Grace Eddy: Her little crew

Ted glanced at the older boy. He glared back, then realized this trim muscular woman was not going to be bullied. "Yeah," he said. They arrived at her berth and began taking off their shoes.

"Why don't you take yours off?" the older boy asked.

"Because they're boat shoes." She unbent a moment. "If you buy them in the expensive part of town they're boat shoes. In other parts of town they're sneakers or 'tennis shoes' and cost half as much."

"Sheeeeeeeiiiiit!" the older boy growled.

"Down forward next to where the mast is stepped," Ted said crisply. "And don't forget to flush it."

To her mild surprise the boy actually had to go. He finished removing his shoes and socks and went below. "There ain't no door on this crapper!" he complained a moment later.

Ted pulled the slide shut and began setting the jib. Normally she would have motored away from the dock but the wind was nearly nothing and she had a couple of extra hands to help push off so she guessed she might as well save fuel. She put the handle in the coffee grinder winch and taught the smaller boy how to wind it slowly as she fastened snaps to the forestay. The jib was hanging limp in the calm and they were setting the mains'l when the boy fumbled with the cabin slide and came back on deck.

"Ain't you got an engine?" he asked.

"There's one basic rule to remember about engines," Ted explained. "Never sail yourself into some kind of corner where you need an engine to get out because no matter how well you tune it, the damn thing never starts when you need it."

"Sounds like my old man's car," the boy growled.

Ted glanced at the sullen boy and felt a sudden flash of rut. A fine thing, she thought. Here I am thirty-nine, widowed, with just about everything I want in the world and suddenly I'm thinking screwy thoughts about some fourteen-year-old loser!

Covertly she studied the boy, wondering what accident had given her a sylph body that had brought her up out of the slums into the deeper dreariness of daily ballet practice. It was funny. Now that she was middle-aged and had given up dancing her body had finally filled out until at thirty-nine she had the kind of body most girls exercised and dieted for when they were eighteen. One of these days, she decided, she was going to fix her hair straight in some youthful style, put on a mini, and see just how many stiff pricked studs she could fool.

Not that she intended to do anything about it. If Ted had been a hot pants type she would never have sacrificed her best fucking years doing the splits for some usually queer ballet master. But still, this boy was-interesting.

He was taller than her own five-two. Probably when he was through growing the boy would be a football-player-sized giant. Right now he was slim, dark, with a Latin… she studied the boy's face and decided he was not Latin. That nose had to be Greek. She caught herself speculating about the bulge in his too small Levi's. Idly, she counted the years since.

Virgil hadn't been half the cocksman his own PR network made him out to be. He had been mildly and pleasantly surprised to discover that Ted really

was a virgin. But he had made no effort to fill in the lost years. Once or twice a week Virgil had knocked on her door and if she had felt like it they had enjoyed a quiet friendly fuck. If she had been under the wrong phase of the moon, or not feeling quite up to it, her husband had said his polite good-night and gone off, leaving her in solitary peace. It had been a good life.

When Virgil had with dramatic suddenness taken ill and died of something mysterious to do with his lymph glands she had felt the loss keenly. But it had been the loss of a good and respected friend. Ted had now been a virgin for twenty-five, uncomplaining years. Just as uncomplainingly, she had accepted the fact that there would be no more semi-weekly visits to her bed chamber. She was thirty-nine, she had her health, a steady income, and a small yacht. Now what was she doing looking at the swollen crotch of this little bastard's Levi's?

She devoted her attention to the other younger boy. "That's the jib," she explained. "These two winches are called coffee grinders. They're to pull it in tight when the wind's blowing hard."

"You think it'll blow today?"

Ted glanced at the sky. "We ought to have a fair breeze in an hour or so," she guessed.

"Wish somebody'd blow me," the older boy grunted.

Ted decided to pretend she hadn't heard. "This's the main sheet," she continued. "And a sheet is a piece of rope to pull the sail in. It's never the sail and don't ask me why, that's just the way it is."

"Sheeeeeeeeeeeeet!" the older boy muttered.

"I sail this sloop all by myself nearly every day," Ted said. "Without the help of any males, chauvinist pig or otherwise. I'll be happy to teach either of you how to sail but if anybody wants off now's the time before I cast off this stern line."

The silence was absolute.

She considered the thousand ways the boys could fuck up casting off and decided to do it herself. Running bow and stem lines aft to the cockpit with a single turn around the bollards she waited until a gust of wind filled the sails. The yacht heeled and she cast off. For a moment nothing happened, then suddenly they were under way, tacking to windward up the crowded basin.

Once they were clear of the basin and headed

out toward the last buoy she started teaching the boys how to steer. It turned into a lovely day as the overcast burned off. Bright sun and a good sailing breeze made the sloop dance along, practically sailing itself. "Keep her pointed toward that buoy," she told the youngest boy, and went below. She was changing out of faded denims into shorts and halter when she saw the older boy frying to pretend he was not looking down into the cabin.

It was funny. All the years she had danced semi-nudity was so common nobody paid any attention to where they shed their tights or tutu. But then, most of the boys in ballet had been more interested in each other than in the girls. Suddenly Ted realized she was thirty-nine, with the body of a twenty-year-old capable of leading a bishop astray. And she was being looked at by a boy in the absolute prime of his sexual vigor. She wondered what it would be like to be male, to be fourteen, to be so obsessed with fucking that he was unable even to think about a woman without mentally calculating his chances, dreaming and fantasizing about how it would feel to slip his hot hard cock into the soft warmth between a woman's… suddenly Ted realized the soft warmth between her own hard-muscled ballerina legs was tingling in a way she had not felt for years.

She finished getting into her shorts and halter. They were both of dark, almost navy blue and set off her long dancer's pony tail of blonde hair in a way that turned men's heads. She came back on deck and to her surprise the younger boy was still steering in the general direction of the buoy she had aimed him at.

"Would you like to steer for a while?" she asked the older boy.

"I sure would," he said. Something about his tone left no doubt that he was not talking about steering. She caught herself wondering what it would be like to…

"You live here on this boat?" the younger boy asked.

Ted nodded.

"All alone?"

She nodded again.

"Ain't you got no husband or no kids?"

"No," Ted explained. "My husband's dead."

"You pretty," the thirteen-year-old said. "How come you ain't got a bunch of men hangin' 'round?"

"I don't know," Ted said. "Maybe they just got tired of hanging and dropped off."

"Sheeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiit!"

"Is that all you know how to say?" she asked the older boy. "By the way, what's your name?"

"Albert"

"Is that all?"

"Albert Warfield."

"I'm John O'Brien," the younger boy said.