Tending Lady Lovecome's Garden

Lady Bathsheba Ottoline Lovecome insisted I (and only I) call her Bash. As if that closed the social gap between us. As if a girl called Bash was a salt-of-the-earth type, the type who could happily hang out with someone like me, her gardener.

I was just twenty when I became the gardener for Lovecome manor. The widower Lord Lovecome was disinterested in gardens and rarely at the big house so for a year at least I had the best job in the world. I even had free accommodation in the groundskeeper's cottage attached to their gothic pile. Then his daughter, Bathsheba, moved back home.

Bathsheba returned from her Swiss finishing school a lady. A hungry lady. I don't mean hungry in a lascivious way, well I do, but mostly she came back hungry for life. She wanted to go to university. Her dad said it wouldn't help her "marry well" so he wouldn't fund it, but she was free to live in the manor house until she found a husband. Instead, she did her best to piss him off. She raided the antique erotica he kept on the top shelf of his library, and insisted on re-enacting it. With me. Then she exaggerated it in her diary, which she left lying about on coffee tables and window seats. Her dad threatened to sack me. Lady Lovecome said she'd leave with me and tell the press about it too. Happy families.

Bash was small and round, where I was tall and wiry. She had jet black hair where I was blonde. She had wicked, deep, brown eyes, where mine are pale blue. I smile all the time, but Bash's pillowy lips were stuck in a pout. She even pouted when she laughed, swallowing it and shuddering as if to quash an underground explosion. The only time she smiled was when she came. Or when I came. Something she tried to contrive as often as possible because, as busy as I was, Bash was always bored.

While all her friends went to university she spent three years at home, alone. Years spent not reading law or history or economics but antique porn. Years spent minxing around barefoot, no knickers, teasing me while I tried to work. Years recorded in her diary-- her dirty-minded days so predictable she'd write it in the morning and then we'd catch up in the evenings. Like generations of her family, Bash was a woman imprisoned in girlish immaturity, wrapped in puppy fat, waiting to be married to replace father with husband. I could relate in some ways. As soon as I could heft an axe, like generations of my family, I was imprisoned by work. We were each other's only escape.

Still, we were on different tracks. On her 21st birthday she left home. I moved in with Jane, a woman who looked a lot like Bash, and set up my own, failing, landscaping business. Bash married a duke. I only saw her on the covers of celebrity magazines, and in the papers when her dad died.

Then one morning I got a postcard from their residence in Sicily:

"Thinking of you, Sweet William. My garden needs attention."

My name is Bill. Sweet William is what she calls my penis. Her garden is her name for her vagina. And I hadn't heard from her in ten years.

It's cruel of me, but I told Jane that Lady Lovecome had offered me work and that I wanted to do it. Sex was pretty bad between me and Jane, and I think I wanted to make her jealous. I wasn't really going to take the job. We were naked in bed when I told her and I hoped she'd get competitive and dirty. She got angry.

"You want to work for Lady cum slut?" She rubbed in hand cream with quick, stiff movements.

"She's not a slut."

"She used to practice blow jobs on you."

"Doesn't make her a slut."

"Why not?"

"I practiced on her too."

Jane folded her arms, wedging the duvet tight under them. "You never practice on me anymore."

"You don't like it."

"Still. A girl likes to be desired."

I smirked, lifted the duvet and hummed at her lovely chestnut bush. She crossed her legs tight.

I sighed, or growled, or both. "She's married to a duke. And I'm living with you. It'd just be for the money. And what's it you say? Sex is so immature?"

She harumphed and twisted away to lie with her back to me. "Whatever."

Whatever is the worst. Whatever is like, "This is what you've got, deal with it."

Bash was the first person to say this to me. I was ordered to chop down a cherry tree I'd tried to grow for years because Lord Lovecome thought it looked weedy. It did look weedy, not like the bushy cherry trees in Lovecome's neighbour's garden. But it was still alive. I refused to kill it. Bash got sick of me moaning about the tree and told me it didn't matter what I wanted. "This is what you've got. Deal with it." It took me two whole days to carefully dig out its roots and transplant it somewhere private.

Where it died.

So I find myself in Sicily. Or near it. The volcanic island of Stromboli where the Lovecomes have summered since they bought the villa from Queen Victoria.

The smoking peak of the volcano towers over the stucco and clay-tile villa, bubbling unnervingly. I crunch across gravel under an army of cypress trees to doors fit for a church. I'm not surprised when they swing open before I even get to them.

