Tamara's ass was stinging sore after nearly half an hour of rough pounding. She panted and moaned with each twist of her hips, tensing her legs to hoist herself in the air, then plumping herself down onto the unforgiving hardness beneath her with a sweaty slap. Her long black hair clung to her temples, and her small, torpedoesque breasts flailed braless beneath her faded superhero t-shirt as she bucked and writhed. Her face contorted into an agony of tension. She was nearly there. She could feel the tantalizing promise of relief beginning to tremble through her limbs. Fuck... Yes... Yes! Ohhh fuck yessss, I'm there!
Tamara slammed her aching backside one last time onto the plastic seat of her bicycle as she sat back and crested the hill, exhausted. She drew a deep sigh and her throbbing muscles sang for joy as she swung her feet off the pedals and began the delicious freewheeling coast down the gentle incline on the other side.
God, I am not cut out for cycling. As soon as I get some money together I really need to get a car.
She had toyed with the idea of asking Andie to drive her over. Andie was a kind person, and she probably would have done it. But Andie had seemed a little preoccupied lately. And Tamara hadn't even told Andie she was taking a second job. Not because it was wrong or cheating or anything, she was totally entitled to do so. Rather, Tamara was just kind of ashamed to have to admit that she was broke, and needed the extra work.
Well, this right here could be her ticket back to solvency. She was going to have to find a better transport solution for the trip over, but the job itself promised to be an absolute breeze. Wealthy older woman seeking a part-time personal assistant. The old dear probably just wanted someone to hang out with, make her cups of tea, listen to her life story and so on. And the pay on offer was decent enough. Not exactly a professional wage, but slightly more than she made at the games store.
Tamara looked up at the house as she approached the garden gate. It looked somehow fitting, for the house of a reclusive older woman, out here on the edge of town, on the top of a steep hill. It was a cottage, really, though quite a big cottage. It was squat and square, and the half-timbered walls bulged out irregularly beneath the eaves of a sloping thatched roof. The white plaster between the timber beams was streaked with the vines of climbing ivy.
Tamara hopped down off her bicycle and winced as her sore legs hit the ground. She made to reach out and push the gate open, but as she did so it swung inward away from her hand, opening as if by some automatic mechanism, though she saw no machinery attached to the hinges. Fancy. Maybe the house was more modern than it looked.
She set the bicycle against the inside of the garden fence. It seemed unlikely that there would be any thieves at work this far out of town, at the top of a hill, so she left it unlocked. She was probably also running a little late. Tamara noticed a black, white, and ginger calico cat that had been perched on the wooden stakes of the fence. It tensed and startled, then scampered off through the grass in the direction of the house. Tamara hurried after it through the garden. It looked as though there were vegetable plots or flowerbeds, somewhere beneath the mess of flailing plant matter, but the garden clearly needed some tending to. She had to push through a tangle of overgrown grass and bushes to get to the front door.
The door was small, barely Tamara's own height. And it looked decidedly worn. It was fashioned from a trio of wide planks of wood, sun-blackened and slightly warped, which only approximated the shape of the doorway. In the center was a bronze knocker, a ring of metal clasped in the mouth of a devilish grotesque. Tamara lifted the knocker, but before she could bring it down against the wood, the door creaked open.
This time, the mechanism by which the door had opened was not a mystery. On the other side, in the relative dark of the interior of the house, stood the figure of a woman, with her hand on the inner doorknob. The woman stepped forward and Tamara shuffled aside to let her stoop under the doorway and step out into the sunlight. As the woman straightened up, Tamara looked up at her.
Imposing. Was the first word that Tamara thought of. The woman who stood in front of her was huge. Probably close to two meters tall. She was dressed in a long faded black gown with loose sleeves and a high neck. The gown billowed around her legs, but held very tightly to her torso, from the hips up to the shoulders. The woman looked robust. Not blocky, or particularly muscular. But firm, and curvy. Volumptuous. Was the first word that occurred to Tamara. Though she suspected she was pronouncing it wrong. As her gaze crept up the woman's body, Tamara found herself briefly eye-to-teat with a very heavy-looking, sloshy pair of breasts.
"My dear girl," said the woman. She spoke loudly, with a rich, husky voice. A smoker's voice, perhaps. Her accent sounded curiously refined, aristocratic. Tamara couldn't quite place it, but it might have been Scottish. Something about the way she spoke the word 'girl' made it sound as if it almost had two syllables. "Agatha, was it?" the woman asked.
"Ta-" Tamara began, but then her throat did that annoying thing where it seized up mid-syllable, helpfully signaling her nervousness to whoever she happened to be talking to. She swallowed and tried again, "Tamara."
"Oh. My apologies Tamara," the woman's expression creased into an earnest concern, "My memory. Old age, I guess."
Tamara studied the woman's face, as discreetly as she could. Though clearly about a generation older than Tamara and her friends, she looked considerably younger than Tamara had imagined. As far as she could recall, the advert online hadn't said anything specific about the woman's age except that she was retired, but in the curious way that imagination does its work unsupervised, Tamara's mind had built up a fairly rich image of a kindly, crinkly sexagenarian in a knitted blue cardigan, sipping tea from a porcelain cup painted with kitschy images of kittens. If Tamara had had to guess, she would have said this woman was perhaps in her mid forties, not older. Long hair that had obviously once been jet black was now a smooth slate gray. Her skin was tanned and rosy, still firm across the bones of her slender face, but her stern smile cut tiny creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes.
She was also rather...
sexier
than Tamara had imagined as well. Quite apart from her shapely hips and her big, soft breasts, which Tamara tried hard not to stare at despite their being right in front of her face, the woman also had a dark, severe kind of beauty. The whites of her chestnut brown eyes stood out between long black lashes, and her lips were curled into a subtle, self-assured smile. She had quite a big nose, which was even slightly crooked, but somehow this one imperfection seemed only to set her beauty apart as special, something distinctively hers.
"Oh, you're not..." Tamara mumbled, snapping out of her overly detailed mental itemization of the woman's appearance, "It's okay."
"Agatha was the girl who was here yesterday," the woman said, perhaps more to herself than to Tamara, "Sweet thing. Not too bright, though, unfortunately. I decided not to take her on."
"Oh, I'm bright," Tamara blurted, "You can take me on."
Tam you fucking idiot. Did you really just say that?
"Good for you," a faint chuckle passed the woman's pursed lips, "We'll see. You can try out today. Come," she held out her hand, snapped her fingers, and turned back towards the door.
It seemed the woman actually wanted Tamara to take her hand. She was waiting, arm outstretched. Tamara took hold and the woman ducked back through the doorway, pulling Tamara firmly along behind her. They made their way along a narrow corridor. The sensation of the woman's firm grip, and the smooth dry skin of her fingers, did warm, and not entirely unwelcome, things to Tamara's insides.
"And you're Millicent, right?" said Tamara, relieved she could recall the name that the woman had signed in their brief email exchange, "Or do you prefer Mrs McMurdoch? Oh sorry, or Ms McMurdoch perhaps?"
The woman pulled up and turned to look down at Tamara, "You can call me Miss Millie."
"Miss Millie?" Tamara hadn't meant to intone it as a question, but that was how it came out.
The woman seemed to search Tamara's face for a moment, as if assessing her, "Yes. I think that's about the right balance of formal and familiar. Will do, for now."
As the woman, Millicent, or Miss Millie, spun around and led her through another small door, Tamara turned the name over beneath her breath.
Miss Millie. Mm, Mmisss Mmmillie. Mmotorboat my massive Miss Milliful mmmammaries young Tammmmara.
What the fuck Tam? Where did that come from?
