El Tablado is on the east coast of Tenerife and I was living there because it was cheap. Tenerife is a Spanish island off the coast of north Africa, so it has its own identity and is not sophisticated like Madrid or Barcelona. It was the weirdest town I had ever lived in, so small it was almost a village, with one small shop that was like the focal point and a little, cramped, dark, unattractive bar that was open only when the landlady had nothing better to do.
Tenerife is a volcanic island, which means it has a volcano, and although it’s not active, the evidence of its past is everywhere. The landscape is dry and ugly, inhospitable, and, on the part of the east coast where I was, there was usually a cold wind blowing in off the Atlantic, although the capital, Santa Cruz in the north, and the touristy parts down south were sheltered and hot. El Tablado was originally a fishing village that had been converted into a resort of sorts during the tourism boom of the 60s and 70s. It had no beach as such, but claimed to have. There was a slope of black pebbles down and up which little boats must have been pulled, and a sort of breakwater had been built to keep out the worst of the Atlantic swells. On this stubby dark stone structure were attached stainless steel ladders with which swimmers could climb back up after they had either leapt into the sea or negotiated the perilous, slippery steps.
After a few weeks I came to realise that this place was a magnet for a particular kind of sun-worshipper, an undemanding kind who was not bothered about golden sand or indeed any sand. Access to the sea was all that was required; that and the possibility of lying in the sun and getting baked. Around the corner was an even wilder stretch where the waves thundered in and which was so hard to reach and so uncomfortable when you managed it that it was secluded. That made it attractive to naturists, so generously-fleshed couples could be seen there, their private parts pointed out to sea. I watched them sometimes from the promenade.
Meanwhile, back at the “beach” the local young women would blithely go topless. I can only imagine what they think of people like me. Do they seriously expect us not to look when they are displaying body parts that may have a practical purpose but are also very attractive as physical features? Another thing I realised after a while there was that Tenerifean women don’t seem to mind being looked at.
Women don’t all over the world, in fact. I have remarked before how it is possible to enjoy a mutually-enjoyable show experience as long as the woman seems to feel comfortable with you as the observer – and if she doesn’t, you just stop. Just as importantly, no one else must know she knows she is being watched. To argue that this arrangement is wrong is to attempt to deny that women are interested in sex at all. It has been prudified over the centuries and of course we are now almost at a stage where written permission is required for one person to be granted access to another in any way at all. Of course there are a lot of good intentions involved, and vulnerable people are being protected. But let’s not forget that sex is also fun and as long as respect is shown, we can all enjoy it and should enjoy it without being terrified of the consequences.
So, back to the women of Tenerife. I think many of them actually enjoy being watched. I spent half an hour on a bus looking at a nice but unexceptional middle-aged woman one day and when I got up to leave, she thanked me – and not with relief or sarcasm. We had passed a boring journey with a little harmless fantasy.
The women there tend to be plump; it must be their diet, I suppose. In mainland Spain that is not necessarily the case, but Tenerife is a law unto itself. So the females of El Tablado tend to be on the buxom side, crammed into stretchy bathing costumes and bikinis, some of the late teen and 20-something ones on the trim side of full-bodied but nowhere near skinny, and a few like to go topless to get some sun on their nipples. The older ones, and some of the young ones who have yet to decide to get in shape, are roly-poly and apparently proud of it.
Which brings us to Miranda and her daughter Lita. Miranda was in her forties, divorced and apparently carefree. She had a menial job and not much money but owned a small house that had been in her family for generations. The house wasn’t in El Tablado itself, which was a good thing, as we will get to in a while. El Tablado had a population of around 100. The streets were narrow and the houses were close together. Everybody knew everybody else, apart from the vacationers who came for the weekend or a week, and even then, within a day or two they were part of the furniture.
