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Track Meet

By: Edgar_Allen_Doh



The day had started rather poorly. I was out running, doing some fast interval training at the track; well, I was attempting to. It was only ten in the morning and the temperature was already topping 80 degrees. My heart was racing from the laps and my head was pounding from the tequila fueled foolishness the night before. My workout was rapidly becoming a torture session. I was on a slow recovery lap and so engrossed in trying to shake off my aches and pains that I didn't hear the runner coming up behind me on the track. She was good; it seemed as if she barely touched the ground as she ran by. Her stride had that quick powerful snap to it; she held her hands low and they swung gently with no wasted movement. Technically her running form was excellent; her progress forward was fluid and beautiful to observe. The day was taking a decidedly better turn.

Her body was also very beautiful. She had long raven-black hair in a pony tail, a graceful neck and shoulders which led to arms with just enough definition to show she worked them out as well as she did her legs. Also hard to miss was a long, lean torso that transitioned to a lower body defined by wonderful lines and curves. Her legs and rear showed musculature that hinted at the explosive power they held. She had run by me too quickly for me to see her face and eyes; I was hoping I would get the chance to see them also. Would they be as striking as her athletic beauty and running form were? As she pulled away from me on the track, her obvious running talent (and my masculine vanity) inspired me to get my butt back into gear and push my run harder. And as to her physical attributes? Well that inspired thoughts of a more primal nature. She was very quick and it wasn't long before she came around and lapped me. As she passed in the lane next to me, she waved. 

"You're leaning forward too much, straighten up," she called out. 

And then she was off again. Her eyes were very attractive and shaded a deep mahogany brown. She had a pretty face, not the drawn look that some runners have but one with high rounded cheek bones tapering down to a somewhat angular jaw. I wanted to catch up and run with her, learn more about her, but her apparently disciplined mind, strong legs, and amazing ass conspired against that. This woman's running was much smoother and faster than mine and I remained impressed with her as she steadily opened distance between us. You see, although I was having a bad day, I do keep myself in shape and put up better than average times in the running and obstacle races that I enter. I'm no slouch, but she was making me look the part. 

A short while later, I finished my workout and collapsed on the trackside grass. I drank some water and watched her run. She was sweating freely and this caused her lithe frame to glisten in the sun. But despite the heat and her energetic pace, she was still in control of her form as she circled the track, it stayed tight and efficient. I lay back and began to doze, until a shadow crossed my eyes.

"I hope you didn't mind the advice before. My name is Cathy by the way." 

I told her I didn't mind at all, introduced myself and handed her a bottle of water. I asked her to take a seat but she replied, "We should really stretch instead."

"You're right," I stated as I got to my feet. 

I had never seen sweat look so good on anyone as it did on her. We chatted about the heat wave, running, and other small talk. Cathy seemed to be very comfortable in her skin and talking to her came easy to me. Then she said the words that made my heart skip a beat. 

"Would you like to come to my place for brunch?" 

Now I think I'm a decent looking guy, but to have this truly beautiful woman ask me over after having just met was almost too good to be true. It is rare that I meet someone and we start "clicking" together in such short order. It's more often the case that when I'm with someone new, I hold back and leave the armor on; that often leads to them erecting similar barriers. So before I over-analyzed and ruined the moment, I cheerfully accepted her invitation. 

It was a short cool-down run to her condo; a studio type with an open cheery feel due to its skylight, light-colored hardwood flooring, and spacious balcony. I tried not to stare too much at the comfy looking futon in one of its corners; I didn't want to get my hopes up too high or look over-eager. We sat on the balcony sharing orange, mango, and melon slices. We spoke of our backgrounds, schooling and our careers. Cathy was a nurse and office manager for a dentist and was attending classes towards her MD. As I've already mentioned, I am usually not very open with people until I get to know them, but Cathy was easy-going and fun to talk to. She even laughed at my joke about mangoes coming from Mangolia (Yeah, sometimes when I'm a little nervous I tell corny jokes).

We carried our dishes inside to the sink. Cathy told me to sit and relax for a few minutes whilst she took a shower, and that I could shower up after she had. With that she walked off towards the bathroom, skimming off her sweat stained top as she did. She coyly spun around once as she reached the doorway; her breasts were small, pert and dome-shaped with dark, compact nipples. She cracked a smile that was both sweet and as hot as the temperature outside. She let her look linger on me for a few seconds, no doubt enjoying the surprised, goofy look on my face. Then she was behind the door. I recovered from the happy shock of her flash and began to enjoy the anticipatory warm tingling rush that began to flow through my mind (and elsewhere). 

Cathy came back through the door a few minutes later, wrapped in one towel and drying her hair with another. The fresh flowery scent of her just cleansed body filled the room. 

"Your turn, there are towels in there for you," she said with a smile. She gave me a quick kiss on the lips as she lightly palmed my jockstrap restrained bulge. "Don't take too long," and with a wink she stepped away to finish drying her hair. Only my self-consciousness regarding the track grit and stink still on me from the run made me resist the impulse to pull the towel from her body and carry her to the futon at that moment. I gave Cathy a big grin and headed for the shower. 

I took a hasty shower (though I made sure to thoroughly clean all the nooks and crannies), but as fast as my shower was, my mind was racing still faster; I was doing it again, over-analyzing the moment and getting anxious for no good reason. But Cathy was so attractive and very comfortable to be with. I was worrying that she wouldn't feel the same of me, or that I would somehow screw it up some other way. True also was that some of the dreaded performance anxiety had wheedled its way into my thoughts (despite the fact that my cock had sprung tall and remained so as soon as I had stripped off my jock). I just didn't want to mess up right out of the gate; I was feeling something very good here. Yes, I'll admit that her excellent body was a significant part of it; but it was more than just that, something further below the surface. 

As I was toweling off she pushed the bathroom door open. Through the dissipating steam I could see that her long dark hair was loose and hanging about her neck and shoulders. She was wearing a shorty robe, loosely tied at the waist which left tawny skin exposed from her neck down to nearly her navel. Her ultra-toned legs seemed so very long from where they jutted below the high-riding hem of her robe down to her toes. Her cute toes were painted a sunny orange to compliment her tanned skin. I tossed my towel onto the counter and stood bare before her, taking in her sexy but so sweet image. For a few long seconds we both stood silent, not moving but just drinking each others image in. I moved to her and took her in my arms to begin our journey with passionate kisses; her lips were exquisitely warm and soft against my exploring lips and tongue. Her tongue was just as adventurous as mine and they danced together excitedly. That tingly head rush escalated in intensity, her kisses were phenomenally good.

