Elizabeth 08: Generations

"Yes, well," Elizabeth said, "Remember you might well have never met us had that happened."

"What a ghastly thought," I said.

"No use in dwelling on all that now, though, is there?" Jonathan asked. "It has been a great pleasure having you back among us, you know. Delightful to have even part of the gang together again."

"Isn't it, though!" Elizabeth hooked an arm through mine and kissed my cheek. "You're welcome to join us next summer, you know, wherever you decide to settle down."

That was my last, best chance to confess. Once again I chose not to take it.

Back in Westfordshire City, there had been countless evenings on the town that found Elizabeth, Irene and myself primping endlessly in Elizabeth's room at the mansion. A golden memory if ever there were one, that! That evening, we both got to relive it in the most wonderful way as Teddy and the girls banged about upstairs. Jonathan lay in wait with the camera at the bottom of the stairs while Elizabeth and I remained out of the way on the couch by the front door. "You do know all three of them are going to be utterly annoyed at the mere sight of that, darling," Elizabeth advised.

"Why, that's the fun part, isn't it?" Jonathan quipped.

"How many photographs do we have of our nights out?" I wondered out loud.

"That, Agnes, is exactly why I shan't take no for an answer," Jonathan said. "They might hate me now for insisting on a picture or two, but they'll hate themselves far more years from now if there isn't one."

I was just about to suggest he have Teddy or Margaret take a photo of the three of us when a minor argument about hair clips wafted downstairs at that point. "Girls!" Elizabeth called out. "Enough of that!"

"But Margaret doesn't need them all, does she?" Lillian snapped.

"It doesn't matter if I need them or not, they're mine!" came Margaret's voice in retaliation.

"Margaret, do you need them all?" Elizabeth asked.

"Don't know, but until I'm done..."

"Lillian, let her finish. Margaret, let your sister use the ones you don't need. And don't think I won't know if you just stuck them where they're not needed to spite her!" Silence from upstairs, and Elizabeth turned to me with an exasperated sigh. "You see what you missed out on, then, Agnes, never having a family?"

"Oh, Elizabeth, I do feel I missed out in a way," I said. "Nothing comes without a price. Especially not being as rootless as I was all those years."

"Is that why you've come home, then?" Jonathan asked.

"Well, it is a bit late for me to start a family," I admitted, shooting squarely at the elephant in the room. "But it just seemed time to at least try to settle down. I just felt a sense of unfinished business back home."

"Have you given any more thought to where you intend to live?" Elizabeth asked. "I do hope it shan't be too far from us."

"I have..." I began. This was not the time I'd have chosen, but my dearest old friend deserved an honest answer.

A knock at the door saved me from having to give that answer just yet. Elizabeth got up and opened the door to a young man, Teddy's age or thereabouts. "Hello," she said. "Ronald?"

"At your service, ma'am," he said, extending his hand for her to shake. "Mrs. Wright?"

"Yes. Welcome." She shook his hand and ushered him in, where I was introduced as 'Auntie Agnes'. "And I believe you've talked to my husband on the phone?" she asked.

"Good evening, sir," Ronald said, sounding suitably nervous. "I...I don't know how...thank you for letting me take Lillian to the dance. I hope..."

Jonathan set the camera down on the edge of the stairwell and smiled. "I don't bite, Ronald," he said. "All I ask is that you have her back here by eleven, do you understand?"

"Of course, sir. Thank you sir." Ronald did not sound the least bit relieved, the poor dear.

"Dad, just how are you torturing him?!" demanded Lillian, who at that moment blossomed forth on the landing in a pale green dress and a hairdo that revealed she hadn't needed many of Margaret's clips after all.

"Oh, he isn't!" Ronald reassured her, looking up in awe at the sight. "My, you're beautiful, Lillian!"

"Thank you, she said," kissing his cheek when she arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Turning to Jonathan, she said, "I told you he was a gentleman, didn't I?"

"And I never doubted it, my sweet one," Jonathan said.

It did not look to me like either Ronald or Lillian believed him. But then Jonathan picked up the camera, bringing forth the wave of resistance we had all anticipated. In the end, of course, they indulged Jonathan and he got a few lovely shots of them standing before the picture window with the view of the beach and the sea beyond in the evening light. In the interim, Teddy arrived downstairs and was off next door to collect Katie, with a stern warning that they were expected back for photos before leaving for the dance. He did not close the door as he left, for at that moment another young man arrived. "Danny?" he asked.

