American Backroads
Washing Away the Pain
19 December 2015
I HAD TO LAUGH AT MYSELF. I was standing in the Hilo Airport staring at the Zen garden that was supposed to bring peace and tranquility. Instead, I was dancing from foot to foot in impatience. I should have stayed in the restaurant another hour, but my computer had run out of juice. I’d been sitting there since three in the afternoon and it was eight now. I went into the bar—the only ‘service’ available at the Hilo airport—and ordered a soda. Once she got here, I still had to drive us safely 35 miles to the cabin.
My ku`uipo. My sweetheart.
They announced her flight arrival at 9:05 and I waited at the foot of the escalator until Alice ran to my arms.
“Ari!” That was all she managed to get out before our lips were smashed together. I’m sure others who saw us thought I was meeting my granddaughter, but that kiss had to convince them otherwise.
“I’ve missed you like crazy,” I said. I held my arm around her waist and draped the lei around her neck. I’d been holding it so tightly I was afraid the flowers were squashed.
“It’s warm! It’s so freaking cold in Montana. I bought a big heavy coat at Goodwill for five bucks and wore it to the airport. I pitched it in a garbage can when I changed planes at LAX.”
“What are you going to do when you go back?”
“Oh, shit!” We laughed and got to the car just before the rain started.
“We get wonderful weather for part of the day, but we also get a lot of rain in December. We’re on the rainy side of the island,” I said.
“We’ll have to cuddle in bed a lot to stay warm and dry,” she laughed.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
A Long Time Ago: Stormy Weather
The main hazard of riding a bicycle across the country was weather. The other hazard was people. I was riding the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, so at least I didn’t have to worry about snow. Everything else was on the table. The thing about weather is that it is always at its worst when you are unprepared.
I was in North Central Pennsylvania following U.S. Highway 6. It’s hilly. And windy. I was thankful to make it to the top of a long climb and see the descent before me. In spite of a headwind, I let it rip down the slope and picked up speed steadily. I had a little clicker odometer on the front fork that turned a notch each time the wheel did. I was going fast enough that it caught and flew off the bike. I wasn’t going to slow up to retrieve it. It was like flying.
There was still a lot of hill to go when the bike started to seize up. It was getting harder and harder to pedal. I looked down to make sure I didn’t have a flat. I shifted down I couldn’t believe I was slowing as I continued to pedal hard downhill. I was in first gear when a carload of screaming kids went sailing past in the other direction and someone threw a Coke bottle at me! It hit the handle bars and glanced off. This was long before the days of safety equipment like bicycle helmets. A better aim and I’d have been in bad shape. I coasted to a stop. How can I coast to a stop going downhill? I stepped off the bike and knelt to check the wheels. They spun freely.
I dug in my pack for my spray can of WD40 and sprayed the chain and rear sprocket. I followed a time-honored tradition. If should move and doesn’t, use WD40. If it shouldn’t move and does, use duct tape. I carried both with me. As I was working, I glanced back the way I’d come and did a double-take. I’d been pedaling uphill for a good three-quarters of a mile. A steep hill. Yet ahead it still looked downhill. An optical illusion. I pushed my bike another half a mile before I reached the next summit.
A mailman turned off a side road and stopped at a mailbox ahead of me. I passed him. He pulled away and passed me, then pulled in a hundred yards ahead at the next box. I passed him. One minute later he passed me. I waved when I passed him again. He pulled alongside me a couple minutes later and started talking to me. Back then, the guys just used a regular car and he rode in the passenger seat while steering with his left hand.
“Been biking far?”
“About a thousand miles when my odometer flew off a few miles ago,” I said.
“Where you headed?”
“The ocean.”
“Here. This might help.” He handed me a five-dollar bill.
“Thank you! It’s been a hard day.”
“At least I know where I’m going to sleep tonight,” he said, then sped up past me and turned onto another side road. I really needed that touch of humanity.
I didn’t know where I’d sleep that night. I labored to the top of another hill and saw a sign for the Eastern Continental Divide. There was a State Park there and I turned in to find a place in the picnic grounds to spread my sleeping bag for the night. I didn’t have a tent, having depended on finding shelter at various farms along the way. I managed to gather a little firewood and start a fire big enough to heat water in my coffee pot. I’d been carrying a few packs of dried camp rations since I started the trip but had not had to use them in the three weeks I’d been out. An old VW Beetle was parked next to a tent a few dozen yards away, but there was no sign of anyone around. It was getting damned cold and as soon as I’d rinsed my pot and cup, I crawled into my sleeping bag.
And froze.
The wind had been a problem all day, but it picked up after the sun went down. I was perched on the East Continental Divide and only about twenty miles south of the North Continental Divide. The wind blew from every direction at once!
And then the rain started.
I wasn’t totally asleep. Who could sleep in this? I scrambled out of my sleeping bag and tucked it under one arm as I dragged my bike under picnic shelter and laid it down. Fuck! My T-shirt was soaked and I pulled it off, only to get blasted by the cold wind. I quickly got my sleeping bag laid out on the cold concrete floor under one of the tables. This was going to be miserable. I grabbed my towel out of my pack and scrubbed at my hair. There was a flash of lightning followed by a crash of thunder almost immediately. That was close!
And a scream.
I looked over in time to see the little tent by the VW collapse in two pieces. Someone was trying to get out of it. So much for being dry. I ran to the tent.
“Are you okay? Do you need help?”
“Yes! Help! I’m all tangled up.”
I set about pulling the pieces of the tent away so the girl could struggle out. She was wearing a long nightshirt that clung to her skin in the drenching rain. I ran around the tent pulling out the two stakes that hadn’t already given way and dragged the whole thing with me under the picnic shelter. It wasn’t raining directly on us any longer, but occasionally a gust of wind blew water half way across the little area. I pulled the tent in far enough that I could put a picnic table on it to hold it down so it wouldn’t fly away. Then I ran to rescue my own sleeping bag before the wind picked it up.
“Do you have anything dry?” I asked as I handed her my towel.
“I’m not going back out there.”
“You might be warmer in your car.” She looked up at me and stepped away.
“You don’t know much about VWs, do you? I could run the engine all night and it would still be warmer out here naked.” She tossed me my towel and stripped out of her nightshirt.
“Uh… I don’t have anything to give you.”
“I’m freezing. Is your sleeping bag dry?”
“Yeah. I had it covered and got it under the shelter.” I squeezed the water out of my jockeys. “You can share it if you want, but I’m a guy.” Even when I stripped out of my shorts, she’d have had a hard time verifying that information. It was just too damned cold.
“I’d rather be raped than freeze to death.”
“I won’t rape you.”
“Then let’s get in that bag. Please! I’m really cold.”
We wrestled ourselves under the table and into the bag. It was a tight fit. She clung to me and shivered. I couldn’t tell how cold she was because my own skin was like ice. The noise picked up and a hailstone bounced across the floor.
My companion… My naked companion scooted farther down in the bag and buried her head against me, shaking and sobbing. I didn’t even know her name. In fact, I had no idea what she looked like. It was dark as pitch out. But where our damp skin touched, we began to gradually warm up.
I know I eventually slept because I woke up to gray light and quiet. And a bundle of girl in my arms. I didn’t move, even though the floor was hard. I wasn’t. I was too exhausted to respond even to the naked flesh in my arms.
“I’m Joanna,” she whispered, her face still tight against my chest.
“I’m Ari.”
“I just thought we should know each other’s names since we’re sleeping naked together.”
“Yeah. I usually like to know who I’m sleeping with,” I chuckled.
“I don’t want to move.”
“We don’t have to. Let’s stay warm a little longer.”
“I’m naked next to a boy. You aren’t even making a pass at me,” she said. She sounded like she didn’t believe it.
