Mandy and Me Ch. 01

Thus, I sat there on the stool, while she sat across from me – smoking her cigarette and regarding me with a critical eye – trying to keep the fact that I was drinking in her sheer beauty from showing on my face as I looked at her. I could tell, from the look on her face, that she was thinking deeply on some subject or other, weighing alternatives and options before she made her choice.

"So, Baby," she sat up straight and said, finally, "would you like to try smoking?"

"I don't know, Mom," I answered honestly. "I know I used to pester the livin' daylights outta you, to let me have a taste from your cigarettes, and I've always been curious about that it'd feel like, to smoke. I think that, if you'd asked me about an hour or so, ago, I'd have probably said 'yes.' But, now – after that episode we had, earlier – I'm not quite so sure."

Mom leaned across the gap between us and planted a kiss that chanced to land half on my cheek, and half on the corner of my mouth.

"That's one of the things I truly love, about you, Baby," she told me. "You always give me an honest, straight answer, no matter what my question is."

"Thanks," I told her, blushing at the compliment – and at the nature of that little kiss.

"So you're just worried about having another one of those coughing fits, eh?" she asked me. "What if I told you that I could teach you how to smoke, and absolutely promise you that you wouldn't cough – not even a tiny bit? Would you wanna try it, then?"

"Sure, I guess," I nodded, smiling.

"All right, then," she said. "You know, your daddy was the one who taught me how to smoke, and he figured out this really sweet trick for helping me to get used to inhaling the smoke without coughing. I can remember it like it was yesterday, so that's how I'm gonna teach you."

She slipped off the stool and stood in front of me.

"Come closer," she beckoned, with a finger.

I moved in until I was almost pressed against her.

"I'm gonna take a drag, and inhale," she explained, "and, when I do, I want you to exhale and empty your lungs. When you've done that, I'm going to lean in and get my mouth real close to yours, and exhale into it. You inhale, slowly, when I do that. Got it?"

It seemed like a pretty straightforward procedure, and I nodded.

She glanced at her cigarette and saw that there was only one drag left on it, so she took that, stubbed out the butt, and pulled a fresh one from her pack.

"It's going to take several repetitions, to get you really used to inhaling the smoke, so it's better if we start with a fresh one," she explained as she lifted the new cigarette to her lips. I took the lighter from her other hand and held it, thumbing the wheel, to offer her a light.

"Handsome, skilled, industrious, and a gentleman, to boot," she grinned at me. "What more could a woman look for, in a man?"

"Don't ask me, Mom," I shook my head, laughing. "I don't look at men, that way!"

"I'm glad to hear that, Baby," she chuckled. "Now, are you ready to give this a try?"

I nodded my assent.

Mom took a drag from her smoke, inhaled, and leaned forward until her breasts brushed against my chest as she touched her lips to mine in an almost kiss. I inhaled as she exhaled. This time was so much better. The smoke didn't choke me and – on top of that – I'd felt the gentle brush of a woman's lips on mine. I'd been wondering what it would be like, to kiss a girl.

She pulled her face back from mine and watched – and it seemed as though she was holding her breath – as I exhaled a somewhat thin cone of smoke into the air to the left of her head.

"Well?" she asked me, smiling brightly.

"That was neat, Mom!" I exclaimed, thrilled by the whole experience. "Can we do that, again?" To be honest, I wouldn't have cared if the smoke tasted like cow manure and caught at my throat like a buzz saw; I'd have asked for another try just to feel the touch of her lips on mine!

"Sure, Baby," she chuckled. "I told you, it was gonna take doin' this a few times, to get you really used to inhalin' the smoke."

We continued to share the cigarette in that manner, and Mom kept watching me with a half smile on her face. Each time she fed her smoke to me, the almost-kiss was longer than the one before, and I think that was because she was taking larger and larger puffs from her cigarette, to pass to me. And, with each of those 'smoky kisses', her lips seemed to be closer to mine, until it reached the point – on the final two drags – where our lips were pressed tightly together. On the final pass of smoke, I could swear that I felt her tongue, tracing my lips with a feather-light pressure.