"Yes," came a voice out on the steps, a moment before Elizabeth and I were treated to our first sight of Danny in clothes and vice versa. He looked at us both as he was shaking hands with Teddy, and the three of us exchanged knowing grins over the secret we shared.

"Be warned, they want pictures of us all!" Teddy told him. "I've just got to go collect my date next door, no escape for me either. But I guess Margaret's already got a couple photos of you, doesn't she?"

"What?" Danny looked a bit panicked, and I couldn't say I blamed him.

"The photography lesson in town, isn't that where you and Margaret met? She told me all about it."

"Oh, right, that," Danny said. "Yeah, the pictures aren't developed yet."

"Right, then, see you in a bit," and Teddy was off.

Margaret followed her sister's entrance just in time to greet her date, looking as confident as her mother in her own prime and basking in the glow of Danny's adoring gaze. "Hello," she cooed at him.

"Oh, my..." Danny said dreamily, just as awestruck with her as Jonathan always had been with her mother. My own heart was melting for her, too, recalling the dramatic change that had come.

"Your turn for the pictures!" Jonathan announced, beckoning them to the window. When Teddy and Katie still hadn't arrived after he was done with them, there were pictures of Elizabeth and myself and of the girls and their parents and a failed attempt at talking Catherine downstairs to join in. I think even Elizabeth was relieved when Teddy returned with Katie in tow, looking just as beautiful as the others.

"Photography lessons?" I asked Margaret with a grin while she stood on and watched the photos of Teddy and Katie being taken.

"I had to tell the others something, didn't I?" she whispered back. "We all know what Mother is like, but she is still our mother, after all!"

I could not very well deny that.

When at last they were off to the dance, Jonathan made drinks for us all and we retired to the veranda to watch the sunset. "I see your experiment with Margaret went well!" Jonathan confessed.

"Better than I dared imagine," Elizabeth said. "I hope it didn't work too well."

"They know better than that, don't they?" Jonathan said.

"Did we, back in our wild days?"

"We were all rather older than they are now," Jonathan reminded her.

"So I keep reminding myself," Elizabeth said. "When I think of some of the things we did, well, as a mother, it's so embarrassing!"

"Why should it be, though?" Jonathan asked. "We were adults, and we handled it all quite well, I think."

"I guess our children are going to make their own way as adults as well," Elizabeth admitted. "I do wonder sometimes, just what would my parents have thought of our escapades?"

"Let's not worry about that tonight," Jonathan said. "It's only a dance, and they won't be seeing each other again for at least a year."

"A year," Elizabeth echoed with a chuckle. "I do remember when that seemed a lifetime." Then she turned to me. "Agnes? You're awfully quiet. Not lost in more wishful thinking on your past, I hope!"

It was time. I took a long sip of my drink and resolved to get it over with.

"It's perfectly normal to make second guesses about our lives, you know," she coaxed. "Especially when you've just made a big change like you have."

"It's not that!" I said, turning to her and giving her hand an affectionate touch. "I mean, it's not only that. It's more that I think I now know that I was right the first time."

"What do you mean?" Jonathan asked.

"I mean, I've been offered another overseas job, and I've accepted it."

"Oh, Agnes!" I was certain I detected regret in Elizabeth's eyes.

"It isn't only because Teddy was so delightful the other night!" I reassured them, realizing a second too late that only now did they have any reason to believe that had anything to do with it.

"Agnes -"

"I admit that is a part of it, and I'm sure you understand - you don't want either of us to fall in love with the other, after all - but it is also simply that my home is out there in the wide world. And that night with Teddy was a sort of reminder that trying to cling to your past is a terrible idea."

"Agnes -"

"I hope you understand, Elizabeth. And you as well, Jonathan."

"Agnes, that is what I've been trying to tell you!" Elizabeth threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek. "Of course I understand! And I'm very proud of you, following your true calling like this. I remember all too well the scared young lady I met that day in the water closet, and I look at how far you've come since then, and I'm perfectly delighted. A bit jealous, perhaps, but delighted."

"Jealous?" I looked from her to Jonathan, and he only nodded in agreement with his wife. "The two of you? With your four wonderful children?"

"Nothing comes without a price, Agnes. All those places you've lived and worked - to us, they're just spots on a map, after all."