“Joanna, I’m aware of every inch of your bare skin that is pressed against mine. But I’m not a rapist. We needed each other to keep from freezing. I’m not going to make a pass at you.”
“I wish boys like you were real.”
“Um…” She gripped me more tightly and we both managed to get some more sleep.
Eventually, nature called. It had become almost toasty in the sleeping bag. Before I’d originally laid down last night, I’d stuffed a T-shirt, jeans, and my camp shoes at the bottom of the bag. I squirmed around trying to reach them.
“What are you doing?” she asked. She sounded a little panicked. I’d tried not to disturb her, but it was a tight fit in the sleeping bag.
“Sorry. I was trying to get my camp shoes and jeans out of the bottom of the bag.”
“You had dry clothes and made me sleep naked?”
“What? I didn’t think about them. If I’d put them on, you’d have been colder. If you’d put them on, I’d have frozen. I wasn’t thinking very well last night. I just wanted to get warm,” I said. She sounded hostile.
“Yeah. You’re right. Sorry.” She squirmed out of the sleeping bag and hit her head on the picnic table. “Ouch!” She rolled across the cement one direction as I went the other. We stood and looked at each other.
She had short brown hair, a round face and a body that had several extra pounds. It’s a wonder we both managed to wedge into the bag. She just stood there for a few seconds and then turned to start gathering her things. I managed to get my clothes out of the sleeping bag and dressed.
“You have clothes in your car, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I didn’t turn you on at all, did I?”
“It wasn’t you,” I said. “I was really too cold and tired to get turned on. I’m sorry.”
“God! I’m so stupid. I didn’t want you to get turned on. I was tired and cold, too. But now I’m standing naked in front of you and… I’m a little disappointed. I know I’m not pretty, but I thought at least my bare breasts would have an effect. I’ll go get dressed now.” She walked to her car in just her panties and opened the front to find clothes. Sure. Now I was getting a rise.
There was a lot of downed wood after the storm, but no way I’d get a fire started. I packed my bike and helped Joanna salvage as much of her tent as we could. Her sleeping bag weighed about fifty pounds with the amount of water soaking it.
“Where are you headed?” I asked.
“Oregon. If I make it. Thought I’d see the country on my way to college. I think I’ll go back to Scranton. What a way to start a trip.”
“I’m headed the other direction. Hoping there isn’t another storm today.”
“Where to?”
“The Monopoly tour. Thought I’d hit the Boardwalk in Atlantic City and then go south to Ventnor and Marven Gardens.”
“And that’s the end?”
“I hope not. I have to get back to Indiana. I’ve never been to Philadelphia or Gettysburg.”
“You’re just riding your bike to the Atlantic and back?”
“Yeah. Sounds dumb, doesn’t it? After last night, I mean.”
We finished our packing and wished each other well.
“Ari? Um… I’ve never… Uh… Never slept with a boy before. It wasn’t what I expected.”
“It was unusual circumstances. But just so you know, as uncomfortable as it was, I liked it. A lot.”
“Really? But…”
“Believe me, it was the circumstances, not the company. I’m not willing to spend another night on that cold cement or I’d invite you to stay.”
She rushed at me and I caught her as she kissed me long and hard. I could tell she wasn’t very experienced at it, but she was enthusiastic and I responded. She rubbed herself against me and I know she could feel me harden.
“It’s true,” she whispered. “I really hope there are boys like you in Oregon. Thank you, Ari.” She got in her little VW and drove west. I coasted on the bike as I hit the Eastern slope of the Divide.
Back to Alice
“Ari? Honey? Is something wrong?”
We were cuddled together on the cabin’s futon bed with the sound of rain on the roof. I’d rushed her home and we only got a little wet running into the house. She got a lot wetter when I pointed her to the toilet out back. She came back in, stripping her clothes off as soon as she hit the shelter of the porch. Now the rain was easing up enough that the coqui frogs were overtaking the noise of the rain. I held her in my arms, inhaling the fresh scent of her damp hair.
“I’m just loving holding you in my arms, sweetheart. I must have been daydreaming.”
“You don’t have to daydream. I’m really here. Don’t you want me?”
“Want you? Yes, I want you. I’ve been dreaming of having you in my arms again for four months.”
“But you’re not… um…” She lightly fondled my limp dick. Fuck! I wasn’t hard! I wasn’t even thinking about being hard. And having her touch me wasn’t remedying the situation.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It… I don’t know what the problem is.”
“Did you find someone else, Ari?” Her voice was very small and muffled by my shoulder.
“No. No! I haven’t…” I stopped to think. “Um… I told you about cuddling with Lehani,” I said. “That’s all there’s been. I enjoy it, but I haven’t gotten much of a rise with her. She’s the only one I’ve been close to since… since I was last with you. I guess I… I don’t think I’ve even masturbated since… Oh, God!”
I broke down crying. I knew since when. It was in Oregon before I wrote that fucking scene. I kept pounding out words in the story. I kept finding more and more pain to write about and less sex. Even my readers were getting bored with Living Next Door to Heaven. And every day was bringing me closer to the moment that chapter would post.
It didn’t help that I was down on the Oregon coast when I wrote the chapter, just a day before a crazed maniac let loose with a spray of bullets that killed ten students on Umpqua Community College campus just south of where I was camped. And I wrote it in fiction, releasing all my rage through Brian who used superhuman powers to kill the fucking gunman. But it didn’t stop the fact that ten died. It didn’t stop three deaths in my story. It didn’t bring Samantha back.
It took a while before I got all that out. It took Alice kissing my almost bald head, petting my back, and whispering soft words.
“You haven’t had a woman since the last time we were together in August?” Alice asked. “I thought you were being coy in your letters. I didn’t think you were denying yourself comfort.”
“I’m a pretty terrible old man,” I said. “I assuage my distress by inflicting it on everyone else.”
“At least I know it’s not me,” she giggled. “I was beginning to doubt the ability of my twenty-one-year-old tits to turn a guy on. I’m too young to retire.”
“Sweet Alice, there is absolutely nothing wrong with your pretty tits.” I kissed the nearest one and she held my head to her breast as I gave a suck and then gradually began to nurse on her.
“Let me hold you, baby,” she whispered. “Go to sleep sucking on my little nip. Everything will be better in the morning.”
The sun woke us in the morning. I had planned to wake her early and take her the few hundred yards down to the cliff to watch it rise over the ocean, but that would have to wait. I didn’t suck on her all night, but we held each other, taking up only about half of the three-quarter width bed.
I shifted a little and Alice moaned. She opened her eyes a little and smiled at me. Then she shifted and I felt that exquisite sensation.
“So nice,” she whispered. “How do we do it, Ari? How do we just slide together without any effort? I love feeling you in me.”
“It’s so… intense,” I gasped. “Honey, I… I don’t think…”
“Come in me, Ari. I’ve been dreaming of this.”
It took only a couple of gentle squeezes from Alice’s muscles to set me off. I hadn’t come in over three months. The release was fast and the shrinkage even faster. I flopped out of Alice long before she’d climaxed. She sighed. I pulled her around so that I could get my face between her legs.
“You don’t have to, Ari,” she moaned as I took the first tastes of our combined juices. “Oh! How can you… after… Oh!”
I’m not particularly fond of tasting my own come, but I would do anything to please and pleasure Alice. She produced so much of her own juices that it watered down my slimy mess and more ran down her crack onto the bed than entered my mouth. I focused on her nub and used the come to lubricate my finger as I probed her ass. I just wanted Alice to know she was loved. It took only a few minutes before that wave of pleasure crashed over her and she wailed out her orgasm. I held her, kissing my way back up her body, licking her nipples lightly, and nuzzling against her neck.
“I love you, Alice,” I whispered. “I will do anything for you.”
“Mmm. Will you make coffee?” I nipped at her earlobe and rolled out of bed.
