Wonderland: Evening, Night, Morning

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Last year when I told Andrea that I would be passing through London after attending a conference in Paris, it had not even crossed my mind that we would have an opportunity to meet. But we did meet, and this is the story of how the meeting happened and what we did together.

I hope you like it. It's long, and the sexy parts, if they're what you're looking for, don't really start until about half-way through the second page. There are plenty of them after that, though.

If you do like it, it would be lovely if you gave it a star rating at the end, or left a comment. I think most of us who write these stories like to know what readers think of them. I certainly do.

I have tried to set down what happened as accurately as I can. Obviously I wasn't taking notes at the time, but I think that I've remembered what happened reasonably well. Some particular moments I can remember as clearly as if I were still there, but at some points I have only been able to remember bits and pieces and I've had to use my imagination to try and recreate the complete picture. I'm sure that in places I've mixed up the order in which things were said and done, and I've probably completely forgotten some things as well. One thing I have done deliberately, in order to protect our anonymity, is alter or simply omit some of the facts about our personal lives. My real name is not Wanda and Andrea Peterson's real name is not Andrea Peterson.

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Prologue

Memories of that day return to me often. Sometimes, when I lift my eyes from my work and look through the window at the hard blue Queensland sky and the sun beating down on the tired street below, I remember suddenly the freshness of that morning in London. I remember the golden sunlight streaming through the window on Andrea and me and warming us as we sat and ate and talked, the morning after we had met and made love, knowing that we would very soon part forever.

And sometimes I lie awake in the night and think of that moment when Andrea's hand first touched my naked body between my legs and a sharp shock of desire took my breath from me.

But most of all I return to the image in my mind's eye of Andrea naked in the shower standing cradled in the crook of my left arm, with the water streaming down on her and her head thrown back, her back arched and small cries escaping from her open mouth, at the moment when I brought her to orgasm with my right hand between her open legs, my fingers loving the soft, silky, slippery wet smoothness inside her cunt.

BEGINNING

I'm an ordinary woman. My life has been more or less entirely normal and middle-class, and I have to say that mostly it has been a very good life. I have been happily married for twenty-five years to the father of my two children, both now grown up and no longer living with us. For the last twenty years we have lived on the Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane in the state of Queensland in Australia, where my story Peregian Beach is set. You will have worked out that I am middle-aged. I work part time as a Certified Practising Accountant and my husband is a senior partner in a law firm. He and I live in a large house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. No doubt it sounds idyllic. It really is rather idyllic, actually.

In my everyday normal life I am just like any other professional, middle class woman. I shop in the supermarket and my husband and I have dinner parties and barbecues with friends and I swim in the sea and I watch TV. Most people think that I'm very conservative and rather prim and proper, probably because I don't swear and I don't flirt and I don't talk constantly about sex. I suppose it's got something to do with being a boring old accountant as well. But I can't quite understand why people look at the fact that I don't behave like a tart and then leap to the conclusion that I'm a puritan and I rather wish they didn't, to tell the truth. I don't really think that I'm a puritan and I wish I didn't give that impression.

There's definitely one way in which I don't quite fit the mould. So far as I know, most women in my situation don't secretly write erotic stories. I do. I write them and I publish them on the internet under the name of Wanda. If my friends and neighbours knew about that they certainly wouldn't think I'm a puritan, but I'm not planning to tell them any time soon. Or at all. When I am writing those stories I think of myself as being a different, secret world. It's a world I love. Sometimes I think of it as Wanda world. Nobody in my every-day life knows anything about Wanda world and that's one of the things I love about it.

That part of my life has grown to include much more than simply writing my own stories. I read other people's stories. I meet other people. I meet them on line, I mean: Wanda world exists entirely in cyberspace.

That's how I met Andrea Peterson. Andrea's also a writer, a much more prolific one than me as a matter of fact, and more popular too. She's published nearly 100 stories. A couple of years ago, just after I'd published my first story, I came across one of hers that I read and liked. I sent her a feedback message telling her that I liked it because I love getting feedback myself. (Even the negative stuff I don't mind. It's better than nothing.) I always include my Wanda email address when I send feedback, and she replied overnight.

Andrea lives on the other side of the world in London. I'm rather orderly in my habits (not much of a surprise, I suppose, coming from an accountant) and I still have all of our emails, sent and received, in my "Andrea" folder on Yahoo. Looking back through them I can see that we seemed hit it off from the very beginning. We were soon writing more or less every day and quickly came to trust each other. I learned that she had been married for fifteen years but had divorced some years before. She had a daughter in her late teens who lived with her.

When I say we trusted each other, I don't mean that she told me absolutely everything about her life, and I certainly did not tell her everything about mine. What I mean is that when she spoke of her feelings and her reactions and her opinions she told the absolute truth. I was equally frank with her. There was no reason for either of us to be anything else. We didn't know each other's real identities at first or for a long time, so neither of us had anything to lose by saying exactly what we felt. The anonymity of the internet gives the ability to lie without fear of any consequences, but it also gives the liberty to tell the truth without fear of any consequences.

