US Highways
Pudding
5 October 2013
ONE OF THE ISSUES we needed to work out as we traveled was what Angie would be doing while I was writing. I encouraged her to be independent in her explorations but, in the evening, she was often left with nothing to do.
“Can I read what you’re writing?” she asked one evening.
“I suppose so,” I said. “I have to warn you, though, that my second ex-wife read the first novel I wrote and laughed all the way through the first page. The operative word there is ‘ex’.”
“You write humor?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
I admit, it wasn’t stellar writing, but she could have shown some sensitivity. It was the derogatory ‘You’ll never be a writer’ attitude that started us on the path to divorce about a week after we were married. Unlike Treasure, who begged me to read to her in the early days. Those were good times. “Why don’t you read something that’s already been published? What kind of story would you like?”
“I want to read the real you,” she said. I gave her my web address and suggested she start with the Model Student series and Mural. We sat together on the bed, the most comfortable spot in the trailer, and I wrote while she started reading. That became our nightly ritual, just before we cuddled up to sleep.
And, yes, there was a lot more cuddling and skin-to-skin contact. I’d woken up just this morning spooned behind her as she held my hand to her breast. I stayed in that position for as long as I could stand. She wasn’t making any overt sexual moves—at least not obviously. But occasionally, my hand would twitch and squeeze her breast. That seemed to trigger a reflex of her squeezing her butt cheeks together on my rigid cock. Before I made a mess of things, I slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom for relief. Then I made coffee.
Havasu was only of interest because we carried our child-like innocence with us. London Bridge was just a stone arch bridge over a channel separating the mainland from a small resort island in the lake. We walked across it holding hands and occasionally humming parts of the nursery rhyme.
We joined up with old Route 66 in Kingman, Arizona, and went to the Historic Route 66 Museum. The Mohave Museum of History and the Arts had a section about Andy Devine that really took me back to my childhood watching Roy Rogers. What a trip! That night, I noticed she had earbuds in while she was reading.
“What are you listening to, Pudding?” I asked.
“I downloaded all the music on Tony’s playlists in Model Student and I’m listening to them while I read,” she said. “You sure have eclectic taste in music.” I had to laugh.
“I suppose I do,” I said. “But remember, I’m not Tony. He probably has some pieces in there that I wouldn’t listen to.”
“Right.” I’m not sure she was convinced.
We camped at Williams, Arizona, and drove up to the Grand Canyon for a day trip. It was only about thirty-five miles. My enjoyment of the magnificence of nature was doubled by the childlike excitement of Angie. I’d been to the canyon before, but seeing it with her was something else.
And at night, we read, wrote, and cuddled together for warmth as the nights became steadily colder.
In mid-October, we camped at Navajo National Monument. The campground was empty. There was a sign that said one of the restrooms was closed for the season. The ranger station was open for limited hours during the day to accommodate tour buses that arrived and left within an hour.
I was grilling a couple of country pork ribs. I’d stocked up on about everything we could need for a week because there isn’t a grocery store within two hours of the campground. We were isolated out here. I turned when Angie brought me a glass of wine.
She was naked except for her camp shoes.
“Pudding, this campground isn’t really clothing optional,” I said.
“Uncle Ari, look around. We’re the only ones in this campground. I thought we could have a campfire tonight and cuddle in the camp chair,” she said. “Please?” I nodded. How do you say no to a naked beauty who wants to cuddle in front of the campfire? I stripped off my clothes.
We spent most of the night wrapped in a blanket in front of the campfire.
The next morning, after cuddling under the blankets in bed against the cold, we got dressed and hurried out to the viewpoint to see the sunrise gradually illuminate the Betetakin cliff dwellings of the Anasazi Indians.
It was a special moment for me for reasons that had nothing to do with the pleasant company under my arm.
A Long Time Ago: Desert Musings
Joy was beautiful beyond my sixteen-year-old mind to comprehend. What’s more, she was friendly. I guess that comes with the territory. Her mother was a county judge. Her father commuted to Fort Wayne to teach government at IUPUFW (Indiana University/Purdue University Fort Wayne). Joy was destined to become President of the United States. Or at the very least, First Lady. I wish she was running now.
She was part of what I had always considered ‘the privileged’ class, of which I wasn’t. My family moved the summer between freshman and sophomore year and my meeting with Joy had been arranged by our parents as a sort of get to know the area arrangement. What I got to know was that Joy was so far above me socially, I couldn’t reach her with a stepladder. Try one of those fire department ladder trucks and I could maybe reach the bottom ledge of her window. But she’d been raised in our little town by parents who believed in an egalitarian society. She went to public school and tried out for the cheer squad—unsuccessfully. Even in our little school, cheerleaders were a special class of their own and simply being smart, beautiful, and rich didn’t ensure that you’d get in.