“Your wish is my command.” I set the water on to boil and put coffee in the French press. Then I scampered outside to relieve myself, peeing off into the bushes. Alice came onto the back porch looking cautiously around before she continued into the yard. She kept checking whether anyone could see.
“Seriously? You pee in the yard?”
“Lehani’s orders. Not supposed to have too much liquid in the composting toilet. And no paper. There’s a basket for paper in the outhouse.” I left her to squat as I went in to pour the water over the grounds.
“You really live in paradise here,” she sighed when she came into the house.
“If you keep bug spray around. Those little ones really bite. And most of the time it seems like they attack the ankles. If you get bitten, and you will, use this cortisone cream. It takes the sting right out.” I poured our coffee and got fruit and yogurt out of the refrigerator.
“Mmm. So, every time you bite me, I should use some of this?”
“That’s up to you. I don’t want to get it in my mouth, so it acts as a repellent, too.” I set my cup down and bent to kiss her again. We finished our coffee and fruit and Alice sniffed.
“I need a shower.” Right on cue, a cloud passed over and we heard a light hiss of rain begin. The sun was still shining brightly, so I didn’t think we were going to get a downpour. I grabbed her hand and led her out the door. “It’s raining!” she complained.
“You said you wanted a shower.” I led her down the little jungle path to where the shower hung from a tree. I turned the water on to warm up before we stepped under it and pulled her to me. We could feel the cool splashes of rainwater on our skin at the same time as the warm shower water. I got her hair wet and began to work shampoo into it.
“I love this feeling. It’s much better than a nudist park.” We’d been to the Magic Circle at Quartzsite and to my favorite park in Idaho.
“Why?”
“They’d frown on us playing with each other in a park. Here, I feel totally comfortable with your hands on my breasts and mine stroking your cock.” She did have her soapy hands on my cock as I held her against me and made sure I’d thoroughly washed her front. She leaned back just far enough that we were out of the direct stream of the shower and began to massage my cock with her butt cheeks. I wasn’t jumping to full erection, but I enjoyed the sensations. She didn’t push it and we rinsed off. The rain had stopped, but we didn’t bring towels down to the shower with us, so we walked back to the deck wet and naked. I grabbed the towels off the line and began drying her.
“Aloha!” a voice sounded from the front driveway.
“Oh, my God! Company!” Alice screeched as she snatched the towel from me and wrapped it around herself.
“Aloha, Lehani,” I called. “Come meet my ku`uipo.” Alice looked me up and down and noticed I didn’t snatch a towel for myself. Lehani rounded the corner of the house and saw us.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” she said.
“Just grabbing a shower in the rain,” I said.
“I got caught in it a mile from here,” Lehani said. She reached behind herself, unfastened her bikini top and set it and a box on the railing. “Towel?” I handed her mine.
“Lehani, this is Alice. Alice, my landlady.” Lehani tossed the towel back at me and turned to the box she’d brought. She presented Alice with a beautiful lei.
“Aloha kākou,” she said, putting the lei around Alice’s neck and kissing her on the cheek. Alice let out a deep breath I think she’d been holding ever since Lehani arrived. With the breath, her towel fell to the ground. Lehani stood back looking at her. “Nani, u`i, maika`i. You are beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Alice said. “You are beautiful, too.”
“For an old woman. No wonder Ari doesn’t get aroused by me!”
“I think that will change,” Alice whispered conspiratorially. I certainly had enough inspiration in front of me. Lehani with her dimples and firm round breasts; long tall Alice with the mounds I loved so much. I made another pot of coffee and we sat with smaller cups as Lehani brought the news of the day.
“There is drumming this afternoon down at the beach,” she said.
“There’s drumming down there every Sunday afternoon,” I said.
“Ah, but today is the mid-winter celebration. There are drummers coming from all over the island.” That perked up my interest. I love drum music and often went down to the beach on Sunday afternoon. It didn’t hurt that it was the only nude beach in Hawaii and was only a mile from my front door.
I fixed a more substantial lunch while Alice and Lehani chatted on the front deck, neither of them at all concerned with their state of undress, even though they were visible from the street if anyone drove to the dead end.
We walked to the beach. If we’d driven, I’d still have had to park half a mile away. Cars lined both sides of the narrow road, almost sliding off into the ditches. We could hear the drumming as we approached the cliff.
It’s a steep path down from the roadway to the beach. I strapped my daypack on and wore my heavily treaded sandals. Alice wore tennis shoes. I couldn’t believe that Lehani just wore flipflops and scampered down like a goat. Practice, I guess. Once we were down, Alice was jumping all over everyplace.
“The sand is black! The sand is black!” she squealed.
“It’s grittier and sharper than white beach sand, too,” I reminded her as she pulled off her shoes. Lehani said she’d be back in a little bit and ran to greet people all over the beach. There were a lot of hugs and kisses, and a few naked bodies being squeezed. She seemed to know all of the 150 or so people on the beach. Alice and I found a spot that was high enough that the tide wouldn’t splash us and spread our blanket out. As soon as I stripped out of my clothes, Alice got naked.
I can just never get enough of seeing her naked. I started to lie down on the blanket, but she grabbed my hand.
“Come on! We have to play in the ocean!” I followed her bouncing buns down to the water just in time to see a good-sized wave crash near enough to soak her up to her tits. “Ahhh!” she screamed. She turned and ran back toward me. “It’s cold!”
“It’s the Pacific Ocean,” I said. “And it’s December.”
“But we’re in Hawaii!” she complained. In spite of the temperature, she dragged me down into the water and wasn’t satisfied until my balls shrank up inside. A very naked Lehani was waiting for us on the blanket when got back and tossed us a towel. We took turns drying each other and got distracted a few times kissing.
This is a public beach that is clothing optional. It isn’t a nudist park. There are no rules other than not being a nuisance. Unwelcome advances are almost unheard of. On the other hand, welcome advances aren’t uncommon. No one was going to throw us off the beach for making out. I was sure that the motions under a large towel not far from us indicated a lot more than making out.
The drums were just getting warmed up. There must have been thirty of them surrounding a fire. I wasn’t sure how they got some of the larger ones down the cliff, or how they planned to get them back. A large canvas canopy tied to a couple of poles and trees sheltered them in case of rain. The rhythms were intoxicating and occasionally a guitar or flute joined the mix. By the time we’d been on the beach half an hour, we were up and dancing. I could make this my solstice celebration with no difficulty, even though it technically wasn’t until the next evening.
There was a lot of skin contact as we danced closer to the fire and the crowd became denser. Some of it was accidental. Lehani seemed to be fine with what appeared to be a random guy embracing her from behind and dancing with his pelvis against her butt. Alice was a little more reserved and quickly shifted in front of me. She had no difficulty, though, when Lehani wedged herself between us and gyrated against Alice. And me. There were some hula moves being practiced against my groin. I was happy to be responding, at least a little.
“After sleeping with you naked, I was beginning to believe this thing was broke,” Lehani giggled.
“Just resting up,” I said. Alice grinned and rolled her eyes.
“You’ll get a crack at it,” she said. “But this week I want Ari to myself. Why don’t you plan to spend next weekend with us?” It was quickly agreed and sealed with a kiss. For each of us.
A little after four, people started to leave the beach.
“It’s hard to make the climb at night,” Lehani said. “Some will stay down here for the night and keep the fire going. Most people will go up to the park and keep the drums going until someone complains around ten.”
We dressed and climbed up to go home. Once we got there, Lehani grabbed her bike from under the shelter of the cabin.
“Still no light on this stupid bike,” she said. “I want to get it home before dark. See you later!”
“How can you sleep through this?” Alice exclaimed. “I’ll be dead by morning.”