We talked about anything and everything. But the fact is that both of us were writers of sexually explicit -- to be honest, pornographic -- stories, and we had met because of that fact, so most of all we talked about sex. You have to admit it's a fairly interesting topic.

One form of sex that both of us had written about was sex between women. I have written two stories about women making love, one before and one after I met Andrea in London. I've had several comments about how realistic they are. The truth is that when I wrote the first of them, which is called Jan's Story, I had never myself made love to a woman. Throughout my youth and young womanhood I was very much a heterosexual. I recognized female beauty when I saw it, but it never crossed my mind to think of another woman in a sexual way.

That all began to change when I was about 35 and I can remember very clearly exactly when it began. I was at the hairdresser. My hair was usually done back then by a girl called Maria who was very nice and all that but nearly drove me insane every time I went there. She talked constantly about a whole lot of things in which I had zero interest, and I would try to smile and join in with her when all I really wanted was for her to be quiet for a while and get on with doing what she had to do and let me have a bit of peace.

Thankfully, on this particular day, Maria was away and the replacement girl was different. She greeted me when I arrived and asked me what I wanted done, but from then on she worked in silence. It took me a little while to realise that I wasn't going to have the usual discussion of Brad Pitt's love life or whatever it was back then, and when I did I said a silent thank you and settled down to relax completely.

What happened, though, was that I found myself after a few minutes studying this girl in the mirror. There was an air of something sad, even tragic, about her, something in her manner and her eyes. I guessed she was about 24 or 25, although that melancholy air made her seem at first somewhat older. Her body was thin and her breasts, like mine, were small, and she was dressed in a sexually provocative manner, verging on the tarty, in a very short skirt, black hose and high heels. Her skin was pale and her features were flat and her eyes were almond in shape. I guessed that she was of eastern European background. She was not beautiful; she was not really even very pretty. She was striking, though, with her face heavily made up and very pale, almost vampire-like, and her wide mouth and her full lips were coated with thick, glossy, scarlet lipstick. Her hair was bleached almost white.

Suddenly, completely unexpectedly, I found I was thinking about what those lips would feel like to kiss, about what that dry, bleached hair would feel like under my hand. I seemed to feel my hand move to her chest and stroke her small, soft breast. I had to catch my breath.

Her name was Wanda, and those images of her would not leave my mind. I would close my eyes and it would be as if she were really there; I could see the texture of her skin and the makeup coating it. Those black-clad legs under that tiny skirt.

From that time on I became more and more fascinated by the thought of sex with a woman. I thought about what sex with a woman would physically involve, what I would actually do to her and what she would do to me. I was aroused by the thought of the softness and I wanted to experience it. Touching another woman's breast. Touching her cunt. Kissing her cunt. I began to write about those things. I masturbated to those thoughts. When I needed an identity under which to publish my first story, Wanda was the only name I thought of.

I used the word cunt a moment ago. That word is another thing that changed for me at about that time. For over half my life the word had made me almost physically sick. It seemed so filthy, so degrading, that I could not bear to hear it. I never, ever said it. I don't really know why or what provoked the change, but now I respect the word; I admire it. It is the plain name for one of the things that makes me a woman. I am proud to have a cunt.

I should also admit that the word arouses me. When I write "my cunt" there is a stirring down there. My cunt begins to moisten. One of the things that Andrea and I admitted to each other was that writing our stories was sexually arousing. Andrea also loved using the word cunt. I had used it in my stories and she used it in hers; it was one of the things that helped to establish the intimacy between us.

Unlike me, Andrea actually had sex with a woman, with more than one woman in fact. I asked her about it and she answered my questions. We began to use our emails not just to converse, but as a form of erotic chat, stimulants to masturbation. We would write about making love to each other. I still get a sexual jolt at the memory of receiving from her an email which she ended, "From Andrea, your moist cunt in London."

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Meeting in London.

Andrea was the one who raised the possibility. At first I could not bring myself even to contemplate it: every part of me shrieked that it was a bad idea. I liked and had become very fond of the Andrea that I had come to know, and I believed that she had become truly fond of me. She certainly said she had. But that was in Wanda world, not real life. I still didn't even know her real name.

I was also nervous about what she might think of me. I am not pretty, not at all, and I had told her that, but that didn't really mean anything at all. I also knew that what I had told her about myself had been presented to her in the most favourable way, not really for the purpose of misleading her, but knowing that it would probably lead her to form a more favourable impression of me than I really deserved. I feared that she would be very disappointed when she saw me.

I guessed that to some extent Andrea had done the same thing. I didn't really think I'd be disappointed in her, but I kept telling myself that I might be. I also knew that regardless of what we had said to each other, a relationship formed over the internet was not like one formed face to face, and that when we met we might simply not like each other at all.