Joy was one of only half a dozen girls in my class who didn’t turn me down for a date. That’s because I never asked her. Even after the night she let me feel her breasts and make out just before graduation. But that’s a different story. This is the one when she convinced me that I needed to go to a college prep school for the summer like she did each year. It was a cinch that I wasn’t going to get any playwriting instruction at the little high school I was attending, so I researched until I found a school in Colorado that had a playwriting program, applied, and miraculously was accepted on a summer scholarship between sophomore and junior years.
My sport for the summer was hiking. My summer girlfriend was Sue. That’s a different story, too, but suffice it to say that even though we didn’t go all the way, at the end of the summer, Sue was the only girl whose bare breasts had actually been in my hands and the only girl who had ever had an orgasm with me.
But at the end of the summer session, Sue was assigned to a different unit than I was, so we never got a chance to see what that last step would be like. Instead, I was with a group of forty boys and girls who rafted down Lake Powell for two days, observing the effects of the Glen Canyon Dam, until we reached Rainbow Bridge National Monument. It wasn’t impossible to reach the bridge via overland trail, but most visitors were coming by boat.
Our group was to hike from the bridge over that land route to Navaho Mountain where we would be picked up by trucks to take us to Betetakin cliff dwellings and then we’d visit the Four Corners monument and head back to school for our last week of synthesizing our experiences.
In the middle of the night, while hiking under a full moon from Rainbow Bridge to Navaho Mountain, we were to pass the other group of forty students and teachers (the group Sue was in) on their way from Betetakin to Rainbow Bridge.
But before that happened, my group’s leader missed the trail turnoff that would lead to the pickup point and instead led us out into the desert. At dawn, we stumbled to a stop beside a puny watering hole as the teachers decided what went wrong.
We camped for the day by that spring but it dried up a little after noon. We slept and talked while we waited for our leader to backtrack until he found out where we’d gone wrong. Then he came to get us at moonrise and we all headed back to what proved to be too rugged a path for some of our exhausted group. I collected backpacks from a few people who couldn’t carry theirs and make the ascent.
Disaster struck again with daylight. Mitzi, one of our students, was sick. She had diabetes and no medication as I understood it. So, two teachers—Fritz and my hiking coach, Leslie—stayed with Mitzi in a bit of juniper shade and cooled her with what precious little water they had while waiting for supplies and rescue. The rest of us began the long climb out of the canyons to Navajo Mountain. Fearless leader had hiked with half a dozen of the strongest boys, out of the canyon to the trailhead, collected supplies, and started back down into the canyon. When we met up on the trail, he was nearing exhaustion. As I figured it, he hadn’t slept in at least 48 hours. I volunteered to exchange packs—since I was carrying about four of them—and take the supplies back down to Mitzi, Fritz, and Leslie.
And thus, we spent another night in the canyon.
I told Fritz that I’d seen water up the trail when we came through in the night and I was going to hike back to see if I could refill canteens. He agreed. What I found wasn’t just water. We’d hiked right through a park service campground with water, restrooms, picnic tables, and rustic signs with yellow lettering pointing the direction. We just hadn’t seen it in the night. I returned with water.
In the heat of the afternoon, while the others slept, I absently gathered twigs from around the juniper where we rested. I started putting them together in an elaborate sculpture, balancing one twig on another and building from a small base to a large top like a tree. Fritz rolled over in his sleep and kicked it down. It didn’t matter. It was temporal.
Early the next afternoon, we watched as five horses and three horsemen came down the long steep trail into the canyon. We loaded our packs on one horse and Mitzi on the other and the other three of us walked out. Fritz stayed with Mitzi. Leslie and I walked out ahead, being much faster than loaded horses going uphill. We’d been hiking together all summer and even though she was much older than me and was faculty, we’d developed a good rapport. She’d even teased me about having to separate Sue and me. Once we crested the canyon ridge, it was a downhill romp all the way to the trailhead and we decided to race the rest of the way to the trucks. I had to keep my hands in my pockets as we ran down the trail to keep my lederhosen from falling down because I’d lost so much weight.
We were two days late getting out of the canyon, so we never made it to the Anasazi ruins or Monument Valley or the Four Corners. We did stop at a trading post before we crossed back into Colorado and a trader offered me fifty dollars for my hat.
I’ve often wondered about the people I met that summer. Did Ed become a politician? Did Sue get together with Frenchy? Was Laramie really an Indian princess? I’ve thought of Paul’s explanations of the dreams I’d had that came true. I’ve thought of Leslie’s warnings and tempered some of my recklessness. And I’ve thought of emerging from the canyon yelling and screaming as we ran.
I was changed that summer. It wasn’t radical—at least in my way of thinking. I still fantasized about Joy, but I figured most of the boys in my class did, too. In addition to plays, I started writing poetry that fall. Volumes and volumes of it. Well, if you don’t write poetry when you’re a teenager, you have no heart. And then I quit football. I’ll never forget Coach Hancock’s expression when I said, “Coach, I just don’t think there should be a game like this.” I became progressively more and more a pacifist.
