The Prodigal
Six
AND THEN IT WAS OVER. Our new friends flew back to Romania. Team USA headed to California and we caught a connecting flight to Seattle. Lissa, Melody, Bree, and Whitney got back from London on Sunday afternoon and we spent a week recovering.
For me, that meant painting. Kate and I went to the studio. I’d focused so much on racquetball in July that I felt I was months behind in producing the paintings for my show in December. I was finally happy with the sketch of Bacchanalia and was ready to start painting it. The suite of paintings that would go with it was a challenge, but my models all seemed to be happy to come in for a day and undress while I completed the sketches for the individual pieces. Especially since I was now paying everyone who modeled a modest fee. I wanted all the sketches finished before Labor Day so I could just paint once school started.
Kate was ahead of me and I liked what I was seeing in her work. She was painting pieces that were broader in scope, but her attention to detail was just as important in the bigger works as in the smaller. The closer you got to one of her paintings, the more you could see. You could almost imagine getting a magnifying glass and seeing even more detail. I mentioned that and Kate abruptly stopped painting as she got a far-away look in her eye.
“You know,” she said, “that might be just what I need. You have entire images super-imposed over other images, but the idea of different levels of reality appearing tinier and tinier hasn’t had a lot of play in the past century.”
“You’ll be painting miniatures next,” I laughed. “I can imagine entire scenes painted on pinheads.”
“How many angels can Kate paint on the head of a pin?” she laughed. “Still…”
“Hey. It’s almost our birthday. What would you like to do to celebrate this year?”
“It would be hard to top last year,” she sighed. “Tony, I’m so happy I came to you all that night.”
“I know that I can speak for Mel and Liss when I say we’re happy, too,” I said. “But even more, I’m happy. Now we’re going to celebrate our birthdays and our anniversary on the same day.”
“I love you, Tony.”
“I love you, Kate.”
We kissed and allowed ourselves to float together, not trying to go beyond the kiss, but putting everything we had into it. I looked into her eyes and saw that pure burst of sunshine that came from her smile.
She pushed me toward my chair and I fell into it. Kate was on top of me in an instant. The little recliner in the studio was adequate. Kate pulled my shirt over my head and my hands slid up inside the oversized white shirt she used as a painter’s smock. I wasn’t surprised to find nothing under it but Kate. The feel of her skin beneath my palms caused the expected response in both of us and she had to struggle a little to get my pants down over my hard-on.
“Kitten, didn’t we just have a week of frolicking naked?”
“Mmmhmm. Did you get your fill?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get my fill. I want to spend my life trying. Will you spend your life with me, darling?”
“Tony! I’m spending all the time I can with you.”
“You know what I’m talking about.” Kate kissed me deeply—a kiss I wanted to never end. I wanted her desperately, in my life, my bed, and my partnership. The word “wife” even crossed my mind. While we kissed, I felt the dual sensation of her pussy settling over my cock and her tears on my cheeks.
“Please don’t pressure me, Tony. Please just fill me. Make my life so there isn’t room for anything else. Love me. Please, love me.”
I did love her. Lying back in that chair as she rode me, kissed me, and wept on me, I made love to her. I filled my hands with her butt, then with her breasts. I got the smock open so I could kiss and suck her lovely nipples. Each lick brought her higher. I could hear the whine of her breath as she reached her peak. Her muscles clamped down on me as she ground against my pubic bone, and life flowed from me. I was barely still breathing when she collapsed, her eyes rolled into the back of her head. I caught her and held her naked breasts against my chest as I drifted off, the tears now coming from my eyes rather than hers.
What was I going to do with Kate?
“So,” I said as we recovered our composure and turned again to our canvases, “what shall we do to commemorate our first time and our birthdays? It’s only a month away. We need to celebrate.”
“I just did. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than crawl in bed with my lovers. I can’t believe that just eleven months ago I was a virgin and now I have a beautiful man and three insatiable women to share my bed with each night.”
“Not to mention the occasional playmate,” I laughed, remembering catching her with Allison. “How about if the five of us go to Las Vegas for a long weekend? That has all the trimmings of a typical way to celebrate our twenty-first.”
Silence. I turned to look at Kate. She was staring at me. Her eyes were brimming with tears again. I couldn’t fathom what had come over her. I thought we got past the awkward part. We’d just been so happy a moment before. Las Vegas? Did she think I wanted to elope?