As we kissed I caressed her face with one hand while my right hand moved from the small of her back to her rear. It was muscular but also smooth, soft and exquisite. I softly caressed and squeezed it. Cathy moaned into my mouth as we were lip-locked together; her moan was echoed by my own. I pulled open her robe and kissed down her neck to her breasts. Her small and now taut nipples were apparently quite sensitive as Cathy's sighs and moans became more emphatic as I began to circle and tease them with my tongue. That verbal cue of her pleasure was followed by a physical cue, her hand dropping to my cock; her slender fingers wrapping around my erection, slicking it with its pre-cum and tugging at it with an arousing rhythm. This initial contact, her skin to mine, brought on a wave of sublime feeling and made me stone hard. I was alternating from kissing, sucking and nipping at her tits, to throwing my head back and howling at an attempt to keep from ejaculating right then. It had been a long while since I had been with a lover; that coupled with her soft, stroking hand had me already feeling that primal pressure to cum hard.

No way was I going to explode that soon, I wanted to keep the energy and anticipation high for the moment. I gave her another deep kiss and looked into her eyes. I think I saw much about her nature there, and by her studied gaze, I believe she may have learned something from mine. Passion, affection, heat and respect all seemed to be swirling about in her look, and between us. I fell to my knees and began to caress the backs of her legs and her butt with my hands. I planted soft kisses along her belly and then started to move them, very slowly, lower. Her hair had been groomed Mohawk style, the skin of her mound was very soft, and her labia were protruding pink and proud. I kissed well to the side of them, to tease her by kissing down her thigh instead. This elicited a low frustrated growl from Cathy followed by a soft: "Please?"

Her legs began to noticeably quiver as I began my ascent up her opposite thigh. I lifted her shapely left leg and slid my right shoulder beneath it, allowing the back of her thigh to rest on it. She held the doorframe for balance and gasped as it opened her pink folds to my meandering mouth. I held her hips with both hands as she was pushing her hips towards me. 

"No Cathy", I thought to myself "nice and slow for now". I gently tugged at tufts of her pubic hair with my lips and alternated that with gently blowing my warm breath across her wanting pussy. Cathy's first "please?" had been in a soft voice; she began to repeat the plea more loudly now. Slowly, slowly I laid random kisses and teasing tongue flicks across her lower belly, pubic mound and her silky inner thighs, drawing each kiss and lick out, inducing more anxious pleas from Cathy. Seeing that her pussy lips now glistened with her dew brought my hunger for her to a peak. Cathy produced a short high-pitched yelp as my tongue slid between those succulent lips to slowly circle her hot juicy opening. 

Her fragrance and flavor were spicy-sweet, I savored the taste as I happily tongued her. After being deprived of this pleasure for so long, I was now overloaded with arousal for this woman, I could barely keep from abandoning my slow, deliberate pace; but I still wanted to hold back a bit, to keep the pressure building to make this an experience we both would remember. I slowly worked my kisses along her puffy lips. When not tracing soft little circles and figure eights about her juicy labia, I would catch them between my nipping lips and gently suck at the sweet silky skin. At first I had avoided her clit, but as Cathy's moaning became more pronounced, I began stroking my tongue gently upwards towards it; her moans grew closer together to become one long aroused purr as I did. With my hands I could detect the muscles of her legs and butt tensing as my tongue moved deeper into her delicious folds, to where her hyper-sensitive bud was peeking out from between them. As my tongue discovered and began to flick about that magic button, Cathy reached down with one hand and used her fingers to further spread herself open to me; that, her taste, and her obvious arousal excited me further, but I noted a slight issue; because of her increased involuntary body movements and the precarious one-legged standing position Cathy was in, she was having a rough time balancing. I scooped her up and carried her to her futon. We shared a deep kiss on the trip across the room.

I laid her down on her back; her lower legs hanging over the edge of the futon. She was not quite satisfied with that and scooted her ass to the edge of it. Then pulling her knees back toward her chest she spread herself open completely for me. 

"You are so beautiful," I told her as I kneeled before the treasure she readily offered. 

She smiled broadly at me and said "Just get your mouth back on me now... Please?!" 

"Your wish is my command," and I lowered my face between her sweet thighs again. 

For a time I ran slow flicking strokes of my tongue from her clit down to just above her now exposed anus and then back. As she got juicer, I began to separate her lips and penetrate her with my tongue; her pelvis moving rhythmically and quite enthusiastically as a result. Her sweet breathy sounds climbed several more decibels as I suckled and tongue stroked her clit and slowly slid one and then two fingers into her hot core. As she pushed her pussy against my face and fingers she was using one of her hands to play with her nipples. Her other hand came down and rested on the back of my head, sometimes stroking my hair, at other moments pushing my mouth onto her more fully, urging me on. 

And then, as a sudden breeze can fan embers into a flame, our smoldering excitement burst into a full blaze as Cathy began to cum; her legs crashed down on my shoulders as her hips bucked in violent little hops. Her hand on my head pulled my hair and mushed my face to the vortex between her thighs. I could feel the pulsing of the hot wet walls of her pussy around my fingers as at the same time she began to cry out, "oh yeah! Oh Yeah! Lover! Oh Yeah! oooOOOOHHH Mmmmm." I pressed my tongue flat against her inflamed clit and moved with her hips, letting my face move with the frenetic dance of her hips. Her whole body was repeatedly tensing and relaxing in quick cycles; it was all very arousing and my cock was achingly erect as a result. Then I felt Cathy's legs relax against my back as her arms fell to her sides on the futon; her body went limp as her breathing slowed to a less forceful rhythm. I disengaged myself from twixt her lengthy limbs and crawled up alongside her onto the futon. We both were smiling broadly at each other. I gathered her closely to me and we began to smooch again. Breaking off from our kissing, she said, "For that, I am going to be very very good to you." 

For some time we lay there being happy and just living in the moment. Cathy ran a hand from my chest down to my belly and then proceeded lower. She palmed my hardness bringing forth a groan of pleasure and frustration from me; she giggled. Her touch was soft, but caused wonderful sensations to my already hyper-charged system. Like water flowing over your body as you swim, it was an engulfing silky sensuousness; I lay back and let the feelings she was rendering flow over and around me.

As her strokes picked up speed, my pulse began to do likewise. I began to take my breath in gasps and groans. My pelvis began to move with her, bucking as I tried to stay in constant contact with her hand; I had been enslaved by her touch. All during this, her eyes were locked to mine; she was experiencing the intensity of the moment as much as I. I loved the way she was looking at me, the emotion I saw in her eyes. I realized also that she was paying close attention, and learning something about me at the same time. Yes her delightfully expressive eyes were disclosing a view to her true nature even as she sought out mine. They flashed with the fire of lust, but a kindness was also detected, a deep caring spirit separate from the primal heat we were generating. It seemed genuine and triggered something quite good, a very comfortable feeling within my psyche; even more of the internal armor I usually wear fell away. These "warm fuzzies" along with her smoldering gaze and the intense physical feelings of her talented cock massage brought me to the precipice of sweet orgasm. I was writhing on the futon, her hand quickly twisting and jacking my pre-cum slick rod. I felt my sack tighten and the "pins and needles" sensation of imminent orgasm flow over me. 

