THE NAKED TEMPTRESS

Reworked from an earlier version.

The soldier had been away from home for far too long. The absence would have been unbearable had he a woman back in the homeland, waiting on his return with all the anxiety a good woman can muster, but he didn't. He was a loner. Always had been.

He supposed it was by choice. It wasn't that he didn't like women: he did. He looked at them secretly, tried to spy more intimately if there was no chance of his being discovered doing it. And it was quite easy finding corners here and there where he could lurk, hidden, eyes on a window space beyond which a young woman might be undressing or attending to her face and hair, or just sitting quietly, guarding her father's homestead.

And sometimes he saw too much for his own good. Sometimes the scenes he beheld stirred his own flesh, sometimes even made him play quietly with himself with the gorgeousness of a forbidden intimacy whenever such an exercise was remotely possible in broad daylight. He couldn't help it. No man would be able to help it, he told himself. Here he was, in this blasted country with their arcane rules and weird god and the whispers of rebellion never so far away. It was no wonder that he sometimes took himself in hand, and he knew others did the same...

Back in Rome, the Emperor had heard those whispers and ordered special forces to keep an extra look-out for trouble. And he, the soldier, was one of those special forces and he had gone to work with a will - but they hadn't told him about the women and the things they did in their own quarters when they were sure they were beyond the eyes of men.

And they hadn't told him how easy it was to spy on them.

How easy it was to get excited. Especially for a loner like him, to whom excitement was never more than a blush away.

He watched the woman - or child … was she still a child? No, she was fifteen if she was a day and she had the breasts and hips to prove it … she was a woman all right. Her window, a rectangular and rather small aperture in the side of the building she called home, was in plain view from one particular and awkward vantage point, and he had made that his own. You didn't go around telling your mates about your spying or they might mock you, call you a pervert, all in jest of course because he was no different from them, but he didn't like jest. So this hidey-hole was his own secret, and he squeezed into it and gazed at that tiny window space. He knew she was in there. He saw her passing the window, her head scarf bright in the sunlight that streamed through onto it.

Then, without warning, the girl took off her clothes. Not in a business-like way, but slowly as if it might be a performance. He didn't know why, it was much too early for her to be turning in for the night, but there she was, pulling her gown over her head slowly, almost seductively, and underneath she was naked. Of course she was, in a balmy climate like this. And her skin was smooth like a baby's skin, her breasts perfectly formed, the angle of her neck, her long, intelligent neck, was perfect and her eyes, those beautiful eyes that occasionally flashed his way, were like windows into the most sacred of souls.

Her father was away from home for long periods and she was left alone. Did she have a mother? He rather thought not, for he'd never seen another woman in the place and anyway women died young, didn't they? Maybe in childbirth, denying the naked angel a brother or sister...

The girl, unclothed, beautiful, walked backwards and forwards, passing out of his view - that damned window was much too small - and then returning. Once or twice he thought she must have seen him, but she can't have. He was sure as sure that he was just about invisible to her and anyway no girl as decent as she clearly was would cavort like she did in plain view if she suspected someone was there, would she?

The window, without any covering, of course, without any glass to ripple his vision, was his aperture into a forbidden heaven. As she crouched there, as still as a shadow, he felt a familiar stirring in his groin, and he groaned. He was under unbearable pressure, but in this place he daren't push his hands down his own front and relieve himself like he sometimes could. Here he was too confined and any movement would be obvious, would be amplified by moving the weeds around him ... and he'd be stoned, surely, if he was discovered by the locals who resented his presence anyway … and according to the local customs so would she for letting him look at her nakedness.

“Hey you!”

The voice cut into his dread like a knife.

It was the girl.

She was standing, naked, inside but just beyond her window, and she was looking directly at him.

His erection raged as he stared helplessly at her.

“Come on, then,” she whispered, barely loud enough for him to hear, “come on … I'm all alone … you can be my angel today … it's not easy being a girl on her own and feeling horny like this... Just be my loving angel...”

The soldier, the loner, could do nothing else. His hormones, his spirit, his desperate needs, urged him, and he clambered awkwardly from his hiding place and made his way, slowly towards the girl.

“You gorgeous hunk of an angel,” she breathed, and he reached through the tiny window towards her bosom.

“Come on in,” she insisted, and he made his way to the open doorway.

She was still naked as he walked into the small home, his uniform clanking, his spirit shaking like a leaf, nervous like he'd never been before.

“You can call me Mary,” she said sweetly, “and I'll call you my angel...”

© Peter Rogerson 05.11.14, edited and reworked 21.12.20

Author's Note

A simple tale but one I enjoyed writing because of the season we're enjoying...