Summer Shed Secrets

Allie and Francis had been friends since they were eleven, which at their school was less a friendship than a survival pact.

Neither of them had been one of the popular kids. St. George's, the international school baking on the edge of the city, ran on the usual cruelties, and the two of them had landed near the bottom of the order early and stayed there. Francis was the quiet clever one, all elbows and bad posture, the boy who knew the answer and learned fast never to put his hand up. Allie was the shy girl who developed late and got punished for it, flat and gangly two years after the other girls had filled out, an easy target for a certain kind of joke. They found each other the way kids like that do, by accident and then on purpose, and their friendship became the one place in that school where neither of them had to brace for the next insult. They ate lunch in the same corner for seven years. They had a hundred jokes nobody else would have understood. When the world was being unkind, which was often, the other one was a door you could shut behind you.

Then, somewhere around sixteen, things changed for both of them.

Allie developed, and she developed all at once. The body that had come late arrived in a rush, and the girl who'd been teased for being a plank became the girl the same boys couldn't stop staring at. She had no idea what to do with it. The attention scared her more than the teasing ever had, because at least the teasing had been honest. These were the same boys who'd made her cry at thirteen, and now they found reasons to stand close to her, and she could feel exactly how little they'd thought of her and exactly how much they wanted her, both at once, and it made her skin crawl. She kept her shoulders rounded, her clothes loose, and her trust to herself.

Francis changed too, just later and more quietly. The elbows turned lean, the posture sorted itself out, and at seventeen he caught his reflection one morning and realised, genuinely surprised, that he'd turned into a good-looking young man. What nobody could see was the thing that had arrived with it: a constant, humming, barely manageable want. He'd spent years assuming he would never get to touch a girl, that it simply wasn't on the menu for someone like him, and now his body had decided otherwise and handed him no instructions for what to do about it.

And the girl he wanted, the only one he'd ever really wanted, was the one beside him every day, who'd been his best friend since they were eleven.

It started, like a lot of things in their lives, in Chemistry.

They sat together at the back, the way they had for years, and the ten minutes before the teacher arrived were the best part of either of their days. They'd wind each other up, trade insults, tickle each other until one of them nearly went off the stool. It was the most physical contact Francis had with another living person, and somewhere in his restless head the line between messing about and something else had begun to blur.

One afternoon, with the lesson under way and the room gone quiet, he did the thing he'd been turning over for weeks. He stopped joking. He put his hand on her knee under the bench and left it there.

Allie went still. She looked down at his hand on her leg, then back up at the whiteboard. She didn't move it. She didn't say a word. Her face had gone carefully blank, and Francis sat there with his heart slamming and his hand on his best friend's knee and no idea what any of it meant.

That was the start, and over the next two years it crept forward by tiny degrees. Every Chemistry lesson became a held breath. His hand would settle on her knee, and a few lessons later sit a little higher, and a few lessons after that higher still, the hem of her skirt, the warm skin above it, every new inch the product of weeks of nerve. He never knew if he was allowed. She never told him. That was the strange torture of it. She let him, but she never once acknowledged it, never looked at him while it happened, never said yes and never said stop.

What he could see was her face, and her face was at war. He'd steal glances while his hand moved, and he could tell that part of her liked it, that her breath changed and her colour rose. He could tell, just as clearly, that another part hated that she liked it, and wanted to take his hand and put it back on his own side of the bench, and couldn't. It was the most confusing thing he'd ever watched, and he was the one causing it.

It went too far on a grey afternoon in the spring of their final year. His hand had gone higher than it ever had, and she'd let it, and at last his fingers reached the warmth at the very top of her legs, and she sat there and allowed it, perfectly still, eyes front. When he risked a look at her, there were tears standing along her lashes. Not falling. Just there, while the teacher talked about reaction rates and she stared at the board and let her oldest friend touch her and cried without a sound.

