In this chapter, our touch-phobic hero goes to university and has a girl in his bed for the first time.
“Untouched” Part 3
(c) Mike Kimera 2010. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@gmail.com
The incident with Sharon told me things about myself that I didn’t want to know. The arousal I experienced in those moments when I had a camera in my hand and Sharon’s bound body in my lens was engraved on my memory. I knew it was an experience I wanted to repeat. And yet, when the object of my desire had been offered to me, I had run away.
I tried to tell myself that I was repelled by Sharon’s depravity but that did not explain why I had spent so many nights since masturbating to the images that I claimed repelled me.
That was when I first began to suspect that something in me might be broken.
I had treated Sharon badly. I knew she deserved better but I could not bring myself to contact her.
A week after the incident, I returned home to find that Sharon had visited while I was out.
“She seems such a nice girl,” my mother said. “It’s such a shame she and her family will be away this summer. Still, she must like you. She left you a present to remember her by.”
The present was a large manila envelope.
“Aren’t you going to open it, dear?”
Ignoring my mother, I ran up to my room and ripped open the envelope.
There was a note from Sharon.
“You are a little shit, leaving me like that. I hope someone treats you like that one day. Then you’ll know what it feels like.
I developed these so you’ll know what you are missing.
Mr. McKinley says you have talent.
Which I guess makes you a talented shit.”
Attached to the note was a set of large format, matte black and white prints of the shots I’d taken of Sharon.
Looking at them made me instantly hard.
I spent the summer wanking to those photos and re-reading that note.
I bought a camera and I promised myself not to be a shit the next time I was with a naked woman.
It was a lonely summer spent taking long distance shots of girls in the park who never even knew I was there and working through the books on the reading list my university had sent me.
In September 1984, I went up to the University of York. I selected York as my university because it had the highest female to male ratio in the country and was located on pretty campus which most of the students lived on.
I was determined that I would lose my virginity in my first term. I had a room on campus, I was studying English, which was dominated by women, and I had a condoms stashed in the drawer by my bed.
York lived up to my expectations. It was filled with young women experiencing the freedom of living away from home for the first time. The Halls of Residence were mixed-sex and the atmosphere was relaxed. I was treated to a daily parade of women being women and I loved it.
I was also a little dazzled by it. I didn’t know where to start. I photographed every girl that took my fancy on campus. I even talked to a few of them. The problem was that I had no idea how to take this further and the pretty girls were being wooed by predatory third year
students who had developed a smooth line of chat that was depressingly effective.
I decided that I could build relationships in my seminar group. My pre-reading meant I was well ahead in my course work and I was naïve enough to believe that this was a good thing.
I doomed myself to social isolation in my second seminar when I asked the tutor whether she favoured the subjective analysis of the text advocated by the New Criticism or the allegedly objective view put forward by the Chicago school.
Only then did I realise that most of my peers were still struggling through the set texts and none of them had done any work on the different schools of literary criticism. I understood that I had labelled myself as a nerd and made myself unattractive to the women in
my group.
By my third week I was feeling lonely and in need of a challenge. I was so deep in nerdom by then that it made sense to me to try and break out of this cycle by auditing an extra-curricular class on Virginia Woolf given by a Grad Student called Charlotte Lowell.
That was the year that “A Room of One’s Own” suddenly became a feminist tract and earnest women with little knowledge of literary criticism dedicated themselves to reading Virginia Woolf.
I attended the first lecture with mischief in mind. I was a fan of Woolf’s novels and I was irritated that “A Room of One’s Own” was now more widely read (or at least purchased) than “Jacob’s Room”. I was also stunned that feminists were deifying a woman with a history of mental illness, possibly worsened by sexual abuse as a child and who had finally committed suicide.
I arrived early and sat at the front. I was, of course, the only male in the room and a little cordone sanitaire of empty chairs was established all around me as the Wimmin kept their distance. Men, it seemed, should be in a separate room of their own.
Charlotte strode into the classroom without looking at anyone and slammed her books onto the lecturer’s table. She wore a v-necked jumper over a white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt were folded back over the ends of the sleeves of the jumper, which been pushed back up
her forearms. Her designer jeans were tucked into soft leather riding boots. All in all, she was the perfect image of a Sloane Ranger ready for a day of huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ on daddy’s country estate.
“OK, so I’m Charlotte Lowell and this is the first of five lectures on the works of Virginia Woolf” she said, leaning forward, hands flat on the desk, weight taken by her splendid forearms, head up and tilted so her hair fell to the side in a dark heavy curtain.
Charlotte’s accent was so Sloane that associating it with anything as intellectual as a lecture seemed an act against nature. I let the accent pass me by and concentrated on the broadness of her shoulders, the slimness of her waist and the taut curves her jeans displayed.
Charlotte moved around the desk, stood for a moment with her back to it, pushed herself up into a sitting position and then crossed her legs. I swear half the room sighed.
“First point: I will not be discussing ‘A Room of One’s Own’. It is not literature. It is barely a pamphlet. If it is your main reason for being here then I suggest you leave now and sign up for one of the Sociology Department’s new offerings on Women’s Studies.”
“Second point: these lectures will apply a de-constructionist critique to explore the emergence in Woolf’s work of a ‘maternal voice’ which uses non-vocal, domestic semiotics to challenge the symbolism and rhetoric, the ‘paternal voice’ as it were, of Colonial Britain. I expect you all to keep up.”
Charlotte waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t seem in the least surprised by the mass departure of the angry, confused or intimidated.
Charlotte smiled, slid off the desk, grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat straddling it, directly in front of me. An image of a naked Christine Keeler sitting in the same pose flashed across my mind.
“So, now we’ve culled the herd, I’d like those of you who think you know what I’m talking about to come and sit close to the only man who seems not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf and we’ll begin with alienation in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’.”
There were about a dozen women in the room. A few of them moved their chairs closer to the front in token obedience to Charlotte’s instruction but only one woman, a small, pale, blonde got up from her chair to come and sit next to me. She gave a shy nod and then gave Charlotte the full wattage of her whiter than white smile.