Those things were important, but the main thing was the sex. We had written to each other explicitly about kissing each other, touching each other, fucking each other. I had described to Andie how much I would love to feast on her cunt and she had written to me about flicking my clitoris with her tongue. But writing about something is very different from doing it. I was a person who went to my office every day and did reasonably sophisticated and responsible work. I swam in the Pacific Ocean and ran on the beach four or five times a week. I loved my husband. I was not a person who had lesbian sex with a woman she had never previously met. In fact I was not a person who had lesbian sex at all. I was scared of it. This woman, Andrea, had said she wanted to put her hand between my legs and her fingers inside my cunt. I did not know whether I could cope with meeting her in real life.

One aspect of it all that did not trouble me was what it would mean for my marriage. No doubt some readers will think that what I did was immoral. I know that because of the reaction to Peregian Beach. That's a story in which two married women made love and if readers look at the comments on it they will see that it outraged some people. The women in that story were fictional characters and I am a real person. But I hadn't written that story back then and all I can say is that it didn't occur to me at all that if I met Andrea I would be doing anything wrong. I wasn't going to leave my husband to live with Andrea and even if I did spend the night with her I wouldn't be having sex with another man -- that's something I've never done and never will. Rightly or wrongly, I never thought that making love with Andrea, or with any woman for that matter, would be the same thing. I loved my husband then and I love him now. I still don't feel that I have done anything wrong. I ask readers not to judge me harshly.

One thing I can say quite definitely is that my meeting with Andrea and what we did that night have had no implications at all for my marriage. My husband knows nothing about our meeting and I have no intention of telling him.

I said that I just didn't think about those things at all. Perhaps if I had thought about them I would have remembered that my husband had been unfaithful to me at least a couple of times. I also said that my life was almost idyllic. I did not say it was totally idyllic. Nobody's life is perfect. My husband travels quite a lot and we have spent many nights apart over the years. He is sexually attractive and sexually active. Twice, when he's come back after a night or two away, I have noticed little things that told me quite clearly that he had been with a woman during his absence. I admit that both times I was shocked and hurt and had a little weep to myself, but I didn't say anything about it. I knew both times that it was an isolated incident. I know that he loves me, and I couldn't see any purpose in making an issue of it on either occasion. Other women might have done that, but I didn't. They were things that happened and I accepted them. But if I'd been thinking about implications for my marriage when I was thinking about perhaps meeting Andrea, I might have thought that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.

What I did do was write Andrea a very long email. I started with the easy part first and explained that I thought that a meeting in real life might end with disappointment for both of us. I was honest, though, and said that if that was all there was to it, then I would be willing to run the risk if she was.

Then I moved to the hard part, the sex. I told Andrea that if we did decide to meet, it would have to be on the basis that we had not agreed to have sex with each other. I reminded her that my life had been totally heterosexual, not that she needed any reminding. I said that although there were things that aroused and stimulated me about the thought of sex with a woman, I was far from sure that I would ever actually want to do it. So I said that our meeting would have to be as friends, not lovers.

I asked her to be completely honest with me about what her own thoughts were, and she was. It turned out that they were virtually identical to mine. She said that she too had been thinking about the sex question ever since the possibility of meeting was first raised, and that it was her wish as well as mine that our meeting should take place with us having both accepted that we were agreeing to do no more than meet; that we were not agreeing to have sex.

So we fixed the date. It was easy enough to "steal" a day. My conference was due to finish on a Wednesday evening in June with a big formal dinner, and my flight from London didn't leave until the Friday, so I was free to do what I liked in the meantime. I booked myself on the Eurostar the next day, Thursday. We agreed to meet outside the champagne bar at St Pancras International Station at 4 pm. We would have a drink there and then she would drive me to my hotel, and when I had checked in we would go out for dinner. I had to be at Heathrow by 11 am on the Friday and Andrea said she would drive me there. It was all fixed.

Smart readers, and maybe some not so smart ones as well, will have noticed one other thing about this arrangement. Both of us were very well aware of it too, though neither of us had mentioned it; it was the elephant in the room, as they say. Andrea and I had acknowledged explicitly that there was no agreement between us to have sex. What we had not mentioned was that there was also no agreement that we would not have sex. I had deliberately avoided ruling out sex entirely and I was absolutely certain that Andie had done the same. When we met we would know that making love was a possibility.

The possibility of making love with Andrea came to dominate my thoughts about the meeting completely. The truth is that I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it more than anything in the world. I dreamed that it would be a moment outside my ordinary life. A moment in the world where I was Wanda. A moment in wonderland.

MEETING

I went to Hermès on my last morning in Paris and bought a silk scarf as a present for Andie, guessing about the colours from her photograph and what she had told me. I wasn't even sure that I would give it to her; it would depend on how things went, but I wanted to be prepared if things went well.

I prepared myself in another way as well. Underwear is not something I usually bother much about: except on special occasions, I wear what is clean and comfortable and fits. For my meeting with Andrea, though, I had bought specially a matching black silk bra and panty set, so light and fine and sheer that my nipples and pubic hair were clearly visible through them. My breasts are small, so I can wear bras that are next to nothing. As I put the diaphanous things on that morning I wondered whether Andie would ever see them, whether she would remove them from my body and make me naked.