The Lady Golfer

I had another mild surprise when Sandra opened the door. She was wearing a close-fitting grey wool dress which hugged her curves nicely. Lower down, her black tights showcased her sculpted calves and slim ankles, accentuated by the two-inch heels she was wearing. In short her figure was as good as I had fantasised about and a warm feeling of possibility and pleasure ebbed through me.

But it was further up that the most significant changes were apparent: she was wearing her hair loose, the first time I'd see it so. It cascaded down past her shoulders in an abundant red-brown wave. It wasn't classic red hair, more of a terracotta, but it was strikingly attractive. She was also wearing much more make-up than usual. Mostly she had a bit of lipstick on and that was it. Now I hardly recognised her. Her face was a darker shade than normal and she'd spent a bit of time on her eye shadow and mascara. Bright red lipstick and a string of pearls around her throat completed the picture. And she wasn't wearing spectacles.

I think the surprise must have shown on my face because she laughed and invited me in. 'I do scrub up a bit better than you see me on the golf course,' she smiled at me. 'Not much, but a bit.'

'You look... great!' I said, and I meant it. Well, ok, she still wasn't exactly a head-turner but she was alright. Better than just alright. I would be quite proud to be her escort for the evening and to hell with any funny looks we might get about our age difference; they'd probably think she was my mum, anyway, I grinned to myself.

'Quite some place you've got here,' I said, as she ushered me into a big, elegant lounge off the main hallway. There were oil paintings on the wall and a big marble fireplace. But there was also a vague air of neglect, as though the whole place needed a coat of paint, or a bit of modernisation. The carpet was worn and one of the single-glazed windowpanes was cracked. On the big, oak coffee table was the bouquet of flowers I'd had delivered to her that afternoon.

'Thank you for the lovely flowers. I adore lilies, and these smell heavenly.' She bent to inhale their scent and, straightening up, gave me an impulsive peck on the cheek. 'It was very thoughtful of you, Michael. Now, shall I give you the tour?'

Sandra was obviously proud of her house and she was more animated than normal as she clacked down the tiled hall to the dining room and the big, comfortable kitchen at the back. I followed, looking at her legs and her neat buttocks in the woollen dress. There was a conservatory opening off the dining room and beyond that a big garden with overgrown shrubs and a shaggy lawn. 'The gardener only comes once a fortnight,' she explained, and I wondered how she manged to afford to pay someone to tend her garden.

Upstairs was the same: big, slightly shabby bedrooms and a dated bathroom with an avocado-coloured suite, except for the hand basin which must have been replaced at some stage as it was white. It's a lovely place,' I said as we went back downstairs.

'It needs a bit of TLC,' admitted Sandra. 'But I haven't really got the skill and I can't afford to get it all done.'

It was a twenty-minute drive to the restaurant and it felt funny having Sandra in my car. She sat quietly, looking around at the scenery and I savoured her scent, a light floral perfume that reminded me of freesia. Steliana's and Sappho's was quiet at this time on a Saturday and we were tucked away on a little table in the window. The food was excellent, the service fast and efficient and almost before we knew it we'd finished the meal and were being subtly encouraged to vacate the table to make way for the late evening diners. Sandra's face was flushed under her foundation and her eyes were sparkling. She'd had about half a bottle of retsina to my one glass; we'd reluctantly left the rest on the table. It was in a folksy-looking carafe, if it had been in a bottle I'd have taken it with us.

I had spent most of the meal in a state of mild arousal. Sandra looked so different, so good. And she smelled good too. I wanted to find out if she felt equally good in my arms but I was nervous about making the first move. Nothing in her demeanour had ever hinted at any desire for physical intimacy. There was the age-gap after all which must, I estimated, be a quarter of a century at least.

Back at her house, Sandra offered me coffee, which I accepted, and disappeared into the kitchen coming back a few minutes later with my coffee and a large glass of red wine. 'I thought I'd treat myself as it's my birthday.' I was sitting on a floral-patterned two-seater settee and she came and sat next to me, maybe a foot between us.

'Thank you so much, Michael,' she said after we'd sipped our drinks for a few minutes. 'You've made it a special day for me.'

'Thank you,' I replied. 'You paid for the meal.' I had protested but she had remained firm.