I turned in her arms and kissed her again. We’d made love for a long time. Sometimes people complain that my stories don’t have any real sex in them because there is no description of a cock going into a pussy. But making love can take hours before that culminating event. For us, it had involved a long time cuddled in a beanbag chair with a blanket covering all our exposed skin so we wouldn’t be eaten by the bugs. We sprayed our ankles and lit a coil repellent on the lanai as we listened to the drums from a distance until they were silenced.
We kissed. We fondled. We talked. Eventually we went to bed and that instant of coitus occurred. I’d gotten Alice off a couple of times, so once she had me in bed and hard, she mounted and rode me until I came. Then we collapsed on the bed. I had already dozed off when Alice made her exclamation about the noise.
I speculate that the sound of the coqui frogs outside the cabin could be measured in decibels. The last time I’d heard anything that loud, it was attached to a jet airplane. But after nearly two months in the jungle, they were mere background noise to me.
“Would you like earplugs, sweetie?” I asked. “They do help, even though they won’t block out everything. That one right outside the screen seems determined to get fucked tonight.” We laughed and I retrieved the plugs. The noise the previous night had not been so intense because of the rain, and the frogs pretty much close the bar at around one. She wedged the foam plugs into her ears and nodded. I moved my lips without saying anything. She immediately pulled one plug out.
“What? I couldn’t hear what you said.” I repeated the ruse and she punched me lightly in the shoulder.
“I said, I love you,” I repeated aloud. “You lift clouds of darkness from my soul.” We kissed, and with her earplugs back in place, settled down to sleep.
“Ari, I’m so sorry,” Alice whispered. Her face was hot against my chest as we sat in front of our little solstice fire looking out over the ocean Monday evening. We could no longer really see it, but it crashed against the rocks below us. It would be another hour before the fire was just coals and we’d walk back to the cabin. The night was chilly and we’d decided to wait until we reached the cabin to complete our own special little part of the ritual. We’d burned our Yule log in silence.
“I cheated on you,” she whispered.
A Long Time Ago: Unfaithful
I know I’ve made it sound like Anabel Lee and I had a wide-open relationship that let us fuck anyone we wanted to. It didn’t start out that way. We said our wedding vows seriously and expected to be true to them. And we were. For a few months.
She didn’t tell me when we were opening our relationship. I had tickets to an Al Jarreau concert for Saturday night and she begged off.
“Why don’t you take Marla? You know she’d love to go.”
“I thought you’d enjoy this,” I said.
“I would, but I got assigned a shift that night and the money is always good on Saturday night.” After she quit school, she’d started waiting tables as a temporary job until someone wised up and gave her an executive position. She already knew how to run the restaurant better than the manager. That was Belle.
Marla and I had a good time. Marla was always like a kitten, wanting to turn around and around, then mold herself to me like she didn’t have a bone in her body. I couldn’t help but get turned on by her and we’d made out for a while after the concert until the windows in the car were dripping.
I hadn’t hurried because the evening shifts at the restaurant went until one o’clock closing, so I knew Belle wouldn’t be home for another hour. At least that’s what I thought.
I walked in the back door from the garage and saw the front door close. Belle was standing there in her bathrobe and turned to greet me.
“You’re home early,” she said.
“That’s what I was going to say. Who was at the door?”
“Oh, that was Tomas. We had a power failure at the restaurant and he gave me a lift home,” she said. I watched her as she went to the kitchen. Belle had a way of walking that left nothing to the imagination.
“He stuck around long enough for you to get undressed and ready for bed?”
“I invited him in for a drink and wanted to get out of that scratchy uniform,” she said nonchalantly. “Did you fuck Marla?”
“No! Why would you think that?”
“Didn’t she want to? I told her she could.”
“I think she probably wanted to, but why would you think I’d cheat on you?”
“It wouldn’t be cheating. I knew about it. I had my own plans.”
“Did you fuck Tomas?”
“No. We didn’t have time. You came home. He practically ran out without his shoes,” Belle said.
“But you were going to cheat on me.”
“I figured I’d tell you after you fucked Marla. One for each of us, you know. That’s not cheating.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Ari, it’s just sex. And neither of us had any tonight. So, let’s go to bed,” she said.
“And?”
“And fuck. Come on. I know you have to be horny with Marla rubbing all over you tonight. I can’t believe you didn’t fuck her.”
“Belle, that is so twisted.” She dropped her robe in the middle of the kitchen. Damn! She was still only twenty and as svelte as the day she walked into my office in her high heels and red lipstick to announce she was my shop assistant. She started pulling at my belt.
“We can do each other tonight, but we have got to get some other players. I know you can’t go out and chase pussy. It’s not your nature. I’ll make sure you get well taken care of. I’m horny. Come and make love to me.”
Back to Alice
“No, you didn’t,” I said.
“But, Ari, I had sex with another guy. It’s just been eating at me since Thanksgiving. I’m sorry, but I had to tell you,” she cried. I petted her hair and held her to me. This was different. Very different than Belle.
“Exactly what promises about exclusivity did you make to me?” I asked. “When did we get married? Have I been cheating on you?”
“No. But I love you and I… I didn’t like it. I felt bad the whole time and got sick on the plane going home.”
“Plane?”
“Kim.” Oh. The hot little flight attendant. I knew she’d fooled around with Alice on occasion. We’d all been together in Arizona almost a year ago.
“Kim’s not a guy.”
“I worked the night before Thanksgiving. Kim flew in that evening and brought her pilot and co-pilot with her to the club. They stayed until closing and Kim asked me to fly with them the next day. What was I going to do on Thanksgiving? I hate turkey anyway. I spent the night with Kim and we took off for Phoenix the next day. That’s a hub for her and there were lots of flight crews. She decided to have a party and got the pilot and co-pilot to join us. And two other pilots. Of course, they wanted a show and I was a stripper. Two of them had seen me the night before.”
“Sounds like you were in a bad situation,” I said. “I want to have a talk with Kim.”
“I already did. They all threw in a hundred a piece to get Kim and me to strip and dance with each other. I’d had a couple of drinks on the plane and the money looked like as much as I could earn at the club on a good night, so I agreed.”
I sighed. It wasn’t the kind of scene that Alice liked. She didn’t drink much and partying with random guys she’d never met before just wasn’t like her. I definitely had to give Kim my impaired judgment and consent speech. And then turn her over my knee and beat her ass.
“Of course, the pilots wanted to dance with us, too and before long everybody was naked.”
“Four guys and two girls,” I sighed. I could just see how this was going.
“Not exactly. One of the pilots was a woman. She was just as naked as the rest of us and apparently already had a relationship going with one of the guys. They paired off right away and when they were doing it doggy on the sofa, the other guys took that as a sign that we’d have sex, too. Kim was willing. She had her eye on her Captain for some time. I just sort of went along with it. I made him use a condom, at least. I was just so lonely at Thanksgiving and let myself get caught up in it.”
“Honey, I’m mad that Kim put you in a situation where you were expected to perform at all, let alone have sex. I’m not mad at you for being lonely and vulnerable.”
“I feel so bad! I know that we don’t have an exclusive relationship. I get off on hearing about your adventures. I even want to have a threesome with Lehani this weekend. I know you were okay with it when I had a boyfriend for a while. But it wasn’t getting paid to strip and get fucked. I feel like a whore.”
All I could really do was hold her and rock her. My poor Alice.
We got back to the cabin, still in a somewhat mournful mood. I needed to do something about this right away. I set our blanket and basket down on the steps and turned Alice to face me. Slowly and deliberately, I unfastened her pareu and laid it on the railing. Then her bikini top and bottom until she was just wearing her flipflops. She smiled wanly and shrugged.
“You want to do it out here?”
“Shh. I’m establishing a new solstice ritual.” I shed my T-shirt and trunks and flipped a switch on the post. A light appeared in the jungle. “Come with me.” I took her hand and led her on the path to the shower hanging from a tree just below the light.
