It was a quiet life but she liked it. At thirty-nine Theodora often laughed at what she had thought being a dancer was like. What it was really like was hard work. Since she had been eight Ted's life had been a daily round of practice, exercises to twist her body into shapes nature had never intended a little girl's bones to go.
It was, she reflected, very like a nun's life except that it required more rigid vows and a greater dedication. A nun had to give up screwing. A dancer… Ted had been a virgin till she was nearly twenty-eight, thanks to the still uninvented pill. Pregnancy for d dancer was not just a social embarrassment. It was The End. Nobody.in the world of ballet cared who fucked whom but if a dancer wanted to Make It she had to devote her whole body, every erg of energy to just one thing. There was no room for fucking. There was even less room for overeating.
Thinking back about it all, Ted knew it had been a waste. All those wonderful years… When she had been fifteen and all her friends had been out in parked cars getting their stockings pulled down their thin legs she, Ted, had been bellying up to the practice bar, exercising, practicing, turning herself into some kind of machine that made old men in the twenty-five-dollar seats sigh. But in street clothes she had been unable to turn the head of any man of any age. They were interested in a girl with some meat on her bones-an ass to grab, some tits to nuzzle. She had often thought of what she could have done for a man if she had been willing to give up her career-all the interesting positions she could twist her slight body into. And she had always felt safe walking down dark streets at night, knowing her thin, almost nonexistent body was as muscular as a rattlesnake's and just about as deadly should any male try something she didn't want tried.
But it was all over now. She had been one of the lucky ones, able to see herself objectively and know that she was a good dancer. She had also known she would not be a great one. When, after wasting all the wonderful years from fifteen to twenty-five pursuing a career that never quite materialized, she had finally found The Man, she had known better than to hesitate.
Twenty-eight-year-old virgins with a body of a fifteen-year-old and the mind of a middle-aged adult are not easy to come by. She had, thinking back on it, sold herself. But it had not been all that much of a sacrifice. Virgil had possessed a hard-muscled body, still interesting at fifty. And he had known what he was doing too. She remembered the day he had proposed.
"Look," he said, "a man my age and with my money has had all the clean young cunt he needs. What I need is a woman who can run my house, wear clothes, entertain my friends, and who knows the difference between 'these' and 'them.' Also, I'd like her to like me enough not to make me go to sleep on the couch half the time. You willing?"
Looking toward dwindling talents, an aging body and fifty more years of virginity, Ted had been willing. And Virgil had kept his bargain, too. Most of his money was tied up in trusts, doled out to wives, sons and daughters from previous entanglements. But he had left her with ten thousand a year tax free. He had also left her the yacht.
At thirty-nine, Ted didn't know which she was most grateful for, the money or the yacht. Until she met Virgil she had never been on a boat in her life. Now she was firmly addicted to sailing. No matter what Nixon might do about selling the country to the oil companies, as long as she could keep the sails of her thirty-foot sloop in repair, Ted knew she would never be bored. It was small enough for her to sail single handed, large enough to go around the world if she felt like it.
She finished bagging the Dacron sails, thanking Neptune for the thousandth time that cotton was obsolete and that nobody had to worry about mildew from stowing damp sails any more: After a day's sailing all she had to do now was tie a couple of things down before she went up to the club house at the head of the dock and had a long, soul-satisfying shower.
She had just finished tying the boom in its crutch when the PA speaker blatted, "Telephone for Ted Stickles."
Now who, she wondered, could that be? Still clad in faded sailing denims, she jumped from the raised-deck sloop to the dock and walked toward the telephone.
"Mr. Stickles?"
Since Mr. Stickles had been dead for almost five years Ted knew immediately it was either somebody selling something she didn't need or begging something she couldn't really afford to give. "Not exactly," she said.
"Oh, you must be Mrs. Stickles." It was a woman's voice. "I'm calling for the Souterrain Hilltop Receiving Home."
Ted was tired. She wanted a shower and then a drink before she went back to watch TV in the small but extremely comfortable cabin of her sloop. "How much?" she asked.
"Oh dear, no," the voice protested. "We're not asking for money."
Ted sighed and wondered how much of this face-saving crap she would have to listen to before the woman got down to how much.
"Most of our children come from underprivileged homes," the woman continued. "Many of them have never seen the ocean, much less a boat."
"A boat," Ted said, "is something you use to get from the dock out to where a ship is anchored. On a sloop as small as mine you make do with an inflatable raft."
