US Highways
Reunited Again
16 June 2014
BOSTON WAS ONE OF THOSE PLACES that my sure sense of direction told me was in the East. It’s funny how I never considered Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas or Virginia to be in the East, even though they all bordered the Atlantic. They were all the South, sadly lumped in with Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. It wasn’t until I got to Maryland and Washington, DC that I felt like I was in the East. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts embodied the very essence of East.
I’d driven up from the Delaware beaches—where I’d dipped my toes in the water of the third coast—north through New Jersey. Then I took a self-imposed detour, departing from the track of Highway 1 and staying well west of the Hudson River. I had no desire to visit New York City. People asked me on Facebook if I was going to go to Ground Zero and to send pictures of the memorial.
No.
I had no interest in seeing the place. I remembered in great detail the day of 9/11 and needed no pilgrimage to remind me. I remembered holding my little girl in my arms trying to explain to her what had happened and why everyone was so angry all the time. I had to explain to her that her little Muslim friend wasn’t a terrorist. I wish I could find the words I used to comfort her now so that I could tell them to the nation.
There’s a validity to remembering certain events to remind us not to let them happen again. Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it, so they say. But I’d seen plenty of evidence that the ‘remembrance of our heritage’ in the South wasn’t to keep another civil war from breaking out, but to keep people reminded that they were part of a different country from the rest of the United States. They flew a different flag than the rest of the country, sometimes in addition to the American flag, but often by itself. The longest undefended international boundary in the world runs right through the middle of the USA. It starts on the Mason-Dixon Line. From what I’d seen throughout the South, we are still two different countries that share a government.
So, when it came to memorializing the Twin Towers attack, I couldn’t see it as something that would heal our nation. The evidence is that it keeps alive the grievance, keeps the wound open. We don’t want to heal. We want to hate. We will keep our hate alive by reminding people daily of what those bastards did to us. That’s the only way we can justify sending ten thousand more Americans to their deaths in the Middle East so the three thousand in New York won’t have died in vain. What the fuck kind of screwed up sense is that?
We’d rain death on one and a half million innocent people who had nothing to do with the attack on the Twin Towers. We’d make sure they kept their hatred alive as well.
I avoided New York City.
Instead, I immersed myself in the history of our country where pilgrims settled, where the Boston Tea Party was held, and where the Revolutionary War began. I toured old cemeteries, churches, markets, and the incredible park called the Boston Common and its adjacent Public Garden, where the Swan Boats famously ply the pond. And I sat outside a little tobacco shop and smoked a ten-dollar cigar while I watched people. Finally, I followed Massachusetts Route 2 along Commonwealth Avenue until it became US Highway 20 at Boston University, a block away from Fenway Park.
A Long Time Ago: Eight-Tenths of a Mile
US Highway 20 has always had a special place in my mind—maybe in my heart. It’s the longest numbered highway in the United States at nearly 3,500 miles. It runs from Boston, Massachusetts to Newport, Oregon. And it goes right through my hometown. Or it used to. Now there’s a bypass.
When I was growing up, my address was Rural Route 2. That’s it. City and State. With that address, the mail carrier could deliver our mail. He knew everyone who lived along that mail delivery route, often stopping to talk to folks and bringing Sears, Roebuck, & Co. packages up to our door. I was sure he read all the picture postcards and knew everyone’s business.
It was an address, but it wasn’t a location. I couldn’t invite a friend over to play and tell him to just come to Rural Route 2. The route covered about twenty miles. So, from the time I could talk, I was told that I lived eight-tenths of a mile north of US 20 on Mosquito Road. I memorized it, recited it, and dreamed about it. I had a location.
Every day of my first fifteen years, it seemed, I crossed US 20. It was on the way to school, to church, to groceries, to deliver my newspapers. No matter where I wanted to go, I either crossed US 20 or traveled along it. My school was on US 20. The church was half a mile off. Every day I’d look up or down the McKinley Highway and wonder where it went.
This summer, I decided to find out.
Back to Boston
I stopped for coffee at Starbucks, half a mile west from the terminus of US 20. The mile markers on East-West US Highways run from West to East. I briefly considered making a game of stopping at every Starbucks between Boston and Newport, but even I can’t drink that much coffee. Or afford it. I had a great time on the journey, camping in the Berkshires, wandering along roads that twisted and turned through villages, and trying desperately to remember a poem I’d written years ago called “Eight-tenths of a mile off 20.”
I took a week’s detour north of Albany to visit a fan who invited me to use his RV pad for a week. It was a great treat to have some relaxed company. In the evenings we sat in front of a fire and smoked a cigar. I’d never been to Upstate New York, and had a completely relaxed time.
Along much of Scenic Highway 20, I saw signs that read ‘No reservation. No separate nation.’ It seemed funny to me, though, that when I passed through a corner of the Onondaga Nation south of Syracuse, none of the cars filling at the tax-free gas station seemed to be owned by natives. And I certainly availed myself of the four-dollar cigars at the tobacco shop—the same cigars I’d purchased for ten dollars in Boston.
You might be wondering what I was doing for companionship during all this time. Well, it was true that the last time I’d had sex was in Pigeon Fucking Forge, Tennessee and I was a little gun shy, so to speak. I’d gone a lot longer than two or three months before. I figured that I could wait until I found something good.
I’d stopped at a strip club west of Boston and got a bit of a surprise. They didn’t do lap dances and had no private dance room. It was all nude, but I noticed—Hey! I was paying attention!—that all the girls were completely shaved and absolutely sealed shut. I asked one of the girls about it. Even though they weren’t allowed to touch a customer, they still came around and sat with you, hoping you’d tip them just for their gracious company.
“Seeing the slit is defined by our city council as artistic freedom. Exposing anything inside is considered pornography. Touching a customer is considered soliciting. We can have a private dance for you if we stay four feet away. And don’t show our pussies. We have a wax we use to keep ’em closed.”
I’ll be damned.
Speaking of strippers, while I was camped at the north end of one of the Finger Lakes, I opened my email to find a message from Alice. You remember Alice? Eighteen-year-old stripper with a wet pussy who wanted to come with me?
We had, on a few occasions. I liked the girl and she liked teasing me. We’d had phone sex once or twice and just seeing her email address in my inbox sent a little jolt of electricity down my spine to my balls.
A-ri,
God! You don’t know how wet it makes me when I whisper your name. I do it while I’m fingering my clit and always end up sleeping in a wet spot. I have to be careful not to think of you when I’m on stage or the customers will get the wrong idea.
Guess what!
I graduated. I’m officially a student at the University now. Hot shit, huh? You know what you said about swinging back up to Montana when I graduated? How about it? Am I still on your list of favorite girls, Ari?