One Saturday afternoon I was down on the sea wall, grabbing some rays and reading one of the few print books that remained from what was once a nice little library but had been replaced by Kindle and the internet. This roly-poly woman kept walking past, going for a swim, coming back cool and dripping, going to the shop and coming back with ice creams. She and her daughter had taken up residence on large stone step away from the wall. I must have been looking at Miranda, because when I glanced at teenage Lita she gave me a look that seemed to say, “Stop having salacious thoughts about my mother. If you want something to look at, here I am.” It wasn’t a friendly look, but a scolding one. Miranda was sumptuous, not just big. She was a Harrods hamper of a woman, packed with unseen goodies and unspoken promise. Her long curly dark hair cascaded down her brown shoulders and her back, while her bright blue swimming costume was under pressure. When she laughed, which she did often, she exposed a gap where she had lost a tooth just right of centre – not one of the front ones but close. It gave her a piratical look, as if she were about to swing across the way on a rope and hurl herself into the sea. She was a jolly, rollicking woman who knew how to have a good time.
Lita, on the other hand, was quiet; she was not fat but overly-well upholstered, her pale skin barely kept in check by her polka dot bikini. Her thighs were creamy, smooth and inviting, even while her facial expression was forbidding. Her breasts, which recently must have been magnificent, were now a shade overinflated, although there are plenty of men in the world who would see that as a good thing.
Lita had long dark hair too, but hers was straight.
It’s hard to ascertain a girl’s age, but from the way she looked and acted, I guessed 18. I certainly hoped she was, because I wanted to lick my way up those thighs to the fork and nuzzle her springy sexual buns before reaching up and pulling her briefs down and off. She stared back at me defiantly, as if reading my thoughts and daring me to try to make it happen. Whatever happens, she snarled silently, you won’t be having my mother because for one thing she has had her day and now it’s my generation’s turn, and for another she is my mother and as such she’s not eligible for having sex.
The two began an animated conversation that included gestures and glances in my direction. Then Miranda marched over to me.
“Hola. You the English teacher?”
“Buenos dias. Yes, that’s me.”
“My daughter need lessons. You want to show me how you work?”
“Sure. When can I do that?”
“Now. We are going home. You get your books and come with us.”
“I don’t need books at first,” I said. My initial class was always the same: going through the basics of alphabet, numbers etc, and seeing how much the student knows.
“Muy bien,” Miranda said. “We go now.”
We piled into Miranda’s beaten up old SEAT and chugged across the bridge over the autopista to the steep hill inland. Not far up it, she turned off onto a rocky track and pulled up outside a simple little concrete house that looked as if someone had got bored or run out of money and just stopped building it once it was wind- and watertight.
We sat in the kitchen and Miranda got some beers out of the fridge. I declined because I was working, which seemed to surprise her, and Lita said no because she was going out soon, although I suspected she was just in anti-parent mode and anything the so-called adults were going to do was a corny idea. So Miranda sat alone outside while her daughter and I ran through some elementary English. Miranda had spent a year in England in her 20s, working as an au pair, hence her command of the language, but Lita had only had the sort of tuition Spanish youngsters get at school. Her knowledge of grammar was sketchy and her accent was terrible. But she wanted to learn and with the maternal presence out of the room she even smiled once or twice. We just did half an hour, enough for me to assess my student and for my student and her sponsor to assess me.
Then, with the sun dipping and the wind making it as far as this hill, Lita got ready to go out and Miranda made herself and me a baked potato with cheese on a dilapidated barbecue.
A friend came to pick up the girl and they headed up to the one-horse nightlife furnished by two rudimentary bars and some people’s houses, where generations of no good had been got up to.
Miranda kept the beer flowing and became increasingly loud and salt-of-the-earth, the Spanish music pouring out of an old CD player in what seemed to me an endless stream of the same thing. She was good company, though, and eventually we were dancing cheek to cheek in the warm, smoky dusk. Miranda was warm and womanly. She cuddled and rubbed herself against me and her hands roamed my back. She certainly wasn’t playing hard to get and I wondered if that was because we had escaped from the tiny confines of El Tablado and the public gaze. Here at her hillside hideaway it was as if we were in a desert village miles from civilization.