“A night shower?” she asked as I turned on the water to warm up.
“On this solstice night,” I said hugging her to me, “I decree the washing away of pain and sorrow beneath the stars and in the presence of my lover.” I pulled her under the warm water and got her hair wet. As I began to work shampoo into her hair and caress her shoulders, back, and breasts with the lather, I continued. “We can never erase our mistakes. What is done is done. But we do not have to suffer the mental anguish of guilt and sorrow. Let those feelings vanish under the spray and leave us cleansed and pure in spirit.” She turned in my arms and began washing my hair.
“Let the hurt we’ve done to others be healed,” she said. “Let our love pour over them like the waters of the shower on our heads. Let us forgive and be forgiven.”
“I love you, Alice.”
“I love you, Ari.”
“Let’s go finish our celebration in an ancient rite of copulation.” We both laughed and dripped all the way to the door where we grabbed our towels off the line and lovingly dried each other.
It wasn’t raucous sex. We lay with each other and kissed. We petted and caressed. I buried my face between her legs and worshiped her with my tongue. I’m not sure when I became erect, nor did I know the precise moment that we joined. We were kissing and moving together and then we were making love, my cock sliding in and out of her pussy. That part never took any effort with Alice. It seemed that when we were ready, our bodies found their own way to join. Not that we never experimented or did anything deliberate, but in these special moments, coming together was something our bodies craved and enabled without our conscious volition.
Feeling Alice open and close around my cock as we slid apart and together was both spiritual and physical. In each other’s eyes, we saw genuine joy in our coupling. The sensations accompanying coitus sent shock waves up and down my spine. At one point I was almost paralyzed as Alice provided all the movement that brought us closer and closer to fulfillment. And then we rolled so I could thrust into her from above as I bent to lick her nipples and give them gentle sucks.
We moaned and whined in harmony as the waves crashed over us, echoed by the ocean not far away.
Wednesday night we went to Uncle Robert’s for the weekly market. We were directed out onto the lava field to park. Where we were parked had been beautiful Kaimū Bay a few years ago. On Wednesday nights food vendors, craftspeople, and musicians gathered. Alice was thrilled with the market and the change in the area over the past two days. On Monday, it had been a sleepy access point to the ‘new beach’ half a mile away. On Wednesday, it was packed. I chose a Thai chicken dish and Alice had a kalua pork sandwich. We washed them down with beers from the bar and then got in line to get our scoops of gelato from the vegan vendors. The woman dipping was so tiny she could be mistaken for a twelve-year-old if it weren’t for the number of tattoos all over her body and piercings in both obvious and implied locations. Her boyfriend partner was about six feet tall, clean-cut, and well-built. He poured waffle batter onto a griddle and quickly formed the fresh waffles into cones that were still warm when the young woman scooped the gelato into it.
“So good! So good!” Alice moaned as we quickly dove into our cones so they didn’t melt before we ate the treat. “And she was so cute! Did you get your reading glasses out? You could settle down in bed with her like a good book and spend all night reading. If you didn’t get distracted by her little nipples.”
“They did kind of peek out occasionally, didn’t they? Listen. The music has started.”
“Let’s go dance, Ari.”
There were dancers who knew what they were doing as far as hulas went. But they only held the dancefloor for a couple of songs before others started joining in with their own unique interpretations. Alice and I joined with a slow swing step that let us hold hands and do spins. It didn’t make much difference what style dancing people chose. Just about everything was represented, including a few little kids around four years old who just wanted to jump and turn with the adults. Very cute.
We picked up some mangoes and a pineapple before we left the market. When we arrived back at the cabin—what I’d come to consider home after two months here—we danced some more and then made love.
On Christmas Day, Friday, we drove south about eighty miles to Naalehu, the southernmost city in the United States. We ate a burger at Shaka Bar and then drove a little farther until we had to walk nearly a mile down to the green sand beach. Lava comes in many colors on the Big Island, and so does the sand.
On the long drive back, we stopped at the summit of Kilauea and looked down from the observation point into the fiery pit of the crater. Pele was talking. Alice huddled close to me. We didn’t have clothes warm enough for the cold air. There were a few snow flurries in the air.
“You’re shaking, honey. Let’s get back to the car and warm up.”
“I’m scared,” she whimpered.
“Why?”
“She’s going to erupt and we’ll all be killed.”
“It’s okay, honey. She’s not quite ready yet. The lava bed is still about sixty feet below the rim and she’s likely to vent farther down the mountain. Besides, you’re safe. I made sure of it.”
“What? How?”
“Pele only accepts virgin sacrifices,” I whispered.
A Long Time Ago: Failed Threesome
Once Paula had her cherry popped on our wedding night, she proved to be adventuresome. Her sigh was more of relief than orgasm when my cock parted her well-protected gates that first time. She got the climax, too. We’d practiced a lot of ways of getting each other off without penetration. I just think that having her virginity out of the way at last freed her mentally to try anything. Once.
When we moved to Minneapolis for grad school, we found a lot of other people who were willing to try anything, including several friends that we hung around with. Paula’s best friend at the University was Lee. Lee was invited to our apartment more frequently than anyone we knew, and she’d been put on the list of people who could ‘borrow Ari’ as a date for special occasions. There weren’t many on that select list. Tracy was a PhD candidate doing her dissertation on Japanese Noh Theater. She did her master’s work in Japan and brought us interesting traditions like drinking hot sake. She presented us with a ceramic sake set of four cups and a server. She was very sweet, very quiet and demure, and only took Paula up on the offer of my company once. She was being honored at a Japanese cultural center and needed an escort. And there was Jordan, who had jumped at the chance to have me take her out, but changed her mind when Paula told her we couldn’t have sex. Too bad.
Lee, however, didn’t have quite the same restrictions. I wasn’t completely positive, but I was pretty sure Paula knew about the blowjob she’d given me. I was certain that she knew about the kisses Lee gave me whenever the opportunity arose. It was Lee who convinced Paula to have a threesome.
Paula wanted to try and I was easy to convince. So, we gathered at the apartment over the holiday break our second year in Minneapolis. Paula and I had already had one trial separation during which she had moved in with Lee. I figured they’d already worked out how to be together during those few weeks.
Paula kept a list on a clipboard next to the bed. She was extremely organized as a director and stage manager. Lists were not uncommon. This one, however, was a T-chart. Two columns. The first was headed ‘Women Ari Wants to Fuck’. The second column was headed ‘Women Ari Is Allowed to Fuck’. Every woman we met automatically went in the left column until proven that she was not on my list. Then she was scratched off. The right column had Paula’s name. Perverse as I was, I wondered what would happen if I scratched her name off the left column.
When Jordan blatantly asked Paula if she could fuck me on our date, Paula produced the chart and showed her that her name was not in the second column. I was surprised to find that before I went to the Japanese Cultural event with Tracy, her name was added to the second column. Very generous of Paula, but Tracy was not interested in that side benefit.
Paula, Lee, and I had dinner together relaxing with a bottle of wine to celebrate the end of semester. The celebration was eerily quiet. As we ran out of excuses not to proceed with the evening, it got even quieter in the apartment.
“Maybe I should leave now,” Lee sighed.
“No!” Paula gasped. “Let’s… get Ari naked and see what comes up.” I guess I was supposed to be the ice breaker. I got several nice kisses as they were getting me out of my clothes. They shoved me back on the bed and decided to do a striptease in front of me. Paula put the bump and grind piece from Gypsy on the stereo and the two of them rather comically got out of their clothes. Seeing them together and naked got me up all right.
Things might have gone okay. They were approaching the bed together and just as they reached the foot, Lee pulled Paula down for a kiss and started caressing my wife’s boob. Paula was stunned for about a minute, just accepting the kiss. Then she jumped away from Lee like she’d been shocked.
