I shouldn't have done it.
I used to feel guilty about it, but perhaps putting my boyfriend in lingerie was the best thing I ever did for him.
Alec and I were what others thought were sweethearts, feeling our way through young love, earnest and unworldly. We were hand-holding, first-kiss-at-the-prom lovers with sheltered pasts and open futures.
And so it might have carried on, wholesome courting leading to a path familiar from our own upbringings, but curiosity drove a wedge between us.
He was emphatically not a curious type, never more clearly expressed than his wish to preserve his chastity till his wedding night. I thought this cute, then quaint, but I always thought he would bend in his will.
We were allowed, by him, to do other things short of sex: fumblings that went nowhere or, latterly, simmered to a frustrating anti-climax as he excused himself.
We would kiss and fondle. We would undress one another, stroke each other's backs, fall asleep in an embrace, his desire protruding gingerly into the folds of my nightie.
I was curious. My friends, in person and especially online, became my vicarious sex life. I harvested their crop of gossip. I reaped them, the stories of first-date sex, comfortable sex, bad sex, getting-the-spark-back sex, break-up sex, make-up sex, sex that dared not speak its name and sex that did so freely.
The consensus, among those who knew, was that we had to get over the hump.
The closest we had come to sex was on his birthday, when I managed to get him naked from the waist down and rubbed myself against him. We were almost there, only the thin fabric of my knickers between us. I held him as I caressed his cock against the satin, convinced that now was the moment. I pushed the knickers down and he rolled away, apologising as he retreated to the bathroom to purge himself.
The apology did nothing to disperse my feelings. I lay in bed, busying myself as he was doing a locked door away. As I tried to wish away my resentment I realised that there was something there to build upon. Something about my knickers.
I was prepared when he next had to excuse himself, no more than a few days later. I pressed a pair of my briefs into his hand and told him that he could take them with him to the bathroom. He said nothing but as I listened at the door I could hear the ruffle and rub as he stroked.
I avoided his advances for the next two weeks, enough to find encouragement in some of the kinkier online forums. Enough, also, to give an edge of hunger.
It was a Friday night when I deemed him ready. After dinner I told him to go to our bedroom and strip down to his underpants. I made him wait.
I appeared in the doorway with a present for him, a small gift in pink tissue paper. He carefully prised the taped ends open to find a pair of black satin knickers, unshowy in their cut but with scalloped edges to the leg holes and a sheer panel at the rear. He stared uneasily at them draped across his thighs. "These are for you," I said. "I'm going back downstairs. Call me when you've put them on."
It took him two goes. When I first returned I found him still in his underpants, primed to make excuses about not wanting to do it.
I told him it was fine and to call me again if he changed his mind. It took him five minutes to summon me back.
"Oh, that's much better, darling," I said. "You look so cute."
He did. The confidence of his bulging knickers was entirely at odds with the apprehension in his downcast face.
I sat next to him and allowed him a kiss while I fondled his bottom. I hadn't wrapped his next present. I produced a matching black camisole from beneath his pillow and helped him put it on, kissing him more ardently as I did so. It was little different from a man's vest, just with stretch satin instead of cotton and thinner straps.
"Doesn't that feel nice?" I asked as I caressed his nipples through the fabric. "Doesn't that look nice, Alice?"
I kissed him again before he could murmur his answer. "It was a rhetorical question, Alice," I said. "You know what that means do you, Alice? It means you don't have to answer."