All of this rubbed off on me and soon we were kissing, then fumbling with underclothes (she had changed out of the bathing suit into a long, baggy, dishevelled linen dress) while I was just wearing my daytime shorts and a t shirt.
Before I knew it we were in Miranda’s bedroom, me naked and flat on my back on her big, soft bed and her also naked, crouched above me with her crotch stationed above my face. With steady, deliberate movements she would rub her slit up and down my nose and over my mouth, whereupon I would lick her as best I could before I grabbed her by the hips and held her still and I ploughed her ravine with my ravenous tongue. Her very quick shower had removed the sweat from her armpits and back, but she had adjudged her crotch sufficiently washed by the sea, and I was only too grateful to suck up her natural salty juices. The occasional pubic hair in my mouth reminded me that this was a wild, unsubtle country woman who treated sex like an adventure rather than a page from an instruction manual. I grabbed her more strongly and brought her undercarriage further back to see if she liked having her arse licked. She gleefully readjusted her position to allow me better access and soon she was bucking and lurching and grinding herself against me in the utter abandonment of orgasm. Then she climbed off and went down on me, sucking my cock and stroking it with carefree confidence until I spurted and she moved like a snake to catch my semen in her mouth.
We made circuits of each other’s body for several hours until the heat and the exertion and the after-effects of the sun hypnotised us into submission and we fell asleep, wrapped around each other, to become untangled as we tried to sleep and then entwined again as we remembered things we wanted we do or returned to favourites. We managed to talk just enough to arrange that I should stay the night and relax in bed after she got up for work.
So it was that I was awake in a sweaty, aching pile as I heard the outside door slam and the car fire up and drive away.
I had forgotten all about my new student until I was sitting outside, eating cornflakes, when the screen door slammed and there she stood, wearing just knickers and a t-shirt. She didn’t look surprised to see me, just world-weary, as if her life had disappointed her yet again. The t-shirt gave her body a mystique which bikini-clad near-nakedness did not.
She spoke in Spanish.
“My mom has gone to work?” I nodded and she went back inside.
I heard the shower gush and tried to just enjoy the morning and the strange freedom I felt, being here, leafing through a local newspaper in a foreign country, at someone else’s house with nothing much to do and a beautiful day to do it in. I had spent the night with a lusty, deliciously full-bodied woman and might conceivably do so again. For now, I was stuck with a grumpy young woman who presumably resented the fact that a potential teacher was sitting there with her mother’s permission to teach her English when what she wanted to do was laze around and be young.
On the other hand, she was young, but old enough to do what she wanted, and that included taking advantage of what she must have seen was a sexual opportunity, and the young are more impulsive than the mature, so I imagined she would be mulling it over while she bathed her naked body and made it ideal for kissing, stroking and tasting.
Twenty minutes later she appeared again, wrapped in a bath towel. Her hair dripped onto her shoulders. She had a new mood of positivity, as if she had decided to be on the front foot with this man who clearly wasn’t aggressive, was probably harmless and with whom she could do anything her mother had. Because after all, she was better qualified than her mother.
The fact that she had elected to emerge in this post-shower state rather than fully dressed gave me grounds for optimism. This was the girl who had allowed my eyes to wander the smooth expanses of her thighs, the mountain range of her breasts and that oddly sinful little hollow of her navel, traditional reservoir for a young man’s eager fluid when contraception was stripped to basics.
She sat on the other cheap white patio chair, protected from me by a rickety square table with a metal frame and wooden slatted top that was not part of the set.
She continued in Spanish, determined not to make this easy for me, because I was still a member of the opposition.
“So you think you can teach me English. I am not a good student. I am a Spanish speaker and I like it that way. Why should I bother?”
“The same reason I am learning Spanish,” I said. “They are the two main languages in the world and if we don’t all speak them, we’re going to have to learn Chinese. Do you want that?”
“Why not?” Lita replied with unreasoning defiance.
“Because they don’t even use the same alphabet,” I began, feeling my way onto a well rehearsed argument. “So that has got to be more difficult, hasn’t it?” She stared at me. “Hasn’t it?” I insisted.
