Alice Takes a Cruise Ch. 01

‘You have beautiful hair,’ she said. ‘So dark and shiny. Is that red colour natural?’

I laughed at her frankness. ‘No. I put henna on it. It’s a nightmare.’

‘It’s very...’ She searched for the right word. ‘...dramatic.’

‘The only dramatic thing about me. It must be a compensation for my shy and retiring personality.’

Even though it was true, I’d meant it as a joke. But Billie took it at face value. ‘Oh, you’re not shy.’ She switched off the dryer.

I looked at her in the mirror and nodded meaningfully at her naked top. ‘Well, you certainly aren’t.’

‘This?’ She gestured dismissively. ‘Being naked is no big deal.’ She propped herself on her elbows. ‘Don’t you ever want to just throw off all your clothes?’

‘Maybe, but in company I usually resist. There’s a time and a place.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a prude. What do you think I’m going to do, rape you?’

‘Of course not. But...’ Well, what did I think she was going to do? ‘You’re not a little girl any more, Billie, you’re a young woman. An attractive young woman. You can’t just walk round naked in front of people.’

‘You’re not people. You’re a friend.’

‘Well, thank you. But that doesn’t make any difference.’

She smirked at me. ‘And you’ve seen me do it. I’d have thought that made a difference. I don’t do that in front of just anybody, you know.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ I suddenly realised the implication. ‘You mean you’ve done it in front of other people? Billie!’

‘Oh, don’t get on your high horse. Only once with a guy in the back of his car and once with a couple of girlfriends from school.’ She put on her pout. ‘I’m not a slut, you know.’

‘I didn’t say you were. And did you and the boy, I mean, the guy...?’ Why was I curious? Her sex life was no concern of mine.

‘Oh, he wanted to all right.’ She grinned at the recollection. ‘But I didn’t like him enough for him to be the first. So I said I’d do it to myself and he could watch.’ She laughed out loud. ‘It drove him wild. Then I watched him do it. Funny, he didn’t seem so hot after that. Acted like he was ashamed or something.’

‘Masturbation guilt,’ I explained knowledgeably. ‘It explains a lot about the way men behave. That’s another thing you’ll discover as you get older.’

‘Yeah?’ She seemed barely interested. ‘Anyway, it was a lot better with the girls.’ She lay back and stared at the ceiling, lost in the memory. A hand drifted onto her belly.

‘Well.’ I tried to sound decisive. ‘Now I have to get dressed.’

She made no move.

‘Billie.’

She glanced over. ‘Sure. Go ahead. Don’t mind me.’ She raised her eyebrows, daring me to object.

For a moment I considered pushing her out, but then decided to hell with her. I’d had enough of being made to feel like some maiden aunt. I was on holiday. I was supposed to be freeing myself, wasn’t I? I could be as carefree and uninhibited as any nineteen year old. I sat down in front of the mirror, making sure the towel was still wrapped securely round me, and started to do my face.

‘So,’ said Billie. I could see her in the mirror, leaning on an elbow, her head on one side. ‘Do you want to hear about it?’

‘Do I want to hear about what?’

‘The time with me and the girls.’

‘If you’ve nothing better to do.’ Where was my foundation?

‘Jeez, Alice,’ she scoffed. ‘You’re such a fraud. Of course you want to hear about it.’

‘If you say so.’

In the mirror I saw her lie back on the bed again, absentmindedly examining a nipple as if looking for blemishes. ‘Yeah, well, I’m going to tell you anyway. It was a sleepover, five weeks ago, beginning of the summer. We were all going away to different places, Sandie up north, Liz to the coast and me down here, so it was the last time we’d see each other til September, so we thought we’d make one last night of it. Sandie’s mom and dad gave us the room over their garage because they knew we’d be up talking half the night and they didn’t want us disturbing the rest of the house. Which was fine by us.’

I wondered if I was expected to prompt. ‘So what did you do?’

‘We went to a pizza place in town and acted all grown up and Sandie put the bill on her dad’s account and all the waiters called us Miss Sandie and Miss Billie and Miss Liz as if we were someone special and that was cool. I didn’t much like the anchovies though.’

‘I know just what you mean,’ I said.

‘Yeah, yuk city. Then we went to a movie, some romantic garbage we giggled most of the way through, mainly because Sandie was sitting between me and Liz and we kept tickling her til some people in front told us to stop. Then Sandie’s dad picked us up and took us back to the room over the garage.’

There was a pause. Which became a silence.

‘Then what?’ I asked.