“No. Um… I can’t do this,” Paula said. All activity came to a screeching halt, as did my erection. “I’m sorry. Just. No.”
“Guess I should have left earlier,” Lee sighed. She glanced at my deflated cock and waved bye-bye.
“No,” Paula repeated. “Give me your keys. I’ll spend the night at your place. You two have been waiting for this for a long time. I’m the wet rag.” She was shoving her feet into her shoes by this time, leaving Lee and me naked. Paula went to the bedside table and got out the list. She quickly scribbled Lee’s name in the second column, waved, and left.
It took us a while to get over the shock. But we were both still naked and there were little touches and then a few little kisses as we recovered. And it didn’t take all that long before we made use of the permission. Repeatedly. Lee had a motto that said, ‘You can never be too rich or too thin.’ I’ve since come to believe differently, but being able to lift Lee up as she spread her legs and then lower her onto my cock was incredible. She kept her legs spread out to the sides, leaning forward to help support her weight with her hands against my chest until I’d slowly settled her fully down on my cock. Then she went to work. Tight. Slippery. Tiny tits. Ravenous mouth. And determination to take advantage of this opportunity like there might not be another.
The next week, the day after Christmas, Paula and I started our second trial separation.
Back to Alice
The threesome with Alice and Lehani was far more successful. I’ve noticed that Alice likes to dominate other women. The fact that she likes an occasional taste of pussy helps. She had confided in me a long time ago that the girls at the club were quite close and sometimes relieved the stress of having a particularly arousing client with each other. Unlike what she’d done with me.
It was low key. We had dinner and drank a little wine. Lehani stripped as soon as she arrived and found both Alice and me nude. So, there was no awkward time of trying to get our clothes off. We just took our glasses to the bed and talked about life.
“I can’t believe I’m only here for two more months. November and December just flew by,” I said.
“What are you doing then?” Lehani asked. “Flying back to the arms of your ku`uipo?” I looked longingly at Alice.
“Ari has a mission. He spent a lot of money this week.”
“On what?”
“I bought a plane ticket the rest of the way around the world. I’m halfway to Japan. It seems silly to fly back to Seattle,” I said.
“Ohh. I want to come,” Lehani said.
“I think those were my first words to Ari. Later that night, I did. So, play your cards right…”
“Mmm. That sounds good, too.” Alice pulled Lehani to her for a kiss and there was a little rubbing going on as well. “Are you going with him?”
“I wish,” Alice sighed. “Next time. I still have school, and this is something Ari needs to do without being bothered by someone nagging him to go someplace else all the time. That’s why you aren’t going with him, either.”
“Yes, makamaka. I can’t leave the island for another six months anyway. I was a bad girl,” Lehani said.
“You know what bad girls get where I come from?” Alice said as she crawled over the top of Lehani and pushed her back. I took their wine glasses and put them on the table. “They get a licking.” Alice kissed her way down Lehani’s torso and the older woman’s legs opened to receive her attention. I occupied myself with Lehani’s lips. She pulled me up by the waist until my semi-erect cock was at her mouth and began sucking me until I was hard. She was moaning while she fellated me, sending vibrations up and down my erection. Then she gave me a shove and pointed me toward Alice, whose rear was in the air as she ate out Lehani.
I licked the length of Alice’s sweet pussy and she squealed into Lehani’s. I stood and nudged my way into Alice from behind. Such a sweet, delicious treat. The sensation of being in my lover was overwhelming. She simply charged my world with color and light. I reached around her narrow hips and found her clit with my finger. From the sudden increase in Lehani’s moans, I guessed Alice passed the added stimulation on to her.
If it was a porn movie, I’d fuck Alice for a while, then switch to Lehani, then get a new position with Alice while Lehani rode her face, then they’d kneel on the floor licking my cock while I beat off and sprayed them both in the face. Fuck porn. Five minutes in Alice and I was coming. Fortunately, my partners were, too. I flagged and collapsed on the bed while Alice and Lehani snuggled up to me.
Sometime around daybreak, I found Alice riding my mustache while Lehani sank onto my condom covered cock. It took longer this time, but we’d all three had an orgasm before I was pushed out of bed to make coffee.
I couldn’t open my email on January 5, 6, and 7. I just couldn’t. For the first time since I’d started posting, I couldn’t read the chapter after it was up. Alice read it and we spent the rest of the evening just holding each other in bed and kissing. Lehani had been with us twice more, but wasn’t making a practice of staying with me while Alice was there. It was clear, however, that she had become a lover. I was still a little undependable in terms of my sexual response. Alice held me and petted me. Periodic tears flooded our eyes.
And yet, with her gentleness and compassion, she brought me once again to the brink. Not waiting to see if I would just naturally slip inside her as I’d done on so many occasions, she rolled me to my back and straddled me, easily finding my erection and sliding onto it.
“Ari,” she whispered. “That’s fiction. This is reality. This. My body held above yours, waiting for you to tongue my nipples. My puss wrapped around your cock, welcoming it into my depths. My lips kissing yours, opening to invite your tongue. This is reality, Ari. I’m here.”
I thrust up into my lover and felt her clamp her muscles tightly on me. Deliberately. There was nothing accidental about our mating. We were making love with all intention of doing it again and again. I became harder and rolled with her to her back, surprising her with a squeak as I plunged deeper. I drove my cock into Alice with passion and she responded.
“Yes! Love me, Ari! Love me!”
I did. For most of the next three days.
We took a long drive over to Kailua Kona and drank coffee at a little shop in a funky part of town. We ended up ordering lunch and drinking more coffee. It was late by the time we headed east over the Saddle Road and there was dense fog. I had the little Toyota floored in third gear in order to maintain 35 miles per hour as we climbed to the 6,600-foot summit of the pass. When the fog cleared, we were surrounded by black lava fields. It looked like there was even snow up on the summit of Mauna Kea at nearly 14,000 feet. Of course, the locals are quick to tell you that Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in the world at 33,000 feet. It simply starts 19,000 feet under the ocean.
“Ari, it’s going to be difficult, but you have to open yourself to loving. That chapter took a lot out of you. You were celibate for months. You didn’t even beat off. With that dish Lehani hanging around, you should be hard all the time,” Alice said as darkness fell and we coasted toward Hilo.
“Not to mention having you around,” I laughed. “I think now it has passed. Having that chapter behind me should help me let loose a little. I’ve had a good life.”
“It ain’t over, bud! I do wish I could go with you when you take off around the world, but I was telling the truth to Lehani when I said this is something you have to do. You have to go get laid in Bangkok and yodel in the Alps or something. When you get back next summer, I want to feel this thing get hard as soon as you see me. Or if you bring back some little Dutch girl, at least have it get hard for her. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve shown that to me this week. All the equipment is in working order. You just need to set it free.”
“I’ll come back to you, Alice.”
“That’s the thing, Ari. Maybe I won’t be here to come back to. I’m not going to die like one of your characters. That’s fiction. I’m me. I’m invincible. But I could meet some flashy dude at the club, get married, and be pregnant in six months.”
I looked at her and snorted.
“Hey! It could happen!” she said indignantly. “Well, maybe not. The point is that you are going on the trip you should have taken right after college but instead, you got married and tried to settle down while you went to grad school. Well, that didn’t work. So, you jumped right back in the sack and got married again. I know you like being married.”
“I’ve been married for thirty years. Twenty of them happily.”
“But you aren’t married now. Don’t say it. You know you can’t marry me. What if I want to go traveling around the world when I get out of college and you’re in a wheelchair with a limp dick? If you want that thing usable when it gets back to me, you’d better start exercising it. Regularly. And for God’s sake, Ari, don’t even go on this trip if you aren’t going to have fun! Think of how many girls you would have fucked if you’d spent six months in Europe after you graduated from college! Don’t turn down opportunities. Remember what you told me the first time I showed you my pussy in the club? You called it ‘primary research’. You’ve got a lot of years of writing feel-good stories. You need to collect a catalog of tastes and smells and feelings for it.”