I know you’re still out in New York because I read your Facebook post yesterday. I’ve got to say, you’ve been boring lately. You haven’t sent me a juicy email since that college girl in Florida. What have you been doing? Honey, if you’ve got six months of come backed up when you get here, we’ll never get out of bed! That’s not a bad thought, is it?
How about you just park the trailer and fly up here for a booty break?
I know. You’re on a mission to do that highway coast-to-coast. I looked on a map. That route goes right through Yellowstone National Park. I could join you there! I’ve never seen Old Faithful. Would you believe it?
Ari, I’m excited to join you for a week. But I’m a little scared, too. It’s like I’ve been building this fantasy in my head about what being with you would be like. I’m afraid it’s all just a fantasy and reality would suck. I’ve been following your trip long enough now to know that you aren’t an axe murderer or anything. You’re really a sweet guy. Maybe that’s what I’m most scared of. I’m not like the kind of innocent babe you deserve. And I’m not submissive like that girl Angie. Or a sex-crazed maniac like the spring break babe. I’m pretty plain and ordinary except that about a million guys have seen my breasts and looked up my twat. No. Not that many, but some days it seems like it. I could have made a career out of being a training dummy for gynecology students.
Am I too… like… dirty for you, Ari?
I’m not expecting anything beyond a fun week when we get together. It’s not like I’m trying to trap you or tie you down, you know. But I worry that I might not be what you expected.
I guess I’ll never know if we don’t get together. I’m ready and willing if you are. College classes start August 25th. Let me know.
Kisses,
Alice
I sent her an immediate note to meet me in Cody, Wyoming on August 16th. I might have to rush through a bit of the trip, but I wasn’t going to pass up a week with Alice.
I still had seven weeks before that and in the middle of it was the class reunion for St. Joe Valley High, the school I never graduated from.
The class I graduated with at Tippecanoe Valley High School wouldn’t be getting together again officially this year, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a little detour and see some old friends.
As I drove across Ohio—on what was absolutely the worst maintained portion of the entire route—the scenery started to look more and more familiar. By the time I crossed into Indiana, which happened to mean crossing under the toll road at the same time, I actually started singing ‘Back Home Again in Indiana.’
I took a detour south to visit the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn—fabulous cars of yesteryear’s rich and famous in an Art Deco showroom—but I kept moving my campsite farther and farther west until I was camped at the lake where Jessica had proven so friendly. I spent an entire afternoon there watching the kids in the water. There were a few nice bikini bodies, mostly on the moms of kids who were in the water. It was pleasant, but no one really seemed to be having the fun that I remembered having.
I entertained nostalgic thoughts of buying the old homestead on Mosquito Road—now completely overgrown with trees—and setting up a parking slab, well, and septic where I could park the trailer for a couple summer months each year. There was a kind of romance to it as I thought about writing Living Next Door to Heaven and all the fun I’d had with the kids I grew up with. Sort of. It wasn’t really them, of course. And Brian certainly wasn’t me. I wasn’t that smart. I wasn’t that athletic. I certainly didn’t have all those friends. Like Alice, I’d built a fantasy and reality fell far short.
A Long Time Ago: Unwanted Childhood
I won’t say I had a miserable childhood. I’d have to say that, if anything, I was oblivious to my childhood. I’d blocked out all memories prior to fifteen, but when I started writing LNDtH, they started emerging, through a fantasy lens. Underneath it all, I was a lonely, insecure kid, just like any other kid. With the others on my section of Mosquito Road, I played softball in the summer, but we really didn’t have much other contact. Carl had been my best friend, but most of what we did together was because our families were together or we were in church together. Cassie and I quit meeting in the woods and playing in the freshly plowed fields sometime before third grade. I don’t know what happened. We just sort of went different ways.
I always liked redheaded Liz next door on the other side from Cassie, but about sixth grade she moved away and some people bought her house and planted all the field with blueberries.
And Hannah. Well, her dad was transferred after sixth grade. How far away didn’t make a difference. I was twelve years old. I’d seen her at my mother’s funeral fifteen years ago. She gave me a hug. Somewhere in my files, maybe buried beneath an old manuscript, I had her phone number. I’d had a severe crush on her in grade school. After she moved, I blew her a kiss out my window each night before I went to bed. For years.
Out of all the kids, I was the ‘religious’ one. At least that’s the way it felt. I went to church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. And any other time something was happening at the church. Yes, I really did have a sixteen-year perfect attendance pin for Sunday School. And I won every ‘sword drill’ the Sunday School teachers could toss at us. I went to what I found out years later was a mainstream liberal church. I didn’t know that. But I once visited a conservative Bible church with a cousin and they were all impressed that I could find verses or simply recite them from my Bible and that I could say the names of all the books of the Bible in order. I produced my first play in the sanctuary of our church for Easter when I was in seventh grade.
To cap off my feeling of being isolated and looked down upon, we were poor. When I think about the other families along Mosquito Road, I think we were all a little below median income. Of course, that wasn’t even a word that was used back then. I keep trying to put it all in a better light, but I can’t find kindling.
Things like my dad being on strike for several months a year when the union contract came up for renewal. Eating government surplus peanut butter, dried eggs, and cheese. Going to Chicago every other month to visit an aunt who worked for a soup company and gave us unlabeled cans. My dad taking a temporary job at a bakery and bringing home a sack of expired bread and sweet rolls twice a week. We’d rummage through the top third of the bag and stuff ourselves with the sweet things. The bottom two thirds of the bag were so smashed together that we dished it out to feed the dogs.
I knew my classmates avoided me. I suspected that I smelled bad. We didn’t have indoor plumbing until I was in seventh grade. Taking a bath required pouring boiling water into a copper tub in the living room, near the stove. Before the plumbing was connected in our new indoor bathroom, I got to sleep in the bathtub.
When Mom got her teaching certificate and a job offer to teach second grade about fifty miles away, we moved. It was between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. I turned away from Mishawaka and swore I’d never go back. I even focused my mind on forgetting everything about my first fifteen years, and until I started writing Living Next Door to Heaven, I’d been successful.
Our old house was condemned and torn down the next year. It about killed my dad. He’d built it with his own hands and put every nail into the siding. It just wasn’t very good.
Back to Indiana
Why was I even considering buying the old homestead? The property I remembered as being all open fields with a little maple grove in the back connecting it to the other properties was all overgrown with trees. Big trees, eight or ten inches across. How could that be? Two new houses with long drives occupied the field where Cassie and I followed her father’s plow and broke dirt clods with our toes. The apple trees my father planted were hidden among the hardwoods that had grown up around them. The huge oak trees where I played on a tire swing had been cut down to make way for the power lines that served the new houses. I took a video and sent it to my daughter, Maddie. She reminded me I’d been gone for over forty years.