This was all a completely new experience, to me, and my body began to react in a predictable manner. If you need that translated, well, standing that close to the person who was my ideal of the sexiest, most beautiful woman in the world, and sharing those smoky kisses with her, caused me to get hard. I tried to back gently away, so that she wouldn't feel it, but her body seemed to press forward with each of my backward steps. Eventually, I took a final step back, in an effort to try and control myself, but I was too late to keep her from bumping up against me. She looked down, and saw the bulge in my jeans.

"I see you're havin' a problem, there," she giggled. "Don't worry about it; I know it can happen 'cause o' what we were doin' bein so much like a kiss. The same thing would happen to your dad, whenever we shared smoke that way. It's a perfectly normal reaction, Baby, and I'd be concerned if I didn't see it."

"But Mom, it's embarrassin'!" I protested. "What if this would happen when I was out with some other girl who wasn't you? It might give a girl the wrong idea, about me, and I have enough trouble as it is."

"Baby, we're home, in the evenin's, together, now that summer's here. Why don't we spend some time, together, workin' on this?" she suggested. "We can take some time, each day, to talk about why you get so all-fired nervous and shy and tongue-tied whenever you get within ten feet of a pretty girl. Maybe we can even do a little bit of role-playing."

"Role playing?" I asked her. "What's that?"

"We'll pretend, for a few minutes, that I'm a girl your age, and either we're out on a date, or you're wantin' to ask me out on one. I'll set the scene up, and you try to figure out words to say an' how to say 'em. We'll play out the scene for a few minutes, to let you get used to what's goin' on, and then we'll drop back and take a close look at what happened, what you said, and figure out what parts went okay, and what parts didn't.

"You need to learn how to talk to folks you don't know, especially girls. We can pretend to be strangers meetin' for the first time, and it'll help you get used to bein' close to a girl."

I loved her as my mother, and had very strong feelings for her as a woman. Since she was the woman I'd spent my entire life with, she set the standard for what I wanted. Over the last year, I'd developed feelings and desires for her that went far beyond just a simple mother-son relationship, but I didn't really know how to show or tell her without looking like either a total idiot or some sort of sick pervert. Maybe her idea would be worth exploring.

We headed back into the house, took turns showering to wash off the sweat and the sawdust, and then met back in the living room with a couple glasses of iced tea. Mom took a seat at one end of our couch, and patted the spot next to her.

"Do I need to sit that close, Mom?" I asked her.

"Well, I think we need to work through a couple more shared cigarettes, to get you to the point where I figure you won't have any more coughing spells if you try one on your own," she smiled, shrugging her shoulders, "and I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to reach you if you're not right next to me. We don't have to sit side-by-side; we can turn sideways and face each other."

Looking back, I'm not sure that she was being truthful with me. I think that she knew – deep down – what those brushes of her lips against mine did, to me, and used the ruse of sharing more cigarettes with me as a bribe to get me to be that close to her.

Still, she lit up a cigarette and began to share puffs with me, interspersing a few non-specific questions about my shyness between drags. It didn't take her too long to establish the fact that she, Grandma (Dad's mom) and Connie Kelly, our one neighbor, were the only females I was halfway comfortable talking with – and Connie was only on the list because her son was my best friend, and he'd helped me get to know her well enough to feel that way, around her. As our talks progressed Mom discovered just how introverted I was, as I gradually got to the point I finally admitted I was scared of girls and didn't know how to talk to them.

The question-and-answer session went on far longer than I realized, since I was at least partly mesmerized by looking into her emerald green eyes as I received those smoke-filled kisses from her. We'd started at around noon, taken a short break for lunch, and then picked up where we'd left off. Now it was late afternoon, and Mom was beginning to get a handle on the full extent of my problem. Armed with that knowledge, she took a couple days to do some thinking and planning, and then her efforts to help me overcome that shyness began in earnest.

5-10 June

One of her primary tools was the idea of role-playing. We would act out little scenes, with me playing the role of myself, while she pretended to be a girl of about my own age, but one whom I didn't know. The scenes varied, of course. In some of them, she approached me and I had to respond without acting shy. In others, I was supposed to approach her and figure out a way to get to know her name, and something about her before the scene ended.

