I think I always knew he was my mother’s lover.
Daddy was away a lot and busy with his deals and his mistresses and Mummy needed company. That, anyway, was how Gabriella, my older sister explained it to me.
“But she’s got us,” I said.
“Its hardly the same,” snorted Gabriella contemptuously.
At first I wasn’t sure why not but Gabriella made sure she explained it to me. At first I was shocked, if a little intrigued, but later I came to accept it as being in the way of things.
He was much younger than my mother, a real “boy toy” Gabriella said. But he didn’t seem like a boy to me. He was dangerously, almost thrillingly, grown up, a real man in my world of girls and women.
I was fifteen when I learned that he was sleeping with Gabriella, just back from university, too. I couldn’t understand how she could have let it happen as my own dark desires for him were still girlish and unformed.
When I was seventeen, Amanda my middle sister but still two years older than me, let me know that she too had sampled his delights.
I found her and Gabriella giggling in a corner of the rose garden, sharing their experiences. At first they wouldn’t tell me what it was about but I pressed the question and Amanda fixed me with her brilliant blue eyes and flat out told me.
Gabriella, dark eyed and impish, could be expected to do anything. Daddy had had to strain every nerve and influence to stop her being expelled from school over that business with the cocaine.
But Amanda was the good one, the straight backed, straight A, straight forward girl interested only in her grades and her ponies.
The thought that she too had spread her legs for this roguish interloper who had now worked his way through my mother and my two older sisters, leaving only …
“Don’t worry, sister dear,” said Gabriella mischievously, “I’m sure your time will come, when you’ve grown up a little.”
Amanda giggled and gave me a sly look, quite unlike her.
I turned on my heel and fled.
I was fuming and indignant but I often thought about what Gabriella had said. It did seem to have a certain inevitability about it.
And would it be so bad? He was devilishly handsome, and clever and witty.
And I had often thought about him, on those long and languid summer days waiting for term to start and in the lonely reaches of the night.
But I was away at boarding school most of the time and with other things to occupy my mind. I was at a different school to my sisters (Daddy thought it best, after the business with the cocaine) so not even they were there to taunt me.
It wasn’t until the first summer that I was home from university that he really began to play on my mind. I was now nineteen, the age both my sisters had been when they had succumbed to his charms.
If it was going to happen, it would happen this summer, just like with my sisters.
I had always regarded this summer as a test. If I could resist him this one summer, if I could prevent myself being seduced until term started again I would be safe for ever.
But I was older now. I was no longer a virgin. I knew that it was to have a man between my thighs.
This wasn’t the nineteenth century. I wasn’t going to be seduced and ruined. Did I really want to be safe?
Was this perhaps not a test, not a threat but an opportunity? And if I let it slip away this summer, might it never come again, leaving me always wondering?
Of course this assumed he was even interested in me. He’d never shown much sign of that before, other than a sort of kindly condescension.
I didn’t even see him for the first week and couldn’t ask about him, didn’t want Gabriella teasing me about my interest.
His fling with Amanda had been brief. She was now in a very serious relationship with a Cambridge physicist and wasn’t the sort to cheat.
He and Gabriella, so Gabriella let me know, would meet from time to time for a “hot fuck” as Gabriella put it, but it was a casual arrangement with no expectation on either side.
Gabriella wasn’t really sure if he and Mummy ever even did it anymore. Daddy was still away a lot, his latest mistress was even younger than Amanda, and Gabriella thought Mummy just wanted companionship.
Although, Gabriella opined, if he were to go down on her every now and then, she doubted Mummy would be complaining.
They were playing chess, the first time I saw him that summer. Mummy playing white as always. He was playing red, toying the antique ivory before making his move with determined insistence.
They both looked up when I entered the room. Mummy stayed seated but he stood up and came over, took my hand and looked me in the eye, said how pleased he was to see me.
It only lasted a moment before he sat back down to the game with his back to me.
But it was enough. He had never looked at me like that before.
It was a look that said, plain enough, that I could have him if I wanted him.
It wasn’t a come on, there was nothing forward about it, but it let me know, right bursa eskort then, that the opportunity was there.
I could have him if I wanted him.