“That sounds so… mercenary.”
“Not when you do it. I know that when you stick it to a woman, you do it with love. It might not feel like the kind of forever love you felt when you got married, or even when I’m sucking on your dick, but even when it’s just sharing the warmth of your bed with Lehani, you do it with love. You should have at least one exercise session with her each week before you leave, just to make sure it’s all functioning properly, and then open yourself to opportunities when you fly away.”
“Alice, I love you.”
“And I love you, Ari. I’m only here for a few more days and then I fly back to school. Let’s make the most of them.”
We finally read all the email messages and I responded to all of them that I could. Most were supportive. Many called me a bastard. A few ranted at me.
“At least I know how the story ends. For me, it ended today!”
“Really? That’s where you leave us hanging? That’s just cruel.”
“May be forced to go shopping with my wife to get out of the house and stay away from the computer for a while. Or worst case, do some of the chores that I have been avoiding!”
“PLEASE don’t kill off Dani. I know it sucks. Lexi, Sam (who’s been around for so long) but Dani is the one I want you to save the most. PLEASE????”
Saturday night, we read the next chapter together. We kissed and were ready to make love again when my computer chimed with the first email about the next chapter.
“You keep making me cry like this I’m going to have to quit reading. What the hell is my wife going to think? A grown man sitting here on the couch bawling like a fucking baby over a sex story? Shit!!”
Alice took over the keyboard from me and responded. “Win points with the wife. Just tell her it is so beautiful and moving, it brings out all the emotion you feel toward her. Then get laid.”
And that’s what we did.
We showered in the jungle during a light rain Sunday morning and then I took Alice to the airport. It was a sad parting with both of us in tears, but we were closer than we’d ever been. I hung around Hilo most of the rest of the day, finding things to do. I needed to buy some traveling clothes. I spent nearly all my time in Hawaii in swim trunks or naked. I was going to need good sturdy hiking shoes when I went to Asia and Europe. And a new hat. I was going to think about a camera as well. I wasn’t at all happy with the pix I got on my cell phone.
I got home near nightfall. I still don’t much care to drive in the dark, though the roads around Pahoa and Hilo were familiar to me now. The light was on in the cabin and Lehani was standing at the stove. Naked.
“Figured you would need some comfort food tonight,” she said as she welcomed me with a kiss. “Get out of your clothes and pour us some wine. Loco moco is about to be served.” I had to laugh. Loco moco is pretty much the Hawaiian equivalent of meatloaf when it comes to comfort food. I stripped, lit a repellent coil on the lanai, and poured us wine from my ever-present box. Lehani joined me and brought two plates of rice with a beef patty. On top of that was a beautifully fried egg, all smothered in brown gravy.
“This looks delicious, Lehani,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I bowed to your mainland taste,” she said. “Normally, I would have used Spam instead of a hamburger.” I groaned. Both Maddie and Alice had been awed by the Spam shelf in the grocery store. On the mainland, Spam occupies a tiny nook between canned salmon and baked beans. There was nearly half a grocery store aisle devoted to it in the store in Pahoa. Bacon Spam, Turkey Spam, Teriyaki Spam, Spam with Cheese, and Jalapeno Spam. Just to name a few.
“I suppose I should try it before I leave the island,” I laughed.
“I bought you a can. I thought we could have it for breakfast with eggs.” Spam and eggs. Didn’t Monty Python do a routine about that?
After we’d had a couple more glasses of wine and cleaned the dishes, we settled into bed and Lehani gave me a long lingering kiss.
“Lehani, I don’t think…”
“I will not try to replace what you are missing,” she cut me off. “Tonight, I will hold you. Perhaps tomorrow we can make love.”
I posted my next ‘Damsels in Distress’ story, Romancing the Clown, the first two weeks of February and it was received with higher scores than the first, Sleight of Hand. That is a uniform thing with stories on SOL. The sequel scores higher than the original because the people who hated the original don’t read the sequel. Except the proverbial troll who decides he hates the author and simply opens every story the author writes and rates it a ‘1.’ Fortunately, the scoring system automatically eliminates those scores.
I was writing intensely during all of January and February, finishing the last chapter of Living Next Door to Heaven: Heaven’s Gate by the 22nd. The editors were turning it around almost as fast as I wrote it, and I was confident that I would get the whole thing ready to upload by mid-March if I could find a solid internet connection from wherever I was in Asia at the time. Going for the Juggler was almost finished, as well, but we were waiting to get LNDtH in the can before we started on the last of the Hero Lincoln Trilogy. Which brings me to the sore topic that many online writers have: the well-meaning but misguided critic.
When Going for the Juggler finally posted in April, I received a lengthy missive from one reader who patiently explained anatomy to me and that the vein in the neck is the jugular, not the juggler. The proper phrase, therefore, was ‘Going for the Jugular’ and I should correct the name of the story. My return email patiently explained that the lead character was a magician and circus clown, including juggling, and that in literature the replacing of a word with a similar word to give a double meaning was quite common and was referred to as a ‘play on words.’ The response I got was a face-palm.
I’d find out months later that the literal-minded readers could not distinguish between a character’s manner of speaking and an author’s poor grammar when I posted “The First Clue Is You Can’t Find Your Coffee Cup.” I got so many comments about how I obviously didn’t put this story through my editors and that my grammar sucked that I turned off scoring on the story.
That was just a little rant that was way out of sequence in my timeline, but I didn’t write this live as it happened. It’s been a year since these events occurred and things pop into my head at random. The point is that by the time the end of February rolled around, my writing projects were rapidly being cleared from my desk and I was ready to start a new adventure.
Lehani and I spent Saturday cleaning the cabin. I’d sold the car four hours after I listed it on Craig’s List. That meant that I couldn’t take the garbage down to the dump and I was worried about it. Lehani looked critically at me as she scrubbed the stove.
“I’m going to charge you a hundred dollars from your deposit for all the cleaning I’m doing. That will include the garbage and laundering the sheets. I have a renter who will be here Monday afternoon.” She was a little cold about the statement, but I suppose she’d just been thrust back into the role of landlord instead of lover. I was leaving.
A Long Time Ago: Chocolate Malts
“I’m leaving.”
I couldn’t count the times I’d heard those words in my life. My three older sisters were all gone and married by the time I was ten. Hannah moved away at the end of sixth grade. Jessica went to college three years before I graduated from high school. Melody left for Carnegie Mellon. Paula took her divorce and left for California. And on and on.
“But you’ll be okay,” Dad said. “You’re used to hard work. You’ll be okay.”
I’d received the call from Mom the Wednesday before and was on a flight back to Indiana on Friday. Just the weekend. Paula and I would miss class on Monday, but Dad was dying. Mom had said, “If you want to see your father alive one more time, you should come now.”
He’d been fighting this cancer since before I left for college. It looked like it had won at last. Paula sat with me beside the bed as Dad doled out what passed for his final blessing on us. At least he’d seen us married. He’d walked Cathy down the aisle this summer, so he figured all his kids were taken care of. My oldest sister, Dale, came into the bedroom to check on everything.
“Anything you need, Dad?” she asked.
“A chocolate malt?” he responded. We all laughed, but Dale went to the kitchen to get the blender and ice cream out. Malt makings had always been in the house since I could remember. Dad had a real sweet tooth. When he was diagnosed with colon cancer the first time, we joked that it was probably just a doughnut that got stuck. But it was no laughing matter now. He was dying.
