Author's note: Please be aware, this story contains themes of abuse and sexual violence. If you are looking for a quickie, this may not be it. Or it might be, who am I to judge?
I want to thank EVHayes720 for their editing support, their excellent suggestions and their kind encouragement.
==========================================================================
I talked to Bernadette for the first time at my friend's 18th birthday party. He had just turned 18, and because in my country this meant that you could drink hard liquor, everybody brought alcohol. Being the youngest of our group, I had taken a dusty bottle from the back of my dad's liquor cabinet, hoping he wouldn't remember it had been there in the first place. The gamble paid off; he never mentioned anything.
Not surprisingly, the party turned wilder as the guests became increasingly intoxicated. Needing a break, I climbed up the stairs from the basement, still fairly steady, and headed into the large kitchen, pouring myself a glass of milk from the fridge and sitting down at the rickety table that had always felt out of place among all that family's elegant furniture. Apparently, my friend's parents had kept it around since they first moved in together.
As I sipped my milk, waiting for my ears to stop ringing and my thoughts to settle, I sensed movement, and looked up just in time to see her enter the kitchen. For an instant, the evening sun lit up her frizzy hair just right so that it looked as if she had a halo around her head. Combined with her round face and full red lips, she looked a bit like an angel. A short, slightly chubby angel with no wings, and a black t-shirt that said "No Religion," but an angel nonetheless.
She ignored me, and started opening cupboards.
"If you're looking for a glass, they're in the one right next to the fridge," I said.
"Mhm."
She filled her glass with tap water, and headed back upstairs, where my friend's older sister had her room. In the doorway, she briefly stopped.
"Thanks," she said.
Then she left. I kept staring at where she had been, until I felt my friend's hand on my shoulder.
"Still nursing your milk? I came upstairs because I was worried you may have gotten lost."
"Lost in thought, I guess," I replied and finished my milk.
I saw Bernadette again a few months later. On my 18th birthday, or more precisely, on the hungover day after, I had decided to do something about my complete lack of fitness and to start running every morning. As I struggled with burning lungs and aching legs to defeat what I'd always thought of as a gentle slope, cursing my foolish idea to head outside at seven in the morning, she overtook me with seemingly effortless steps. I was relieved that she didn't seem to notice me, but trying to keep up with her did give me the motivation to finish my run, even if I couldn't match her pace and lost sight of her quite soon.
Apparently, she followed the same early morning schedule as I did, and because she lived only a couple of streets further away from the forest, she would overtake me every day. It filled me with pride to notice that this would happen later and later, as I slowly got into shape. However, the prospect of her not being able to catch up with me anymore if I got even faster was not at all enticing. Should I start running more slowly? Should I start later? By how much would I need to adjust my start time or speed so that it would not be too obvious that I was trying to get her to catch up to me for longer?
"You're Bastian, right? Why don't you wait for me tomorrow morning?" she asked me as she passed me the next day. "If you think you can keep up, that is."
By the time I finally got over the shock of having her talk to me and of stumbling and almost falling into the ditch, she was gone around a bend in the path, and I only heard her laughter. She must have been the first woman who addressed me without being in a familial or professional relationship with me. Me, Bastian, a perfectly average guy who liked to spend his time reading, as we didn't have social media or smartphones at the time, living in a faceless German town whose only claim to fame was that it was close to the university of the nearby city.
From then on, we ran together. For the first weeks we ran silently, until one day her walkman ran out of battery in the middle of the run, then we started talking. I learned that she was an only child, four years older, studied history and German literature at the local university, and that she still lived with her parents, who were very strict Christians. Outside her small circle of female friends, she hardly had any social interaction.
We both liked Hemingway and disliked Habermas, and had written our share of cringy poetry in the past, some of which we guiltily shared, as far as we pretended to remember. I wonder whether she also started preparing poems just to have something to make fun of during our next run. Nowadays, we would have exchanged numbers and spent countless hours texting away, but mobile phones were clunky things installed in cars in those years, and the internet was not yet widely accessible.