‘See?’ Billie was triumphant. ‘I knew it. You’re just dying to hear about it.’

‘Nonsense.’ I concentrated on my eyelashes.

She turned to face me and rolled on her front, propping her chin in her hands. ‘Anyway, Sandie’s mom had put doughnuts up there for us, so we sat and ate those.’

‘It can’t have been very comfortable, a room over a garage.’ I thought of the bare roof space over the lean-to up against the side of my mother’s - no, now my - semi-detached house in Ruislip.

‘Oh, it was a regular bedroom, carpets, TV, big enough for two beds, a kingsize double and a single.’ She grinned mischievously. ‘We drew lots for who’d get the single, but in the end we all shared the kingsize. Still, that was much later. After we’d lit candles and sat and talked for about ten hours.’

‘Ten hours?’

‘Well, one or two. It was still early, not much after eleven. We’d planned to stay up all night. We had an idea we were going to watch the sun come up, pretend we’d been to some all-night party, stupid stuff like that. We changed into our t-shirts. Mine had a picture of a sleeping cat on it and came down practically to my knees; Sandie’s was even longer, it was a football shirt she’d got off her brother when he went to Cornell. Liz wore some weird stripey shirt thing with buttons that looked like it belonged to her grandpa. We teased her about that for a while, til she told us to leave her alone. Then we just sat cross-legged on the kingsize and talked.’

‘What about?’

‘Stuff. School. Classmates. Teachers. People we hated. Then Liz said, why don’t we tell ghost stories? It must have been way past midnight then and really quiet. Actually it was a bit creepy, what with the candles and all the shadows flickering up in the roof and you couldn’t really see into the corners of the room and Sandie said, what if some murdering maniac has crept into the garage downstairs? Yeah, I said, or crawling over the roof or climbing up the tree outside? And Liz screamed and said, no, I mean real ghost stories, the ones like with ghosts and everyone dressed up like people out of Dickens. And me and Sandie had to laugh at that, because when it comes to videos, Liz is always the one who wants to try and get Scream II or the slasher movies her brother is always telling her about. Then like when we do get to watch one, she always acts like they don’t frighten her and pretends she’s perfectly fine. That is, until we get to the end of her driveway and she always says, stay here and watch me until I go indoors, like she was about eight years old still.

‘So anyway, we tried to take turns telling some ghost story, but it all fell apart, because as soon as we got to a scary bit I would run my fingers up Liz’s back like a spider and make her jump a mile. And in the end she went all grumpy and said she was going to bed. So she got into the single bed and me and Sandie shared the kingsize. We blew all the candles out except one, but it was too much for Liz. About every five seconds she went, what was that? what was that noise? who’s there? And Sandie didn’t help, because half the time she was leaning out of bed and making scratching noises with her fingernails on the floorboards. In the dark it sounded just like someone dragging their feet along. And then she’d make a sort of low moaning noise, like someone rising from the dead. That was enough for Liz. She was out of her bed and into ours like she’d been stung.’

I decided to experiment with some new mascara.

‘For a long time we just lay there, but you could tell none of us were sleepy. We’d probably frightened ourselves too much. Then Sandie said, so, have either of you two done it yet?

‘It’s funny, but I think we were all thinking about the same thing. After we’d scared ourselves so much, I just wanted to cuddle someone, you know, sort of feel safe, but I didn’t like to, because I thought it might make me look like a kid. But when Sandie said that, it was like a way out for us, like a good way for us to feel better again, warmer, safer.’ She looked at me in the mirror. ‘You know what I mean?’

‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

‘Because that’s what it was like, really. It wasn’t sex - well, not to begin with - it was just wanting to cuddle, to be together.’

‘I know.’ I remembered Jenny, the drunken evening, that first embrace.

‘Anyway, none of us had done it, of course, not with a boy. Though we took a long time admitting it. So that was a bit of a dead end. We all wanted to know what it was like, but no one knew. Liz had once caught her brother doing something to himself in bed and we all had a pretty good idea what that was, but since it had been under the covers and she’d only seen it for a second or two, she wasn’t much help with the finer details. Sandie had seen her dad peeing once and we’d all seen pictures of men’s cocks, of course. Frankly they all looked a bit weird. We couldn’t quite see what it was about them that was supposed to turn us on.’

Concentrating on my left eyelid I couldn’t help smiling.

‘What we needed were details, you know, first-hand experience.’

‘So this was before you and that boy...’ I put in.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said, dismissing him instantly. ‘That was only a couple of weeks ago. And that didn’t teach me much, either.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Except how rough they are with themselves. I guess now I know why they call it ‘beating the meat’.’

