Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women

by Nancy Madore

  One spring afternoon, as the ugly duckling rested languidly under the shade of a large tree in her yard, reading a book, there suddenly appeared a dark shadow directly above her. She looked up and beheld the most beautiful creature she had ever laid eyes upon.

  He was well formed and dark, and stood smiling down at her. Half thinking the apparition to be a figment of her imagination (perhaps a character out of the romantic story she had been reading) she at first only stared mutely at him. Seeing her startled expression, the young man spoke to her in a friendly tone, explaining that he was merely passing through on his way to a nearby pond for an afternoon swim. Apparently the only way to reach the obscure little pond was by trespassing through the ugly duckling’s yard!

  The ugly duckling recognized the handsome young man as a fellow student in the same school that she attended. She secretly felt that she would enjoy seeing him on warm summer days as he made his way to the pond for an afternoon swim. Perhaps a bit too warmly, she informed him that he was perfectly welcome to cross her yard as often as he liked.

  But the handsome young man did not immediately leave her upon gaining her consent, lingering instead to ask her about the book she was reading, her classes at the university, and other matters about herself that no man had ever asked her about before.

  The ugly duckling’s eyes shone with happiness as she chatted with her new friend, but suddenly the images of her sisters flashed before her and she remembered that she was ugly. At once she felt ashamed to have any man look upon her, and so, making up an excuse, she abruptly escaped into her cottage, where she watched from a small window as the young man left in the direction of the pond. He was energetic and healthy, with large arms and shoulders, and she wished for the thousandth time that she was beautiful like her sisters.

  The days grew warmer and before long the trees and flowers were in full bloom. The young man now passed through the ugly duckling’s yard nearly every day on his way to the pond beyond. And each time he passed he would stop and speak to her. Slowly she got over her self-consciousness around him, even looking forward to his visits, and they got to know each other better. Sometimes they would pass each other at the university, and he would thrill her by calling out to her.

  One day the handsome young man asked the ugly duckling to join him at the pond. She abruptly declined, but from that day forward she felt a strange pull towards the pond, and often found herself wondering what the water was like, and how it would feel to splash around in it with her handsome friend.

  And so it went, until one unusually warm summer morning, when the ugly duckling crept out of her bed very early and slipped down to the pond in her nightdress. She told herself she only wanted to look at the pond, but behold, it was more beautiful than she had imagined it. She glanced around guiltily. Certainly no one would be around at this hour of the morning. She would just slip into the cool water for a moment and then go back to her cottage. Before she could stop herself, her nightgown was shed and she was in the water.

  The ugly duckling splashed the water all around her as she swam about happily. The water felt like silk on her skin. When she got tired of swimming she floated about, gazing up at the soft, hazy clouds that hovered in the blue summer sky. Occupied in this way, she completely forgot about the time.

  The ugly duckling was not aware of his approach until she heard the huge splash as he jumped in the water. She stood perfectly still, frozen in horror as she waited for him to surface. She dearly hoped he didn’t have his eyes open under the water, for she was ashamed to have him look at her body. And how on earth was she going to get out of the pond and put her nightgown back on?

  Finally his head and arms bounced up to the surface. There was a huge smile on his beautiful face.

  “I figured you for a natural girl, but I never dreamed you’d have the nerve,” he said cheerfully.

  So he had opened his eyes under the water! She was so horrified and embarrassed that tears came to her eyes. He was slowly swimming closer to her. She wanted to ask him to turn the other way so that she could get out of the water, but she was afraid of the sound she would make if she were to try and speak.

  He was still smiling as he approached her. She saw that he was holding something out to her and, numbly reaching out her hand, she realized they were his swimming trunks. “Now we’re even,” he said, laughing.

  She did not feel like she was in any respect “even” with the beautiful young man, however, and she merely stood there in awkward silence, holding his trunks in midair.

  He seemed then, at last, to sense her discomfort. Very slowly he took the trunks from her stiff fingers and threw them over to the shore. He was standing very close to her, and she imagined that he was thinking about how ugly she was, and even expected that he would laugh at or insult her in the next moment, but to her utter shock he slowly lowered his head and gently placed his lips on hers.

  The feeling was so glorious that she nearly lost her footing, but at the same moment, he took hold of her, drawing her even closer to him, so there was no danger of her going anywhere.

  His body was exceedingly warm. His lips were demanding and insistent. His arms clutched her tighter, causing their bodies to press closer together. The water fluttered and swelled around them.

  In the tumult of her first kiss, the ugly duckling forgot that she was ugly, and she returned his kiss with all the passion that she felt. She realized then that she was falling in love with him, and wondered if he guessed her feelings and, if so, what he felt. Just as she was dwelling on these thoughts, he drew his lips away from hers to search her eyes. He smiled at her uncertain expression, confessing that he loved her, too. Then he kissed her again, and again, and even then again! She clung to him, never wanting the kissing to stop.