Back to Angie
And what does all this have to do with my travels with Angie?
When we visited the Four Corners Monument and photographed each other with our feet in four different states, I got a special permit to enter Navajo territory. I gave Angie the option of staying in camp, but she wasn’t about to be left behind.
I drove up Indian Road 16 in Arizona to Navajo Mountain. As soon as you first see the mountain, the speed limit drops to 45 mph. For thirty miles, we watched its incredible hulking presence fill more and more of our field of vision. I drove on up into Utah past the mountain and onto Trailhead Rd. That’s a sand track and we drove out as far as I considered it safe to take the truck. Technically, that trailhead leading to Rainbow Natural Bridge is closed now. We weren’t equipped for backcountry packing. We parked on a promontory overlooking what the newspaper story back then had called ‘the airless canyons.’
I brought my spiritual tools with me and cast a circle. I told the wind, the fire, the rain, and the earth that I was here. It was beautiful as I sank into a trance looking out over the desert.
As I meditated in my circle, I met my younger self emerging from the canyons, whooping up a storm. I found, oddly, that I had no advice for him. It’s his journey. I’ve already been there.
I had a small drum with me and I began to tap out a rhythm. I don’t do it frequently, but I have my own meditation rhythm. Angie and I had listened to hours of Native American flute and drum music as we drove, so no doubt there was some influence on my drumbeats.
I was so caught up in my own memories that I ignored Angie. My attention was caught, however, by a scuffling beside me and her shadow crossing over me. I looked up and as I kept my drumbeats going, Angie danced. She’d been wearing shorts and a bandana top. As she danced, she stripped off the top and used it as a kind of veil to accent her dance. She captured it. The journey. The adventure. The race to freedom. Emerging from the canyons to the mountain. I watched, mesmerized, as this creature of light and sand danced my story and then settled in my lap looking out over the desert.
We camped at Navajo National Monument for nearly a week. It was amazing how little we said during that time.
Of course, we had to stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. I let Angie drive the truck (without the trailer) down the street and open the door for me to climb in. Then we headed for Santa Fe.
It was getting darn cold at night in the mountains. In fact, it wasn’t always very warm during the day. We drove as far as Taos and camped in a nice RV park with full hookups. I got out the electric heater so I wasn’t burning so much propane and we were toasty warm.
I’d been outside having a smoke and contemplating just how good life is. Not only was I getting a lot of writing done—and I had great prospects for what I was outlining for my new erotic paranormal romance western mystery, Redtail—but I had great company. Every night I held a small goddess in my arms. I touched her breasts and she snuggled her little butt up against my erections until I had to go relieve myself. I was glad we hadn’t had sex. What we’d developed was far more than what I ever anticipated.
I finished my cigar and my last sip of wine, and took one last look up into the crystal clear night sky. The next day we planned to cross the mountains on US 64 to the Capulin Volcano. Brazos Summit, a 10,507' high pass lay between Taos and the northeastern New Mexican volcano but all reports were that it was clear and open. I walked into the trailer and stopped, stunned.
Angie didn’t notice that I was inside as I slipped my shoes off at the door. She was sprawled out on her back on the bed. Her head was propped up on pillows enough that she could see her iPad. Her left leg was bent with the knee in the air to prop the tablet up so she could read without holding it. Her right leg was spread so far out that her foot dangled off the edge of the bed. One hand was pulling at her nipples while the other was very busy in her pussy. It was obvious that she was near to orgasm.
We tried to allow each other a bit of privacy to take care of those base urges. I knew I should go back outside and let her finish. But it was so beautiful. She was flushed, her shuddering breaths causing a small quake in her breasts. Her hand occasionally abandoned her breast to turn the page on her tablet, but her awareness was limited to the words she was reading and the stimulation of her clit. Tears ran from her eyes.
Her pitch increased and her fingers plunged into her pussy. Her nipples looked almost painfully stiff as she pinched and pulled on one and then the other. The tablet rolled off its prop onto the bed as she arched her back and cried out in orgasm. She threw her head back against the pillows and gasped for air.
I’d shed my sweats when I entered the trailer. My rigid cock was leaking lubrication as I continued to helplessly look at her recovering from climax. The tears continued to flow from her eyes.
“Are you all right?” I whispered. She turned her head toward me, making no attempt to cover herself or conceal what had just happened.
“So beautiful,” she said. “So loving. Uncle Ari, touch me. Touch me, please. Make me come again.”
My body moved of its own volition. I was next to her, reaching toward her, before I stopped myself.
“Angie…” My words were cut off when her hand, still drenched with her own juices, wrapped around my cock to spread my own pre-come. I groaned.
“We’ve been together for a month and a half,” she said. “We’ve been hiding our fantasies from each other. If we were only dating each other a couple times a week, we’d have progressed to touching each other by now. Uncle Ari, please touch me and make me come. Please let me touch you.”