My head lolled back, eyes closing as I heard my voice, low and guttural vocalize, "Caaathyyy". Then the sudden feeling of... Nothing?! Cathy had let go of me. My head snapped back up to see a view of my curled toes and forsaken erection straining towards the ceiling.

I looked at Cathy, she was smiling mischievously and said, "I'm just going to calm you down a little lover, and then get you back there again; make it something very special." She jumped up and walked over to her discarded robe and removed the tie from it. She came back and knelt alongside the futon, kissing me deeply and taking hold of my wrists. As she bound them together she saw the apprehension in my eyes (I mean even though we had connected so well, the fact remained that we had just met.). "Relax, I promise you will like this," she advised as she pulled my now secured wrists over my head. After tying my hands to the futon's frame, she then produced a scarf and blindfolded me with it. Placing a hand on my chest and holding it there, she waited until she detected my heart rate and respiration slowing from there previously aroused levels. My cock remained as hard as ever in anticipation of the coming pleasures.

Her hand left my chest and I heard her moving about the room. Next I felt a soft tickling moving down my bound wrists, along my arms and to my armpits, each in its turn. A feather! She began to tease my arm pits with a vengeance. I am quite ticklish as she quickly deduced by my thrashing about. As she continued her assault with a friendly weapon, she straddled my thighs to keep me in place. Now on top of the tickling, I was being aroused and tormented by the feel of my cock occasionally brushing against her wonderfully soft pussy as I writhed. She knew how this was driving me crazy and exploited that by occasionally reaching down and pushing my shaft against her, not allowing it to enter her, but to just ride between her hot and slick lips. I begged for more and she answered by moving the feather down my body, to my belly, my hardness and my balls, this to torture me further. 

Then in a leap she was off of me and moving to a position by my side. One of her hands began to drag down my chest; nails raking along my skin with some force but not quite hard enough to draw blood. Then she worked my body with the nails of both of her hands, running them from my chest to my belly and then back up again. This was a quite different sensation from the tickling. Tickling is a pleasurable sensation that can become overwhelmingly so. Cathy's nails dragging across my skin was a pleasurably painful sensation that somehow she had sensed I would enjoy; her intuitiveness and the sharp drag of her nails drove me to another level of arousal and caused me to wonder and anticipate about what else she may have planned for me. Her nails traveled along my torso in an unpredictable pattern, sometimes pausing at a nipple to pinch, twist or tug at it. As with the action of her nails, her pleasing punishment of my nipples was painful enough to elicit physical reactions from me, but not so painful as to make me not want more. For ten, maybe fifteen minutes this delicious agony went on with Cathy never touching my rigid erection. Finally, mercifully, she closed in on my cock and balls; she began to pull at the hairs above my cock, gently and slowly, just so I could feel my skin stretch with each tug. At the same time I began to feel her warm breath being blown across my pubic area. She was playing with me as I had with her. In conjunction, the two sensations had an electrical quality to them. With one hand, Cathy began toying with my balls, tickling, scratching and squeezing them. She also concentrated her breath on my shaft and its pre-cum weeping head. 


Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 01



The opening that Lynne had noticed in the face of that house-sized boulder proved to be a niche that was more than large enough for us both. We entered it, and we dropped to the ground. Looking about, I saw that we were in an alcove where a huge chip—eight feet long and about five feet deep—had broken from the boulder's bottom corner as it had fallen, eons ago, from what had then been the edge of the butte above. The ceiling sloped from about six feet high at the rear to about five feet at the opening.

Now we'd been out of the wind and the rain for a few minutes, but we were both badly chilled. And we weren't warming up, in spite of the shelter we'd found. It didn't take us long to figure out that our cotton shirts and our jeans were the reason; they were sodden and cold.

I replied, "We have to get out of these wet clothes. I think we'll warm up if we get them off and get our warm-ups on."

She looked me in the eyes. "I don't have anything on under my shirt," she said. "Can you handle that?" She paused awkwardly. "Uh… I mean…" She paused again, fumbling for words.

Smiling at her again, I said, "I know what you mean, even if it came out wrong. I promise I won't look." 

We took our packs off and dug out the warm-up gear—fleece pants and jackets. Turning away from each other for modesty's sake, we stripped off the wet clothing—which, in my case, included my underwear. Once the soaked articles were off, we replaced them with the fleece articles. We made the change none too soon. I was definitely too cold, but Lynne was shivering visibly and there was a blue tinge to her lips. 

Miserable, arms folded against her chest, she looked at me, looked into my eyes. "Jase, I'm so cold! Are we going to die here? Tonight?" she asked. She was fretful. I saw no fear in her; only deep sorrow at the possibility that our lives might be cut short before they had really begun. 

I pulled her toward the rear of our refuge and, seating myself with my back against its rear wall, I pulled her down close to me. I took her into my arms, hoping that the combined heat of our bodies would make us both more comfortable. "We'll warm up faster if we stay close," I said. She put her own arms around me and snuggled against me, tensely but gratefully, on my left. Slowly, her shivering subsided, and she relaxed. I realized then that she'd been dangerously cold. I didn't know it then, but now I know that she was on the verge of serious hypothermia: She'd almost gotten so cold that her own body's ability to generate heat wouldn't be enough to keep her alive. But we'd warmed her up in time. I was warming up, too, but I hadn't been as chilled as she. 

We sat there in the middle of the refuge we'd found, holding each other close, in order to pool our bodies' warmth. 

We have some shelter, now," I told her. "And we have each other. We got into this together, and we're going to get out of it together! We'll have a long, miserable night, but we'll be alive when it's over. I won't let you die, Lynne! And you won't let me die!"

She smiled, and said, "Deal! You've got you a deal, Jason!" I returned her smile. I could tell that she was still worried about the coming night, but now she knew that we had hope.

The rain hadn't stopped while we'd recovered from the chills the storm had brought us, but it had subsided to a gentle patter and the wind was now just a breeze. No rain had penetrated our shelter, and the coarse sandy earth under us was dry. The unbroken cloud cover to the west glowed above the horizon, suggesting that the sun wasn't below the horizon yet. I looked at my watch and confirmed that it was seven-thirty, or about half an hour before sunset. There was still plenty of light, but it would fade quickly now; our long night was only beginning. The wind and rain had stopped almost completely. And then I noticed something about our boulder. 

"We may be better off than we thought," I told her hopefully. "Let me up so I can check."

She moved so that I could get up. I stepped out into the open. It didn't take me long to make up my mind. I rejoined her in the alcove, sat back against the boulder again where I had been a few moments earlier. She looked at me questioningly as she moved back into snuggling position.