But Charlotte was already up out of her chair, pacing the room with relentless energy as she thrust her ideas at us. She worked us hard in that first session. The ideas were complex and slippery and startlingly new back then. I didn’t understand it all but her passion carried me through and gave me that wonderful feeling of grasping something original, something that would make a difference.
At last she said, “OK. Not a bad start. Next week we’ll look at the significance of colonial rhetoric and new technology in ‘The Voyage Out’.” Then she picked up her books and strode out of the room leaving us all breathless behind her.
The young blonde woman who had taken the seat next to mine said, “Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet.”
I turned towards her. A blush spread across her pale skin. It made her look quite beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but she is the most attractive woman I’ve ever met in real life. I kept getting distracted by those riding boots. I bet she’s got perfect seat.”
“I think we could all see her perfect seat,” I said.
“But I’ll bet I was the only one imaging Ms Lowell’s seat pivoting on my tongue.” she said, with a sigh.
“You do realise that you said that part out loud as well?” I said, still slightly stunned by the image she’d just placed in my head.
“I know. Wicked of me isn’t it? I’m Fiona, by the way,” she said and stuck out her hand for me to shake.
“Fiona. It means white, fair and beautiful. It’s a good description:” I said as I held her hand in mine.
“You do realize I’m gay don’t you?” she said, her handshake having come to a sudden stop.
“The eating out Charlotte image sort of gave that away.” I said, “But that doesn’t make you any less beautiful.”
After a moments hesitation she smiled and said, “I bet you say that to all the lesbian girls.”
We went for a beer and she told me all about herself. She’d come to university determined to be her real self – hence the verbal neon flashing signs saying lesbian that she taken to displaying.
Neither of us knew what to say to that, so, for a while, we talked about hobbies. I described myself as a would be photographer, Fiona labeled her self as a book-addict who could not live without a daily dose of fiction. Then she asked me which TV show I was most ashamed of liking. I offered up my continuing obsession with “Captain Scarlet”. I even did the “This is the voice of the Mysterons” line in that weird deep voice. Fiona confessed that she had a crush on Erin in “The Waltons”.
Several beers later, she told me that she’d come out to her parents just before going up to York and she hadn’t heard from then since. I comforted her in a drunken and clumsy way and we ended up staggering back to my room.
“Beer makes me tired,” Fiona said, collapsing on my narrow little bed and struggling to take off her trainers. I helped her with them, standing above her with her feet resting on my chest.
“I can sleep here tonight, can’t I?” she said, looking up at me.
I don’t know if it was the beer or the fact that I knew Fiona wanted nothing from me physically, but I wasn’t freaked out by having a woman on my bed in the middle of the night. I felt calm and happy.
“Sure you can.” I said.
“I don’t have any pyjamas,” she said, sounding more perplexed than embarrassed.
“That’s all right, neither do I.”
She laughed and said, “Can you help me with these jeans?”
Fiona undid the top of her jeans and I pulled. Her legs were startlingly pale. She wore black cotton panties that had been pulled down a little as the jeans came off. I paused, still holding her legs in my hands. She looked vulnerable. I wanted to say something to make her more comfortable but all my words had gone away. All I could do was look her in the eyes and gently put her legs down on the bed.
Still looking at me, she sat up, crossed her arms at the wrists, reached down and pulled her T-shirt above her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Hers were the first breasts I’d seen in real life. They were small and pale and perfect.
“Wow.” I said.
“That’s the comment I get from the first person to see me naked? Gosh, I so grateful I’m with someone who’s so articulate.”
The vulnerability was gone now. Fiona was back to normal. She was also tugging at my belt.
I stepped back, perhaps a little too quickly.
“Hey, I wasn’t trying to jump you. Gay girl here, remember? But I’m not gonna be naked in your room while you’re fully dressed.”
I could see the sense in that. I stripped as quickly as I could in my tipsy state. I didn’t look at Fiona while I did it. She took the hint and paid attention to pulling the covers back from the bed.
I considered leaving my boxers on; Fiona still had her panties on after all, but my boxers weren’t that clean and I knew I’d be uncomfortable so I stripped completely. I had the first stirrings of an erection, barely enough to defy gravity a little.
Fiona had already slipped under the sheets when she looked up and saw me naked.
“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be.” She said and then reached down under the sheets, pulled off her panties and threw them onto the floor.
Fiona held back the sheet for me and I lay down beside her. There was just about enough room for the two of us.
Fiona continued to hold the sheet back. She was looking at my torpid cock and grinning.
“What?” I said reaching for the sheet that she was keeping out of my reach.
“
Well, isn’t it supposed to be stiffer than that?”
“I thought you were gay girl.”
“Yeah, but you also said I was a Wow. Is this how you normally are when you have a naked Wow in your bed?”
I stayed silent for a moment too long and Fiona’s grin vanished.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. I’m just nervous. I’ve never been in anyone’s bed before.”
“Well I’ve never had anyone, Wow or otherwise, in my bed either.”
“So we’re both…”
“…virgins. Yes.”
Fiona scooted across the bed until she was on her side, leaning her head on her hand and with her back against the wall. I stayed on my back beside her. My erection subsided completely.
I wasn’t embarrassed or angry. I just wasn’t aroused. I had no idea what to do next.
“I masturbate a lot,” Fiona said.
I raised an eyebrow, “Define a lot.”
“At least once a day.”
“Amateur,” I said. “I masturbate much more than that.”
“What do you think about when you do it?”
“Women I’ve seen that I think are hot”
“Me too.”
“If I was alone tonight,” I said, “I’d be thinking about Charlotte Lowell.”
“Me too.”
A loud silence followed.
I realized that I really wanted to think about Charlotte while the images of her were fresh in my mind. Now that the idea was in my head, I had to do something about it.
“We could pretend we are alone.” I said.
I managed to sound casual but my heart was pounding at the thought of it.