I drove down Mosquito Road and wondered where everyone I knew had gone. I knew Cassie lived in Florida. I’d heard Carl was in Detroit. I drove past his house and saw his older brother, Mitch, outside. For unknown reasons, I stopped and we chatted for a while.
Mitch, being four years older than any of the rest of us, hadn’t been as central to the play group. But he’d turned out to be a jovial, if rather conservative, soul who recognized me right away. We talked for a couple of hours over coffee with his dad. He even called Betts and had me talk to her. She’d had a rough time over the past year with breast cancer, but she and her husband were still hanging in there. She said she was happy to hear from me. I tried calling Carl, but Mitch warned me that Carl didn’t answer his phone if he didn’t recognize who was calling. I sent a text message and a couple days later got a response that just said he couldn’t make it to the reunion.
I gave Mitch my card and he said that I needed to drive down to his farm south of Bloomington and camp there. I promised to do that right after the reunion. He got a kick out of the fact that I wrote erotic romances and said he was going to read some of them. I never thought that he might read Living Next Door to Heaven.
One thing Betts said got to me. I asked her if she attended any SJV reunions.
“No. Why would I go back to see them? I never had any friends there. Nobody liked us, Ari. They still don’t,” she said.
Why? Why would I want to go back and live in a place where nobody liked me? Why was I even going to the reunion? What made me think I was the only one no one liked? Why was I romanticizing my childhood?
I wondered absently if Betts still remembered the two of us playing doctor and touching each other’s privates.
I couldn’t believe how nervous I was about going to a stupid reunion. I’d looked through that old yearbook and tried to identify people I might know. One image jumped out at me. Brenda—who I always considered to be a bubbly person, even though she wasn’t one of the cheerleaders in real life—looked sad in her picture. Yes, she’d been an early bloomer and the fantasy of every boy in junior high. But in her freshman yearbook picture she just looked sad and maybe a little frightened. It’s weird what you think you remember and something contradicts the memories. Perhaps she, too, made up stories about an idyllic youth in Indiana.
I went shopping and bought a pair of slacks and a shirt for the party. I had a nice sport coat that in my big business days I’d had tailored for myself in Singapore. I donned my plantation hat and decided I looked as good as it was going to get. I was in town hours early and spent time at the Studebaker Museum wondering which of the cars my father had helped assemble. Finally, I walked to the banquet hall where the reunion was.
“Oh! You’re Aroslav! I don’t know if we ever met. I was from a different junior high than you, so we only overlapped for a year in high school. Welcome!” The speaker was our class representative, Sarah. She was nice and when she said she’d show me a table where I should sit, she wheeled herself ahead of me. A wheelchair? “Sorry I’m a little slow navigating through the crowd,” Sarah said. “It’s muscular dystrophy. I can still get up and walk a little, but I’ve put so much weight on that it hurts my legs. Look! There’s Cassie!”
Indeed, Cassie Clinton Jones was standing by a table and waving at us. I looked around at the general condition of people at this reunion and Cassie looked spectacular. She’d chosen an off-the-shoulder party dress that made her look fifteen years younger than anyone else at the party.
“Ari! We saved you a seat with us,” she said as she gave me a hug. She introduced me to the other eight at the table, three of whom were spouses to others. I didn’t even recognize the names of the others who had supposedly been in my class. I looked around the room and saw a few people who I recognized vaguely, but wasn’t sure who they were. Still, the party seemed to be a time where we were introducing ourselves. I handed out business cards with both author names on them. Some of these people would recognize the settings and a few might think they recognized someone I described, but they’d never really know. The fantasies were way too distant from the realities.
There was one guy I spotted and resolved to go visit with. Josh was sitting at a table with four couples and an empty chair. He looked alone. Like me.
There was dinner. There were drinks. And there was music. Some of the worst music I could remember from my school days. Cassie threw up her hands.
“Nobody is going to dance to any of this. We didn’t dance to it when we were in school. I’ll be right back,” Cassie said as she headed toward the DJ. Cassie always had a strong personality. She was naturally a cheerleader. The next song the DJ played was a gentle ballad. Cassie was back at my side.
“Come on, Ari. Dance with me. We’ll be teens for a while.”
What she meant was that she’d wrap her arms around my neck and lay her head on my chest while I held her and we swayed to the music. Putting my arms around her, though, meant that I was holding her bare shoulder in my hand. It felt good. Really good.
“This is nice, Cassie. I don’t think we ever got this close since second grade,” I said.
“I used to hold your hand when we walked in the woods,” she said. “Did I really hurt you, Ari? I cried when I read the scene in the woods.”
“Oh, god, Cassie! Don’t tell me you’re reading that stuff. It’s not real. It’s just fantasy stuff,” I said. I was a little panicked. Even my older sister had thought the things I wrote about were real. As if.
“I was just going to peek at it a little. I mean, it’s not like I read erotic romances every day. Then you started posting that new story right after I saw you in Florida. It all seemed so familiar. So, I kept looking for new chapters. And then, there I was. I didn’t recognize my character at all until Brian and Cassie started meeting in the woods to play. And suddenly I remembered you and I used to go play in the woods. Then in the story I ran away and Brian was really hurt and I was crying and I found so many memories just flooding out of my eyes. I remembered the last time we went walking in the woods. Remember those teens who saw us and called us boyfriend and girlfriend? You know, it took me a long time, but I finally figured out they’d been messing around and we interrupted them. But after that walk, I just never went back there with you again. We still played ball sometimes, but I didn’t really do that very often. And I got to wondering if I really hurt you. I didn’t mean to.”
Wow! What a speech. The DJ went into another ballad and the dance floor was filling with couples. It was exactly the kind of music we needed. Cassie kept her arms wrapped around my neck, hugging her face to my shoulder.
“Cassie, we were eight or nine years old. I was becoming a stinky boy and you became… an even more beautiful and perfect girl. You were popular. I knew what I was. I didn’t even become fully a human being until I was forty,” I laughed. Cassie laughed, too.
“Silly. Nobody’s human until they are at least forty. I’m so glad you let me rejoin the group. Who am I going to end up with? You? I’m dying to know.” I considered and then nodded my head toward the table in the corner. Josh was sucking on a beer. It looked like everyone else at the table was on the dance floor. “Really? Josh? Hmm. He was always kind of geeky and quiet. Nice, I guess, but I never really knew him well in school. I hear his wife is really sick. Maybe dying.”
“Damn. That’s a shame. I’m going to talk to him. I just haven’t gotten over there yet,” I said.
“Ari, that reminds me of something. Please don’t be offended.”
“What?” I looked down at her and she raised her eyes to meet mine. I almost kissed her, but we were on a dance floor and even if no one remembered me, everyone knew Cassie.
“Uh… It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to contact Hannah right now. She might think it was…”
“Oh, Cassie, please don’t tell me Hannah has been reading Heaven. You didn’t.”
