Nude and Erect

Other girls issued invitations to boys to be here back at the pool for private training sessions. Boys stripped to the buff, with their little fan clubs of half a dozen females. And Clara pinned down frightened Carl while he stood blushing with his small limp sliver on display, to attend her pyjama party- he'd be the only boy- with a group of her girlfriends. Does he have shortie pyjamas? Could he bring his jockstrap? Shyly he consented...but could he keep them on, both pyjamas and jock strap, the whole night, he asked in a quailing voice. Clara and Gloria Smedley looked at one another and laughed. Carl slumped. And Laura was positioning herself to become his girlfriend, the keeper of his secret, the girl who would assure him she had never wanted a big one.

Samson was popular, and standing with a now-downward jutting broomstick, its head still sticking out of its cloak, faced Laura Greensleeves, Millicent Moore and several other panting girls. They couldn't keep eyes off that red-brown head, as they told him that they (his fan club) would see him at the Young Women's Christian Association baths on Saturday afternoon where he could practice for them "unencumbered by swimsuit." How they loved saying that! Nobody else would be there, they said, only a few old dears, grandmothers really, who would have no objection to sharing the pool with him. He staggered at the prospect, begged to be spared, almost went down on hands and knees. But, they told him, the fan clubs were in place and backed by the coach and that rule about no swimsuits was absolute.

Point is, we girls have seen everything now, you will come when we call: this was the bold spirit. That goes for you Danny, said Lucy Childe, who committed him to calling at her home after school when her mother would still be at work and when she and Karen Strawbridge and Beatrice Weatherall would make him strip entirely for them to show his style and take a few fan pics- and examine that bent-over penis as if they were medical researchers.

Stevie accepted his fate for Saturday- empty house, Sally Wainwright, two sisters, maybe Magda- and trailing to the showers, his small stick was rigid again.

All the boys, for the most part crestfallen, retreated to their changeroom. A few went slower than the others, Kerry for one, wanting to have female eyes on their skin for as long as possible. And the towering pole-thin basketball champ with the tree inch erection, well, he stretched out the time talking to Holly, Nan and Cathy about when they might watch him train, perhaps in Cathy's family's pool when the rest of the family were out of town? Or at a secluded spot by the lake, just the three of them and him, he offered. Naked? Of course, he said, he liked it without clothes. Even with girls there, he added unnecessarily, smiling like MGM's Carleton Carpenter.

The girls left, suffused with special feelings and thoughts, many it must be confessed to the privacy of cubicles in their restrooms to absorb what they had seen. The coach steered Charlie, his bottom still raw and pink, to his distant office, murmuring about the need for a good massage with cold cream. He threw his arm over the boy's shoulder.

Ada lingered, after a long exchange of looks with the chocolate eyes of Tom Wilson whose penis now hung heavy and whose testicles relaxed into a capacious shopping bag. His eyes recognised something very familiar in Ada's: pure female ruttishness. I know what you want, he thought, looking back. And, yes, she thought, I have a spare room that needs painting and you look like you could cope with a weekend job in a lady's apartment. She lingered on the view of his bell-bottom buttocks as he walked, the last of them, into the changeroom.

She looked at Charlie's sticky sperm on her shoe leather, at the patches on the tiles. She tried to recall Shakespeare's sonnet about lust. Sonnet 129, yes, it came to her. She had winkled it out of books at college, too gamey to be on any official reading list, but unequivocally about hot-blooded lust that makes humans do things that are "savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust," the things she had just witnessed. The things the boys had done, and their coach, but even more the whole adventure she and the girls had devised and executed. All out of lust.

What had the Bard said? "An expense of spirit..." Well, "spirit" had certainly been expended here. She even imagined the smell of all these emissions now competing with that of the chlorine. Some shone right before her, glistening under the strip lighting. That was Tom's proud deposit, expelled from that shimmering black pole. And there was more of Charlie's, there Rodney's, there Carl's. Way over there was Samson's. Out of their ball sacks, shot from their wonderful pricks.

She remembered. Shakespeare had opened his sonnet with the words:

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ is lust in action

Well, "spirit"- the word Shakespeare used for cum or emissions or sperm- lay all around her. Ravenous girls had goaded them, and naked young males, seeking relief from the shame of their nudity, had spilt their fluid, sent it flying with wild stroking as if they had been possessed- it was the very essence of Shakespeare's vision of wild sex.

An "expense of spirit" indeed.

And "a waste."

Today a waste.

But not to be wasted like this in future. Her vow, on behalf of her girls.