“OK,” Fiona said, after a long second, “But you go first,”
“We’ll go at the same time.”
“Only if you guarantee no touching.”
Now there was a statement that helped me relax.
“OK, no touching.”
“But you can look if you like;” she said. “You can tell me if I’m still a Wow.”
I put my hands behind my head and said, “And you can watch me if you like”.
Then I closed my eyes and achieved a full erection merely by recalling the way Charlotte, lost in thought, habitually swept her long hair to one side, exposing the soft strength of her neck. I overlaid other images of her: the way she tapped the eraser-tipped pencil against her full lower lip while she listened, the way her nipples pushed up and out through her shirt when she’d stripped off her v-neck jumper.
In less than a minute my cock was hard against my belly..
I opened my eyes when I heard Fiona mutter, “Jesus.”
She turned onto her belly, her head facing me, her body less than an inch away from mine, and slid her right arm under her belly.
As I watched, her arse rose and fell. I could feel the mattress moving as she pivoted on her fingers, knuckles pressing into the bed. She started to rock gently.
I looked away, held the images of Charlotte in my imagination almost as firmly as I held my cock, and started to stroke in time to the movements I felt through the mattress.
When Fiona started to make little mewling noises, like a kitten in pain, I let my fist move in a blur of activity until my back arched and warm sperm flowed over my fingers like melting ice cream.
Fiona was still going. Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was covered in sweat and she was grinding her pubis hard into the bed. I watched fascinated. A few seconds later she let out a long low growl and went limp on the mattress.
She opened her eyes and smiled at me.
“That was intense,” she said, her face still flat against the mattress.
“You turn pink when you come” I said. It seemed that my brain no longer had control over my mouth.
Fiona sat up, pulled her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Well at least I don’t cover myself in sticky goo” she said. Then she passed her fingers beneath her nose and added, “Though I could do with washing my hands.”
I laughed.
“Do you think we’re both still virgins?” I asked.
“Well, either that or we just double-teamed Charlotte.”
“Now there’s an image to conjure with.”
Fiona hit me with a pillow.
“I need a pee,” she said, “and you need a wash.”
I dragged myself off the bed and headed towards the sink.
“The bog is down the hall,.” I said. “So you might want to put some clothes on.”
Fiona pulled on her T-shirt and her panties and headed off sleepily into the hall.
Standing at the sink, soaping my balls, I congratulated myself on having finally had sex with a woman. True, we hadn’t actually touched, but she’d been there and she’d looked wonderful. I lost myself a little as I considered precisely how wonderful and my erection
returned, not as fierce as before but still saluting the sink. I was looking down at it when Fiona came back into the room.
“You weren’t kidding when you said you masturbated a lot were you?” she said. Her voice sounded calm but she’d lingered at the door and she looked a little anxious.
“I’m sorry” I said turning towards her.
It was only when she took half a step back that I realized that my erection was now aimed at her.
I turned back towards the sink, moving a little too rapidly, and slapped my hard dick up against the porcelain.
Fiona laughed.
“Erections really are ridiculous.” she said, stepping towards me. “No wonder men can’t think when they’re aroused; the brain must hardly get any blood at all. Charlotte has a lot to answer for tonight.”
“Actually, I was thinking about you.” I said.
Fiona froze.
“Well you are a wow. I could spend hours watching you turning slick and pink.”
Even before I finished the sentence, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”
Fiona smiled. It was a tentative smile, as if she was trying it on but wasn’t sure it would fit.
“Of course you’re an idiot. All men are idiots. It’s a well known design fault.”
My laugh sounded strained but Fiona’s shoulders relaxed.
“Are you going to put that away or do you need to drain it first.”
“I’m fine thanks. The er… mood has passed.”
“Let’s keep it that way. You’re sleeping on the floor.”
“It’s my room.”
“You want to have your room to yourself?”
“No. I’ll take the floor.”
Fiona slipped back into the bed, face turned towards the wall.
I pulled the cushions off my chair, switched off the light and settled on the floor.
Silence filled the room.
“Good night Fiona”
“Good night John Boy”
I knew then that everything would be all right.
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The incident with Sharon told me things about myself that I didn’t want to know. The arousal I experienced in those moments when I had a camera in my hand and Sharon’s bound body in my lens was engraved on my memory. I knew it was an experience I wanted to repeat. And yet, when the object of my desire had been offered to me, I had run away.
I tried to tell myself that I was repelled by Sharon’s depravity but that did not explain why I had spent so many nights since masturbating to the images that I claimed repelled me.
That was when I first began to suspect that something in me might be broken.
I had treated Sharon badly. I knew she deserved better but I could not bring myself to contact her.
A week after the incident, I returned home to find that Sharon had visited while I was out.
“She seems such a nice girl,” my mother said. “It’s such a shame she and her family will be away this summer. Still, she must like you. She left you a present to remember her by.”
The present was a large manila envelope.
“Aren’t you going to open it, dear?”
Ignoring my mother, I ran up to my room and ripped open the envelope.
There was a note from Sharon.
“You are a little shit, leaving me like that. I hope someone treats you like that one day. Then you’ll know what it feels like.
I developed these so you’ll know what you are missing.
Mr. McKinley says you have talent.
Which I guess makes you a talented shit.”
Attached to the note was a set of large format, matt black and white prints of the shots I’d taken of Sharon.
Looking at them made me instantly hard.
I spent the summer wanking to those photos and re-reading that note.
I bought a camera and I promised myself not to be a shit the next time I was with a naked woman.
It was a lonely summer spent taking long distance shots of girls in the park who never even knew I was there and working through the books on the reading list my university had sent me.
In September 1984, I went up to the University of York. I selected York as my university because it had the highest female to male ratio in the country and was located on pretty campus which most of the students lived on.
I was determined that I would lose my virginity in my first term. I had a room on campus, I was studying English, which was dominated by women, and I had a condoms stashed in the drawer by my bed.
