HOUSE SITTERS

When I was 14, my dad made me go to every house on our block and introduce myself. I offered my services in lawn mowing, weeding, washing cars, whatever the local neighborhood boy gets hired to do. It was summer and I was supposed to start "earning my way" in the "real world," as my Dad liked to say. "It builds character." What it really seemed to build was a set of menial job skills.

The extra money I earned each summer helped me go to movies, eat pizza with friends, as my Dad did not give any type of spending allowance in his "Real World." And the work, summer after summer, was steady: each summer, the lawns needed mowed, cars and motor boats and RVs needed scrubbing before and after their owners took their 2-week vacations. When the homeowners were gone, they'd have me pick up mail, water their flowers, and feed any pets. Dogs usually went on vacations with their owners, so mostly my chores involved dashing fish food into aquariums, or feeding cats and changing litter boxes. Not exactly glamorous. But year after year, the work was steady and the neighbors kept calling me back.

Then, in high school, I had a girlfriend. I invited her over to hang out with me when I went over to the Barkers. Bill and Bonnie Barker had a ranch house with big windows, modern art painting on the wall, square furniture, and a back patio with a pool and a tiki bar. Pool chairs and darts, they obviously threw cool pool parties. The rumor was that they were "swingers." Frankly, I didn't care what the Barkers did when they drove off in their RV for the week. All I knew was that I had their house to myself, and my girlfriend and I (like any teenagers) were going to take advantage of the situation.

My girlfriend was older than me, and she seemed so mature. We wasted no time in fixing drinks from the tiki bar. As I mowed the lawn, I became hot and sweaty. She suggested we cool off in their pool. "But I don't have my suit," I said.


"Duh," she said. "Big deal." She stripped and dove in. I followed. We swam and splashed an hung out, sipping on our "mai tais." I couldn't believe my luck, it was as if all the menial labor had finally paid off. I had a house totally alone with my girlfriend. Maybe some of the guys thought she was a bit "plain Jane," but to me, she was beautiful, and had a perfect figure. They hadn't seen her sunning herself by the pool, or sitting on the pool chair, naked as a jay bird.

I lost all my innocence that week. Drinking, skinny dipping, then washing the chlorine off with my first co-ed shower. In the afternoons, I'd quickly do my chores so we could swim and relax. We'd kiss and fondle each other in the pool, in the shower, on the patio.

On friday night, I told my folks that I was catching a movie with my friends. "Ok," my Dad would say. "You've earned it."

Yes I had. It was the last night of my housesitting for the Barkers, and I intended to make it a private date. No sooner than I was out the door, I headed down the block to the Barker's, where she was already waiting.

In the house at night seemed extra dangerous, extra naughty, and extra thrilling. Curiosity overtook us, and we couldn't help snooping around. The Barkers' master bed had a big headboard and two built-in side tables with drawers. In one, we found a jar of valseline and a torpedo-shaped plastic vibrator. We laughed. In the other drawer we found a stack of magazines. I'd seen Playboys. They were pretty common back then for my friends to find, sneak out and peek at. This stack was a magazine I hadn't heard of.

The women were far less attractive than the Playboy bunnies, but they had fewer inhibitions. Rather than soft focus, dreamy come-hither looks, the women in Mr. Barker's magazines spread their legs, parted their patch of curls to show the pink, wet skin. They got on their knees, butts in the air like dogs in heat wanting to be mounted. I was rock hard as my girlfriend and I casually flipped the pages. The images were completely lewd. In all the images I'd seen, women were coy, flirtatious, and silly. In those images, the models seemed to say, "golly!" and "ghee!" but in the images we were looking at, the women stared directly into the camera, eyes holding the viewer, their legs open with no questions asked, just a statement: "now!" I had no idea what was going through my girlfriend's head then, but my mind was exploding. It was a totally new way to look at women--not as passive, but as direct and sexually powerful.

Just then a photograph fell out from between the pages. It was a small black and white, the type we all had in scrapbooks the decade before. In it, a woman sat on a chair, in stockings and garter, her legs spread. It was similar to the images in the magazines, but even more erotic, because it felt real. The glossy image was tangible in my hand. I knew this was not just any woman in a magazine, but a specific woman, someone who had posed just for this image.

