by Roger Quine
‘Been doing it since she was in the sixth form,’ he was telling Simon - and the rest of us. We all groaned inwardly at the thought of Sophie at seventeen, doing what she’d just been doing, but in white socks and a blue pleated skirt.
‘Copied it off her sister,’ he added, and we almost cried at the thought of the two of them doing it together. ‘No, not like that. Susie got caught by her mum and there was a big row, and it sort of made Sophie curious. They talked about it, like girls do, and Sophie tried it and liked it.’ He beamed smugly, the self-satisfied bastard. If his parents weren’t rich he’d have no friends at all.
‘Mind you,’ offered Dave, ‘if you had something like that in your pants you’d never leave it alone, would you?’ It was a long speech for someone making his first conversational sally of the evening, and a very good one at that. We all thought about it for quite some time, remembering those pin-sharp pictures of Sophie’s elegant fingers slithering around on the pink softness between her legs.
‘She does have a very pretty little fanny,’ breathed Simon, demonstrating once again his gift for the obvious.
‘Juicy, too,’ agreed Hugh, with a smarmy smile that almost concealed a very powerful state of arousal, and for the first time it became obvious that showing us the video had turned him on even more than watching it had got to the rest of us.
Reading magazines had told me that loads of men get hard at the thought of watching their wife or girlfriend having it off with another man - or men, preferably. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise to find Hugh was one of those who enjoyed it, and that for him showing us pictures of his girlfriend diddling herself was the most fun he could have. In fact, it wasn’t that much of a shock; it was the idea of Hugh having any kind of sexual fantasy that surprised us. Good-looking and rich - yes. But so devoid of personality you couldn’t imagine Mr Android actually wanting to have sex or being aroused by it. Except to prove ownership and demonstrate ability. That’s why it wasn’t a video of him and Sophie together; he wanted to be part of the audience, not part of the act. He wanted to watch her being fucked by someone - or something - else.
‘So was it her own, um, thing?’
That was Gavin, normally quiet and reserved, but obviously so interested in the answer that he’d overcome his usual reticence.
‘Nah, I got that when I was in London.’ Spending his parents’ money, of course. None of us could afford weekends away, certainly not in London.
‘How did you get her to... I mean, what did you say to her?’ asked Gav.
‘Just wrapped it in a pink bow and left it on her pillow, did you?’ sniggered Alan. Good on the ball, hard man in the scrum, crap with women. Just grunted at them and made signs. Don’t think he’d had a proper girlfriend in his life.
‘She was quite surprised,’ Hugh agreed, his smile oily. ‘But she soon got used to the idea. As you saw. Much better with a proper one than the sort of things her sister used.’
‘Things?’ Simon, naturally, asking on behalf of all those not brave enough. And Hugh had been expecting the question. It was his way in these situations to dribble information drop by drop, making us quiz him so he could lord it up all the more.
‘When she was younger. Stuff lying about the house. A lot of girls do, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ Simon was clearly stunned by this intelligence. I think we were all a bit taken aback. Well, you are a bit naive when you’re only just twenty-one, aren’t you?
‘Course they do. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’
It did, when you thought about it, but most of us never had. We thought of girls as being above all that - oh, they did sex all right, but only with blokes, and never in the same way. And they certainly never wanted it or needed it like a chap does, so you couldn’t imagine them doing - well, doing what we’d just been watching Sophie do.
‘Things?’ said Simon, clearly still puzzled.
‘Things,’ said Hugh patiently. When Simon still didn’t get the picture, he added, ‘You know - bananas, chocolate bars, hairbrush handles. Anything that’s the right size and shape.’ He sniggered in his unappealing way.
‘Blimey, I never knew that,’ said Simon, still not embarrassed to display the degree of ignorance the rest of us were scrupulously concealing while we conjured up mental pictures of Susie experimenting with bananas. Peeled, or unpeeled?
‘Everyone else knows,’ sneered Hugh, absolutely in his element; he knew our collective silence for what it was and was loving his moment of glory as the fount of all knowledge on such a vital topic. ‘I mean, deodorant bottles aren’t that shape by accident, are they?’
We were temporarily silenced, partly by the mental images his words had produced and partly by the idea that large international corporations might deliberately package their products in conveniently shaped plastic bottles to increase sales among teenage girls and young women too embarrassed to buy the real thing, even by mail order.
‘So Sophie... she, when she was... um...’ Even Simon was lost for words now.
‘No. She’d never tried it with anything before. That was her first time. You could say she lost a kind of virginity.’ Hugh smirked obnoxiously.
‘And S-S-Susie...?’
Gary was older than the rest of us by a couple of years, old enough to remember Sophie’s sister as the lust object of an entire fifth form, and he stuttered like that all the time. But the expression on his face was a clear indicator of how deep an impression she’d made.
‘Couldn’t leave herself alone. Sophie told me all about it.’