The woman's canned spiel continued right over Ted's acid commentary. "We're trying to see that each youngster gets an afternoon sailing. It may not sound like much but have you ever considered that a boy who's busy building a boat is too busy to be out stealing hub caps or robbing stores?"
Ted really hadn't considered it. Her own hub-cap-stealing years had been spent bending her ass out of shape at a ballet practice bar. But suddenly she knew she might as well give in. If she didn't this woman would never stop pestering her. And besides, she had never had a child. Maybe it was time she started paying her dues to the human race. "All right," she said. "I've only got room for maybe two. When?"
"Would tomorrow morning at nine be all right?"
"It would except the wind never comes up before noon. Try to have them here at eleven."
The woman's voice was hesitant. "I'm afraid we're a little crowded for transportation," she began.
"I have a ten-speed bicycle to get to the grocery." Ted said with a tone of finality. "Have them out here at eleven."
And that was how it had happened. The next morning a woman gone to fat had pulled up with a station wagon full of grubby children. While they did their best to destroy the car she had gotten out and looked around uncertainly. Ted appeared and the woman gone to fat had laid two boys on her. Leading them down the float of the marina Ted had not been impressed. "First," she began, "you take those shoes off before you mark up my deck."
"Why?" It was the larger boy. He seemed to be about fourteen, tall for his age and rather thin. Though white, he seemed more loaded with hostility than a carload of newly emancipated blacks.
"Three reasons," Ted explained. "First, those soles are slippery on a wet deck. You wear them and you'll be overboard before I'm past the first buoy. Second, you're not on land now, no nails or dirt to step on and plenty of clean white decks that have to be scrubbed dean every time somebody puts a scuff mark on them. And third, I'm the captain of this ship so you'll do what I say without argument. Is that understood?"
"Yes, ma'am." It was the smaller boy. He was maybe thirteen, with a mop of curly red hair that would look like an Afro if the boy had not been so thoroughly Irish in appearance.
Ted glanced at the older boy. He glared back, then realized this trim muscular woman was not going to be bullied. "Yeah," he said. They arrived at her berth and began taking off their shoes.
"Why don't you take yours off?" the older boy asked.
"Because they're boat shoes." She unbent a moment. "If you buy them in the expensive part of town they're boat shoes. In other parts of town they're sneakers or 'tennis shoes' and cost half as much."
"Sheeeeeeeiiiiit!" the older boy growled.
"Down forward next to where the mast is stepped," Ted said crisply. "And don't forget to flush it."
To her mild surprise the boy actually had to go. He finished removing his shoes and socks and went below. "There ain't no door on this crapper!" he complained a moment later.
Ted pulled the slide shut and began setting the jib. Normally she would have motored away from the dock but the wind was nearly nothing and she had a couple of extra hands to help push off so she guessed she might as well save fuel. She put the handle in the coffee grinder winch and taught the smaller boy how to wind it slowly as she fastened snaps to the forestay. The jib was hanging limp in the calm and they were setting the mains'l when the boy fumbled with the cabin slide and came back on deck.
"Ain't you got an engine?" he asked.
"There's one basic rule to remember about engines," Ted explained. "Never sail yourself into some kind of corner where you need an engine to get out because no matter how well you tune it, the damn thing never starts when you need it."
"Sounds like my old man's car," the boy growled.
Ted glanced at the sullen boy and felt a sudden flash of rut. A fine thing, she thought. Here I am thirty-nine, widowed, with just about everything I want in the world and suddenly I'm thinking screwy thoughts about some fourteen-year-old loser!
Covertly she studied the boy, wondering what accident had given her a sylph body that had brought her up out of the slums into the deeper dreariness of daily ballet practice. It was funny. Now that she was middle-aged and had given up dancing her body had finally filled out until at thirty-nine she had the kind of body most girls exercised and dieted for when they were eighteen. One of these days, she decided, she was going to fix her hair straight in some youthful style, put on a mini, and see just how many stiff pricked studs she could fool.
Not that she intended to do anything about it. If Ted had been a hot pants type she would never have sacrificed her best fucking years doing the splits for some usually queer ballet master. But still, this boy was-interesting.
He was taller than her own five-two. Probably when he was through growing the boy would be a football-player-sized giant. Right now he was slim, dark, with a Latin… she studied the boy's face and decided he was not Latin. That nose had to be Greek. She caught herself speculating about the bulge in his too small Levi's. Idly, she counted the years since.
