First Summer: A Long Holiday Ahead

I threw back the curtains and was almost blinded by the intensity of the light and colours that flooded in to my room. Deep blue skies and aqua blue seas speckled with shimmering flashes of reflected sunlight. Dominating it all was unfiltered dazzling orb of the sun still low in the morning sky casting its rays directly in to my East facing room.

Its warmth washed over my body caressing my skin where is fell on bare flesh and seductively warming the material of my bikini and the erogenous zones that lay beneath. I admired for the first time the view from my room. There were some advantages to being both the youngest child and only daughter. Daddies give you the best room in the holiday house.

Sitting below the expanse of blue hues in my field of vision, and standing just across the road from our cottage, was a line of low costal scrub which hid the yellow sands of the beach. To the right was a headland jutting aggressively out to sea giving the town the point surf break for which it was renowned.

As I moved down to the foot of the bed the window gave me an angle to the north. The road ended a couple of houses past us and from there stretched an endless forest of gums. From the maps I'd looked at before we came up I knew a Nature Reserve started from there and went for miles along the beach. Just across the road was a path through the scrub to the beach and from this particular point in the room I was able to get just a glimpse of the beach itself.

Picking up my beach bag I headed out to the living room

In the five minutes since I'd finished breakfast and gone back to my room to get ready, the older of my two brothers – Steve – had come out to the living room, turned on morning television and draped his tall lanky frame untidily over the lounge chair. He looked like a giant rag doll which had been thrown carelessly in the chair's direction. Lanky might be a bit harsh. He had the tall slim athletic shape my parents genes had bequeathed to all their children, enhanced in this case by his devotion to surfing; a sport which if nothing else gives a guy a nice figure.

Still, dressed in a thread-bare old T-Shirt and an equally ancient faded pair of board shorts which together constituted his PJ's and with his straw blonde hair showing a decided lack of either combing or a wash in anything other than salt water, the comparison was a valid one.

The doors to my parent's room and that of my other brother Brad were still closed; the late night arrival up here still taking its toll.

From occasional glances in his direction following our exchange of good morning greetings I knew Steve's eyes were following me as I packed my beach bag; first with a towel from the suitcase still sitting in the living room and then with a sun-dress retrieved from the suitcase in my room. Showing greater perception than I'd normally credit to a brother, he made a correct deduction from my packing of the sun-dress.

"Hay Sis, you're not going out dressed like that are you?"

I turned towards him. My brain wracked itself in search of some witty put down reply to his tease, but it was too early in the morning, "Mum really liked it when she helped me buy it. Anyway, since when are you my protector", was the best I could come up with.

Looking straight at him for the first time I noticed that the leg he had over the arm of the chair gave me a direct view up the leg of his shorts. Not only could I see that he had no undies on, but the eye of his one eyed trouser snake was looking straight back at me. While that was definitely more than a sister wants to see, I found the sight both repelling and distracting.

As a beach orientated family, none of us were shy about our bodies; but nor did we go around naked. It had been many years since I'd seen Steve exposed and I was barely old enough to remember when it last happened.

I was snapped back out of my distraction by Steve's voice. "I'm not. I'm just worried about all the guys who are going to be arrested for jerking off as you walk along the beach"

"I'll take that as a compliment then. I'm heading out for a jog on the beach"

"Don't say you got a compliment from me or you'll ruin my reputation as a brother"

I remembered I wanted to take the purse which was still on my dresser, so headed back in to my room. Dresser is a generous word for it. It was nothing more than a small chest of drawers with a tall mirror on top and apart from the double bed and a single bedside table was the only other piece of furniture in the room. Indeed it was probably the only other one that would fit. With my suitcase on the floor beside it just about all of the floor space was covered with only a narrow walkway around everything left.

When I picked up the purse I emptied out my credit and bank cards, just in case I lost it at the beach; leaving just enough cash for something to eat after my exercise.

