take the moral high ground and simply pretend that nothing had happened. If he apologised, all to the good. If not, well, she’d just have to forgive him anyway. That was the way women were, forgiving and modest – sweet and modest – charitable and modest. Always modest. Modest. The damn word landed with a dull thud.
He wasn’t on the couch and it hadn’t been disturbed. There were no dishes in the sink. His shaving gear and toothbrush were missing from the bathroom. His spare suit wasn’t in the closet. There was a space on her bookshelves where his IT books had been.
Jeff had taken his things back to his own apartment.
She’d been dumped. Well, no. She’d dumped him, really. A slap across the face counts as that, right? He’d broken her rule. She’d slapped him. He’d left, taking his things. How did she feel about that? Crushed, for sure. Empty inside? Maybe. She’d thought he might have been the one. Angry? Yes, she was angry. How dare he! Look at all she’d done for him, the things she’d let him do to her. For him, she’d been a very bad girl. She’d enjoyed it all, but that was beside the point. When a girl does those forbidden things for a man she’s doing him a favour, no matter how good they feel. All she’d ever denied him was to let him look at her shameful nakedness. Could that be so important that it’d make him break up with her?
Couldn’t he have explained that?
Perhaps he’d tried, but not hard enough, obviously. The bastard!
What was it about the sight of a girl’s body, anyway? She’d let Jeff bugger her. Bugger, bugger, bugger. Bugger her. Fuck her up her bum. There! If he’d wanted a bad girl, she’d been the baddest, for him. He’d been ready to risk losing that,
Why were men so obsessed with looking at women’s bodies?
On a whim, very quickly, before the impulse fled, Connie sat down in front of her dressing table, slipped the top three buttons of her cotton nightdress and smoothed it down her right shoulder and breast – all the way, not just exposing its upper slope but baring it completely, nipple and all. By reflex, her eyes flinched away but she forced herself to actually look at her own smooth pink skin.
It wasn’t as if she’d never seen a breast before. When she’d first left the commune, it’d seemed that she couldn’t open a magazine or watch TV without them jumping out at her. Seeing and looking are two different things. Her mother had trained her to avert or close her eyes when they were exposed to immodest displays. It was hard. In the outside world, girls wore skimpy or transparent tops all the time, and not just in special places, like beaches, that could be avoided. They also displayed their legs in most unseemly ways. Her mother had allowed that exposed calves were acceptable. Not knees, though. Nor anything higher. Certainly not!
Well, there was her bare right breast, in the mirror, and she was looking at it.
In a way, it was a disappointment. Not because it wasn’t pretty. It was. Her skin was so pale a pink that it was almost translucent. She could just make out a delicate blue tracery below the surface. Her nipple was a crinkled berry, darker than its halo, but not by much. As for shape, she felt she could compete with the statues she’d seen when Jeff had dragged her to the museum to demonstrate that he was right and she was wrong.
How was it that she didn’t find the sight of her own flesh exciting?
Somehow, Connie had been sure that if she exposed herself that way, to herself, there’d be a forbidden thrill. There wasn’t. Not exactly. Maybe a twinge? How about if she imagined that it was someone else’s breast, Shirley’s, the office receptionist’s, for example?
Maybe she felt something. Just a pleasant little buzz?
Is that all there was to it? Why had Mother made such a fuss? Come to that, why had Jeff been so obsessed? It was his silliness that had broken them up. She’d like to … make him suffer! That’s what she’d like to do, and if she dared, she knew exactly how it was she could make him squirm.
For a moment, Constance considered touching her nipple but decided against it. She’d looked at it. That was a good start. Perhaps the first time she touched herself there, it’d be under the bedclothes. Little by little …
Towards what end?
Mother had liked to talk about the slippery slope. One little sin always leads to a slightly greater one, and so on, until you were damned to hellfire for eternity. Mom’d been right when it came to the physical acts. Connie had avoided being kissed until she was twenty but once she’d allowed a boy to put his tongue into her mouth, it’d been an exhilarating downhill ride, all the way down to sucking a man’s cock and finally to allowing Jeff to force his up her bum. After that, there’d been a bit of disappointment. By then, she’d committed all the sins she knew of, except the one of physical immodesty. What next? Well, now she knew. She’d exposed herself, to herself. Next, she’d expose herself to Jeff, just a little, just enough to drive him crazy. And to make him feel remorseful. Eventually, if he begged nicely, she might consider taking him back.
She didn’t dare, did she? Dare tempt Jeff? That way? Did she? It’d be the worst violation of her mom’s rules possible.
If she was going to do it, she’d have to do it straightaway, before her courage failed her. When she went in to work, in just under two hours, it’d have to be dressed as the new and slightly immodest Constance, not as whatever it was that she had been up to now. A frump? A prude?
Constance’s office ‘uniform’ was always a twin-set worn with a single strand of cultivated pearls, plus a straight skirt that went down to just below her knees. She had no alternative outfits, so she’d just have to see what she could do with what she had.
After forty minutes of experimentation, and feeling like a total hussy, Constance left her apartment with the waistband of her skirt rolled over twice, so that her hem just skimmed her knees, and wearing just the cardigan of her twin-set, with no bra under it and with the top button undone. She added a light topcoat. It wouldn’t do to get arrested on her commute.
On the bus, a man gave her his seat. Did the sluttish way she was dressed show on her face, somehow? When she got to the office, hung her coat and turned, reluctantly, to face the population of her working world, Shirley smiled a welcome at her. That was new.
For a while, Constance worked with her elbows tucked in tightly but she gradually got used to her breasts feeling loose and free and forgot about it until Larry, the mail delivery lad, brought her some files. His eyes widened and he blushed. Constance glanced down at herself. Damn! A second button had come undone. She was showing two inches of cleavage.
That was terrible. She wasn’t ready for such a blatant …
Or was she?
If she was so shocked at herself, how come her cheeks were glowing? How come she felt so warm down there?
Larry shuffled. Constance looked at him and quickly averted her eyes. The lad was wriggling to conceal an erection – that she had caused. He was only a boy – barely nineteen. At his age, he most likely had an erection most of the time. Even so, his reaction, she had to admit, gave her a certain sense of satisfaction.
As he turned away, Constance put her hand to her throat to do the extra button up again, but decided not to. Making men horny was kind of fun, she’d discovered. Sorry, Mom!
At coffee break, Shirley was pouring herself an espresso. The curvy redhead