York lived up to my expectations. It was filled with young women experiencing the freedom of living away from home for the first time. The Halls of Residence were mixed-sex and the atmosphere was relaxed. I was treated to a daily parade of women being women and I loved it.
I was also a little dazzled by it. I didn’t know where to start. I photographed every girl that took my fancy on campus. I even talked to a few of them. The problem was that I had no idea how to take this further and the pretty girls were being wooed by predatory third year
students who had developed a smooth line of chat that was depressingly effective.
I decided that I could build relationships in my seminar group. My pre-reading meant I was well ahead in my course work and I was naïve enough to believe that this was a good thing.
I doomed myself to social isolation in my second seminar when I asked the tutor whether she favoured the subjective analysis of the text advocated by the New Criticism or the allegedly objective view put forward by the Chicago school.
Only then did I realise that most of my peers were still struggling through the set texts and none of them had done any work on the different schools of literary criticism. I understood that I had labelled myself as a nerd and made myself unattractive to the women in
my group.
By my third week I was feeling lonely and in need of a challenge. I was so deep in nerdom by then that it made sense to me to try and break out of this cycle by auditing an extra-curricular class on Virginia Woolf given by a Grad Student called Charlotte Lowell.
That was the year that “A Room of One’s Own” suddenly became a feminist tract and earnest women with little knowledge of literary criticism dedicated themselves to reading Virginia Woolf.
I attended the first lecture with mischief in mind. I was a fan of Woolf’s novels and I was irritated that “A Room of One’s Own” was now more widely read (or at least purchased) than “Jacob’s Room”. I was also stunned that feminists were deifying a woman with a history of
mental illness, possibly worsened by sexual abuse as a child and who had finally committed suicide.
I arrived early and sat at the front. I was, of course, the only male in the room and a little cordone sanitaire of empty chairs was established all around me as the Wimmin kept their distance. Men, it seemed, should be in a separate room of their own.
Charlotte strode into the classroom without looking at anyone and slammed her books onto the lecturer’s table. She wore a v-necked jumper over a white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt were folded back over the ends of the sleeves of the jumper, which been pushed back up
her forearms. Her designer jeans were tucked into soft leather riding boots. All in all, sheas the perfect image of a Sloane Ranger ready for a day of huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ on daddy’s country estate.
“OK, so I’m Charlotte Lowell and this is the first of five lectures on the works of Virginia Woolf” she said, leaning forward, hands flat on the desk, weight taken by her splendid forearms, head up and tilted so her hair fell to the side in a dark heavy curtain.
Charlotte’s accent was so Sloane that associating it with anything as intellectual as a lecture seemed an act against nature. I let the accent pass me by and concentrated on the broadness of her shoulders, the slimness of her waist and the taut curves her jeans displayed.
Charlotte moved around the desk, stood for a moment with her back to it, pushed herself up into a sitting position and then crossed her legs. I swear half the room sighed.
“First point: I will not be discussing ‘A Room of One’s Own’. It is not literature. It is barely a pamphlet. If it is your main reason for being here then I suggest you leave now and sign up for one of the Sociology Department’s new offerings on Women’s’ Studies.”
Second point: these lectures will apply a de-constructionist critique to explore the emergence in Woolf’s work of a ‘maternal voice’ which uses non-vocal, domestic semiotics to challenge the symbolism and rhetoric, the ‘paternal voice’ as it were, of Colonial Britain. I expect you all to keep up.”
Charlotte waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t seem in the least surprised by the mass departure of the angry, confused or intimidated.
Charlotte smiled, slid off the desk, grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat straddling it, directly in front of me. An image of a naked Christine Keeler sitting in the same pose flashed across my mind.
“So, now we’ve culled the herd, I’d like those of you who think you know what I’m talking about to come and sit close to the only man who seems not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf and we’ll begin with alienation in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’.”
There were about a dozen women in the room. A few of them moved their chairs closer to the front in token obedience to Charlotte’s instruction but only one woman, a small, pale, blonde got up from her chair to come and sit next to me. She gave a shy nod and then gave
Charlotte the full wattage of her whiter than white smile.
But Charlotte was already up out of her chair, pacing the room with relentless energy as she thrust her ideas at us. She worked us hard in that first session. The ideas were complex and slippery and startlingly new back then. I didn’t understand it all but her passion carried me through and gave me that wonderful feeling of grasping something original, something that would make a difference.
At last she said, “OK. Not a bad start. Next week we’ll look at the significance of colonial rhetoric and new technology in ‘The Voyage Out’.” Then she picked up her books and strode out of the room leaving us all breathless behind her.
The young blonde woman who had taken the seat next to mine said, “Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet.”
I turned towards her. A blush spread across her pale skin. It made her look quite beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but she is the most attractive woman I’ve ever met in real life. I kept getting distracted by those riding boots. I bet she’s got perfect seat.”
“I think we could all see her perfect seat,” I said.
“But I’ll bet I was the only one imaging Ms Lowell’s seat pivoting on my tongue.” she said, with a sigh.
“You do realise that you said that part out loud as well?” I said, still slightly stunned by the image she’d just placed in my head.
“I know. Wicked of me isn’t it? I’m Fiona, by the way,” she said and stuck out her hand for me to shake.
“Fiona. It means white, fair and beautiful. It’s a good description:” I said as I held her hand in mine.
“You do realize I’m gay don’t you?” she said, her handshake having come to a sudden stop.
“The eating out Charlotte image sort of gave that away.” I said, “But that doesn’t make you any less beautiful.”
After a moments hesitation she smiled and said, “I bet you say that to all the lesbian girls.”
We went for a beer and she told me all about herself. She’d come to university determined to be her real self – hence the verbal neon flashing signs saying lesbian that she taken to displaying.
Neither of us knew what to say to that, so, for a while, we talked about hobbies. I described myself as a would be photographer, Fiona labelled her self as a book-addict who could not live without a daily dose of fiction. Then she asked me which TV show I was most ashamed of liking. I offered up my continuing obsession with “Captain Scarlet”. I even did the “This is the voice of the Mysterons” line in that weird deep voice. Fiona confessed that she had a crush on Erin in “The Waltons”.