As I did so I had another look at myself in the mirror. I was actually quite chuffed by Steve's backhanded compliment. Mind you the bikini I had on was quite brief – what one would call Brazilian in style and one of two new similar ones I'd bought for the holiday. The triangles of the top barely covered half of the orbs of each breast and the pants were very low cut. With a simple design, no padding and skin tight fit, even in the warmth of my bedroom you could see a bit of nip pushing through. As I looked down at the pants I noticed my Brazilian wax job meant there was a very obvious hint of camel toe.

That only left the hair.

This jogging along the beach routine I'd promised myself I'd get in to was really just a response to the fact we were going to be in this holiday house for three months. As nice as it might sound, for me it was three long months.

My father had long service leave from his Accounting practice and my oldest brother was finishing Uni, so that would be the end of any extended holidays for him. We looked at overseas possibilities, but it was the Northern winter and nobody could agree with the options available. So in the end, we just rented the beach house in which I now found myself– from Mid-November until mid-February.

It was OK for my dad and brothers; they were mad surfers, so the attraction for them of this town with its world famous point break was obvious. I quite like the beach, but there's a limit to everything. I'd be missing my tennis competition and dance classes and in the process most of the exercise I'd otherwise get. Socially and particularly in relation to boys I thought I'd had a pretty good idea of what these holiday towns are like; it's only the bogans who don't leave town to go to Uni and get a life after they finish school and if you meet someone else who's also on holiday, they're gone home at the end of the week. Finally, I normally spent a good part of the Christmas holidays working to save up enough to give me some measure of financial independence during the University terms, so I'd be missing that too.

Still, I liked my family and it was important to them. I was happy enough to fit in. Plus, without me even mentioning it, dad anticipated my concern about working and offered me a special allowance to make up for it; which I thought was extraordinarily generous.

Which is a long way of saying that just going for a jog is not something I was normally motivated to do. To help myself, I'd given myself a motivational image I was pursuing. Crass though it was, the image was of the bikini clad exercise bunny which is always part of the background to a beach set in any Californian movie or TV show.

You know the one...

Tall and athletically slim. Check

Pretty faced. Somewhat subjective, but I'll give myself a check.

Clear skinned. Check

D cups bouncing gently in an undersized bikini top. Hmmm. No, don't quite make that one. My perky B's are going to have to do. I might console myself with the fact there's only one reason those in the movie are bouncing gently rather than like tennis balls in a stocking – and we all know what that is and even with the fact the B's balance the rest of my figure nicely. Still I had been a late developer. For many years at school I had nothing when all my class-mates seemed to show impressive bulges in their school uniform, so perhaps I have been left a little scarred and insecure in that area. Even now perhaps my one body image wish might at least to have been given a C.

Tight little glut muscles working teasingly inside her bikini bottoms. Check. I can make that happen.

Long blonde hair plaited seductively in a pony-tail and secured with a pink ribbon fastened in to the most perfect bow; swinging from side to side with every stride; which brings us back to the hair with which this mental diversion started. While I had the hair, there were two problems with this. The first was a lack of bother spending the time plaiting my hair this early in the morning. The second was the lack of a pink ribbon or indeed – due to a packing oversight - any hair tie to pull my hair back with. I cast through the hard drive of my brain for a movie cliché which I could substitute but for some strange reason 'girl with long blonde hair blowing in her face when running with a following wind' just wasn't in there.

Modest and self-effacing. Of course that's not part of the movie image, I just threw that in because by now you must be wondering what sort of person I am. If you have in mind one of the Plastics out of Mean Girls, nope. Not even close. Indeed, even at an all-girls school I was so far down the pecking order that the equivalents of the Plastics couldn't be bothered picking on me. Maybe the answer is in the fact I actually wanted to follow my father and elected to study Accounting. Too boring to bother with and certainly not enough of a social wanna-be to care.

Plus as much as I think I've been blessed to date with good looks, sufficient brains and a happy family, I've always thought the Ancient Greeks knew what they were talking about when they said "never call a life lucky until it's over" and spoke of the dangers of hubris. Luck can change at any time and you should never take what you have for granted nor disrespect those presently down on theirs.

