The Summer of Lust

After breakfast, Sebastian returned upstairs for a shower. A haggard young man stared back at him as he examined his face in the mirror. Life had not been kind to Sebastian, and it showed. The six weeks off school hadn't done much rejuvenation.

The problem with being handsome-in-a-brooding-kind-of-way is that comparisons to Mr Darcy are apt to be made. This is all well and good when the character's aloof demeanour are presented on screen, paired with the good looks of Colin Firth or Matthew MacFadyen. Women are liable to swoon as they imagine themselves as a Lizzie Bennett type, but few are willing to put in the work for a real-life Mr Darcy. Handsome-in-a-brooding-kind-of-way is often more effort than it's worth.

Sebastian ran the back of his hand along his jawline, feeling the coarse stubble, and decided it was short enough to go another day without shaving.

Once undressed, Sebastian's hand went immediately to his member. Growing up, Sebastian had discovered, like most young men, that the shower was the best place to masturbate. It was one of the few places privacy was guaranteed for a sufficient length of time. The noise masked the sounds, and all evidence was quickly washed away, leaving no splatter, used tissues or strange odours, and inviting no questions. The trick, however, was to be erect before turning on the water. That way, no time was wasted and suspiciously long showers could be avoided.

Sebastian was a wanker. It was a natural mechanism for coping with two opposing forces. One was puberty, which had struck him on the younger side and cursed him with an aggressive libido. The other was the cruel void of outlets for his urges. Together these resulted in an unusually long and active history of self-love.

The earliest memory Sebastian had of a vagina was a monochromatic diagram projected onto a whiteboard in a primary school sex education class. Labels gave the scientific names for the various parts, names which nobody could possibly remember at nine years old. Though it was not at all sexy — they were children; it wasn't meant to be sexy — a precocious classmate later told Sebastian what you were meant to do with them. Sebastian instinctively knew that was what _he _wanted to do.

By thinking about doing it with girls in his class, he realised he could induce an erection, but it took him a while to fully understand the mechanics. When he learnt that thrusting was required, it wasn't long that, after some experimentation, he experienced his first conscious ejaculation with the help of a sheepskin bootee that was just the right size to accommodate him. The wool made him itchy, but he quickly discovered his hand would do the job just as well.

Initially the objects of his desire were girls his own age, including Catriona, his first crush. His horizons expanded, however, when he realised that time and space were no barrier to his imagination. He didn't even need to actually know a girl to fantasise about her. Any girl or woman was fair game.

Eventually masturbating twice a day became the norm. On weekends and during holidays he could easily manage four times a day. His personal best was eight.

This past time intersected with another of his proclivities: collecting. Underneath Sebastian's bed was a box containing a folder of collages, each held in a plastic sleeve. Given the subject of the collages, this was a good idea. From about the age of ten, Sebastian had cut out pictures of attractive women from newspapers and magazines, turning them into collages that formed a sort of paper harem to accompany him on his masturbatory exploits. Among them were pictures of Angelina Jolie in the skin-tight silver wetsuit from the second Tomb Raider film, Liv Tyler smoking a cigarette in her underwear from around the time she was filming The Lord of the Rings, and Sarah Michelle Gellar promoting Scooby Doo. They were joined by a blonde bikini model with curly hair, an Asian lingerie model with a round face and nut brown skin, and many others.

Also in the box were stacks of quarterly lingerie catalogues that Sebastian's aunt received in the post. Sebastian had managed to spare each one from the recycling, and there were now almost thirty issues, organised chronologically, with his favourite pages bookmarked. Even after Sebastian discovered pornography, he still found a use for the more subtle, tasteful images, had a sentimentality toward the women who seemed to mutely understand and accept his needs.