Several beers later, she told me that she’d come out to her parents just before going up to York and she hadn’t heard from then since. I comforted her in a drunken and clumsy way and we ended up staggering back to my room.
“Beer makes me tired,” Fiona said, collapsing on my narrow little bed and struggling to take off her trainers. I helped her with them, standing above her with her feet resting on my chest.
“I can sleep here tonight, can’t I?” she said, looking up at me.
I don’t know if it was the beer or the fact that I knew Fiona wanted nothing from me physically, but I wasn’t freaked out by having a woman on my bed in the middle of the night. I felt calm and happy.
“Sure you can.” I said.
“I don’t have any pyjamas,” she said, sounding more perplexed than embarrassed.
“That’s all right, neither do I.”
She laughed and said, “Can you help me with these jeans?”
Fiona undid the top of her jeans and I pulled. Her legs were startlingly pale. She wore black cotton panties that had been pulled down a little as the jeans came off. I paused, still holding her legs in my hands. She looked vulnerable. I wanted to say something to make her more
comfortable but all my words had gone away. All I could do was look her in the eyes and gently put her legs down on the bed.
Still looking at me, she sat up, crossed her arms at the wrists, reached down and pulled her T-shirt above her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Hers were the first breasts I’d seen in real life. They were small and pale and perfect.
“Wow.” I said.
“That’s the comment I get from the first person to see me naked? Gosh, I so grateful I’m with someone who’s so articulate.”
The vulnerability was gone now. Fiona was back to normal. She was also tugging at my belt.
I stepped back, perhaps a little too quickly.
“Hey, I wasn’t trying to jump you. Gay girl here, remember? But I’m not gonna be naked in your room while you’re fully dressed.”
I could see the sense in that. I stripped as quickly as I could in my tipsy state. I didn’t look at Fiona while I did it. She took the hint and paid attention to pulling the covers back from the bed.
I considered leaving my boxers on; Fiona still had her panties on after all, but my boxers weren’t that clean and I knew I’d be uncomfortable so I stripped completely. I had the first stirrings of an erection, barely enough to defy gravity a little.
Fiona had already slipped under the sheets when she looked up and saw me naked.
“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be.” She said and then reached down under the sheets, pulled off her panties and threw them onto the floor.
Fiona held back the sheet for me and I lay down beside her. There was just about enough room for the two of us.
Fiona continued to hold the sheet back. She was looking at my torpid cock and grinning.
“What?” I said reaching for the sheet that she was keeping out of my reach.
“
Well, isn’t it supposed to be stiffer than that?”
“I thought you were gay girl.”
“Yeah, but you also said I was a Wow. Is this how you normally are when you have a naked Wow in your bed?”
I stayed silent for a moment too long and Fiona’s grin vanished.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. I’m just nervous. I’ve never been in anyone’s bed before.”
“Well I’ve never had anyone, Wow or otherwise, in my bed either.”
“So we’re both…”
“…virgins. Yes.”
Fiona scooted across the bed until she was on her side, leaning her head on her hand and with her back against the wall. I stayed on my back beside her. My erection subsided completely.
I wasn’t embarrassed or angry. I just wasn’t aroused. I had no idea what to do next.
“I masturbate a lot,” Fiona said.
I raised an eyebrow, “Define a lot.”
“At least once a day.”
“Amateur,” I said. “I masturbate much more than that.”
“What do you think about when you do it?”
“Women I’ve seen that I think are hot”
“Me too.”
“If I was alone tonight,” I said, “I’d be thinking about Charlotte Lowell.”
“Me too.”
A loud silence followed.
I realized that I really wanted to think about Charlotte while the images of her were fresh in my mind. Now that the idea was in my head, I had to do something about it.
“We could pretend we are alone.” I said.
I managed to sound casual but my heart was pounding at the thought of it.
“OK,” Fiona said, after a long second, “But you go first,”
“We’ll go at the same time.”
“Only if you guarantee no touching.”
Now there was a statement that helped me relax.
“OK, no touching.”
“But you can look if you like;” she said. “You can tell me if I’m still a Wow.”
I put my hands behind my head and said, “And you can watch me if you like”.
Then I closed my eyes and achieved a full erection merely by recalling the way Charlotte, lost in thought, habitually swept her long hair to one side, exposing the soft strength of her neck. I overlaid other images of her: the way she tapped the eraser-tipped pencil against her
full lower lip while she listened, the way her nipples pushed up and out through her shirt when she’d stripped off her v-neck jumper.
In less than a minute my cock was hard against my belly..
I opened my eyes when I heard Fiona mutter, “Jesus.”
She turned onto her belly, her head facing me, her body less than an inch away from mine, and slid her right arm under her belly.
As I watched, her arse rose and fell. I could feel the mattress moving as she pivoted on her fingers, knuckles pressing into the bed. She started to rock gently.
I looked away, held the images of Charlotte in my imagination almost as firmly as I held my cock, and started to stroke in time to the movements I felt through the mattress.
When Fiona started to make little mewling noises, like a kitten in pain, I let my fist move in a blur of activity until my back arched and warm sperm flowed over my fingers like melting ice cream.
Fiona was still going. Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was covered in sweat and she was grinding her pubis hard into the bed. I watched fascinated. A few seconds later she let out a long low growl and went limp on the mattress.
She opened her eyes and smiled at me.
“That was intense,” she said, her face still flat against the mattress.
“You turn pink when you come” I said. It seemed that my brain no longer had control over my mouth.
Fiona sat up, pulled her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Well at least I don’t cover myself in sticky goo” she said. Then she passed her fingers beneath her nose and added, “Though I could do with washing my hands.”
I laughed.
“Do you think we’re both still virgins?” I asked.
“Well, either that or we just double-teamed Charlotte.”
“Now there’s an image to conjure with.”
Fiona hit me with a pillow.
“I need a pee,” she said, “and you need a wash.”