She was already touching me. I stretched out on the bed beside her and began stroking her beautiful body. I’d woken up many mornings recently with one of her breasts in my hand and my hard cock lodged against her butt. This seemed more… deliberate. I kissed her. In six weeks living together and naked most of the time, I’d never kissed her lips. There was something final about that kind of intimacy. A line that once crossed couldn’t be uncrossed. As I kissed her, I felt the lines dissolve. I explored her body thoroughly with my fingertips and when I found the slick passage between her legs, she arched her back against my hand encouraging me to go deeper as she stroked my cock. The round pebble of her clitoris begged for attention and when I gave it, she came, crying and weeping once again.
“You’d better stop now or I’m going to make a mess,” I said as I felt my balls beginning to contract.
“I wash. Go ahead and make a mess.”
I didn’t need more encouragement. Another stroke and I was spraying her abdomen. We kissed some more, coming down gradually from our summit and enjoying the afterglow.
“What set you off this evening?” I asked.
“It was so beautiful,” she said. “I read it over and over. Each time I read it, I got more turned on until I just couldn’t contain it any longer.”
“What passage had such a profound effect on you?”
“In Odalisque, where Tony places the collar around Wendy’s neck.” Oh yes. I’d taken some flak for that when it was released. Some readers were offended that I’d brought in a character who was submissive and called Tony ‘master’.
“That scene isn’t particularly sexy,” I laughed. I kissed her again. Now that we’d begun, I couldn’t get enough of her lips.
“But it is,” she said. “Tony wasn’t a master. He wasn’t particularly dominant through any of the rest of the story. Even when Wendy needed him to help her choose clothes to wear, he did it in a way that helped her make decisions. And when he put the collar on her, he accepted her. He accepted her for what and who she was, even though it was hard for him to do. It made me realize… Uncle Ari, you’ve done that for me.”
“Hey, Pudding,” I laughed softly. “You are not a slave in need of a master like Wendy.”
“No. You could have made me into that, but you didn’t. You might not accept the title of ‘master,’ but you are. You made it clear from the first night that we would have a relationship built on trust. The punishment you gave me… You could have fucked me and I’d have been your slave. Instead, you used it to show me I could trust you and that you had to be able to trust me. You broke through my body issues. You got me to run around naked outdoors with other people around. You showed me a bit of your soul up on that rock overlooking the desert. You encouraged me to go off exploring by myself and made me independent. And you’ve shown me love. You… We do have a sexual relationship that you’ve allowed me to grow into rather than force upon me. I don’t want us to have to masturbate alone in the dark any longer.”
Is it still called masturbation when it’s someone else’s hand? Or butt. Or mouth? We didn’t get quite that far that night, but my fingers seemed to stay wet in Angie’s juices as we cuddled all night long.
For the first time in a long time—possibly since I started this trip—I didn’t wake up early. In fact, after Angie had put me to sleep again rubbing my cock between her butt cheeks, she got up and hummed a tune as she made coffee. I came back to life with the aroma of the blessed brew.
A Long Time Ago: Milkless Latté
In most of my stories, the hero has a coffee addiction. Well, that’s me. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest to work on publishing technology, I discovered lattés. Seattle was the home of Starbucks and paying four dollars for a cup of espresso and steamed milk was the norm. So was weight gain.
I was sitting with some of my colleagues—mmm, one of my colleagues. That was during my time with Colette. Irish, about five-three, red hair. Very, very smart, but complained that no one took her seriously because she had big boobs. It wasn’t that they were really big, but she had a pretty small frame, so they really stuck out under her sweaters. I’m getting sidetracked. I’ll talk about her again sometime. We were drinking coffee and shooting the bull when I came to the sudden realization that…
“I don’t like milk,” I said.
“Then don’t drink it,” Colette answered. Colette always had a simple answer for life’s dilemmas.
“But lattés are full of milk. Drinking coffee flavored milk is the same as drinking milk. It’s the coffee I like.” Colette went to the Starbucks coffee bar where we were sitting and a moment later returned with a tiny cup. She set it down in front of me and waited. “What?”
“It’s a latté without the milk,” she said simply. Espresso! Oh yes!
The only problem with drinking straight espresso is that a shot is only one and a half ounces. That’s great for an energy boost in the middle of the day, but it makes a lousy beverage. I could remember a time in college when I would start a huge pot of coffee in the scene shop in the morning and drink cup after cup all day long. So, I set out to find the perfect brewed coffee.
It took a while, but I discovered Chemex. It wasn’t just the elegant shape of the pot, like an hourglass figure. It even has a nipple. Did you know that James Bond in Ian Fleming’s books used a Chemex pot to brew his coffee? From Russia with Love, 1956.
It consisted of very strong coffee, from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed in an American Chemex, of which he drank two large cups, black without sugar.
I got the brewing technique down quickly, but it took a long time to find the right coffee. De Bry went out of business years ago.