There she is.

Her left cheek dimples as she tries to hide her grin behind her pout. She's lost her puppy fat but is still curvy. Fit looking. I can tell because she's wearing a bikini under a gauzy kind of beach dress that reveals rather than conceals. She's still got her shaggy, bellish bob. I recall us playing shadow puppets with spotlights, positioning ourselves so that her full-body profile matched the shadow cast by my erection.

"At last. Sweet William," she says.

I'd forgotten how deep her voice is. One rainy Sunday, she made me come just by humming Land of Hope and Glory on "Sweet William".

"Lady Bathsheba," I say.

She presses her cheek to both my cheeks. "Come. I simply must show you my garden. It's in such a state." Her eyes shine.

I laugh too loud.

She shows me into the national museum she calls a summer home. Her feet slap-slap-slap on marble and she swings her hips, leading me through the grand hall and out a glass wall to the back terrace. She has a tight waist and wide hips now. Her bottom is round as ever. She used to complain that it wasn't elegant. She called it her "sit-up-and-beg bum." I told her men adore it. She said, "But I'm not a man."

The villa's built on a volcanic beach. A swathe of black sand leads out to frothing breakers. In the middle of the beach a crimson Turkish rug holds two enormous teak loungers, set like thrones with a sweating silver champagne bucket between.

The sea breeze cools my face. It brings me Bash's powdery lemon sent. I sigh.

Bash stands on tip-toe, leans into my neck and takes a deep breath. "You smell delicious." I'd forgotten how it felt to sometimes share a thought. It's like holding hands inside our heads.

"Let's swim." She takes my bag off me and immediately drops it. "I've given all the servants the day off." She sashays toward the sea, pulling her beach dress off over her head and dropping that too. "So It's just us I'm afraid." She kicks a wave. "For miles!"

I strip to my boxers while she kneels in the surf, knees apart, peering at me. We're in Lovecome Manor again and she's watching me shovel, her hands up her skirt.

I know Bash's body as well as my own. It's like she's a part of me, another pair of arms and legs. And it seems 10 years is nothing between us. I can almost feel the frothy breakers lapping at her gusset.

The water's freezing. I dive in and come up howling.

She coils her arms around my neck and squeezes me very tight. "Fuck," she gasps into my ear. When she pulls away her eyes are wet and spilling. "I've missed you every day." Her hips are wedged to mine. Her front nudges me as if looking for something. I'm not hard. Yet. I don't know where to put my hands.

My eyes overflow, too. I wipe, pretending it's seawater. "I've missed you, Bash." I hug her. Her body is like a memory made solid. A treasured memory.

We muck about in the surf. She loves me to throw her over the waves. I love to see her spinning against the sky, eyes screwed shut, screaming. I love her spluttering, "Again!"

Once she's worn me out, she takes my hand and we retire to the loungers. Bash and I used to refer to each other as soul mates. This is how, in the twenty steps from water to carpet(!) we decide, without speaking, that this is not to be a polite afternoon.

She chucks me an insanely fluffy towel but lies down wet on hers where it's spread on the lounger.

I wrap the towel around my waist and drag off my soggy boxers. I like the secret air round my cock and balls. I lie on the lounger beside hers. Me on my back, Lady Lovecome on her front.

Bash and I rarely chatted. I mean what did a gardener have to say to a Lady? But our three years together was so physically intense, we didn't need to make conversation. Not the formal kind anyway.

She looks at me with her cheek pressed to the backs of her hands. Behind soggy strands of bell-bob, her eyes swell up bigger than the sky. Water droplets glitter all over her shoulders, down her back and legs. Like diamonds.

She squirms. "What?"

"You're a beautiful woman."

She dimples, gulps. "You too--no, I mean. Whatever. You're much beefier though. I like it."

This makes me laugh even though it isn't funny.

She reaches over, takes my left hand, but only to hold it up. "Hmm. Not married."

"Living with someone. You?"

She flashes me a diamond the size of a grape, then drops her arm like the ring's too heavy to lift. "Gaudy, I know." She leans up on her elbows. "Are you happy?"

I shrug.

Jane calls me Mr Sad. She describes me as a glass half-empty person. She even blames the lacklustre performance of my business on my own lack of lustre. And I don't get it. At the big house I couldn't get the grin off my gob.

Time must pass with us just looking at each other in silence because, suddenly, Bash's skin is dry. She reaches under the lounger, produces a bottle of sun lotion and throws it at me. She unfastens the back strap of her bikini top.

