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.