It was in this same obsessive spirit of collecting that the Summer of Lust began. The summer holidays had barely begun when Sebastian turned to his most recent yearbook for inspiration. To Sebastian, his yearbooks were collections, just like the collages and catalogues, and he often opened them when he wanted to fantasise about someone “real.” Celebrities and models were fine, but was never plausible that what he imagined doing with them would actually happen. The students and, to a lesser extent, staff at Cobham High were within the bounds of possibility.

Although Courtney had his heart securely locked down, Sebastian's eyes were free to wander. Courtney wasn't the only attractive girl at Cobham High, and his tunnel vision for her was confined to romance, not lust. Thinking about other women allowed him to indulge in fantasies of varying degrees of debauchery that he couldn't imagine acting out with Courtney. Sex with the others could be dirty. Animalistic. Primal. Disposable. Uncommitted. Sheer pleasure and access all areas.

To a large extent, that meant anal sex — Sebastian was, after all, a teenaged boy. When he had first discovered anal pornography, it turned him off. He didn't get it. But it was unavoidable and he quickly developed a taste for it. He interpreted it as dedication to sex in its most raw form. It had nothing to do with procreation. It was purely for the pursuit of pleasure. Sexual desire uncoupled from biological imperative. If a woman took it up there it wasn't because natural selection told her she had to. Not to mention the tighter seal around the shaft had an appealing, satisfying aesthetic.

As he had turned the pages of his yearbook, skimming all the faces for one that caught his eye, Sebastian had wondered how long it would take to complete one whole cycle. Could he wank his way through the entire thing over the summer holidays? He tore a sheet of lined paper from an old exercise book and wrote on it the names of all the female students and staff he found even remotely attractive. With his yearbook open on his desk, he went through methodically, face-by-face. If he could imagine a scenario involving her that was capable of producing an erection, she made the list. By the time he was done there were well over a hundred names. Sebastian's sordid game thus began.

Now every name on the list had a cross through it. Sebastian had done what he felt was the “right thing” and given Courtney the “honour” of being first, but had then proceeded in no particular order. Only some of the plumper and less attractive teachers had been challenging: they were only on the list because they were teachers and presented a taboo. He was back at the beginning.

While Sebastian was in the bathroom, Laura went upstairs to his bedroom and navigated her way through the small piles of dirty clothes and sweet wrappers that littered Sebastian's floor until she reached his closet. Inside, she found a square cardboard box of the sturdy kind supplied by movers that Sebastian had brought from London all those years ago. Inside were the keepsakes and mementos that Sebastian had accumulated since he developed a sense of sentimentality.

Laura didn't make it a habit of snooping on her nephew, but she realised she didn't even know what his crush looked like. She felt delicately through academic awards, chess trophies and museum brochures until her fingers found the soft leatherette cover of Sebastian's most recent yearbook. From a well-thumbed page near the middle, Courtney's face looked up at her, full pink lips frozen in a perpetual smile. Her nephew had good taste.

“If only there was something I could do to help,” she thought.

As he stood naked in the bathroom, Sebastian massaged his shaft until it could get no harder, then turned on the tapes. While he waited for the water to warm up, he closed his eyes and conjured up the image of him and Courtney. They were naked on a bed, surrounded by darkness, as though they were the only things in existence. Her bosom was resting on his bare chest and she was kissing him on the lips, her large breasts pressing against his body. It was no longer his hand around his shaft, but hers.

Ready, Sebastian stepped under the water. In his fantasy, Courtney began to kiss down his torso until she was able to take his shaft between her lips. Her head bobbed up and down as she fellated him, her eyes looking up at him lovingly. The image suddenly changed and now she was on her back, her legs spread apart. Sebastian imagined Courtney's labia were small and closed, forming a neat, hairless slit between her creamy thighs in which he could bury his face. He had little idea of how to perform cunnilingus, but that didn't stop him from longing to try it. Swiftly, the vision changed again, and this time he was on top of Courtney, his shaft inside her, pumping in and out of her body as she moaned, panted and wailed in pleasure until …

Sebastian opened his eyes just in time to see the water wash away the last of his milky seed.