Virgil hadn't been half the cocksman his own PR network made him out to be. He had been mildly and pleasantly surprised to discover that Ted really
was a virgin. But he had made no effort to fill in the lost years. Once or twice a week Virgil had knocked on her door and if she had felt like it they had enjoyed a quiet friendly fuck. If she had been under the wrong phase of the moon, or not feeling quite up to it, her husband had said his polite good-night and gone off, leaving her in solitary peace. It had been a good life.
When Virgil had with dramatic suddenness taken ill and died of something mysterious to do with his lymph glands she had felt the loss keenly. But it had been the loss of a good and respected friend. Ted had now been a virgin for twenty-five, uncomplaining years. Just as uncomplainingly, she had accepted the fact that there would be no more semi-weekly visits to her bed chamber. She was thirty-nine, she had her health, a steady income, and a small yacht. Now what was she doing looking at the swollen crotch of this little bastard's Levi's?
She devoted her attention to the other younger boy. "That's the jib," she explained. "These two winches are called coffee grinders. They're to pull it in tight when the wind's blowing hard."
"You think it'll blow today?"
Ted glanced at the sky. "We ought to have a fair breeze in an hour or so," she guessed.
"Wish somebody'd blow me," the older boy grunted.
Ted decided to pretend she hadn't heard. "This's the main sheet," she continued. "And a sheet is a piece of rope to pull the sail in. It's never the sail and don't ask me why, that's just the way it is."
"Sheeeeeeeeeeeeet!" the older boy muttered.
"I sail this sloop all by myself nearly every day," Ted said. "Without the help of any males, chauvinist pig or otherwise. I'll be happy to teach either of you how to sail but if anybody wants off now's the time before I cast off this stern line."
The silence was absolute.
She considered the thousand ways the boys could fuck up casting off and decided to do it herself. Running bow and stem lines aft to the cockpit with a single turn around the bollards she waited until a gust of wind filled the sails. The yacht heeled and she cast off. For a moment nothing happened, then suddenly they were under way, tacking to windward up the crowded basin.
Once they were clear of the basin and headed
out toward the last buoy she started teaching the boys how to steer. It turned into a lovely day as the overcast burned off. Bright sun and a good sailing breeze made the sloop dance along, practically sailing itself. "Keep her pointed toward that buoy," she told the youngest boy, and went below. She was changing out of faded denims into shorts and halter when she saw the older boy frying to pretend he was not looking down into the cabin.
It was funny. All the years she had danced semi-nudity was so common nobody paid any attention to where they shed their tights or tutu. But then, most of the boys in ballet had been more interested in each other than in the girls. Suddenly Ted realized she was thirty-nine, with the body of a twenty-year-old capable of leading a bishop astray. And she was being looked at by a boy in the absolute prime of his sexual vigor. She wondered what it would be like to be male, to be fourteen, to be so obsessed with fucking that he was unable even to think about a woman without mentally calculating his chances, dreaming and fantasizing about how it would feel to slip his hot hard cock into the soft warmth between a woman's… suddenly Ted realized the soft warmth between her own hard-muscled ballerina legs was tingling in a way she had not felt for years.
She finished getting into her shorts and halter. They were both of dark, almost navy blue and set off her long dancer's pony tail of blonde hair in a way that turned men's heads. She came back on deck and to her surprise the younger boy was still steering in the general direction of the buoy she had aimed him at.
"Would you like to steer for a while?" she asked the older boy.
"I sure would," he said. Something about his tone left no doubt that he was not talking about steering. She caught herself wondering what it would be like to…
"You live here on this boat?" the younger boy asked.
Ted nodded.
"All alone?"
She nodded again.
"Ain't you got no husband or no kids?"
"No," Ted explained. "My husband's dead."
"You pretty," the thirteen-year-old said. "How come you ain't got a bunch of men hangin' 'round?"
"I don't know," Ted said. "Maybe they just got tired of hanging and dropped off."
"Sheeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiit!"
"Is that all you know how to say?" she asked the older boy. "By the way, what's your name?"
"Albert"
"Is that all?"
"Albert Warfield."
"I'm John O'Brien," the younger boy said.
"You can call be Ted," she said.
"That's a man's name."
"Do I look like a man? Anyway, Ted stands for Theodora."
The older boy volunteered something for the first time. "No," he said. "You sure don't look nothing like a man!"
Suddenly Ted wished she had worn slacks or at least something less revealing than shorts and halter. It was her own fault. She had never been around horny boys like this. The only boys she had ever known would have zipped her up without a second glance. It was the older girls she had had to be careful about.