I squeeze white lotion across her shoulders and down her spine. She wriggles at its chilliness and the dimple-cheeked smirk of her hidden smile undoes me. Every time. When we first met she smiled as easy as me. All the time. I can't remember when she decided she needed to hide her happiness.

I perch beside her hip on her lounger and rub the cream in. During our time in gilded prison together, we experimented with the openheartedness you lose later in life. There's no part of each other we haven't explored with fingers, lips or tongues. That's why her skin still feels as familiar as my own. I even get a ghost of my own touch on my own back. My hand is hard and leathery. She breathes a little heavy. When my rubs spiral to her bikini bottoms she tugs them down, so I can go lower. She pulls them all the way to the cleft of her bum.

Her skin is rose gold. All over. "No tan line," I say.

"I usually sunbathe nude," she says. "Tan lines are so... gauche."

My hand strokes lower than it needs to, over her cheeks. She purrs, grinds her hips at the lounger.

I grasp her bikini bottoms and pull them down her legs and off her feet.

She adores being nude for me. All her diary entries (she read them to me, of course) started: "William lustily tore off all my clothes, eyeing every detail of my nudity... until he was rigid." She leans up on her elbows and looks over her shoulder at her own nakedness, as if to share seeing it with my eyes.

I'm so hard under my towel I can hardly bend.

I squirt cream on her bum and rub it in. More like knead it in, if I'm honest. In the dim at the top of her closed thighs, I can just make out intimate wrinkles and clefts I haven't seen in ten years. The little pink knot of her anus is a friend I'd forgotten I'd missed.

She growls, and wriggles onto her back. Her breasts are still small and firm, her stomach smooth with a decadent little pot-belly. The ball of her mound is topped by a clipped triangle of jet hair. I stand up. I can't help it. It's like royalty has walked onto the beach. I should probably salute.

She yanks my towel off. My cock bounces into the Italian sunshine.

Her eyes widen. She pulls hair back off her face. "Goodness, you're much bigger than I remember."

I don't know if this is a compliment or not.

With a serious expression, she runs fingertips over my balls. She flicks a regal glance up at me, one eyebrow raised, then tests my shaft. The tip of her tongue curls out.

"What's got you so het up, Sweet William, hmm?" She says this to my cock as she grips it and slides up and down, so I guess she's joking.

She flops her legs open a little. Her clit hood, now neatly defined by waxed baldness below, is prominent as ever. I stroke her outer lips, they're podgy and so soft I almost can't feel them. Her thick, protruding inner lips graze my palm.

I smile, slip a fingertip along her slick groove.

She lets out a long, ragged breath. With Bash in my hand, and me in hers, I feel complete. Bash puts it better. Wrinkling thick eyebrows in a pained kind of realisation she says, "I feel like I'm finally home."

But then she releases my cock and shuts her legs.

"Rules," she says. "I'm worried. I don't want to be that woman who forces you to be unfaithful to your partner."

I lick her glossiness from my finger. She slaps my thigh. "If we don't come, then we're still being faithful to her don't you think?" She says this to my cock, robotically, like she's rehearsed it.

"What about your husband?"

"He fucks around," she says. "He doesn't count."

I sense she's replaced father with spouse as a target for her disappointment. I kneel beside her so my erection is next to her face. I stroke her tight little breasts. She chews her lip, watching my cock buck.

"You won't be able to stop yourself," I say. This sounds like a boast, but it's not.

"I should be OK. I came massively earlier." She flicks a glance up at me and flushes. "You were late."

I stoop to kiss her, and she cups my neck and leans into me, but we find we can't close the last millimetre.

"This is very against the rules," Bash says, her lips brushing mine.

I groan, and kiss her cheeks instead, down her jaw. I cover her breasts and nipples and wish I'd shaved but then remember, unlike Jane, Bash likes my chin rougher. Her body rolls under me like a wave trying to keep me on its crest. When I dip from breasts to ribs to belly, she squeezes my shoulders and arms and gushes, "Good lord, you feel like a horse," but really she's pushing me down.

I swivel as I descend, climb onto her lounger and kneel astride her shins. She likes my cock between her feet. I do too. When my kisses reach her mound I take her hips and lift them to my mouth. I bury a kiss into the bare flesh below her tuft. I keep her legs tight together, nuzzle into that gap to get to her clit with my lips. It's exciting that I can't quite get to it. She lifts her hips to my mouth, tries to open her legs. Her body wants me to lick her. Her heart wants me to delay it.

