Author's note: This story started out as a short single chapter but with suggestions from someone on Tumblr it kinda grew into at least two chapters. A big thank you to her!
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It is sunset on a beautiful calm day in Betty's Bay which on most days has an impossible wind that tears at your hair, your clothes and anything else exposed. The sea is calm, only a few sea horses from yesterday when the wind is howling, but now it is peaceful. The mountains and beaches are painted in pinks, and reds and yellows, there are a few birds calls from the mountain slopes behind us as we sit outside our home relaxing after a hard day at the beach. I feel the new life fluttering cautiously inside me and I smile, remembering the long, wild and sometimes painful path that I followed to get here.
I am the youngest of four children. What the locals would call a "laatlammetjie" a late lamb. My brother born just before me is roughly 10 years older than I am, the oldest sibling is 16 years older than I am. They are scattered across the world, spread far and wide by what I suppose you could call the globalisation diaspora. For this reason I am handed the task of caring for my ageing mother. My father is alive (we think) having done a runner shortly after I was born. No one is certain where he is or even if he is still alive. We sometimes hear echoes of possibilities of where he might be which ever seem to pan out.
My journey starts when my gentle, patient husband Jake finally loses patience with what he calls my repressed sexuality. I had fended him off sexually until we are married, then once married I limit what I will allow him to do. I was brought up in a strict Christian household where sex was only for procreation, where extra-marital sex was banned and homosexuality was an evil sin and it limits me. Problem is that Jake is a brave experimenter and I am a prude. His outburst contains a threat. Either get rid of my repressed sexuality or he is leaving. "Six months!" he snarls. "You have six months to sort out your issues with sex or I am out of here."
And that threat terrifies me. I love the man, but I cannot break through the strictures my mother had built into me. I approach Alice the one person in my social circle who seems to be really on my side, who cares about me, who might have an answer for me. And she does.
"My friend Sara is a shrink. Sorry, she hates the word "shrink". She is a therapist and she is good and kind and she will help you."
I contact Sara and start talking to her about my problem. Eventually she carefully suggests that maybe Jake is right, that I am sexually repressed and that maybe my mother had a lot to do with it. I defend my mother furiously. She had raised the entire family alone after my father had deserted her, she is a goddess in my eyes. She can do no wrong. We are getting nowhere and time is slipping by. I start to despair. Then fate intervenes, not just once but a number of times leading me down a dark and dangerous path that terrifies me but ultimately frees me.
Fate's first intervention starts when my mother starts showing signs of dementia. After consultation with my siblings I get her into a frail care centre and I start to pack up her house with an eye to renting it out to bolster her meagre income. It is a sad and difficult task to dismantle the house you grew up in and I am often in tears after spending time there.
The fateful intervention comes when I am packing my mother's books. She was an avid reader. Her books were her friends, her treasures, resources to be revisited, annotated, book marked and they showed it. Open one of Ma's books anywhere and Ma's annotations are there. Put the book on its spine and then let it open slowly and you will find the pages Ma considered most important and/or most aggravating. The annotations are almost a scatter shot diary and so it is like a journey into my mother's mind and thinking, fascinating and some times terrifying. It was for this reason that she discouraged us from reading her books. We were encouraged to buy our own books, even if they were duplicates of hers. Of course she couldn't keep watch on them all the time and I could never resist the temptation of sneaking into her room and opening books at random. It was like entering a strange and wonderful world ruled by my mother.
I am taking the collected works of Dickens out of a book case when there is a soft thump from behind the book I have just removed. I reach in and find a book tucked in behind the Dickens. Intrigued, I pull it out. Imagine my shock when I find myself starting at a very well thumbed and annotated copy of the Kama Sutra. Ma had not only annotated the book but seemed to have tried out some of the less bizarre sexual positions it describes. Was this my mother who was such a prude writing "We almost broke our necks! But what fun." But yes, it is because it is her handwriting and her way of speaking.
I reached in again and find another book. This time a book of Shunga wood cuts. "Shunga?" I ask myself and find photos of beautifully executed Japanese woodcuts and each woodcut image details a sexual position. The genitals enlarged so that there is absolutely no doubt about what is happening, no misreading the activity being illustrated. See he is putting his penis into that woman's pussy. Absolutely no doubt. The book is my mother's book, witnessed by the fact that the annotations are there too, commenting on the expertise of the artist, the beauty of the print and the possibility of trying the position or not as the case may be.
Another book. This time Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure. Also annotated. Then comes the final book. Fear of Flying - Eric Jong. I open the book carefully, to reveal the most read pages and find this well annotated paragraph.
"The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving". No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one"
The annotation that gets my full attention is: "But I have and it was great."
I flee the house in tears, my world turned upside down leaving the books still scattered across the carpet.
The idea of returning to the house and those books terrifies me and I use any excuse not to return. The next evening is a book club meeting and I tell myself, I definitely cannot not miss that. And then fate steps in, again. We call ourselves the Adventurous Book Club with any topic open for discussion. No, don't ask me why I am a member with such a broad remit, but I am. The conversation that night was never meant to be anything more than a naughty discussion of our favourite fantasies. Sally started it by saying she had lived out her fantasy of fucking a plumber who was dressed in overalls purely by accident.
"You see," she said "my kitchen sink was leaking so I called Joe the plumber. I was expecting a fat, middle aged, balding guy, but Joe was mid twenties, slim, muscular with this uber cute backside."
We all ooh and ah as she tells her tale which she drags out long enough for the first wine bottle to be emptied and the second going down with little or no pain. She tells of a ripped stomach, I am not sure how she got to see or even touch it but everyone noisily follows the details of the progress of a large engorged penis into her mouth and then into her pussy. Each detail told in lovingly explicit detail. The detail I remember vividly is how he bent her over the sink and ploughed into her "mercilessly". Then he dressed, packed up and met her husband at the front door just returning from work.
"Timing was tight." she comments. "And I had to hurriedly go to the toilet and clean up as the plumber's cum was dribbling down between my legs. Paul scored heavily that night with me reliving my plumbing activities. And the plumber even billed me for the visit! Cheeky sod."
Julie tells us of a "special" pair of shoes made of perspex with 7 inch heels that she can scarcely stand up in let alone walk in that she is keeping for a special someone who will kneel at her feet and suck the heels while jerking off. She admits that her fantasy will probably never happen as even the high heels are imaginary.
Sue talks of being blindfolded and the having her hands in cuffs held above her head from a bracket on the door and then letting someone tease her, edge her and finally fuck her when she is begging to be fucked.
Alice admits rather diffidently that she wants to be seduced by a woman who will use a strap on dildo to fuck her. Then she looks at me.
"Someone really dominant like you!"
Sally laughs then looks at me.
"Ooh! You have an admirer. You gonna take her up on the offer? But wait, you need to tell us what your fantasy is!"
Everyone looks at me and I stall.
"Cummon! Don't you have a fantasy? You must have! I told you mine now you gotta fess up."
Another bottle of wine is circulating already and the party is becoming really raucous. Yes, I do have a fantasy, but I am reluctant to share it. I am embarrassed by the debauched nature of it. I am, to use my shrinks words, repressed about it. I make love to my husband Jake with it running in my mind but I cannot, I will not share it. Suddenly I remember the words I read in Erica Jong's book Fear of Flying last evening.
"The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving". No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one"
So, I told them all that a zipless fuck is my fantasy. They all cheer, we finish the last bottle of wine and declare the meeting to be over and more importantly a massive success.