'It's a thank you for being so kind to me since I joined the golf club.' We chatted while Sandra finished her glass. The conversation was stilted and I had the impression that she was leading up to something. Eventually she offered me more coffee and went to get herself another glass of wine. 'The last one,' she announced as she came back in the lounge, and I saw that her eyes were slightly unfocussed and the skin of her face and throat were tinged with pink.

She sat down and took a big gulp of her drink. 'There are some things I want you to know about me,' she began after a pause. I looked at her sharply, senses on the alert. 'You've probably been wondering why I haven't got any friends.' It hadn't occurred to me that she hadn't but I said nothing. 'I've never been very good socially but I did have one or two acquaintances, and there were the people at the office.' She paused again and took another big sip. 'My husband drove them away. He was a horrible man.' I sat quietly, listening intently. 'He treated me like dirt and he crushed my self-confidence. I know I'm not very attractive but he called me ugly and stupid and he undermined everything I did.' A tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. I remembered that I'd put a clean cotton handkerchief in my pocket before coming out and now I drew it out and offered it to Sandra. 'Thank you. You are a kind person.' She dabbed her eyes and started again.

She told me how her husband had met her and charmed her and made her feel like the ugly duckling had turned into a swan. But after a few years of marriage he had grown cold to her and had started seeing other women, sometimes flaunting it in front of her to highlight her inadequacies. 'It turned out it was about money,' she said, quietly. 'My parents are wealthy and he thought he could get his hands on their money, but dad never liked or trusted him so he didn't get a penny when we divorced; this house belongs to my parents. But by the time I'd summoned the courage to go through with a divorce it was too late to have children and that's all I ever wanted.' At this final disclosure she broke down and sobbed and I reached out to her and took her in my arms and she clung to me and I kissed the top of her head and stoked her hair and tried to comfort her as best I could. This was certainly intimate contact, though the circumstances were not what I had imagined and I felt no arousal now, just deep sympathy for this poor vulnerable lady and the trauma she had had to endure.

'Can you imagine how it feels to find out that the man you thought you loved only married you for your money?' I held her and stroked her as her sobbing subsided and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose and straightened up and looked at me. Her face was a mess: the foundation couldn't disguise the blotchy skin any more than the eyeshadow and liner could disguise her puffy eyes, and her tears had left streaks down her cheeks. This piteous display aroused all my male instincts to protect and safeguard. Perversely it also tweaked my libido.

'I don't think you're ugly or stupid, Sandra,' I said. It probably wasn't the best time to kiss her for the first time but that's what I did. I leaned towards her and she closed her eyes, divining what was coming, and our lips met, mine slightly parted, hers warm and wet with tears. Then we were pressing our mouths against each other, mashing our lips together, tasting her lipstick, smelling her scent and the light odour of her skin.

It lasted about thirty seconds. A frantic moment where we held each other tightly and devoured each other hungrily. Then we broke apart as though surprised to find ourselves kissing. 'I'm sorry,' I said, lamely, 'it was insensitive of me.'

'No,' she said quietly, wiping her eyes with her hand, 'don't be sorry.'

I moved back and disengaged gently. 'It's gone eleven, I really need to be going.'

She gave me a small smile and I suddenly felt the weight of her loneliness. 'I'll see you out.' At the door she pecked my cheek again. 'Thank you for this evening. I can't imagine what it was like for you to have me suddenly start in on all that. I am sorry. I've never told anyone else any of that before, except my parents.'

'How do you feel now?' I asked, guilty at the thought of leaving her in this condition.

She gave me a watery smile. 'A bit better, I think. Catharsis, I suppose. Will I see you on Tuesday?' There was a note of pathos in her tone.

'I wouldn't miss it for anything,' I said, firmly and she smiled more widely and looked a bit more together.

The guilt lingered on into Sunday and I struggled to sleep when I got home from work. About ten o'clock I called Sandra. 'Hi, I was wondering how you were after last night.'

'Oh I'm fine now, thank you. I'm quite resilient really. I'd just had too much wine. I'm sorry you had to put up with it. How was your night shift?' She sounded tired.

'Boring.'

'Look, Michael, I'm glad you rang. I was about to call you. You see there's something I didn't say to you yesterday, well I probably wouldn't have said it face to face anyway, even after all that alcohol.'