The boy-now what had he said his name was?-Albert was doing as good a job as could be expected steering. But she knew it was hard for the boy to keep his eye on the buoy when it kept wanting to stray back to the firm line of her well-muscled thigh, to trace the curve of her defiantly skyward pointing tits. She still had a ballerina's body-but a ballerina's body that had filled out into full-blooming womanhood, with an ass made for grabbing, tits big enough for a man to get his hands on, and with a waist that still remembered those hours and years of constant exercise.
Ted was still a woman. She was reminded of it every time she stepped from her bath and-studied her naked body in the full-length mirror. She-was solid from head to toe-not an ounce of flab. She was, and she knew it was plain fact and not just wishful thinking or bragging. At thirty-nine she was in better shape, with a better body and even a better face than most of the bikini queens who lorded it over their tiny harems of a half dozen surfers. The only difference was Ted didn't have a man. Not because she couldn't trap one, but because she hadn't ever really needed or wanted one.
The jib fluttered. She glanced ahead and saw the boy was still steering properly. She wound the jib sheet around the coffee grinder and taught little John how to sheet it in. A moment later they took up slack in the main sheet and the Sloop settled down on her lines again. She had been afraid a day's sailing with a couple of inexperienced boys would be a nightmare but so far they were doing pretty well. "When we pass that buoy we're going to come about," she warned.
"What's that?" John asked.
"It's kind of exciting if you've never done it," she said. "Suddenly the boom slams over and sails are flapping and everything changes sides. The hull lays over the opposite way and then you settle down on the other tack." From the way the boys looked at her she knew they hadn't understood anything.
"I can think of something exciting," Albert muttered.
"I'm sure you could," Ted said. "But it takes both hands to steer and if somebody doesn't we'll tip over and all drown." Suddenly she realized neither of these boys would know how to put on a life jacket if there were an emergency. She showed them where the life jackets were under the cockpit seat and put one on. Albert's eyes never left the straps as they bit into the soft yielding flesh of her crotch. He sighed ecstatically.
She knew what the boy was suffering even if she had never experienced it herself. Some people, she guessed, needed it worse than others. When she had been Albert's age she had gone to bed so tired and sore each night she had never had time even to think about sexuality. She supposed it was the aimless dull nothingness of life in the ghetto that so obsessed these boys with fucking. More than ever she was feeling the same thing herself lately. It must be, she supposed, because she was retired, no longer working herself to death at the practice bar, and it had been now many years now since she had had the release of those long, slow, gentle and friendly fucks with Virgil? Suddenly she was assailed with a flash of rut as strong as the boy's.
She wondered what his reaction would be if he knew what she was thinking. Probably run, she guessed. She wondered if he had ever actually what kind of a thing did a boy that age have? A real boy, that is… she had seen some of the boys' in dancing school. They had been athletic enough but somehow she had always suspected they should have been born girls. At least their cocks hadn't even been in the same league as Virgil's.
But this boy was not the type to end up in a ballet school. She wondered if what she had read about ghettos was true. Did they actually start fucking when they were only ten or twelve? Could this younger, curly headed boy with the look of a boyish saint who had managed to be born without original sin… had he already stuck his little tally whacker into the girl next door? Ted wondered how much in life she had missed out on.
Plenty, she supposed. She had never had a date. During all those years she had been too busy dancing ever to think about going to what other girls her age called a 'dance.' But now those other girls were all fat and dowdy and lying awake nights worrying that their daughters might be out doing the same things they had done. Maybe Ted had come up winners after all…
At least she knew none of the girls she had gone to school with would dare wear shorts and a halter any more. Nor could any of them coax a bulge in the Levi's of a fourteen-year-old boy who was going to put this sloop in stays in a minute if he didn't get his eyes off her tits and back on course. "You're pinching it," she warned, then realized she might as well be talking Greek. "Let it out a little," she explained. "Let it go the way the tiller keeps trying to go. That's right. Now hold it steady that way."
The sails stopped their warning flutter and the sloop settled down again. A moment later they rounded the buoy. She warned the boys to duck as the boom slammed across the cockpit. John worked for a moment winching the jib in with the other coffee grinder and they settled down for a long tack. "Now's your chance to get a tan," she said.
"Huh?"
"Go on up to the foredeck and take off your shirt if you want," she explained. "We won't have to move anything for an hour."
"Who's gonna steer?!" Albert said.
"Who wants to?"
"I do!" little John said.