When she laid the whole idea out, for me, the night before the actual games commenced, I thought it was fairly ridiculous. Of course, that was before that first night, when she showed up in costume for her role as the girl who started talking to me. She was dressed in clothes of the sort I'd seen on many of the other girls at school and, when she came out of the bedroom, I was startled to realize that she was a very attractive lady who already looked far younger than her 38 years, and who looked even younger, still, with a careful application of make-up and a change of hairstyle.

In addition to working with me on the notion of talking to a strange woman or girl, she also looked to help me overcome my reluctance about touching. As part of the role-playing, she had us holding hands and hugging, along with those almost-kisses we shared with cigarettes. Whenever I popped an erection – which happened more often than not, as I got caught up in these little romantic scenes with this ultimately beautiful and sexy woman, she always managed to come up with some light, joking comment that helped to defuse the tension of the moment without making me feel self-conscious.

By the time two weeks of this nightly role-playing had passed, I found myself finally loosening up and getting to the point where I could make some joking retort to her joking comment. That was the first night that she ever touched her lips to mine without a mouthful of inhaled cigarette smoke to pass to me.

"What was that all about?" I managed to ask, breathlessly, when she finally pulled her lips from mine after that first true kiss.

"That was a reward, Baby," she informed me. "You've worked really hard, at this, and you've come a long way in a very short time, and so I figured that you deserved something special, as a reward for your progress."

"Can I ask you a question?" I asked her.

"I think you just did," she giggled, "but I'll allow you another one."

"The first time you shared your smoke with me – an' I got hard – you said somethin' about Dad getting' that same way, whenever you two shared smoke like that. Were you meanin' that you didn't stop that sharin', once you could smoke on your own?"

"Oh, mercy, no, Baby!" Mom laughed delightedly. "After your daddy used that trick to teach me, I tried it once on him, just for grins an' giggles, and he got all hard. He made the mistake, then, of tellin' me that it got him all hot an' bothered, to have me doin' that to him. From then, on, I did it as often as I could manage gettin' away with it, just to get him in the mood to make love to me!"

"Oh." Now, that had me wondering what was going on!

11 June

During one of these sessions the subject of sex came up. It was a very embarrassing discussion for me, at first, but it enabled Mom to uncover the last bastion of my insecurity around women: sex, and sexuality. Part of the roots of the problem lay in the very meager amount of sex education taught in Texas schools, in those days. Another part of the problem was the sheer wealth of misinformation being bandied about in the form of 'locker room talk' by some of the males in my class. And part of it, if I was being fully honest, was Sean Connery's fault.

"You understand that sex is a normal part of life, don't you?" she asked.

"Yeah, I know that," I replied, blushing heavily.

Gradually, then, and not without the aid of several of those smoky almost-kisses, she wormed the truth of it out of me.

Our health class, back in 7^th grade, was segregated by sexes, since sex differences were one of the areas supposedly taught. Our instructor, Mr. Spier, was one of the science teachers, and so he often strayed into areas that were more properly discussed in a lecture on genetics or some such thing. Also, as a practicing Catholic – and in direct defiance of the 1962 Supreme Court's O'Hare decision, which effectively ended religious discussion in the public school system, used the class as a 'bully pulpit' to rail against the 'evils' of unmarried sex and of sex for any purpose other than reproduction, and the effects, primarily venereal diseases. The material he presented was judgmental and highly colored by his prejudices.

As far as the material in our textbooks, it was mostly dry and clinical, and ran along the lines of 'Fit Tab, A, into Slot, B,' without a whole lot of other detail.

Finally – and this is where Sean Connery comes into the picture – I'd become an avid fan of James Bond when Mom took me to the drive-in movies, over in Longview, a few summers back, to see a film called 'Doctor No'. We'd been to all the rest of the Bond movies – 'From Russia, With Love', 'Goldfinger', and 'Thunderball', in the years since then. Connery, as Bond, was so smooth, suave, and sophisticated, romancing the women in those movies, and I knew that was anything but me. I truly understood, though, why a magazine article I read about the movies referred to Bond as 'the man that all men want to be, and all women want to be with...'

