CHAPTER TWO: A BIRTHDAY TREAT

There was a concession involved with Carmel's willingness to live with me, and it related to her three-year-old daughter, Julia, who would have to be accepted as part of the deal. No Julia, then no Carmel! It was as simple as that, take it or leave it. Well, I had no second thoughts about the matter and promised to be as good a substitute father to Julia as was humanely possible. But I made it perfectly clear to Carmel that I would never marry her, nor anyone else. I would remain loyal to her, but on my own terms.

At first Carmel wondered whether she had done the right thing in visiting me. For she had left her husband and virtually caused the break-up of her marriage in the process. Now that she found herself denied access to a second husband, however, she seriously considered the possibility of returning to her legal spouse. But the combination of my loving with assurances that I wouldn't desert her ... finally decided her in favour of accepting my terms. And so, shortly after our first night in each-other's arms, we agreed to set up home together in Cambridge. Carmel could retain her daughter but must divorce her husband, who, in any case, was turning into an alcoholic womanizer.

I immediately recognized Carmel in her daughter and took to Julia as though she were my own child. The remaining years of her childhood, spent in various flats in Cambridge and, eventually, Norwich, were on the whole satisfactory, even happy. When she entered High School, Julia was almost a replica of what Carmel had been at the same age. For her hair was also wavy-golden, her eyes light blue, and her nose slightly retroussé. I expected her to do well in most subjects, and so she did. But her bias was for languages, like her mother, and she hoped one day to teach German.

Meanwhile my relationship with Carmel had deepened over the years, but I still wouldn't marry her, or anyone else, and she had to accept this fact with intelligent resignation. Consequently I was never a stepfather to her daughter but, at best, only a sort of step-uncle who was fondly known as Uncle Joe, which suited me fine. One day it would suit Julia too, but that wasn't to be before her sixteenth birthday! It was then that the advantage of my social position became fully apparent - and not just to me!

"Now I understand why you didn't want to marry me," said Carmel one evening, just before her daughter's sixteenth birthday. "You wanted to mix the mature with the virginal in later years."

"I simply wanted to remain free," I replied, keeping my eyes on the present I was wrapping in the most eye-catching green-and-silver-striped paper. "I've always tended to regard myself, perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly, if not oversimplistically, as a free-electron equivalent and you, my long-term companion, as a quasi-electron equivalent. I had no desire to form an atomic integrity in the strictly bourgeois, marital sense."

"And now that Julia has come of age?" asked Carmel, her voice slightly husky from repressed emotion.

"I intend to take her virginity," I frankly declared. "But artificially, in accordance with my status as a more civilized type of human being." I looked up from the carefully-wrapped parcel and caught a glint of what I took to be complicity in Carmel's soft Irish eyes.

"You were always a bigamist at heart," she opined, and I responded with but a faint grunt. For I would never have taken her as my woman, had I not known about her young daughter at the time.

When Julia's birthday finally arrived, I was as excited by it as if it were my own sixteenth birthday. For I had looked forward to it for several years, and was only too eager to establish my domestic life along new lines. I had, however, instructed Carmel to inform Julia of my intentions shortly before the latter's birthday, so it wasn't altogether with surprise that she received a special kiss on the cheek and a warm smile from me, as we sat down to table in the evening to celebrate, by way of a private party, Julia's coming of age. My darling companion was also quite excited by what lay in store for her daughter, and had resigned herself to temporarily taking a secondary role in my affections.

Before I proceed to describe what followed, let me inform the reader that, by now, Julia was a most beautiful young lady whose physique, during the course of the past year, had filled-out to something approaching womanly proportions. Not only did she take after her mother in matters of facial appearance, with exactly the same kind of wavy-golden hair hanging loosely down her chest, but she even surpassed Carmel in some matters, not least of all the size of her breasts, which were just a shade larger. And, of course, her legs and rump were by no means devoid of physical allure, but, on the contrary, could only be described as potentially highly seductive.... Having bathed and perfumed herself, she had specifically dressed in light, semi-transparent attire for this occasion, which, in any case, happened to coincide with a warm summer's evening, and was about as ravishing-looking as such a beautiful young lady, caught-up in the first flush of youth, can ever be. With her mother seated at one end of the table - still, at thirty-five, a very attractive woman - and Julia at the opposite end, I felt pretty smug in my central position between them.

The meal was, on the whole, a highly agreeable one and, after a few drinks (Julia having her first taste of wine), we retired to the sitting room where the special parcel I had personally prepared for the birthday girl lay waiting to be opened. She stared at it with an ironic smile on her lips for what seemed like a long time, and then set about freeing its contents from the eye-catching wrapper. I was trembling with excitement as much as she and feared, for a moment, that I might have wrapped it too tightly.

"Go on!" urged Carmel, as Julia tore the remaining wrapping-paper from the box and, with a glance at me, opened it to reveal a battery-operated red vibrator, which immediately caused her to blush a similar colour herself.

"Oh, Uncle Joe!" she exclaimed. "How could you?" She had of course expected some such present, so was partly acting for my - as well as her own - benefit. There could be no doubt that Carmel had warned her what to expect, and gone some way towards explaining its purpose.

"Well, then, are you ready for the initiation ceremony?" I asked, and, as Julia made no verbal objection I took it she was. So the three of us proceeded up the stairs towards Julia's bedroom, which Carmel had specially arranged for the ceremony by placing a couple of thick cotton sheets on top of the bed, sheets which would absorb any blood-letting that the artificial deflowering of our virgin might provoke. The room itself was sweetly perfumed and spotlessly clean and, as soon as we were all three comfortably ensconced, I dutifully requested Julia to hand me the vibrator and prepare herself for the revolutionary experience ahead. This she did by removing her slender white panties and kneeling astride the bed with her light dress hitched up over her waist - Carmel taking pains to adjust both Julia's posture and clothing to my exact specifications.

"You may feel a little pain initially," I warned her, "but don't worry; you'll be alright in just a minute or two!" As I gave voice to this palpable understatement, I noticed that Carmel was holding one of Julia's hands, as if to reassure her. "Tonight's an historic occasion," I continued, "for you're going to become one of the first, if not the first, young women to lose her virginity to a vibrator on her birthday, and thus to lose it artificially." So saying, I turned the said implement on, lined myself up behind Julia's kneeling form, took aim, so to speak, and, with an almost scientific detachment, thrust it up inside her. There was a muffled cry from Julia's lips, but the swift vibrations of the artificial phallus were soon to evoke a positive response from her, as I gently manoeuvred it backwards and forwards in mimicry of coitus. For Julia, the excitement of her first orgasm was fast approaching and, as it expanded towards a monumental climax, she moaned in crescendo to the shivers of ecstasy which shot through her tender clitoris with virgin exuberance. Ah, I could see plainly enough that she was enjoying every moment of this unique experience, and enjoying it, moreover, in spite of Carmel's slightly envious proximity beside her! This was a birthday treat Julia was unlikely ever to forget. She had lost her virginity not to a hot-blooded male, but to a plastic phallus. Civilization had never before achieved anything so spectacular!