Francis took his hand back like he'd been scalded. He felt sick. Whatever this was, he'd shoved it past something it shouldn't have been shoved past, and he spent the weeks after drowning in guilt, certain he'd wrecked the one good thing he had. They never spoke of it. The touching stopped completely. He assumed, miserably, that it was over, that he'd taken his oldest friendship and broken it for the sake of his own hands.

Then school ended, and nothing was what he expected.

Exams finished, the building emptied, and the last summer before university opened up in front of them. And Allie, to his complete astonishment, acted as though none of it had happened. She texted him the day after results came out. She wanted to swim. Did he want to come to the old school pool, the one they kept open for alumni through the off-season?

He went braced for awkwardness, and there wasn't any. She was warm and funny and easy with him, the way she'd been before Chemistry got complicated, and he didn't understand it at all. He'd spent weeks sure he'd ruined everything, and here she was in the sun, treating him like her oldest friend, because that was what he was.

It rewrote the story he'd been telling himself. Maybe he hadn't gone too far. Maybe, he let himself think, lying awake that night, he'd had it wrong the whole time, and the tears hadn't meant stop. And underneath that, barely admitted, was a second thought that wouldn't leave him alone. Maybe she had wanted it.

They fell into a routine fast. Most mornings they had the pool to themselves. They'd swim and race and lie in the sun, and afterwards they'd drift through the overgrown gardens and end up at the old shed behind the pool, the one with vines over it and a door that never quite shut and a cool dim quiet inside. There was a long wooden bench in there. It became theirs.

On the third day, lying in the sun with her shoulders aching from swimming, Allie said the thing that started all of it.

"My back is wrecked. You've got those big chemist's hands. Make yourself useful."

The first time, he kept it honest.

She lay face down on the bench in her swimsuit and Francis sat beside her and started on her shoulders, and his heart was going so hard he was sure she could hear it. This was not Chemistry. This was daylight, and her asking, and his hands openly on her body, and he had to remind himself to breathe. He worked the knots from her shoulders and down the long muscles either side of her spine, and he kept it clean, he honestly did, but his hands had their own ideas. They kept drifting to the sides of her, the soft give where her ribs curved, the place where the edge of the suit met bare skin, and every time they did his whole mind narrowed to one thought. A few inches. A few inches higher and round and he'd be cupping her breasts. He didn't. He just thought about it the whole time, his thumbs circling the side of her ribs while the rest of him stood at the edge of a cliff he didn't have the nerve to jump off.

What he didn't know was that the same sum was running in her head. Allie lay with her cheek on her folded arms and her eyes shut and felt exactly where his hands were and exactly where they weren't, doing the same arithmetic he was. A few inches. She was waiting to find out if he'd do it, and she honestly couldn't have told you which answer she wanted. When his thumbs grazed the very edge of her breast, by what could have passed for an accident, she felt it everywhere, and she said nothing, and neither did he.

"Better?" he asked when his hands finally stopped.

"Mm." She didn't open her eyes. "Much."

They did this for several days and it never went past the edges, and both of them lay awake those nights thinking about the inches.

That was the part Allie wouldn't admit to in daylight. At night, alone in her room with the shutters half closed against the heat, she'd replay it. The weight of his hands. The exact moment his thumb had brushed the side of her breast and how she'd had to keep her breathing level so he wouldn't know. She'd lie there and turn it over and feel her face go hot in the dark, and tell herself it was nothing, two friends, a massage, and half believe it, and then think about the inches again. This was the boy who'd been her friend when she was invisible. That was what she kept coming back to. The other boys had wanted her the second she got a body. Francis had liked her for seven years before that. Somehow it made it different. Somehow it made it allowed.

A few days later the angle changed.

She was sitting up on the bench that morning, and he sat behind her to get at her neck, and from up there, over her shoulder, he had a clear line straight down the front of her swimsuit. He noticed about ten seconds in, and then couldn't un-notice it, the shadow between her breasts right there every time he glanced down, his hands working her shoulders on autopilot while his eyes did something else entirely.

