The Next Best Thing.

Jackie was thinking of a man. Any man. Age was unimportant but he had to have stamina.

A man, or the next best thing.

She closed her book. Her thoughts were getting in the way of reading and the sun was too bright on the page.

It was warm and quiet in her secluded garden. She put the book down beside her deck chair and looked around. There were a dozen things she could be occupied with but she didn't want to do any of them.

She watched a bee gently force its way into a half-closed drooping bloom. The bright flower trembled with the bees' excited movements. It made her think about nectar and then honey and in a moment she was thinking about a man again.

Someone tall, she fantasised, then immediately reconsidered. Or short. Or rich. Or poor. Young or old. Good looking, or not. She was prepared to make concessions, nothing was set in stone when her needs were great. Young, with a stiff, slim, arrogant cock, or older, with a thick, bullet-headed one.

But not too old, she decided, watching the bee zoom purposefully away.

A newly fledged sparrow was trying to land on her bird table. It miscalculated and expended an enormous amount of energy trying to compensate.

And I don't want a man too young, either, she thought. All I really want is someone with experience who knows where to put it and what to do with it when it's there.

She smiled at her thoughts and the young sparrow as it finally achieved its goal.

Sections of the red brick wall of her house were visible through the shrubs and variegated leaves that screened her favourite spot in the garden. She hoped for the click of the latch on the garden gate, footsteps approaching on the path, a shadow to fall on her bare legs.

Jackie sighed when no one appeared. Her solitude remained undisturbed. Her fantasy unfulfilled.

She was having the kind of day when dirty thoughts were never far away. She'd always imagined that when she was older she'd think about sex less rather than more but her fleshy thighs ached no less than when she was eighteen. Her pussy was as eager and hungry as ever.

The sky was a perfect postcard blue. There were no clouds or white vapour trails when she raised her eyes to study it. Nothing to show that the earth still turned. No sense of movement. She hoped for a hot air balloon, a horny Phileas Fogg descending smiling by rope, turning slowly, raising his hat and unbuttoning his trousers; a handsome adventurer with good manners who'd fuck her politely then quietly take his leave.

Why couldn't men be like that? Appear when she wanted them and vanish when she didn't? It didn't seem much to ask.

She brushed an insect from her arm. Her pores were open. There was no breeze to cool her tingling skin. She opened her legs and felt her sticky thighs peel apart. Her garden was the only place she felt comfortable wearing a bikini. Her breasts hung low and heavy, her stomach was too big. She used to have nice knees but they were gone somewhere, lost in excess flesh, and only the memory remained.

She was too horny to mourn the body she'd had when she was younger. The thing to remember was that everything still worked. Inside she was a princess. No man had ever had second thoughts when he saw her naked, even after she was big. Self doubt was all in the mind she reminded herself. Regrets a waste of time and energy.

She breathed deeply of the warm, summer scented air. The hot sunshine was a delight, she could almost feel her tan deepening.

Her thoughts turned to lonely men, young, shy, awkward eighteen year olds, wasting their seed in wads of paper tissues, their fast-moving hands a blur of motion, their faces a picture of studied concentration. The thin, the fat, the socially inept. It seemed such a waste. There must be thousands of them regularly beating off in solitude, dreaming unlikely dreams of cheerleaders and supermodels, when here she was, horny and alone, ready to take all comers. She thought of the queen bee serviced by scores of devoted workers and she made them into young men of eighteen or nineteen with slim and eager cocks. She'd gather them around her as she lay naked with her legs splayed and watch them jerk above her until she was bathed in a rain of hot, spitting cum.

She made a wish, sent out a thought; come to me, all of you come to me, NOW. I command it.

She could almost feel their hands all over her and imagined herself writhing under their intimate caresses. She listened, waiting, but the gate didn't open and Phileas had yet to appear and abseil down to her garden.

Closing her eyes she opened her legs still wider and felt the full midday force of the hot sun beating down on the brown, stretched fabric of her bikini bottoms.

Wet, she thought. I'm wet and waiting. Sitting here, wet. Dripping, flooding. There should be an obliging man between my legs, licking and tasting. Tasting my flooding wetness. A man with a skilled and flexible tongue. With knowledge and finesse.

Two men.

She moaned softly at the thought and pictured wet, dark spots spreading slowly across the brown material stretched tight between her legs.

If a man appeared now she was in the mood to do anything he asked. Anything at all. Raise the cross-bar. There was nothing she wouldn't do. She'd probably kill him the way she felt. One man might not be enough. In no time there'd be a pile of limp-dicked bodies lying in the sun, their pitiful groans filling the air, while she snapped her fingers, 'Next!'

No. What she really wanted was a machine, something mechanical to ride. Something she might squat over while it thrust smoothly and tirelessly. Pumping and thrusting with a variety of speeds and settings to experiment with. Changeable heads of various thickness and lengths. And one that swivelled deliciously. She was in the mood for something that swivelled.

Still with her eyes closed she moved her hand over the soft bulge of her stomach and into her bikini bottoms where she caressed her close cropped pubic hair and dreamed of a machine to ride to heaven. She could almost hear the sound it might make; a soft, seductive, repeating rhythm. Pistons sliding. A hiss like a sigh, a muted rumble like a groan. A mushroom-shaped, lubricated head to stretch her pussy. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yesss.

When she opened her eyes the day was so bright that for a moment all the colour was gone. The shrubs that surrounded her were pale imitations, like a photograph faded by sunlight.

She frowned and blinked and the colours slowly returned.

She drew her hand from inside her bikini. Where were all men she'd known when she needed them?

Upstairs in her bedroom she took off her bikini and sat on her bed. She gathered up her breasts and lowered her head and took a salt-tasting nipple into her mouth. Eyes closed she suckled, one nipple at a time.

From her bedside table she took a dildo and lay back with her knees raised.

Her mouth opened as she slipped it smoothly into her pussy. Four, then eight inches filling her. Ten. The next best thing to a man. She lifted her hips and breathed in short gasps as she fucked herself.