Three Sides of the Coin (Catherine I) (22 page)

             
Steven stood and ran down the beach before his courage gave out.  He set out at a pace he knew he could keep up for hours.  As he rounded the point, he hoped that he would see her bright red bikini, but it was not to be.  The beach opened up and he could easily see down the beach for a mile and he knew her pace would not let her be near that far ahead.   He imagined that she had turned to go up to one of the endless beach houses or hotels along the shore.  Out of habit really, he kept his jogging pace up for another five minutes so he wouldn't appear to be doing what he was doing; and finally he stopped and walked a minute before he turned back and thought about what he would say to Kathy and Mark.  He was proud that he had overcome his reticence, but wished he had decided sooner, and maybe he would have met her. But maybe she would have been angry or a boyfriend would have found him talking to her, and then he realized he was ‘sour-grape-ing’ the entire thing.

             
"Are you looking for me?"  A voice called out.  He looked over and there lay the red bikini girl on a beach towel.  He immediately was embarrassed that his search pattern had been so linear and hadn't expected her to stop and lie down.  She smiled casually at him, knowing full well that he was embarrassed.

             
"Yes," was his simple reply.

             
"Come sit down then," she offered, as she sat up and moved over to make room for him.

             
She introduced herself and in the course of the conversation, Steven found himself wondering what he had done.  As beautiful as she was physically, with clear blue eyes, flawless skin and not a wrinkle on her body, her mind was as empty as the sea beyond the lapping waves.  She offered him a toke of her marijuana and even told him to meet her at a party that night, and gave him a deep, drug induced, (so he imagined, in retrospect.), kiss before he was able to leave.   As he jogged back down the beach, he realized that it had been worse than a rejection, or a boyfriend intervention.   A perfectly formed body had been wasted on a small mind.   He was easily at peace with himself and he never even thought twice when he skipped the party that night.

             
And that was the way it was so many times.  Whenever he would chase a pretty young thing, he found that there was a reason they were available.  On the other hand, he discovered that many pretty, shy girls had many things to say, all stored up inside, waiting for someone like him to open the floodgates of thoughts.

             
For him, shy pretty girls were puzzles.   What could he do or say to get them to respond?   He found it easy to talk to them.   It was a soft and gentle way.   The shy girls did not preen or act distant like the party girls.  They did not flirt and flit.   He could tell, he could always tell.  And so he made them laugh.  That was the secret to shy girls.  Pay attention to them and make them laugh.

             
The hard part about shy girls was that there was no off switch.   He imagined that all shy girls had as many thoughts and ideas as all the other girls, and once you found the on switch, all those thoughts and ideas were doomed to come flowing out.   But not all thoughts and ideas need to come out, if the truth be known.

             
So he would find himself with the problem of how to break up with these shy girls.  In most cases, he found, they were happy to break up, they just didn't know how.  They knew their ideas and thoughts were not interesting to him, but they would usually A.) Try a few more, hoping that something would stick, or B.) Keep up and hope he would break down and beg for mercy, so they wouldn't have to.

             
Occasionally, he would completely surprise the young lady and she would be heartbroken.  Those were tough on him as he did not ever wish to cause harm.   As a result, he weaned himself off the shy girl circuit and his dating career slowed as a result.

             
Dating became an increasingly rare event as the only women that seemed to fit him were beautiful, confident women who wanted to be with a confident, smart, but shy man.   Since these women usually had the pick of the men, it wasn't often that he would be in the right place at the right time for the rare lining up of the moons that these conditions required.   But oddly enough they did.

             
What made it all possible was the fact that the most beautiful and confident women were less confident of their beauty than one would think.  They knew they weren't hideous, but they all knew they could be better.  The essence of confidence rather than ego was this simple fact: confidence admitted to being good, but knew it could, and should, be better.  As a result, they tried.   Ego-centric women were vain and assumed they were entitled to something, but also feared that they might lose it.  So despite their vanity, there was an air of desperation to them that seemed to flow around them like smoke around a fire.   They would fling themselves at the best looking men to confirm their pride and rich men to buy insurance for a future.   It was never a mission to build a relationship, it was always about them.   They would fear age or criticism.  Being ignored was the worst punishment and foretold of the end, the old wrinkled woman with the shopping cart.   So they pursued stuff and surgeries to buy time and a future.  They would drink or drug themselves to buy away the fear and anxiety.  As the result, they did the very thing they were trying to avoid: They made themselves ugly.  Fortunately, they stayed away from the likes of Steven.   He was not good looking enough for them, and never rich enough to be plan B, and maybe, just maybe, they had enough integrity to realize that they would hurt him unnecessarily.

             
But the women he needed to be with, the confident beauties, saw in him what they needed: someone to love them, to help them, to augment them, a true partner.   And like other couplings they did not always work out.   We are all just a few crucial preferences away from total incompatibility.   Classical vs. Country & Western Music; Meat lover vs. Vegan; Atheist vs. Devout Christian; Sauerkraut vs. Indian food; Dog vs. Cat person, Liberal vs. Conservative politics .   And sometimes these are not at all a deal breaker.  So there is some karma in all of our lives.   And that karma may have brought Steven and Catherine together.

             
He was naturally inclined to defer to women.  And Catherine, naturally, liked to get her way on just about everything.   And until the Big Fall from the ladder, she thought she needed an equal partner in the sack.   But once they started to experiment with a more female aggressive style in the bedroom, they both started to discover things, delightful things, about sex, about minds and about themselves.

