The events that took place on a Fall day in 1999...
***
I had been waiting for my grandmother out in the kitchen for almost an hour, and to be honest I was starting to worry because what I had given her to read shouldn't have taken her more than ten or fifteen minutes to finish.
It was possible that she had read it and perhaps not believing what she had read, went back over it again. It was also possible that she had fainted after reading what I had written, the horror of what I had described too much for her.
I dismissed the chance that she could have had a heart attack because she's as healthy a 61 year old woman can be. She ran a 5K race a couple of weeks ago and had finished first in her age group.
So I waited, leaning on the stove, and watched the clock, figuring that when it became a full hour and she still hadn't emerged from her computer room, I would come in and check on her, but what I really wanted her to do was come out to my birthday party in the kitchen.
On the table was the birthday cake, two pieces taken out of the homemade cake Grandma had made for me, the 18 candles long ago blown out. I had made my wish, and now I was waiting to see whether it would come true or not.
The birthday card Grandma had given me was on the table, along with the $18 - one for each year I have been around - and that had been a tradition of hers, along with the best cakes I had ever tasted every year.
Grandma did a lot for me over the years, especially after my Mom passed away, and I tried to do all I could to help her as well after Grandpa died four years ago. Now I was asking her to give me the one present that I had fantasized about ever since my interests evolved from games to girls.
Just before I was about to go check on Grandma, I heard footsteps coming down the hall, and then Grandma entered the kitchen, ashen faced and walking like she was in a trance. I don't know if she even saw me at first as she walked over to the sink and got a drink of water.
The floorboards squeaked as I walked over to join her at the sink, and when I got behind her I could see her hand - the one that held the glass was shaking, the water that remained dancing inside. I saw her wedding ring, still worn after all these years because, as she often said, in her heart Grandpa and her were still together.
It was a romantic thought, and while it was true that they probably shared a special love, it was also an unusual relationship. I had learned about it by accident a couple of years ago, when I was helping Grandma clear the attic of a bunch of Grandpa's stuff.
Now Grandma was aware that I knew her little secret, and as I stood behind her and put my hands on her shorts, I heard her suck breath in through her teeth, and as I gently kneaded her bony shoulders I heard her breath come chattering out.
"Bradley," Grandma said, and I interrupted her, reminding her that wasn't the word I asked her to use after she read my story, and then because I felt I had to know, I asked her how she liked my story.
"It was - graphic," she managed to say, and I had to admit that it was that indeed.
What my Grandma had just finished reading was a story of mine that was inspired in part by my discovering this website called Literotica, and being a horny guy I found those stories were very arousing. I thought I could do just as well as a lot of those authors so I gave it a shot, and wrote about the woman I lusted after and wanted more than any other.
I had already experienced sex with a couple of girls, and I thought it was funny that my girlfriends always seemed to resemble Grandma, since they were tall and slender. I also admit to having closed my eyes at times while we were screwing and pretended that it was Grandma beneath me.
"Those pictures," Grandma said as I nibbled on her neck.
"They're in the shoebox on your dresser," I told her. "All of them."
"Ward - he told me he burned them," Grandma said. "Why he hid them in the attic - I don't know."
"Probably used them like I did," I said honestly, and I could picture the old guy, who was about a dozen years my Grandma's senior, shuffling up there to take them out of hiding and going through them, reliving memories.
Grandma's head went up at that, and even though I couldn't see her face I suspected she was rolling her eyes and cursing her husband for leaving her so exposed like this.
I had come across the shoebox of Polaroids by chance, seeing the end of the box stuffed behind a piece of dangling insulation, and when I peeked inside and saw what it was, I didn't say a word about it and brought it home for a closer inspection.
The pictures were, well they were pornographic, to put it mildly. They depicted nudity as well as every sex act imaginable, and some of them even tested my imagination. Some of them were of one person, most of them were showing two people, and a few of them even had three participants.
There were close to 2 dozen different people in the photos all together, but there was only one person that was in every single Polaroid. It was a women that was a knockout back in the 70's when those pictures were taken, and although the reddish brown hair had given way to grey and there were a few wrinkles as well, she was still hot. My Grandma.