"Wow." I had never thought of it all in such terms.

"It is not that we regret anything," Jonathan added. "But what was right for us wasn't right for you."

"And there are days I'd have loved to switch places just as much as you would have," Elizabeth said. "And Irene with both of us, undoubtedly."

"Poor Irene," I reflected. "Still stuck in Westfordshire City after all these years..."

"She loves it," Elizabeth corrected me. "That school is her life, and she's done a wonderful job of improving it in so many ways. And I'll tell you, sometimes I do wish I could have stayed up there as well. If we all could have gotten together and lived at your uncle's mansion forever - well, I know it could never be, but how I used to long for that!"

"And I as well," I agreed, reflecting that Elizabeth's taking leave of the mansion when she got married played a part in my decision to go out into the wide world in the first place. I tried to recall if I had ever told her that; I could not recall for certain.

"Heavens, Agnes, don't get lost in memories of those days," Elizabeth said in response to my searching of my memory. "You are only remembering our finest hours, not the way life really was."

"Yes, well, when I came to join you here, that was all but a guarantee that I would recall those times, wasn't it?" I asked. "And that was before the encounter with Teddy!"

"Oh, Agnes, I know," Elizabeth admitted.

"As do I," Jonathan said. "I have to confess, Agnes, I've been recalling it as well."

"Make it unanimous," Elizabeth confessed. On sensing my tacit reminder of her gentle reproof to me at Porter's Cove, she went on, "I simply did not feel it right to do anything with you without asking Jonathan first, my dear."

"Thank you, darling," Jonathan said. "But if the two of you do want to have a bit of fun..."

The three of us looked at one another, and I took a look out at the serenity of the empty beach.

"It is perfect weather for a swim," Elizabeth said in that teasing tone of hers that I remembered ever so well, and without another word she arose and pulled her dress off. I followed suit, feeling utterly exhilarated and turning to see Jonathan eyeing us both hungrily as he unbuttoned his pants. Elizabeth presented her back to him, and wordlessly he unhooked her brassiere. "You do grow accustomed to having this done for you, you know," she said.

"I remember," I said, the only reference to my failed marriage that I needed to make; she had learned enough from my letters over the years. Now was no time to dwell on that! For good measure, I also turned and flashed Jonathan a grin to invite him to liberate me of my brassiere as well. He did so most willingly.

"Care to return the favour?" Jonathan asked me as I turned to provide his first view of my breasts in nearly two decades. He stood before me in his skintight underpants; the fabric was quite taut against his hard cock, which I had missed as well.

Responding only with a smile and a kiss on his hand, which I then placed on my breast, I reached down and slid my fingers inside his waistband. Slowly, gently, I rolled the fabric down out of the way to reveal the first penis I had ever enjoyed inside me all those years before. "How I've missed you!" I chirped, taking it in both my hands as I enjoyed his caresses.

"Shall I leave you two here?" Elizabeth teased. We turned to see her standing by the steps down to the beach, having also done away with her panties by then.

"Hardly!" I said. Jonathan helped me off with my panties, the last bit of clothing any of us was wearing, and then stood back and took himself in his hand as I opened my arms and Elizabeth floated into them. As I touched my long-ago mentor's lips with mine and our mouths opened, I was wonderfully aware of Jonathan sighing in appreciation of the sight as he stroked himself. Locked in one another's arms, breasts to breasts and bush to bush, we swayed together in a rhythm that would put the younger set at the dancehall to shame.

I do love cock, but one advantage of making love to another woman is that when I sense my own wetness, I've got a good idea that she is aroused as well. And so when I felt myself growing moist between my thighs, I had no reservations about sliding one hand down Elizabeth's side and into her lovely vast bush. Just as I had suspected, she was every bit as wet as I.

"Oh, Agnes!" she sighed. "Truly a magic touch! Always!"

"All I know I learned from you!" I whispered in her ear, to which I also gave a gentle nibble.

Hungrily I ran my fingers through her vast triangle and over and around her clitoris, rejoicing in the beautiful memories it evoked. Elizabeth tittered and gasped in turns at my intimate caresses, and I thought - but did not speak - of the joy Margaret would be in for now that she had put her own shame behind her. Perhaps her mother had the same thought, for she murmured, "Such a gift!" or something to that effect.