I’d never lived in this house. The folks moved to a new area right after I graduated from high school. It was closer to the hospital where Dad had treatments and Mom had a good job offer. Cathy was a little pissed that she had to change schools, but she adapted, fell in love, and married right after graduation. But since I’d never lived there, I didn’t have a room to call my own. Having all four of my sisters and a few members of their families needing space, I checked us into a Days Inn about a mile from the house.
Paula and I got to our room about nine that night. It was early for us, being grad students, but Dad was asleep by seven-thirty and the rest of the family was scattering to various neighbors. I flopped down on the bed with a sigh and Paula sat beside me, stroking my hair.
“He’s the first,” Paula sighed. “I’m sorry, Ari.”
“First?”
“The first of our parents and loved ones to die,” she said.
“There was Grandfather, last year,” I said. My mother’s father passed away when we were seniors in college. I had only ever met him twice, but he sent me letters periodically from the time I was old enough to read. He was a poet and encouraged me to follow my dream of writing. He lived in Southern California, so we’d been unable to go to his funeral.
“Yes, but our parents. They’ll all leave us. Ari, I’m scared. Don’t leave me.”
I know, that’s ironic since a year and a half later she left and went to California. But we only live in the now. We don’t live in the future.
And, I’ve given short shrift to Paula in my memoirs. Yes, she was neurotic and unpredictable. I didn’t realize how easy that was to live with until I married Anabel Lee. She was psychotic and unpredictable. But I probably haven’t said how much I truly loved Paula. I rolled toward her and pulled her into my arms. We just held each other for a long time and I began to kiss her head and pet her hair. I love women’s hair. Even though Paula always kept hers very short, I loved to have my fingers in it. She shifted herself enough to reach my lips and a light kiss slowly developed into one of increasing passion. We undressed each other, loving and caressing every part uncovered with a lover’s touch. We got into bed and kicked the covers down.
“What would you like, lover?” I asked. I knew that if I just rolled over on her she would welcome me, but I wanted to assure her of my love more than anything. She looked deep into my eyes with a smile slowly creeping across her face.
“A chocolate malt?” she snorted. We started laughing and kissing. Of all the things for a dying man to ask for. It was the perfect thing to break our somber mood and Paula and I made love with all the exuberance of the young newlyweds we were. We rocked in each other’s arms, tickling, kissing, and loving each other. I was on my back when she mounted me and I caught a nipple between my lips as she bounced. When she came the first time, I was still well behind her. We rolled over and I pushed her legs up and apart as I pounded into her. The rough treatment brought her to another peak and I emptied into her welcoming depths. We lay together, panting in the afterglow. She rolled onto her side and I spooned behind her thinking we had finished. She had other ideas.
She rubbed back against me with her butt as she pulled my hands to her breasts. I stiffened and she bent forward farther so I could enter her from behind. There was no lack of lubricant fluids as I penetrated and Paula moaned as she busied her hands in front flicking her clit. When we climaxed, we both lay in exhaustion, professing our undying love.
I awoke some hours later to find Paula nursing my cock back to erection with her mouth. It wasn’t completely unheard of, but Paula so seldom offered her mouth to me that all I could do was watch as she pumped me to full hardness. My hand petted her shoulders, careful not to touch her head lest she think I was trying to force her down on me. She was very sensitive about that. As soon as she felt me touch her, though, she rolled to her back and spread her legs wide.
“Come and make love to me, Ari,” she said. “I can’t get enough of you.” I accepted her invitation and she locked her heels behind me as I plundered her pussy again and again. We kissed, fucked, and sucked. We slept and when we awoke again, we made love.
“Wasn’t sure you two would make it in time for lunch,” Mom said when we finally got to the house. “What would you like?” Paula and I looked at each other with that same grin crawling across our faces.
“A chocolate malt?” we said in unison.
Paula and I returned to Minneapolis on Monday to finish the semester. Dad passed away the week before Christmas and we went back for the funeral and the first Christmas without him. I looked around at my sisters, their husbands, their children. Cathy was showing her baby bump. I had no idea then that I wouldn’t see them all together again until my Mom died twenty years later.
“We’re leaving now,” I said. It was time for us to head to the airport and return to our lives, no matter how tumultuous, in Minneapolis.
“I guess we all have to hit the road,” Dale said. “The kids start school again on Monday. We have to give them a few days to get readjusted.”
It was a year and a half later that Paula and I divorced and she left for California with her little Gremlin pulling a U-Haul trailer with about everything we owned in it. “I’m leaving now,” she said as she pecked me on the cheek. “Keep in touch.”
I sat in the empty apartment and started writing my first novel. After twenty minutes of staring at the blank sheet of paper in the typewriter I angrily said, “What do you want?” The answer was clear. I grabbed a notebook and pen and headed out.
It was time for a chocolate malt.
Back to Lehani
“I suppose that’s fair,” I said. “My ex always told me I simply couldn’t see the dirt.”
“Is that what I am now, Ari? Your next ex?”
“Lehani, we’ve never been anything to be ex over. I like you a lot and I hope we’ll remain friends. Maybe you could come and visit me in Colorado next summer.”
“In the nude park? I don’t know. It’s one thing to be nude here where there’s just you or even with Alice, but with all those people? Maybe. You’d still be okay with that?”
“Of course I will. I told you, I like you a lot.”
“I love you, Ari,” she said. There it was. Her feelings had developed more deeply and rapidly than mine. I wished I could do something about it, that I could make the same declaration, but it just wasn’t there. To say, ‘I love you,’ to Lehani was the same as proposing that we live and travel together from now on. I was not going there. I just hugged her and gave her a kiss.
“Do you want to book the cabin for next winter? I’ve had an inquiry about a month, but I’d hold it for you for the four months. Or maybe you could make it six.”
“Too far away for me to know what I’ll be doing. I know I’ll be looking for something cheap next winter while I recover from the travel I’m about to do. Let’s just wait and see.”
I woke with the sun on Sunday morning. The only bus was at nine o’clock and I didn’t want to miss my flight. It seemed a little strange to dress in my traveling clothes. I had my new hiking shoes on. I’d wear those traveling because the sandals took up less space in my backpack. Lightweight drawstring pants that I’d found at Macy’s along with a tropics weight white shirt and a linen jacket. I was even wearing underwear. I put my new Panama on my head. As soon as I’d bought it, Lehani claimed the cheap raffia hat I’d bought in Honolulu. The coffee was almost ready and I bent to kiss Lehani.
“It’s almost time,” I whispered. “Coffee’s ready.” She pulled me down for a kiss and threatened not to let my head go as I tried to stand up. She reminded me of Becky the Reckless who would not let go until she was satisfied. She finally rolled out of bed and pulled her bikini on and her light terry shorts. I poured us each a cup of coffee and she carried them while I pulled on my backpack and computer case.
We walked the quarter mile out to the park overlooking the ocean. I’d managed a lot of sunrises out here, even though there were often low-hanging clouds. I’d see the sun come up and then disappear behind the clouds before the disk was fully visible above the horizon. We took pictures of each other and even set up a timed-release shot so we could hold each other as the camera clicked our picture with the ocean behind us. Eventually, the time came. I could see a few others gathering at the bus stop. I handed my cup to Lehani and took my place in the little line that formed when we saw the bus at a distance.
I kissed her one last time and she let me pull my lips away when the bus rolled to a stop. I squeezed her.
“I’m leaving now, Lehani. Blessings on you.”
I turned and boarded the bus for the Hilo Airport.
I got to Honolulu about four o’clock. It turned out that I could have made an earlier flight from Hilo, but I’d had to allow for the contingency of missing the bus and having to call a cab to get me there. I was in a hotel room near the airport which meant nothing else was near. There was an ice cream shop in the lobby, though. Apparently, the first thing a lot of people want when they arrive in Hawaii is shaved ice.
I was about to embark on the next part of my great adventure. I was just going to keep heading west.
First, though, I needed a chocolate malt.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