“She hasn’t read it. But I sort of told her about it. She’s still one of my best friends. I hated it when she left our school and moved to Angola.”
“But she hasn’t read it,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. I had no idea that a fifth and sixth grade crush could suddenly become such a devastatingly embarrassing thing at my age.
“No. But you know she always liked you. She told me she saw you at your mother’s funeral. And I sort of told her that you’d written a part for her as a girlfriend of the hero in a story. I wasn’t going to tell her that I’d read it because… I’m not that kind of woman, Ari. I have morals.”
“Okay, so she already knew I had a crush on her in grade school. She isn’t reading the story, so what’s the big deal?”
“Her husband died last month,” Cassie whispered. “I think Hannah would probably want to talk to you and maybe even see you sometime, but if you contact her now, so soon… She might think it was a little stalkerish.”
“Shit. The poor thing. We’re getting old, aren’t we, Cassie?”
“Well he was a good bit older than us, but still, it was sudden and unexpected. He seemed to be in perfectly good health one day and the next he was dead. Both her parents died last year. I mean, they were in their nineties, but still. Both parents and her husband. Do you understand, Ari?”
“Of course I do, Cassie. It’s not like Hannah and I are ever going to get together. I just feel bad for her. But I see what you mean about calling so soon out of the blue. I’ll let it ride for a while.”
“She’s got a place not far from me in Florida. She’s not full time, like me, but she spends a couple months there every winter. Maybe we’ll all get together the next time you’re down in Florida.”
I sighed. The song ended and we went back to the table so Cassie could collect another dance partner. Poor Hannah. I decided to go say hi to Josh. We’d gone to different junior highs, but we’d had several classes together as freshmen. He and Carl got along great and the three of us did just about everything together that we could.
“Hey, Josh,” I said, holding out my hand. “It’s Aroslav.” He looked at me blankly.
“I can’t quite place you,” he said. “Did we graduate the same year?”
“Well, we only really knew each other as freshmen. I moved away. You and Carl and I used to do all kinds of stuff.” Josh kind of rocked in his chair and took another swig of beer.
“I kind of remember Carl. Sometimes we played cards in the cafeteria.” He set the bottle down on the table. “Sorry I can’t place you, Aroslav. I guess I’m too distracted. Marcie said I should come tonight, but I just want to go home and be with her. She’ll miss it if I don’t sing our song to her tonight. Excuse me.” He got up and headed toward the door. I stared after him and then decided to go get another glass of wine. One of my two best friends as a freshman and he didn’t remember me at all. It was too bad about his wife. I didn’t get a chance to ask him what the problem was. This getting older sucks.
I did meet some other people I vaguely remembered. I even danced with a couple girls I remembered. Not enough to have made it into a story yet. I danced with Sarah. That was interesting. She just stood in front of her wheelchair while I held her hands and she bobbed back and forth a little. After that one song, she collapsed back into the chair.
“That was fun. I always loved to dance. I went to five proms! Just because boys who could dance asked me. You should have known me in high school, Ari. We’d have gotten along just great. I was kind of wild,” Sarah said.
“Not Ari,” Cassie laughed as she sidled up beside me. “He was perfect. He would never have done anything wild.”
“Besides which,” I said, “I was too low on the totem pole. You never would have noticed me. Nobody liked me.”
“Ari! How can you say that?” Cassie said. “Okay. I know how you can say that, but it wasn’t that nobody liked you. We were all a little afraid of you. We kind of hid everything from you.”
“You thought I’d rat you out?” I asked. I’d done stupid things, but I’d never told on my friends.
“No! You wouldn’t do that. It was more like we were afraid you’d disapprove. If you saw something that we did, we’d be too ashamed to go to school afterward. Do you see?” she asked.
“I was never a perfect little angel,” I said, scoffing at her. “I got into just as much trouble as everyone else. I just wasn’t around long enough to get caught.”
“I bet I could have found his devilish side,” Sarah laughed.
“I do, too,” Cassie said. “Sarah, you have got to read his story about growing up here. It is just… Heavenly.”
“I’m going to get such a reputation now,” I said. “Among my two fans.”
It was getting late and the party was beginning to break up.
“My feet are killing me,” Cassie said as she took off her shoes. She was suddenly three inches shorter. I didn’t remember her being that short, but I’d gotten most of my height when I was a junior. I’d always felt like a short little kid in school. Even though I was close to six feet now, I still felt like I looked up to everyone. When I finally got my driver’s license my senior year, I’d told the clerk that I was five-eleven-and-a-half. He put down on my license that I was five-twelve. Indiana, man. “Will you give me a lift to my hotel, Ari? It’s over by the University.” When anyone said ‘university’ in this area, they meant Notre Dame. I was parked almost a block away, but I offered to bring the truck around for her. She said she could walk a block if I’d let her lean on me. Oh, hell yes.
“Thank you for bringing me back into the story,” she said once I’d helped her up into the cab of the truck. “Wow! This truck is as big inside as mine.”
“You have a truck?”
“Motorhome. Class C. Built on an E-450.”
“You didn’t tell me that in Florida! Maybe we can meet up on the road sometime.”
“I’ve been thinking of doing Quartzite for the big gathering in January.”
“It’s a blast.”
“Are we going to have sex?”
I turned and looked at Cassie. Where the fuck did that come from? Hell, yes, we could have sex. I looked at her and still saw the fifteen-year-old I’d last seen getting off the bus next door to my house. I reached out and put an arm around her.
“Would you like to make love, Cassie?” I whispered as I moved in to kiss her.
She slapped me!
“Ari! I’m a married woman. What do you think I am?”
“But you just asked…”
“In the story, Ari. In the story.” Oh, fuck.
“Oh. Sorry. I must have had more wine to drink than I thought. I didn’t mean to offend you, Cassie.” She reached out and I flinched a little as she stroked my cheek.
“Didn’t mean to hit you so hard, Ari. You just surprised me. I know you must have the story all planned. I just want to know if there is going to be a hot sex scene in it that features Brian and Cassie, like the scenes in Model Student.”
“You read that, too?”
“I’ve read everything. Andy thinks our marriage has suddenly been revitalized. He’s getting more sex now than he did when we were first married.”
“Oh. Well, glad to be of help. I haven’t gotten to the point of knowing who is going to have sex with whom. Nobody gets to have sex until they are seventeen.”
“I didn’t last nearly that long!”
“Maybe you can improve my sex life by telling me the story.”
“I’m working on it. Tell me more.”
“A few weeks ago, I wrote a scene about Brian and Cassie’s first date. It was to be a couple days after your sixteenth birthday in January.”
“My birthday is in June.”
“It’s not really you.”
“Okay. What did we do on our date?” she asked. She’d taken my hand to keep me from sliding away from her and might have even slid a little closer to me after she’d soothed my cheek from the slap. My arm was still sort of around her shoulders and she didn’t seem to mind, so I left it there.