"It's a lot warmer in this space than it is out in the open. Feel the boulder. It's warm! The sun must have heated it up before the storm."

She looked up at me and, after reaching back to test what I'd said about the boulder, she said, "Maybe this won't be as bad as we were afraid it would be!" She smiled and went on. "But I'd rather keep warm by leaning against you than against a rock! You're softer!" She wiggled in a little closer. Having just been out in the open, I could now feel the heat radiating from the boulder. And I realized that the dry sandy floor of our space was warm, too. It wasn't hot, as the sand we'd walked through that afternoon had been, but it wasn't cold, either.

"You're softer, too!" I remarked, putting both arms around her and giving her a little squeeze.

She relaxed against me again, and I relaxed, too. When we were no longer talking, I found myself thinking about how we'd gotten ourselves into this fix. It had started on a Saturday afternoon a month earlier. 

==||||==

"Jase! Jase!" Lynne had yelled as she burst, unannounced and without knocking, through the front door of my parents' house. "Jason! Where are you?"

Fred, our border collie, chuffed a couple of times at the invasion; but quickly subsided when he saw that it was Lynne, and not The Unspeakable Enemy. (We knew that the mailman would never enter the house like that, but Fred wasn't so sure.)

"Up here, Lynne!" I yelled back.

Breathlessly, she continued as she mounted the stairs two at a time, "Jase! Let's go see these next month! After we're out of school!" 

When she found me where I'd been hanging out in my room, she shoved a Denver Post article from the previous May, almost a year earlier, into my hand. It was about Picket Wire Canyon's dinosaur tracks, down in the National Forest Service's Comanche National Grasslands near La Junta, Colorado. She had cut the article out, stuffed it into a folder, and laid it on her desk almost a year ago. And then she'd promptly forgotten about it. She'd just found it as she was going through things in a fit of what she called "spring cleaning." I looked over the article curiously, and I decided that I wanted to see those tracks, too. 

Lynne and I were the closest of close friends, but otherwise introverted kids—and nerdy. We shared academic, scientific bents. All four of our parents worked full-time, so when school wasn't in session, we spent a lot of time hanging out with each other.

We both liked everything science, but she was particularly interested in the life sciences—paleontology, in particular, so dinosaur tracks were right up her line. My interests were stronger in astronomy, math, and computers. But I thought the life sciences interesting, too. According to the newspaper, the site in Picket Wire Canyon had hundreds of fossilized apatosaur and allosaur footprints. They'd been made, the article said, a hundred-fifty million years ago.

"That's really cool!" I said. "One-hundred-fifty-million-and-one-year-old dinosaur tracks!"

"No, Jase! One-hundred-fifty million!" she corrected me without really hearing what I'd said.

"That's what it says in the paper," I agreed. "But the article's a year old!" I went on to rub it in: "One-hundred-fifty-million plus one is one-hundred-fifty-million-and-one!"

"Okay, Nerd!" she retorted. "It's no wonder you don't have a girlfriend when you make jokes like that!"

"You must make jokes like that, too, Nerdette." I pointed out helpfully. "You don't have a boyfriend!"

"Touché!" she replied, smiling. Neither of us had a love life, and both of us knew it. We both regretted it. But we teased each other about it all the time; it wasn't something we would allow to affect our friendship. "But they're still one-hundred-fifty million years old!"

I went on. "I'd like to see those tracks! But it's a good three- or four-hour drive. And the tracks are over five miles from the closest place where we can park, so that's a two- or three-hour walk. And that's only one way. We'd probably have to spend a night away from home. Will your parents let you do that?"

"Dad wouldn't let me do it by myself. He thinks girls are too weak to do things like that alone!" she said. The emphasis she'd put on the word "weak" was very slight. I was probably the only person in the world who knew her well enough to pick it up—along with the scorn in it. She continued, "But we're both 18 now, and he'll let me do it with you!"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Lynne was, literally, the girl next door. Twenty years earlier, within days of each other, her parents and mine had moved into a pair of next-door houses on 17th Avenue Parkway in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, which was peopled mainly by liberal Democratic professionals. Then, a little more than a year later, our mothers had gotten pregnant at almost the same time. They'd had their babies (Lynne and me) just nine days apart that April. 

Being our respective parents' only children, we had grown up together. Really together! So much together, in fact, that by the time we were six we were making our parents split the difference and celebrate our birthdays on the same day each year: The day that fell halfway in between, naturally. Which house? There was no way to split that difference, so we took turns.

We'd been friends, fast friends, inseparable friends, ever since we were three, though she'd never let me forget that she was older than I—by nine whole days, eleven whole hours, and twenty-six whole minutes. A few weeks before showing me that newspaper article, she'd even scolded me, for having a different opinion about one of our teachers than she, by saying, "The trouble with you young people today is that you don't respect your elders!" I usually gave as good as I got, but that had been a jaw dropper I hadn't had a reply for.

Once we were big enough to open doors by ourselves, we had treated both houses, and both yards—not to mention both sets of parents—as though they all belonged to both of us. I don't remember how our parents at first took our shared habit of barging into either house unannounced, whether accompanied by the other or not. Now it was just the way things were; we each even had a key to the other's house. Neither of us ever bothered to tell our parents when we were going next door; they knew exactly where to find us if the two of us weren't in their house and hadn't told them we were going somewhere else. I suppose we could have taken advantage of that, but we had never thought of doing so. For years, now, they had taken it for granted that each couple owned just half of their only child. But as compensation, they owned half of the neighbor child. 

Each of us had called the other's parents by their first names ever since we could remember—though I've been told that when I was really little I'd addressed Robin as "Lynne's Mom," Dennis as "Lynne's Dad," and, for a week or two, my own parents as "my Mom" and "my Dad." She called my folks "Al" and "Julie".

Lynne and I had played soccer on the same team in a City Park unisex league, together. 

We'd learned what dirty words meant, and how to use them (as well as when not to), together. 

When a bully had picked on either of us, we'd joined forces and kicked his ass, together. 

When several bullies had ganged up on either of us, we'd joined forces and gotten our own asses kicked, together. 

We'd gone to the same private schools, together. There, we took courses, together, and prepared for the same tests, together. 

We'd gone to a local driving school and earned our driver's licenses, together. 

We were both long distance runners on our high school's track team; and, even off-season, we panted and sweated through training runs, together. 

If it was an important part of growing up, we had done it together. Hell, it's hard to think of even unimportant things we hadn't done together.

She's a girl and I'm a boy, so as kids we'd each thought that the other had a serious handicap on that account. We'd thought it a defect something like being blind, deaf, or lame. But we'd been able to overlook that, just as we would've overlooked blindness, deafness, or lameness in a friend. 

