consent, say 14-15 yrs
1 very pleasant
2 fairly pleasant
3 a little unpleasant
4 very unpleasant
In so far as he could make himself address his mind to the problem, he found he thought all four. The age thing didn't come into it: the attractiveness of any willing female past puberty depended for him on her attractiveness, though as far as he knew he had in practice confined himself to those of 16 yrs and over. What counted was the immediacy or lack of it. Some time or other in Hawaii or somewhere, very pleasant; on his next trip to Italy, fairly pleasant; by the end of next month in Orris Park, a little unpleasant; here and now, very unpleasant. Even that wasn't quite right because of the difference between the thought of sexual intercourse and the thought of the thought of it. If he could snap his fingers and boof, there he was in mid-job, very pleasant; if she were really actually in fact standing a yard away on the precise point of starting to show how willing she was, very unpleasant. Not unpleasant, either, just as much as his old man needed to set it trying to haul itself up into his abdomen. But he couldn't write all this down, especially since the question was obviously nothing to do with any of it. Like the good examinee he had always been (best classical scholarship of his year at Charterhouse, First in Mods, best First of his year in Greats) he asked himself what was expected here, what was being looked for. A means of sorting out the child-molesters from the gerontophiles, why yes, and no doubt of making the finer distinction between the inhibited who welcomed any accepted restriction and the robust sturdy husky hardy hearty etc. He ticked 2 and picked up the other paper.
A fantastically beautiful girl with an unbelievable figure wearing a skin-tight dress cut as low as it possibly could be is looking at me with eyes blazing with uncontrollable passion (he read). With lazy languorous movements she peels off the dress and reveals herself as completely stark naked and utterly nude. Her breasts are so enormous that there is hardly room for them on her thorax. They are rising and falling with irresistible desire as with her shapely hips swaying lazily she glides over and stands insolently before me with her hands on her curving hips and her colossal breasts jutting 100 words out at me. I tear off all my clothes and she gives a tremendous gasp of astonishment and admiration and awe. She lies down on a bed which is there.
There was more, but he was still 73 words short of the 600 minimum set by Rosenberg and had already been compelled to introduce two additional girls, the first with immense breasts, the second with gigantic ones, for the sake of variety. He felt that this must violate some important canon of the genre but could find no other alternative to direct repetition. It was not that he had been idle; this was the fourth draft. The first, which had said all he really wanted to say on the matter, had consisted only of nouns, verbs, prepositions, pronouns and articles and been 113 words long; gamma minus at best. Well, he had to find those 73 somewhere before setting off for Harley Street the next morning. What about a black girl? With Brobdingnagian breasts? No no, with gleaming ebony skin. Mm..... The trouble was that being white himself he tended to think about white girls when he thought about girls at all.
Brenda tapped softly at the open door. 'All right?'
'Right.'
He followed her across the small landing, where a Bengal rug lay, and into their bedroom. Here, in a drill they had been through many times together, they lifted off, folded and laid down on an ottoman the patchwork quilt she had expertly made. Again by tradition, lapsed in this case, she slipped off to the bathroom and he quickly undressed and got into bed. He felt calm and yet uneasy, quite resolved to carry out orders but unable not to wish that something harmless in itself would prevent what was in prospect. After a minute he turned over so that he would have his back to Brenda when she reappeared. She had treated with exemplary seriousness Rosenberg's letter about her need to lose weight, had joined the local group of Guzzlers Anonymous at the first opportunity and had already taken off six ounces, but that wasn't going to be enough to make her feel all right about being seen naked, which she had avoided for the past year or more, he supposed.
There was a patter of arrival behind him (she moved lightly for so large a woman) and she got in and snuggled up to him with wincing and puffing noises.
'Ooh! It's freezing. It's supposed to be the middle of April and it's like January.'
'Would you like to turn the other way?'
'No, this is fine for me. Had you heard of comfort eating before?'
'What?'
'Comfort eating. What Dr Thing said I'd been going in for because of feeling sexually inadequate. Had you heard of it?'
'I think so, anyway it's dear enough what it's supposed to mean, which is all balls. If there's anybody who feels sexually inadequate it's me and I haven't started eating my head off. Just another example of thinking that if you name something you've explained it. Like .... like permissive society.'
'I don't think you're always meant to go in for comfort eating when you feel sexually inadequate. And in any case what makes you think you're the one who feels it so terrifically you leave everybody else standing, how adequate do you think I feel when I think about things and look back, that's what I'd like to ....'
Brenda, who had started talking at some speed, stopped altogether because a jet was passing and even at this range she would have to shout rather and she was bad at shouting. A part of the window-frame buzzed for a short time as it always did on these occasions. Eventually Jake said,
'My fault. I just got fed up and guilty and ashamed. Of course you must feel inadequate if we have to use the word, but I can tell you there's no need for you to, it's all me, we went into that.'
'I know we went into it, but we decided it must be me as well as you.'
'You may have thought so, but it wasn't what we decided.'
'Well I think it was. And of course it is, it's obvious. Anyway I'm warm enough now. Hadn't we better get on with it?'
'All right.' Grunting, Jake turned over so as to face his wife.
They intertwined their legs in a friendly way.
'Tell me again what we're meant to do.'
'We take it in turns to stroke and massage each other anywhere but what you used to call down