Why did that crass movie image motivate me? In part boys might be the answer, so Steve's comment had hit home. But it was more complex than that.

The beach was just across the road, so, asking Steve to let mum and dad know where I was I picked up my bag and headed to the door still clothed only in my bikini. I didn't even bother with shoes – after all this was a holiday.

In a strange sort of way, the bikini, my motivation, Steve's comment and the flash I had up his pants were all interconnected and now the thought process had been started my brain kept working on it as I crossed the road to the beach. Steve was a player. Girls threw themselves at him and he wasn't rude enough to throw them back. I knew that eye I'd got a glimpse of had seen the inside of an awful lot of pussy (and I hope you'll forgive me here if a lifetime of living with older brothers has let me pick up less decorous aspects of the way they talk). Me, I was a virgin. Nearly 21 and still a virgin.

Not for religious or moral reasons, not even because of any attitude of my parents – my brothers had girlfriends sleep over all the time and my mother had long ago insisted I carry a few condoms in my purse. She was far more concerned with me not getting pregnant or catching something than pretending she could stop her teenage children from experimenting.

Nor did I feel I was 'saving it' in the sense of doing that was something special. It's just that, much as I yeaned for it, sex to me was part of a bigger package of love, companionship and desire and I'd never really got that far in a relationship.

I know these days a girl is allowed to want it nearly as much as a guy and there were certainly times I felt sexually deprived or yearned for something more. Maybe I am a little old-fashioned, but however driven the need for sex was, it wasn't enough to lower my expectations; even masturbation didn't seem to offer what I really was seeking and I'd never tried it. I was an avid reader of Cleo magazine and read all the articles about sex and that sort of stuff, so considered myself as knowing about as much as you could know without ever having been there.

I'm happy to acknowledge I had a suite of sexual fantasies, and when the confusion of a young girl's life made it hard to get to sleep, or when I was feeling deprived and wanted to indulge in that lovely feeling of strong hot arousal, I'd entertain myself with them as I dropped off to sleep.

My favourites all involved slow tactile romantic love making; his hands touching me, exploring me as I willingly surrendered to him. In my most used one our bodies were intertwined, our mouths engaged as with sensitive hands he pulled the string ties to strip a bikini off me and fingers me. But it says something about my love life that in all my fantasies, the males were faceless. Even when I had a boyfriend, he wasn't the one in my imagination. It was like the right man to fill out those fantasies just hadn't come along yet.

Just once a recognisable face popped up in one; and even then I didn't knowingly put him there. I'd been entertaining myself with such thoughts and was slowly dropping off to sleep, when suddenly I realised my lover had morphed into a guy from my Accounting 1 course at Uni. Even though he sat opposite me in the class, I'd never spoken to him, never really focused very much on him. I'd been in class with him that day and he'd been an active – and I thought quite intelligent - participant in the class discussion; so maybe he'd imprinted himself on my sub-conscious. Because two of the guys from my friend group sat either side of me in the class, it more than most was one where I hadn't really got to know the rest of my class-mates. And silly though it seems, I never really had followed up and made the guys acquaintance.

In some ways my favourite fantasy did disclose much about me. Notice it was not penetrative. I have to acknowledge it was more powerful for the fact it didn't confront the fear I, and I'm sure every girl, feels about being penetrated for the first time. And probably that fear contributed to my virginal status. When a fantasy did involve penetrative sex, I was nearly always on top, in control.

Notice also the bikini. Embarrassing though it is to admit it, my one seriously erotic weakness is an attraction to – almost an obsession with - bikinis. I feel sexy in them. I don't just mean I think I look sexy in them. I mean they activate feeling of sexuality and they trigger a sense of arousal in my erogenous zones. I like the way they fit my body like a glove. I like the way their soft silky material pushes against and rubs so very subtly on the most sensitive parts of my body.

I have drawers full of bikinis. I often wear them as undies and a bikini top is virtually the only type of bra I wear. If I'm feeling vaguely randy, I sometimes wear one to bed because they seem to trigger erotic dreams and compliment the fantasy I usually indulge in. Maybe the closest I've come to feeling the need to masturbate was when I did wear one to bed.