‘Yes,’ I laughed. ‘They take a while to learn to do things slowly too.’

‘OK, OK,’ said Billie. ‘Enough with the lessons.’

I held up my hands in surrender. ‘I shan’t say another word.’

Billie rolled over on her back again and stuck her legs straight in the air, pointing her toes like a ballerina, then folded them neatly. ‘So we got off boys pretty quick and started talking about doing it ourselves. It was kind of awkward at first, you know, lying in bed together, even though the bed was so big none of us were actually touching. But when Sandie admitted she liked doing it lying on her front with a pillow between her legs, it sort of opened the floodgates.’

‘That’s one I used to like,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

‘Yeah?’ said Billie absentmindedly. ‘Maybe I should try it some time. So then we started comparing. Liz said she used a sort of shower attachment to the faucet in her tub, which sounded pretty wild until she admitted she had to practically bend over backwards to get the angle right and the last time her foot had slipped and she’d banged her head on the side. I said that I liked looking at my dad’s girlie mags first, which the others pretended to be shocked at til I got them to admit they liked looking at pictures of sexy naked women too. And we all agreed we liked rubbing our breasts, which I was a bit embarrassed about because mine were so small compared with Liz and Sandie’s.

‘Then we just lay there for a bit. And I realised I was getting that itchy feeling between my legs, when I always knew that’s what I wanted to do. My hands were just up around my waist and I really wanted to move one down to between my legs, just to stop the itching. But I couldn’t. Not with Liz one side and Sandie the other. There wasn’t a sound. It was so still, I could hear the candle guttering. So I just lay there, in a kind of torture.

‘Then out of the corner of my eye I caught a faint movement. At first I thought it was just another shadow thrown by the candle. But then I heard a little rustle at the same time. It was coming from Sandie’s side, I was sure of it. I kind of pretended to start and snort, you know, like you do when you’re just falling asleep, and turn my head a little towards her, just so’s I could get a better view. But of course she just stopped. At least for a bit. Then whatever she was feeling must have got the better of her, because I caught it again. And this time I saw it, a faint rising and falling of the bed sheet over her middle and the tiniest sound of cotton rustling. I watched it fascinated for a minute or two, the way her hand slid down for a moment and rested - or maybe her fingers were busy below - then rose up again before quickly going back down again. I squinted up at her face. She looked, well, what’s the word, lost. Her eyes were tight shut and her lips were just a little bit open, like she was short of air.

‘I didn’t know what to do. The itching between my own legs had gotten much worse now and I was dying to touch myself, but equally I didn’t want to miss what Sandie was doing. I looked at her and at her hand going up and down. She seemed to have forgotten where she was. Ever so slowly I moved my own hand under the sheet until it touched her thigh. And the moment it did, she opened her eyes and looked at me, almost in panic. I didn’t know quite what look to give her back. I could hardly tell her anything out loud, not with Liz the other side. So I tried smiling. But it may not have come out right, because she just stared back at me, like a rabbit caught in car headlights.’

I had done my eyelid at least three times now. ‘So what did you do?’

‘I just carried on smiling. And carried on moving my hand until it had reached hers. I didn’t really know what I intended to do, just put mine over it, I guess, feel it moving. But as soon as she felt it she slid hers away, so that instead of feeling her fingers what I could feel was soft hair, sort of like mine but thicker, nicer. She was still looking at me, still frozen, but now expectant, like she was waiting to see what I would do. And her eyes had a sort of hooded look. So I slowly moved my hand down, almost experimentally, as if I wasn’t sure that she’d feel pretty much the same as me. As if to make it easier for me, she moved her legs apart. Then I felt all that lovely warm wetness, all smooth and soft and clinging, and it was so nice, I could feel her kind of relax with the way I touched her, and her face lost that scared rabbit look a bit.’

I tried to start on the other eye, but my hand was shaking too much. In the corner of the mirror I could see Billie lying on her back, one knee bent, a hand idly stroking the blonde triangle between her legs. ‘Didn’t Liz notice?’ I asked, trying to keep the catch out of my voice.

‘Not straight away. Or maybe she did,’ she conceded, ‘but she didn’t want to say. Anyway I just carried on moving my fingers, just a little, because I guess we were both a little scared. But apart from moving her leg, Sandie stayed as still as a rock, like she’d been struck dead or something, just stared at me with her mouth open. But I could tell it was doing something to her because her breath was coming in little spurts, especially when I touched a sensitive spot. You know the place.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’ Billie’s fingers had now disappeared beneath the blonde triangle. I got up from in front of the mirror and stood by the bed.

