I had known Carol since we were kids. My parents knew her parents, so I knew who she was and we said hello when we saw each other around the place, although we weren’t actually friends and certainly nothing more. I had seen her at the beach, though, and as a teenager, I had lusted after her as I lusted after every girl I saw in a bathing suit. She was big, though: tall and stout, so, like a stereotypical teenager, I wouldn’t admit to being attracted to her.

But, as you get older, you become more flexible with these things. When you’re no longer the young stud yourself you’re less likely to chase the sort of perfect lookers who, rightly or wrongly, are referred to as bimbos.

So, in my mid-forties, when I found myself working for a large company where she was the receptionist, I looked at her with different eyes. We felt like allies from the old days and we had brief chats about people and places long gone. She was now not just stout but fat, and had been married for twenty years to a Korean restaurateur. It was the one interracial marriage in our small town and people were less worldy then, so she had come in for a bit of criticism for not marrying “one of her own kind”. There was no real malice attached to these thoughts; people just thought it was strange – and I suppose they wondered what it was like to be with someone different.

There was this old thing about whether a Chinese girl’s slit was up and down like white women’s, or side to side. Anyway, Carol had become part of the small Korean community as much as she was part of the traditional British one.

Her husband had been much older than her, and had died a few years earlier. So she was widowed, firty-five and past her physical best, yet still attractive in her way. I enjoyed talking to her.

One day, we got onto the subject of music, and she said she still had all her old LPs. I had recently made the switch to CDs and sold my albums, and I sort of missed them.

“You should come round and have a look,” Carol said, so we arranged that for Friday night. That was siginificant too: Friday night. It was one of the traditional going-out nights, when you were supposed to have special things to do. So to agree to meet up on such a night, was to bestow a sort of honour on the other person. She and I were, according to each other's weekend status.

Carol lived in a house with a large garden of gravel and fish ponds, with big wrought iron gates. A host of cats prowled around as she greeted me at the front door. She was wearing a purple velvet dress which struck me as a bit formal; maybe the most appropriate option from a limited wardrobe. Nice, anyway. She looked elegant and it hid her bulk.

I flipped through her album collection and found it rather predictably girly. Carole King’s Tapestry. Some Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens. Roberta Flack and the current female singers of the time: Gabrielle and Lisa Stansfield. Some good stuff, but it was what it lacked that was significant. No oomph. No masculine element. I deduced that her husband hadn’t been interested in western music at all, or maybe she had weeded out his contributions after he died.

She was very generous with the drinks: tequila sunrises with more tequila than sunrise flowed from the moment I arrived, and soon I was feeling disarmed and a bit reckless. I was helping her in the kitchen, making a salad, when she excused herself for a minute.

I found a post-it pad and a pen, wrote a note and placed it next to the salad bowl in the fridge.

The starters – avocado vinaigrette - were already on the table in the cold, pretty dining room, so I went and sat down, taking two wine glasses and a bottle of a nice fruity white wine, Viognier, with me. Carol joined me at the table and we chatted about music and how out of touch we both were with the new stuff. I was right the first time about her husband; it seems she had been left to her own devices a lot. She was only now discovering herself, she said.

Carol cleared the starters and went into the kitchen. I heard her open the fridge door and wondered what she would think. After a moment she said aloud, but quietly, “I have always wanted to pull your pants down.” Then there was silence for a moment as she moved around the room, before appearing with the salad and a large plate of salami and cheese with olives.

She placed it in the middle of the table and changed the record: off went Judy Collins and on came an album by Free: Fire and Water, the one with All Right Now on it. She said nothing about the note but she had a slight smirk, I thought. When we finished the wine I went into the kitchen to get some more. Although it was red I was after, I opened the fridge out of curiosity. She had written on my note. I picked it up and saw in a neat, swirly hand, “How old are you?”

I took the wine through and Carol said, “No dessert, I’m afraid.

Shall we go into the sitting room? This room’s very nice with all the light, but it’s cold, isn’t it?”