“What is it, Kitten?” I asked. I put down my pencils and caught her as she nearly collapsed with a sob. “Darling. It’s okay. What is it, sweetheart?”
“I… I… lied to you,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me, Tony. I’m so sorry.”
“Kate! Kitten! I’m not going to hate you, no matter what. What do you mean you lied to me? Isn’t your birthday the same day as mine?”
“Yes. But I didn’t tell you the whole truth and now I have to and you’ll know. Everyone will know and you won’t want me anymore.”
I led Kate back to the recliner in which we’d so recently made love and settled her on my lap, petting her hair and whispering softly to her. We weren’t going to get any painting done today, but I didn’t care.
“Unless you are an axe murderer or a child-rapist, I don’t think there is anything you’ve ever done that could possibly make us hate you, Kitten. I’m going to forgive you right now for the lie, whatever it was. I promise I will never hold it against you. You don’t even have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
That resulted in renewed sobs, and when she’d finally settled a little, she kept her head facing my chest.
“I can’t go to Las Vegas for our twenty-first birthday. It… isn’t my twenty-first. It’s only my nineteenth,” she gasped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to know I wasn’t as old as you.”
“What? Why would that make a difference? We’re not going to be upset about… But you’re a junior in college. How old were you when you came to PCAD?”
“Sixteen. I was so scared someone would find out. I was so afraid when I fell in love with you that you’d think I was just a kid. I didn’t want Lissa to think she had taken a little girl to bed. What will she think, Tony? I waited for our birthday so I’d be eighteen when we made love. I’m still only eighteen.”
“Well, if you haven’t noticed, Lissa’s got another eighteen-year-old she’s been seeing lately, too.”
“Whitney turned nineteen in April. I’m even younger than her.”
“How did you manage to get into college when you were just sixteen?” I asked. “Oh, god, you were all alone here that Christmas and you were just seventeen? You poor kid.”
“I’m not a kid! Please don’t treat me like I’m just a kid now.” She pounded my chest with her fists, not hard, but emphatically.
“That’s not what I meant, Kitten. I think you are the most adult of all of us.” I said. “I’ll never use the term again.”
“I got here the same way Willow, Sunday, and Rainbow did. Rainbow will be seventeen in November and the twins in December. We’ve been emancipated. It’s part of why we all left the commune. We were adults and expected to pair up by the time we were eighteen,” Kate rattled. “When I went back at Christmas, there was a lot of pressure. That’s why I wanted you with me when I went back. The commune is a beautiful place to be a kid and great if you choose the lifestyle. But there’s pressure to conform to the standard if you choose not to leave.”
“So, you were emancipated at sixteen?”
“That summer. I told Mama that I wasn’t going to stay and I wanted to go to college. She and Papa took me to Portland and signed the papers for my emancipation so I could manage my own life at college and so I would be considered completely independent when financial aid was determined. It’s why I got such a great scholarship. But I didn’t want anyone at school to know I was two years younger than them.”
“Kitten, I love you. Do you get it? It doesn’t make any difference to me how old you are. You could tell me you’re only sixteen now and I’d still be in love with you and I wouldn’t stop anything we are doing,” I said. “It explains something that I always wondered about, though.”
“What?”
“When we first met you never said anything to anyone. You answered questions with one word and walked away from anyone who approached you. I thought you were incredibly stuck up. Then, after the mural, I decided you were just shy and hiding. It made all of us want to coax you out of your shell. And that first kiss? Not the contest, but when I pinned your flower on—I fell in love with you that moment. Nothing you could say from that point on would ever have changed it. Please, Kitten, don’t pull away from us just because we’re old people. Nothing will ever change our love for you.”
“But you’ve done everything. Don’t you see? That kiss was my first. You had a normal childhood, went to a normal school and had friends and dates. I had a farm where the principal crop was marijuana. I don’t know anything except what I read in books.”
“Yet this book-learned kitten courted three people at once and won their hearts. She got her passport and traveled to Canada before she was eighteen. She had a gallery exhibition and earned nearly sixty thousand dollars. She took her girlfriend on an adventure to the Caribbean and translated for two Romanians who didn't know anyone and are now our friends. She’s smart and talented and funny and beautiful and the most incredible woman I’ve ever met.”
“Will Wendy hate me? I couldn’t tell her either.”