She opened her eyes. ‘You look funny.’

‘Do I?’

‘You look like you’ve got a black eye.’

‘I’ve given up for the time being. I can’t concentrate.’

She looked at me for a moment, an expression of great seriousness which almost made me laugh out loud it looked so incongruous on her innocent features, then nodded decisively at the towel wrapped round me. ‘Take that off, then,’ she commanded.

I stood rooted to the spot. I wanted to be naked too, to display the uninhibitedness she so carelessly flaunted, but too much of me was still stuck in that semi-detached house in Ruislip. ‘I can’t.’

She got on her knees on the bed in front of me. ‘I’ll have to do it for you, then.’ And she put her hands on the knot of towel.

‘No, don’t,’ I said, but I didn’t step back.

‘Yes,’ she insisted and tugged at the edges of the towel.

I pressed my arms to my side to prevent it falling.

Billie pulled gently. ‘What are you afraid of?’

‘I don’t know.’

Gradually I let my arms relax. The towel fell to the floor. Instantly I could feel her eyes exploring every part of me. But surprisingly, now I was actually naked in front of her I felt no embarrassment, rather an unaccustomed freedom, a thrill of nervous anticipation.

‘See,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

‘No.’

She continued to study me. ‘You’re very beautiful, aren’t you?’

‘I’m not, but thank you for saying so.’

She looked down. ‘Your hair is different there.’

‘Well, I don’t bother to henna it there.’

‘It’s still nice.’

‘I’m glad you like it. Yours is nice too.’

She regarded herself critically. ‘I don’t know. Blonde hair looks kind of funny against skin. Especially when it isn’t tanned.’

‘Use fake tan, then,’ I suggested.

She looked dubious. ‘I guess I could. That all seems like too much effort. Especially when hardly anyone sees it.’

‘I know what you mean. That’s why I don’t henna mine.’

She fixed her eyes on my belly. ‘It still looks better than mine.’ She looked up. ‘Can I touch it?’

‘No, you can’t.’ I laughed - a feeble, nervous laugh. ‘I want to hear the rest of your story.’

‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Lie down then.’ And she patted the bed beside her.

‘All right.’ I sat on the bed with my head propped up against the pillows, my arms crossed.

It didn’t satisfy her. ‘No, like this,’ she said and crawled up alongside me, put my arm round her and rested her head on my shoulder. ‘OK?’

I could smell the faint tang of seasalt in her hair; it felt a little heady. ‘OK.’

She suddenly kissed my nipple. ‘Where was I?’

I suppressed a tremor. ‘Giving Sandie a good time?’

‘Oh, yes. So anyway, there I was with my hand between Sandie’s legs and she was breathing like she was about to die, but neither of us moving a muscle in case Liz got wind of what we were doing.’

‘And what did it feel like?’ I asked.

‘What? Oh, great. No question. All soft and wet, just like when I do it to myself, only different. I mean, she felt different but a lot the same, like I knew where to put my fingers, what would make her feel good, even though I couldn’t feel it. Because although I’d never felt another girl’s, it was more or less the same as mine, everything was a bit bigger in Sandie’s case but it was all there and I knew just which bits to touch to make her feel what I felt.’

‘She must have appreciated that.’

‘I reckon she did. Because then she started moaning, and I thought, oh, right, here’s where Liz wakes up and wants to know what’s going on. So I whisper to Sandie, shush, do you want me to stop? But she just carried on moaning and said, no, no, please, just keep going.’

I realised that I was stroking Billie’s hair in rhythm too and that her hand was stroking my nipple in a gentle circular motion. I had the urge to press my legs together. ‘And did you keep going?’ I prompted.

‘Of course. What do you think I am, some kind of sadist?’

‘But what about Liz?’

‘Well, she woke up. Sandie and me were so engrossed we hardly noticed. But then there she was, kneeling over me and saying like some teacher who’s just found someone smoking, what’s going on? what are you two doing? Huh. Like she didn’t know.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Carried on. What else? Sandie was too far gone. There was no way she was going to stop. And by this time I had my other hand between my own legs, I had such an itch. So Liz just pulls the bedsheet right off and stares. Sandie and me were lying there, me with one hand between her legs and the other between my own, and Sandie just gone completely. She was moaning and crying out, please, don’t stop, don’t stop, and Liz just stared with her mouth open. Then Sandie said, oh God, and went all rigid and squeezed her legs together so hard she almost crushed my hand. And that was it.’