Yeah, parents can't watch kids all the time, and we'd played the standard "I'll show you mine if…" game. We'd managed to avoid getting caught, and it had been sort of interesting. But we hadn't thought it was any big deal. The difference between boys and girls, we'd concluded, was just that they had different arrangements for taking a leak. For some unfathomable reason, boys weren't supposed to see girls' arrangement, and vice versa. We weren't sure what that was all about.

There were the cooties, of course. But by the time that other boys had told me that girls have them, we were already such close friends that I could ignore hers. (I knew that she didn't have to ignore mine, because boys don't have them.) Our close friendship, cooties notwithstanding, did mean that other kids thought we were a little bit weird. Our shared nerdiness gave them even more reason to think us weird. But what the other kids thought didn't bother either of us: We had each other. 

Lynne and I talked about everything with each other. Our school had separated the boys and the girls for sex ed classes when we were pre-teens. At that age, we were old enough to get a grasp of the mechanics but young enough to be fundamentally uninterested in what they might mean for us. But Lynne and I talked about everything that those classes covered. After all, I had to be sure that Lynne hadn't learned something I hadn't, and she felt the same way about what I had learned.

Even after we knew that there's more to The Difference than leak-taking equipment, we still talked about nearly everything. We would have talked about everything, but there just wasn't enough time for that! As we went through our high school years, we would have talked to each other about all of the nitty-gritty details of our love lives, if either of us had had one. But nerds don't have love lives, and there could be no doubt that we were nerds. Possibly even total geeks. I was too shy, too afraid of girls; and Lynne was one of those smart girls so many boys are afraid of.

We talked to each other about how much each of us wanted a love life. But it hadn't occurred to either of us that the other might be, or have, what we were looking for. We just didn't see each other that way—we were real friends, not a boy-girl couple! So neither of us happened to think that either set of parents might have objections to their 18-year-old's spending a night on the road with no company but an 18-year-old friend of the other sex. 

And, as it turned out, none of them had any such concern. Neither Lynne's parents nor mine saw any reason why we shouldn't do what we had in mind, provided that we gave them some evidence of having thought things through by producing a definite plan that they could approve or (preferably, we suspected) make us revise. (Or, I suppose, that would give them reason to rescind permission completely if it was too half-assed.) We spent an afternoon making one, and they approved it on the first try, with only minor adjustments. 

We were seniors in high school, about to be graduated. Our last classes would meet on the middle Friday of May. Then we would have three weeks off before commencement ceremonies. We decided to take several days off after we were out of school, to relax and to prepare for this trip. 

Then we would leave Denver early on the morning of the following Thursday, to drive down to the Comanche National Grasslands in my Mom's Subaru Outback. The newspaper article gave directions, so finding the trailhead wouldn't be a problem. That afternoon, we would hike down into the canyon, see the tracks, and hike back out. We would stay the night in a pair of motel rooms, for which we would spend our own money. On the twenty-third, we would drive back home.

They did have some questions, for which we had almost acceptable answers. The conversation went something like this.

Parents: "Five-and-a-half miles? Each way?" 

Us: "Won't be a problem for a couple of fit long distance runners."

Parents: "Clothing?"

Us: "Jeans, sturdy shirts, and hats."

Parents: "If you drive down there and hike on the same day, you'll be out on the trail pretty late in the day. What if it gets cold?"

Us: "We'll take our track warm-up stuff with us. It's good warm fleece that we won't have any more official use for."

Parents: "Equipment?"

Us: "We'll throw some bottled water and a couple of power bars each into the packs we carry our books to school in. Oh! And plenty of sunscreen! And we'll each take a suitcase with a change of clothes for the next day."

Parents: "We hear it gets hot in those canyons; better take plenty of water."

Us: "We thought a gallon each, but we'll each throw in another quart." (As long distance runners, we knew a thing or two about thirst.)

Parents: "Navigation?"

Us (accompanied by teenaged eye-rolling): "It's a canyon! There are only two directions we can go. And the Purgatoire River runs down it. If we forget which direction we're going, all we have to do is look at the river to see which way it's flowing."

Parents: "What if you get in trouble?" (This one was pro forma. They asked it because they were the parents and we were the teenagers. Neither they nor we really thought that we could accomplish this.)

Us: "We'll take our phones with us, of course."

Parents: "Sounds like you two have thought this thing through."

And that was it.

Yeah. Anyone who's ever done any serious hiking can see that our plan had some some mighty big holes. The overall plan for getting there, spending a night, and getting home was fine, but a car trip on well-traveled roads is a little different from a hike on a little-traveled trail in what turned out to be a remote desert environment. 

But all four of our parents were transplants to the Southwest from the East Coast. They weren't outdoor people, and they'd never done any hiking in a remote area. Lynne and I had grown up in Denver, but neither we nor our immediate friends had ever done anything at all like this. So We're gonna walk in and then walk back out! seemed, both to our parents and to us, like all the planning we needed to do for that central part of the trip. When May 22 rolled around, Nature was going to deliver an unforgettable lesson on backcountry hiking, how to prepare for it, and how much a couple of naïve teenagers can accomplish in the way of finding trouble.

==||||==

Lynne stirred in my arms, bringing my thoughts back to the present. "I'm going to try my phone again, Jase," she said as she broke out of my arms and sat up. Why don't you try yours, too?" I had a different carrier than she did. There was a chance that one of us could connect. Not a big one, but a chance.

We found that the phones, buried in our packs, had survived the rain; both turned on nicely. But once again, neither could make a connection, even when we stepped out into the open. Cell phones generally don't accomplish anything useful in remote areas, but neither of us had thought of that. 

At least, we figured, we wouldn't get any flak about that particular oversight from our parents. They hadn't thought of it, either. We were typical teenagers in one respect: We were more worried about getting a scolding when we got back than about the possibility—all too real—that we wouldn't get back alive.




Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 01



"Well," I said, "it was worth a try." And we put the phones back in our packs.

We returned to the alcove and sat again in each other's arms. It hadn't warmed up out there after the storm, so it was chillier than would be comfortable for long, even with our warm-ups on. I wished we had brought some matches—until I realized that there wasn't enough wood for a fire within miles. But with her against my chest and the warm rock against my back, I was actually beginning to feel toasty. "Are you still cold?" I asked.

"No," she answered. "I'm feeling pretty good now. How about you?"

"I'm doing pretty good." I said. "You and the rock behind me are doing a pretty good job right now." I happened to think, then, that she wasn't getting the benefit of the warm rock directly, as I was. "Do you want to trade places for a while? Or just sit back against the boulder?"

"No," she said. "I'm fine here." She paused. Then she went on. "Jase, don't take this wrong, but I'm glad that that you're here with me."

"How could I take that wrong?" I asked. "I'm glad you're here with me, too."

"I was afraid you'd think I was glad I'd gotten you in trouble!"