“Wendy is still more of an innocent than even you. And she loves you like the rest of us. Kate, I understand the need to back off a little and not rush you now. But we… I will always love you.”
I’d never seen Kate so completely misjudge someone. I thought back about all the times when she’d pointed us in the right direction, been there for one of us or one of our friends, and guided us. I thought of the way she’d teased us and held us all at arm’s length until her eighteenth birthday and then let passion burst out like water from a fire hose. Her intuition about people like Wendy and Bree was spot on. But when it came to thinking that being two years younger would be a negative to any of us, she was completely mistaken.
“You’re eighteen? You’re only going to be nineteen on your birthday?” Melody squealed. “I’m not the baby? I’m not the baby!”
Lissa was lying back in the tub waiting for us when we walked into the bathroom. Melody yelled again as she got into the hot water. “I’m not the baby!”
“Hey, you two,” Lissa said, “before you get in the tub, I want Kate to turn around slowly so I can see her.”
“Huh?” Kate looked like she was in a foreign country and hadn’t understood anything, but she slowly started to turn around. I reached over and pulled her robe off and hung it on the door. Kate continued to rotate until she was facing the tub again. “What?” she asked.
Lissa had the most lascivious grin on her face I’d ever seen.
“Nope. Doesn’t change a thing. I still want to pull this tender little morsel into my lap and eat her all up. Come here, lover.”
Kate stepped into the tub and right into Lissa’s waiting arms. There were tears, but Lissa was licking them off her face then pulling her lips to hers in a kiss I thought might not end.
“Oh! Oh! OH!” Kate cried when the kiss finally broke. It was then that I realized Lissa’s fingers had been busy.
“That sounded like a cramp. Tony, assume the position.”
I sat up on the edge of the tub and pulled Kate onto my lap. I spread my knees, forcing her legs apart and Melody dove in between them. It was only a few minutes until Kate’s cries crescendoed into another orgasm, lifting her up as her legs stiffened. When she collapsed back, Melody guided my cock into her warm center. Wendy crawled up facing Kate and began kissing her lips and her breasts. That started us back up the ramp to another peak. Wendy squealed with her and I realized Melody and Lissa had been at work on my fourth queen. This time Kate slumped back against me, still conscious but too exhausted to move. We slid into the water and fired up the jets. Melody and Lissa closed in on us from either side. With Wendy in front, Kate was in the center of a four-way sandwich.
“I love you, Katarina,” I whispered in her ear.
“I love you, Kitten,” Lissa said.
“I love you, Kate,” Melody repeated.
“I’ll never stop loving you,” Wendy said.
We’d recovered some and were simply lounging, enjoying the jets, and fondly caressing each other.
“Has anyone noticed a change in The Trips?” Lissa asked. “Something seems different.”
“I noticed,” Melody said. “Ever since we got back from London, it seems like they’ve been… I don’t know. Even more responsible?”
“I think the time we were away gave them confidence,” I said.
“I think they got laid,” Kate said. We looked at her.
“Why would that change anything? They’ve been living together here for almost three months,” I said.
“Yeah, but at least one of them was still a virgin,” Kate said. “Maybe all of them, depending on how you define it.”
“You mean they’ve been living down there together all this time and haven’t been making love to each other?” Melody asked. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?”
“Think about what I did to you all,” Kate continued. “I’m sure that Willow hadn’t had intercourse with either of the girls before we left for London and the Dominican Republic. I’m not saying they hadn’t relieved the tension regularly, just not gone all the way.”
“What makes you think it’s different now?” Lissa asked.
“All the things you’ve been noticing, but there’s something else, too. It’s the way they look at each other. It reminds me of how I looked at each of you after our last birthday. It’s not just an ‘I love you’ look. It’s more like ‘I adore you’.”
“You know what, Kitten? I noticed that look after we made love. I didn’t know what to call it,” I said. “I adore you.”
“I’ve always adored you, love,” Wendy said.
Kate looked at me and it was so penetrating that I was sure she saw everything inside me. It’s always been that way—like I’m an open book and she’s reading my heart. She looked at Lissa and I could see the same intensity. Then her eyes shifted to Melody and I was reminded of the way she looked at each of us when she was sketching the pose for the Triptych. Wendy was last to come under her gaze. We all just stayed still and quiet while she made her survey.
“I am the luckiest girl in the world,” she sighed at last.
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