I lie along her legs and pluck kisses to her pressed-together cunt lips as if they were the mouth I'm denied kissing. We have the same rules for each other as others have for prostitutes, it seems. She lifts her lounger's backrest so she can watch me without straining, and pulls her clit hood up to unsheathe as much of her bud as she can.

She shivers. "I need to come already."

"Mm-Hmm."

"Perhaps it's OK to come," she says. "What do you think?"

I'm not thinking, I'm kissing. Kissing brings me pleasure. Thinking, pain.

I kneel upright, grasp her ankles and open her legs. Now I'm going to bring her pleasure.

Her "garden" has just the one flower. It's pink and fleshy and it's in full bloom. Her juices loop between slot and thigh. I settle between her knees like a jigsaw piece slotting into place.

She strokes my head. "Oral is foreplay isn't it? Not actual sex. I mean, Fore--play?" She tips her feet onto their sides to sag her knees wide and make more room for me. "Christ I've done it at parties. It's almost dancing. Polite, really.."

I press a kiss to her slipped-open lips as politely as I can, given the circumstances. She's hot marshmallow with a liquid centre. Her juices string thickly to my lips. I lick her salty taste off them with my eyes closed. When I open them again she's watching me, her cheeks blazing.

"To be safe." I kiss her again, slower, harder. "I'll stop when I think you're gonna come." Then I kiss her again. And again. And again. Each kiss hitches her breath. Each hitched breath pulses my cock. Her pleasure, every tiny, hitched breath of it, makes my day. It always has. That someone's most intimate joy is also mine raises a deep moan to my kissing.

Her eyes slit. She opens her inner lips with delicate, beautifully manicured, fingers. Her diamond flashes. Juices bubble inside her, dribble from the dim into the sunlight, down her bum cleft.

I focus on her clit, pressing my lips to it lightly as I can.

"Taste me." This is her thing, me enjoying her taste and smell. In her diary once, I came just from her dripping on my tongue. It was written to annoy her dad. I don't think it ever happened. Not often anyway.

I kiss her clit firmer, nip it between my lips.

She tremors and opens herself explicitly. "Lick me."

It's her body talking. I ignore it, like I'm ignoring my own body, which also badly wants to eat her, and badly needs to be eaten. Instead I take a deep breath of her spread cunt. "Musky ocean," I say. "Your smell makes my mouth water."

She bites her lip. As if to show me what she needs, her finger dips into her slot, and traces juices up over her clit, itches at it. She grunts and stops, splaying her fingers above her clenching cunt. It always pulses like this before she comes. I don't know if this is the same for other women, it's not for Jane, but this is what happens for Bash. And when she clenches inside I have to bear down hard on the echoing pulse behind my balls.

I reach into the champagne bucket between us, scoop cold water. I dribble it over her flushed folds.

She gasps. A smile! But she doesn't come.

I suck her clit and curly labia just to enjoy her chilled flesh in my mouth.

"Fuck!" Bash says to the sky. I guess my mouth feels very hot on her. I stop, kiss her inner thighs.

"This is why we've never fucked," she says. "Licking is too fabby."

"We never fucked because we were terrified of getting you pregnant. Your dad would have had me killed."

"But I've been on the pill since I met you for fucksake."

I laugh along with another, deeper kiss to her folds, so I can vibrate into her. Always a favourite.

She grips herself behind her knees, pulls her legs apart and back. Her toes wriggle beside my head. "You ejaculated fountains though... I swear If one could get pregnant orally we'd have--ah!"

I send an emergency lick up her slot, then down. Top of tongue, bottom of tongue. I follow it with more ice water. I want to shut her up because she talks dirty to get herself off.

Bash always told me her fantasies while I licked her. Of course, they always started with "William eyed every detail of my nudity" but they always ended with me unable to control myself. She liked to describe me spurting all over her bottom, breasts, clit or tongue. And when she came it was usually to blustering, "His...his salty sweet eruption!"

Bash calms down for a bit, but is still spread to my mouth so I breathe into her and nuzzle. She's soon off again though. She nods at the smoky peak of Stromboli rising above her house. "I think of you whenever the mountain erupts. Pretty much every day. How you always came with me. How I always came with you."

I huff a laugh into her.

"Don't laugh, it's true. Sometimes you just spurted without either of us even touching you. If I came while squatting on your face, say. You just loved that." She made fireworks of her fingers. "And I came sucking you off, of course."