Ex-teacher and former pupil bond over writing porn
A special thanks to RF-Fast for helping to proofread and ensuring the story is in good shape.
Down By The Creek
It started with my monthly drinks with a couple of my former school friends. To be honest, I'd happily let this tradition die, as they were both a little bitchy and married to wealthy men. Men who cared little for their wives, but a wife was a tick box in their requirements to fit in at the golf club.
"God, what loser posted that?" Kiera asked and tossed me the paper.
In the personal ads were one she'd circled with a pen. 'Young female model sought for photo assignment. Some nudity, nothing lewd.'
"Probably some pent-up virgins trying to persuade a girl to show them her bits. 'Oh, I don't have a studio, but we can take the photos in my parent's basement.' Pathetic."
I had to agree, but the phone number niggled at the back of my brain. Somehow, it seemed familiar. That evening, I found the same advert in my paper and dialled it. As soon as I did, the number on my phone changed to Jason and it started ringing.
Jason was my neighbour's son, recently turned 19, and I had his number on my phone as he'd fed my cat when I'd last been on holiday.
"Hello?" he answered, and I recognised his voice.
Pitching my voice a little higher and aiming for a ditzy sound, I spoke. "It's about the advert in the paper. How much does it pay?"
"Don't you want to know what I'm looking for?"
Switching back to my usual voice, I replied. "I think I know what you're looking for, Jason."
"Mrs; I mean, Claire, what is this?"
"I think you should be answering that question. What the hell are you thinking, doing something like that? I'm disappointed in you." Without meaning to, I had adopted my no backchat teacher's voice.
"It's about my writing." He blurted.
I stopped my impromptu tirade about respecting women and trying to trick naive girls. He'd been quite serious about his writing when I was his teacher. I'd tutored him for a time, until recently, when something happened in the family, and he abandoned his plans to go to university and become a professional writer.
I'd not pried as to why, but he told me he left high school and walked into a low-level job as an admin in a small factory.
"What writing requires naughty photos?"
"Who said they would be naughty?"
"Seriously. Want me to read the advert back to you?"
"Fine, but they weren't going to be that naughty. Topless at best."
"Explain." I ordered, as more than a decade of teaching authority rang through my voice.
It turned out he'd not dropped his dream of writing and discovered he could write and publish stories on Literotica to practise his craft. The more he wrote, the more he improved. That was a direct quote from something I'd told him years before. Not the erotica obviously.
He'd published some stories with reasonable success but needed a proofreader or editor to get rid of the silly errors. His current story begged for some photographs to illustrate it. That was why he was looking for a model.
I'd read some stories on that site and the quality of the stories varied greatly. Some were crude and badly written, but a few were both very well written and highly erotic. The stories I'd read of his when I was his teacher and tutor were quite inventive for his age, and I wondered how it had changed.
"I could do it." I blurted.
"The..." He started to reply.
"I mean editing, not modelling." I laughed at the very idea. He'd not want me to model.
I'm 37 and in good shape, but not about to let guys see me topless so they could stroke their dicks. As I thought that, I was surprised it didn't disgust me as I would have expected.
"You realise it is adult content?"
"I'm not an idiot, and I'm sure I can cope without whatever comes out of your imagination. It's nothing weird, is it?"
"No." He replied, a little offended.
I gave Jason my email and a minute later I got an email from Google inviting me to a doc shared with me as an editor. It was called 'Down By The Creek' and I opened it a little nervously. I'd known Jason since he was little, and it was a little jarring to admit he was now an adult. Too easy to think of him as a neighbourhood kid and trying to avoid thinking that I was getting older as well.
It's hard to be an English teacher without being aware of how tough it was to be a professional writer. Getting noticed, and then staying current, was difficult. Talent was not always enough. Publishers were paying less and less, even for the big names, and everyone was squeezed.
I'd never considered writing porn as a way to advance your writing craft, but in a way, it was clever. A large and eager audience. You'd not get paid, but that removed criticism from other writers who felt you stole their money. And it left your legitimate story private until you were sure they were good enough.
