Clara

1975 was my first year at college. During summer vacation I washed dishes in a small family fast food restaurant in the small seaside town which was my home. The owners' daughter, Clara, was a waitress there. She was a knockout, and she knew it. She stood a shade over 5', and she had a round, unlined, baby face framed with tumbling, wavy, light brown hair. Her big blue eyes were crested with dark brows and, when she looked at you, eyes wide, with that almost surprised look, it was as if you were drawn in to the very centre of her. Her features were so flawless that she would have had the perfection of a china doll had it not been for her upper incisors being crooked: so slight that remedial dental work had never been considered, this imperfection was nevertheless enough to make her human rather than goddess. Most of the time she wore the shapeless pink nylon shift which all three of the waitresses wore: off duty, wearing jeans, tee shirts, light summer dresses, her figure was more obvious. She was a pocket Venus, voluptuous but trim. She was full of herself, knowing how good she looked, although I got on very well with her. I liked her, was frequently irritated by her, and I lusted after her, but from afar. I never even tried my luck with her.

The reason I never bothered trying was that Anne's family spent the winter in Spain, where she was into a heavy relationship with a young Spaniard. She never stopped talking about him, and those of us who worked in the restaurant were all sick of hearing how wonderful he was. So, although Clara was very sociable and would happily hang out with any of us outside work, she was so besotted with her Spanish love that any advances - and I had seen others make them, frequently - were met with a firm rebuff.

Summer vacation started late the next year, it seemed - it had been a very mild winter and a warm and sunny spring. I had a different vacation job, doing bar work - it paid better. But I remained on good terms with Anne's family and would pop in to socialise during the day. Clara had remained in Spain but would be coming back soon, and I looked forward to seeing her. I called in to the restaurant on her first full day back. She was working, and looked tired - she had arrived late the previous evening. I sat with a cup of coffee and she joined me as soon as there was a lull in work.

"Hi," I said, "How have you been?"

"OK," she replied. She didn't seem happy. She spoke quietly and secretly to me. "Look, I need to talk to you. When's your evening off?"

"Today," I said.

"Good. I'm off at 8 tonight. Meet me at the pier at half past."

I was puzzled but, as always, happy to be able to hang out with her. When she arrived that evening she was wearing, way ahead of her time, baggy combat trousers and a khaki sleeveless tee shirt which displayed the heaviness of her breasts. She looked great.

"We going on the pier?"

"No, I just want to walk."

So we walked, in companionable silence, along the sea front. At last, we reached the end of the road, and started to walk along the beach. And as we left the lights and crowds behind us, so she began to talk. We carried on walking as night fell and a full moon appeared in the cloudless sky, bathing the beach in silver light, and still she talked. We carried on walking, past The Point, right round to Golden Cove where, finally, we sat on the sand and watched the moonlight turn the flat sea into a silver mirror, and still she talked. She talked until the tide came in, up to the cliffs at The Point, and I sat and listened, occasionally replying or making some comment.

Clara told me of her relationship with the Spaniard, of how it had started when she was just a giddy teenager. She told me of giving him her virginity. She told me of the intensity of the emotion she had felt for him. She told me of the heat of the sexual relationship she had had with him. And through all this I tried to listen and respond with a maturity beyond my 19 years - although I had had several clumsy encounters with girls at college, I was deeply unsure of myself and far from experienced, and I had great difficulty in responding coherently to the catalogue of sexual activity pouring forth from the girl who had fuelled so many nights of fantasy over the last year. Even so, I did my best to provide a measured, thoughtful, sympathetic response to everything she told me.

And then, finally, she told me of the death of the relationship with the Spaniard, of how she had seen him with another girl, of how he had tried to lie his way out of it, of how, in the end, he had turned on her and said things calculated to hurt her.

We had been sitting side by side, and Clara had gradually started to lean on me, resting her head on my shoulder. I had put my arm around her, gently rubbing her bare arm. Despite our physical closeness and the heated, fevered, explicit content of what she had been telling me, somehow I felt nothing sexual at all - it was as if I was a visitor, hearing something which simply didn't apply to me. But I tried to comfort her as best I could through her tears, cuddling her for reassurance as she sobbed. No, nothing sexual at all.

