In truth it had never occurred to me to steal Mrs Greening’s underwear. I couldn’t even believe anyone would steal clothes from a line. My mum and dad hadn’t said anything about thieves in the neighbourhood and Mrs Greening would have told them, I was sure.
“That’s mine, I think you’ll find. Looks like I’ve caught the culprit, red-handed.” She seemed to have a smirk on her face as she said it.
Words failed me, but I managed to stutter something out along the lines of: “M-Mrs Greening . . . I hadn’t . . . I mean, it isn’t me . . . I don’t steal . . . this . . . urn, girdle blew over –”
“Hmm, you know what it is then,” sighed the woman. “Please don’t make it worse for yourself by lying.”
I felt crushed. I wasn’t lying and I thrust the offending girdle towards the woman, feeling ashamed and confused. But she didn’t take it. Mrs Greening stood, hands on hips, and regarded me, her eyes going to my crotch. “I do understand, believe me. An attractive, mature woman’s underwear on a clothes line always attracts young men. Excites them, too.”
“Oh!” I gasped as I realized what the woman was looking at. Blushing red, I tried to cover my embarrassment by dropping my hands, still holding the girdle, over the front of my pants. Mrs Greening merely laughed.
“Tony, as you are so fascinated by my underwear, I suggest you come over here and gather all my clothes in off the line. Think of it as a test that you can touch my underwear without wanting to steal it. Bring them into my house, please, while I consider if I should tell your parents about what you have been up to.” At that she turned and marched off into the house, leaving the kitchen door open.
I gulped, understanding at once that here was some get-out clause, that bringing all her underwear in would somehow help prove my innocence. I hopped over the fence and set about gathering the assortment of bras and girdles and stockings and even knickers – deep-waisted knickers, I noted – off the line. Under normal circumstances the chance to visit so much mature women’s underwear would have made me swoon with delight, but this was more serious than that.
Mrs Greening was waiting in the kitchen and indicated I should drop the pile of clothes on the table. “It wasn’t me,” I said as I put them down. “You have to believe me, Mrs Greening. I wouldn’t steal your clothes.”
“Really? And yet you spend so much time staring at them, when I hang them out.”
I felt my face burn. So she had noticed me, staring at the underwear on the line, and I earnestly wished the ground would open up and swallow me. “It . . . It isn’t like that,” I managed to say.
Mrs Greening was cool and very much in control. “Tell me what it is like, then.”
“It’s just that . . . urn, your clothes. Seeing them –”
“My underwear,” corrected the woman. “My skirts and blouses don’t hold the same fascination for you, do they, Tony?”
I felt my face grow even redder. I started to say something vague about all women’s clothes holding a fascination but it was not only gibberish that came from my mouth, but clearly a lie.
“I’m disappointed in you, Tony,” said Mrs Greening gently, interrupting my implausible little speech. “I hoped you would understand better.”
Understand? If I wasn’t confused already I certainly was now. “Mrs Greening, please don’t tell my –” But I didn’t get any further. Mrs Greening had undone the tie at her waist and let her robe fall open.
The act revealed she was wearing a black bra and girdle complete with suspenders holding up her dark, almost black stockings. My jaw – for the second time that day – must have sagged open in disbelief as I saw her in her underwear. Underwear I had never seen on the clothes line. I remember hearing a strange gurgling noise coming from my throat, a mix of shock and delight I suppose.
“Do you like what you see?” Mrs Greening was almost purring, eyes on me. She put her hands on her hips, inside the robe, so it was held open even more, one nylon-adorned knee forward as a model might display what she was wearing. “Wouldn’t you say my underwear is better on me than on the clothes line?”
Somehow, I nodded. I hardly dared blink in case this apparition disappeared. Then something happened that I would curse silently for another three years. There was a knock at the front door, my mother calling out: “Mrs Greening, are you in?” She sounded urgent.