I dragged myself off the bed and headed towards the sink.
“The bog is down the hall,.” I said. “So you might want to put some clothes on.”
Fiona pulled on her T-shirt and her panties and headed off sleepily into the hall.
Standing at the sink, soaping my balls, I congratulated myself on having finally had sex with a woman. True, we hadn’t actually touched, but she’d been there and she’d looked wonderful. I lost myself a little as I considered precisely how wonderful and my erection
returned, not as fierce as before but still saluting the sink. I was looking down at it when Fiona came back into the room.
“You weren’t kidding when you said you masturbated a lot were you?” she said. Her voice sounded calm but she’d lingered at the door and she looked a little anxious.
“I’m sorry” I said turning towards her.
It was only when she took half a step back that I realized that my erection was now aimed at her.
I turned back towards the sink, moving a little too rapidly, and slapped my hard dick up against the porcelain.
Fiona laughed.
“Erections really are ridiculou
The incident with Sharon told me things about myself that I didn’t want to know. The arousal I experienced in those moments when I had a camera in my hand and Sharon’s bound body in my lens was engraved on my memory. I knew it was an experience I wanted to repeat. And yet, when the object of my desire had been offered to me, I had run away.
I tried to tell myself that I was repelled by Sharon’s depravity but that did not explain why I had spent so many nights since masturbating to the images that I claimed repelled me.
That was when I first began to suspect that something in me might be broken.
I had treated Sharon badly. I knew she deserved better but I could not bring myself to contact her.
A week after the incident, I returned home to find that Sharon had visited while I was out.
“She seems such a nice girl,” my mother said. “It’s such a shame she and her family will be away this summer. Still, she must like you. She left you a present to remember her by.”
The present was a large manila envelope.
“Aren’t you going to open it, dear?”
Ignoring my mother, I ran up to my room and ripped open the envelope.
There was a note from Sharon.
“You are a little shit, leaving me like that. I hope someone treats you like that one day. Then you’ll know what it feels like.
I developed these so you’ll know what you are missing.
Mr. McKinley says you have talent.
Which I guess makes you a talented shit.”
Attached to the note was a set of large format, matt black and white prints of the shots I’d taken of Sharon.
Looking at them made me instantly hard.
I spent the summer wanking to those photos and re-reading that note.
I bought a camera and I promised myself not to be a shit the next time I was with a naked woman.
It was a lonely summer spent taking long distance shots of girls in the park who never even knew I was there and working through the books on the reading list my university had sent me.
In September 1984, I went up to the University of York. I selected York as my university because it had the highest female to male ratio in the country and was located on pretty campus which most of the students lived on.
I was determined that I would lose my virginity in my first term. I had a room on campus, I was studying English, which was dominated by women, and I had a condoms stashed in the drawer by my bed.
York lived up to my expectations. It was filled with young women experiencing the freedom of living away from home for the first time. The Halls of Residence were mixed-sex and the atmosphere was relaxed. I was treated to a daily parade of women being women and I loved it.
I was also a little dazzled by it. I didn’t know where to start. I photographed every girl that took my fancy on campus. I even talked to a few of them. The problem was that I had no idea how to take this further and the pretty girls were being wooed by predatory third year
students who had developed a smooth line of chat that was depressingly effective.
I decided that I could build relationships in my seminar group. My pre-reading meant I was well ahead in my course work and I was naïve enough to believe that this was a good thing.
I doomed myself to social isolation in my second seminar when I asked the tutor whether she favoured the subjective analysis of the text advocated by the New Criticism or the allegedly objective view put forward by the Chicago school.
Only then did I realise that most of my peers were still struggling through the set texts and none of them had done any work on the different schools of literary criticism. I understood that I had labelled myself as a nerd and made myself unattractive to the women in
my group.
By my third week I was feeling lonely and in need of a challenge. I was so deep in nerdom by then that it made sense to me to try and break out of this cycle by auditing an extra-curricular class on Virginia Woolf given by a Grad Student called Charlotte Lowell.
That was the year that “A Room of One’s Own” suddenly became a feminist tract and earnest women with little knowledge of literary criticism dedicated themselves to reading Virginia Woolf.
I attended the first lecture with mischief in mind. I was a fan of Woolf’s novels and I was irritated that “A Room of One’s Own” was now more widely read (or at least purchased) than “Jacob’s Room”. I was also stunned that feminists were deifying a woman with a history of
mental illness, possibly worsened by sexual abuse as a child and who had finally committed suicide.
I arrived early and sat at the front. I was, of course, the only male in the room and a little cordone sanitaire of empty chairs was established all around me as the Wimmin kept their distance. Men, it seemed, should be in a separate room of their own.
Charlotte strode into the classroom without looking at anyone and slammed her books onto the lecturer’s table. She wore a v-necked jumper over a white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt were folded back over the ends of the sleeves of the jumper, which been pushed back up
her forearms. Her designer jeans were tucked into soft leather riding boots. All in all, sheas the perfect image of a Sloane Ranger ready for a day of huntin’, shootin’ n fishin’ on daddy’s country estate.
“OK, so I’m Charlotte Lowell and this is the first of five lectures on the works of Virginia Woolf” she said, leaning forward, hands flat on the desk, weight taken by her splendid forearms, head up and tilted so her hair fell to the side in a dark heavy curtain.
Charlotte’s accent was so Sloane that associating it with anything as intellectual as a lecture seemed an act against nature. I let the accent pass me by and concentrated on the broadness of her shoulders, the slimness of her waist and the taut curves her jeans displayed.
Charlotte moved around the desk, stood for a moment with her back to it, pushed herself up into a sitting position and then crossed her legs. I swear half the room sighed.
“First point: I will not be discussing ‘A Room of One’s Own’. It is not literature. It is barely a pamphlet. If it is your main reason for being here then I suggest you leave now and sign up for one of the Sociology Department’s new offerings on Women’s’ Studies.”