And, as she spoke, I could hear her talking it all out, I could hear the hurt gradually ebbing away, to be replaced by anger.

"Do you know what he said to me?" she asked me, fire in her voice. "He said, "Yes, of course I fuck other girls. The only reason I've kept you all this time is so I have someone to fuck during the winter. And quite honestly, you're not even that good a fuck." The bastard!" I could feel her shake with suppressed anger. "That was what got me most. I mean, if it was true, he only had himself to blame, didn't he? I'd never been with anyone else, everything I knew I'd learned from him. What a shit!"

I agreed with her. She abruptly pulled away a little, and looked up at me. The moonlight was so bright that I could see the dried tear tracks on her cheeks.

"Poor you," she said with a slight chuckle. "Listening to hours of my misery."

"Friend in need," I said.

"Yes, friend indeed," she said, nuzzling up against me. "I never realised quite what a good friend, either. Well, I'll tell you what."

"What?"

"It must have driven you mad, hearing me go on about him all the time. But you'll never hear another word from me about him. Ever. Fuck him."

I laughed. "Or not."

She laughed, too. "Yes, or not."

Abruptly, she stood up. "Right, that's enough about that." She looked back to The Point. Where the tide had come in to the foot of the cliffs, Golden Cove was now cut off. "We're stuck here for the rest of the night, now. It's a lovely night, let's go for a swim."

"Oh.. OK, then," I said, somewhat taken aback by this rather unexpected change in mood. Hearing my tone of voice, Clara laughed. "Don't worry, I haven't gone mad, I just want to do something - I don't know - alive, vigorous, to wash all that horrible old stuff away. You coming?"

With that, she pulled the tee shirt over her head. She was wearing a bikini top beneath, tied with strings and quite small and daring for the 70s. It looked black in the moonlight, and seemed barely adequate to cope with her breasts. They were not particularly big but she was a diminutive girl and, for her size, they were full and heavy. I was stunned. This was the first time I had seen her so scantily clad. Her hands went to the waist of her combat pants.

"Err.. OK," I said, by which time the combat pants were off leaving a bikini bottom, also with string ties, smaller than the areas of body whiteness beneath it. "The only thing is I'm wearing underpants, not bathers." I was also acutely aware that, during the ten seconds in which she had stripped off her outer clothing, my penis had gone from somnolence to raging tumescence. I was, however, hopeful that the night would conceal it, especially if I was careful about how I positioned myself. I cautiously got to my feet.

Clara looked at me as I stood awkwardly, trying to arrange for a shadow to fall over my groin. She smirked. "Fair enough," she said, "don't want to get your drawers wet. Take 'em off then, we'll both skinny-dip." And, with that, she reached behind her and pulled the ties on her bikini top. It fluttered to the sand. As she turned towards the sea, I caught barely a glimpse of the dark tip of one naked breast before her back was presented to me. Then she began to trot to the sea, pulling the ties on her hips, and the bikini bottom also dropped to the beach. The moonlight was so bright that, even with her back in shadow, reflected moonlight from the sand showed the white untanned crescents of her buttocks against the dark of the rest of her, monochrome nude form silhouetted against the silver sea.

My shirt, jeans and underpants came off in one hurried stumbling scrabble, and I was chasing after her before she had reached the water. For a brief few seconds, there was simply sight and sound: my sight focused on her naked form jogging lightly down the gentle slope of the beach to the water's edge, and the sounds - oh, the sounds! So few, so quiet and yet so deafening. There was the small, regular sound of the tiny waves lapping over as the reached the sand. Then there was the scrunch of Anne's feet on the sand, and the first splashes as she reached the water and began to walk out. My own feet scrunched, too, reinforced with the bone-conducted impact of my feet hitting the beach at every trotted step. Then there was the thunderous pounding of my blood in my ears. And finally there was a slapping noise which I couldn't identify until, abruptly, I realised what it was - my erection, slapping into me from side to side with each step I took.

Clara, reaching mid-thigh depth, dived under the water and, before she came up, I dived forward too. It seemed almost dreamlike in the silent blackness underwater, and I swam and swam until my lungs were bursting, almost forgetting the sexual urgency which had driven me to strip and follow her so short a while ago. At last I broke surface, standing rib deep, taking a great breath and slicking my hair back from my face. I looked around, and Clara was about ten feet to my left, slightly closer to shore than I was, the water caressing the upper slopes of her breasts. Her hair, too, was slicked back, smooth to her head, black in the moonlight.