Mrs Greening half shrugged, and drew her robe round her, fastening it again and hiding the vision of her in her black underwear. “I think you’d better go out of the back door, don’t you? Before your mum sees you in here and starts to think strange thoughts.”
I fled as suggested, and never did find out what those strange thoughts might be, but I soon found out why my mother’s intervention was so urgent. There’d been a big accident at the factory where Mr Greening worked, with three people badly hurt – including Mr Greening. He wasn’t expected to survive and didn’t.
The funeral of Mr Greening ten days later was a sombre affair. I felt I should go, but there were so many going to the service, so many of the Greening family and friends were there, the chapel would be full to bursting. As a good friend my mother went, but no one else from our family did. I peeked out from behind the curtain as I saw the woman next door, dressed all in black, being helped into the lead car behind the hearse. Although it was a sad occasion I felt slightly guilty thinking about what the widow might be wearing under her black outfit.
I felt incredibly bad about such a thought at a time like this, but then I had come so close to something quite wonderful. I fantasized about fucking the woman (in her underwear, of course) but the opportunity had disappeared almost at once. I might have hoped that in time she would call me into her house again but within a week of the funeral Mrs Greening had moved to her sister’s place, somewhere near Skegness.
Three years later it all seemed so far away. I had a girlfriend, had got engaged and was thinking about settling down when one day, out of the blue, a parcel arrived at the small flat where I was living. I didn’t recognize the handwriting on it but it was clearly from a female. Not my mother’s handwriting, or my fiancee’s Denise or even my aunt Doreen who was convinced I couldn’t possibly survive living on my own and usually sent some tins of ham over via my mother. But never a parcel.
I tore it open and was astonished to find a set of women’s black underwear. As the items tumbled out I realized that they were one and the same that Mrs Greening had been wearing that afternoon when I had come so close to sex. At least, what I imagined was close to sex with the woman.
There was a bra – a heavy, long-line bra with wide shoulder straps and sort of pointed cups – and a black girdle with a satin front panel and metal suspenders. Plus there was a pair of stockings in black. There was also a note in with them.
“Dearest Tony,” it began. “Please do not be alarmed at this: I obtained your address from your mother when I called her the other day and as I haven’t forgotten our little time together in my kitchen, I thought you might like a little reminder of that day. Sorry to say that circumstances prevented what might have been a very special moment for you, but please accept these as a token. I hope you are well and can make good use of them. I believe you have a girlfriend now and are planning to marry: I am sure Denise (that is her name, I understand) will make you very happy. I am also quite sure this underwear will not fit her. But perhaps you can make use of it somehow. Every best wish for your future, Liz Greening.”
I was shaking when I finished reading the note. Then I held the underwear up and examined it, knowing that it wouldn’t fit Denise at all but understanding just what I was going to do with it.
I married Denise a year later and we moved into our first house together, but she never did discover where I’d hidden Mrs Greening’s black bra and girdle, and for many years whenever my wife was away on business I got a chance to wear them. But then, I’d hardly been out of them when I was alone at my flat, remembering Mrs Greening and masturbating over what I planned to do to her when she’d worn
them just for me that day in the summer of ’69.
I CAN HAVE ANY WOMAN I WANT
Bob, Llandudno
Maybe this is more of a boast than a confession, but it’s not quite as much of a boast as the title suggests. I can’t have any woman I want, that would be impossible, but there was a time when it seemed as if I could come close.
I spent so many years married to a woman who, to use that ubiquitous cliche, simply didn’t understand me. She was very strait-laced and anything sexual was confined to her beliefs that the word “sex” had to have the word “normal” appended to it. And she didn’t think my desires were normal. That injured me at first, but I gradually realized that “normal” equates to “boring” or “dull” and became quite happy to be considered anything but normal.