Second point: these lectures will apply a de-constructionist critique to explore the emergence in Woolf’s work of a ‘maternal voice’ which uses non-vocal, domestic semiotics to challenge the symbolism and rhetoric, the ‘paternal voice’ as it were, of Colonial Britain. I expect you all to keep up.”
Charlotte waited a couple of seconds. She didn’t seem in the least surprised by the mass departure of the angry, confused or intimidated.
Charlotte smiled, slid off the desk, grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat straddling it, directly in front of me. An image of a naked Christine Keeler sitting in the same pose flashed across my mind.
“So, now we’ve culled the herd, I’d like those of you who think you know what I’m talking about to come and sit close to the only man who seems not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf and we’ll begin with alienation in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’.”
There were about a dozen women in the room. A few of them moved their chairs closer to the front in token obedience to Charlotte’s instruction but only one woman, a small, pale, blonde got up from her chair to come and sit next to me. She gave a shy nod and then gave
Charlotte the full wattage of her whiter than white smile.
But Charlotte was already up out of her chair, pacing the room with relentless energy as she thrust her ideas at us. She worked us hard in that first session. The ideas were complex and slippery and startlingly new back then. I didn’t understand it all but her passion carried me through and gave me that wonderful feeling of grasping something original, something that would make a difference.
At last she said, “OK. Not a bad start. Next week we’ll look at the significance of colonial rhetoric and new technology in ‘The Voyage Out’.” Then she picked up her books and strode out of the room leaving us all breathless behind her.
The young blonde woman who had taken the seat next to mine said, “Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet.”
I turned towards her. A blush spread across her pale skin. It made her look quite beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but she is the most attractive woman I’ve ever met in real life. I kept getting distracted by those riding boots. I bet she’s got perfect seat.”
“I think we could all see her perfect seat,” I said.
“But I’ll bet I was the only one imaging Ms Lowell’s seat pivoting on my tongue.” she said, with a sigh.
“You do realise that you said that part out loud as well?” I said, still slightly stunned by the image she’d just placed in my head.
“I know. Wicked of me isn’t it? I’m Fiona, by the way,” she said and stuck out her hand for me to shake.
“Fiona. It means white, fair and beautiful. It’s a good description:” I said as I held her hand in mine.
“You do realize I’m gay don’t you?” she said, her handshake having come to a sudden stop.
“The eating out Charlotte image sort of gave that away.” I said, “But that doesn’t make you any less beautiful.”
After a moments hesitation she smiled and said, “I bet you say that to all the lesbian girls.”
We went for a beer and she told me all about herself. She’d come to university determined to be her real self – hence the verbal neon flashing signs saying lesbian that she taken to displaying.
Neither of us knew what to say to that, so, for a while, we talked about hobbies. I described myself as a would be photographer, Fiona labelled her self as a book-addict who could not live without a daily dose of fiction. Then she asked me which TV show I was most ashamed of liking. I offered up my continuing obsession with “Captain Scarlet”. I even did the “This is the voice of the Mysterons” line in that weird deep voice. Fiona confessed that she had a crush on Erin in “The Waltons”.
Several beers later, she told me that she’d come out to her parents just before going up to York and she hadn’t heard from then since. I comforted her in a drunken and clumsy way and we ended up staggering back to my room.
“Beer makes me tired,” Fiona said, collapsing on my narrow little bed and struggling to take off her trainers. I helped her with them, standing above her with her feet resting on my chest.
“I can sleep here tonight, can’t I?” she said, looking up at me.
I don’t know if it was the beer or the fact that I knew Fiona wanted nothing from me physically, but I wasn’t freaked out by having a woman on my bed in the middle of the night. I felt calm and happy.
“Sure you can.” I said.
“I don’t have any pyjamas,” she said, sounding more perplexed than embarrassed.
“That’s all right, neither do I.”
She laughed and said, “Can you help me with these jeans?”
Fiona undid the top of her jeans and I pulled. Her legs were startlingly pale. She wore black cotton panties that had been pulled down a little as the jeans came off. I paused, still holding her legs in my hands. She looked vulnerable. I wanted to say something to make her more
comfortable but all my words had gone away. All I could do was look her in the eyes and gently put her legs down on the bed.
Still looking at me, she sat up, crossed her arms at the wrists, reached down and pulled her T-shirt above her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Hers were the first breasts I’d seen in real life. They were small and pale and perfect.
“Wow.” I said.
“That’s the comment I get from the first person to see me naked? Gosh, I so grateful I’m with someone who’s so articulate.”
The vulnerability was gone now. Fiona was back to normal. She was also tugging at my belt.
I stepped back, perhaps a little too quickly.
“Hey, I wasn’t trying to jump you. Gay girl here, remember? But I’m not gonna be naked in your room while you’re fully dressed.”
I could see the sense in that. I stripped as quickly as I could in my tipsy state. I didn’t look at Fiona while I did it. She took the hint and paid attention to pulling the covers back from the bed.
I considered leaving my boxers on; Fiona still had her panties on after all, but my boxers weren’t that clean and I knew I’d be uncomfortable so I stripped completely. I had the first stirrings of an erection, barely enough to defy gravity a little.
Fiona had already slipped under the sheets when she looked up and saw me naked.
“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be.” She said and then reached down under the sheets, pulled off her panties and threw them onto the floor.
Fiona held back the sheet for me and I lay down beside her. There was just about enough room for the two of us.
Fiona continued to hold the sheet back. She was looking at my torpid cock and grinning.
“What?” I said reaching for the sheet that she was keeping out of my reach.
“
Well, isn’t it supposed to be stiffer than that?”
“I thought you were gay girl.”
“Yeah, but you also said I was a Wow. Is this how you normally are when you have a naked Wow in your bed?”
I stayed silent for a moment too long and Fiona’s grin vanished.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be bitchy. I’m just nervous. I’ve never been in anyone’s bed before.”
“Well I’ve never had anyone, Wow or otherwise, in my bed either.”
“So we’re both…”
“…virgins. Yes.”
