“Tis right as rain I am. Don’t be concernin’ yourself, Skipper,” I assured him. I had the rail by both hands now and I was arching like Elvis-the-pelvis toward the pitch-black stairway. I closed my eyes and saw stars as the eager tongue soothed the tenderness engendered by the previous day’s frustration.
Then I was engulfed all the way, and my head spun with the pressure of the hungry lips and the sudden, anticipatory contraction of the throat. I lunged forward and exploded. “WOW!” I yelled loudly, covering the sputtering, choking sounds below.
“What is it, Mr. O’Ryan?” The Captain was alarmed at my outburst.
“Over there.” I thought fast and pointed into the darkness. “Did you ever see anythin’ like it now?”
“Like what? ”
“Too late. It’s gone.” My manhood was being tucked neatly back into my shorts now. The zipper was pulled up silently, there was one final pat, and then it was over.
“What’s gone?” the Captain wanted to know.
“Indescribable it was,” I told him. “Too bad you missed it. Well, I think I’d best be turnin’ in now. Good night to you, Skipper. Good night, Matey.”
“Good night,” the Skipper answered.
But the Mate didn’t reply. I glanced over at him. His belly was pressed against the rail in the shadows. His eyes were bright and staring straight ahead. He was breathing quite heavily. I wondered . . .
In retrospect, I also wondered about something else. Was it really Mavis? I couldn’t be sure. I tried to put it out of my mind, but despite myself, I found myself staring at the hands of the members of the crew and looking for long fingernails. The longest of all seemed to be on the hands o the slimy, pudgy steward. I suppressed my rising gorge when I realized this, and then I did put it out of my mind. Some things you’re better off not knowing for sure.
In any case, the sneaky sex interlude would have been just like her. That’s what I thought to myself the following day when she came up on deck and returned my greeting in such a freeze-out manner that I began wondering if I was suffering from delusions about the things I should have been sure had happened between us. Mavis was all sexless tweedy again, and when I called her attention to the fact that we were well into the Red Sea, her only response was that the water looked brown, not red, to her. Then she stuck her nose in a book so pointedly that I almost felt called upon to sniff my armpits for signs of whatever it was my best friends wouldn’t tell me about.
The freeze stayed on until early in the morning of the day we started through the narrow Red Sea passage between Aden and French Somaliland. I was asleep in my cabin. It had been a hot night, and I’d left the porthole open. It was a high bunk and a low porthole. This had enabled Mavis, standing on the deck outside with her back to the porthole as she chatted with the steward, to reach behind her with her arm, lower her hand, and pull the blankets off me. Like a homing pigeon, her hand had reached into my pajamas and found its favorite roost. Of course, that’s only a guess, because I was sound asleep at the time.
I don’t remember what I was dreaming, but it must have been a lulu. I say that because the feelings in the dream carried over into wakefulness. And wakefulness sent me shooting almost straight up horizontally from my sack as I finally exploded under Mavis’s caress.
“So that's Aden over there,” she was saying to the steward. “My, isn't it picturesque?” Her fingers, having lost their prize, were wiggling at me now.
Obligingly, I wiped off her hand with the sheet. She removed her arm from the porthole then. I sat up and looked out of it.
“I think I’ll take a stroll around the deck,” Mavis told the steward.
I watched her move off, and then found myself looking straight into the steward’s face. “Will there be anything, sir?” he asked unctuously.
“No. Not a thing. I’m not needin’ a thing,” I told him. I settled back down on the bed and slowly woke up the rest of the way.
The next evening, as we sailed through the Gulf of Aden, the Captain had the crew put on an amateur show for us. It was pretty dreadful, but Mavis saw to it that I was in no mood to be too critical. She sat directly in front of me, the Captain beside her, the Mate alongside me. Our section of the deck was in the dark area beyond where the crew had set up a pair of spotlights for their makeshift stage. I think it was during the harmonica duet that Mavis made her move.
She moved her chair slightly backward, and then reached behind her until she found my hand. She guided it to the side part of the back of her chair and left it there a moment while she took off her tweed jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Then she reached around as though scratching her ribs or something and pulled my hand under her arm.
The blouse she was wearing was sleeveless. Her jacket covered my hand as it slid into the armhole. Her bra was very loose— purposely so, I guessed. There was plently of room for my hand to get under it and palm the nipple of her breast.
“They’re really quite good, aren’t they?” she whispered to the Captain.
“Yes, they are,” he agreed.
The act drew to a close, and the three of them applauded loudly. I didn’t clap. I was at a disadvantage, you see, one hand being tied up, so to speak. Instead, I squeezed Mavis’ naked breast enthusiastically. She responded by bouncing up and down in her seat as if carried away by the high caliber of the performance. I took it for granted it was my performance she was carried away by, though.
One spotlight was killed for the next performer, an off-key Neapolitan-style tenor who sobbed rather than sang his selection. I didn’t sob along with him, though. In the darkness, I was grinning from ear to ear as Mavis once again reached back and got her usual intimate grip on me.
We had our own rhythm going now, and it was double-time compared to the tenor. I squeezed, she squeezed, I squeezed, she squeezed, etc. . . . It didn’t take much with Mavis. No ultimate intimacy was necessary, if you know what I mean. She was a veritable patchwork quilt of erogenous zones, with that one breast I was fondling getting an A-rating for sensitivity. I squeezed, she squeezed, I squeezed, she squeezed. . . . The song ended. “Bravo!” We both shouted it together, with one voice, rising from our seats with our enthusiasm. Then, before the lights could come on, we hastily rearranged our clothing. And Mavis never blinked an eye in the face of conversation with the Captain and the Mate.
By now it should be obvious that Mavis was a girl who got her kicks out of performing sexually under the noses of others. I guess there was something about getting away with it without getting caught that she found particularly exciting. Nor did the excitement seem to pall on her throughout the rest of our journey.
After the Gulf of Aden, mealtimes in the Indian Ocean were even-Steven affairs with never more than three hands on the table between the two of us. The Captain and the Mate never seemed to catch wise—partly, I guess, because I was becoming more and more adept at concealing my sexual releases. Mavis, of course, had never had any problems that way. Still, I wondered what the steward though about the state of the tablecloths and any other evidences of our sly kanoodling.
The night we passed the tip of Ceylon headed toward the Straits of Malacca, Mavis was out on deck, stretched out on a chaise longue, a light blanket over her as she chatted with the Captain. He puffed on his pipe in the deck chair beside her, never dreaming that, concealed by her blanket, I was on my knees on the deck beside Mavis, my face buried just under the hem of her raised skirt. And she kept right on talking as she reached under the blanket with one hand, grabbed the back of my neck, and held my head rigid as spasm after spasm shook her body.
The next day we sailed the Straits of Malacca between Sumatra and Malaya. When the Mate called Mavis, she leaned out of her cabin porthole to see the Sumatran coastline. Seated out of sight on the bed behind her, I had both hands under her skirt and was squeezing the foam-rubber globes of her derriere as she ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the scenery the Mate was pointing out. Like her breasts this area proved highly reactive. She had three violent body-quakes while she passed the time of day with the Mate.