"Oh my god!" said my girlfriend. "That's Mrs. Barker!"

We held the image to the light and inspected it.

"See, with long hair. Like ten years ago."

If the week had challenged every sexual idea I'd ever had, this completely blew my mind. I had always seen Mrs. Barker as an "adult." She was married, had a house, went on vacation. I mowed their lawn and cleaned their pool and fed their fish. The term "adult" in my mind meant anyone not a student. There were three categories to me: little kids, students, and adults. Adults were old; they were nothing like students. Yet it never occurred to me that Mrs. Barker was probably around 30. If the picture had been snapped a decade ago, she would have been maybe 20? Not that many years older than my girlfriend. Mrs. Barker had a similar figure: lovely medium sized breasts, and the curls between her legs looked a lot like the curls of my girlfriend.

"She's foxy," said my girlfriend. "Look at those stockings."

I hadn't really considered the stockings. Now my eyes took them in, and how they framed her legs and pubic patch. I nodded.

"Let's do that!" said my girlfriend.

"Do what?"

"That!" she said and jumped from the bed. She went over to the dresser and began to sift through the top drawer.

"Go," she said.

"Go what?"

"Find a camera."

I was confused, overwhelmed. I moved as if in slow motion. It all seemed like a blur. I couldn't find Mr. Barker's polaroid, but found an older 35mm with film in it. When I returned, my girlfriend had found some stockings and a garter. With the magazine open on the bed, we reencated some poses.
She lay back on the floor the the curtain, her legs parted. She looked down at her nipple, hard with excitement. Snap. She sat on the rattan chair and opened her legs. I could see beads of her excitement in her tight curls. Snap. She pinched her nipples hard. And moaned. Snap.

I couldn't hold back any longer. I had to take her. We made love like we never had before, not soft and romantic, but hard and passionate. We were both so hot. She clawed my back and wrapped her silky legs around me as I pumped. I could see the open magazine and the image of Mrs. Baker as a 20-something sexy woman. I thrust deeper, harder, feeling not like a teenage boy having awkward sex, but like a man taking a woman. It didn't' feel like me and my girlfriend having sex, but rather two adults, two married, experienced adults gong at it in white hot passion. My girlfriend screamed as her orgasm over took her. I couldn't stop myself and gushed a huge load inside her.

We collapsed, sweaty, exhausted, but our hearts still racing, our breath ragged. Soon, we'd be ready to go again, and tried every position we could think of. She straddled me and rode me, her breasts bouncing, her hand reaching back and cupping my balls, making me shoot another load inside her. We rested entangled, and then I was hard again, and took her a third time, her on her knees, her breasts hanging down, jiggling, her pale bottom in the air, slapping back to meet my thrusts. I grunted and shot my last bit of semen.

We were totally spent, our hair wild, our skin salty. My cum leaked out from between her legs, and made wet spots on the bedsheets. Hers labia was red and swollen, soaked from her own orgasms and my spunk.

It was now late and we had to hurry. She helped strip the bed and change the sheets. And in a panic to avoid getting grounded, we kissed quickly, and each ran our separate ways home.

The Bakers returned, so our week of naked bliss was over. Our week, though, would have lasting effects. We knew we were more in love than ever, and that we wanted to get married, and have a house of our own. Thus was good, because we soon learned that my girlfriend was pregnant. Although we were young, it was happy news. It meant the end of summer jobs and stepping into a new role, the "real world," as my dad like to call it.

So I got a steady job, and I had to go around one last time around the block and tell my neighbors that I'd no longer be available for odd jobs. It certainly felt like the closing of a chapter. When I got to the Barkers, Mrs. Barker was home. She told me that was too bad that she would have to find a new summer pool boy, that I had been such a good worker. "We really appreciated how you took care of our house," she said, with a wink. She smiled at me, as if we shared a private secret.

As she talked, it was hard not to see her in relation to the photo we'd found. I knew what she looked like naked, when she was closer to my age. I knew that she liked sex like I liked sex. That I had done what she had done. On her floor, in her chair, on her bed. Then suddenly it dawned on me: That last night, in our rush to wash the sheets and get home, we'd forgotten the film in the camera.