Albert turned over the tiller to the smaller boy. He went forward, peeling off his shirt and lay down where he could keep his eyes on Ted's smooth hard muscled body. She felt her crotch tingle from the intensity of his gaze. God, she thought, what a torture to be young.
It was a novel sensation for Ted not to be working her sloop. She knew instinctively from the feel of wind and wave that the smaller boy was steering a proper course. She leaned against a stay soaking up sunshine, thinking idle goatish thoughts about what might happen if she had gone asea with only the one boy instead of two.
She remembered the odd look from the gone-to-fat lady in the station wagon. Served her right she guessed, going through some mailing list of boat owners and assuming Ted was a man. Ted had had problems from time to time with her masculine nickname but she wasn't about to change it. If for no other reason, at least a Ted Stickles didn't get the breathers and obscene phone calls that lay in wait for a Theodora.
She wondered what it would be like to get an obscene phone call. Funny. All the years she had been in show business and chances were the average nun had more of a sex life. People wrote erotic novels about the adventures of ballerinas. Why didn't somebody someday write about the manageress of each company, some fiftyish female with a face like a sackful of hammers who lurked in the lobby and could chill the hard-on from the most persistent of stage-door-johnnys?
The boy was staring at her crotch. He stopped staring at it only long enough to inventory her tits. Damn him! Ted was damned if she would go below and change into slacks. It was her yacht. She would wear whatever she damn well pleased, if the boy wanted to stare, let him. It would be his stone ache and not hers.
Somewhere a bell buoy tolled mournfully. A harbor seal sunned himself on the rocks a hundred yard-s windward. Miles to sea she saw the bulk of an aircraft carrier dwarfed by its mushroom-shaped cloud of black smoke. She glanced at the sky, at the sun. She could hold this course for another hour and a half. Then it would time to turn around and get rid of these boys. She wondered if they were enjoying their first sail.
From the corner of her eye she glanced at Albert. The older boy lay on the foredeck, head pillowed on his shirt. He was really a rather handsome boy when he forgot to keep looking angry and important. His slim body was well formed. Someday there would be hair on his chest but now there was only the same heavy fuzz that covered his chin. His chestnut hair was wavy and, thank the gods, he had not plastered it with greasy kid stuff.
He lay at a slight angle, trying not to show that he was looking at her. Even so, she could see the bulge in-his Levi's. What, she wondered, would it be like to be young and male, to suffer incessantly from that demanding drive-slave to six inches of cock that would never lie down and stay down? What, she wondered, would it be like to lie down flat on her back with all her clothes off and let the boy try himself out on her? Did he know how? Had he ever done it? Someday somebody would know. Ted knew she never would.
Too bad. It would be fun. And what could she lose? She lived alone and never took the pill and never seemed to need it. All the years old Virgil had been sticking it into her she had never caught an heir in her trap. She had no family to be outraged. And her friends… if anybody from ballet days were to learn she was playing around with boys it would bring no more than a smile and a raised eyebrow. What could she lose?
One hell of a lot, she knew. Most of all Ted knew she could lose her freedom. She wasn't quite sure what they were but she knew there were laws about playing around with underage boys. She had a nice quiet life on this boat, enough money so she would never have to twist her ass into a pretzel again. She had everything she needed-until lately. She wondered if being thirty-nine and maturing late had anything to do with it. Suddenly she was beginning to feel all the urges that had bothered other girls-girls who were now fat and flabby grandmothers while she was still built like the proverbial brick pagoda.
She was going to have to do something about it, Ted knew. It just wasn't healthy to bottle up something like this. Either she would have to enter into some working relationship with one of the lonely graying men who lived aboard their boats at the marina-or she was going to end up doing something foolish with some boy entirely too young. She wondered what it would feel like to have this boy on top of her, struggling to push his hot, throbbing maleness into the opening she had kept intact for twenty-five years. Good God, she thought, I was a virgin, stiffening thousands of cocks in the twenty-five dollar seats for more years than this boy's been alive!
She squinted into the sun and wind. The younger boy was steering well enough. It didn't really make any difference if he drifted off a couple of points. There was nothing to hit any closer than Hawaii. She looked through squinted eyes at the other boy. He lay face up on the foredeck now, his cock making a prodigious bulge in the crotch of his tight stretched Levi's. What would happen if she were to go over and pull down his zipper, let all that straining masculinity spring free?
It was unhealthy to dwell on that kind of thoughts. She guessed she'd better go below and see about rustling up some lunch for these kids. She was about to step down into the cockpit when she felt a hand close over her bare ankle.