“We went to dinner and a ballet.”
“A ballet? On a first date? And you didn’t get laid?”
“Cassie, what’s got into you?” I laughed.
“About six margaritas,” she sighed. “What else?”
“I introduced the ‘kiss with promise’,” I said.
“What kind of promise?”
“The promise to kiss again.”
“Wait a minute. They were all out at the lake and talking about kissing. I figured out the friendly kiss. We all do it all the time.” She reached up and pecked my cheek. “The kiss with intent is pretty obvious. How is the kiss with promise different?”
“Well… It’s soft and intimate, but not passionate,” I said.
“Show me.”
I looked at Cassie’s face to make sure I wasn’t about to get slapped again. Her eyes were closed and her lips slightly parted as she turned her face to me. I took a deep breath and kissed her.
It started with just a light brush of my lips against hers. She sighed. I paused as our lips touched again and pressed slightly into her. I brought my left hand to her cheek and stroked it softly as I gently squeezed her lips between my own. When I felt her tongue slip out to touch my lips, I pulled away. She leaned her head over on my shoulder and breathed deeply. The skin exposed by her off-the-shoulder dress was tantalizing. ‘How many other women at our reunion had dared go braless?’ I wondered.
“That was promising,” she finally breathed. She hesitated, but then spoke again. “And exactly how does that differ from a kiss with intent? I’m sure I could feel your intentions. Naughty boy.”
“Well, there’s more passion…”
“Show me.”
It started about the same as the first kiss, but this time, I touched Cassie’s lips with my tongue and hers flicked out to meet it. I expected at any moment she would jerk back and say ‘enough’ but the kiss just deepened. My hand slipped from her cheek to her bare shoulder and I pulled her toward me as I gently stroked her skin. She made no move to break the kiss and, in fact, petted my cheek and head as we continued to explore each other’s mouths. When my hand came across her bare shoulder to the front, she pushed away.
“Andy is going to get so fucked when I get back to Florida,” she whispered. “I’d better go in while my virtue is still intact.”
I scrambled out my door and around the truck to open hers, helping her down out of the cab. She leaned heavily against me as she directed me to her motel room. She got her keycard in the door and the green light went on. She pushed it open.
“Goodnight, Cassie,” I said as I leaned in to kiss her again. She pushed me away.
“Ari! What are you doing?”
“I was just going to… uh… kiss you goodnight,” I stumbled.
“You can’t do that! I’m a married woman.” She reached up and pecked me on the cheek. “There. Good night. I’ll see you for brunch at eleven,” she pointed at the restaurant next door that advertised Sunday brunch. She would? We were meeting in the morning? While I was still processing the information, she slipped into her room and closed the door.
I needed to get back to my trailer and rewrite that scene.
“All right. I want the rest of the cast list,” Cassie said as we sat at the brunch table. I’d thought it was just going to be a normal brunch between old friends, but after we’d had a course of mimosas, she was right back on to the story. “Me, Hannah, Betts, Jessica, Liz. Those are easy. Carl, Josh, and Doug are easy. Who the heck are Whitney, Rhiannon, and Rose? Especially Rose! I’d almost have thought you were thinking of me when you wrote her with the cheerleader thing, but the size of her breasts obviously means you had someone else in mind. And Samantha. Who was the most beautiful woman in the world with no hair below her head? Give.”
“Really, Cassie. Who doesn’t want to make love to the most beautiful woman in the world? They’re all just made up. I grabbed the fact we used to meet in the woods. Everything else is made up. I grabbed one little thing that happened with Jessica. Everything else is made up. It’s the same with almost everyone. Rhiannon was a cute girl I met after I left St. Joe Valley. I never even dated her. Give me some credit for imagination.”
“Oh, I do. I know we didn’t do any of the things you wrote about, and I could only wish we’d had an agreement like the one you created. I might have stayed a virgin longer. Maybe not. There were all those jocks,” she said wistfully.
“They didn’t seem to be buzzing around you last night like I expected,” I said.
“They all had their wives with them. Andy gets off on the fact that Sarah and I were so wild in our teens. Most wives don’t.”
“Yeah. Well, you might have to learn to share with Sarah,” I snickered. Cassie’s eyes popped open as she stared at me.
“You’re going to make me a lesbian?”
“And deprive all those guys of your favors?”
“But…”
“But you might have to share.”
“All I can say is that you and I had better fuck in this story and it had better be as good as the scenes in Model Student.” She looked at me intensely. “It’s all we’re going to have, Ari. Make it good.”
We kept chatting and Cassie said she had some friends along my route across the country and she’d make sure I got introduced through Facebook. She admonished me to treat them well.
We parted with a hug and a friendly kiss and a promise to see each other in January at Quartzite. I neglected to tell her that I camped in the nudist area. I was sad when I got back to the trailer. The next day, I went to a picnic with cousins I hadn’t seen in fifteen years and we laughed and talked about a hundred odd little events in our lives over the years. We told stories about growing up. We had a good time.
In the morning, I packed up and headed south. Mitch had promised me a place with peace and quiet on his farm for a few days, and I felt like I needed that. I had a lot to talk over with my characters and Cassie had gotten the conversation going.
They say that if you hear voices in your head and they are ignoring you, that you must be an author. If you hear voices and they are talking to you, you have a different kind of problem.
“Are you going to kill me, Ari?” she asked.
Kill her? How could I kill her? She was dead.
A Long Time Ago: The Most Beautiful Woman
I met her my junior year in college when she transferred in. Paula and I had become an institution with the expectation that we’d be married by graduation, even though our relationship was always on and off. But Samantha was the most beautiful creature I’d ever laid eyes on. And talented. She was an actress, of course. She absolutely dominated the stage at UIndy and we just knew she was going places. I wanted desperately to write the role that would win her a Tony. And she was versatile. She could play character roles as well as ingénues. We were cast together in a musical as the older parents of the young couple and got to sing a sweet duet together with a little waltz. She felt good in my arms.
“Haven’t you suffered enough, Samantha?”
“You can’t just let it go. It’s been twenty years, Ari. You need to deal with it.”
Twenty years? How can it have been so long?
Sam had a bright career ahead of her. Paula and I got married and moved to Minnesota to start our grad work. Sam headed straight for New York. Of course, she didn’t land a leading role and make Broadway history. This isn’t a fantasy story. Exactly. But she’d managed to start working in shows Off-off-Broadway and became the only person I knew who had an Equity card and was earning money by acting. Not enough to live on, of course. She still had to hold down a day job, but her energy was indefatigable. Someone had stuffed a size twelve woman into a size two body. She dominated a room when she entered. People’s heads just turned when she walked in. Like when that broker talks and people listen, rooms fell silent.