It was innocent bliss, until that fateful Sunday morning in spring. We stood in front of her house saying goodbye, when she grabbed my hand. Instinctively, I pulled back, my sweaty fingers gliding out of her grip. Undeterred, she grabbed my wrist and pulled me in her direction.
"Why don't you come inside for a moment?" she asked.
I didn't know what to reply, so I let her take the lead. The front door of her house wasn't locked, and I was surprised to see white stone floors inside. Was that marble? We took off our shoes, and she led me into the kitchen past a painting of Jesus that seemed to look at me inquisitively.
"My parents are at church, and won't be back till lunch," she explained as she put glasses on the table. She was just about to serve sparkling water, when she stopped to look at me.
"You're dripping all over the place!" she exclaimed. "That's going to leave traces."
I stammered an apology. Was she going to kick me out?
"Go have a shower. Come!"
She led me upstairs to one of the biggest bathrooms I had ever seen. They had a shower cabin, a free-standing bathtub, and a jacuzzi in the corner. I was uncomfortably aware of the damp spots my sweaty socks were leaving on the tiled floor. Was it really ok to use their shower? Then again, Bernadette had said I should. In the end, it was a burning drop of sweat running into my eye that got me moving. I started undressing, but hesitated when I was about to take off my boxer briefs. What if she came into the bathroom? Eventually, I left them on, and I was soon steaming up the place with a relaxing hot shower, letting the scalding water massage my head and my neck. Suddenly, the water stopped. I turned around, and there was Bernadette. Naked except for pink bikini bottoms. Entering the shower stall. Naked breasts. Completely overwhelmed, my brain provided me with such helpful insights as "her breasts are cross-eyed - look at how one nipple points straight ahead and the right one slightly to the left," or "she has shaved her armpits, but hasn't shaved her thighs," and finally "she is also staring at me."
She blushed when she realized that I had noticed her staring, but recovered instantly.
"I'll give you a hand", she said.
I remained frozen as she started soaping up my body. Was this normal? Shouldn't we have, like, kissed first? Would she touch my penis? Her hands moved lower and lower, until she grabbed my waist, turned me around, and started on my back, beginning with my shoulders. This time, she didn't stop as she moved lower, and soaped my ass cheeks through my boxer briefs with enthusiasm, before continuing to my legs and feet. As she stood back up again, her hands slid over my soapy shins, knees, and thighs. Then, her hands came to rest at the top of my legs, to both sides of my rock-hard penis. She took a half step forward, and I felt her belly and breasts against my behind and back. I held my breath, willing her hands to move just a little bit sideways to touch my penis through the boxer briefs - but she grabbed my waist again and turned me around. Apparently unaware of the level of my arousal, she looked at me, then looked at the bulge in my boxer briefs, then back at my face, and said: "Your turn."
I dutifully started washing her arms, then her shoulders, and gingerly moved down to her breasts. My first breasts. They felt surprisingly heavy when I cupped them to wash their undersides. Not daring to linger more, I moved down to her waist, and turned her around,just like she had done. Washing her back was a lot easier. I even got to touch the sides of her breasts a bit as I also washed her sides, and I got fully hard again as I got to her soft ass cheeks..
I felt her muscles under the thin layer of fat around her legs, and noticed how they started to twitch as I rubbed her inner thighs higher and higher up. I hesitated, not knowing how far I should go, when she grabbed my hands, making me stand up.
She turned around again, reaching around me to get the showerhead, and rinsed me down, before taking care of herself, apparently oblivious to my disappointment. The cold water of the shower made my penis shrivel back to normal, and discouraged me from lingering with her in the shower.
As I dried myself with the fluffy white towel she had prepared, I noticed that my clothes were gone. Did she want me to stay in my soaked boxer briefs?