So what were these tastes that were too outlandish for Anita? They fell into a few categories and her response was varied. My liking for sexy lingerie, black stockings (preferably with seams) and suspenders was tolerated rather than enjoyed. She’d wear such things and, aside from annoying comments like “bloody suspenders” and complaints about draughts, she’d indulge me on special occasions. High heels are an obvious accessory to the above, but were far too uncomfortable for her bunioned feet. Oral sex – well, I guess all men like that, or probably all men like receiving it, though not all that many seem to want to reciprocate, and those who do don’t do it well. More of that later. Anita would do that for me, but I always got the impression that was the only reason she did it, there was no enjoyment whatsoever on her side. That takes the edge off, in some ways. More of that later, too.
And then there’s bondage. I like it. No, I love it. I can’t really explain why or where my liking originated, but it’s been there ever since I was a small child. It has so many facets that explaining them to someone who can’t, or won’t, understand can be difficult. There’s the visual appeal of a woman in ropes. There’s the fact she cannot move, that she’s put in positions not of her choice. That leads on to the whole power exchange thing, her helplessness increases along with my power over her. But she has to be willing, she has to submit. I’m no rapist, not without prior consent anyway. There are issues of trust – if she is helpless she has to be able to trust you not to go beyond agreed limits. Anita couldn’t understand it. So she wasn’t willing, she was scared. It just didn’t work. We did try a few times and I got something out of it, but nothing to satisfy the craving.
As for pain and punishment, don’t even go there. She didn’t want to know and wouldn’t even talk about it.
We were both members of an amateur theatre group. A few years ago we staged a play where a woman was kidnapped and held hostage in an old barn. I knew the woman – Jayne – well but had never fancied her, and – as far as I am aware – she’d never fancied me. But I was cast as the kidnapper and she was cast as the victim, with Anita cast as the female villain. The stage was a split set – by that I mean that half of it was an apartment and the other half was the barn. We had to bluff our way into the apartment, chloroform the wife that Jayne was playing, then, when she’d collapsed in my arms, carry her out and take her to the barn. Once there I had to dump her unconscious body on a straw bale, straddle her and tie her hands behind her back. During rehearsals we didn’t actually tie her, of course, but as time went on she wanted to practise as she would be in the play, so I used my tie to tie her wrists. I can still remember having to bluff my way out of the fact I’d got quickly and powerfully erect while I was doing it, and Jayne magically appeared in my masturbation fantasies from then on.
It was only when we were doing the final rehearsals that I realized she actually liked it, and for sure it was the best performance she had ever given. We never took it any further, since we were both in committed marriages, but we would share glances now and again that betrayed we’d actually shared something neither of us fully understood.
That was what started me writing about it. I’ve written books before, under my own name, but now I started turning my attentions to erotic books, chiefly about bondage, punishments and so on. The very first was based on the play and Jayne, but beyond those first ideas was a work of pure fiction. I sent it to a niche publisher and they accepted it, which did my ego no harm at all.
Anita read the book and it did nothing to alleviate her reservations about my preferences. But by that time, for totally unrelated reasons, our marriage was starting to disintegrate anyway, and I found more pleasure with my own right hand and a fertile imagination than she’d provided for many years. Flushed with the success of my first BDSM book, I went on to write another, then another and so on, each triggered by something I’d witnessed in real life, rather than some ridiculous fantasy world of cruel prison guards mistreating gorgeous simpering women. My stance was that, in the reader’s mind, all this could be happening just down the street, and that those taking part were just ordinary everyday people.
I never made any secret of the fact I’d written these books, and anyone who asked me was welcome to read them, be they man or woman. By the time I’d got to double figures I was being looked at by friends and acquaintances with varying views. Some were shocked; some found it distasteful. Others’ reactions varied from interested to fascinated and, without doing anything to foster the view, some saw me as a kind of expert on the topic. My stories were all based on my opinion that if I could make them as realistic and everyday as possible, people would be able to identify with them and wonder if, just maybe, their neighbours could be getting up to all kinds of things belied by their outwardly respectable personae.