But all the time I knew her, she was also sweet and kind. She didn’t seem to even realize how beautiful she was.
Well, I learned that wasn’t completely true. It was a month before graduation that she came to me with an unusual request.
“Ari, I know it’s not really your major thing, but I’ve seen some of the pictures you’ve taken of sets and productions and I was wondering if you’d take some pictures of me for my portfolio,” she said.
“Sure, Sam. There’s a lot of people with cameras that are probably better at it than I am. You sure you want me?” I asked.
“They know cameras, but you know lighting. It might sound silly, but you’re really the only one I trust.” It did sound a little silly. She’d been seeing Rick for most of the year and I knew he was as good a photographer as I was. He was a bit of a male prima donna, but he seemed to be smitten with Sam.
We arranged to have a photo session over the weekend in the rehearsal hall. There wouldn’t be anyone around as our last show had closed. I’d been doing some work in the shop and rehearsal space to make sure it was clean and organized for the next tech director.
Rehearsal hall was all painted black and had a limited lighting set up. We did studio shows there as well as rehearsing. Studio shows were usually one acts that wouldn’t draw an audience from outside the department. We could only seat about thirty. Most of the shows were done with minimal settings and lighting. Sometimes just with a few props.
In addition to acting, Samantha had done a lot of volunteer work in the costume shop. Everyone in our small department ‘volunteered’ in every aspect of every production. She’d selected a few costumes that she’d appeared in over the past two years and asked me to pull a few set props. She brought the camera and film and explained her concept for the shoot while we sipped a cup of coffee.
“I know I have nice color portraits in each of these costumes,” she said. “But I want a set of art shots. I need to distinguish myself from the crowd when a director sees my portfolio. So, these will be in black and white.” I nodded. It made sense. “Ari, do you know what I mean by art shots?” she asked.
“You mean interesting poses that might not have been actually part of a production but that show you in the best possible light,” I said. I was confident that I knew what she wanted.
“Ari. Oh, god. Remember I said I trust you?” I nodded. “Some of them are going to be nude.” I almost dropped the camera. “I want poses in costume, yes. But then I want artsy poses where I’m only partly in the costume or just looking at it or something. We’ll work out the specifics as we go. I trust you to not tell anyone that you’ve taken a bunch of nude photos of me. I also trust you to tell me if a shot doesn’t look right or if I’m not standing straight or if I’m showing too much of my Jill. I should have talked to you more about this before, but if you can’t do it, I’m not going to do it at all.”
“Samantha, how are you going to get them developed? Your pictures could end up anywhere.”
“I have a friend with a dark room. He’s agreed to do the processing and printing for me. He can’t do the photography. He doesn’t get around all that well,” she said. “He’s kind of old. My mother’s uncle. But I can trust him.”
“This might be hard,” I said, “but I’ll give it my best shot.”
“I’m sure it will be hard, honey,” she laughed. “But think of the images you’ll have in your mind when you get yourself off tonight.”
“You loved that day, didn’t you?” she asked in my head.
“Every single minute of it. I fell in love with you that day.”
“Ari, you fell in love with all of us.”
The shoot was fun as well as serious. She was perfect. She was the first woman I’d ever seen who was shaved completely hairless. We didn’t do spread beaver shots, so there was no gaping pussy, but there were a few that would clearly show the crease between her legs. We took photos that were clothed and photos as she stripped. I pulled out a fainting couch from the props room and she did poses that mimicked old paintings with drapes and a few props. I guess that’s where the image of Tony’s first painting of Melody came from in Model Student.
When we started, Sam had dressed in the dressing room and come to the stage area where I could set lights. By the time we finished, she was simply changing costumes right in front of me, asking me to fasten her up or to unzip her when the time came. And as I worked to manipulate the lights, she’d often just stand in the spot naked while I focused.
Just before Paula and I packed up to move to Minneapolis that summer, I had coffee with Samantha to say goodbye. She handed me an envelope.
“You probably want to keep these someplace secure,” she said. “I don’t want to create any problems for you and Paula, but you were so nice that I wanted you to have a few for yourself.” I started to open the envelope but she stopped me. “You should do that in private, not at the Waffle House.” I blushed.
I held her image in my mind as I described Samantha in LNDtH—the most beautiful woman in America.
“You still haven’t dealt with it, Ari.”
“I can’t, Samantha. Please don’t make me.”
“You have to, sweetheart.”
It was all so stupid. A misunderstanding. Mistaken identity. Some woman thought Sam was trying to steal her husband. She met her outside a theater stage door in Baltimore. One gunshot. Just one and she was gone. I was married to Treasure and we were expecting our child when I heard the news. Treasure put a comforting hand on my shoulder as I cried. She let me have my grief that I couldn’t explain to her. I stayed up late that night, going through a storage box I had in the attic. I held the photos in my hands while I wept for Samantha.
How could I ever let that out in my story? I just wanted that beautiful, gentle creature forever in my arms. I wanted a happily ever after ending.
Back to Indiana
I stayed camped under an old sycamore tree on Mitch’s farm for four days. I wrote and soothed myself. I took a field trip up to Bloomington and walked around the campus. I was particularly struck by a sculpture at the edge of Dunn Woods called The Space Between. I spent a long time sitting on a bench staring at it. I went to the library and was shown to a section of yearbooks with sports scores and team records. I knew now where the college years would take place in LNDtH. I didn’t want to use UIndy for another novel setting. I’d already set The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality there. I photographed the pages of the yearbooks that had basketball and football scores and descriptions of the seasons. I went to the University archives section of the library and a very helpful archivist brought out the annual press kit for the women’s and men’s basketball teams for those years so I had the actual schedule, game times, scores, and players for all the games. I had a place for Lionel and for Whitney. Great!
Mitch and I talked over dinner and drinks one night.
“I’m a farmer. I raise cattle. I read Redtail and I thought, ‘I know these things. But I know Aroslav, too. How does he know these things?’ When did you get so much experience on a ranch and raising cattle?”
“It’s all research, Mitch. Did I tell you I called the School District Transportation Office up there to find out how long a bus ride it was for high schoolers from Centennial to the school in Laramie? Even found out about how many kids there were who made the trip. It’s not just high school, but the junior high as well.”
“Research. It was real enough. And horses! You didn’t have horses. We had horses.”
“I loved your horses! I got one when Treasure and I got married. She gave me a buckskin quarter horse for a wedding present,” I said.
“Now that’s fine gift. I tell you, those horses were a babe magnet. I got laid so many times in high school by taking a girl for a ride. It got to the point where I’d say something like, ‘Dor and I are going for a ride,’ and Dad would say, ‘Oh no you aren’t!’ I think he discovered the secret.” Hmm. I had another scene to rewrite.