  But suddenly his kisses grew more passionate, and his hands were touching her everywhere. She discovered that she loved the feeling she got from pressing her naked body up against his. She felt dizzy with happiness to have his strong hands and beautiful lips upon her skin, but the kissing was becoming more and more urgent and demanding, and his body was rigidly pressing against hers. She was totally unprepared for what was happening. What’s more, she could not help wondering if his declaration of love had a part in it.

  With a little cry, she pulled herself away from him. She knew he cared for her in some way, but could he really love her? She would not allow herself to be taken for granted, ugly or not!

  For good or for bad, I must know for certain what his intentions are respecting me, she thought, and if I am agreeable to them, whatever they may be.

  For a moment they both stood apart, and for an instant he seemed almost angry at her. But at length, he smiled.

  “I will turn and face the woods while you dress,” he said kindly. “But will you wait for me?” he asked.

  “Yes, I will wait for you,” she promised.

  “Well, if it isn’t our own dear, plain little sister!” all four sisters exclaimed cheerfully.

  The youngest of the five smiled warmly at her sisters. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “But how nice it is to see all of you again!”

  “I must say,” remarked the oldest sister to her younger sibling. “The years must have been good to you. I have truly never seen you looking better!”

  The ugly duckling smiled. “I doubt the details of my life could keep your attention for a single moment, as exciting as I’m sure your own lives have been,” she replied. She blushed slightly as she said this, though, for she was thinking of the previous night she had shared with her beloved husband and was certain that, even with all their beauty, her sisters could not have experienced greater happiness than her own.

  “Exciting!” repeated the third eldest sister with bitterness. “I was cheated out of the excitement I should have had.”

  “At least you got married,” snarled the second-eldest, even more bitterly.

  “Married!” she returned. “Imprisoned would be a better word.”

  “Aren’
t you happy to be married?” asked the ugly duckling, shocked.

  “Do I look happy to you?” she answered, with tears welling up in her beautiful eyes.

  Her four sisters stared at her in surprise.

  “Oh, my husband never loved me,” she confessed. “When we were young, he was attracted to me, but he only wanted one thing. I mistook that for affection. I never stopped or held back to see what he really felt for me. I was so happy to have the attention and so sure that my beauty would make him love me. Then I got pregnant…and he was obliged to marry me. But he doesn’t love me! Women are just replaceable objects to him. He has affairs while I stay home and take care of our children.”

  “My God,” uttered the eldest. “And I thought I had it bad.”

  “I would give anything to have your life!” the unhappy lady pronounced.

  “No, I don’t think you would,” the eldest sister rejoined. Then she turned to her sisters with her own sad tale.

  “You see, I thought to make my fortune by showing my beauty openly to men, so I became an exotic entertainer. I figured I could earn a better living that way than through anything an education could teach me. And I was right about that at first. But you can only do this for a little while. Soon there are younger girls that come to take your place and you don’t earn very much after that.”

  “Perhaps,” said the unhappily married lady, without seeing the irony, “you should have married one of your admirers while you were still young.”

  “Then I would be in the same boat as you!” the eldest replied with disgust. “Besides, most of them were already married.” She sighed unhappily before she went on. “Anyway, how could I ever trust a man after I had seen firsthand how lecherous their behavior becomes when they are not in their wives’ sights?”

  “It’s quite true,” said the second-eldest sister, who had made her way in life by selling even more of herself to men than her older sister. “Once you see that side of men you can never trust them.” She looked sadly at her older sister and added, “And once you sell that part of yourself it’s no longer your own. It becomes a tedious occupation. I have never genuinely enjoyed being with a man because it has never really been for me, or on my terms.”

  “You’ve made it so easy for men to treat you like that,” said their unhappily married sister harshly, adding under her breath, “and the rest of us, too.”

  “Oh, so it’s our fault that men are the way they are,” her older sister replied defensively. “Why are women always so quick to blame the other women?”

  “Maybe it’s because you are willing to do for a fee things that men would otherwise have to prove themselves worthy of,” she said resentfully, now worked up into full anger. “Lots of women, just like me, continually work to improve themselves—and they are, in fact, far more than their men deserve. But the men don’t have to put forth any effort; yet they can have the most beautiful women imaginable at their fingertips if they have money.”

  “Well, it should make you happy to know that we have paid a high price in offering that service to men,” her sister argued back.

  “Yes, I see that you have,” said her sister slowly. “But you chose the price you have paid in exchange for the fees you have collected. The rest of us have not made any such choice or collected any such fees, yet we have to pay the price right along with you!”

  There was silence for a moment after this outburst.

  The third-eldest sister sat brooding about her unhappy marriage while her older sister made an attempt to turn the subject around.

  “You know,” she said with a sigh, “it is true about the men. Most of my customers are fat, bald and ugly.”