“Maybe,” she said, and tried to becalm the conversation there. Something, though, told her it was rude to do so. Maybe it was her decent upbringing, the basic good manners instilled in her by her mother. She wanted to keep talking, even if she wasn’t going to come over to my side.
“So what are you going to teach me?” she asked. “What words does a woman need to know? Fuck? Lick?”
“Kiss,” I said. “We can start with that. You know what it means?” Lita puckered her lips at me half petulantly but aware that even that meant she was engaging with me.
“Men and women kiss,” I said evenly. “A kiss is an application for a job downstairs. You know that saying?” She shook her head.
“It doesn’t start with a kiss,” she said. “It starts with a look. A boy looks at me and I look back at him.”
Unwillingly, she found her eyes drawn to mine and she had to wrench her gaze away.
“You have beautiful eyes,” I said.
“Oh please!” she protested. “You think I am stupid?”
“Too stupid to accept a compliment, maybe,” I said with a slight smile. “I think you have beautiful eyes.”
“Be quiet,” she said, with a quick glance to see if I was offended or shocked. I shook the newspaper straight and pretended to read it. After a minute or two she became impatient; she didn’t like being ignored. She sat still to plan her next move and then leaned back slightly and her thighs separated just an inch or so.
“You said maybe,” she said in a measured tone. “What is the difference between maybe and perhaps?”
“Not much,” I said, happy to be on my subject. “I suppose maybe is more American and perhaps is more British. A bit more formal. In Spanish you have puede ser and quizas. And tal vez. What’s the difference between them?”
“No, you’re teaching me,” she said quickly. “I’m not teaching you.”
“Ah, so I am teaching you,” I said.
“Coño,” she said, an expletive regarded as minor even if it literally means cunt, with that n that has a y sound attached: conyo. It still surprises me when women use it, but Lita, like so many, clearly didn’t think it was noteworthy. To them it just equates to shit or bollocks or even damn. Just a harmless interjection.
“Okay, let’s go through the basics,” I suggested. “The alphabet. Go on.”
“A b c d e, shit I am not a child,” she protested in English.
“ Coño,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“Not what you think,” she said. “Let’s go inside.” She walked straight into her bedroom, which was surprisingly tidy, and showed me a bookshelf, on which were English textbooks and a couple of novels: Oliver Twist and The Firefly Summer.
“Maeve Binchy,” I observed aloud, taking advantage of the non-Spanish words to switch to English. “You like her?”
“Someone gave it to me,” she said. “I have not read it.” Then she turned to face me. “Are you going to try to teach me something? Teach an unsophisticated girl from an izeland?’
“Island,” I corrected. “Let’s start with looking. You looked into my eyes before. Let’s do it again.”
I caught her gaze and held it, uncomfortably for both of us. To ease the pressure I stepped towards her and put my hands on her shoulders. She capitulated and we fell into a long, languid kiss. When we eventually broke it she stepped back and said,
“Do I have things to learn?” Realizing that she was still wearing the bath towel, I hooked a finger behind the little tuck and it fell to the floor. Her hands immediately went down to my flies and she wrenched my shorts and underpants down.
Lita was thrillingly naked, still slightly damp from the shower and with even her pores open. I sat her on her bed and pushed her back, then parted her thighs and put my face in her hot, moist, perfumed crotch. She was like a loaf of bread straight from the oven: warm and fragrant and in the best condition she could possibly be. And just like a lovely fresh loaf, I intended to eat her. I wouldn’t even have to put butter on her, though, because her natural lubrication was replenishing what had been washed away by the hot water. Her pussy was as smooth as a peach and I presumed she had given herself a quick shave while she was in the shower, perhaps having done most of the work the previous evening, prior to going out to do whatever an 18-year-old girl would do in a one-horse town on the big night of the week. Perhaps she had a boyfriend, although there had been no talk of such a thing. But she hadn’t pestered her mother for a lift to one of the towns nearby where there might have been two horses and restaurants and bigger bars, plus better places to hang around in the street, hoping to catch some passing action without spending any of the money they didn’t have.