"Why haven't you said anything, before now?" she asked me.

"Well, it's not something I really feel comfortable talking about, even to you, Mom."

"Haven't I always told you that you can talk to me about anything?"

"Yeah... but it's so embarrassing. You know how I am. I have a hard time talkin' to girls and don't know what to say," I told her. "Up until you started those role-playing scenes, I was barely able to talk to you, Grandma, or Mrs. Kelly."

"You have to remember that sex is how you got here," she commented. "Your daddy and I both enjoyed sex a lot. I'm not sayin' you should go out and do it now, but you need to know how it works. When the time comes, you need to be able to have a good relationship with a girl that you both can enjoy."

"That's another one of those points from Mr. Spier's lectures," I reminded her. According to him, it ain't supposed to be done just 'cause it feels good."

"Baby, I'm not one to say that there's a God, out there, and I'm not one to say that there ain't. But, if there ain't any God, out there, then you've got nothin' to fear, about any sort of eternal punishment because you and some girl made love just for the sake of makin' each other feel good."

"Well, what if there is a God," I asked her.

"If there is, well, I'll tell you somethin' I learned, in my nursin' school classes. There are about a thousand times more pain-pleasure nerve endings in a man's penis or a woman's vagina, than there are in any other part of the human body. You think about that, for just a second. If there is a God, and He designed everything in the universe, do you think He'd put that many pleasure nerves down there, if sex wasn't meant to feel really, really good? Or punish you and your lady because you did it as a way of makin' each other feel really good, and sayin' 'I love you'?"

"It don't sound rightly logical, Mom," I shook my head. "Not when you put it that way!"

"Alright, then. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. You're at the age, now, when your sex drive should be very high. You're masturbatin', now, aren't you? You know, playin' with yourself?"

"Mooommm!" You're really embarrassing me!"

"Well, aren't you?" she asked. "Answer me."

"Yeah," I answered, sheepishly, hanging my head. "I am."

"I know you are," she said, with a sly grin. "I also know right about when you started, and that you're doin' it most every night."

"Mooommm!" I said. Then I thought for a minute. "Yeah, I guess you do. You said, the other day, that just about anything I could do you'd already done and knew about, didn't you? You play with yourself, too, don't you?"

"I knew I didn't raise a dummy," she chuckled. "And, before you go sayin' anythin' else, I know you've heard the stories about how it'll make you go blind or go crazy. Don't believe it. Masturbation is a normal part of a person's sexuality. There is nothing wrong with doin' it, since it helps keep a person's sexual urges under control. Now, I need to show you something and we need to talk some more. There's a lot of things I can show you that'll help you in the future with girls, and I can help you learn how to make a girl happy, 'cause you're well on the way already."

I had just long enough to wonder what she'd meant, by that last phrase – 'you're well on your way, already' – before she continued.

"Let me get one of my books, and we'll use the desk in your bedroom," she said, going to the bookcase in her bedroom, where she pulled out a large volume.

I got one of the chairs from the dining table and carried it to my desk. Mom was already seated at the desk with the book.

"This is Gray's Anatomy," she told me, showing me the book. "It's a very thorough, detailed book on human anatomy, used in medical and nursing schools. Almost everything you'd ever need to know about the human body is in here. About the only thing missin' is the slang names for certain body parts."

She chuckled, a bit, over that last comment, as she opened the book to the section covering the male genital anatomy. Going through the pages, we read parts of the text, as she showed me the illustrations, and explained how arousal in a male caused blood to be trapped in the penis, causing an erection. She also explained about the function of the prostate, testes, and other glands, explaining the erection and ejaculation process to me, in both scientific and slang terms.

As part of her explanation, she referred to the diagrams and pointed out the more sensitive areas, in particular the coronal ridge, frenulum, and perineal area.

"You were circumcised, when a baby, which allows the crown, or head, of the penis to be fully exposed when erect. A non-circumcised man has to manually pull the foreskin back to fully expose the crown. The primary reason for circumcision, other than religious reasons, is to make it easier to clean the penis.

"Now, this is what you'll be more interested in," she said, turning to the section covering female genitalia.