No Picnic, part one

So I went to Jessica’s for tea, just like her mother had asked!

Once there I changed back to gym kit, because even by late afternoon it was still too hot a day for school uniform. Jessica’s little cousin Kyle and the friend from his school who he’d brought to tea had both done the same, so we sat about the garden in our shorts and tees a bit, enjoying the sun. Kyle looked like Jessica, only he had fair hair and freckles. Until now I’d only ever seen him in his school uniform, which seemed to make him fidget even more than Jessica did in hers. His friend meanwhile had green eyes and dark brown hair. It was too hot to start chucking a ball round, for which I was secretly grateful. The company of other boys was more fun for me when we didn’t have to do that!

Just then the kitchen door opened. We turned.

It was Jessica, her little sister Holly, and her mother. Holly, slim and slight with long blonde hair and freckles like Kyle’s was wearing a sweet white summer blouse and skirt combination that a girl like her might wear for tennis in the garden. The other two had showered and changed into swimsuits. Jessica’s mother was in a two-tone blue one-piece costume, princess-cut with a full skirt. She looked like a superstar, her impossibly gorgeous long legs all exposed and whipping us three boys into a frenzy of excitement, while the skirt flipping at the very tops of her perfect thighs teased us to near madness with desire to see what was underneath. She’s a grown-up, I remember thinking feverishly, surely only girls are supposed to have that effect!

But if her mother was a superstar who every male wanted, Jessica was a starlet who only teen-boys and the very young craved with all the intensity of their hopeless passion. She was truly the unimaginable beauty of the three, and none of us boys had ever seen anything like her. Her red bikini with white polka-dots, full-skirted like her mother’s swimsuit, was showing us for the first time her figure with hardly anything at all to cover it up. The shape of her had never been clearer to see, and a more desirable shape to us surely could not exist. All we could do was stare, captivated and entranced by the way her bikini top moved with each step she took, and the flip and flutter of her skirt that threatened us with craziness even more than her mother’s did.

All three of our hostesses were wearing sunglasses and floppy hats too, but we didn’t pay quite as much attention to their headgear! They were carrying a picnic basket, a pitcher of lemonade and a blanket, which they began to set out on the garden. I was struck by how alike the whole family looked, and even Jessica’s hair, dark when everyone else was fair, didn’t detract from the resemblance. All were pretty, and that certainly included the only boy Kyle. And as for the female ones, when they had their swimwear on…!

Jessica finished laying out the cakes, put her shoulders back, and smiled a smug smile at our gaping-mouthed, burning-faced, helplessly longing expressions.

“Hi, boys!” she sang.

Most of us sat down on the grass to triangular cucumber sandwiches, little pink-iced cakes and lemonade, but Kyle’s friend stayed standing. He twined his hands both in front and then behind his shorts, his burning cheeks downturned.

“Um, can I go to the bathroom first, please?” he asked the picnic blanket, his face as red as the pickled beetroot in the salad.

“If you like, but you might miss something!” Holly said to him sweetly.

For some reason this seemed to decide Kyle’s friend. Still blushing furiously he sat down with a bump, clearly cringing down to his toes but refusing to leave. With legs tightly crossed he blushed at his feet, though I saw he shot occasional fevered glances at where Holly was smugly sitting. I didn’t understand this, so raised my eyebrows quizzically at Kyle.

“Oh, Holly’s told him she’ll let him get with her if he can just tell her what colour underwear she’s got on,” he explained in a whisper. “Of course, she’s just teasing him. She’s never going to let him see.”

My own cheeks went a little pink, because this made me feel indignant. The little Missy! Clearly a certain sort of behaviour ran in this family, when it came to the girls at least! I was getting very fond of Kyle’s little friend and didn’t like to think of some stuck-up girl treating him that way.

“He-ee-y, Kyle,” Jessica then sang, in a manner that seemed to take about a minute from beginning to end. When a girl interpolated a boy like that it usually meant some teasing was on the way, and sure enough Kyle turned to her with a half-challenging, half-frightened look.

“Remember how we played one-on-one last time you were over?” the girl went on. She was slowly getting onto all fours, still facing us with the same taunting smile, and the view down her bikini top was getting both of us hot under the collar.

“Yes, what’s it to you?” Kyle returned defiantly, with a little pout.

“Do you also remember what happened to you quite a lot?” she inquired. “Was it something like this?”

So saying she whirled around on her knees so her back was to us, and the next second her red polka-dot bikini skirt had flown up in both her hands and her bikini-bottoms, which were plain red without the white dots, were in our gawping faces.

“Maybe that’ll jog your memory!” Jessica giggled at Kyle, looking prettily at us from between her legs with her head upside-down.

“So I saw way more of your butt than anyone could possibly want to, big deal!” Kyle cried, but he was very hot in the face. I could tell what an excruciating memory that one-on-one defeat at the hands of his girl-cousin must have been, and how awful it felt to be reminded of it now. I was blushing too, of course, just from what was right in front of my nose!

“Don’t tease the boys, sweetie,” Jessica’s mother then told her, in too mild a voice to be really telling her off. The girl, not in the least bit abashed, gave me and Kyle a final inverted smirk then whirled triumphantly round and sat down again with a bump, the top of her bikini bouncing in a way that nearly gave me and Kyle us a mutual heart attack. But it was the tone of her mother’s voice, making it clear there was nothing except her parental intervention that could stop Jessica teasing the boys, that stung me and Kyle most of all.

END OF PART ONE