“Well, I could imagine. Had they been my horses, my social life might have been better. Never figured out why Carl always seemed so out of it when it came to girls. He was a nice enough guy. I haven’t talked to him since high school,” I said.
“You’re not likely to,” Mitch said. He took a slug of his beer. “He still blames you for stealing his girlfriend.”
“Stealing his what? Who?”
“Some girl named Georgia. None of us even knew he had a girlfriend. I mean they were in the youth group together, but I don’t think he ever went out on a date. Man, did he cut loose in college. Still, he thinks you stole Georgia and he still holds a grudge.”
Georgia. Oh shit.
A Long Time Ago: Georgia On My Mind
Bear with me. This is going to sound a little convoluted, but there’s a point.
It started in biology when I was a senior in high school. Mrs. Adams began where most biology teachers do, with one cell life forms. A cute girl in class that I’d lusted after for most of the past year answered an innocuous question by stating that all life started with single cell life forms, evolving from primeval muck.
“That’s not right,” Patty said. “God created each being. It says so in Genesis.”
“Science is on my side,” Deb answered. “Evolution is a proven process.”
“Using the word ‘proven’ might be a bit of a stretch,” Mrs. Adams said. “Evolution is a theory that we will not address in this class. Just as we will not address any theory of creation.”
“It’s not a theory,” Patty insisted. “It’s in the Bible.”
“Lots of things in the Bible are metaphors,” I said. “There are two completely different creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. Evolution is not in conflict with religion. God just used that as a method.”
“Mud,” Patty said. “God created us from mud.”
“I think that’s just what Deb said,” I answered. “She called it primeval muck.”
“Class! Attention. This is not a subject we are debating on the first day of school,” Mrs. Adams said.
“Could we debate it?” I asked. “Later?” Mrs. Adams thought about it a minute.
“If you have a solid presentation, I will allow each side one class period between Thanksgiving and Christmas to present their case. Patty? Will you accept leadership of the creation argument?”
“Against him? He can argue anything,” Patty said.
“That’s true,” my friend Jon piped in. “He had Mrs. Streeter convinced that he was a recognized poet for speech contest.”
“Hey! Thanks, friend,” I said. “I know you haven’t asked yet, but I accept the challenge to present the evolution side, Mrs. Adams.”
“I want to help,” Deb said.
Mrs. Adams put an end to the discussion and told us to pick our teams after class and to please pay attention while we discussed the difference between single cell animal life and single cell plant life. She also discussed the difficulties of classifying lifeforms.
And that was how I started dating Debra.
She was cute and fun and, aside from the fact that I couldn’t even talk to her while she was eating, she was a great conversationalist. When Deb ate, she put all her concentration into it. She did the same the first time she gave me a blowjob.
But the upshot was that Jon and his girlfriend Carol joined Deb and me and the four of us put on a show. Jon and I both strummed guitars and Carol played piano. Deb owned, and had read, a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. And that’s what we called our little show. Origin of Species: The musical.
We combined a few show tunes, a hymn, and a skit about evolution. I’d read the script of Inherit the Wind and Jon and I reenacted Henry Drummond’s cross-examination of Matthew Harrison Brady. We ended the show by quoting the play. “You’re absolutely right! God created man in his image. But you’re looking for God too high up and too far away.” I turned around and Deb shoved a big fistful of mud in my face.
Somehow, a photograph of that got into the weekly newspaper in our small town. With the caption, “Tippecanoe Valley Senior Defends Evolution.” If you don’t know small-town Indiana, you don’t know what a controversy a statement like that could have. Indiana schools still teach creationism as fact and evolution as a theory. What I’ve painted in my stories as an idyllic, tolerant, community where everyone cares for everyone else is, in reality, an isolationist state where belief is far more important than truth. Our little town of Liberty—one of five towns in our school district needed to make a school big enough to qualify for tax dollars—had a population of 210 people. It had seven churches. That is an average of thirty men, women, and children per church. Two of the churches weren’t large enough to hold thirty people. But all seven had sermons about creation and evolution on Sunday.
Our little drama group became much in demand. Rev. Dave had us perform our little musical at church on Sunday evening, but we had to do it in the church basement because the content might damage the holiness of the sanctuary. We played to a packed house, including fifteen very loud hecklers from the Bible Church. We got a call from a big church in Wabash and presented the musical there the next weekend. And so on.
Suddenly, our little drama troupe—the four of us—were being asked to perform The Origin of Species: The Musical almost every weekend. Many times, just for the youth group, but most of those were also attended by members of the church. And one of those weekend performances was at the very church that I left when we moved two and a half years earlier—where Carl was the president of the youth fellowship.
We went. We performed. We were asked a lot of questions by people and generally adored. There were cookies and cocoa after the performance and shuffleboard. Don’t ask. There was a shuffleboard court painted on the cement in the basement and kids liked to play—or pretend to play.
And there was Georgia. Georgia attached herself to my right side when she was unable to dislodge Deb from my left. She wanted to know all about how I developed the show, wrote the script and music, and produced it. I am not sure she realized that there were three other people on stage. And I didn’t really notice she was cutting everyone else out because I was a freshly minted eighteen-year-old, and of course it was all me that did the show.
Now, Georgia was a junior. We were seniors. She was sixteen. I was eighteen. And, she was damned cute. Skinnier than Debra. I’ve mentioned how Deb enjoyed food. Not that Deb was fat, but she had curves. Georgia’s curves were far subtler. I figured that in a few years, she could be a real beauty, but right now, she was cute. She gave me a hug before we left for the hour-long drive home.
Jon was driving and Deb and I were in the back seat.
“You have an admirer,” Deb laughed. She didn’t seem offended by the attention I’d received from another girl. “Did she give you her panties?”
“Deb! What do you mean?”
“If you’d sung another song, she’d have thrown them on stage for you,” she laughed. “‘What inspired you, Ari?’ ‘How did you come up with that song, Ari?’ ‘Was it hard to learn to play guitar, Ari?’ ‘You’re so creative, Ari!’ I bet she’s home rubbing one off, right this minute while she sighs your name.”
“She didn’t. She wouldn’t. Was she really like that?” I stammered.
“Oh, geez, Ari. Even I could smell her,” Carol laughed from the front seat. She turned to look at us and found Deb and I kissing. “If she’d done that to Jon, I’d have strangled her with her own panties.”
“What’s it like to be a rock star, Ari?” Jon asked. They were all teasing, even though Deb was teasing down between my legs with her fingers while they all tossed barbs at me.
“Boy, if I’d realized how girls were going to throw themselves at me when I wrote this, I’d have thought twice about having a girlfriend with me all the time,” I said. I pinched Deb’s nipple and she gasped.
“Yeah, but then you’d be constantly wondering if you’d make it with one of them instead of being assured of a blowjob on the way home.”
