CHAPTER ONE: AN UNEXPECTED VISIT

It was an evening just like any other for me, an evening during which I would continue to remain in my solitary room with a book on my lap and wax earplugs in both ears, the better to concentrate on what I was reading. The neighbours above and below would doubtless continue to make disagreeable noises in their respective flats, but I wouldn't be unduly disturbed by them. Only someone loudly knocking at my door would have caused me to put my book to one side. But, apart from the landlord, no-one ever knocked at my door, least of all loudly, so I had little to fear in that respect. Tonight, however, was to prove an exception. The clock had hardly reached eight-thirty when I was startled out of my book by the unexpected - the sound of a person boldly seeking admittance to my room!

For a moment I wondered whether I oughtn't to ignore it, pretend I wasn't in or hadn't heard anything. But no sooner had I dispatched this negative thought than a positive one took its place. Supposing the knock was connected with Carmel, the young lady to whom I had recently written a flattering letter, inviting her to visit me? That seemed unlikely but, all the same, I acted on the basis of that supposition and, putting my book to one side and carefully removing the earplugs preparatory to depositing them in their protective case, I duly hurried over to the door, which by now had become the recipient of a further knock. "Just a minute!" I cried, as my fingers groped for the lock, though in point of fact I opened the door in less than three seconds.

Standing there before me in the dimly-lit corridor that led from the stairs to my first-floor apartment was a young woman of average height and chest-length, wavy-golden hair. I had scarcely recognized this much when I heard: "Joe?"

"Yes," I replied, with a simultaneous though possibly gratuitous nod. And then, as if in echo, I said: "Carmel?"

The young woman smiled in confirmation and I knew at once that my wish had been granted. Delighted, I stood back to usher her inside and then, with the self-consciousness of one who has just admitted an attractive female to his room and knows it, I gently closed the door behind her. "So you actually got my letter this time," I remarked, turning around to face my surprise visitor. It hadn't been the first letter to her, but it was evidently the first to have had a positive effect.

"That was a letter I just couldn't ignore," she said.

"Yes, it was rather special," I opined.

"And long, too!" she declared, as though to point out that the length and the specialness were two entirely different things. "Quite the longest hand-written letter I've ever received."

I smiled in a sort of proudly apologetic way. "I had intended to type it, but thought such a procedure would have detracted from its romantic import and rendered it too ... impersonal."

Carmel smiled understandingly and said: "As you told me in the postscript."

"Indeed," I responded, and then succumbed to a brief pause, which gave me time to note the light-blue colour of her eyes and the fawn colour of the raincoat she was wearing. "Allow me to take your mack," I added, manoeuvring myself into a position behind her from which I could help her out of it. She seemed grateful to be relieved of the garment and I carried it across to my single wardrobe, where a metallic hanger was duly procured for it.

Having deposited her raincoat on the door-handle of the said wardrobe, I once more turned to face her and noticed that she was wearing clothes according to the colour-pattern I had specified in the letter as being most appropriate for a visit to my room - namely the green, white, and gold (or pale orange) of the Irish tricolour. Shyness prevented me from taking a long, hard look at her, but I could see that she was wearing a white blouse, a gently-flounced gold miniskirt, and a pair of dark-green stockings, with matching open-front shoes. The colour combination couldn't have been more apposite, especially as, like me, she, too, was Southern Irish. "I see you've conformed to my patriotic suggestion," I remarked, pointing a brisk finger at each item of visible clothing in turn.

"I couldn't very well refuse to," she responded, her pale face gently suffused by an invigorating blush. "Naturally, I don't normally dress in such a blatantly republican fashion."

"I particularly like your miniskirt," I confessed. For I couldn't help noticing that it exposed more of her thighs than it hid, and that they weren't skinny but, on the contrary, pleasantly firm and fleshy without, however, being conspicuously fat. They were the kind of thighs one doesn't see too often but can be mighty impressed by when one does - firm all the way up, rather than delicate and tapering.

"You like minis?" she asked.

I smiled defensively, then replied: "Some of them, though it often depends more on the woman who's wearing them than on the skirt as such. But I do like the flounce in yours though, which grants it an agreeably loose quality, a sort of buoyancy and suggestibility. And the material is nice, too - very smooth and semi-transparent. I saw two women like you on Saturday, by the way. Thought at first one of them might have been you."

"I was in Cambridge on Saturday," said Carmel. "So unless you were there too, neither of them could have been me."

"Ah, well, they were attractive all the same," I remarked.

"Tell me about them."

I offered her a soft seat in the room's only armchair and then took myself to the bed which, being made, I sat down on. So, obligingly, I proceeded: "The first one I happened to see as I was on my way back from the library late that morning. The weather being so warm and bright, she was wearing a light-green flounced minidress and had bare legs, which were enticingly firm and very sexy. I was trailing behind her in the high street for a number of yards, intermittently staring at her legs with that feeling of guilty self-consciousness which usually afflicts me in such a situation. She automatically reminded me of you, especially with her wavy-golden hair. But when a sudden stiff breeze briefly caught the rim of her minidress, I was granted the unexpected bonus of a glance at what she was wearing underneath - namely, a pair of frilly-white panties on a highly seductive rump!"