"You've both given me so much," I whispered, and gently I lay her back on the reclining beach chair by the steps, which I rather suspected she and Jonathan had used for the same purpose many a time throughout their summers here. With two of my fingers now clenched in her vagina, she wriggled about in joyful sensation and anticipation as I bowed my head down into her bush. Inhaling deeply of her scent, I was reminded once again of just how long it had been; my days of intimacy with other women had begun with Irene and Elizabeth and had more or less stopped there. If this was to be a last hurrah with my mentor and my dearest friend, I intended to make it a good one.

It would appear I succeeded, for my very first tease of her vulva with my tongue brought forth a delicious yelp of pleasure. From there, her responses only grew more intense, as did her rhythmic squeezing of my head between her thighs as I licked and sucked to my heart's content. Upon noticing that her screeches of pleasure were being muted now and again, I came up for air to find Jonathan, not to be left out of the fun, was kissing her and caressing her breasts. When he did break the kiss, her lusty cries were surely loud enough to be heard on the beach; I was unsure whether to fear or hope that anyone was there.

Evidently no one was, for we were not disturbed as I licked and tickled Elizabeth into an intense orgasm. "Thank you," she said in a husky whisper as I enjoyed one last caress in her beautiful overgrowth. She indulged my lingering touch with only a knowing smile down at my hand, which I finally withdrew and held awkwardly at my side, finding nothing on which to dry her lovely dampness.

"I know what you can do with that, Agnes," Jonathan said, and he stood up and presented me with his hard cock. Eagerly I wrapped it in my damp hand and gave him an affectionate squeeze up and down as I kissed his lips. He let out a moan of appreciation just as intense as his wife had done, and for good measure he teased my pussy lips with his fingers and then slipped two of them inside. Through my own intense pleasure, I managed to continue rubbing steadily and gently until Elizabeth's juices dried up.

He had me on the cusp of an orgasm when his lovely stroking slowed and then stopped, and he placed one hand over mine. "I think I've got to save that for her," he whispered. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry," I reassured him, for I looked down to see Elizabeth looking hungrily up at both of us. She scrambled to her feet and beckoned Jonathan to take her place on the chair. As soon as he was settled with his cock pointing skyward, she straddled him and drew him inside, eliciting a lusty roar from him.

"Gee, Agnes, I think we ought to make sure he doesn't make too much noise," Elizabeth teased. "Have you got something to cover his mouth?"

"Why, yes I do!" Without another word, I stepped over the chair and crouched just over Jonathan's face. Presently I had to grab onto the bannister post near the chair for balance, for he craned his neck and gave my pussy a lavish lick well before I had expected it. My own voice then joined in the ragged harmony of pleasure, and I thrust my hips back and forth against his face as he lapped hungrily at me.

As I lost myself in his heavenly kisses and licks, I gazed out at the dark sky. The music from the dancehall was only just audible and the roar of the waves was palpable just behind us, but I was lost in my own sensation and the delightful presence of Elizabeth and Jonathan's own pleasure. Presently Elizabeth and I both broke the near-silence with our climaxes in tandem, and our joyful shrieks brought Jonathan off too as he came with a jerk.

I stood up and turned to see Elizabeth catching her breath, still clutching Jonathan within her forest of curls. "We'll never be too old for this, Agnes, will we?"

"I should hope not!" I agreed, as Elizabeth finally climbed off her husband. We each gave him a hand and pulled him to his feet, and we all joined hands and frolicked off into the surf. Any lingering angst about our bygone youth was wonderfully absent as we splashed about and grabbed at and fondled one another in the salty water.

The holiday did not end there, of course. Nor did it end a couple of hours later when, dried and dressed, we welcomed the young ones home from the dance amidst a happy chorus of tales from the evening. But when I did set off not long afterward to return to my calling, that final encounter with Elizabeth and Jonathan was to be my final defining memory. Of them, of Westfordshire City, of my youth. Our long and extremely intimate friendship had begun in a rather awkward way, but it had reached its final consummation in the most pleasant circumstances I could have imagined. My love and friendship for Elizabeth and Jonathan had not ended simply because I had given in again to my yearning for adventure, but a long-unfinished chapter had at last reached its conclusion. As my boat pulled away from the dock some days later with Elizabeth and Jonathan's tearful farewells still ringing in my ears, I chose instead to see and hear their orgasmic joy reflected in the beautiful ocean that spread out before me on the cusp of a new page to be turned.