Nanine

I suspected this might be a bad idea, I was already so anxious about it. I'd decided to go to a dance.

Just possibly I was overdressed, and I was definitely clean! I’d scrubbed myself pink and my hair was tucked behind my ears, irritating. Unfortunately overcoming anxiety and nerves wasn’t so easy! I gulped down hard on both, then timidly decided myself and took my flutter off into the warm evening.

So I'd kind of known it was a mistake all along, but meeting Nanine taught me that.

Very pink and smooth and full, her legs perfect milk-bottles and her brown hair scrimped in a glossy ponytail without a strand out of place, she was wearing a floaty dress that looked like it had been sewn together from several gingham pillowcases. She danced with every boy her age and over, but there were also some little boys there, as shy and feverishly hormonal as I was. It was clear that although I was older even than Nanine, she grouped me with them.

This made me smoulder, restless, but it wasn't the worst way Nanine made me feel that evening. She had a curious way of dancing when she was doing so on her own, and she always seemed to do it in front of me and the smallest boys. The she’d come out with little tappy intricate steps, like she was deliberately trying to irritate us with the pattern.

The tapping of her tiny feet, that maddening sound. Quick and tappy and never setting a foot wrong. Enticing, and furiously irritating in its smug swift little rhythm.

When she was near, the still air would be heavy with deeply suggestive perfume-smell. I hardly dared take a sniff.

Then all of a sudden music Nanine would hold her feet still and stand before us, her face lifted away, her eyes idly pinning a corner of the ceiling. To the tinkles and plinks she’d then began to pick at her floaty pillowcase skirts, lifting and dropping, then raising the other side higher, showing a quivering of smooth pink milk-bottle thigh.

My heartbeat was catching in my throat. Were we going to see her knickers? Oh Nanine, I thought frenziedly, stop teasing us with your skirts like that and show us!

She was putting me in a whirl. My small companions may have felt it too, but I was worse, and getting more so by the minute. I could hardly stay still, especially when she danced like that. In fact could hardly breathe.

Her eyes stayed on the ceiling, while she continued to flink her skirt. The other boys and I stared in vain. I couldn't bear it.

All evening I was never anywhere near brave enough to ask Nanine to dance, but when we were going home I couldn't help it. I had to. Somehow I fought back my frantic fright and stumbled over to her to say "Hi."

She just looked at me, and she coolly finished the drink in her plastic cup. Then without a backward glance she strolled out into the late dusk, her gingham folds floating on the warm air, tempting.

I flushed furiously. After all that struggle to pluck up my courage!

That was what decided me. With my indignant face set I scrambled after that sleek bobbing ponytail, clutched at those floaty folds, and threw them up. In so doing I gazed at the most perfectly pink bare butt any girl ever owned!

I guess that answered my question about whether I was going to see her knickers. Probably not tonight, since she wasn’t wearing any!

But like everything else about me that evening, even this didn't bother Nanine much. Haughtily she turned her head and just looked. I shrank to something like the size of one of my smaller freckles, blushing and flustered all over, whereas her other pair of cheeks didn’t turn so much as pink.

Then Nanine left, taking with her the milk-bottle smoothness that had driven me to rapture, the perfume-scent I couldn't get enough of, and every last bit of my confidence.