She knew. Of course she knew. She felt the exact moment his attention dropped, the small change in his breathing, the way his thumbs slowed. She kept her eyes forward and let him look and felt that hot confusion rise again, half of her appalled and half of her lit up, and she didn't say a thing. She told herself he probably wasn't even doing it on purpose. She knew that wasn't true.

Neither of them mentioned it. The next day she sat up again without being asked, and the day after that, and within a few days it had quietly become how they did things. The new normal. He sat behind her, hands on her shoulders, eyes down the front of her suit, and she let him, and nobody said a word about any of it.

It was Francis who finally said something, and it cost him everything he had.

He'd been working up to it for two days. That morning, behind her, pulse going, he made himself do it. He took his hands off her shoulders, and instead of putting them back he hooked one finger into the front of her swimsuit and drew it out, just enough to open the gap and let himself see properly down the front of her.

"Sorry," he said, and it came out higher than he wanted. "Just. Improving the view."

There was a horrible half-second where he was sure he'd ruined it again. Then she laughed, a small embarrassed breath of a laugh, and brought a hand up to cover herself and push his finger away.

"You're terrible," she said. But she was smiling, and she didn't get up, and she didn't tell him to stop forever. She told him to stop now, which he'd learned by then was a completely different thing.

The next day he did it again. She covered up again, a little slower. The day after, slower still. And over the better part of a week, by tiny increments and a great deal of shy laughter and at least one "Francis, honestly," she stopped covering up, and let him hook the suit forward and look his fill at the tops of her breasts, the smooth upper curves of them, the cleavage deepening every time she breathed. She'd sit there with her cheeks pink and her eyes front and let him, and the air in the shed those mornings was thick enough to lean on.

The nights were getting harder for her.

She'd lie in the dark and not even pretend it was nothing anymore. She'd let him look down her swimsuit. She'd let him open it with his finger. She'd replay the look on his face when he did it, that mix of nerves and wonder, like he couldn't believe his luck, and being looked at like that, by him, did things to her she didn't have words for. Then the other voice would start. What was she doing. This wasn't her. She was the girl who kept her clothes loose and trusted no one. She'd agreed to a massage, that was all, and somehow, inch by inch, she'd agreed to a great deal more, and she didn't recognise the version of herself who lay on that bench every morning and let her oldest friend undress her with his eyes. The two voices argued until she fell asleep, and the frightening part, the part she really couldn't say out loud, was that the second voice was losing.

It went wrong the day he got greedy.

By then the tops of her breasts had become their own new normal, and Francis, bolder the way he always got once a thing turned familiar, decided that morning to push for more. His heart was hammering as ever, and he made the call before he'd even sat down. Today he'd see all of her. Halfway through the massage he took both straps and drew them down and out, and the suit peeled off her chest completely, and there they were, her bare breasts, fully uncovered in the dim light, and for one second he thought he'd died and gone somewhere better.

Then she snapped.

She grabbed the suit and yanked it up and was on her feet in one movement, and when she turned around her eyes were furious and wet. "What is wrong with you." It wasn't a question. "What do you think this actually is?"

"Allie, I'm sorry, I thought..."

"You thought what. That you can just keep taking?" Her voice cracked. "Is that all I am now? Is that all any of you ever see?"

That last word, the plural of it, landed on him like a slap, because he knew exactly who else was inside it. He stood there useless while she gathered her towel with shaking hands.

"I'm not one of those girls," she said, quieter, and the hurt in it was worse than the anger. "I thought you of all people knew that."

She left. He didn't follow. He sat in the shed with his head in his hands, eighteen years old and certain, for the second time, that he'd taken the best thing in his life and broken it with his own greed.

They didn't speak for two days, two of the longest of his life. He didn't text her, because what could he possibly say, and every hour of silence was another hour of replaying her face and the thing she'd said about being just another body to look at. He'd done it again. He'd looked at her the way the boys who hurt her had, and she'd seen it, and she was right.

