Fiona's adventures after her divorce, inevitably got me thinking about the spring before I graduated from college.
I met Jane the previous winter. She was a regular customer in a camera store where I worked and shortly after we had talked a few times, she settled into a regular routine, never visiting except on afternoons when she knew I would be alone in the shop, always lingering for idle conversations on those predictably slow days.
And, yes, it was obvious from the beginning that she was flirting. If there were any doubts about that, she soon dispelled them by coming into the store en route to her tennis lesson dressed in a tight outfit that displayed fine firm legs and a petite but full figure. Often her aroused nipples pressed through whatever top she was barely wearing.
Her story was more or less known around town. She was married to a philandering orthopedic surgeon when she finally had endured enough to divorce him. She exited the marriage with a pile of cash, a Jaguar, and an extravagant house near the edge of town.
"I will be needing a portrait for the garden tour program," Jane said casually one Saturday afternoon. "Didn't you tell me that you moonlighted with that sort of thing?"
Indeed, I had.
"Would you have time this Sunday afternoon to come to my house and take a few shots?"
I would.
"Good. Four o'clock tomorrow. The sun should be right."
Yes, it would be.
"Four o'clock then!" She smiled somewhat ambiguously and swiveled out of the shop's front door. When she was safely down the street, I went to the window and stole a last glimpse of her tight bottom and long legs pivoting into her car.
One of the secrets we shared was a slide she had left for printing a month or so earlier. When she dropped it off, Jane remarked that Eastman Kodak had processed the slide and she hoped that they would now make a print of it. Without looking at the slide or knowing its subject, I predicted that they would, but the reference was provocative. When I had a discreet moment after she left, I looked at the photo, as I am certain she had invited me to do.
It was Jane, standing nude on a Caribbean beach, glistening head to toe with droplets of water from the surf. Her nipples were hard and jutted toward the camera. They were framed in tan lines from the smallest of bikinis. She stood, arms akimbo, legs topped by neatly trimmed pubic hair, the first intimate grooming of which I was ever aware. She smiled a smile that I can still see in my mind's eye. Unabashed. Vital.
That image drove me crazy for weeks. Although I was certain that she had wanted me to see it, she never mentioned the picture again, not even asking to pick up the finished print. Still, I was confused about the implications of her Sunday invitation and was badly bothered for the rest of the day.
By that point in my life, I had fucked my share of college girls and spent a memorable night with a forty-something tourist who claimed to need instruction with a camera I had sold her that afternoon, except that she ended up instructing me about stimulant fueled acrobatic sex.
Jane felt different. To begin with, she treated me as if I were her equal. Our conversations were rarely about trivial things, and she seemed genuinely interested in what I thought. Looking back all of these years, I think she was the first woman who made love to me with her brain.
The other riveting thing about her was a mature confidence with which she wore her sexuality. There was no college girl tease about her. She knew that she was desirable and wore it like a mantle.
Still, I had not yet developed a sexual confidence myself. My first serious girlfriend and I had hurried to bed a few years earlier, our couplings driven by hunger and curiosity more than anything. Since then, I had become adept at spotting girls who volunteered "Yes" with their smile. Later, my self-assurance would signal to woman what was going to happen with the simplest nod of their assent but that was still down the road.
There was nothing casual, however, about Jane. And she seemed to be the one giving signals. Or was she?
After locking up that afternoon, I went to the finished photo orders and looked again at the picture, feeling my cock stiffen and my stomach churn. Impulsively, I took the photo home with me. At dinner, I could think of nothing else, my erection never subsiding. In those days a hard penis begging for release had the power to block out any rational thoughts of anything else. Before long I was home, stripped out of my clothes and on my bed with Jane's picture in my hand, which is to say, my free hand.
I came massively that night with jets of semen arching toward the ceiling. It was something that I had to take care of if I had any hope of sleeping that night or of dealing with what felt like a complicated situation the next day. I stroked my cock, losing control so that I could maintain control on Sunday.
I never felt a repeat of that need until more than twenty years later, the night that I nearly fucked Fiona for the first time. We weren't ready yet, but she had already fucked me with her brain as we groped each other on a stool in her kitchen. I ended up at home in the predawn hours pumping my hand and spilling semen over the spot on the bed where I would slide my penis into her for the first time a week later. It took me years to realize the parallel.
The next day was a muddle. I slept late, then gathered my photo kit, carefully preparing two cameras, each with a slightly different lens suitable for portraits. Everything finally assembled and tested, I looked again at Jane's beach picture, almost certain that I had misread her. I was even slightly relieved by the thought. Still, there was the photo. And her oblique remark. And the tennis dresses. And the two of us alone that afternoon. In the middle of a decade when all of the sexual barriers came down.
I tried to concentrate on my cameras.
When she met me at her front door a few hours later, I thought her demeanor confirmed that I had misread her. Pleasant enough, but she was almost business-like. She wore a breathtaking tailored sheath dress that sculpted her breasts, squeezing them into a neckline that showed just enough underneath the de rigeuer strand of pearls. Here, on her turf, she seemed demure and controlled even though that dress and her calves, finely sculpted by low heels, screamed sexuality. I noticed that she was not wearing stockings.
"Come out by the swimming pool," she said flatly, leading me through the house. "This picture is for the Garden Week house tour program. The flowers there should make a nice background and I think you will like the light." She spoke without emotion.
"This is a last hurrah for me. I have resisted these house tours for years but now that I am going back to Durham I finally agreed. I leave next week to start getting ready for some summer classes."
"Durham? You haven't mentioned that."
"Yes," she replied over her shoulder. "I have kept that quiet. I am going back to Duke to finish my degree. That was the second mistake I made in order to marry my first mistake."
She turned and faced me, somewhat icily. "He was a medical student. And we were -- in love." She hissed the final two words. "It turned out that he only loved himself and his toys."
Jane selected a patio chair, positioned it in front of a spectacular bed of tulips and perched casually on its arm. "How is this?"
It was fine. The low sun made her hair glow and bathed her shoulders in the soft light of the afternoon.
We worked through a series of poses quickly, but I knew that the first photos were best, so there was not much work to accomplish. I directed her gently, but she was physically confident and needed little encouragement from me to hold her head at just the right angle or to position her figure for maximum effect.
"You are a dancer," I said at one point, eliciting a happy and surprised smile. Click. Perfect.
"How on earth did you know?"
"It's obvious. Besides, you told me."
