A story about a shy virgin and how he spent his 18th summer. Please note that the story involves a certain degree of good-natured domination by a woman over a shy young man.
***
My kid sister made a face, sticking her tongue out after my mother turned her back, and if Mom wasn't within earshot she would have given me one of those ha-has that annoyed the hell out of me. Cathy had good reason to gloat though, because she had managed to weasel out of something that I was getting stuck doing.
That was the way it always seemed to be, since Cathy was the the baby of the family. Being the older kid, it seemed like I never got away with stuff. That was the way it was when I was 8 and she was 5, and now that I was 18 and Cathy was 15, it was still the same.
Mom had volunteered our services to a friend of hers who was planning to clear the field around her house. According to Mom, the woman was going to use the land to start doing some farming and build a stone fence of some kind with all the rocks that seemed to little the landscape of our sleepy little hamlet in the Southern Adirondacks.
Just was the world needed, I thought when Mom explained this. Another farm stand on the side of the road with zucchini you couldn't give way, I did my best to back out of it but failed. By not being able to find a summer job to fill the summer before college started in the fall, I had no good excuse to offer when Mom sentenced me to the task.
Cathy didn't either, because I knew that the reason she gave was bogus. "My back hurts," was Cathy's out for everything, and while maybe it did, it was probably because her tits were so big that the weight of them caused her back to allegedly bother her.
"Miss Couse gives me the creeps," Cathy confided to me afterward after she got done gloating about her victory. "She's always staring at me. Ew!"
Miss Couse stared at all the girls at school, or so the stories went. She was the school nurse and if there was a dictionary with the word lesbian in it, chances are her picture would be there next to it. There wasn't much feminine about her, from her short haircut to her short and squat body, she looked the part and had the reputation to go along with it.
Probably just talk, I figured, when it came to the stories that had gone around about Miss Couse, whose nickname "Bulldog" gives you an idea of her facial characteristics. If she ever did do anything with a girl at school she would have gotten canned or arrested, so I guessed that it was just people ragging on somebody who was a little different.
I probably had joined in on the snickering myself from time to time, but in reality Miss Couse interested me in some strange way. Beyond the usual fascination a lot of guys have about lesbians, I found her mannish and androgynous look attractive in some kinky way, although I would never admit that to anybody.
Miss Couse was about my mother's age, which would put her near 50, and was about 5'6". She didn't seem to have much of a body, but she did have decent legs. I had noticed that through many glimpses of Miss Couse in her uniform, seeing those muscular but shapely calves as she walked briskly down the halls at school. NOT hairy calves, as many guys suggested.
So it was that I got sent over to Brown Tract Road to the little house that Miss Couse called home. Like many of the places in our rural area, Miss Couse's place had seen better days, but to me hers looked pretty well kept as my mother drove me there that Thursday afternoon in late June.
"Now Andy," Mom said as she pulled up to the house. "Please don't do anything that would..."
"Ma," I whined.
"Well sometimes you get this attitude," Mom explained, dutifully playing the part of both Mom and Dad since the old man had bailed on us a few years back. "I just don't want Meg to..."
"I won't do anything to embarrass you, me, or anything else," I assured her, although that was the first time I had heard Miss Couse's first name.
I guess Mom knew Miss Couse because my mother was a nurse too, having worked at the local hospital most of her life and so she thought I would do or say something to humiliate her in her colleague's eyes. Mom decided to walk up to the house with me, which made me feel even more like a kid than usual.
"Audrey!" Miss Couse said as we neared the door, and I admit to getting a little turned on when Miss Couse hugged my mother, as sick as that sounds. I wondered whether Mom knew her friend was a lesbian, not that I knew for sure myself, but when they hugged my teenage imagination ran wild.
Miss Couse had her hair cut even shorter than usual, and her black hair was almost like a crew cut. She was wearing a baggy t-shirt and denim shorts, so while I wasn't going to get much of a view of the rest of Miss Couse, at least I would get to see those muscular legs.
"Where's your little girl?" Miss Couse asked when she saw that I was the only help she was going to get.
"Cathy - her back has been giving her problems," Mom explained, and I wondered how Mom could have missed the disappointment in her friend's face when she heard that.
"Oh, that's a shame," Miss Couse said. "You know Audrey, you should have her come over so I could work on her."
"That's right," Mom said. "I forgot you're a massage therapist. That might be a good idea."
"Well, I guess that I'll have to get Andy here to work twice as hard to make up for not having your daughter here," Miss Couse said. "You up to that Andy?"
"I guess so," I mumbled, and then Mom was off to work.
"I'll bring him home for you," Miss Couse said. "Might be a little late though because that's a lot of land."
"Fine Meg," Mom said. "If you need him for more than today that's fine too because otherwise Andy would just be sitting around the house doing nothing."
I didn't see anything wrong with that, but having to spend more than one day here was going to be incentive enough to bust my ass to get done whatever old lady Couse wanted done.
"Come on in and have a cup of coffee, Andy," Miss Couse said as Mom drove off, wrapping her arm around my shoulder and herding me inside. "It's supposed to be a scorcher today."