Those feelings had been thrust into dormancy during the few weeks between Ken’s belated diagnosis with terminal cancer and his death and the months it took to sort out his posthumous business affairs. But once she was comfortably settled at fifty-five in what had been their family home in the small Bedfordshire town of Sandy, she felt those suppressed stirrings coming to life again - in spite of the pain of loss. Alone in the house, she was now free to indulge her burgeoning fantasies whenever the mood took her. It increasingly did.
At first she felt guilty when lying in the bed she had shared with Ken for thirty years, watching videos of women making love – either to each other or to themselves – or looking at images of young, nubile, big-breasted women, imagining herself having sex with them, and bringing herself to orgasms of an intensity she had never known with him. She solved that problem by giving the bed away to a charity that helped needy families and buying a new, bigger bed in which she could spread herself with imaginary partners.
Among the videos she sought out on the internet, her favourite kind featured what she called “milfs and sylphs” - older women with younger female partners (either seducing or being seduced by them). But it was not only the women she watched on the internet that triggered her erotic imaginings; she found herself developing feelings of attraction to women in her circle of acquaintances – as well as the daughters of some of them – even to unknown women who caught her eye in the street, the supermarket, and other places she frequented.
Well-meaning women friends, some of whom peopled her erotic fantasies, would tell her she should start dating, offering to “fix her up” with eligible men. If only they knew! Veronica began to discover that there was an oppressive side to living in a small town and being the widow of a man who had been a well-known citizen of it. The stronger her feelings of attraction to women became, the more afraid she felt of what those who knew her would think if she were to act on those feelings. Desire was building up a pressure within her that she struggled ever harder to contain.
Sometimes she was disturbed by the growing intensity with which these feelings seized her. Once, on a trip into Bedford, she had seen an attractive woman in Sainsbury’s, and the attraction had driven her to stalk the woman all through the store, then out into the street, following her obsessively for well over an hour, all the time berating herself, terrified that the woman would become aware of her behaviour and make a complaint, yet unable to wrest herself away, drawn helplessly on as if magnetized.
Since then there had been several more such stalking incidents, which usually ended with her rushing home and locking the front door, trembling with a mixture of lust, frustration and panic, masturbating to three or four orgasms in a row until she collapsed, sobbing and exhausted, and stricken by the fear that this time she might have been observed – perhaps, worst of all, by someone who knew her.
For a few days, or even weeks, she would resist the temptation, but gradually she would become aware of the urge growing anew within her, teasing her senses with mounting insistence, until at last, despising herself, she would surrender again to the obsessive cycle of temptation, lust, fear and self-contempt, and set out in search of a new quarry.
It was a late Friday afternoon, and she was sprawled face downwards on her bed, recovering from a frenzied climax after one of her “incidents”, when the phone rang. Automatically she picked up the bedside receiver.
“Ronnie, darling!” It was her friend Angela Postlethwaite, a widow of about her own age and a pillar of the local Women’s Institute. “I was – gosh, are you all right?” She had obviously become aware of Veronica’s laboured, post-orgasmic breathing.
“Er, yes – I’ve just been having a session on my exercycle and I’m…a bit out of breath…”
“Sounds as if it was a pretty vigorous session – for a moment I wondered if I’d dragged you out of the arms of a gorgeous lover at a critical moment…”
“Oh, I wish….”
“That’s the spirit – you’ve been going to waste for far too long. Anyway, what I was ringing about was that I’d like you to come round for lunch tomorrow if you’re free. There’s a nice lady I’d like you to meet. She’s recently moved into the area and needs to make friends, and I thought: who better to start with than you?”
“That sounds nice, Ange – yes I’d love to. What’s she like?”
“Oh, forties-ish - but you wouldn’t guess from looking at her. Divorced. Has a figure to die for – I got to know her at my gym, which explains the figure, I suppose. Good, so you’ll come. About 12.30?”
“Lovely. What should I bring?”
“Well, yourself of course, darling – but if you can find the time to rustle up that lovely brown rice salad you make, that would be marvellous.”
“OK. What’s her name, by the way?”
“Jennifer. But she likes to be called Jen. I’m sure you’ll like each other.”
Veronica hung up, rolled over and lay back on the bed, stretching out sensuously as she thought of Angela, and of how she would like to undress her and…if only… kiss and fondle the magnificent breasts she was sure were hidden beneath the stylish clothes she usually wore.
She had known Angela for years; Ken had been the Postlethwaites’ family solicitor. Colin Postlethwaite had preceded Ken in dying of an aggressive cancer, and Angela had been a wonderful source of support and advice in the time leading up to and following Ken’s death. A living refutation of the notion that to be involved with the Women’s Institute was by definition to be a stuffy old bag, she was smart, vivacious, fun and – in Veronica’s eyes – sexy, with a figure she worked at keeping delectably trim. It was, Veronica thought, one of life’s painful ironies that the Angela who had been endeavouring to pair her off with men was a woman whom she herself often thought of as a milf - someone she longed to fuck. If only…
“…a nice lady I’d like you to meet...” Veronica wondered what this Jen would be like. Would she be anything like the woman she had spent more than an hour that afternoon shadowing as, together with a beautiful late-teen-looking girl (a milf and sylph couple? she wondered), her quarry shopped for lingerie?
Her hands began to move caressingly over her body as she let her mind drift back to the woman whose statuesque beauty had so captivated her. Form-hugging jeans tucked tightly into knee-high boots, emphasizing the delicious contours of calves, thighs and buttocks; white sweater tucked into the jeans, blatantly showcasing the ample roundness of voluptuous breasts…
Her nipples began to tingle in anticipation as, with deliberate slowness, she let her fingertips trail up the inner surfaces of her parted thighs, pausing to tease apart the still-moist lips of her smooth-shaven sex, then moving on, tracing leisurely whorls on her belly and over her ribcage until at last she lovingly cupped her breasts and played five-finger exercises on nipples that were now stiffly erect and radiating delicious currents of pleasure.
Soon her left hand made a downward return journey to slide into the abundantly welling wetness between her thighs. And now the need to reach orgasm again gripped her with sudden urgency; she turned over again to lie face downwards, humping her hand with ever faster, stronger thrusts, two fingers plunging deep inside her vagina, her ring finger, liberally lubricated with her copious nectar, doing the same in her anus. She came, violently, loudly and convulsively, and dissolved in tears of relief.
On Saturday morning she rose late, enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and an equally leisurely bubble bath, then set about her preparations for lunch with Angela and Jen. The brown rice salad had been made the night before, and she gave it a final thorough stir to ensure that the soy sauce, raisins, cashew nuts, capsicum and other ingredients were as evenly mixed in as possible. She selected a bottle of her favourite New Zealand pinot gris and put it in the fridge to chill, then turned her attention to the matter of what to wear. She finally settled for simplicity with a touch of understated sexiness: a silk turquoise blouse, matching bra and panties, a black skirt that clung to her hips and flared out just above the knees to a scalloped hem, flesh-coloured hold-up stockings, and three-inch heels.
