Adventures in Dating…in Heels

Excerpt

Adventures in Dating…in Heels
Liam Livings © 2018
All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

1987

I first realised I wasn’t quite like other boys when I was seven. By then, I was old enough to know what I liked and what I didn’t like and, more importantly, confident and talkative enough to do something about it.

One afternoon, when Dad was at work and Mum was making cakes in the kitchen, I found a pile of Mum’s large dresses in the living room, waiting to be ironed. I knew they were hers as I’d seen her bustling about the house in them, just before Dad came home from work. At four o’clock every day, after I’d been home from school a while, Mum would disappear upstairs dressed as Mrs. Mop and reappear at quarter to five in one of her long flowing dresses, full makeup, and heels, her hair brushed out from spending a day under a head scarf.

Mum was really into the Mamas and the Papas, and during the summer holidays while Dad was at work, and once the house was straight and she’d “done through” as she called it, we’d dance to her twelve-inch records in the living room. She would come in from hanging out the washing in the back garden and say, “A good day for drying. If they’re done in time and I’m all done through, we can have a little dance with my records.”

One afternoon while Mum was upstairs making herself look nice for Dad, I grabbed one of her dresses and climbed into it, ready for our dance.

Mum walked into the living room as I held the Mamas and the Papas album, wearing her size-twenty dress covered in bright-pink daisies, a wide grin filling my face.

She took the record off me. “What you doing in my dress, love?”

“I like the flowers and I want to see what it feels like when I dance around in it, like you do.” Perfectly reasonable as far as I was concerned.

“They’re for me, not for you, love.” She put the record on and turned to me, her hands on her hips. “Take it off and we can have a dance together.”

But I didn’t want to take it off. I wanted to keep it on with my whole being. As I swayed from side to side, brushing the dress between my hands as I swung my arms around, I felt so right I couldn’t understand why I had to take it off.

“I’ll be careful. I won’t make it dirty.” Dirty was the worst thing in that house as far as Mum was concerned, and I knew I wouldn’t do that to the dress.

As the music filled the room, Mum knelt in front of me. “One dance. But it’s our little secret. Don’t tell Daddy, all right?” She made a zipping motion with her hand across her lips.

I nodded emphatically and started to dance with her to the music. It was the one that made me dance the most on the whole album, it was “One Way Ticket.” It all felt perfect: the swishing sound of the dress as it moved around me, the feeling of the gap between my bare legs, and how different it was from wearing trousers.

As I danced, I caught a glimpse of myself, stood in my mum’s frock, smiling as I jumped about.

The song finished, and Mum lifted the needle on the record player and told me to take off the dress.

There was a bit of a disagreement as I begged for one more song, held up my He-Man figure and said, “I want to dance for him.”

“You like He-Man, do you, love?”

I nodded and Mum kept looking at her watch. In the end, she unzipped the dress behind my back and lifted me out of it. As the dress lay on the ground, pooled around my feet, the back door clicked, signalling Dad’s return from work. Mum scooped up the dress and folded it quickly into the ironing pile in the living room, then greeted Dad, in his grey suit carrying a black briefcase, with a hug and a kiss.

“What’s for dinner?” Dad asked over Mum’s shoulder, staring at me.

I was still moving a bit to the song continuing to play in my head.

“What’s he dancing about for? Why’s he not got any clothes on? Hasn’t he got something useful to do, like lay the table?”

Mum pulled back from the hug and told me to throw on some clothes, and then asked me to lay the table as dinner would be five minutes. Raising her eyebrows towards me, she said, “Fish fingers, peas, and chips. Your favourite.”

I ran upstairs to dress, nipping in ahead of Dad. Once we had both changed, we made our way downstairs again. Mum beamed at my dad, who was now wearing a shapeless grey tracksuit he’d bought from a catalogue when Mum had complained his old tracksuit had too many holes to be darned anymore.

We continued with our little secret most evenings. Sometimes, I would watch Mum putting on her makeup from their bed and I’d ask what each item was for as she applied them.

“Can I have a go?” I asked once got the courage.

She turned, half her lips bright red, the lipstick in her hand. “Not on you. You can do it on me if you want.” She handed it to me. As I applied it to her lips, I had to force my whole body not to put a bit on my own.

“How does it come off?” I asked innocently.

She showed me the makeup remover in the jar on her dressing table and the cotton wool in the drawer.

Now I knew everything I needed to know.

