The Beauty Within

When I look back on it, I would have to say that my mother and father, as much as I love them, were not the most responsible parents in the world. For a start, they went out drinking a lot when we were kids, and my mum worked shift work as well, so as kids we spent a lot of time at home on our own.

There were three kids in my family, and I was the middle child. You know, the one they always say is the forgotten one, although I don’t know how true that is, because I think I got on okay. I had a sister, Gail, who was just over a year older than me, and then there was a big gap between me and my little brother, Stevie, who wasn’t born until I was six.

We lived in a big, old house, a few miles from town. When I say big, I mean enormous. The place had originally been a farmhouse, and had been added onto and remodelled over the years, but at some point, the city council had acquired it, and I think they were waiting for the urban sprawl to reach that far out so they could make a killing on developing the land. In the meantime, when I was six years old, my dad got the house, and an acre of land to go with it, for a fairly cheap price, and we moved there. The house wasn’t really in bad condition, but it just needed a lot of TLC, so over the next few years, my dad spent a lot of time painting and doing some carpentry, so it was quite comfortable after a while.

The big advantage of living out where we did was that there were no close neighbours, so we could pretty much do whatever we wanted. Plus, the house was so big that no one ever got under anyone else’s feet. The rooms were big, the ceilings were high, and there were literally more rooms than we could use, plus there was a self-contained granny flat around at the side. We used the granny flat to store some old stuff, and there was a double bed in there, and a few other things, although for some reason, the electricity didn’t work in the flat, because it was on a separate circuit from the house, and it was switched off.

When my sister, Gail, was eighteen years old, and in her last year of high school, her two best friends were Lisa and Ashley. She met them in her first year, and they stayed the best of friends all though school. Both of them were lookers. Lisa was small, pretty and petite, standing around five feet four, with a curvy figure, a medium complexion, an oval shaped face, with brown eyes, and dark brown hair that she wore long, and parted in the middle.

Then, there was Ashley. To me as a teenage boy, Ashley was one of the sexiest things on two legs. She was around five feet six, with a slim but curvy figure, perky tits, a naturally tanned complexion, soft brown eyes, and long, wavy brown hair that framed a very pretty face. Her legs were long and shapely, and in summer time, she often used to wear cut off denim shorts that showed that she also had a great backside as well.

I’ll be honest here, more than once I masturbated to thoughts of both Lisa and Ashley, and when I was sixteen, I read in a porn magazine about two girls and a guy having a threesome. After that, I even fantasized occasionally about having a threesome with Lisa and Ashley together.

I wasn’t totally na? about sex at that age, but I was still a virgin. There was a girl the same age as me, called Judy, whose parents owned a property that backed onto our place, and we used to hang out together a bit, from time to time. Judy always seemed to know more about sex than me when we were kids, and she would tell dirty jokes or recite rhymes about sex that sometimes went over my head, but even so, when we were teenagers, she let me kiss her occasionally, when the mood took her. She even let me reach inside her panties and touch her on her pussy one day, and a few weeks later, she let me finger her inside her pussy, but it never occurred to me to try to have sex with her, so we never did. The thing was that I was very awkward with most girls back then, and it almost seemed that the prettier they were, the more awkward I was. Judy was fairly good-looking, but I guess the main reason I got on so well with her, and my nerves weren’t a problem, was that we had known each other for a long time, and she was pretty forward when I think about it.

Gail and I normally got on pretty well together as a brother and sister, but when her friends were around, she used to behave as though I was some kind of pesky nuisance kid brother, and I was not always welcome at her get-togethers with her school friends when they came to our place. It didn’t bother me much, but sometimes I would hang around trying to get a look at Ashley or Lisa, especially in summer, when they would wear their bikinis and splash around in our aboveground pool. The big attraction of our place, to most of Gail’s friends, was the fact that it was out of the way, and our parents weren’t always around, so they could get away with stuff they wouldn’t get away with in town, so it was pretty common for Gail to have friends over, apart from Lisa and Ashley. Usually, when this happened, I would find something to do in another part of the house. After all, there was plenty of room.

By the time Gail was in her last year of high school, she had a boyfriend called Pete, who was in the same year as she was at school. Ashley had a boyfriend as well, and his name was Matty. He was an apprentice electrician, so he had a job and an income, which made him pretty popular. Lisa was a bit of a party girl, and she didn’t seem to have any particular boyfriend, so she seemed to be with a different guy every week. I overheard a few conversations between Gail and Ashley that made it clear that Lisa had screwed most of the guys she got around with.

Like most guys at that age, I had sex on my mind a lot of the time, and after I heard about Lisa’s taste for variety in her men, I fantasized about Lisa coming to our place looking for Gail, but finding me alone there, and being so horny that she fucked me in one of the many rooms you could go to if you wanted privacy, but it was only idle fantasy, I can assure you.

I knew that Gail was having sex with Pete, because one night when they were out together, I lived up to the bratty kid brother thing by sneaking her diary out of her room, and reading a few entries, including one about the night she lost her virginity to him in the back seat of his old Fairmont, and a couple of others where she wrote about sex with him. That diary fuelled a few masturbation fantasies, too.