Boyfriend or not, years of experience or no experience at all, Lita had decided to give me a go and I, of course, was delighted.
I sucked her large, expansive pussy lips and licked her clitoris and she spread her legs as wide as she could to make sure I reached all her good bits. I licked her beautiful smooth canoe and poked my tongue into her hole. She shuddered with pleasure and pushed herself back at me, wanting to contribute. Again, this could have been due to her good upbringing, although I couldn’t imagine the subject coming up during mother-daughter growing-up conversations.
“Turn over,” I said urgently, and made a circling motion with my index finger to clarify what I wanted.
She obeyed, although perhaps complied is a better word, because she clearly intended to remain in charge of her actions. Her brain did a split-second assessment of the situation, weighing up the submissiveness versus what she stood to gain and concluding that she was going to get the better part of the deal, if I intended to do what she hoped. I could sense her preparing to repel a wrong move, ready to bump me off if I tried to fuck her arse. She expected me to move smoothly into place behind her and slot my cock into her pussy.
Lita’s body went momentarily slack as she felt my body change position and she found my face between her buttocks. Another split-second assessment told her this was probably not just harmless but potentially very enjoyable and I felt her relax as my tongue found her anus and gently licked it. She groaned with that animal sound that is just about all that remains of man’s primitive sounds of acceptance and encouragement. Lita found herself naked in bed with an older man who knew how to play her instrument and I could sense a combination of pleasure and almost bewilderment as my tongue urged her towards dirty, primeval fulfilment. She was moaning and whimpering, powerless to resist a feeling that threatened to take over her entire body, her mind having been already been restrained by her own desire to see this through to its cataclysmic conclusion.
Soon she was stretching and twisting, writhing and tensing, as an electric eel of extreme desire slipped in through the back door and flooded her with accepting lust which made her beg silently for the climax. When that climax came, she tensed and released, tensed again and shuddered as the ultimate physical pleasure raced through her like a torrent, a river of all-consuming lust. Then she just stayed there, on her knees in grateful acceptance of this gift from her maker, brought to her via a man she had only just met but who read her like the simplest of instruction manuals.
Feel-good chemicals flooded her body and brain and she knew exactly what was happening when I moved up behind her and masturbated, my knuckles brushing against her buttocks deliberately, to give her senses some kind of commentary on what I was doing. My semen shot from my pumped-up balls and hit her crack hard, the initial impact firm but instantly giving way to a mellow slathering of dirty desire as she felt herself bathed in what in some circumstances might be construed as something to do with love. It was a confusing feeling; Lita’s fast-maturing brain felt something like pristine, noble adoration mingled with unscrupulous passion.
The warm jelly of my spunk wobbled gently but alarmingly in her crack and she reached awkwardly for something under the pillow, a scrunched-up pair of knickers, which she handed to me. “Clean, please,” she said.
I wiped my stuff out of her crack and we lay together in a post-orgasmic trance. Then Lita ran her free hand over my body and up to the back of my head, pulling me over to kiss.
“I like you,” she said softly. “You are a nice man.” In English teacher mode, I could only wonder at the possible nuances of these simple sentences. Then she rolled on top of me and her substantial physical femininity exerted itself as she transmitted something akin to love.
Lita was still there, her thighs astride mine and her beautiful breasts squashed against my chest when the screen door slammed. I had thought I heard a car engine, but brushed the thought aside as passing traffic.
“Lita!” came the firm but gentle call of her mother, and before we could react, Miranda was in the doorway.
“Oh,” she said. “The gentleman is still here. Excuse me.” I could only imagine how the sight looked to her, her 18-year-old daughter naked astride the man who had fucked her the night before. She must have seen the girl’s central split slightly ajar and the air was probably still heavy with the thick smells of sex; the brain is very quick, even if it doesn’t immediately present the information for consideration and assessment.
Miranda backed out of the room muttering apologies.