When Mum was hanging out the washing or deeply involved in dinner preparation, I would take some of Mum’s makeup into the bathroom and make up my whole face and then stare at myself in the mirror, amazed at how I no longer looked like me. Afterwards, I’d dutifully remove it all with the bottle and cotton wool just as Mum had done.

That Christmas, Mum opened her present from Dad: a pair of shiny black high-heeled shoes. The toes went to a sharp point and the heel was longer than my index finger. She tried them on, parading around the room and twirling her feet at every turn.

I looked at the Meccano tractor set I’d just opened and my heart sank. Why didn’t I have a little sister so I could play Barbie dolls with her as I was growing up? I’d seen these dolls in their bright-pink boxes and blonde hair next to the muddy-grey Action Man in the toy shop. When I’d asked for one of those, Dad had said not to be so silly. I wanted an Action Man, didn’t I?

Now, Dad said, “Shall we build the tractor?”

Desperate for something to have in common with Dad, I nodded, opened the box, and cleared a space on the living room carpet. Soon the tractor was built, with its red shiny three-inch wheels, bent tube of a body, and frame around the seat where my old Action Man could sit—if I could have found him. I’d just handed Dad bits and pieces, watching him build it. It was the most we’d talked to each other in years.

After everyone went to bed that night, I sneaked into the living room, pushed my tractor aside, put on Mum’s shiny black high heels, and walked around the kitchen, enjoying every quiet tap they made on the floor. After I’d had my fill, I put them back where they’d been left and went to bed.

Chapter Two

1995

My one attempt at making friends at school taught me not to bother again. Somehow, when I was fifteen, I found myself signed up for the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, which required camping. I think Mum had said it would be a good way to get to know the other boys. Only not in the way that it happened.

After a day of carrying our backpacks across the wilds of Dartmoor, trying to find letter boxes—little plastic boxes hidden across the moor with stamps you dipped in the ink block to mark your sheet, proving you’d found the letter box—I fell into the tent with two other boys. Russell loudly spent an hour talking about his sexual exploits with various girls in our year, ranging from how many he’d had, how far he’d gone—hand jobs, fingering, all the details—and whether he’d gone back for seconds with any of them. Some of the details he shared made me feel a bit ill, and much of it was so over the top I doubted its truth somewhat. I didn’t say this to Russell, though. As he finished his personal biology lesson, he said how horny he felt—hardly news for a fifteen-year-old boy—and lay on his back, making a feature of the lump in his sleeping bag, and then complained that it ached and he didn’t know what to do with it.

“Anyone want to see?” he offered nonchalantly, adding that if it had some fresh air it would probably go down or something.

I said I wasn’t bothered and the other boy, who’d said nothing up to this point, said he was going to sleep and, whatever we did, to keep the noise down.

Russell unzipped his sleeping bag to reveal himself poking out the flies of his baggy boxer shorts. In addition to not going down, it stood even more to attention and he complained he’d never get to sleep like that.

By this point, I too was pretty turned on, but not from listening to his sex stories, and I knew why, so I kept that to myself, trying not to stare at him next to me.

There followed a conversation about him needing a release, and I probably did, too, and we could give each other a hand with it. But not in a gay way, of course, because just hands wasn’t gay, was it, and it would only be gay if we enjoyed it, and this was just so we could get to sleep, wasn’t it?

Agreeing with his logic, nonchalantly as I could, I leant across and gave him a hand, noticing how in my sleeping bag I responded by becoming even more turned on. A few short flicks of my wrist and it was over for him, leaving a sticky mess on his stomach and my hand. I unzipped my sleeping bag and started to reveal myself, saying how it was such a drag that we’d had to do this, and I’d be glad when it was over and done with so I could sleep.

Russell looked at my bulging underpants, tidied himself up, zipped his sleeping bag up and said, “I don’t think I can as it goes. I’m not touching your cock. What do ya think I am, a fucking queer? Nope, I’m tired, best you take care of it yourself.” He leant close to my ear and whispered, “If you dare tell anyone what you did to me, I’ll spread it around that Kev Harrison forced himself on me in our tent.” He rolled away so his back faced me.

I lay on my back for a while, thinking about what had just happened. No matter what I said or did, no one would believe me, and if anyone else found out about this, I would look like the pervert. No one would believe Russell of the multiple girlfriends at fifteen would have asked a man to wank him off. So I closed my eyes, thought about the gruelling walk tomorrow and the little plastic Tupperware boxes hidden, and very quickly, I was able to lie on my front and fall into a fitful sleep.

After that, I dropped out of the scheme and stopped even trying to make friends at school.