What he couldn't see was the other half of those two days. Allie wasn't only angry at him. She was angry at herself, at how much she'd wanted it, at the part of her that had been disappointed when she pulled the suit back up. Anger at him was easier, so she'd grabbed it first. But lying in the dark on the second night she made herself be honest, and the honest thing was that she missed him, and that she hadn't actually wanted him to stop. She'd wanted to want to stop. There was a difference, and it had taken her two days alone to find it.

On the third morning his phone lit up. It was her. Three words.

"Pool? Same time."

He nearly dropped it.

She was already there when he arrived, sitting on the edge with her feet in the water, and she gave him a small careful smile, and they swam, and it was almost normal, and neither of them said anything until they were in the shed and she'd sat on the bench and he stood there not knowing what he was allowed to do.

"Come here," she said. "Sit. I want to say something."

He sat behind her. For a while she didn't speak. Then, to the wall, not to him, she said it.

"I'm sorry. For blowing up like that." She picked at the edge of her towel. "It wasn't really about you. Or it was, but not the way it sounded." A breath. "You've been my best friend since we were eleven. When everyone else was awful, you were the one who wasn't. You've always been there. The whole time." Her voice dropped. "I forgot that for a second, and I'm sorry."

He started to say something and she kept going, because she clearly had to get it out in one piece.

"And." A long pause. "I won't object. If you want to do that thing again."

For a second he genuinely thought he'd misheard her. "The."

"You know what I mean," she said, and he could hear the blush without seeing her face. "Don't make me say it twice."

His hands were not steady. He set them on her shoulders and felt her breathing, quick and shallow, and understood that whatever this was had just gone somewhere past anywhere they'd been. He worked her shoulders for a minute, gathering his nerve. Then, slowly, his heart like a fist on a door, he reached down and took the front of her swimsuit and drew it not out but down, peeling it away and down her body, further than ever, past her breasts, past her stomach, all the way down, until he was looking down the whole naked front of her, every inch, right down to the dark hair between her legs.

She gasped. Her hands twitched like they wanted to cover up and didn't. "Francis." But it came out shaky, not angry, and looking over her shoulder down the length of her he could see that her breathing had gone ragged and her skin had flushed, and the gasp had not been horror. It was a lot closer to the opposite.

"Sorry," he said, not letting go.

"You're not sorry at all," she said, and the wobble in it was almost a laugh.

"No," he admitted. "I'm really not."

Quiet. Then, in a small voice, eyes down: "Did you like what you saw?"

It would have been easy to be smooth about it. He wasn't a smooth person and he didn't try. "I love it," he said, simply. "All of it. And I." His ears went red. "I really like that you've got hair. That you're not, you know, bare. I like that a lot. I always hoped you would be."

It was such an unguarded, specific, ridiculous thing to confess that she didn't know what to do with it. She faced the wall so he wouldn't see, and she smiled, a small private smile entirely to herself, and put it somewhere warm.

That night she didn't argue with herself at all. She lay in the dark and thought about the way he'd said it, that "I always hoped you would," the plain honesty of it, the fact that he wasn't performing, and she felt the last of her resistance quietly pack its things and go. She wasn't frightened of it anymore. She was, she realised, looking forward to the morning.

The next day she didn't make him work for any of it.

She didn't sit forward with her shoulders up and her guard on. She leaned back, settling against his chest while he massaged her, and stayed quiet, with a small smile he could just see from the side, and the quiet was a louder permission than anything she could have said. So he lifted the suit again, down the front of her, more than before, baring her from her throat to her thighs, and she let him, still smiling, still silent.

And then, without a word, she let her knees fall open.

Francis stopped breathing. She'd spread her legs. She wasn't being undressed now, she was offering, opening herself to his eyes on purpose, and the smile on her face had gone from shy to something that knew exactly what it was doing. He looked down the whole length of her, all of her, completely open across his lap in the gold light, and thought his heart might give out.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. They didn't need to. Something had been settled.

