After the bright, brisk Hello with which she answered the phone, Fenella’s next words, Oh Jo, how lovely, came at a lower, more intimate pitch, with a throaty, feline vibrancy that sent pleasurable shivers over my skin.

“Are you back home now?”

“Yes, I’ve been home for a while.” I took a breath to steady myself, then went on: “I’ve been reading. About you. And about Pilar…”

“Oh…?” Her voice softened still more to a silkily caressing purr. “And…?”

“I got to the bit where you and she first danced together.”

“Only that far?”

“Fen, I had to stop there. It was… oh god, it was so…”

“...arousing…?”

“Yes. Imagining you and her… holding each other close. Your breasts pressing against her, hers against you… That got me excited…”

“Just from reading that?”

“Yes, just from that. It reminded me of what it felt like having you in my arms…back then…”

“Ah, yes… I know… I’ve been remembering that too…”

“Yes, darling. You wrote about it.”

“…remembering you kissing me, your hands caressing me, your fingertips trailing up my thighs…”

“Oh god yes. Remembering the feel of you… I just had to stop reading. I got wet thinking about it”

I switched my phone into speaker mode, freeing both my hands, then I leaned forward, extending my arms between my thighs until my fingertips reached the hollows behind my knees – I’m very sensitive there – then leaned back, drawing my fingertips up my inner thighs and pulling up the hem of my négligée.

My forefingers came to rest full length against my outer labia, and I began to squeeze gently and rhythmically from either side, teasing my clit with the indirect pressure and release.

“I know what you mean,” Fen murmured. . “The memory does that to me too. Ahhh…”

I heard a brief, faint but unmistakable moan.

“Are you feeling wet now?”

“What do you think? Imagining you…getting wet imagining me… Ohhh…Oh yes…” I could hear her breathing heavily in the pause before she went on: “So, when you had to stop reading because you felt so wet – mmm, I’m loving hearing you talk about this – did you have to do something about that excitement?” There was no mistaking the erotic breathiness in her voice now. The purr had become a soft, sensual, growl.

“Yes, I did.”

“What did you do, darling?”

“Surely you can guess.”

“Ohhh, yesssss…” Her voice was little more than a whisper now, but so full of seductive vibrancy it felt as if she had reached out to touch a deeply intimate part of myself. “Sure I can guess. But I want you to tell me what you did…what you felt… Go on darling, tell me!”

I started telling her, in full graphic detail. From the sound of her breathing and her increasingly frequent sighs and moans I could tell that my blow-by-blow, stroke-by-stroke account was turning her on big time. When I got to telling her how I had fucked myself anally she gave a loud, growling Mmmm…

“You sound as if you’re really wet now,” I said.

At that point she must have moved her phone close to her wetness, because the next thing I heard was the unmistakable sound of her fingers playing in it. I could also still hear her voice moaning in the background.

“Fen… oh shit that is so fucking hot!” I could feel my own juice welling up inside me already. I spread my legs wider and slid two fingers in and out of myself - in and out, in and out…positioning my phone so that she would be able to hear.

“Ohhh! Ahhh! Oh Jo, don’t stop doing that, don’t for chrissake stop! I wanna hear you cum!” Her accent was becoming more strongly kiwi as she became more aroused.

“I wanna hear you too, hun!”

“Yeah, let’s go for it! Oh fuck, this is fantastic…”

I’d had plenty of phone sex in my time, but nothing to match this in sheer intensity. Our cries became louder and more incoherent, cutting across each other in escalating counterpoint, each of us egging the other on, each pushing the other to new heights of pleasure.

“Oh baby…aaahhh…fuck! Ohfuckohfuckohfuck…!”

“Shit, I’m close already…”

“Me too…”

“Oh god, oh fuck, oh, oh, I’m gonna cum, I’m gonna cum, I’m cumming, I’m…aaaahhhhhhh!!!” Fen’s long-drawn-out wailing scream finally pushed me over the edge in her tumultuous wake.

For long moments neither of us spoke. I could hear her breathing heavily, with occasional groans and gasps which I guessed were caused by the same kind of post-orgasm contractions that were rippling through me. Presently I heard her give a deep, contented sigh and murmur: “Do you like being fucked in the arse, Jo?”