"Well, it's my own fault I'm in trouble! This is what I get for being too respectful of my elders," I remarked, pleased with myself for finally turning that one around on her. Before I could go on, she pinched my gut. I yelped before I continued. "Technically, I guess you did get us into this, because you're the one who suggested coming here," I said. "But we planned it together. Or, more to the point, we planned it poorly, and we did it together. It's a good thing we found this boulder when we did!"

I felt her arm tighten around me as she said, "I'm glad you're my friend, Jase!"

"I'm glad you're mine," I answered. And then a thought struck me. "Are you hungry?"

"Yeah!" she replied. "Lunch was a long time ago! But we still have those power bars in our packs. Should we eat one?"

"Might as well!" I said. "Maybe just one each. That'll leave a couple for breakfast before we walk back out of the canyon."

"What about the river?" she asked. "Will we be able to get back over to the other side in the morning?"

"I hope so!" I said. "We'll be in real trouble if we can't. But I think that was a flash flood, from a storm upstream. It'll probably go away almost as quickly as it started. I'll bet we could cross it now, down there by the dinosaur tracks. But it's too late to try tonight. It'll be too dark to travel soon, and we have a pretty decent shelter here. We'll just have to hope that it doesn't rain any more tonight!"

"Sounds good," she said, as she dug into her pack. "We'll hope for the best with the river." She found what she was looking for in her pack. "Here. One for you and one for me. There're two more in your pack, right?"

"Two more," I said. "Not the best dinner I've ever had, but, given the circumstances…" I let it trail off and smiled at her. She smiled back as she tore at her wrapper. I tore at mine, too.

"How are we fixed for water?" I asked when we'd finished our meager supper and each had a few swallows from a bottle of water.

"I've got about two quarts," she answered. "What about you?"

"About the same!"

"I think that'll get us through the night and part way back to the car in the morning. We might be pretty thirsty by the time we get there, but we can start walking when it starts getting light—even before sunup. It'll be cooler than it was during the afternoon today, and I think we'll be okay. There are a couple of bottles of water in the car, just waiting for us," she said.

"We'll be glad to see them!" I added.

"Yeah," she said, ruefully. "We'll be hungry, too. But La Junta's only about an hour's drive. We can get some real food there."

"We should try to get some sleep," I suggested. "The more we can sleep, the shorter the night will seem."

"Do you need to pee?" she asked. "While there's still some light?" It was getting dark, but there was still enough light to walk around in the open without fear of walking right into a cholla. It's one of the nastiest of cactus: People sometimes need surgery to remove cholla spines.

"Yeah," I said, "I do."

"Okay, you go first, and then I'll go. I'll wait for you so you can follow the sound of my voice if you get turned around."

That irritated me. I frowned at her. In a surly tone I began, "Do you really think that I would—"

She interrupted me. "No! Not really! But I think we can't afford to make any more silly mistakes. If one or both of us were to get lost as it's getting dark, that would be a disaster!"

Chastened, I looked into her eyes again and said, contritely, "I'm sorry. You're right. We shouldn't take any chances we don't have to!" 

"It's okay," she said. "I understand. I probably sounded like a parent!" 

I stepped out of our alcove and walked about thirty yards to the right among the boulders. As I peed, I realized that it was getting even chillier. That made me even happier about the warm refuge we'd found by lucky chance. I finished and found my way back to our boulder. On the way, I paid attention; there wasn't a single cholla anywhere near the path I was retracing. That might be nice to know in the darkness that was coming.

When I returned, she left for her turn, saying, "I'll be right back." The sound of her footsteps diminished as she moved off to the left among the boulders.

It wasn't long before she was back. As we returned to our places against the rock, she remarked, "It's cold out there! Being close to you feels really good!" She settled in beside me and leaned against me, returning her head and her arm to my chest. I put my arms around her and held her soft warmth. She wiggled a bit against me, turned until her weight rested on her hip, and threw her upper leg across my legs.

In the dim, thickening twilight, I could just make out the face of my watch if I twisted my arm a bit. It was about half past eight. Sunrise, I knew, would be a little after five-thirty; first light, a bit earlier—maybe even as much as an hour earlier. We had seven or eight hours of darkness to get through. Fortunately, the moon was just three days or so past full and would be rising in a few hours—some time around eleven. Having moonlight should help, I thought; if we could see, even a little, the night might not seem so long.

Her body softened as she relaxed against me. I relaxed, too, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head back to see if I could sleep a bit. My thoughts drifted back to earlier that day.

==||||==

We had gotten some breakfast and left home, as planned, at around eight that morning. The drive from Denver to La Junta took us until nearly noon. We stopped there to buy a dozen quarts of bottled water at a supermarket. We also got some lunch: A one-third pound bacon cheeseburger, a large Coke, and a large order of fries for each of us. (Teenage long-distance runners don't worry very much about calories!)

It was a pretty spring day, with plenty of sunlight; the temperature was in the low eighties. We spent most of the drive chatting and wondering what college was going to be like in the coming fall. We'd been careful, early in the school year, to apply to the same colleges. And, this spring, we'd been even more careful to choose the same one to go to. We weren't going to let a little thing like Life separate two best friends. 

We were going to go to Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, together. Fort Collins was close enough to Denver that our parents would be pleased by our proximity. But we thought that it was far enough away that we would feel as though we'd escaped their supervision. One of the things near the top of our summer agenda was to figure out what kind of living arrangements we were going to make. 

We'd talked about that some during the last few months. We wanted to share an apartment. But we knew that Lynne's dad and my mom would each object strongly to having their child share living quarters with a member of the opposite sex. Thus, even though neither of us had the 'evil' intent that our over-protective parents credited us with, we knew that it was out of the question. Maybe, we hoped, we could find apartments that weren't too far from each other.

The first indication that we might be getting into something we weren't quite ready for came shortly after we'd passed through La Junta. But we didn't understand, then, what that signal meant. We turned off the main highway onto the first of several Forest Service roads. It was a well-graded gravel road that would take us southwest for about eight miles across the Grassland.

It wasn't anything like what we'd expected. Yes, there was grass. There was a lot of grass. It came about halfway up to our knees. (Okay, we'd expected that! Even though we were city folk, we hadn't supposed that anybody mowed it!) But it was brown. And it grew in clumps that were less than a foot across, leaving the sandy earth uncovered between clumps. In fact, there seemed to be less grass than bare ground.

Even in the spring, just two-thirds of the way through May, the grass was a dirty, dry, brown! It looked as though it had died a hundred years earlier and been preserved for our inspection. There were some trees. Not big ones, and not many—piñon and juniper, isolated, shrub-like, maybe as many as a dozen per acre. Though dark green, they looked black against the brown grass in the unforgiving light.