One day, Gail came home from school and told me that Matty had dumped Ashley, and this was a major talking point among her friends for a couple of weeks. Naturally, Ashley was devastated, and Gail did her best to stand by her friend, and help her get over it, so I saw a bit more of Ashley at our place. Her parents seemed to think it was a good idea for her to spend more time with Gail, to help her get through the breakup of her “first relationship,” so she had a few extra sleepovers during the next two weeks, although she had slept over at our place quite a few times over the years. As usual, when she stayed over, I found myself getting an eyeful of her in her little silk nighties and pyjamas, as she and Gail sat around in the evenings, or at breakfast in the mornings before school.

With Ashley staying over for those few extra nights, and none of Gail’s other friends around, I was allowed to hang out a little more with the two of them, and I had a few longer conversations than usual with Ashley. One night, the three of us were sitting around talking and laughing, and Ashley made a comment that she never knew I had such a funny sense of humour. I was pretty pleased to hear this, because I simply thought she was the sexiest thing around, but I knew there was no question of anything happening between us, because I was just her friend’s little brother, but it still made me feel good.

A couple of weeks later, it was a Friday night, about a week after my seventeenth birthday. Gail had been in town with Pete and Ashley, and just after dark, they arrived home in Pete’s car, with some beer, a bottle of bourbon, and some bottles of coke. They were followed down our long driveway by Lisa, in her car, with some guy called Craig, who she was with that week, and they got out with some booze of their own, and everybody came inside.

My parents had gone out as usual on a Friday night, and we wouldn’t see them until after midnight, and Gail had left our dinner in the oven before Pete had arrived to pick her up, so we all ate in the big room that we referred to as the dining room. Like most of the rooms in the place, it was huge, and in addition to the dining table, it had a couple of couches and a TV set in there as well, so it was also used as our family room.

The living room was down a corridor from the dining room, and it was a huge room, about twenty-four feet square, and divided into two sections by an archway supported by two columns. It must have been pretty grand in its day, and the far wall had a row of windows that looked out onto the veranda, with french doors leading out there. The veranda went around three sides of the house, and if you walked out through the french doors, you could walk to the front door of the granny flat at the side of the house.

The side veranda was on my dad’s to-do list at that time, so some of the floorboards out there were little rickety, but it was okay if you watched your step.

We all sat around a big table as we ate, and Gail had changed into some jeans and a casual top, but Ashley was still in her school uniform, which consisted of a dark blue plaid skirt and a light blue blouse, but she had taken off her shoes. She had gone straight downtown from school to meet Gail and Pete, and hadn’t bothered to change out of her uniform when they got back to our place. Lisa was wearing a short skirt and sleeveless top, and even during dinner, she and Craig had their hands all over each other. Stevie and I sat and ate, and during dinner, Pete and Craig brought out some six packs of beer, and the three girls all had a beer with dinner, as well as the guys.

After dinner, Stevie went to his room to play with his computer games, and that left me with my sister and her friends in the dining room. The beer was flowing by this time, and Pete offered me a beer from one of his six-packs.

I got on well with Pete, and although he was only a year or so older than me, he had a car and a part time job, and I saw him as an experienced man of the world, which just shows how much I had to learn about life, at seventeen. Pete used to sit around with me sometimes, talking about cars and football with me, when he and Gail weren’t mauling each other, and I liked a beer occasionally so I took the beer from him.

“Rick, I didn’t know you drank beer,” Ashley said over the table, as I cracked the top of the bottle and took a swallow. I tried to think of something cool to say, but I was a little surprised that Ashley even bothered to notice, so the best I could come up with was, “I don’t mind one now and again,” as I took another swig. I drank the beer and sat at the table, feeling kind of grown up because I was hanging out with my sister and her friends, drinking beer with them.

Before long, the boys were mixing bourbon and cokes for themselves and the girls, and the voices were getting louder, and the laughter more raucous. I could see Lisa and Craig seriously making out on a single seater couch in the corner, and Gail was kissing Pet in the other corner, over near the bench where they were mixing the drinks.

I went to the stereo to change the CD, and as I was flicking through the CD’s in the rack next to it, I picked up one by Nirvana, and started to look at the playlist. Ashley came over a moment or two later, and also started to look through the CD’s, and then she looked at the one in my hands.

“I love them,” she said, looking at the CD in my hand.

“Yeah, they’re brilliant,” I answered, turning to look at her.

She stepped a little closer, looking at the CD cover in my hand, and said, “They started out so long ago, but their music is just as good as ever, and some of their later stuff just reaches out to you.”

Ashley and I stood there, talking animatedly about Nirvana and Pearl Jam for few minutes, and Pete came over with a bottle of beer from one of his six packs. He handed it to me with the cap off, and said, a little louder than necessary, “Here, Rick, get another beer into ya!” I didn’t drink much then, and I could already feel the effects of the first one, but I took the bottle, and he put a hand on my shoulder, then he winked, nodded at Ashley, and said, just as loudly, “Be gentle with her Ricky Boy, it’s her First Time, this week anyway!” and he turned and strutted back to Gail, on the other side of the room. I could feel myself blushing red, and I saw Ashley turn and poke out her tongue, and wrinkle her nose at Pete’s back, as he walked across the room. She saw me looking at her, and said, “Don’t worry, he can be a prick sometimes, when he’s had a few beers.”

I took a mouthful of beer, and then Ashley reached out and took the bottle from me, and took a mouthful from it herself, making eye contact the whole time, and then handed it back, saying, “Not bad, but I think I’ll stick to bourbon.”

I took a breath, and I was trying to think of something cool to say, but Gail called out from the other side of the room, and Ashley excused herself, and walked over to her.