"Please," Grandma said when I tried to turn her to face me, and she was gripping the sink now. "I have to tell you, but I can't look you in the eye right now. I'm so ashamed."
"I love you," I said. "Just like I said in the story. The pictures, I didn't understand them at first, but I'm older now."
"Your grandfather and I - we really loved each other," she said in a quivering voice, and I ran my hands down her smooth rail-thin arms as she spoke. "Those things you saw me doing. I haven't seen those pictures in over 20 years, but I remember some of them."
"Do you want me to get them?" I said. "We can look through them together."
"No!" Grandma said sharply. "Please don't tell me you showed them to anybody else."
"I didn't," I said truthfully.
"Your grandfather - let's just say he had this - habit?"
"Fetish?" I asked.
"Is that what they call it? Anyway, him and I, we had a great sex life, but one day he suggested that we could make it better," Grandma explained. "The kids were out on their own, your Mom was away at school. So your grandfather tells we that we could get involved in something that was all the rage at the time."
"Swinging?" I asked.
"That's what they called it," Grandma said. "It wasn't my idea, but I wanted to make Grandpa happy so I did it, and after I got over the nervousness I have to admit that I liked it."
"Then something happened. Your grandfather, he didn't seem to be all that eager to be with the the wives of the husbands I was with, and then he admits that he doesn't really enjoy making love to anybody but me," Grandma said. "I say fine, let's not do it any more, but he said no..."
"He wanted to watch you with other men - and women," I added, and I could see Grandma's head nodding.
"So he would stay in the room while I had sex with these other people, and he would take the Polaroids of us while we were - you know," Grandma said. "He said that he enjoyed looking at them with me after the other people left. I'm sure he gave pictures to the other men and women too, so who knows how many of them are out there."
"Were these people friends?"
"Some were," Grandma said. "I'm still friends with a few of them, even though none of us are crazy like that any more. Some of the folks your grandfather found in these ads people would put in magazines. They were almost always decent people who were just - adventurous."
"I recognized Grandpa's writing on the backs of each photo," I said, reciting some of the ones I remembered. "Emily and Bob, Emily and Ellis, Emily and Denise, and the one - Emily and Miles. That wasn't..."
"Your Uncle Miles," Grandma said with a sigh. "We were getting out of control around that time, and I think we stopped swinging soon after that."
"You were so beautiful back then," I said, my hands going down the lightly freckled arms while nuzzled by way to her ear through her short silver hair. "And you're still beautiful."
"I'm not," Grandma said, shaking her head. "I'm nothing like those pictures these days, if that's what you're thinking, Bradley."
"I want to see for myself," I said, moving my hands to the bottom of her blouse, and as I started up the row of buttons Grandma kept gripping the sink. "You read in the story I wrote what I think you look like."
"I don't," Grandma sobbed, and when I got the last button free I parted the blouse open and peeked over her shoulder.
Her breasts, back in the days of the pictures, were small cones that jutted straight out, and I knew that with her in her sixties they wouldn't be like that. I saw the little orbs nestled in the cups of her bra, 34A that I knew from many visits to her undies drawer, the slightly tanned and freckled area around her collarbone becoming white in her modest cleavage.
My hands came up and took the bra cups in my hands, gently kneading the very soft flesh inside them, and even through the lightly padded harness I could feel Grandma's nipples get hard.
"Bradley," Grandma was saying as her chest heaved. "Not here. Can I at least get prepared? I'm a mess."
"I want you just the way you are," I said, not wanting to give her a chance to think about what I was planning on doing.
I didn't care that she was a little frazzled. I could see the big sweat stains in the armholes of her blouse, formed in the time we had been at the sink, and I didn't care. I didn't give a damn whether she hadn't shaved something or other. It had to be now.
"Your story," Grandma said to the window she was facing. "When you described yourself - what's that true?"
I could have said that she would find out, but instead I pried her hand off of the sink and brought it back behind her, and when she felt the bulge I heard her gasp and whisper something. Did she say, "just like your father"?