Carmel blushed anew and said: "Joe!" with an emphasis of teasing reproof.

Smiling, I continued: "She must have sensed that someone was admiringly trailing after her, for she stopped in front of an estate agents just a few yards farther along. I ought really to have stopped beside her but, shy or vain fool that I am, I continued on my way, noting en passant that her nose was slightly retroussé, like yours. By the time she got moving again, I was already too far ahead of her to turn back and was waiting to cross the road by the local clock-tower, headed for home. She turned up an adjacent side-street before I could cross the road, however, and we exchanged glances from about six yards. The rest of the morning and much of the afternoon I spent regretting that I hadn't attempted to pick her up."

Carmel smiled sympathetically, and said: "She probably regretted that you or someone else hadn't picked her up." There then ensued a brief silence before Carmel's memory latched-on to the second female who had apparently reminded me of her, and I was duly asked to explain.

"Well, the other one I also saw on my way back from the library, which I normally visit twice on a Saturday, but that was at about four in the afternoon and I had to walk virtually the entire length of the high street before I came upon her, standing in front of the advertisement-board outside the local newsagents and evidently reading various of the adverts on it. I saw her red miniskirt from quite a distance and it had an effect on me analogous to that of a bullfighter's cape on a bull, or so I supposed. It was very conspicuous, but I didn't think, with my short-sightedness partly to blame, that the woman wearing it would be particularly attractive, since such blatantly conspicuous colours are usually worn by the more sluttish types. However, when I got to within a few yards of her, what a surprise I got! Not only wavy-golden hair like yours, but the most delightful-looking pair of firm, fleshy legs as could be imagined. And, as if to set them off, her waist, arms, and shoulders were slender and narrow, such as one only finds, as a rule, on women of exceptional quality. Ah, such a delightful contrast! Even more delightful than that between her gently-flounced cotton miniskirt and the tight-fitting nylon blouse she was wearing!"

"But, presumably, you didn't attempt to chat her up?" Carmel commented, smiling.

"Alas! as she was standing beside a man and a woman, I thought she must be connected with them in some way - possibly as a friend or even a daughter. Nevertheless I was intending to go into the newsagents anyway, for I had decided to buy a Penthouse in accordance with a regrettably long-standing habit of mine to acquire some better kind of men's magazine on a Saturday afternoon, when the sex-starved blues are beginning to catch-up with me. Anyway, angling towards the door of the shop, I must have attracted her attention slightly, since she gave me a quick glance as I drew close to her, prior to disappearing inside. The Penthouse under my arm, I duly retreated to the street, only to discover that she was already some twenty yards along the pavement from the direction in which I had just come, and was about to cross the road. She evidently wasn't connected with the couple I noticed earlier, because they were still standing in front of the advertisement-board - the woman, I now noticed, with a notepad and biro in her hands. However, feeling compromised by the magazine under my arm, I turned in the opposite direction ... towards Elder Avenue, where, as you know, I live. I hate being seen with a men's magazine, even when I've taken the precaution to fold it in two, so that only part of an advert is showing on the back. I always imagine that people are instinctively contemptuous towards anyone who might be classifiable, through association with such a magazine, as a sexual pervert, a wanker or whatever. Despite all my progressive theories, I have an almost puritanical shame of being regarded in such a light; though, to be perfectly honest with you, I scarcely ever masturbate these days."

"Did you ever?" asked Carmel, showing no particular embarrassment, but more an objective curiosity, which had the effect of compelling me to an admiration of her intelligence.

"Up until my twenty-third or twenty-fourth year," I blushingly confessed. For I could hardly add that the reason I subsequently stopped wanking was because the orgasm had become less keen, as Gide would say, and the temptation correspondingly less intense. "But nowadays," I quickly added, as though to allay suspicions to the contrary, "I only look at the erotic stimuli to be found in such magazines. However, getting back to that young woman in the red miniskirt, I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening regretting that she wasn't mine. You can't imagine how sorry celibacy and solitude can make me feel sometimes, especially as they've dogged my steps for so many years now."

"Poor Joe!" sighed Carmel, who had got to her feet and, walking across to me, now placed a commiserating hand on my left shoulder.

"Do you think you'll be able to straighten me out after all these solitary, celibate, poverty-stricken years?" I painfully asked her.

"I'll certainly do my best," she replied in a husky tone-of-voice.

The scent of her sweet perfume had a slightly aphrodisiac effect on me and, without raising myself from the bed, I slipped a hand up her legs, bringing its palm to rest against the flesh of her outer thigh a moment.

"Aren't you going to kiss me first?" she teasingly asked.