Fiona scooted across the bed until she was on her side, leaning her head on her hand and with her back against the wall. I stayed on my back beside her. My erection subsided completely.
I wasn’t embarrassed or angry. I just wasn’t aroused. I had no idea what to do next.
“I masturbate a lot,” Fiona said.
I raised an eyebrow, “Define a lot.”
“At least once a day.”
“Amateur,” I said. “I masturbate much more than that.”
“What do you think about when you do it?”
“Women I’ve seen that I think are hot”
“Me too.”
“If I was alone tonight,” I said, “I’d be thinking about Charlotte Lowell.”
“Me too.”
A loud silence followed.
I realized that I really wanted to think about Charlotte while the images of her were fresh in my mind. Now that the idea was in my head, I had to do something about it.
“We could pretend we are alone.” I said.
I managed to sound casual but my heart was pounding at the thought of it.
“OK,” Fiona said, after a long second, “But you go first,”
“We’ll go at the same time.”
“Only if you guarantee no touching.”
Now there was a statement that helped me relax.
“OK, no touching.”
“But you can look if you like;” she said. “You can tell me if I’m still a Wow.”
I put my hands behind my head and said, “And you can watch me if you like”.
Then I closed my eyes and achieved a full erection merely by recalling the way Charlotte, lost in thought, habitually swept her long hair to one side, exposing the soft strength of her neck. I overlaid other images of her: the way she tapped the eraser-tipped pencil against her
full lower lip while she listened, the way her nipples pushed up and out through her shirt when she’d stripped off her v-neck jumper.
In less than a minute my cock was hard against my belly..
I opened my eyes when I heard Fiona mutter, “Jesus.”
She turned onto her belly, her head facing me, her body less than an inch away from mine, and slid her right arm under her belly.
As I watched, her arse rose and fell. I could feel the mattress moving as she pivoted on her fingers, knuckles pressing into the bed. She started to rock gently.
I looked away, held the images of Charlotte in my imagination almost as firmly as I held my cock, and started to stroke in time to the movements I felt through the mattress.
When Fiona started to make little mewling noises, like a kitten in pain, I let my fist move in a blur of activity until my back arched and warm sperm flowed over my fingers like melting ice cream.
Fiona was still going. Her eyes were closed. Her forehead was covered in sweat and she was grinding her pubis hard into the bed. I watched fascinated. A few seconds later she let out a long low growl and went limp on the mattress.
She opened her eyes and smiled at me.
“That was intense,” she said, her face still flat against the mattress.
“You turn pink when you come” I said. It seemed that my brain no longer had control over my mouth.
Fiona sat up, pulled her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “Well at least I don’t cover myself in sticky goo” she said. Then she passed her fingers beneath her nose and added, “Though I could do with washing my hands.”
I laughed.
“Do you think we’re both still virgins?” I asked.
“Well, either that or we just double-teamed Charlotte.”
“Now there’s an image to conjure with.”
Fiona hit me with a pillow.
“I need a pee,” she said, “and you need a wash.”
I dragged myself off the bed and headed towards the sink.
“The bog is down the hall,.” I said. “So you might want to put some clothes on.”
Fiona pulled on her T-shirt and her panties and headed off sleepily into the hall.
Standing at the sink, soaping my balls, I congratulated myself on having finally had sex with a woman. True, we hadn’t actually touched, but she’d been there and she’d looked wonderful. I lost myself a little as I considered precisely how wonderful and my erection
returned, not as fierce as before but still saluting the sink. I was looking down at it when Fiona came back into the room.
“You weren’t kidding when you said you masturbated a lot were you?” she said. Her voice sounded calm but she’d lingered at the door and she looked a little anxious.
“I’m sorry” I said turning towards her.
It was only when she took half a step back that I realized that my erection was now aimed at her.
I turned back towards the sink, moving a little too rapidly, and slapped my hard dick up against the porcelain.
Fiona laughed.
“Erections really are ridiculous.” she said, stepping towards me. “No wonder men can’t think when they’re aroused; the brain must hardly get any blood at all. Charlotte has a lot to answer for tonight.”
“Actually, I was thinking about you.” I said.
Fiona froze.
“Well you are a wow. I could spend hours watching you turning slick and pink.”
Even before I finished the sentence, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”
Fiona smiled. It was a tentative smile, as if she was trying it on but wasn’t sure it would fit.
“Of course you’re an idiot. All men are idiots. It’s a well known design fault.”
My laugh sounded strained but Fiona’s shoulders relaxed.
“Are you going to put that away or do you need to drain it first.”
“I’m fine thanks. The er mood has passed.”
“Let’s keep it that way. You’re sleeping on the floor.”
“It’s my room.”
“You want to have your room to yourself?”
“No. I’ll take the floor.”
Fiona slipped back into the bed, face turned towards the wall.
I pulled the cushions off my chair, switched off the light and settled on the floor.
Silence filled the room.
“Good night Fiona”
“Good night John Boy”
I knew then that everything would be all right.
s.” she said, stepping towards me. “No wonder men can’t think when they’re aroused; the brain must hardly get any blood at all. Charlotte has a lot to answer for tonight.”
“Actually, I was thinking about you.” I said.
Fiona froze.
“Well you are a wow. I could spend hours watching you turning slick and pink.”
Even before I finished the sentence, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”
Fiona smiled. It was a tentative smile, as if she was trying it on but wasn’t sure it would fit.
“Of course you’re an idiot. All men are idiots. It’s a well known design fault.”
My laugh sounded strained but Fiona’s shoulders relaxed.
“Are you going to put that away or do you need to drain it first.”
“I’m fine thanks. The er mood has passed.”
“Let’s keep it that way. You’re sleeping on the floor.”
“It’s my room.”
“You want to have your room to yourself?”
“No. I’ll take the floor.”
Fiona slipped back into the bed, face turned towards the wall.
I pulled the cushions off my chair, switched off the light and settled on the floor.
Silence filled the room.
“Good night Fiona”
“Good night John Boy”
I knew then that everything would be all right.