  “Indeed,” chipped in the fourth-eldest sister, who had remained silent up until this point. “It is because we are expected to be perfect, in a world where perfection doesn’t exist. The standard is so high that no woman could possibly reach it. Meanwhile, the men just sit back and enjoy the show. They don’t have to worry over their appearance because nobody ever seems to notice them. They are invisible.”

  The sisters laughed in agreement when they heard this.

  “But you have reached physical perfection,” interjected the ugly duckling, who had listened in silent shock to her sisters’ confusing harangue. “I saw your picture on the cover of that prestigious magazine.”

  “I am ashamed of that picture,” said her sister with emotion, gaining the full attention of her sisters, and then continuing with her own story as follows.

  “I know I am a beautiful woman. I have dedicated my entire life to beauty! But that is not enough to satisfy the editors of the women’s, ha, women’s—” she paused over the word for emphasis before continuing “—magazines. How women can bear to read them is beyond me.

  “Anyway, I found that I was not—indeed none of us were—good enough to grace the pages of those militant catalogs of female delusion and torture. Before I could even be accepted as a candidate I discovered that I would have to submit to a number of surgical alterations and virtually stop eating. All of this I did, and at last I was chosen for the magazine of which you spoke. But would you believe, even after all I had suffered and endured, in the end I was still not beautiful enough, and the picture was altered in the final draft.” There were tears in her eyes as she looked at her youngest sister. “That picture is not one of me, but of a specter—the very same specter that is being held up before women to keep them racing after perfection.” She looked around sadly at her sisters, and added, “It is the same specter that has ruined the lives of each and every one of us.”

  For some reason this brought their youngest sister to their attention. Almost simultaneously the women turned to her.

  “What has life been like for you?” asked her oldest sister.

  “Well, I am certainly satisfied with it,” she answered humbly, not wishing in the least to gloat over her own happiness in light of what she had just heard.

  “You continued your education, didn’t you?” another sister asked. “What was it you studied?”

  Timidly she began to tell her sisters about her studies, never at a loss for words when she spoke of the things she had learned. Yet their silence intimidated her, and her voice trailed off. No doubt they would think her life ridiculous.

  But her older sisters did not mock her or laugh. They questioned her with interest and, at length, she told them about her many interests and her marriage and her little daughter. Feeling guilty over her own good fortune and happiness, she refrained from telling them about the many little joys in her life; like how her husband worked so hard to keep himself in tiptop shape for her, or how he never lost interest in making love to her. The sisters were too astute not to see these things in her face, however, and could not help feeling envy for the accomplishments of their youngest sibling, despite her supposed physical defects.

  The third-eldest sister, being the bitterest of the four, could not help remarking, “It seems as if we would all have been better off to have been born ugly!”

  The eldest sister immediately jumped to her youngest sister’s defense, saying, “You’re just jealous.”

  The youngest sister took courage by this. “I don’t think it is because I am ugly that I am so happy,” she said slowly, thinking. “Of course, I did not rely on good looks to do me any favors, and that was part of it. But mostly I felt that whatever I should seek out of life, I should first identify it for what it truly is, and then find out what it would cost me. And that is what I have done.”

  She looked at her sister who was so unhappily married and went on, “You said yourself that if you had held back and waited, you might have discovered that your husband did not really love you. But you allowed yourself to be flattered by his attentions, not realizing that they weren’t really all that flattering because he didn’t care very much for you at all.”

  She turned to her other sisters and continued, “Each of you suffered similarly because you let yourselves be used for the moment as beautiful objects. You
did get paid, but not enough considering that you traded your own requirements for a happy life for that payment. You’ve in a sense made men unaccountable for their actions.”

  After that, there seemed little left to say.

  Finally inside the door to her house, her haven, the ugly duckling sighed in relief. It was late, but a welcoming light had been left on in the entranceway. There were newly cut flowers in a vase sitting on a small table. She took a moment to smell them, savoring everything about being home.

  She continued on up the stairway until she came to a small bedroom at the top. She stepped inside, carefully making her way in the darkness to the small bed where the barely audible sleeping sounds drifted upward from a clutter of soft blankets. She stooped to kiss the tiny cheek, soft and warm. She adjusted the blankets as she admired her daughter, so beautiful like her aunts. She would teach her to enjoy her beauty but not to rely upon it.

  She left her sleeping daughter and quietly made her way down the hall to the larger bedroom. Upon entering, she stopped for a moment and closed her eyes, breathing in deeply the familiar scents of his cologne as it mingled with her perfume. It was a warm night, and it delighted her to see the long, filmy curtains swaying gently with the breeze.

  She removed her clothes and eased her way into the warm bed. He was awake, and without a word, took her in his arms and pulled her into his warmth. She nestled against him and felt the familiar hardening of his body.