Elizabeta Brooke: Never: an erotic retelling of Peter Pan

At the time Dee had shown only cursory interest, taking the slur on the chin, but Billy's wheat blond hair and open, honest face had stuck in her mind, reminding her of the life she'd left behind. No doubt he'd have the slow, drawling speech pattern that identified people from the West — the same pattern she'd worked so diligently to eliminate from her own. He was a country boy then. He'd want a country girl. Perhaps a girl that rode horses.

Or… a girl that would ride him?

Yes. Dee visualised a diminutive redhead with creamy skin and ginger freckles. Dressed only in a cowboy hat and boots, she'd push him down on the bed and mount him like a jockey, her breasts swaying over him as she slid his stallion size penis into her moist depths.

Oh yes, that was good. Dee smiled to herself, warming to the fantasy, feeling her own flesh respond to the fantasy woman's actions. He'd buck but she'd grip tightly with her knees as she rode him, her long soft hair brushing his chest as he reached up to…

Suddenly Billy rolled on to his back and dropped the book to his side. Dee’s fantasy halted in its track.. An erection was straining the front of his briefs and for a disorientating moment she believed her thoughts had aroused him. She blinked a couple of times, trying to clear the fantasy haze from her mind and reconnect with reality. Billy lay rigidly straight on the narrow bed and his arms, stiff at his sides, ended in balled fists. She could see his eyes were clenched tightly shut.

She stared at the evidence of his arousal — her arousal — for the two seemed mentally intertwined. His chest rose and fell heavily, and she unconsciously matched her breathing to his. Then he dived off the bed to pace around the room, his hands gripped tightly behind his head.

"Oh, my," she whispered. He was a magnificent specimen. Michelangelo material.

He stopped at the huge picture window, his hands splaying on the glass as he stared out into the darkness, not realising that a mile away Dee could see him as clearly as though he was in the next room.

His body demanded all her attention but she couldn't tear her eyes away from the tortured expression on his face. Was there some reason he couldn't masturbate? A medical problem? A moral one? She'd been witness to the act a hundred times before and was eager for Billy to give himself the release his body craved. But for an interminable time he simply stared out at her. Unconsciously, her breathing grew heavier as she waited, hoping.

Then finally, as though in obedience to her wishes, one of his hands slid off the glass and came to rest on the top of his chest. His forehead dropped to the glass, his hair falling forward to obscure his face so she couldn't tell whether he was staring down at his erection or if his eyes had closed. He would feel completely safe standing there in the window. The bush land around the building precluded anyone from seeing him from the ground. He would be staring out into the darkness, seeing only the tops of trees, never suspecting he was her plaything.

Then slowly, so slowly that Dee felt faint from anticipation, the hand on his chest eased down to his waist. His shoulders rose and fell with his obviously laboured breaths, then as his hand paused, Dee saw the heaviness inside his underpants twitch.

Gradually the large hand slid lower until it was just above the band of his briefs, resting on the tensed muscles of his abdomen. Dee held her breath and for a timeless moment she felt connected, as though his breath was her breath, his hand was hers resting on skin that trembled with sensual expectation. Inside her mind they were one creature reaching for a pleasure they could share. And then he moved, pulling his hand away and raising it to slam his closed fist against the window.

Dee flinched, expecting the glass to shatter with the force but it held. Then he raised his head, his teeth gritted in frustration and Dee felt an alien emotion grip her. It was a total simpatico of spirits, hers and Billy's. Lust, fear and compassion churned inside her and in that instant she felt the barriers of her voyeurism collapse. She had fallen over the line, and though she tried to pull back the analytical part of her mind had shut down.

She wanted to be there with him. Really there, not just in her mind. She wanted to slip into his room and take that throbbing penis he was so loath to touch, inside of her. She wanted to feel the heaviness of his body pressed against hers, smell the warm clean scent of his arousal and taste the strength of his flesh against her lips. And above all, she wanted him to stop torturing himself.

So intense was the feeling that for a moment she pulled away from the telescope, closing her eyes against the anguish that seemed to fill her body. Somewhere inside her mind a litany was repeating, only a body, it's only a body, but it was too late, they were connected somehow. And she had to get that out of her head. He was a boy. Little more than half her age, just eighteen. She flung the hurtful words at herself, trying to punish the pain away — to sever the link between them, but in the next minute she was back at the telescope, hungry to see him, knowing her denials were a lie. He was a man. She was a woman. She wanted more of him than just to look..

For a second she couldn’t find him in the room and had to pan around until she found him by the dresser pulling on shorts and sneakers, his movements jerky and uncoordinated, and she swallowed back the lump that was forming in her throat. Stupid, school-girl longings filled her chest, the shards of desire cutting into her heart. She full of pathos, as if she was drunk.

Billy slammed out the door and she angled the sight down but the native forest between their buildings obscured the dormitory entrance, frustrating her. Seconds ticked by, then a minute. He had to be out. She panned around the building, her hands starting to tremble.

Then she found him on one of the side paths, jogging steadily towards the ring-road that encircled the Campus. She watched until he was out of sight, then stood restlessly and paced around her office, wishing she smoked. A tense feeling of anti-climax sat in the pit of her stomach but she didn't want to go back to the telescope. Watching someone else make love would be unbearable now. And neither did she want to rush home to James as she'd planned.

She wanted…

She wanted Billy. And all she had to do was go out there.

Thrusting her hands into the pockets of her trousers, she stood at her floor length window, much as Billy had in his room moments earlier. Through her opened side window a eucalypt scented breeze fluttered the edges of her unbuttoned blouse, chilling her breasts but she welcomed the sensation. She needed to cool down, to put things in perspective.

Her hormones were getting the better of her, she already knew that. And Billy's heroic self-restraint had been no more stirring than any number of sexual acts she'd witnessed over the years. It had nothing to do with her, and she wasn't involved. She had to make herself believe that.

Ignoring the dorms, she stared down into the quiet forest below and slowly, very slowly, a sense of calm did come. She let herself gaze down the path he'd taken, feeling not desire now, but sympathy. Punishing his body for the sins of his mind wasn't the answer. Experience had shown her that. It was akin to her strategy with the cleaner, it merely distracted. Her own schedule of three aerobic workouts a week, maintained over the years to keep her sedentary academic body toned, had mushroomed to an almost daily attendance. Yet even with a tired body her imagination worked overtime and her blood pumped hot, craving sexual excitement, and she had no idea how to make that stop. In fact, she was concerned that her voyeurism was just making it worse.