“You must be the gamekeeper.”
The words were spoken by a thin, pale woman of about thirty-five, wrapped in a red waterproof jacket, jeans and walking boots. She was standing at the foot of the treacherous, mossy concrete steps that led down from my holiday apartment, Gamekeeper’s Cottage. It was on an estate in deepest Cornwall, former home of some lord of the manor who had made his fortune from the tin mines that used to flourish in the area.
“Yes, I’m the gamekeeper,” I said, entering into the spirit of the woman’s playful greeting.
It was seven in the morning. These days I can never stay in bed, even when I don’t have to get up. And on this week-long break in the countryside, I certainly didn’t have to get up. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to meet. I had even turned off my phone.
The woman watched me as I negotiated the block-built abyss, and smiled as I reached the bottom and looked up at her.
“So, what’s the difference between the gamekeeper and the landlord?” she continued, and my eyes quickly scanned hers to see if she was really joking. She wasn’t. It was a genuine question – the genuine question of someone who genuinely didn’t know this vocabulary.
“Where are you staying?” I asked, letting her off the hook.
“The Hen House,” she said, gesturing to one of the new building down the drive. “We got in last night and I’m just exploring. Husband was up half the night cos he had to relax after the drive. I’ve been snooping around, up around the main house. Says it’s out of bounds, but I’ve always been a rule-breaker.”
She looked at me intently, I thought, trying to gauge my response. A rule-breaker engaged in what could be construed as chatting up a stranger. You never know how much to read into people’s off-the-cuff utterances.
The woman had a small, round face and innocent, blankly staring eyes. She reminded me for some reason of a girl I had once met when we were both in our early twenties. She had been brought up in care homes and was accustomed to being taken advantage of by men. This was years ago, when such things were more or less taken for granted. This woman wasn’t her, but I felt strangely protective of her.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” I asked, and she accepted gratefully.
Gamekeeper’s Cottage may well have been originally what it was called. It was certainly old enough and smelled of damp and centuries of airborne forest debris. It was decently furnished in an old-lady’s-house way, with bits of overlapping carpet that didn’t match and a settee too soft to sit on without remodeling your lower back.
The place was just warm enough in the cool of autumn, although I didn’t hang around in the bathroom after showering. The bed was okay, but the mattress rolled you from side to side as if it were made of one thick piece of rubber.
Penny and I introduced ourselves and sat at the kitchen table as the kettle did its stuff. She was a Londoner now living in Norfolk, in an area not so different from Cornwall, but her husband loved exploring the rural parts of the country.
When she warmed up and opened her jacket, she was flat under her sweater and jeans: no undulations to get a man wondering about roaming her hills and dales. But there were undoubtedly little inclines and hollows to be explored.
“Are you a morning person?” she asked guilelessly.
“More and more,” I replied. “I can’t stay in bed past 6:30 these days.”
“Me too,” she said. “But, I mean, are you… lively in the mornings?”
Again I scrutinized her words, looking for hidden meanings and invitations.
“I suppose so,” I said. “But there isn’t that much to do early on, is there?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Depends who you’re with. And there’s staying in bed, which can be boring, and there’s going back to bed.”
Penny’s thighs parted briefly at these words and I was caught off guard, confused, wondering if I was imagining it. If this had happened in the evening its meaning might have been clearer, but I wasn’t used to receiving erotic charges before breakfast.
All the same, she was now out on a limb, and a gentleman doesn’t leave a lady there.
“Didn’t you get much sleep?” I asked softly, and she made a “poor me” face. “Would you like to lie down for a bit?” I continued, not knowing if I was being gallant or exploitative. But a swelling cock doesn’t really do gallant, so I stood up and took her hand.
“Thank you, kind Sir,” she said with a bashful smile as I led her into the bedroom.
Once in the theatre of passion we clung together and kissed ferociously. I don’t know how long it had been for her, but she was determined to make the most of this opportunity. She wrenched off her sweater and shirt, then her little white bra, before starting on me. Within seconds she was on her knees, sucking my cock and looking up at me with mischief in her eyes.
“See? You are quite lively,” she said. “Or he is, anyway.”
Giving my cock a farewell kiss, she lay back on the bed, arms above her head and legs spread like the common English girl who taught Cleopatra all she knew.
“Look at me,” she said urgently. “Down there. I like to be looked at. I’m not ashamed. God gave me a beautiful pussy and what’s the point in having a work of art if you’re not going to share it?”
I wondered who had put this thought and this line in her head, because it didn’t sound like all her own work. Her pubic hair was shaved into a little heart shape and her crotch really was very pretty, with delicate lips that opened onto a lovely welcoming pink paradise.
I headed straight down to her crotch, bypassing the areas of natural beauty that men are taught to visit before the main event. Penny spread her legs wide and raised them high, giving me unlimited access. I licked her gratefully. She obviously hadn’t had a shower yet, but probably a good wipe with a tissue, because she smelled and tasted beautifully savoury.
She was wriggling down further and further until her pussy was staring at the ceiling and the little hazelnut of colour around her anus was looking at me. I tentatively put my tongue there and she quivered with delight.
“Oh yes,” she said excitedly. “I knew you were a naughty man as soon as I set eyes on you. I woke up this morning wanting this, and half an hour later there you were.”
So I really was her knight in shining armour. Thus entrusted and emboldened, I licked her arse diligently and lovingly and she writhed and moaned and muttered in a high, excited voice.
“Coming!” she screamed, and her thighs clamped around my head, then unclenched and she anointed my nose with her happy, wet cunt, up and down, up and down.
“I want you inside me,” she said with a sort of half-laugh, pulling me up her body until I lay with my cock next to her entrance. With a slick movement her cunt sucked me in and I was sailing along through the cosmos with my penis enveloped by the most wonderful device in all creation. Penny stroked my back and ran a finger into my crack and felt around gently, the rule-breaker doing whatever the hell she wanted. Then she plunged the finger into my arse, worked it around a bit and pulled it out. She lifted herself and wiped the finger in her own crack, then pushed it inside herself and performed the same rite in reverse, wiping her own waste in my valley.
I found myself wondering how a woman could come to this state of ease, allowing herself to do things that were certainly not in the manual, and clearly seeing them as nothing other than natural.
It bothered me, not for the first time, that such uninhibited sex was only to be had with strangers or those to whom we are not really close, and that it all flies out of the window, along with the kissing, when we become emotionally and practically entwined with someone.
If lust really is a mechanism designed to keep men and women together through the pregnancy until parental responsibility takes over the reins, what a pity it has to die when confronted with the mundanities of life. Or is it just me?
Meanwhile, back at the gamekeeper’s bed, Penny and I were banging each other as if there were no tomorrow, and indeed, if this encounter ever had to end, tomorrow was a dismal prospect.
The feeling of orgasm was stirring deep within me, somewhere at the back of my crotch, and she was engaged in a continuous climax like a pan of soup boiling on a high heat.
When I unleashed my torrent into Penny we were both growling and yelping and screaming like some newly-bred species designed for sex and nothing else. I filled her with my semen and she drenched me with her juices, stroking and patting me like a racehorse that had just won the Derby.
As we reentered the earth’s atmosphere we laughed helplessly at ourselves and kissed and silently promised undying devotion, while knowing our adventure was already over, and that even if we could arrange some more time together in our primitive, historic bedroom, it would be different, the sheer lust diluted by affection. And would that be such a bad thing?