Back to Angie
Angie was expertly copying my method for brewing a pot of coffee just like I like it. Hot, strong, and black. Just like God made it.
Or in this case, a goddess.
Just call me Bond, James Bond.
“We should probably go use the showers before we pack up this morning,” I said. “You, sweet girl, are covered with dried come.”
“And you smell like a pussy,” she laughed as she kissed me. She grabbed her sweats, towel, and shower kit and opened the door. “Ari… I think we have a problem,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Snow.”
Oh, shit! I scrambled around and looked out the door. In fact, there was a good three inches of heavy wet snow blanketing everything. I dressed and pulled a hoodie out of my closet. I wasn’t prepared for snowy weather. That’s why I came south. Of course, Taos is 7,000 feet in elevation. I needed to get downhill. While Angie took her shower, I went into the park office and asked about the weather.
“The pass is closed. They got thirty inches at 9,000 feet,” the manager said. “We’re expecting to get hit by another storm blowing down out of the northwest within a couple of hours. If you are moving today, you should get going. This is the beginning of winter and once it hits, we won’t see bare ground again until spring.”
That was all it took. When I got back to the trailer, Angie was dressed and I sent her to the roof to scrape the snow off while I got us hitched. I had her batten down the inside of the trailer, filling the thermos with hot coffee and making sure everything inside was stowed and ready for travel. We disconnected the electric and water. I was amazed that my hose hadn’t frozen in the night, but the temperature didn’t drop as far as it was about to. The next wave was expected to bring temperatures in the teens.
In half an hour, we were slowly navigating our way south out of Taos.
After racing the snow past Albuquerque, we found a more temperate climate following the Rio Grande. I’d been in touch with the author GraySapien who writes so many stories set in New Mexico and he’d given me some hints on places to stay and visit while I was there. We worked our way south to Las Cruces and then cut across a low mountain range and White Sands National Monument to Alamogordo. I left the trailer at an off-season park there and we took the truck East. On Halloween, we pulled into Ruidoso.
My timeshares had mostly gone unused for the past few years because I kept convincing myself that I didn’t have time or money to travel. Amazing how a divorce can change your perspective. I exchanged a week for a nice, if rustic, two-bedroom unit. Snow hadn’t reached this far south yet, even though the elevation was over 7,000 feet and everyone was looking forward to the start of ski season. Our condo even had a fireplace.
“I figure you can have this bedroom,” I said, pointing to a room with two double beds in it. “It has its own bath. Mine has a bigger bed, but the bath is in the hall. We’ll go out and get some groceries after we’ve unpacked.”
I turned to Angie and found her staring at me with such a look of horror that I couldn’t imagine what had happened. Tears were streaming down her face and she was shaking.
“You don’t want me with you?” she cried. Oh, my god! She thought I was sending her away.
“No, no. That’s not it, Pudding. I just thought you’d like to have a little privacy for a change. We’ve been cooped up in that little trailer for seven weeks. I know it has to be hard on you to never have any privacy.”
“No,” she said.
“You know that tomorrow is November 1,” I said. She nodded. “Well, you know that is the start of NaNoWriMo?” She shook her head.
“What’s that?”
“National Novel Writing Month,” I explained.
“You write like a novel every month,” she said.
“Well, not quite. But this is a special time when I write at the same time as about half a million others. We do a lot of chatting and sharing what we’re doing. I’ll probably be up late at night and/or early in the morning because they are in a lot of different time zones. Like tonight. I plan to be asleep by six, but I’ll be up before midnight so I can join my group in Seattle for the kickoff. I’ll probably write for a couple of hours and then crash. Then I’ll get up early when my friends in the Eastern and Central Time Zones get up to start writing. My phone might be buzzing at all hours of the night with Facebook notifications.”
“Are you starting a new story?”
“Yeah. It’s called Redtail. Now with all that chaos going on this week, are you sure you don’t want a private room?”
“Yes. Uncle Ari, I just want to be with you. I won’t get in your way. I’ll do all the cooking and cleaning this week so you can write. I’ll keep a fire in the fireplace and coffee in the coffee pot. I’ll be quiet. Please, just let me sleep with you. Don’t send me away,” she pled. Well hell. How can I resist that?
“What are you doing with your clothes still on?” I asked.
Our week in the condo wasn’t all focused on me writing my erotic paranormal romance western mystery. Occasionally, I would read a passage to her as she stroked my ego. Sometimes she would read while I dipped my fingers into her honeypot. And my phone buzzed with Facebook messages at all hours. I could always tell when WritingMama in Kansas City got her kids off to school in the morning. My phone would start in as she ‘liked’ all the posts from the previous day and started responding. She was a flirt, too, and occasionally, Angie would suggest ways that I should respond to her.