'If it's about the kiss,' I said, 'I know it was inappropriate after everything you'd said about your ex, and I'm sorry. I just wanted to make you feel better. It's hard to explain.'

'I loved the kiss, Michael! I wanted it to go on and on. I was really sad after you'd gone. The thing is, as I said yesterday, I don't have many friends and I have so enjoyed meeting you on Tuesdays and playing golf and I think we've become friends, at least I hope so.' There was an expectant pause.

'Of course we're friends.'

'But in my head I've wanted you to kiss me like that for weeks. And I know I'm not pretty and I'm much older than you and so it was hopeless and then last night you kissed me and I'm sure it was because you were sorry for me but I thought...' She tailed off and there was silence.

'What did you want to say, Sandra?' I asked, gently.

'I wanted to say how important your friendship is to me and... well, I am very happy for us to be just friends, but,' there was another pause, this one charged with a sort of static electricity. 'But if you wanted to become more than just friends, then I'd like that very much too,' she ended in a rush of breath.

'Oh, I see,' I said, taken aback.

'You don't have to say anything now, Michael, in fact I'm going to put the phone down.'

After her call I wandered around the house, tired but wide awake, my mind a whirl of conflicting thoughts interspersed with erotic images. It was true that I had become attracted to Sandra but a handful of secret, semi-juvenile fantasies, mostly about her body, were different to being confronted with the realistic prospect of a physical, and presumably emotional, relationship. Was that what I wanted? My instinct told me that I was entering potentially dangerous waters; if we took our friendship to the next level it would imply some degree of commitment from me. From both of us. Did I want that? She was twice my age and, well, not great looking.

Suddenly I was ashamed of my chauvinism. Sandra was lovely. She might not be the best-looking girl on the block but she wasn't ugly and I enjoyed her company very much. I thought about how she'd looked when she opened the door to me the previous evening. Then I thought about what she'd said about her marriage and her tears and her loneliness and what it had felt like to hold her and to kiss her and my mind was made up. I reached for my mobile phone and opened a new text message.

Hi Sandra, The answer is yes. See you Tuesday. Michael xx

I hit send before I could change my mind and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

The next Tuesday was a perfect early summer's day: warm and cloudless with a light breeze ruffling the new season's leaves. So it was surprising that there were so few people out on the course. I found out later that a seniors' competition had been cancelled and that couldn't have worked better for Sandra and me because it meant that when we got to the little brick hut by the ninth green, the halfway point, there was nobody in front or behind us. We seemed to have the whole course to ourselves.

It was little more than a shelter with some benches, donated by some past member. We usually stopped there for a coffee from Sandra's thermos flask if the group behind us wasn't pressing too hard. Now we entered its shaded gloom and sat down with our drinks. We'd met at the first tee as usual and we'd chatted in the normal manner during the first nine holes but there had been a tiny distance between us, an issue to be resolved. Now Sandra looked at me shyly. 'There's no one else around. Would you mind kissing me again.'

I took her in my arms and our lips met and I kissed her gently and softly, rubbing my lips over hers, parting her lips with the tip of my tongue, everything done in slow motion as I gauged her reaction. At first she was passive then, as my tongue entered her mouth and explored her teeth and gums she started gripping me tighter, her fingers pressing into my back, her mouth working against mine, her tongue slipping between my lips. I was becoming very aroused.

After a few minutes of this exquisite physical contact I moved my body slightly so that I could cup one of her breasts through the nylon sports blouse she was wearing. It was small and firm through the flimsy material of her bra, much less than a handful. Sandra broke the kiss and rested her head on my shoulder, her mouth against my ear. 'I'm sorry they're so small,' she whispered.

'You've got nothing to be sorry about, you've got a wonderful body,' I told her, truthfully. We kissed again, slowly and languidly, and I stroked her back and her arms as we nuzzled each other, soft, undemanding kisses, tasting her saliva and smelling her perfume, giving promise of passion to come.

A faint "thump" outside as a ball landed on the green next to the hut roused us from our embrace. 'We'd better get on,' said Sandra, standing up and emptying the dregs of her coffee. 'That's the group behind us, they've caught up.'