Gary went into a private trance as he tried to picture Susie with a hand in her knickers, and by the look on his face he obviously succeeded. Though legend held that Susie’s legs were longer, her bottom more rounded, and her breasts just that little bit firmer and fuller, the rest of us were happy to think about Sophie, since we’d all seen more of her - in every sense of the word.
Finally, Alan broke the appreciative silence with the obvious question. ‘So how come she doesn’t mind? Sophie, I mean. That we’ve all seen it - her?’
‘I haven’t told her.’ Hugh looked slightly off-guard for the first time.
‘You didn’t tell her you were going to show us the film...?’ Alan was lost for words, pretty much as usual.
‘No. I didn’t tell her I was making a film. I hid the camera.’ He sounded as smug as the Cheshire cat with a bowl of cream.
‘Jesus!’ Simon expressed the enormity of our response in a single word.
‘S-s-s-so she th-th-thought... th-th-th...’
‘So she thought that was just a private little moment in your love life, is what Gary’s trying to say.’
‘God, yes,’ said Hugh. ‘You saw how hard it was to make her do it at all, never mind filming her as well.’
‘What will she say? She’ll go loopy when she finds out, won’t she? Absolutely fucking loopy.’
‘She won’t find out, though, will she?’ Hugh was now clearly less pleased with himself than he would have liked. ‘Because no one’s going to tell her, are they?’
Of course they weren’t. The idea was stupid. Just wandering up to her in the pub and casually saying, ‘Hi, Sophie, love your work. Smashing tits, beautiful fanny. Great wrist action.’
Who’d do a thing like that?
Chapter Two
‘Oh, come on, for God’s sake!’
Susie Wills was shouting at the car she was driving, a rattling old diesel that fitted, so the new editor said, the character she was playing.
Susie thought it fitted the scrap heap rather better and said so, but she agreed she shouldn’t be driving anything posh. A little better than this, perhaps, but not much. She groaned in frustration as she pulled off the roundabout onto the dual carriageway and floored the accelerator with no discernible result, although there was quite a bit more
noise.
Normally she wouldn’t hurry, but this was an emergency, and she’d left the assignment she’d been working on to rush home at once.
Just as well she’d got what she needed, she thought, a wry smile revealing a row of even white teeth as she pictured the scene in the vicarage on Sunday morning when he opened the Sunday Newspaper, although, despite popular legend, it never happened just like that. They always had a phone call first, asking for reaction or comment, but as late as possible on Saturday in order to reduce the possibility of an injunction. It wasn’t unknown for well-off prominent people to get a judge to work at the weekend, but unlikely for a country vicar. But they still wouldn’t ring him until Saturday teatime; give him a whole night without sleep to think about the bad news.
And it would be very bad news.
It had started, as it nearly always did, with an anonymous phone call to the news desk, and the new editor had decided this was just the job for Susie.
‘Perfect,’ he’d enthused. ‘This’ll be just the thing to get you back up to speed after all your, er, experiences.’ And he beamed brightly at her. ‘Spend a week or so in the country, make friends with the vicar, wait for him to pounce, get the pictures to back it up and then bring it all home to us. Couldn’t be easier.’
To be honest, it couldn’t be. Much. The only drawback anyone could see was that to get away with it in such a small community she’d have to be alone.
‘But what harm can you come to?’ he boomed cheerfully. ‘Chap’s only a bloody vicar, after all. Just get him to drop his strides and wave his todger at you and you can make your excuses and bugger off back here to London.’
Trying not to brake too much for the next roundabout, knowing how long it would take to get the damn thing back up to speed, Susie smiled ruefully. It was never as easy to make your excuses and leave as they made it sound in print. Partly because you had to get your story and they had to do enough to make it worthwhile - which meant you had to get rather more involved than the story made out, lead them on with the right sort of encouragement. As the editor said before she left, ‘Make sure he gets it out or touches you up. We can’t have him if all he does is leer and make improper suggestions.’ Which meant, as always, that she’d have to let him touch her breasts or put his hand up her skirt at least, although she didn’t mind since it was all in the line of business, and that was a problem in itself. Ever since she’d been old enough to know that the thing between her legs had been put there for more than her own private entertainment, Susie had enjoyed a voracious and uncontrollable sexual appetite. And she did enjoy it, with a wholehearted innocence that was very appealing to men - and women - and brought large numbers of them to her side hoping to gain access to the contents of her underwear, blissfully unaware that she generally shared their ambitions in that department.
Indulging her enjoyment by going to work as an investigative reporter on the nation’s most scurrilous Sunday paper had been a natural choice for Susie. But, sadly, the very thing that made her suitable for this job - in fact, the very thing that had made her apply for it in the first place - also made it difficult to do the job successfully. She always found encouraging others also meant encouraging herself, and by the time they got to the point where the victim had done enough to write a good story, Susie was usually so aroused that the idea of making her excuses and leaving the room simply wasn’t an option. She kept promising herself it would be different next time, but so far it never had been. Not even with the vicar.