I flicked my eyes over to Mummy, her expression was inscrutable.
And I decided, right there, that I did want him. I would have him.
Whether despite Mummy, Gabriella and Amanda or because of them I couldn’t tell, but I would have him.
The only question was when.
…
Alex Crosshands was a writer of historical fiction. It wasn’t exactly high literature but it was uncommonly popular and sold by the crate load.
He had written multiple volumes of a complex, seemingly endless family saga set in Renaissance Italy (with various other exotic locations thrown in).
They had enough blood and adventure for the boys and fashion and romance for the ladies to ensure they were a more or less permanent fixture on the best selling charts (despite at best indifferent reviews).
I well remember one particularly racy passage being passed gleefully around the dormitory of my boarding school. I couldn’t help but notice that the aristocratic older woman being seduced by the young buck bore an uncommon resemblance to my mother. Or that the book was dedicated “For C,” which was Mummy’s initial.
Obviously I didn’t let the other girls know I had any connection to the author.
He lived in a large cottage about twenty minutes walk from our house.
I’m not sure how he met my mother but he was a common visitor to our house, almost a permanent fixture, by the time I was in my early teens.
For the most part his path never crossed with Daddy’s but he was never a secret. On the rare occasions they did meet, Alex would be respectful, Daddy would be affable, both men respecting Daddy’s superior place in the pecking order, but it would never last long.
Daddy must have known about Alex and Mummy, but it would have been hypocritical for him to complain. More than that, I suspected, Alex’s relationship with Mummy made Daddy’s life easier and Alex was at least respectful and discrete.
Whether Daddy knew Alex was tupping his daughters as well was less clear.
Of course for a man like that, his amorous adventures were not just restricted to our family.
Or so at least Gabriella led me to believe. She was, or at least affected to be, very well acquainted with his goings on.
Maybe he told her himself, holding her naked sweaty body close to his after one of their “hot fucks” and boasting about his other conquests.
Or perhaps not boasting, that didn’t seem his style. He was a curiously unassuming man despite his wealth, his success and, it must be said, his dark good looks.
Probably Gabriella had asked him and he had simply told her. I could see that turning her on.
If Amanda was the good one, Gabriella was the wild one, the slutty one.
“You let that girl run riot,” Daddy would complain to Mummy, as if it was everything to do with Mummy and not his responsibility at all.
In fact, it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Daddy’s whole contribution to her upbringing was to pay for her boarding school and hushing up that business with the cocaine.
Slutty and wild she may have been but she had a romantic streak a mile wide. It was one of the few things we had in common. Amanda of course was much too sensible for that.
I could see the appeal to Gabriella of being bedded by an old school rogue and rake. And what better proof of that than talk of his extensive experience?
It was proof of his virility, proof that he was the sort of man Gabriella would want to sleep with.
Most girls would hate it. But most girls wouldn’t want to sleep with their mother’s lover either.
He gave regular book readings up and down the country to a largely female audience, mingling with wine and canapes with his breathless fans afterwards.
Few men would be able to resist such ripe fruit hanging so very low. And Alex was not the sort of man to refuse himself pleasure.
He had a flat in London too, somewhere ever so slightly boho, Fitzrovia, Borough, somewhere like that.
And there were parties apparently, so many parties, all sorts of parties.
And a flat in Paris too. And a long standing affair with a senior figure in the Parti Socialiste.
Among other things.
But despite all this, he was for years now a very regular visitor at our house. A devoted admirer and confidant of my mother.
He would drop by a couple of times a week, maybe more, although there were longer stretches when he was away.
According to Gabriella, again who knows from what source, they almost never actually “did it” in our house, out of respect for Daddy apparently.
Although note, almost never not never never.
Rather it seemed that all those long walks in the woods I remembered her taking were actually the shortest possible walk to Alex’s house followed by a long roll around his sheets.
No wonder she always seemed so pink and breathless when she returned.
Mummy bursa escort bayan didn’t seem to take so many long walks these days but still Alex would come to call with the same regularity as always.
Mummy had been a great beauty in her day, a “trophy wife for Daddy” Gabriella said. But she had no longer been in the first flush of youth when Alex arrived on the scene and that was ten years ago.
