The Slumber Party Ch. 14

Julia, Melissa, and Audrey were up earlier than the others, and Julia sternly warned her daughters not to make a big thing of Aunt Isabel's seemingly sudden conversion to sexual rapture—and certainly not to tease her about it. She emphasized that the experience had been wondrous, deeply emotional, and even transcendent; and the last thing Isabel would want was to become the butt of a jest. That would taint the whole episode in her mind, and would be deeply unfair to her.

Still, as Isabel walked with obvious stiffness down the stairs and sat down demurely on a chair in the dining room, doing her best not to grimace in discomfort as she did so, Melissa had to restrain herself from bursting out laughing. Instead, she hugged her aunt around the shoulders and whispered in her ear, "Sleep well, Auntie?"

Isabel could have taken offense, but Melissa's obvious warmth and affection made her smile. "Very well, dear. Thank you for asking."

It was now Rod's turn to amble into the dining room. He looked somewhat worse for wear, but nonetheless had a broad grin on his face. He boldly came up to Isabel, knelt down beside her, took her face in his hands, and gave her a sustained kiss on the mouth. She didn't object, although she didn't return the kiss with great ardor. Her transformation wasn't so complete that she could be comfortable with such public displays of affection.

But when Rod said earnestly, "You're a sweetheart, Isabel," she stroked his cheek and replied quietly:

"So you are, dear. So are you."

Another kind of transformation was in the offing, at the simultaneous urging of the three other Waters women. Now that Isabel had joined their ranks as a sexual creature, they sensed that a certain makeover in her appearance would be beneficial. To her objections that they would simply be objectifying her and making her a "shameless tart," Julia said:

"Isabel, just because a woman looks her best doesn't mean she's a tart. You're not doing it to attract men—although if that incidentally happens, so much the better; you're doing it for yourself, presenting your best face to the world. And a pretty face—and figure—doesn't mean that you don't have other virtues: you obviously do, and they would be obvious to anyone who gets to know you."

Isabel wasn't entirely reconciled, but her sister and nieces brooked no delay and bundled her into the car and made their way to their favorite hairdresser, who luckily had an opening that day. This woman, a Ukrainian immigrant named Olga, scrutinized Isabel as if she were a wild nymph from the woods and said in her thick accent, "Yes, there is something I can do with this."

Overcoming Isabel's apprehensions, she sat her down in a chair and set to work. In a sense, Olga regretted having to tamper with her subject's long, flowing hair, but knew that some of it would have to go if she were to produce a true gem out of this uncut jewel. And so she set to work, and an hour or so later the results were available for all to see.

"Omigod, Isabel," Julia breathed, "you're beautiful!"

"You sure are!" Melissa said.

"I'll say!" Audrey chimed in.

And she was. Olga had layered Olga's rich, thick black hair in a series of curls that framed her head in a way that actually added an inch or two to her height, but also framed her face exquisitely well, softening the somewhat harsh features and making her look radiant and seductive. Even Isabel gasped as she saw herself for the first time in the mirror, placing a hand over her heart. Melissa could tell that her aunt's eyes were filling with tears.

Unexpectedly, Isabel hugged the hairdresser closely and whispered in her ear, "Thank you so much, Olga."

The next stop was to Macy's, where the beginnings of a whole new wardrobe would be secured. Julia realized that this process would take a long time, and Isabel would have to scrap her old, unattractive attire one piece at a time until all her old clothes were replaced by garments that would set off her unquestionably nice, curvy figure to best advantage.

Here Isabel balked a bit more than she did at having her hair done, but eventually the other women overcame her scruples and made her buy a luscious red dress whose tight waist made plain the swell of her bust and hips. Julia even made Isabel get a push-up bra that revealed a substantial amount of her bosom under the low-cut neck of the dress. When Isabel saw herself in a mirror, she almost fainted.

"Oh, Good Lord, Julia!" she cried. "I look like a—like a—"

"Don't say that word, Isabel," Julia warned. "You don't look like that. You just look like the most scrumptious forty-seven-year-old woman in creation."

"I can't wear this thing in public," Isabel whispered in a harried voice.

"You can and you will," Julia said firmly. "At least let Rod see it. He'll appreciate it."

"He sure will!" Melissa said heartily.