And then, the way summers do, it began to end.

The pool was closing for the season. Their separate universities were a couple of weeks off, in cities a long way apart. They both felt the clock on it now, and maybe that was what made Allie do what she did on the last day. Or maybe she'd have done it anyway, having come this whole distance from the girl who'd guarded herself from everyone.

She had a plan. He could tell the moment he walked into the shed, because she was standing, not sitting, and there was something deliberate in the way she was waiting for him.

"Sit," she said. "Not behind me. There." She pointed at the bench. He sat facing her, and she stood in front of him and took a breath like she'd rehearsed it.

"I've been working out what to say, so let me just get through it." She looked at him steadily, surer than he'd ever seen her about anything. "You've wanted one thing from me for years. Since Chemistry. Before that, probably. You've wanted to see me. All of me." She didn't say it like an accusation. She said it like a fact they could finally both hold. "And for the longest time I told myself I'd never let you. That it wasn't who I was. That letting a boy see me like that was for some other kind of girl."

She stepped closer.

"Then this whole summer happened, and I worked something out. It's not the boys who started noticing me when I got a body. It was never going to be one of them. It's you. You liked me when I was the flat weird girl nobody wanted. You've never once made me feel like I was just a thing to look at, even when you were absolutely looking." A small wet laugh. "So I decided. I want you to see me. Not because you took it. Because I'm giving it to you. There's a difference, and it matters to me that you understand it."

And then, slowly, watching his face the whole time, she undressed.

She slipped the straps off her shoulders and eased the swimsuit down, and this time there was no pretext, no massage, no accident to hide behind. She peeled it down past her breasts and let them spill free, and Francis went rigid, a strangled sound catching in his throat. Her tits were full and high, flushed in the warm light, her nipples already hard, and she didn't cover them. She lifted her own hands to them instead, slow, and cupped them, squeezing them together, rolling her nipples between her fingers while she watched what it did to him. He was trembling. He honestly couldn't keep still, his hands locked on his own knees, his eyes fixed on her chest like the rest of the world had stopped existing.

"You like my tits?" she said softly. It wasn't really a question.

He managed a nod. He couldn't have spoken to save his life.

She kept going. She pushed the suit down over her stomach and her hips and let it drop, stepped out of it, and stood completely naked in front of him in the full gold light. He let his eyes move over all of her, because she was letting him, because she was standing there wanting him to. The fair freckled skin. The full tits with their hard pink nipples. The dip of her waist and the flare of her hips, the long smooth legs, and at the centre of all of it her pussy, the dark hair he'd confessed to loving, thick and soft on the mound of her, the flushed lips below it already starting to glisten.

His whole body jolted at the sight of it, and she saw it happen, and felt herself get wetter just from being looked at like that.

"And this?" she said. She slid one hand down over her stomach, into the hair, and used two fingers to part herself, spreading her pussy lips open for him so he could see the slick pink inside, the wetness gathering and catching the light. "You like my pussy, Francis?"

He made a broken sound. He was shaking openly now, his breath ragged, and part of his brain was back in a grey Chemistry classroom with his heart in his throat and his hand frozen on her knee, certain he'd go his whole life and never get to see this. That boys like him didn't get girls like her. And here she was, standing naked in the gold light with her own fingers holding her wet pussy open for him, and he thought he might genuinely lose his mind.

And then she did the thing that finished him off completely.

The shy girl who'd guarded herself from everyone, who'd cried in a classroom rather than say a single word, was gone. In her place stood someone he'd never met, working two fingers slowly into her own wet pussy in front of him, her head tipping back, a filthy little moan slipping out of her.

"I've thought about this so much," she breathed. "Being your dirty little slut. Just yours." She drew her glistening fingers up and, holding his eyes, licked her own wetness off them. "You have no idea how long I've wanted to be filthy for you."