Not to mention that Alex was at least ten years younger than she was.
Gabriella would joke, giving me meaningful glances, that he was only sticking around to pick up the full set.
But I wondered if, in their own complicated way, they really loved each other.
And if they did, what did it mean that he was making his way methodically through Mummy’s daughters?
I had made up my mind to sleep with him by then so I wasn’t sure I wanted to dwell on it too much but the thought made me shiver.
Or at least I had almost made up my mind. I wanted to talk to Amanda about it first and it was hard to find a moment when she was apart from Phil, the dull but responsible physicist.
It was obvious why Gabriella had slept with Alex.
Mummy and Gabriella had always fought tooth and nail because really Gabriella had always wanted to be Mummy.
She was always trying on her dresses and her make up. Once Mummy’s sapphire necklace, a wedding present from Daddy, had gone missing for six months before turning up at the back of Gabriella’ cupboard under a pile of cheap plastic and glass rubbish.
It was inevitable that she would want to steal Mummy’s lover as well. Nothing would have made her feel more like a woman.
But Amanda? That was a different story. Why would she want to?
Why would I?
If Gabriella was the wild one and Amanda the sensible one, what was I?
I didn’t feel it was fair to have to pin myself down in a single adjective like that.
But if I had to, well I was, I suppose, if I’m being very honest, the normal one, maybe even the average one.
I could never be as wild as Gabriella or as over achieving as Amanda. I just had to walk my path somewhere in between, which was a kind of freedom really.
I could just be me and plough my own, cheerfully unexceptional way through the world.
But sleeping with the man who had bedded your mother and both your older sisters was hardly normal or average. It was the stuff of daytime TV freakshows.
So, why was it so appealing?
When I finally got Amanda alone, she explained it to me like this:
“In the end, I just thought, why not.
“I had already met Phil. We weren’t together yet but I had a feeling that we would spend the rest of our lives together.”
She said this very matter of fact, as if the thought of spending your entire life married to Phil filled her with neither joy nor dread.
It was simply how it was.
“I’d had other boyfriends before, or at least other things with boys. And it had never been, quite, well … satisfactory.”
She trailed off as if I knew what she meant but I didn’t really. Did she mean romantically? Sexually? Something else entirely.
Somehow I didn’t get the impression she wanted to go into it.
“Alex was around. He was available. And, yes, he was, is, pretty sexy.”
Amanda looked as close to uncomfortable as she ever got. The word ‘sexy’ didn’t sound quite right coming out of her mouth.
“Of course, I knew about Mummy and Gabriella. In fact if he hadn’t had the thing with Gabriella, it wouldn’t even have occurred to me.
“To hear Gabriella tell it, he properly seduced her, enflamed her with desire until she was unable to resist, couldn’t control herself.
“But I’m pretty sure it was the other way around and she threw herself at him.
Shameless little slut that she is.”
Amanda wrinkled her pretty little nose in distaste.
My two older sisters were close. Closer than either of them were with me. They had both been to the same school after all.
But Gabriella was permanently scandalising Amanda, loved provoking her and Amanda loved being provoked. ‘Shameless little slut’ was almost a term of affection in the circumstances.
“Gabriella used to tease me. She said I should give him a go when I was older, should learn to feel what it was like to have a real man between my legs, not the nerdy academic types I usually went for.”
We both thought of Phil.
“Of course, she never thought I would.
“But one day we’d all been out riding. It was hot and Mummy had a headache and wanted to go back home. Gabriella never had much of a seat anyway and you were happy to head back too.
“Alex had wanted to show Mummy a wild meadow with flowers in bloom that he had recently found and I could tell he was disappointed when she said she wanted to turn back.
“I offered to walk on with him, to see his beauty spot.”
I remembered that day, two summers ago. It was a blistering hot day and we had been riding through fields under the merciless sun with no görükle escort shelter anywhere.
This wild meadow Alex was so keen on us seeing didn’t sound too different to any other meadow nearby and it was unclear why Alex was so keen to take us all there.
Well to take Mummy there. It had originally been planned as a trip a deux, and perhaps he had always intended on taking Mummy to that meadow and making love by the riverbank.