“You what?” Jon exclaimed. “In the car? While I’m driving.” Deb had me unzipped and was fishing in my pants even though Carol was watching over the back of the seat.
“Don’t worry, Jon,” she said. “I’ll describe it all to you and then do a replay after we ditch them. She’s got his cock out now.” Jon moaned. “Keep your eyes on the road!”
Deb and I had fooled around a lot, touching and kissing, but it was the first time she gave me a blowjob. It set a new standard for the back seat of Jon’s car. I had my hand under her shirt diddling her nipples the whole time.
“I bet she calls you,” Deb said, popping off my cock before I popped. “You should definitely do her.”
“I have all I need right here,” I sighed. Deb kissed me and went back to sucking.
It was only a week until Georgia called me. There was a Valentine Dance at her school and she wanted to know if I’d take her. I almost said no, but then what Deb said slipped into my mind. My entire freshman year in high school, I’d tried unsuccessfully to get a date to a school dance. It would be like returning victorious.
Deb reiterated that I should go.
“You should go and give her the time of her life. We’re young and we haven’t decided to spend our lives together,” Deb said. “You should totally have some other experiences. Only don’t fuck her. Anything we’ve done together, you can do with her, but nothing else. Is that fair?”
“I should be taking you out for Valentine’s Day,” I weakly protested.
“I think Carol and I will give Jon a little thrill.” Oh shit! I could only imagine. But fair was fair. I called Georgia and told her I’d take her.
The dance wasn’t formal, but I wore a suit. I had a nice corsage for Georgia. She wore a strapless party dress that stopped about mid-thigh. Since it only started about six inches below her neck, the dress itself didn’t cover all that much. She giggled as I pinned the corsage on. My fingers were against something very soft.
And modest. I said she wasn’t as curvy as Deb. She had very nicely shaped small breasts. They were soft when I held her in my arms at the dance. I honestly don’t remember seeing anyone else I knew. I guess everyone changed over the past two-and-a-half years.
Georgia was still in full hero-worship mode and I fell for it. We left the dance just before midnight and I took her home. We sat in the drive kissing until her mother flicked the porch lights.
“You can come in,” Georgia said. “Mom said we could make out in the living room if we wanted. I just need to be inside by midnight to meet curfew.”
I didn’t have a curfew, and even though it was an hour drive home for me, I could stay out all night if I wanted. I went in the house with Georgia. We sat on the living room sofa with a dim lamp on and kissed. And kissed. I started to move a hand over her breast and she wiggled around a little, but eventually let me gently squeeze her.
Apparently, strapless gowns don’t depend on the breasts to hold them up. This one had a wire or plastic framework that held it in place. Which meant that it wasn’t tight against her breasts either. From my angle, looking down to kiss her, I suddenly realized I could see right down the front of the dress. Those perfectly shaped little breasts were capped with delicious-looking reddish nipples that I wanted to suck as soon as I saw them. I returned to the kiss with vigor and my hand moved up off the fabric and then back down beneath it.
“Oh! Ari! You shouldn’t,” Georgia said. “I shouldn’t let you.” She was squirming around as if she was going to push my hand away, but the squirming opened the gap between her breast and the dress further and my hand slipped down to cup that sweet tit in my palm. Georgia squeaked and slammed her mouth against mine, sucking my tongue in and making me believe she would have me for a late dinner. I pinched her little nipple and I think she came.
That was the only conclusion I could draw. After she panted and squeaked into my mouth she struggled away and stood up. She was panting and squeezing her eyes shut and open again. I wondered if it was the first time she’d had an orgasm. It really didn’t seem like it was me she was startled by.
“You… uh… you need to go now,” she said. “I can’t take you to bed with Mom in the next room. Oh, my god! That’s all I’m going to think of for the rest of the night. Go quick, Ari. Oh wow! I think I love you.”
If there were ever words to make me go quick, those would do. I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door. Georgia caught me there and slammed her mouth into mine again. I was eighteen and had no practical sense at all, except that Deb had given me permission to do anything with Georgia that I’d done with her. As I bent down to kiss Georgia, I reached my hand down and slid it under her skirt and up the back of her leg to cup her butt and squeeze her close to me. She gasped and pushed me out the door.
“Wait!” she said as I was turning to leave. I looked at her. Her hands went under her skirt and came out sliding her panties down her legs. “Here!” she said. She threw them at me and closed the door. It was like I got hit in the face with a wet washcloth.
Very fragrant.
I went home with a raging hard-on and a pair of panties held against my face. When I got home, I lay with the panties on my pillow while I rubbed off a giant-size come.
Back to Indiana
“I had no idea she was Carl’s girlfriend,” I said.
“I’m not sure she had any idea,” Mitch agreed.
“Well, if it’s any consolation, he dodged a bullet on that one. She was a stalker. She actually followed me to college,” I said. “The dorm monitor was a friend and during an inspection found her mirror covered with photos of me and hearts drawn in lipstick. It took another crazy woman to resolve the problem. It was damned frightening.”
“Life is strange,” Mitch mused. “I’d suggest to him that he read Living Next Door to Heaven, but he really doesn’t have much sense of humor. He’s a real liberal.”
“Well we have that in common. You ever hear anything from Jessica?”
“Oh yeah. She and her husband were up to visit about four years ago. It was while my wife was still alive. She is just as much a tease now as she was when we were kids.”
“I should have used a different name in the story.”
“The story? You mean the Jessica in that story is our Jessica? You’re kidding. She’s pretty, but she was never going to be a supermodel. She teaches math at a school in Western Kentucky. When she came to Purdue, we finally made it a few times,” Mitch said. “She liked sex almost as much as me.”
“I wish I’d been a couple years older,” I sighed.
“Even when she and Brett were here to visit, she was jumping on my lap and rubbing my shoulders. At one point, she leaned down and whispered in my ear, ‘It’s a good thing Brett and Jane are here or we’d be naked.’ She’s still a good-looking woman, too. I’d never have thought that was who was in the book, though. Heaven? Well, I guess I could see it. I’d still get naked with her, just for fun.”
I hitched the rig and headed north back to US 20 and my continued trip west the next morning. I camped at Indiana Dunes State Park for a couple days and was amazed that even in August, Lake Michigan could freeze your feet in a half-mile walk along the beach. But I’d dipped my toes on the North coast.
I wrote furiously. I had new scenes to include in the book. I went back and added a scene about Elaine and Brian spending a day at the beach. I had plenty of experience with that. And then suddenly Nikki popped up in the story. That’s the way my brain works. The way my head works. Get reminded of Georgia the stalker and crazy Nikki makes an appearance in my daydreams. As I headed West for my rendezvous with Alice, Nikki became the focus of a whole subplot in Living Next Door to Heaven.
I was going to have to do some more thinking about Nikki.
Later.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