That was the third thing that broke him, after her tits and after her pussy. Not just that she was naked, not just that she was beautiful, but that under all that careful modesty she'd been hiding this the whole time, a dirty streak she was finally letting out, only for him. Watching his sweet, shy oldest friend turn into a slut right in front of him was more than his body knew what to do with.

She came down off her feet and knelt in front of him, her hands sliding onto his knees, and the filthy confidence softened just slightly into something more honest.

"All this time you wanted my body," she said. "And the whole time I wanted yours. I used to lie awake thinking about it." Her hands were already at his waistband. "I've always wanted to see your cock. To touch it. To suck it. I want all of it, Francis. Can I?"

He couldn't have said no if the shed had been burning down around them. He nodded.

Her hands weren't steady as she undid him and dragged everything down, and he lifted to help, and then his cock sprang up hard against his stomach, and she went still and stared at it the same way he'd stared at her.

"Oh," she breathed. "God. Look at it."

She wrapped her hand around him and he made a wrecked sound, and she felt the heat and the weight and the pulse of him, and the power of it, after a whole summer of being the one looked at, went straight to her head. She explored him slowly, exactly the way she'd promised herself in the dark all those nights, her hand sliding up the length of him, her thumb spreading the wetness at the tip, tracing every ridge and vein like she was memorising him. He was undone by it, by the hunger on her face, by the fact that it was her.

And then she leaned in, looked up to make sure he was watching, and took his cock into her mouth.

The sound he made barely belonged to him. She moaned around him and gave herself to it completely, no shyness left in her at all, her hand and her mouth working him together, her tongue dragging along the underside, taking him a little deeper each time. She pulled off just long enough to look up at him with wet lips and wild eyes.

"I've wanted to suck your cock for so long," she said, and went back down on him, hungrier now, sloppy and shameless, the wet sounds of it filling the little shed.

He was losing it fast. "Allie," he gasped. "I'm close, I don't, I don't know if you want me to..." He couldn't even get the question out. Even now, with his cock in her mouth, he didn't want to assume, didn't want to do one single thing she hadn't said yes to.

She answered him by taking him deeper. She pushed her mouth down further, took his cock all the way to the back of her throat and held it there, her eyes locked on his, and the message could not have been clearer. She wanted all of it. In her mouth. Now.

That was the end of him. He broke with a strangled cry, every muscle locking, his hands flying to her hair without gripping, and he came hard, in her mouth, pulse after pulse, more than he thought was in him. She stayed exactly where she was and took every drop. And when he was finally spent and shaking she drew back, and instead of swallowing she opened her mouth and showed him, let him see his cum pooled on her tongue, holding his stunned stare for a long second before she closed her lips and swallowed all of it down with a satisfied little hum.

Then she wasn't done. She bent back to his cock and licked him clean, slow and greedy, lapping up what was left of him like an animal, chasing every last drop. There was a streak of it high on her cheek where he'd caught her. She scooped it up with one finger, looked him dead in the eye, and sucked her finger clean too.

Francis stared at her, completely wrecked, certain he had never seen and would never see anything as filthy or as beautiful in his whole life.

She sat back on her heels and looked up at him, her lips swollen and shining, wearing a look he'd never seen on her before. Past wonder. Something like triumph, and disbelief, and love, all at once. She'd done it. After everything, after the tears in that classroom and the two years of silence and the whole long summer, she'd done all of it, and she'd loved every second.

He slid off the bench onto the floor beside her, useless and grinning, and pulled her in, and she came easily, fitting against his chest the way she'd fitted into his life since they were eleven, both of them naked and stunned in the last gold light of the summer.

"When we were kids," he started, and stopped, and tried again. "I never once thought I'd get to. Any of it. You."

"I know," she said into his neck. "Me neither." She was quiet a moment. "I'm glad it was you. I think it was always going to be you."

Outside, the cicadas kept up their racket, and the last afternoon of their last summer burned slowly down around them, and neither of them was in any hurry to move.