But somehow Gabriella, in her pushy, insistent way, had managed to obtain an invitation. And with Gabriella coming, the invitation had to be opened to everyone.
Amanda, much keener on horse riding than the rest of us, would never turn down the chance of a ride. And with Gabriella and Amanda going, I thought I might as well go too.
Which would explain, I supposed, why Mummy was in such a bad mood about the whole thing. She had probably been excited by the plan in its original incarnation but having three daughters in tow rather put paid to that.
Such a bad mood was she in, that it was quite a relief when she demanded she turn back. She and Gabriella had been sniping at each other all the way and Gabriella was as put out as Mummy at this point.
I had almost forgotten Alex and Amanda hadn’t come back with us. Alex came and went mysteriously and Amanda always rode out further than the rest of us, so it all seemed quite natural.
“So, we rode on alone.
“We didn’t talk much but we were riding side by side. I’d seen him looking at me all summer. Knew he wanted me.
“And I was thinking, maybe that I wanted him too. Wanted to try something a bit different before getting serious with Phil when term started again. “
Amanda trailed off, almost whistful.
“And then?” I asked.
“And then, we arrived there. And it really was beautiful, a riot of reds and blues and pinks by a deep pool, fringed by delicious cool willow trees.
“Quite hidden, quite lovely.”
“And then?”
“And then.. and then I let him have me among the wildflowers.
“But listen here,” and here Amanda’s tone turned businesslike, almost brusque.
“I won’t say don’t do it, that would be hypocritical. I can’t even say I regret. We were only together a few times but Gabriella is right, he really is a wonderful lover.
“But just know this: If you sleep with him, I think it would break Mummy’s heart. You were always her favourite.”
And with that bombshell, she finished her tea and turned and left.
…
Would it? Would it break Mummy’s heart? And was I really her favourite?
I had almost completely decided to do it, but now I wasn’t so sure.
Was I just being selfish? Probably I was, I didn’t love Alex, the idea was just absurd.
I just wanted to have him. Or have him have me.
For while my little talk with Amanda had sown doubts that hadn’t been there before, it had also increased the attraction.
I thought about her story and her words.
A wonderful lover she had said. Gabriella had said the same but she was a creature of hyperbole and exaggeration. You couldn’t trust a word Gabriella said.
But Amanda was a lady of her word. If she said he was wonderful then wonderful he must be.
That night, as I lay alone in my bed, I imagined it was me in her story, not her, riding through the sunlit meadows with Alex. The ache in my thighs from riding a foretaste of a different and better ache to come.
I imagined him laying me out in the flowers, spreading my legs for him under a spreading willow tree, sunlight dappling our bodies as he moved inside me.
But it wasn’t just my legs that spread for him, it was Gabriella’s and Amanda’s and Mummy’s.
I tried to push that thought away but it kept crowding back again.
God, I was so confused and horny and desperately, desperately in need of a shag, a good hard fuck as Gabriella would say.
I fingered myself feverishly, my orgasm coming easy but genuine release much less so.
Finally, I fell into fitful unsettled dreams of legs and flowers and horse rides and meadows and Alex and Alex and Alex.
…..
It was late when I woke the next day. It may have taken me hours to get to sleep but it seems I slept deep and long once I had done so.
Sunlight was streaming through the insubstantial fabric of my curtains, suffusing the room with a soft warm glow.
Swinging my legs out of bed, I felt the roughness of the bare floorboards on the soles of my feet.
I yawned and stretched, thrusting my chest forward as I did so, then padded with soft feet across the deep rug to the full length mirror hanging on the wall.
My restlessness was gone. I hadn’t decided what to do but I decided not to worry about it. I was young and on my summer holidays.
It was weeks til term started and nothing to do.
No responsibilities. I might as well enjoy it.
My reflection looked back at me. I let my soft white lacy nightgown fall to the floor and admired my naked reflection.
Gabriella was dark and curvy. Amanda was blonde and athletic. I was, I supposed, nothing too exceptional. But not too bad either.
My hair was chestnut if I was feeling positive, mousey if I wasn’t. Brown anyway but long, falling half way down my back.
My breasts were nothing exceptional but a good medium size and firm and round.