A Story of Discovery
It is difficult for me to say, with any degree of certainty or accuracy, exactly when I might have first begun to consciously perceive that my Auntie Claire was anything more than just the generic entity I had always known as my Mother’s sister. Certainly, my earliest perceptions and recollections of her were distinctly platonic and familial. We were never especially close, she and my Uncle Charles lived several hundred miles away and, in my formative years, our families visited only once or twice a year. In my youth, I knew her essentially as a very amiable and personable woman who always remembered me fondly with a thoughtful gift on my birthdays and at Christmas. Whenever I thought of her, in those years, it was always with the same reserved warmth and affection that I had for any and all of my other Aunties and Uncles.
It was shortly after my Father’s untimely passing and the coincidental, but unrelated, death of my Uncle Charles that Auntie Claire came to live with my Mother and me and the three of us became kind of a second family.
At first glance, it was often difficult for anyone to discern that Auntie Claire and my Mother were related at all, let alone sisters. They were quite a study in contrasts. While my Mother, in her early thirties at that time, was petite and slight of build with blue eyes and blond hair, her sister, Claire, six years her senior, was several inches taller with a generously full figure, auburn hair and hazel eyes. My Mother, a proud housekeeper and homemaker, was almost always dressed comfortably casual in jeans or sweatpants with a tee-shirt or pullover sweater, while Claire, a professional woman with her own real estate business, always radiated a distinctly feminine demeanor by favoring dresses or skirts.
As I began to mature and reach the age of adolescence, I am sure that it was unquestionably because of my Auntie’s penchant for dressing so distinctly feminine that I, quite naturally, began to take notice of, recognize and appreciate her very appealing, physically feminine presence in the household.
In retrospect, I think I had always been aware, however innocently, of my Auntie’s legs. Even as a very young boy, I was able to recognize and appreciate the fact that she was blessed with very shapely and attractive legs. Perhaps the point could somehow be made that, because of my Mother’s disinclination for dresses and skirts, my Auntie’s exposed legs were, for me, somehow more appealing simply by being something new and different to my experience. I suppose there might even be some truth to that. But, regardless of how or why, suffice it to say that I had always, on one level or another, been aware of, and admired, the inherent beauty of Auntie Claire’s legs. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that, as I began to mature and reach puberty, my naïve and innocent admiration would, quite naturally, begin to transform into a different kind of admiration, as well as feelings that were decidedly less than platonic.
I can vividly recall one profoundly poignant incident that rather dramatically exemplified my blossoming sexual awareness. On a typically quiet Sunday afternoon, I was reclined, in my favorite position, on the floor in front of the television while my Mother and Auntie bustled about the kitchen preparing dinner and chatting amiably. From my position, I was able to see into the dining room where Auntie was setting the table. I watched her as she moved from the cupboards to the table, her high-heeled shoes clicking softly on the tile flooring. She wore a skirt I had never seen her wear before. It was navy, matching her shoes, and fully pleated, flaring to just above her knees. As she walked, her skirt seemed to spring and sway in a provocatively appealing manner. As she would turn quickly on her heel, her skirt would lightly swish in such a way so as to occasionally reveal a glimpse of her legs that was well above the hem of her skirt.
I stared in complete fascination. While I had always been cognizant of, and admired the shape and symmetry of my Auntie’s legs, I had never seen her legs looking quite as lovely as they did at that moment. It was almost as though I was seeing her for the first time. The late afternoon sunlight glinted alluringly from her hosiery and seemed to accentuate and highlight ever curve and swell of her shapely calves to the soft turn of her ankle. To my complete mortification and embarrassment, I received an almost instant erection, which tented the front of my jeans obscenely, and I was forced to quickly turn away before she might notice.
Even if that particular incident was not my very first perception of physical, sexual attraction expressed specifically for my Auntie, it was certainly, at the very least, the most profound. It was, essentially, the very first occasion, I can recall, when my innocent admiration had manifested itself in a form of sexual desire.
That night, in the privacy of my bedroom, I surrendered to the impulse I had felt earlier and I masturbated while fantasizing about my Auntie’s legs. It was, I believe, the very first time I ever directly focused a sexual fantasy upon or toward any one specific person and, doing so, seemed to inspire me to an intensity of pleasure I had never reached previously.
I had, by fortuitous accident, discovered the pleasures of masturbation several years earlier while climbing the support pole of a swing set on the school playground during recess. And, while I liked the sensation very much, I seemed to know instinctively that it was not something I needed to do in front of my classmates. I quickly learned to translate the playground experience to the privacy of my bedroom and, through experimentation and touching I became rather adept at pleasing myself that way. From that first accidental incident, I masturbated over the next several years on a semi-regular basis, but had only, most recently, begun to associate the act, and the pleasure derived from it, with sexual connotations. My primitive female fantasies, to that point, had been primarily generic in nature, relating, more often than not, to the intangible, imaginary women that posed for the catalogue lingerie photos.
By inadvertently employing my Auntie’s legs and, by association, my Auntie, as a focal point of my sexual fantasy lent a new and special element of reality and personalization to the fantasy that I discovered to be tremendously appealing.
Because my fantasy of her had so pleasurably enhanced the experience for me, it is in no way surprising that I would come to repeat the performance many times over and, in doing so over a period of time, would inadvertently allow my Auntie to become the primary focus of all my sexual fantasies. Over the next several weeks and months, it became increasingly more difficult for me to perceive my Auntie with that same kind of childlike innocence and naiveté as I had before. She was no longer just my Auntie, an entity I had taken for granted for so many years. As my fantasies of her continued to expand and escalate, she soon became, in my adolescent eyes, an extremely attractive and desirable woman.
I began to watch for and create other situations and encounters with which I might fuel my growing infatuation for her. Feigning an offhand casual attitude, I began to watch her covertly, paying specific, physical attention to her as a woman. It seemed as if everything she did exuded a sensuality I had never noticed before; the soft whisper of her hosiery as she walked; the way some of her skirts and dresses clung to her and emphasized the swell of her hips and the plushly rounded curve of her buttocks; and her matronly voluptuous bosom which, as she moved, always seemed to sway and bounce in a most delightful way. It seemed almost inconceivable that she and I could have lived together, under the same roof, for so long without my ever noticing her exceptional loveliness.
Every day, when she arrived home from work, Auntie would always relax on the sofa with a glass of wine and read the evening newspaper. I would sit cross-legged on the floor, directly in front of her, and pretend to do my homework at the coffee table. With her face hidden by the newspaper, I took great advantage of my position to steal long revealing looks beneath her skirt and watch in astonished wonderment as she would, so gracefully, cross and uncross her legs. Most often she wore sleek, shiny pantyhose, but occasionally she would wear stockings. It was always especially sensual for me to be able to catch a glimpse of her milky white thigh above the tops of her stockings.
I began to look for any opportunity at all to take advantage of a situation where I might look up her skirt or dress, or catch a glimpse of her cleavage whenever she bent over. Each new and revealing indiscretion seemed to excite and provoke me to increasingly greater heights of arousal. My frequency of masturbation increased dramatically. From once or twice a week, it rapidly became a daily experience for me and, quite often, even more than once a day. And, almost invariably, I employed visions of my Auntie as the quintessential focus of my fantasies.
As the frequency of masturbation increased, so did my desire and need to experiment and enhance the experience. I took every opportunity, when I was alone in the house, to sneak into my Auntie’s bedroom and investigate the contents of her lingerie drawers. I loved the sensory feel of her sleek underthings against my skin and quickly learned, through experimentation, what an exceptionally wonderful experience it could be to employ her lingerie to physically magnify and enhance my fantasies.
