Melina Breaking Free. Dimitra Mantheakis

girl of the past was her long, carefully-groomed red hair that had always been her trademark characteristic.

      In the beginning Mary did not take much notice of the young man’s discreet approaches. Later though, influenced by repeated compliments voiced about him by several girls who had set their sights on him, she started noticing him, finding him to be very much to her liking. In two months they were in a relationship and Anesti, who had fallen in love with her, felt he was walking on air. Mary, it was true, didn’t feel the same way for Anesti. She found him interesting, she liked him, she was flattered by his choosing her from among so many rivals who wanted to lay claim to him, but that was as far as her sentiments for him went.

      The next month Anesti asked her father for Mary’s hand. The pharmacist replied that Mary would have to finish high school first, but the young man was impatient. He tried to impress on her father that his daughter would not need any qualifications as she would become his wife and the mother of his children. He did not want Mary to work and if in the future she were to become bored at home, she could occupy herself at his office which was not short of architectural assignments for houses and shops. But Mary, even though she was a very bright student, wanted to get married to escape the restrictions of life at home. She would be able to go out with her husband whenever she wanted, to stay out late in clubs, to travel and to run her house the way she wanted to as its only mistress. Her mother, her ally, had two more daughters to marry off and considered Anesti to be a godsend present for their family because he didn’t demand a dowry. Their finances were unable to allow them to live well and at the same time to provide money and homes for all three daughters, according to the social custom. The pharmacy provided for their needs, but left no room for savings, let alone any investment in property. The help that they received from their sister-in-law was for exclusive use by Penelope for her personal needs and she selfishly did not share this money with anyone else.

      Despite her mother’s logic and Mary’s own wishes, the pharmacist’s inflexible resolve for his daughter to finish high school, and then to do whatever she wanted, prevailed. Anesti gave in. He wanted to have good relations with his future in-laws, and, in any case, the waiting period was limited to just a few months. The two families agreed to keep the engagement secret in order to avoid problems for Mary at school. The engaged couple limited their meetings to visits to relatives’ homes and no one suspected that there was anything more than mere friendship between them. The young architect satisfied himself with a few snatched kisses and Mary’s lack of experience and her innocence thrilled him. He was not in a hurry to possess her. In a little while she would belong to him, would be his wife and he would have the opportunity to teach her, step by step, everything that she did not know in the sexual sphere, a prospect that built up sweet anticipation in him.

      In the meantime the other hopefuls did not give up their dreams since they were unaware of Anesti’s commitment to Mary. Without their mothers’ knowing they phoned him, offering to meet him. It was plain that they wanted to use their physical charms to tempt him and to make him see them differently, with the prospect of their becoming a permanent fixture at his side as his wife. Anesti was a male and was not about to reject the voluntarily offered fruit brought before him. When the village shops closed at lunchtime and all their fellow citizens went home to eat and to have their siesta he remained behind at his office after telling his staff to leave. He would leave the door unlocked and wait. Taking a hundred precautions, each of the young women would slip into his office and from there it would be ‘Showtime’. After two or three trite exchanges of conversation Anesti would make his move. He was surprised by the fact that the girls’ reactions were all the same, as if they had agreed on a common game plan. “Don’t Anesti! I haven’t been with anyone before. All I’ve had was an innocent flirtation before now!” and other similar phrases to convince him of the attraction of their virginity. Anesti saw things from a different angle, so much from their willingness to submit, as from the experience he discerned from their behaviour. Two out of four visitors may not have “gone all the way” but they were supremely familiar with everything else in the repertoire of sexual acts. The other two, from the first half hour, and after receiving the exciting caresses of the experienced man, gave themselves without resistance and begged for him not to pull out. Their screams of passion were so loud that Anesti, to avoid getting into trouble, had to seal their mouths with his hand for their cries not be heard by a neighbour or a passer-by outside.

      He had sex with them everywhere. On his desk, in the revolving chair, on the floor, even on the sink of the office kitchenette. One of his partners, after squeezing him dry by her repeated demands for “More! More!” as if a man were a machine, turned and said to him “I imagine that now you have made me your woman, you will marry me! I won’t let you have your way and then dump me.”

      Anesti laughed, saying “The person who should marry you is the one who deflowered you before me and taught you so many of the tricks that you did for me, if indeed my predecessor was just one in number! Judging from your performance I personally very much doubt that he was the only one. I am tired of always having the number “2” on my back, as the second lover in the sexual career of most of you. If you want we can continue to have a good time together, but that is as far as it goes. I have no intention of tying myself up with anyone. Besides which, you came here on your own. I didn’t phone you, chase after you or know who you were.” The girl, pretending to be insulted usually shed a tear or two, but in a little while grabbed his private parts and with her capable hands prepared him for a new round…

      For several months Anesti enjoyed himself, making love to the girls by rotation, after the other ones had pressingly demanded that he enter them to feel his organ deep in their vaginas. Anesti overcame his initial hesitation and after the third or fourth date there wasn’t a single position that he had not tried out with them, nor any erotic game that he had not played either with his penis or with his tongue. It was true though that they too offered him pleasure, exploring his almost permanent erection with their lips with the ulterior intention of enslaving him with their sexual encounters and to permanently trap him in their nets. Luckily for Anesti, none of them knew of the existence of the others, and even though all four were friends, they had not opened their mouths to say anything. One could say, of course, that at a time when girls would not admit even to kissing a boy, would any of the young women dare to admit the extreme sexual limits they had gone to during lunch hours at Anesti’s office? The hills would blush!

      A little before the beginning of June Anesti, sated by the erotic encounters now they had nothing new to offer him, was not willing to copulate with them and satisfied himself with oral sex. As soon as they, each one in her turn, demanded satisfaction with conventional sexual penetration, expressing their dissatisfaction at his unwillingness, saying that he “excited them and then left them to simmer in their own juices”, the architect found an excuse to get rid of them, one by one. He was sure that they would not let slip even a word about the hours of depravity they had spent with him. In any event, he himself felt absolutely nothing emotionally for any of them. When he satisfied his male sexual longings that were so pressing and intense at his young age of twenty-seven, and after he indulged every fantasy that came to him with his willing partners, he could hardly wait for them to leave his office so he could take a shower and wait for his day’s work to be done so that he could visit Mary.

      After each round of debauchery with his “volunteers”, Mary appeared even purer, even more innocent, and the thought that she would soon become his wife and that he would be able to explore every part of her body made the erection springing up from his crotch so obvious that he went to great effort to control himself so that he would not give himself away and be made a laughing stock. It is a fact that he missed his lunchtime activities with the hot and subservient provincial girls who were not wanting in imagination, nor in their ability to put their thoughts into practice compared to the females he had connected with in the past; women who had enjoyed the freedom of offering themselves to him, wherever and however they desired, without limits, and without raising a social outcry. He had, however, to be careful not to give his sexual partners more rights over him by extending their presence in his life because the hour of his wedding on the fifth of July was approaching and there would be a scandal in the small town if his activities became known, as well as the fact that Mary, for sure, would leave him if she were to find out what had been going on…and the last thing that Anesti wanted was to lose