"Water's OK?"

"Warmer than I thought it'd be."

We swam, not talking, in leisurely parallels with the shoreline, maybe fifty yards, then turning and swimming back. It was calm, relaxing, and my erection subsided. After five or ten minutes, again without talking, we stopped swimming and started wading in to shore. Again, Anne's back was towards me, lit by the moonlight this time. I waded faster and caught up to her while she was still knee deep.

"Wait!" I reached out, my hand to her elbow.

"What?" She was surprised, and half turned. We faced each other, no more than two feet apart, and I looked down into her face, into those huge eyes.

"Can I....?"

"Yes?"

"Can I look at you?"

A smile. "You are looking at me, aren't you?"

"No, properly, I mean."

"But it's night time."

"No, the moon's out, I can see perfectly. Except I've never seen you, and I'd really like to."

"But you see me all the time at the restaurant."

"No, Clara." I tried to explain myself. "I think you're beautiful - God, you know you're beautiful - and I'd really like to see you, your body, I'd like to see it properly."

She appeared to think for a minute. "OK then," she said, and took a couple of steps back from me, allowing the moonlight to flood her body.

Those huge eyes watched me from the middle of that beautiful, expressionless face as I swallowed, my mouth dry. For a while I simply looked into her eyes, seeing nothing other than their luminous, liquid depths in the centre of her face, framed by her damp hair which was now starting to regain some of its waviness. And then, at last, I dropped my eyes, down from the slenderness of her neck to her chest. She held her arms, relaxed, at her sides, calm as I took in the sight of her breasts. They were not small, but neither were they grotesquely large. Rather, they were full and heavy, and good-sized in proportion to her small frame. Soft and round, riding high on her ribcage, firm and weighty, dark nipples erect in the white triangles where her bikini had been, moving gently as she breathed - I ached to cup them in my hands.

But, instead, I dropped my gaze further down, over the gentle swell of her stomach, to the patch of shadow in the vee of her thighs. But it wasn't shadow, it was hair: a dark triangle edged with white, where the bikini bottoms in which she sunbathed had protected her skin from tanning. And the moonlight was so bright that I could see that the hair wasn't curly, but plumed out from the centre line of her mound in a herringbone pattern. It looked graceful, and delicate, and unbelievably sexy.

I stood there, just looking, taking in all the disparate parts of her - her eyes, her face, her breasts, her pubic triangle, her limbs, dusted with the fairy dust of moonlight on water droplets, her curves - and also the wholeness of her, the overwhelming impact of her naked beauty so close to me. The sight of Clara, all of Clara, naked, vulnerable and elemental, was so hypnotic that I was almost unaware of my erection returning.

"I - can I touch you? Can I touch your... your.. breasts? Please." I asked the question shyly - I felt that I shouldn't presume, shouldn't jump to conclusions. The moment was far too magical for that.

"I'd like that." Anne's voice was low, husky. I slowly stretched my right arm out, and she stood straighter, shoulders back, chest forwards. It could have taken no more than a second or two, but the time stretched like elastic, like the slowest of slow motion films until I could have cut the moment into a thousand slices.

My fingertips touched her left breast, to the side and on the lower swell, a couple of inches away from her nipple. She shivered at my touch, and I slid my hand forward, underneath, lifting, the weight of the breast filling my hand. Her eyes closed. I took her other breast in my left hand, and caressed them both at the same time, rotating my hands so that my thumbs reached her nipples, hard and rubbery, stiff yet firm, and her breasts so warm despite the night air. Her breathing, her breath, feathered from her mouth, and her eyes opened again, wide, looking at me seriously. I returned her look, single-minded, my hands lost in their playground.

"Can I touch you... down there?" My voice was little more than a whisper.

"Oh yes." And, had I not been watching her face, I wouldn't have known that she had spoken, for her words were little more than breath on the night air.

I wished for more hands, but my prayer was not answered. Reluctantly I dropped my right and from that exquisite breast, and moved closer to her so that I could reach her thatched mound more easily. As I closed in to her, my penis prodded her in the stomach. I was surprised - despite the thunderous pulsing of my blood, echoed by my erection beating time like a deranged conductor's baton, I had almost forgotten it was there in the wonder of the moment, and now it bluntly betrayed me. But Clara chuckled throatily.