             
One Saturday morning, as he started the shower, waiting for it to warm, she told him she wanted him to shave all the hair off his genitals and he did so.  When he came out of the shower and dried off, she stood in front of him and had him remove the towel.  She found it interesting how vulnerable it  made him look and how powerful it made her feel to see him like that.   She sensed, rightfully, that he felt slightly lessened with the hairless condition and that he felt ambivalent about it. She found she discovered his ambivalence about the sex intoxicating.   He seemed staggered by wanting and not wanting the same thing.   It amused her to see this clever man reduced to uncertainty.  It made her feel the stronger of the two.

             
For his part Steven was amazed how something as insignificant as his pubic hair had sheltered him.   As he stood before her, he felt subservient to her and then as she sat in a chair in the bathroom and produced a pair of women's underwear for him to put on, he felt knocked down three levels.   He tentatively put out a trembling hand and took the white see-through panties in his hand.   As he slid them up his legs, he noticed the little pink and green flowers sewn on the sides.  There was no doubt that these were women's panties and as he pulled them up, Cat stroked the wrinkles out and her hands were like electricity on him.   This is what he had wanted for so long, and it was better than he had ever thought.   He had, of course, bought cheap panties before and had tried them on, imagining a moment like this, but this was so much more.  This was not just him and his imagination, this was him and the love of his life.  He suddenly panicked, imagining that she was going to pull the rug out from under him, to say that she couldn't go through with it and her first thoughts were correct and that he had a problem.   But she did not.   Instead, she said, "Tomorrow I want you to shave all the hair off your legs and chest.  You can leave it on your arms.  But the rest must go.  I think I like you pretty."   She stood and fiddled with his hair and his panties and noticed he was trembling, trembling like a little girl, she thought.

             
"You like these don't you?" She asked, smiling into his face, as she ran her hands over his body possessively.

             
"Yes," a whisper rushed out of him.  "I do.  Thank you."  He said with a quiver.   She found his sudden, almost girlish, demeanor erotic and she reached forward and tweaked his nipples.  He gave a contented sigh and she felt a surge of erotic power go through her.

             
"Perhaps I should turn you into my little girl." She said playfully.  She was amused by the reaction his penis showed to this statement and the confusion running across his face.   She rushed ahead to see what other things she could do to throw him off kilter.  "Perhaps a bra," she said running her hands across his chest, "To cover your little girlie ‘titties’,” and then, "A dress, a nice sundress that just covers your panties so you'll be constantly worrying about showing your unmentionables."

             
She reveled in his frozen posture and ran her hands across his backside.  "That way I could push your dress up and play with you anytime. You'd like that wouldn't you?" 

             
He let out a little sound that she found precious and said weakly, "Yes."

             
"I didn't hear you," she brought her lips close to his head and demanded into his ear.   She felt him sag and felt another surge of power, as surely as he felt a surge of helplessness, when he said louder, "Yes, Mistress, I'd like that."

             
Cat delighted in this turn of events and vowed to take things as far as she could, as quickly as she dared.   She found the already willing Steven to be more compliant as she made more changes in the relationship.   It was not all sex all the time, but now sex became at least a low background noise in everything they did.   She had him wear panties every day they were at home, and slowly found herself fascinated with his nipples as they became permanently hard and seemed to connect directly to the part between his legs.  So they became a new sex organ for her to manipulate him.

             
Steven found himself slowly being comfortable as her “Fifties housewife" or "Little lusty girl.  He was amazed how his self image changed.   As a male in society, he had always thought of himself as bland and quiet and that as his role in that society, he was to augment and be an observer of the more flamboyant females.   As opposed to the animal world where the males preened and bragged on their colorful feathers and huge manes, the human world he felt belonged to the female and they controlled both the pace and  show.   So now, he felt both humiliated and proud.  He was humiliated that he wanted to be 'sexy' and showy.   It was so out of character for him, but yet sex was meant to be a release from the rest of the mundane world.   And so it became more of a release than he had ever imagined.  

             
Cat's fingers on his nipples, his 'little titties' as she described them, became a touch he found he craved.  He found himself curling into her to caresses like a cat.  He extended his natural modesty to include his breasts and was careful to keep them covered.  When she bought his first bra, he felt like what he imagined a young girl would have felt, a strange pride at coming of age.   As things progressed, he found himself, for the first time in his life, wanting to be sexy, rather than just wanting someone sexy to be with.  He actually enjoyed the greedy feeling of wanting her to touch him, to pay attention to him and he felt great pleasure when she enjoyed herself with him, both physically and mentally.

             
Cat enjoyed seeing him writhe beneath her hands, his wanton thrusting of his body to her hands.  She felt ever so in control as she rejoiced at working him into a frenzy and then rejecting him, making him wait.  She loved the whimpers he gave out as she would say, "Later.  If you are good, maybe later."   She thrilled to the fact that he loved her control over him and wondered what else she could do.  As the months passed, she found out.  She had him compliant and pleasing.  She had him talking and confessing.  She had him open to her and he became closer and closer.  She found their relationship was getting more complex and thorough.  Sex and mind and heart all blended together as they explored what she could do.   She found herself being more confident, as anything she tried seemed to bring a new level of interaction between them.   The more she did, the closer they became.

  She wondered why everyone wasn't doing this
, as happy as she had become.   Then she realized that it was more than just two people playing at roles, it was two people playing at roles they were destined for.  And like Sauerkraut vs. Indian food, it probably wouldn't work for everyone.  She doubted that Steven could ever take the dominant role, as Captain Jack had done with her, but she equally knew that she and Captain Jack would have not have likely met in a natural world; and if they had, they would have surely been such a water and oil mix that they would have spun out of each other's orbit within days.   And so she assumed that this would be the same with any dominant man.