And, south of the road, the land was featureless. And flat! God, it was flat! As we came to a second road, which we were to follow due south from the oblique T-junction where our first road ended, Lynne pointed to a ridge. It was maybe all of fifty feet high, several hundred yards north of the junction. "Wait, Jase," she said. "Let's get up on that ridge and see what we can see.

I turned that way and, after getting to the top of the ridge, I pulled over. We got out and looked south. We saw flat, brown, desolate, seemingly unending country to which a few piñons and junipers, black and lonely, seemed glued randomly. The road led south, showing a barely noticeable curve to the right. Distance swallowed it where a shadowy low ridge obscured the horizon. 

A pair of dust devils danced across the emptiness. In the strong warm wind that blew from the west, the whirling columns moved smartly to our left. Off to the southeast, tiny, almost indiscernable in the distance, stood a ruined old windmill, motionless in spite of the wind, evidently long abandoned. Entranced, we both stared.

When we'd had our fill of the view, we walked back to the car. We were about to get back in, when she stopped me. "Look!" she cried, pointing across the road. There was a spot of bright yellow against the dreary brown background. Wondering, we walked over to look at it. It turned out to be a prickly pear blossom peeking out from a cactus amid the clumps of grass. We looked around and saw a few more. 

Thirty yards down the road, I saw a droplet of scarlet glowing against the brown background. I pointed it out, and we went to examine it. When we got closer, we saw that it, too, was a flower, growing out of a small, barrel-shaped cactus. She breathed, "A claret cup! It's lovely!" 

We admired the claret cup for a bit before heading back to the car and getting in. As we descended from the ridge, she declared, "It's so bleak! I've never seen anything like this before. I thought a grassland would be lush and green. Especially now, in the spring!"

"I thought so, too," I agreed. "But even though it's so desolate… so God-forsaken… I like it!"

She paused, looked again over the stark, forbidding landscape. After a moment, she spoke again: "Me too! I can't explain it, but there's something about it… something fascinating about it! It draws me, somehow!"

"It's hypnotizing." I remarked. As I spoke, it dawned on me that I should pull my eyes back where they belonged in order to stay out of the ditch at the side of the road. "But I'd better pay attention to where we're going!"

"Yes!" she squealed as the right front tire crunched through loose gravel at the edge of the road. "You'd so better!"

==||||==

She stirred against me as I slept, and I woke to find that it was pitch dark. There was, as yet, no moonlight, so I couldn't have been asleep for long. 

"Jase!" came her hissed whisper. "Are you awake?"

"Just barely," I answered her. "I slept for a little while; I woke up a bit before you asked."

"Me, too," she said. "Are you warm enough?"

"I'm not as warm as I'd like to be," I admitted. "But I'm warm enough. How are you doing?"

"About the same. What time is it?" she asked.

"I can't see my watch, but the moon hasn't risen, so it can't be eleven yet."

"Would we see the moon through all the clouds?"

"The moon's close to full tonight and enough light would filter through that we could tell where it was and see things around us."

"How do you know that the moon's almost full, Nerd?" she teased.

"The same way you know about claret cups, Nerdette!" I teased back.

We exchanged squeezes and sat there in the dark for a while, enjoying our shared warmth. And then she jerked upright. "Jase!" she bubbled. "I'm so dumb! I just thought of something. I need to find my pack!" We separated and felt around in the dark. In our confined space, it didn't her take very long. "I found it!" she informed me, with a note of excitement in her voice. I heard her open a zipper. There was a jingle of metal and, suddenly, a cold white light pierced the darkness. It couldn't have been very bright, though it seemed so to our dark-adapted eyes! "I forgot that my keys were in the back pocket of my pack, and there's an LED light on the keyring!"

"That's great!" I said, enthusiastically. "We don't have to worry, now, about not being able to see until the moon comes up. We can see whenever we need to!" It was a small victory, and it would make no difference in the long run. But it was a victory at a moment when we needed, desperately, to win something.

The light went out, and she returned to me. "I think it's getting cooler, Jase," she said. "Do you think we'll be okay?"

"I'm still warm enough," I reported. "And the boulder still feels pretty warm. I think it's going to stay warm all night. How about you?"

"I'm okay, too. But I'm going to move to your other side for a while if that's okay. A couple of hours in one position is plenty!"

"Yeah, I'm getting a little sore where you've been leaning against me. The other side will be good." She shined the light, so that she could see to rearrange herself at my right. In its glow, I looked at my watch; it was ten-fifteen. "It's a quarter past ten," I remarked. "It should start getting a little lighter out there before long." 

"Do you need more light? Or should I turn it off?" she asked.

"I don't need to see anything right now," I said. "Turn it off and save the battery."

The light went out and I heard her put it back in her pack. The zipper closed, and she leaned into me again. Soon we were in a mirror image of the position we'd been in a few minutes earlier, her body propped against my right side, her right leg thrown across my legs. Thinking to try to sleep some more, I leaned back and closed my eyes. My mind returned to the drive down here.

==||||==

We drove south from the ridge. Fifteen minutes and six miles later, we reached a crossroads marked by corrals, a brown and yellow Forest Service sign that labeled them the "Picket Wire Corrals", and a small new-looking building that turned out to be a restroom. We both took advantage of the last toilet facilities we expected to see before we returned to this crossroads.

Our trailhead was about four miles east of that crossroads. We made the turn and found ourselves traveling on what the Forest Service calls an "unimproved dirt road". Short green grass carpeted the roadside; and the piñons and junipers, interspersed with cholla cactus, grew almost densely enough to be called chaparral. After a half-hour or so, we reached the road's end, where it looped through the old Withers Campground, now abandoned and closed to camping. A sign marked our trailhead, and there was plenty of parking space, all of it empty. 

We tried to call home to report our arrival, but neither of our phones could find a connection. That was another notice that things might not go quite as we expected, but we didn't catch on. We just shrugged our shoulders and went about our business.

It was about half past one in the afternoon. Sunset, we knew, would be at roughly eight that evening, so we should have no trouble walking five miles or so, looking at the dinosaur tracks, returning to the car, and getting back to the crossroads before dark.

In a matter of minutes, we were on that trail, each of us wearing a small backpack containing the items we'd promised our parents we would bring: five (surprisingly heavy!) quarts of bottled water, a bottle of sunscreen, and our warm-ups. We were wearing, according to The Approved Plan, jeans and durable cotton work shirts. We'd slathered our exposed skin with some of that 30 SPF sunscreen, and we each wore a baseball cap. The sunlight was bright, and there were no adults around we could irritate, so we wore the hats with the bills facing forward.

Soon, we had descended three hundred feet or so into Withers Canyon, a side canyon of Picket Wire Canyon. From there, our walk would be nearly level. The trail curved around to the right, and emptied into the main canyon almost immediately. There it joined an old wagon road, now a four-wheel drive road, which we guessed was used by the guided tours permitted by the Forest Service on weekends. It ran along the near, north, side of the river, roughly parallel to it. We turned right, toward the southwest, to head up the canyon.