There were times when we wrote more in our Facebook posts during a session than we did in our stories. Nonetheless, having company while writing was a great thing. I was over halfway through Redtail before the week was over. Part of that was also meeting local writers at a coffee shop in Ruidoso. We spent a couple hours each day in front of the fireplace at the coffee shop. A few other writers joined us on an irregular basis for our daily write-ins. It was a crazy time and I was pleased to have Angie’s naked butt bobbing around the apartment as I wrote my erotic scenes. She was quite an inspiration.
Of course, the condo was only ours for a week and we headed back down the mountain to retrieve the trailer. Once we were hooked up, we went back across the mountain eastward and dropped down into Roswell. We camped there a couple days and interrupted my writing with trips to take our pictures with aliens beside the road or in the museum. Then we headed generally southeastward. I stopped in several towns to meet with other NaNoWriMo writers. It’s a great social event, as well as a productive one. I’d finished the first draft of Redtail by the seventeenth. By then we were camped near El Paso.
Angie started showing her skills as an English major and editor. She was reading everything and making solid suggestions regarding the storyline and characters.
“He needs to respond in kind when Geneive sucks him. Can’t you just see them trying to get into position in the front seat of his truck?” she asked. Oh, yeah. I could imagine that. “We could try it if you like,” she whispered. “Just for the sake of research. I want to make sure you get it right.” I was thinking that I wanted the first time I licked her smooth little snatch to be in a nice comfortable bed, but in the interest of the story, we slipped out of the trailer and into the truck where we made out and got each other’s clothes off. That wasn’t much since we’d only slipped our sweats on to leave the trailer.
It wasn’t as easy to get into position in the front seat of the truck as you might think. Fortunately, the seats in the F150 slid back to give us more room and after a good bit of giggling and one accidental horn blast, Angie settled her slick, smooth pussy on my mouth while she swallowed my cock.
And the world stood still.
I thought about the first time I’d punished her and sat staring into the eye of god a few inches from my face. Now I reached out my tongue and tasted her treasure. It was more than I could have anticipated, even after having her juices all over my fingers for the past two weeks. She was sweet and a little salty, a combination I decided I liked. I almost forgot about my cock being sucked into her mouth simply because I was so engrossed by the tiny pussy in front of my face. This was one of the rare times I was glad to be nearsighted. Without my glasses, the details of her pussy were clear to me at about six inches away. And everything I saw I wanted to touch and lick.
We probably spent a lot more time just exploring each other with our tongues than the two teens, Cole and Geneive, would have. I was having trouble holding back so I could enjoy the experience. I was sure it would be over a lot faster for two sixteen-year-olds.
It was over much too quickly as it was. Angie bathed my face in her juices while I filled her mouth with mine. The difference between using my own right hand to pound the meat and feeling the delicate fingers of a beautiful naked girl surround it was astounding. It was another order of magnitude better to feel her lips and tongue sucking me deeper into her mouth as I came.
“Towel,” she said as we entered the trailer afterward. It was late at night and we’d dared running naked from the truck to the trailer.
“We have plenty of them, Pudding.”
“No. Cole and Geneive. They’re going to get the seat of the truck a mess. They need a towel or a blanket or something.”
We stopped in Abilene for a couple of days and I visited my editor. Old Rotorhead and I had never actually met except through our correspondence and as a volunteer editor. His help on the Model Student series had been invaluable. As we chatted by email, he even suggested places I should visit as I traveled. I liked him a lot and could see that we’d be working together for a long time into the future.
But I didn’t tell him about Angie. This story is as much a surprise to him as it is to you.
From there, we fled the cold that had already hit as far south as Dallas and took two long driving days to get to Corpus Christi. It wasn’t exactly beach weather, but the temperatures were mild even if the wind was so strong that I couldn’t run out the awning. We stayed there for a week as I finished re-writing Redtail and launched my next project, Pygmalion Revisited—a continuation of my tribute to the art world.
Over the next few weeks, we slowly worked our way along the Gulf Coast. Galveston. The Houston Space Center. The Bayou.
“This is where that character in Odalisque came from. Whitney, the athlete,” she said when I pulled into a parking lot where we could see the fairly new school building, a portion of which was still under construction. In front of it, much of the rubble from the original school was still piled and awaiting removal. To our right, the land stretched smooth and uninterrupted to the water about two miles away. I could just imagine a wall of water rushing inland with the hurricane. “How did you choose this as where she was from?”
“I was doing some part time work on the docks in Seattle,” I said, “processing the tickets for people going on cruises. It was an opportunity for me to have daily interaction with people so I could expand my stock of characters. I met some good ones that summer. I heard a rich accent and looked up to greet a family from Louisiana going off on an Alaska cruise. The daughter was so stunning I had to force myself to pay attention to her father. By stunning, I don’t necessarily mean just teenage beautiful. She was at least an inch or two taller than me and she just looked like she was fast. Her name was Whitney and that was all I needed in terms of a character. When I started writing about her, I had to do a ton of research on this general area and came up with this location as her home. Everything else about her, I based on Carly.”
“Carly the Clown. You told me about her. I can’t wait until the day I end up in one of your stories.”