The sitting room was indeed warmer and more comfortable. It was full of furniture: settee suites, leather armchairs, footstools and a long wooden coffee table. Carol sat on the big sofa and I joined her there.

We sat in silence for a moment and then she said, “Cryptic notes in the fridge, eh?”

“Well, I have,” I replied.

“You have what?”

“Always wanted to pull your pants down. When I used to see you on the beach.”

“You were in love with Stella Sims,” she said.

“Infatuated,” I said in my defence. “But I used to lust after you.”

“And why didn’t you?” she asked.

“Why didn’t I what?”

“Pull my pants down?” She looked into my eyes and then away quickly. “I might have liked it.”

“Yeah, well,” I mumbled. “Kids, you don’t know if… and you’ve got nowhere to go.”

“Kids arrange things,” she said. “You were too shy.”

“I was,” I admitted.

“Are you still shy, Christopher?” I loved it when she used my full name, which she did often. I was actually still a bit shy, but at that moment I had to throw caution to the wind. I put my arms around her and kissed her. She almost fell on top of me in her eagerness to reciprocate. I felt her breasts, first outside her dress and then inside her bra, thanks to the dress’s wide armholes. Her hands were on my legs, pawing me. She was no expert at this, and I liked that.

I slid a hand up Carol’s skirt and felt her panties. It was humid up there.

Suddenly she stood up and put her arms out to the sides.

“I’m not stopping you,” she said, expressionless.

I reached under the voluminous skirt and grabbed the sides of Carol’s panties. I pulled them down to her ankles and she stepped out of them.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “Too many cats down here,”

I followed her up the wide staircase and through double doors into a large bedroom with a huge bed. Carol stood next to it expectantly and turned around as I approached.

“Unzip me,” she said, and I did. “Now the bra,” she added. She turned to face me and gave a shy smile. “Now you’ve got me naked, Christopher. What shall we do next?”

I undressed as quickly as I could and knelt in front of her. I kissed her sparse but unshaven pubic hair. Carol sat on the bed and lay back. I hooked my arms behind her knees and pulled her towards me. I licked her pussy, with its long moist lips. I licked her clitoris and she flinched, then relaxed.

“Do you know what I always wanted?” she asked. “Maybe not at that time, but as I thought about you over the years. Stand up.”

I did as I was bid. She could have reached out and touched my cock from a sitting position, but she chose to kneel in front of me and do it there.

“I wanted to be a very bad girl and pull your shorts down and give you a blow job,” Carol said. “Dreams are coming true tonight, aren’t they?”

She sucked me tenderly, her breasts caressing my legs, and eventually stood up and we kissed. I enjoyed the feeling of her well-upholstered body against me.

“One other thing,” she whispered. She turned and knelt on the bed. “Lick me from behind,” she said almost inaudibly. I got down there and licked her furry pussy. I smelled the woman who had grown from that innocent girl. I sucked her lips. And then she began to wriggle down until my face was in her buttocks.

“Please,’ she said.

I licked her bottom and it was somehow ruder, more authentic, stemming from the very early days when you don’t know exactly what it is you want from a girl, but you know it is inside her pants, between her legs. I licked her and it was like our destiny.

“Oh God, Chris, nobody has ever done that to me before and I’ve always thought about it. You could have done that to me years ago, in one of the fishermen’s huts or behind the tower on the hill. The time we waste because we’re too shy to act on impulse. And now,” she continued, lying on her back, “You may shag me.”

I leapt on top of her and shagged her with reckless teenage abandon. We came together, she squeezing me in her arms and I with my hands behind her shoulders, pulling her down onto my rampant cock. I squirted my spunk into her to atone for more than thirty years of not doing so.

I slept with Carol that night, there in the huge bed. We made love in the middle of the night in the dark with nothing to guide us but our instincts. I stayed with her the next night too. We spent the daylight hours walking the lanes around her house, having tea in little cafes and we would sit there in our adult innocence, sore down below but betraying no trace of our lusty making-up for lost time.