But I do also know I look good in them in a way that is attractive to guys; which is what was so reaffirming about Steve's comment. I am confident about my body – vague desires about a bigger cup size notwithstanding – and know its sexual power. They actually make me feel confident when I wear them. Whether it's a skimpy bikini at the beach or appropriate displays of cleavage or leg and figure hugging clothing in other contexts, I use my figure to attract attention without – I hope – going so far as to look slutty in the process. But I think about how I dress. How I dress when I am safe and in control is different from my approach when I am in a less secure environment.

And to that extent it works. There's been no shortage of guys who tried to chat me up. The hard part was to sift out those who just wanted sex from those offering something more; and even in the latter category working out which ones might really push the right buttons. Plus I know enough about myself to realise that some of the shy ones who might actually suit me might feel competed out, so I am always willing to make the first move on a good prospect who is hanging back.

So once I've got through all the angst of pissing off those disappointed by the refusal of a quickie, once I've as nicely as possible shaken free of those who clearly weren't right for me, why haven't I found myself a boyfriend? Why hasn't there been someone my heart fell for and my body wanted?

I know some of the fault is mine. I am a little boring; probably more than a little in the eyes of some. I'm not a big party girl, I don't really like to drink much and I'm not keen on bars and pubs. So without the social lubricant of alcohol and the venues designed for it, guys have to work a bit harder to keep my interest and they're not going to get my body by getting me drunk enough. Somehow a relationship had never reached take-off point.

That was starting to bother me. I'd hoped that I might find the right guy during my first year at Uni. While I was part of a great mixed social group, the right guy wasn't there. Then I'd hoped something might happen during the long summer break – which is why coming to this place for the whole break was not the joy for me it was for the rest of the family.

More recently that feeling of sexual deprivation had been growing. I still want the whole relationship package and I certainly wasn't interested in just hooking -up; it's just the desire for it was now made increasingly urgent by a more primitive urge. That's where, in the most obtuse way, catching a glimpse of Steve's trouser eye that morning had set the thought processes rolling. That eye might have seen the inside of a lot of pussy, but it made me think about the fact that somewhere out there was one that would be seeing mine. Where was it?

While completely distracted by these thoughts, I walked down the track to the beach and looked up and down it. To my right was the main part of the town and the flagged area about 400metres away a little beyond which was the headland which closed off that end of the beach and created the point break. To the left, the beach just seemed to go on forever as it ran alongside the bushland. Apart from someone in the water about 50 metres up the beach, it was deserted. It was time to put my motivational image into operation.

In the end I'll admit my motivational image was not just crass. It was sexist, demeaning, inappropriate and any other adjective you want to attach to it. But I offer two defences. The first is that as much as the exercise bunny is there just to appeal to the baser elements of the male half of the audience, if there's one thing my brothers and their friends had taught me it's that every single male has that baser element within him however nice they might otherwise be. Beauty might be skin deep, but without that element of attraction nothing else happens. Perhaps the more important thing I had learnt is that beauty can take many forms and I was well aware I was offering only one; albeit a popular one.

The second was more practical. It was still the one that got me out here early on the first day of my holiday. So on that basis alone I'm sticking to it. In good time half my objective was to be seen by a beach full of guys as I exercised. But today I was just starting out. I wasn't sure how far my fitness would carry me; for all I knew I'd spend most of my time walking. Since it would also give me a chance to explore the more natural side of things, I turned left and started jogging along the firm damp sand near the shoreline.

I soon decided the bag I was carrying was a mistake. It was a canvas satchel type with a long cloth shoulder strap. Unfortunately if I swung the bag around behind my back it constrained my movements; but if I left it at my side it swung back and forwards uncomfortably – the beading on it even threatening to catch the side ties of my bikini and pull the bow. Plus it somehow didn't fit the picture of the cool sexy athlete exercising on the beach that was my motivational image. I was starting to think about ditching it and picking it up on the way back.