We camped at Lake Pontchartrain a few days before Christmas. My time with Angie was growing short. She’d booked her flight from New Orleans to Los Angeles on Christmas morning. She was going home to start her master’s work at the university. We were both feeling a little sad, but we’d found a quiet and private campsite next to a sandy stretch of beach. It had been a wet winter and there was no burn ban, so we spent a lot of time cuddled in a blanket next to the fire. If anyone chanced to come by, they couldn’t tell we were naked wrapped in our blanket.
I’d promised to celebrate Yule with Angie. It was a far cry from the celebrations of my favorite holiday that I’d held over the past twenty-five years. Often, there were twenty to fifty guests, enough food and champagne to last the night, and stories told by everyone. We kept our champagne bottle concealed under the camp chair that we cuddled in against the chill night air. We drank it from a shared paper cup.
Don’t be too appalled. It was cheap champagne.
“We’ll use this as our Yule log,” I said as I pulled a stick out of the pile of firewood. “Yule is like an annual rite of passage. The price of any passage is to leave a part of yourself behind. Remember, the goddess was left in the underworld for six months each year. So, the question we answer in the ritual is ‘What are you leaving behind?’ Typically, it is something that we want to be rid of. Once we place it on the log, we burn it.”
“Mmm. What am I leaving behind?” she mused. “It might seem strange, but I think I can leave some of my submissiveness behind. I still have a craving for approval. Maybe even discipline. If you told me to run out and swim across the lake, I’d do it.”
“The lake is five miles wide.”
“I’d still do it, just because you said to. But I don’t think I’ll be looking for anyone to take your place when I go back to school. I hope that doesn’t sound like you were so bad I’ve learned my lesson!”
“Maybe you need to be punished again!” I laughed.
“Oh god! Would you? Please?”
“Hmm. I’d have a lot more trouble resisting temptation this time,” I said. She smiled.
“I think I was so shocked when my father died that I felt like I had to replace his love. But the only thing I could identify was seeking his approval and direction. He praised me when I did good things and disciplined me when I was bad. I mistook those for his love. I dated that crazed guy who used my submissiveness to make me do perverse things. I refused to do drugs and broke up with him. It wasn’t something my father would make me do. Then you came along. You were kind. You demanded that I pull my weight. You punished me when I was disrespectful. You guided me in making some of my own decisions and in freeing me from poor body image.” She snuggled close to me and whispered as she put her hand on the log. “Uncle Ari, I think you helped me mourn my father and adjust to his loss. I think I can let go now.”
We sat cuddled together and shared another sip from our champagne glass. What was I leaving behind?
A Long Time Ago: Price of Passage
When Paula finally admitted that it was over and left, she took everything with her. What was mine was hers. What was hers was her own. The only thing she didn’t dare take was my manuscripts. She considered them worthless anyway. She took the few pieces of artwork that we had, all the books, all her LPs and all mine. She took the bed but left the mattress because she didn’t want to sleep where we had slept. I had a typewriter. That night I sat on the floor of my barren apartment and typed the first words of my first novel.
And I started accumulating things again. When Anabel Lee left me, several years later, she took just about everything. She swore that she would never take my music and she lived up to her word. She left me one painting and my recliner.
And I started accumulating things again.
Treasure and I parted amicably and split things evenly. We still had some things in storage that we hadn’t been able to liquidate. There were family mementos as well. After all, we’d had a daughter together. You can’t just throw away her kindergarten art projects.
But I had to reduce my life to less than 750 pounds. That was all I could add to my trailer and still tow it successfully with the little F150. A third of my weight allowance was paper. I needed to cull that and digitize what was of value. I’d shred the rest.
So really, what did I have left to leave behind?
Back to Angie
“I’m leaving the accumulation of stuff,” I finally said. “I’m leaving behind the perception that my self-worth is tied up with what I own. Stuff doesn’t contribute to my self-worth. In fact, it hides it. I am laying that burden on the log. Let it burn.”
Angie got up and placed the log on the fire. Darkness had fallen and we couldn’t see anyone else on the beach. It was delightful, though, to see her naked form silhouetted in the firelight. She returned to my arms and I covered us with the blanket as she shivered against me. We drank more champagne.
“And what would you like to have remembered from this year?” I asked, moving on to the second part of the ritual.
“I want to remember this night, held in your arms, forever,” she sighed. I could only agree.
“I’ll seal that memory with a kiss,” I said.
We kissed for a long time. She was on my lap and turned to straddle it. She didn’t attempt to mount me, though as stiff as I was, it wouldn’t have been difficult. We hadn’t had much genital to genital contact aside from a few slips when we were waking in the morning and I could feel my cock slide through her wet folds. The heat from her pussy now inflamed my desires and we kissed more as she slid against me.
