Felix Baron - Look at Me!

For a moment, Constance considered touching her nipple but decided against it. She’d looked at it. That was a good start. Perhaps the first time she touched herself there, it’d be under the bedclothes. Little by little …

Towards what end?

Mother had liked to talk about the slippery slope. One little sin always leads to a slightly greater one, and so on, until you were damned to hellfire for eternity. Mom’d been right when it came to the physical acts. Connie had avoided being kissed until she was twenty but once she’d allowed a boy to put his tongue into her mouth, it’d been an exhilarating downhill ride, all the way down to sucking a man’s cock and finally to allowing Jeff to force his up her bum. After that, there’d been a bit of disappointment. By then, she’d committed all the sins she knew of, except the one of physical immodesty. What next? Well, now she knew. She’d exposed herself, to herself. Next, she’d expose herself to Jeff, just a little, just enough to drive him crazy. And to make him feel remorseful. Eventually, if he begged nicely, she might consider taking him back.

She didn’t dare, did she? Dare tempt Jeff? That way? Did she? It’d be the worst violation of her mom’s rules possible.

If she was going to do it, she’d have to do it straightaway, before her courage failed her. When she went in to work, in just under two hours, it’d have to be dressed as the new and slightly immodest Constance, not as whatever it was that she had been up to now. A frump? A prude?

Constance’s office ‘uniform’ was always a twin-set worn with a single strand of cultivated pearls, plus a straight skirt that went down to just below her knees. She had no alternative outfits, so she’d just have to see what she could do with what she had.

After forty minutes of experimentation, and feeling like a total hussy, Constance left her apartment with the waistband of her skirt rolled over twice, so that her hem just skimmed her knees, and wearing just the cardigan of her twin-set, with no bra under it and with the top button undone. She added a light topcoat. It wouldn’t do to get arrested on her commute.

On the bus, a man gave her his seat. Did the sluttish way she was dressed show on her face, somehow? When she got to the office, hung her coat and turned, reluctantly, to face the population of her working world, Shirley smiled a welcome at her. That was new.

For a while, Constance worked with her elbows tucked in tightly but she gradually got used to her breasts feeling loose and free and forgot about it until Larry, the mail delivery lad, brought her some files. His eyes widened and he blushed. Constance glanced down at herself. Damn! A second button had come undone. She was showing two inches of cleavage .

That was terrible. She wasn’t ready for such a blatant …

Or was she?

If she was so shocked at herself, how come her cheeks were glowing? How come she felt so warm down there?

Larry shuffled. Constance looked at him and quickly averted her eyes. The lad was wriggling to conceal an erection – that she had caused. He was only a boy – barely nineteen. At his age, he most likely had an erection most of the time. Even so, his reaction, she had to admit, gave her a certain sense of satisfaction.

As he turned away, Constance put her hand to her throat to do the extra button up again, but decided not to. Making men horny was kind of fun, she’d discovered. Sorry, Mom!

At coffee break, Shirley was pouring herself an espresso. The curvy redhead looked Constance up and down thoughtfully. ‘New boyfriend?’ she asked.

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘You’ve got a certain glow about you today, honey, like you’ve been fucked three ways from Sunday.’

Constance had forgotten the earthy way Shirley had of talking when away from her desk. It should have shocked her but somehow she found it refreshing. ‘I dumped Jeff,’ she confessed. ‘Perhaps that’s it.’

‘The cute IT guy? He any good?’

‘Any good?’

‘In bed.’

Constance felt her face burn. ‘I guess. Yes, to be honest, he’s pretty good.’

‘Mind if I do him?’

‘You mean …?’

‘Fuck him. He’s pretty cute, but if you’d have a problem …?’

‘No, no, no problem,’ Constance lied.

‘Thanks. Say, Connie, you doing anything at lunch?’

‘No, why?’

‘I’m going to shoe-shop. Want to come along?’

What was happening? In five years, no one in the office had ever approached her socially. She knew that some of the other women, the younger ones mostly, got together to go places. She’d overheard some of them talking about going clubbing and the like. Constance had never been included. Now, just because she was showing a little cleavage, she was sure, she was being invited. How powerful was that ?

‘Sure, love to,’ she said without stammering.

‘One o’clock, then?’

‘One o’clock.’

Time was, when Constance would have been mortified to have walked down a busy street beside an over-made-up girl in a too-short skirt and too-high heels who swung her hips so emphatically.

To her own surprise, shame was the last thing she felt. So how did she feel? There was a trace of pride in being seen with someone who drew so many approving stares. Then there was jealousy. Constance might as well have been invisible, or, at best, a moon to Shirley’s sun.

But she was prettier than Shirley. She knew that, even if the thought was immodest. She was prettier but she wasn’t – sexier. That was it. And that was by her own choice, or by her mother’s.

Damn you, Mom. Look at what you’ve deprived me of, all these years. Well, it ends, now ! A sense of relief washed through Constance. She felt reborn, emerging as a liberated woman, free for the first time in her life.

Shirley said, ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it. I just caught our reflection in a window and that’s the thought that popped into my mind.’

‘What?’

‘It’s my philosophy.’

‘Oh!’

‘Don’t hide your light under a bushel, right?’

‘Right.’ Wow! Shirley could justify her brazenness with quotations from the Bible. With that justification, Constance tried swinging her hips a little. It took a moment to get the rhythm right but, once she got it going, it almost felt natural. Almost.

‘Here we are,’ Shirley announced. She led the way in.

The boutique was called Spikes. Constance swallowed hard. The shoes on display were … impossible. But beautiful, in a dozen different perverse ways. There were sculptures in leather, scraps of fabric on soaring heels, straps that made Constance feel restricted just from looking at them, puffs of pink fluff and slivers of snakeskin. People actually wore these?

A tall thin man in lavender pants and a matching shirt waltzed up to Shirley and arced to kiss her cheek without making body-contact. ‘Shirley-girly, my pet! How nice to see you again.’