“I love it.”

“Me too. But I love giving it as well. I’ve got a great strapon. When you and I get together, I promise I’ll give you the anal fucking of your life. It’ll be the absolute arse-fuck from heaven.”

“Oh god, Fen, you’re getting me going again just thinking about that.”

“Go with it, baby, I’m with you…”

“Yeah, cum with me again…”

And so we were off on another orgasmic spiral that left us breathless, unable to speak coherently for minutes on end.

“You know what, darling?” Fen murmured at last.

“Tell me.”

“Next time, we should do this on Skype.”

“Oh god yes,” I said eagerly. “But not right now. I’m absolutely exhausted. “

“Worn you out already, have I?” Fen chuckled earthily. “On top of that dear friend of yours? Hey, tell me about her.”

And so I began to tell Fen about my beloved aunt Gemma and the part she had played in my life. When I described how she had seduced me when I was seventeen, she chuckled softly. “No wonder you knew how to turn me on back then!” Then she added, her voice suddenly full of sadness: “You were so lucky.”

“I know that now,” I said. “I didn’t realize how lucky I was until I read about you and your parents. Do you hate them?”

“There was a time when I kind of did. But no, not now. They didn’t mean to be cruel.” Then her voice brightened again. “Anyway, go on telling me about your lovely auntie.”

She hooted with laughter when I told her about the horse-riding, the saddles and our Steeplechase game, and how we had ended up rolling about post-orgasmically in the grass the previous day. “Omigod, Jo, that is so fucking hilarious and so fucking sexy! I wish I could have seen you! Better still, joined you… Tell you what, though, I know someone Gemma might get on well with. Maybe even sexually too - who knows?”

“Really?”

“Yes. Her name’s Rosemary. Rosemary Williams.”

“Your partner Claire was a Williams, wasn’t she?” I ventured tentatively, not sure if I would be entering painfully sensitive territory.

“That’s right.

Rosemary’s her mother. She’d be about Gemma’s age, I would guess. A very outdoorsy lady, very environmental as well. Rides horses too. She lives in Tekapo. She and a girlfriend run a sort of outdoor education and adventure business together – taking people horse-trekking, doing guided nature-interpretation trips, teaching bush skills, that sort of thing.” The kiwi twang was fast disappearing from her speech now.

(I should explain about Tekapo. It’s a small town south of Christchurch, a bit over two hundred kilometres away, in a sparsely populated inland area of the South Island often called the Mackenzie country (named after a notorious nineteenth-century sheep rustler). Its location at one end of Lake Tekapo, plus its semi-alpine environment and its nearness to Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain, are among the things that make it a popular tourist spot.)

“Sounds as if they might have some common interests business-wise,” I commented. “Some of Gemma’s consultancy work is agriculture-related, but a lot of it is sort of environmental and outdoorsy too. Recreation, eco-tourism, a lot of her clients are organizations involved in stuff like that. She’s pretty passionate about the impact of agriculture on rivers and streams too.”

“That’s something Rosemary cares about a lot. So did Claire. Rosemary’s quite political in her eco-concerns – she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Green. Well, it definitely sounds as if these two ladies should get to know each other.”

“What about your aunt Amy? Was she bi?”

“I call her Mum now, and I call Uncle John Dad. They’re still alive and flourishing at nearly eighty. And would you believe, they are still at it sexually. I’ve heard them when I’ve been to visit and stayed with them. Mum was never bi as far as I know. She accepted the fact of my being attracted to girls, but I don’t think she was ever-able back then to see it as a permanent way to be, and I know she always hoped that I’d eventually turn into being straight. She talked with me a lot about sex and sexuality, but she never mentioned ever having had or wanted to have sex with girls. She wanted me to have an enjoyable sex life – bought me my first vibrator, “fixed me up” with my first boyfriend - and I did try. Partly I suppose because I loved her and wanted to please her and Dad.”

“Didn’t you actually enjoy sex with boys at all?”

