Elaine sat alone in the corner booth of her favorite restaurant. Every Wednesday, when her classes had let out, she would walk the half-mile to Clark’s Diner for a piece of cherry pie and a cup of coffee. The waiter at the diner didn’t need to take her order; he already knew it. Elaine had been coming here since the 8th grade. Now well into her senior year, this routine was well established.

“Enjoy.” Jackson said with a wink as he set the pie and coffee down in front of Elaine. She blushed at his sight and looked at what was just set out in front of her in order to hide the red that flushed to her cheeks.

Jackson’s parents owned Clark’s Diner. It had been in his family for three generations now, four if you count Jackson, who would inherit the diner at some point in the near future. Elaine was best friends and classmates with Jackson’s little sister, Hannah.

One bite into the pie and Elaine started daydreaming about a camping trip their families had gone on a few years ago. It was a hot weekend, hotter than most weekends in Ohio, so everyone had decided to spend most of their free time during the day, when the sun was at his harshest, playing in the lake and lounging around under an umbrella at the beach. Jackson started to throw around Elaine and the other girls as soon as they got into the water for a swim. She remembered how strong his hands felt when he grabbed around her hips and tossed her around in the water as if she were weightless. His palms were rough and calloused, but she remembered how tenderly he handled her. With a little extra focus, she was almost able to grasp onto the feeling of Jackson’s hands around her waist again.

Jackson would dive under the water and swim in between the legs of the girls and resurface behind them, grabbing each one of them around their hips and launching them out of the water into the air. Each of the girls squealed with juvenile delight as they splashed back into the water. This would take place every day for hours, much to everyone’s enjoyment.

Towards the end of the week, on the second to last day of the camping trip, Elaine decided that today she was going to fight back against Jackson when he tried to throw her into the water. When the families arrived at the beach, the girls immediately stripped down to their swimsuits and rushed towards the water. Elaine noticed Jackson’s eyes lingered on her for a few seconds after she slipped her shorts down her legs and off of her feet. She wondered if he was watching her strip down to her bikini the entire trip. Just as soon as their eyes met did Jackson look away. She didn’t have enough time to read his face and try to venture a guess into what it was that he was thinking when staring at her, if in fact he was even staring at her at all. But that half-a-second of eye contact coupled with catching him in the act of probably watching her undress made Elaine’s pulse race. Happy to be in the water because it hid just how wet her sex had become from watching Jackson set up their spot on the beach. He stood up after laying out the towels and dug his toes deep into the sand. She blushed when she saw him cross his arms, reach down to his waist, grab the bottom of his stone grey T-shirt, and pull it off his body. Elaine wondered if he took off his shirt like this just for her to return the favor of watching him undress. That thought left her mind and Elaine felt silly when she watched him wipe the sweat off of his brow with that same balled up shirt. Jackson grabbed the umbrella with both of his hands, opened it up, and started to drive the bottom of the metal pole deep down into the sand. Each time Jackson readjusted his grip on the pole and drove the open umbrella deeper into the beach, Elaine felt a fire rise deep inside of her womb. It started slowly at first, but by the time Jackson had finished making the camp up, Elaine had looked away out of utter shame and embarrassment. These feelings felt too strong to her to be natural. She had to cut them off at the source. Where did this feeling come from?​          she wondered. It was utterly foreign to her. There was a passion newly awakened inside of Elaine that hadn’t been there before, at least not like this. Elaine was sure of two things: it was Jackson who had aroused such an intense desire in her and that she wanted nothing more than to give herself over to these newfound passions completely, to surrender these newly harbored desires that rang out from the very depths of her being and to succumb fully to Jackson’s whimsy.

A car horn screeched outside of the diner. The blaring sound emitted from the car was enough to bring Elaine back down to reality and out of the fantasy that played endlessly in her head. She noticed her breath had picked up and a few drops of moisture had begun to collect on the inside of her satin pink panties. She stuck her fork through the crust of the pie and into the middle of a dark red cherry. Her lips pursed as she brought the bite of pie to her mouth. Teeth closed around the fork as the juices from the cherry flooded every empty inch of her mouth. Elaine let herself slip back into her fantasies while continuing to munch down on the pie and sip at her coffee.

Elaine always suspected that Jackson was attracted to her, but never was quite sure enough of herself to make a pass at him. He was nine years her elder, and with a gap in age that large between the two of them, any desire Elaine felt towards him while she was growing up had to be suppressed.