"You betcha!" Audrey burbled.

They managed to persuade Isabel to wear the dress out the door—but only because she insisted on wearing a pretty little coat that hid her boobs from being ogled by all the men she passed.

When the women returned home, Rod—who had been peremptorily prevented from accompanying them, as they only wished him to see the final result—was in an ecstasy of anticipation.

And so, when the door opened and Isabel walked in, his jaw dropped.

"Omigod, Isabel," he breathed, "you're beautiful." He blushed and what might have sounded like a faint insult. "I mean, you were always beautiful, but now everyone can see it for themselves."

"Thank you, dear," she said, unable to meet his eyes.

Julia, tramping in after her sister, said, "Take your coat off, Isabel. Let him see the rest."

Isabel's face had turned crimson, and she took her time unbuttoning the coat. She did so with her back turned to Rod, and when she finally slipped it off and turned around, Rod thought he might pass out.

Instead, he stalked slowly and stiffly over to his bedmate of the night before, wrapped her arms around her, and kissed her tenderly on the mouth. Isabel threw her arms around his neck and received his tokens of affection with good grace.

To everyone's surprise, she made no complaint when Rod, unable to help himself, slid his hand down to Isabel's bottom and rubbed it gently, first over the thin cloth of the new dress, then—to the astonishment and amusement of Julia, Audrey, and Melissa—going under the hem of the dress, reaching her underwear, and pulling her panties down her thighs to touch her bare bottom.

Isabel just moaned while her lips remained pasted to Rod's, and she even made bold to stroke Rod's groin over his clothes.

"Hey, you two!" Julia said in mock severity. "Save that for the privacy of your bedroom!"

They in fact did exactly that.

Isabel had to wait three days for her next turn with Rod, as he had to fulfill his obligations to Melissa and Audrey. Now there was no need for secrecy, and Rod proceeded from bed to bed openly and unashamedly. Unlike Grant, he didn't care to go from one female to the next in the same night, preferring to focus his physical and emotional attentions on one woman for the duration of the evening. The women in turn appreciated the gesture and came to an understanding that they wouldn't press Rod to perform every single time he was in their bed. He may have been twenty-one years old, but there was a limit to even his stamina!

When Isabel did get him again, they engaged in a slow, tender, but scarcely gentle coupling—both front and back—that took well over an hour. As they were resting from the intensity of copulation, Rod felt that some pillow talk was in order.

"Isabel," he said with studied carelessness, stroking the back of her head as she nestled her body against his, "can I ask you something?"

"Go ahead," she said.

"Why did you remain a virgin for so long?"

She looked up at him, and Rod was confused at her expression—a mix of regret and melancholy. But she said nothing.

"I mean," he went on heedlessly, "it's clear that you had the desire" (your self-pleasuring makes that obvious), "so I'm just wondering . . ."

Isabel said something Rod didn't even remotely expect. "You'd better ask Julia."

"Julia?" Rod said. "What does she have to do with this?"

Looking searchingly at him, she said, "What do you know about Julia's past?"

A little shudder ran through Rod.

"Not a whole lot," he said nervously. "I know she met her future husband, Arthur, in college, and that they married almost as soon as they'd graduated. She had Audrey a year later, and Melissa two years after that. And then, a couple of months ago, Arthur just left her for some 'floozie,' and that's how I came on the scene."

"What about before?" Isabel persisted.

"Before? Before what?"

"Before she met Arthur. Going back to high school."

"I guess she hasn't told me much about that."

Isabel sighed deeply. "Rod, I know you love Julia, just as you love her daughters, and that's wonderful. She needs the love of a good, sweet man—although, much as I found Arthur not exactly to my taste, I have to admit that he loved her too for a long time. The point is that she was a very different person when she was younger."

"What do you mean?"

"She was . . . a little wild. In fact, very wild."

Rod's eyes widened. "You're not telling me . . ."

"Yes," Isabel said. "She was a little crazy—boy-crazy. From at least the age of sixteen until the time she met Arthur, she was—well, not to put too fine a point on it . . ." She couldn't finish.

"I refuse to believe that," Rod said flatly. "Julia—a slut? No way—she's the last person in the world to come across like that. In fact, she pretty much stated that Arthur left her at least partially because, um, she wasn't very exciting in bed."