The story was about an 18-year-old who had been sent to live with his grandparents on a farm for the summer, while his parent's marriage imploded. The farm was in the middle of nowhere in almost tens of miles of featureless fields. He'd assumed he would be able to help on the farm, but nearly everything was automated and done using massive machines.
He was not qualified to use them and would either kill himself or damaged equipment worth 100's of thousands. So, he was stuck doing nothing. He had no transport, and the nearest town was more than an hour's drive away. The farm had no internet or cable, and the mobile signals were spotty.
The boy in the story was also called Jason and struggled with the boredom. Having grown up in AC cooled homes, the heat was stifling. He described his daily routine, and I stopped reading to figure out how to add comments to the document.
Ever an English teacher, I thought. I suggested more use of the sense of smell, the dry heat, the stickiness of the sweat sticking his clothing to his skin. Perhaps play with the descriptions of colour to leach out the colour to emphasise the boringness of the environment.
I'd barely clicked the ok button when a message popped up on screen saying that was a great idea and he'd think about it. I wasn't used to having interactive editing, but it seemed pretty useful.
The young man in the story would stay in his room most of the day but got too restless later in the day. And would head out and walk the perimeter of the fields. There were other farms dotted about, but he'd not seen another living being, apart from his grandparents, since he'd arrived two weeks before.
Then he spotted what he thought were green bushes. In an environment with ripe wheat for miles, the colour was enough to draw him to investigate. It must have been close to two miles from the farmhouse. He discovered they weren't bushes, but trees in a ravine with a shallow creek running through it.
He found part of the ravine that he was able to climb down and tried to walk across the rocks in the creek. Naturally, he fell in and decide as his feet were wet already, he'd walk in the creek instead. After a few turns, it opened up to a wider space and a pond about 60 feet long and 20 feet wide. With another 10 or 15 feet of damp ground next to the ravine walls where the trees grew.
Jason stripped down to his underwear and swam in the pond, feeling cool and refreshed for the first time in weeks. But regretted his choice to keep his pants on as they chafed on the walk home. Next time he'd skinny dip.
I stopped reading as I thought I saw where this story was going and decided a glass of wine was a good idea. Jason, the author, was quite good, but this was different from anything I'd read from him before. Fewer lasers or wizards as he matured into more grownup content.
He promised himself he could swim in the creek every day from that point. But the next day he was stuck helping his grandmother make apple sauce and strawberry jam in the farmhouse basement. Which should have been cool, but for the boiling pots.
It was after dusk when the boy in the story snuck from the farm. In just a pair of shorts, shoes but taking a towel, he hurried over to the creek. He stripped off and waded into the water. It felt warmer than the previous day, but that was probably just in comparison to the daytime temperature. Still cool enough to be invigorating.
Rather than swim, he lay on his back, staring up at the stars. Using his arms and legs he was still buoyant enough to keep his face above the water. The sky seemed so clear and so infinite. The longer he looked, the more stars seemed to appear.
He wondered if his girlfriend was looking up at the stars now, or if she'd moved on. She'd not been happy to find he was going to be gone for the whole summer. He moved his mind on to nice things and remembered that midnight picnic they had gone on.
Well, 'picnic' was an overly grand word, as it consisted of a can of whipped cream and a bowl of strawberries. But given she was serving them off her naked body, they were the best he ever sampled. Admittedly she complained the next day that he's squirted so much cream, from the can into her pussy, it smelt funny.
He looked down and saw his erection poking from the water like a periscope. Grinning, he sped up his legs to make more of it visible.
"Very impressive." Came a feminine voice.
Jason jerked and submerged, spluttering, kneeling on the bottom of the pond to see who it was. She was about his age, dressed in a light sundress, which chimed with the memory of that picnic. She sat on a rock about 15 feet away and didn't look the least perturbed about finding a naked man here at night.
He looked for his clothes only to realise she was sitting on them.
"I was enjoying the view. And if you want your clothes back, I'm hoping to see it again and up close?"