"He's pleased to see me. I'd like to hold him - may I?"

"Yes," I croaked, disbelieving, still.

And then, for the first time, I felt her hand, cool from the sea, close round it - the shaft, the head, the rigidity, the pounding blood, the exquisite sensation streaming from my teeth, down my throat, to the new centre of my being. My brain had been disconnected, sight and touch was everything, and it all centred around my cock.

Clara breathed in, very slightly, but very definitely, as her hand closed in, and her mouth formed an "o". At the same time, my own roving hand released the weight of her breast and, flat to her, slid over her ribs, down the gentle round of her belly, so that my fingers combed down through her fine hair, my palm cupping the succulent mound from which it grew. Somehow, the tiny sound of her hair rasping under the movement of my hand was louder in the quiet night than the thunder of my pounding heart. And, as my hand dropped further down under her, my index and ring fingers fitted into the angles where her thighs met her body, and my middle finger slid into the groove which lay between.

This was 35 years ago. There was no detailed reference material available, and my few fumbled encounters had not strayed below waist level (despite my best efforts). I was therefore profoundly unprepared for what lay along the length of my middle finger. My finger slipped into a miracle of wet, slippery heat and, as it slid along, exploring, Clara gasped quietly, trembled, and gripped my erection more tightly.

At the tightening of her grip, and with no further warning, my seed pulsed up from what seemed like a million miles away, white hot spurts of molten liquid lacing her left hip with laces of pearly dewdrops. And, even as I fired this salvo of ecstasy, I sobbed with shame, and Clara laughed.

"It's alright," she said. "it's wonderful. It's a real compliment for someone to come just from looking and feeling. You'll be hard again in a few minutes, and it means that you won't come so quickly next time. So don't get upset."

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"My God, talk about unsure of yourself. You're worse than I am," she said. She came up to me, wrapped her arms around my neck, pulled my face down to hers, and kissed me.

We stood and kissed for what could have been minutes or hours, and I was in total sensory immersion, the slippery wetness of her mouth on mine, her tongue in mine, my tongue in hers, matched by the pulsing liquid heat of the furred slit explored by my fingers, the velvet weight of her breast filling my other hand, her hand still fondling my limp but recovering manhood.

And then she shuddered and pulled away from me slightly. Panicked, I stopped moving. "What's the matter?"

"No, don't stop!" urgently, her other hand snaking behind my neck and pulling herself closer to me, thrusting down on my fingers, "I'm going to come," a strange broken voice, stuttering in the throat, "Keep going, don't stop, oh do it faster, come on, harder, harder, oh I'm coming, I'm coming!" her voice almost weeping, and my fingers were squeezed tightly, contracting walls of wet heat, the strength went from her legs, and she made a noise I had never heard, a cross between a cry of pain, a groan and a whimper.

I couldn't hold her, and I tried to ease her to the sand as her knees gave way, while doing my best to keep my fingers where they were. What actually happened was that we tumbled rather clumsily to the ground. I managed to fall slightly to one side, still looking at her silver naked form in the moonlight while she caught her breath.

"That was nice. That was really nice," said Clara after a few moments.

"I was worried for a moment. You went all funny."

"I certainly did! But it's supposed to be like that. That was good. Hello, it looks as if you're ready to go again. But we'd better wash off this sand first, and then lie down on the clothes." This was not her first time on a beach at night: the Spaniard had introduced her to the notion of sand in private places, not an experience she wished to repeat. So we washed the sand off in the shallows, and then walked back up to where our clothes had been scattered. We made a pile of them, then lay down side by side. I looked at her.

"You look a lot, don't you?"

"I like looking. You're really good to look at."

"Don't you like doing?"

"I've never "done" before."

"No," she agreed, "but it's time you started."

Her legs parted. They didn't just part, they arched up and fell back to her sides until they were almost flat on the sand, and the area between her thighs was exposed to the light of the moon. Even in the dim light, and between the thinning curls which flanked it, I could see the paler folds of her female opening, glistening with silver highlights. This was the area which I had always understood was called "private parts", and here it was, wantonly exposed for my personal examination.