"If you insist," I jokingly responded and, although I would have preferred to stay where I was, with her thighs in such invitingly close proximity to my hands, I got to my feet and, drawing her into my arms, placed a somewhat tentative kiss on her half-smiling lips. I hadn't kissed a woman in over ten years, and so it can hardly be wondered at if the experience was a little unnerving and unrewarding initially, since I was in dire need of practice. Yet despite my initial self-consciousness, I soon managed to apply my lips to hers with greater firmness, as the first few exploratory forays into the kissing domain were supplanted by the inception of mounting confidence and an intimation of sensual pleasure such as I had completely forgotten the existence of during the agony of my solitary years in north London. And, to my relief, I discovered that my mounting confidence was accompanied by a relaxation on her part, which caused her to close her eyes the better to concentrate on my kissing and the pleasure she was evidently deriving from it. As if by instinct, I transferred one of my hands to the back of her head in order to press her lips more firmly against my own. She responded by relaxing still further, and I was able to drive my tongue between the gap which now opened-up between them - a procedure she particularly seemed to like. For by thrusting it backwards and forwards between her slightly-parted lips, I was mimicking the coital relationship of penis to vagina which I knew she was expecting me to establish in due course. And yet, whilst I behaved thus, another part of me was curiously detached from my actions, inducing me to imagine how the situation would look to an observer situated at our side, especially to one who was on his knees and noting the indirect effects of my kissing and caressing on Carmel's ample legs, now that her attention was absorbed in the mouth and the rest of her body had become a kind of impersonal entity, functioning, as it were, by remote control. Had she gone weak-kneed, this other part of my mind caused me to wonder, and if so, was she on the verge of dampening or even wetting her panties? I couldn't answer that, for now I was withdrawing my tongue from its probing role in order to speak with it. She opened her eyes with a start, as though from a pleasant dream, and I said: "Darling Carmel, I've waited so long for this ... that I can't express my gratitude enough, now that you're actually here with me."

She smiled in flattered response to this rather pathetic admission on my part, and then replied: "Just do what you want to."

Oh, I had so many things I wanted to do that I didn't know where to begin or, rather, how to continue. The kissing was fine but ... caressing was important, too! And then there were her breasts; I needed to see them and was eager to unbutton her blouse. They were small but firm, nestled ever so sedately, it seemed to me, in a half-sized white bra that appeared to possess a special erotic appeal of its own. Indeed, so harmonious an impression did the combination of breasts and bra make on me ... that I hesitated to free the one from the other. But I gently kissed first the left and then the right breast, which connoted, in my imagination, with some kind of delicious fruit - possibly a peach or a large plum. I sank to my knees, overwhelmed by the luxury of her body, and bent forwards to kiss each of her stockinged insteps, gripping her ankles in the process and conscious of the rim of her gold miniskirt brushing against the crown of my head, as I again straightened-up to contemplate her lovely legs. In silent wonder, with forceful pulsations of heart, I slid both my hands up the length of her dark-stockinged legs, lifting her skirt back in order to expose the entirety of her thighs to my avid gaze and discover more about her. Ah, what physical beauty I then beheld, as my vision encompassed a pair of golden suspenders stretching from her stocking tops via a pair of delicately-embroidered white-nylon panties to the partly-obscured suspender-belt above! I held her skirt aloft like a canopy and smacked a kiss on each of her thighs, reserving an especially-protracted one for that central patch of her panties behind which a dense mound of pubic hair would be leading a separate little vegetable-like existence of its own. Ah, how beautiful was this woman! She was to become my woman, and I wanted her to learn exactly what that meant this very evening, between now and the time when we temporarily abandoned our sexual adventure, some hours hence!

"Carmel," I said, well-nigh staggering to my feet, "I'm going to teach you just what ten years of enforced celibacy in this vast city can do for inflaming a man's ardour when he eventually acquires the woman of his dreams. I'm going to fuck every last drop of cunt juice out of your wet little hole this evening and, by god, by the time we're finished you'll know what it means to be intimate with me!"

"Joe!" cried Carmel in a tone of delighted surprise, and, without another word, she swooned to the floor, where she lay prostrate with one arm up across her brow and one leg drawn up to a position just short of her rump. The other arm was flat-out by her side, as was the other leg. She had become exquisitely erotic all of a sudden, and I couldn't prevent myself from taking a voyeuristic pleasure in her exposed white panties. Now she was like 'Chastity' of Penthouse, whose lovely form I had seen subjected to a similar erotic posture, following a swoon of fright at the hands of various hairy monsters. My Ideal had swooned from desire and appeared even more ravishing than 'Chastity', though a similar type of woman - the only type for whom I had ever really cared. I got down on my knees before her parted legs and, gripping her damp panties between finger and thumb, began to ease them from her capacious crotch. There was only one sensible way to bring her back to full consciousness, and I knew exactly how to go about it. In a little while she would be moaning from ecstasy, whilst I whispered besotted endearments into her vulnerable ears!