We had another kiss just off the fourteenth fairway, behind a bush like a pair of adolescents. So by the time we had finished and put our clubs in our cars and settled into the clubhouse restaurant I was in a rare state of arousal. I reached across the little table and put my hand on hers. 'I'm not due in to work until just before midnight. Shall we...' I began, suggestively.

Oh, Michael,' her face creased into a mask of woe. 'I can't this afternoon, I've got a dentist's appointment and if I cancel at this notice they'll probably strike me off their list. But I did have an idea. Saturday's your last dayshift before your week off isn't it?' I nodded. 'Well I wondered if you'd like to come round on Saturday evening. I can cook you dinner and then maybe on Sunday we could go for a nice walk or something.' This implicit proposal that we would sleep together on Saturday night caused Sandra to blush deeply from her throat to her cheeks, which went bright pink. I guessed she hadn't made many suggestions like that in her life.

'That sounds great!' I said, enthusiastically. Bloody hell! Sandra had just offered me her lovely body on a plate! I was rapturous.

'And it'll give me a chance to get into town on Friday,' she said, still blushing.

My shifts before Saturday were busy and that was good. There was a major outage coming up and the maintenance and repair schedules had to be worked out. Nevertheless, I frequently found my mind wandering into the realms of sexual fantasy, heightened by the knowledge that fantasy was about to become reality. Doubt also nagged at me. What if she weren't as lovely unclad as I'd imagined? What if the whole sex thing was a disaster?

So it was with a tinge of trepidation that I arrived at her house on Saturday evening, armed with an overnight bag, and rang her doorbell. She opened the door thirty seconds later and stood smiling at me. 'Hello, Michael.' I took in her dark-red dress, in a silky material, and the way it clung to her slim figure. I also took in the black sheer tights and patent leather heels. Further up her striking hair was loose and contrasted perfectly with her dress. As before, she was wearing more make-up than usual and had applied it with care and skill. Her face seemed to glow and her eyes, without spectacles, appeared enormous. She'd even painted her fingernails to match the dress.

I walked into the hall and dropped my bag and took her in my arms as she turned from closing the door behind me. 'You look amazing,' I said. 'That dress suits you perfectly.'

She blushed charmingly under her make-up. 'Thank you. I bought it on Friday, in town. I've had my eye on it for a while but I hadn't got a reason to splash out on clothes, until now,' she ended, shyly.

We kissed, lightly, her hands on my shoulders, me fearing to spoil her lipstick which was red and glossy and had obviously taken some time to apply. I did however take the opportunity to reach around and cup her buttocks in my hands. They were round and firm and felt delicious. I also felt suspender straps under the silken dress material and my cock began to fill with blood. I briefly contemplated pressing her crotch into my growing erection, she was as tall as me in her heels, but now was not the time and with a final hug I let her go. 'Stockings?' I smiled at her and she blushed again.

'My underwear was in a terrible state, I hadn't bought anything new in years! I literally had nothing presentable so I bought some new things in town when I got the dress. I didn't know if you liked stockings but I wanted to feel sexy,' she said quietly, still pink with embarrassment.

'I'm a big fan,' I assured her. 'Now, what can I do to help?'

'You can open a bottle of wine. There's white in the fridge or red in the rack in the utility room if you'd prefer.'

We went into the kitchen and I found a bottle of Chablis and poured us each a glass, then I went up behind her as she peeled potatoes on the kitchen island unit and put my arms around her and pressed her to me, cupping her small breasts in my hands. 'Shouldn't you have an apron on?' I said, pulling aside her hair and kissing her ear.

She leaned back into me. 'Mmm, that's nice. But if you want to eat before nine you might want to go and watch the television or read a book or something.'

It did occur to me to just haul her upstairs and to hell with dinner but I was also aware that Sandra was nervous; this would be the first time she had been intimate with anybody since well before her divorce, five years ago, and she wasn't the most confident of women at the best of times. She needed the security of a plan, which in this case involved her cooking dinner. Intimacy would come later when we had gone through the preliminaries. So I mooched off into the lounge and switched on the television and flicked through the channels until I happened upon a repeat of some old sit-com which was passably funny. Even so, I couldn't resist the odd trip back to the kitchen, ostensibly to replenish our glasses but actually to steal a kiss or two and a grope of her breasts or buttocks. There was no denying the fact that I was finding this haute-couture version of Sandra very appealing indeed.