“What do you hope for in the future?” she whispered. “That’s the last part of the ritual, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. I reached down next to the champagne bottle and retrieved two beeswax candles we’d found in a voodoo shop in New Orleans. My lighter was in a pouch attached to the chair. “I hope to always be your friend, of whom you think fondly on occasion,” I said as I lit a candle. I pressed it into the sand next to us and watched the flame flicker in the slight breeze off the lake. Angie took the other candle and lit its flame.
“I hope you will make love to me,” she whispered.
“Angie?”
“Not a one-night stand. Not a goodbye fuck. I want to be your lover. And I want you to say truthfully like you still say of Carly, ‘We might not always be lovers, but we will always be lovers now.’ Will you say that for me, Uncle Ari?”
“Will you ask that question without using the ‘uncle’ in front of my name?” I whispered. She pressed her candle into the sand next to mine and kissed me.
“I love you, Ari. Make love to me, please.”
We were much too far gone to change positions. I couldn’t have moved us to the trailer for anything. We had a fire on the beach and were covered by a blanket. I lifted Angie a bit and she pushed my cock to her entrance. As she settled onto me, we resumed our kiss.
What was that I said about an order of magnitude? I wanted to live in her pussy. It grasped my cock and she rose and fell on me as we continued to kiss. I held her breasts in my hands, but as our passion increased, I slid them around to hug her to me.
“I love you, Angie. My god, I love you.” Those were my last coherent thoughts as I was lost in the sensation of making love to my companion.
For most of the next three days, we stayed in the trailer making love. I didn’t write anything new, but the day before Christmas Eve, I began posting Redtail. We celebrated together.
On Christmas morning, we made love again before I took her to the airport. We both wept as she passed through security and I lost sight of her. I hung around the area for an hour and a half until she’d boarded and had to shut off her cell phone. I finally went to a Chinese restaurant for Christmas dinner and then returned to my trailer. I opened my computer and started to type.
Maybe I’d write a coming of age story. A kid grows up in Indiana loving his next-door neighbor. I don’t know what all will happen, but it will have a happy ending.
“We need to talk,” my sister growled into the phone.
“What?” I asked innocently. She’d recently decided she needed to read everything I’d written. We’d reconnected after ten years when I went on my book tour a couple of years ago. Not that we were estranged. We just lived in different states and different worlds. Well, she’d only read one of my stories at SOL. Then she’d told me she certainly didn’t need to read any more of that. But my newest literary fiction, The Volunteer, had come out in the middle of January, and I’d just sent her a copy automatically.
“You must have had a different father than I had. Mine was nothing like the one you wrote about in this book.”
“Shay, it’s fiction. It’s not my autobiography.”
“But I recognized things! I recognized the house and the cars and the neighborhood. The housing development where all the basements sank. I even remember when you got your first stage role.”
“Well, sure. Experience creeps into what I write. That’s what keeps it real. But please. I’m not a homeless wino catching boxcars and wandering around the country.” That was mostly true. I guess technically I was homeless. My most recent ex-wife still let me use her street address. Can’t get a driver’s license without a street address. But other than that… And I like to have a couple glasses of wine in the evening. But other than that… I sighed.
“It just seemed so real,” she said. “It was like I even knew the neighbors.”
“Well, I’m glad I was so convincing. What did you think of the book?” I asked. Yeah. I’m a glutton for praise, even if my sister’s was one of the only twelve copies that would ever sell.
“It’s good. I understand why Maddie thinks it’s your best. But it’s a hard book to read. That’s not exactly what I mean. It’s a hard book to have read. It was so sad. Couldn’t you have given him a home at the end?” she asked plaintively.
The book had even upset the Unitarians at the church I sometimes attended. They believed they could put an end to homelessness. They weren’t happy that I challenged that idea and told them that their ten-year plan to end homelessness in King County wasn’t working. I wasn’t complaining about what they were doing. It was good work. It was helping a lot of people. But it wasn’t ending homelessness.
“I write books with happy endings,” I laughed. “I think you called them smut.”
“Not that kind of happy ending. Maybe we’re not related at all!”
We were back on an even footing and I promised that I’d stop and visit her again when I went through Missouri.
Her complaint wasn’t all that unusual. A woman in my neighborhood had read For Blood or Money and nodded knowingly at me. “I could see this was you,” she said. Really? I’m a fifty-seven-year-old computer forensics detective waiting for a heart transplant? Another friend had said, “Did you have heart surgery? What you described was exactly like what it was like for me before I had my quadruple bypass surgery. I felt like I never got my lungs completely full of air. Walking from one room to another left me needing to sit down and rest. Why didn’t I know you had heart problems?” Um… because I don’t?
“Only you could have written this book,” a former co-worker of mine had said on my book tour for The Gutenberg Rubric. “This was you all the way. I could just see you working on those manuscripts.” Yeah. I wish. That was twenty years of research that made that book realistic. I’d never touched a manuscript over a hundred years old.
But my experiences crept into what I wrote. Someone once said that we should write what we know. I had my own interpretation. Write what you wish you knew.
Comments
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