As people viewed me as a guru, my confidence and ego grew, so I unconsciously developed a kind of swagger that appeared to send messages to any woman who was tuned in. Sadly, that isn’t all women, but it is a surprising number and quite enough to keep this pervert busy. Also sad is the fact I can’t turn it on and off. It just happens, so maybe there’s some sort of subliminal communication between people of complementary types that we don’t understand and can’t control.
But I do know when it happens because I feel different. The first time I noticed it was at a party given by a friend of mine who is obscenely wealthy. He is boss of a cosmetic surgery company and as such is always surrounded by lots of very good-looking women. Most of these women danced to the music as if they were one with it. I, meanwhile, was watching on the sidelines of the dance floor, since I am not good at dancing and prefer to watch. This time I was being watched back. A rather attractive thirty-something, whose name turned out to be Elaine, kept looking my way as she danced sinuously with a girlfriend. If I looked at her she’d lower her eyes and carry on dancing. Her movements were ever more sinuous and provocative from knowing I was watching. The guy next to me, Chris, was watching the dancers too, but that didn’t matter -there was some communication going on between this girl and me without any need for anyone else.
Before many minutes had passed she danced her way over to me, took my hand and suggested I join her on the dance floor. I declined, but smiled as I did. She pouted, an image of a spoiled child. As she held my hand I twisted it from her grasp, round so I was holding hers, and when she moved her other hand in to play fight, I grasped that as well, holding both her wrists in front of her using my much larger hand. She could probably have twisted out of my grip if she had tried hard enough, but she didn’t, accepting her position as submissive to my dominance. The feeling of power was very strong as I held her there, right in front of Chris who was all too happy to have this girl in our tiny gathering. She, meanwhile, just remained where she was, held fast as Chris and I continued to talk. It was as if she didn’t really matter and remained there purely because I was keeping her there. We watched the dancers as the volume of music increased, and she backed into me, her body sliding seductively inside her silky dress, until I could growl into her ear, “I’m going to have you.”
The words seemed to melt her. It was a farcical situation. She was several years younger than I, thousands of times more attractive, almost cer
tainly wealthier and could probably have had any man in the room that she wanted. But she stayed with me and breathed hard as my words hit home.
“Where?” was her only response.
“Outside,” I told her. “Be at the back of the pool in five minutes.”
Maybe it was foolish to let her go, and maybe it was foolish to risk everything in such a public situation, but if her excitement at being told what to do was anywhere close to my own excitement for telling her, she’d be there. Chris had overheard and didn’t quite believe it all, thinking this was some kind of set-up to wind him up. But I excused myself and left the room. I walked towards the toilets in case anyone was overly curious, but stepped out the back and made my way to the building that housed the swimming pool. Elaine was moments behind me, sliding her arms round my neck to be kissed. She smelled of the best perfume, yet fresh and perfect. With some women you want to breathe in the scent of them and never exhale, and Elaine was just such a woman.
“Tell me what to do,” she asked.
“Take off your clothes,” I responded, curious to know how daring she could be.
Answer: totally. She unzipped the dress and dropped it, showing all she had on beneath was a white thing, which soon followed her dress to the ground. I pushed her to a wooden bench and prised her legs apart, kissing up the insides of her thighs as she whimpered and moaned and she didn’t know whether to pull my head in or push me away. She told me afterwards that I was very good at giving oral sex, which may have been flattery, but I enjoy it and do it when I can, and I’ve never had any complaints, so I guess I’m quite proficient. She tasted briefly sour, then sweet and liquid. And she didn’t take very long, moaning out sufficiently loud that I had to put my hand across her mouth to quieten her. I unzipped and pushed inside her, meeting wet warmth and greedy suction. She was nearly there again before, at a whim, I pulled out and stood, holding her head while I erupted over her face.
The Mammoth Book of Erotic Confessions Page 51