"That was later. When she was a teenager she never met a guy—or a guy's cock—that she didn't like."

The coarseness of her words was so strikingly uncharacteristic that Rod felt he had suffered a blow. "No way," he said again, weakly.

"I'm sorry to say so, but I saw it all happen. This is not something a girl can keep from her older sister. She developed a notorious reputation in high school, and that continued when she went to Western Washington University in Bellingham. I know—I was there. She went through dozens of men—maybe hundreds. She actually didn't have 'relationships' with very many of them—perhaps none of them. She just seemed to be engaged in some kind of personal contest to see how many men she could bed down with.

"There was one time—God, I hate to talk about it!—when she attended a frat party and, after it was nominally over, made herself, shall we say, available to the guys. All of them. One after the other. There must have been fourteen or fifteen of them."

"No, no," Rod said, covering his face in his hands.

"It happened, Rod. Maybe I shouldn't be telling you all this, but it's really the answer to that question you asked. As I was taking in this appalling behavior by my younger sister, I myself determined that I would do the exact opposite. Okay, I wasn't the most popular girl in high school, but seeing her make such a spectacle of herself made me more determined than ever to remain 'pure' and 'untouched.' I tried to persuade myself that I didn't even want a man's touch, or his affection. Yes, of course the urge came over me every so often, and I had to satisfy it somehow; but I did my best to restrain myself. And then, after years, it just became second nature. I convinced myself that I was better off being a virgin, and I scorned any and all attention from men—few as there were.

"And I kept up that pose until I met you. And you were my downfall."

She said that with a smile, but Rod was nevertheless concerned about one key point.

"I—I hope I didn't force you," he choked out.

"No, you didn't," she said emphatically. "I did what I did by my own choice. You needn't worry about that."

Rod was relieved by that. He went on: "But—but how did Julia suddenly change? People don't transform overnight."

"Well," Isabel said, "she'd been heading in that direction for a while. By junior year she had become disgusted with herself, and she yearned for a more meaningful relationship with a man. Very few of her previous bedmates were inclined toward that, because they felt she would never remain faithful to them and just wanted physical satisfaction. But Arthur was a rather shy, unworldly young man—he didn't go to parties much or even have much of a social life, so he knew nothing of Julia's 'reputation.' When she met him, she seemed to fall genuinely in love with him. And so she became determined to become a new, transformed woman and keep herself 'pure'—or as pure as she could be—for him.

"Then, when she had children, she went to the other extreme, becoming so focused on her motherly duties that she actually came to regard sex as something rather distasteful—a disgusting urge that men have, and that a wife is obliged to satisfy for the sake of the marriage. That may be an exaggeration—and I won't deny that I had something to do with inculcating that attitude in her—but she did seem to become very conservative as far as her sexual proclivities were concerned. Arthur, from what Julia told me, wasn't exactly the most ardent man in the world; but I suppose that he eventually tired of Julia's 'lie-back-and-think-of-England' attitude. I daresay there were other factors in their breakup, but that must have been one of them."

This was so much information to take in that Rod had trouble digesting it all. And he couldn't help reflecting that Audrey had, wittingly or not, copied Julia's behavior. Like mother, like daughter. When, seemingly stunned, he continued to keep silent, Isabel went on.

"Julia is not a bad person, Rod—and she wasn't even in her wild phase. Many other people become addicted to sex, men more than women. It's to her credit that she did manage to reform herself. I'm sorry she lost her husband, but maybe it's for the best. And you've been a very good influence on her: she's becoming a full-fledged woman again, not just an overprotective mother."

"I hope I can continue to be that," Rod said tightly.

"I'm sure you will," Isabel said. Then, after a pause: "I wonder if we can, um, resume?"

Rod shook the cobwebs out of his head. "You—you want more?"

"Yes, please."

He smiled genially. "Okay, ma'am—I'll do my best."

*

But Rod couldn't help broaching the subject with Julia the next time he was in bed with her. This was not in any sense—well, not very much, anyway—out of prurient interest in her "wild" sex life as a teenager, but out of a need to understand how she had become the woman she now was. He didn't have any idea how to broach such a delicate subject, so he simply said, as they were cuddling one night:

"Um, Isabel told me something about how the two of you were as teenagers."