“Oh, sometimes I did quite enjoy it, when a guy knew what he was doing, or when it was with someone I liked a lot. But even the most pleasurable sex with guys left me feeling somehow unsatisfied, as if there was something missing. Look what I did to poor old Dan; wore him out trying to get at whatever that something was. It wasn’t until I met Pilar that I found it. You must read about it.”

“I’m going to – in bed.”

“Best place for it! Of course, Mum and Dad long ago came round to accepting the way I am. They were very fond of Claire and genuinely made her feel part of the family, and they were marvellous to me after her death.”

We chatted on for a while; then all of a sudden I started to feel very tired and hungry, and Fenella accepted that we should probably call it a night. “After all,” she teased me, “you need to get up your strength for tomorrow evening!” That was when we had agreed to have our Skype tryst.

“I’ll be counting the minutes until then. God, Fen, I can’t believe how quickly this has all happened.”

“Ah, but remember, darling, how many years ago it began. It hasn’t just started now. We’re catching up, Jo. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do...”

I went through the rest of the evening in a blissful daze, with a feeling that somehow all my senses had been sharpened. My spicy chicken casserole seemed to taste spicier, my favourite craft beer seemed to have more than its usual tang.

Most surprising to me of all was that, when I took my tablet off to bed with me, intending to continue reading Fenella’s story, I felt no need to masturbate. I just wanted to cherish the wonderful feeling of physical and emotional fulfilment that I had attained with Fen. I wondered if she felt anything like the same.

I picked up the story where I had left off.

Pilar had walked to the dance club from her nearby apartment, but she returned to it in Fenella’s car.

“While we had been dancing.” Fenella wrote, “I had been waiting for her to make a move, not daring to do so myself, and feeling tense with desperate hope that she would and fear that she just mightn’t. At the end of one dance she kissed my cheek and just said ‘Come home with me.’ I nearly wept with relief.”

To summarize Fenella’s very explicit description of what followed, Pilar spent hours pleasuring her in ways that she had never imagined. She lost count of the number of orgasms Pilar gave her. “But it wasn’t just the orgasms that blew my mind,” she wrote. “It was the whole way she made love to me. Not just with her lips, tongue, teeth, hands and fingers – she used her whole body to caress me. When she titfucked me, she didn’t just rub her nipple against my clit – she got me to pull my cunt wide open and filled it with her breast, pushing and grinding it so far in I swear the nipple touched my cervix. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced anything like that – the feeling is incredible.”

Oh yes, I knew. Gemma could send me into orbit doing just that.

“That night,” she wrote, “I experienced something that was infinitely more than just pleasure. I can only call it sheer ecstasy, bliss beyond anything I had ever imagined. As if my whole being, my very soul, had been melted and remade. She took me to heaven, opened the gates and led me in.”

Fenella’s words were turning me on and reawakening the urge to touch myself. Juicy beads were oozing out from between my outer labia. I decided to resist the urge for the time being, just to see how much further I could be aroused by her words alone. I had never heard of anyone having an orgasm simply from reading , but there might always be a first time…

What was it she had written about Pilar? Earthiness and elegance, passion and poise. Professor Hazelhurst could have been describing herself and her writing: earthy passion erupting from elegantly poised prose, weaving a seductive sensual spell…

After her description of Pilar’s lavish lovemaking and her own feelings, Fenella turned to describing the fresh delights she began to discover under Pilar’s guidance as she explored her lover’s body and its sensitivities.

I managed to hold out from touching myself until I reached a passage in which she described them tribbing for the first time, cunts and clits pounding and grinding together, breasts flying, bodies bucking, spittle spraying on gusting breath as they cried out in mutual ecstasy… Suddenly the need for a quick powerful orgasmic release overwhelmed me.

I didn’t need to lubricate my cock-shaped vibrator; my cunt was overflowing already. I slid it in, turned it on to full power, then turned over and lay face downwards, my mound pressing against the heel of the hand that was holding the vibe inside me, while the other hand kneaded my left breast (by some anatomical quirk, my left nipple is more sensitive than my right). I began to thrust with my hips – slowly and gently at first, then rapidly accelerating and increasing in force until I was pounding in a mounting frenzy. I came violently and loudly, with Fenella’s name on my lips, and soon fell into a blissful sleep.