She’d arrived in the village posing as Caroline, fresh new bride of David, who was something in the City. She’d come down from London and rented a cottage alone while she looked around for the house they would occupy in wedded bliss three months or so hence. In the course of the first few days she made a point of meeting everybody including - she was almost certain - the troubled woman who’d made the first phone call to the paper. Julie was a prim-looking woman of around thirty-five, with a fondness for tweedy country casuals, horses and golden retrievers. A straightforward, honest sort of woman, happily married without a care in the world except her younger and somewhat errant sister, who was a completely different story. Amanda was a pretty girl in her late twenties, with long curly hair so black it was almost blue, and a tight-packed body that wriggled around inside her clothes with a life of its own. Possessing a wide-eyed innocence that seemed unbelievable at first but which Susie came to think was genuine, Amanda could devastate a small village like Kingscombe, causing farmers to forget about crop rotation completely. No wonder the vicar had forgotten his holy orders and begun straining, quite literally, at the leash.
Susie met him on her third day, careful not to arouse his suspicion by moving in on him too quickly.
In his mid-fifties, with a head of wispy white hair, he was the epitome of the country vicar, except that he was no mild-mannered cleric, but an imposing figure with a commanding presence and a forceful personality. Slightly red in the face - possibly from an excess of communion wine, but equally possibly because of all that pent-up perversion - he’d obviously been good-looking in a clean-cut sort of way when younger. Out of a dog-collar he probably would have been very successful with women. In it, he could probably have anyone he wanted. But it wasn’t his rich voice and compelling personality that set a warm trickle in her underwear - it was fear. Knowing why she was there and what she was going to do made her first encounter quite nerve-wracking and, inevitably, fear not only sent butterflies cartwheeling through her stomach, it also sent juices soaking into her knickers as her body responded with arousal.
It was always the same and it was usually a problem, even on an everyday level. At school poor exam results had been the result of nerves; she’d found it hard to concentrate on quadratic equations because she was stuck to her seat and her mind was seeing lurid images. And now, in her work, it meant she was often in a state of arousal just at the very moment when she needed to control herself, make her excuses, and leave.
Like this morning.
She’d been to no less than three of the vicar’s coffee mornings and was not surprised to find that five of the seven women gathered there were young and attractive. All were attentive to him, overly so, it seemed, with a reverence they were supposed to reserve for God, not the reverend, Susie thought, writing a line or two of the story in her head.
None of them was Amanda, which was probably just as well, but there was one attractive redhead there, with a full body and a wickedly knowing smile. Susie targeted her as her best chance, befriending Stephanie with ease. There was a natural rapport between the two of them, and after each coffee morning they walked home through the village together, Susie going back to her place for an iced drink the first two times, and returning the favour the third, by when she’d become accepted in the village and was beginning to feel quite relaxed. The editor had been right about that, anyway.
They sat in the kitchen of her little cottage, looking across the rolling farmland that curved away to a distant sea, discussing the vicar. It was all they seemed to talk about, which Susie took as a good sign as far as her story was concerned.
‘He takes such an interest in us all as individuals,’ Stephanie was saying, fluttering her dark lashes almost as if the man was in the room. ‘I mean, the parish is so large and he has so many concerns, but he still finds time to spend with us, one on one.’
Oh, Susie had little doubt about that. Despite his age, his white hair, his red face and his shaky hands, he was still quite attractive to women, including her; even when she was on guard and concentrating on him as the object of her story. She’d sat through all three of the coffee mornings with damp knickers from a body aroused partly by fear and partly, she had to admit, by expectation. She had a good idea of the sort of things the vicar had in store for her, and the idea of him whipping off his dog-collar and whipping out his erection knotted her stomach. Aside from the fact she’d never done it with a vic
ar, he was a bit of a charmer who had a way with women, even when they knew he was the enemy.
And he knew it. He loved the way they doted on him and he loved exercising his power over them - you could see it in the way he made them pour the tea or fetch the biscuits.
And he wanted them. The way he looked at them, the way he watched their eyes, their legs, their bottoms and their breasts, and the way he touched, hand on arm, shoulder, even thigh - all so innocent because he was a vicar, but if any other man did that you’d think he was trying it on.
And it worked on the others, too. Susie initially thought they were a bunch of silly women buried in the country with nothing else to occupy their brains, but she changed her mind the first time the vicar sat close beside her and casually let his thigh rest against hers. He looked right into her eyes with a penetrating stare, and as he laid a hand gently but firmly on her arm and began to speak - she couldn’t remember what about - the dampness increased, and if they’d been alone she would have let him do anything he wanted. And he knew. From the way he looked at her, the tiny hint of a smile, the extra pressure of his thigh and the small squeeze of his hand on her arm, he knew the turmoil he was creating in her knickers.
‘So what do you talk about - you and the vicar, when you’re alone?’ Susie asked.
Stephanie lowered her eyes and appeared to be thinking carefully, before looking up and gazing directly across at Susie. ‘Self-improvement,’ she said pointedly, as if revealing a state secret.
Susie raised an eyebrow, inviting further information with a look of interest that was hardly false, because this sounded promising. Very promising. ‘What, through prayer and so on?’ she asked.