She stiffened immediately. "Oh?" she said in a cramped voice.

"Yeah," he said, unnerved as to how to proceed. "She seems to think you were—kind of wild."

Julia looked up at him. Already tears were in her eyes. "She said that?"

"I'm sure it's not true," Rod said valiantly. "I mean, Isabel probably had pretty strict views of how a girl should behave—"

"I was wild, Rod," Julia said lugubriously. "Very wild. And shameless."

"No, you couldn't have been."

"Rod, I was." She propped her elbows on Rod's chest and looked him in the face. "I was a whore, a harlot—whatever you want to call me." She laughed bitterly. "The only difference is that I didn't get any money for it! So I guess that just makes me a slut!"

"Don't call yourself that!" he cried.

"Well," she lamented, the tears now flowing down her cheeks, "that's what I was! Why mince words? I couldn't help myself."

"But—but why?"

"I wish I knew! There was nothing about my upbringing that could have brought it on. I mean, my parents weren't unduly strict, and they wouldn't have minded my having a boyfriend in high school, and certainly not in college. But once I discovered the pleasures of sex—oh, man, I just went insane! It was a feeling like I'd never had before. In fact, the reason I went through so many men was that I just couldn't find anyone who truly satisfied me. I was delighted that I could satisfy the guy (although most of them pooped out after the first go), but these silly high-school and college boys really didn't know anything about what gives a girl satisfaction. Don't get me wrong: intercourse is great, and a lot of times I didn't mind not actually having a climax. But female orgasms take time—and skill on the man's part—to generate, and I just couldn't find such a person reliably."

"Um," Rod said, blushing, "could I ask how many guys you 'did'?"

"Why do you want to know that?" Julia said sharply.

His blush increased. "Just curious," he said disingenuously. Okay, maybe this is prurient curiosity—but can you blame me?

Julia started breathing fast and irregularly, her chest rising and falling rapidly. "Well," she said, her voice rising, "I didn't exactly keep count, you know! Maybe there were a few dozen—"

"Isabel said hundreds," Rod said in a small voice.

"Oh, that's ridiculous! There couldn't have been that many!" She paused abruptly, and a deep frown covered her face. "Could there have been? No, impossible! Maybe a hundred—a hundred and fifty? Oh, golly, I don't know!"

"But you stopped."

"Yes, I stopped," she said heavily. "It was all getting too boring and stupid. And when I met Arthur, I was just determined to turn over a new leaf. He was so sweet—kinda shy (I like that in a guy), and pretty unworldly. He—"

"Was he a virgin?" Rod interjected.

"No," Julia said, casting her mind back, "I don't think so. I seem to recall him saying he'd had only two or three previous girls—but one of them had lasted a fair amount of time, apparently enough to teach him a good many of the tricks to make a girl come!" She giggled girlishly.

"So he was good in bed?"

"Well, good enough—a lot better than the self-absorbed oafs I'd spread my legs for before. God, what could I have been thinking? He was slow and careful, and I came to like that. It was so different from the 'slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am' practices of my previous bedmates. And he had the good sense to give me my orgasm before attending to his own. Almost none of the guys I'd been with before had done that. He wasn't the most ardent guy in the world: even when we were dating we probably had sex only about once a week, and a little less than that when we were married. But that was enough for me—because he was a nice guy, really caring and considerate."

"But he left you," Rod said quietly.

Julia got choked up. "Yes, he left me. I still don't know why. I thought we had a good marriage—not great, but good enough. But it seems as if he was just waiting for the girls to get to college before running off with the floozie." Now the tears were cascading down her face.

"You don't really know anything about her, do you? This woman he went off with?"

"No," she said in sudden anger, "but what else can I think of her as? Who else but a floozie would steal someone else's husband—especially someone who has daughters almost as old as she is! What sort of horrible person does something like that?"

"So you still love him?"

"No, I don't love him anymore!" Julia said, enraged. "He betrayed me! How can I love him after that?" She was sobbing again. "I loved him for more than twenty years—tried to be a good wife to him—and this is how he treats me?"

"I think he still loves you," Rod said with peculiar certainty.

"How can you possibly know that? You know nothing about him, or about what happened! How could he have done this to me if he loves me?"