The first thing we noticed was the wind. It blew down canyon, from the direction in which we needed to go; it was a lot stronger than the wind had been on the plain above. 

Then we noticed the heat. Except for three-hundred-foot buttes here and there, the floor of Picket Wire Canyon is flat and about a mile wide. But the sun shines on the northwest canyon wall, which then reradiates and turns that side of the canyon, where the trail is, into a pretty good reflector oven. And there is very little shade. Although it was in the low eighties up where we had left the car, we estimated that it was about 95° Fahrenheit down where we were. I'd thought we might be packing too much water; now I began to think otherwise.

Maybe, we guessed, the heat was the reason for the names of river and canyon. The Spaniards who had been the first Europeans in the canyon had named the river El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, or The River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory. French trappers had later shortened the name and translated it into French; for them the river was La Purgatoire. Later American homesteaders and their successors had corrupted that into "Picket Wire" for the canyon. They simply called the river "the Purgatory". At that moment, in that heat, Lynne and I could see good reason for the name.

The walls of the canyon were mostly very soft sandstone, consisting of large grains that were barely cemented together. Capping that soft stone, at the top of the walls, was a twenty- or thirty-foot layer of harder sandstone, more finely grained. Over that harder stone lay a foot or two of topsoil that was mostly sand. Once we were down there, we could see that the river had formed the canyon by first wearing a channel in the uppermost layer of harder sandstone. Then, as it varied its course over the millennia, the river had eroded the softer underlying rock away. When the softer rock was gone, the upper layer, no longer supported from below, had collapsed, a bit at a time, into the void underneath. The canyon floor was littered with boulders from that upper layer, especially near the walls, but also around the scattered buttes that the ever-changing river had left unaltered for eons.




Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 01



Vegetation in the canyon was very much like what we'd seen on the plain above: Sparse grass, mostly brown but lightly sprinkled with the green of piñon, juniper, prickly pear (in bloom down here, as it had been above on the open plain), and cholla. Once in a while, we saw the bright scarlet splash of a claret cup. Off to our left, the distance ranging from twenty-five yards up to almost a mile, the Purgatoire meandered. It was, at least for that part of our walk, well below the level of the trail, so it was a while before we got a good look at it.

We'd gone only about a half a mile up the canyon, walking together side by side, when a sudden motion on the ground in the middle of the road ahead of us prompted Lynne to grab my arm to halt me.

"Stop!" she said, as an electric buzz filled the air. "That's a rattlesnake!"

That's exactly what it was: Ahead of us, in the middle of the road, was a four-foot rattlesnake that objected to having its afternoon sunbath interrupted. It seemed even more surprised by our appearance than we were by its. And it seemed determined to be left alone.

"I've never seen a live rattlesnake outside of a zoo before," I told her.

"Me either!" she said. "Isn't it beautiful? I'd like to get closer, but that probably isn't a good idea."

"Well," I said, "if you aren't a small rodent, it's beautiful. And even though you aren't a rodent, please don't get close. We're a long way from help!"

The snake had, very politely, warned us off when we were still a dozen feet away. And we had heeded the warning, so we were in no danger unless we did something stupid. Careful not to do any such thing; we admired the creature from a safe distance for a little while before we bypassed it with a wide margin of safety. 

Once we were safely past the snake, Lynne took my by the arm. "I'm glad you didn't want to kill it, Jase," she said. "Too many people want to kill rattlesnakes on sight. But if not for snakes, we'd be up to our bellybuttons in ground squirrels in this canyon. Snakes are important, and they don't bother people, if people just don't bother them."

"I've got nothing against snakes," I said glancing over at her. "And this is its home, not mine! I'm happy to let it be." 

She smiled at me. I smiled back, and we continued on up the canyon, arm in arm.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We walked past old homesteads, of which little remained but disintegrating stone walls. Some of those walls still supported a log or two that had once served as rafters. I didn't wonder, until much later, where the settlers had found logs large enough for that purpose; those logs couldn't have come from piñon or juniper.

We were about halfway to our goal when she clutched at me again. "Look! There on that boulder!" She pointed back over my right shoulder. 

Across the flat black face of an eight-foot high boulder we had just passed were petroglyphs. Ancient Indian inhabitants of the region had inscribed multiple carvings into the black desert varnish that covered the rock. There were stick figures of men as well as other markings that looked like the wave-trains you sometimes see on oscilloscopes in old "science" movies. Lynne's newspaper article had mentioned petroglyphs in the canyon, but had made a point of telling us that the Forest Service knew that there were many petroglyphs in the canyon, but didn't have the resources to protect them properly. Afraid that they would be damaged if their locations were too widely known, they wouldn't talk about their locations. 

As we stared at them from a distance of six or eight feet, Lynne said, almost reverently, "I wonder what they meant to the people who carved them!"

"I guess there's no knowing," I replied. "They must be a thousand years old! Maybe more!"

After a bit, we shook off the trance the drawings induced. But before we moved on, we found a juniper standing on the bank on the south side of the road; we sat for a while in its shade. We each drank almost a quart of water during that break. We'd been walking for a little over an hour. In the heat and the wind, that rest in almost the only shade we'd seen was a welcome one. Had it not been for the wind, the heat would have been oppressive, unbearable. The wind cooled us, but, I was beginning to understand, also sucked water right out of our bodies.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We were about four miles from the trailhead and it was nearly four when we reached the ruin of the old Dolores Mission. We stopped, briefly, to see the remains of the church that Hispanic settlers had built in the early 1870's. Not much was left of the small stone building: The back wall still stood, along with parts of the other walls. An old rafter leaned crazily from the remains of one wall into the center of the building; another, half rotted away, stretched between what remained of the sides. 

Someone, whether one of the original church-goers or a more recent vistor, I couldn't say, had nailed a couple of boards together to form a cross. It leaned against the back wall for passersby to see. 

In the churchyard, cholla tried to reclaim a small cemetery. From the road, we could see tombstones bearing the names "Padilla" and "Abeita". We wanted to explore the cemetery, but we didn't; after all, cholla is well worth keeping away from. But I do remember seeing the date 1875 on one of those headstones. 

As we looked at those stones, Lynne said somberly, "I think 'Dolores' is a fitting name for a mission here in Purgatory! It's Spanish for 'sorrows' or 'pains'."

"There must have been plenty of pains and sorrows for people who tried to farm this country," I agreed. 

"They settled here and made their homes. They had hopes and dreams. These ruins are all that's left of them and their dreams," she said. "It's sad, isn't it!"

I nodded in agreement, and added, "When I first saw these ruins, I thought to myself 'An ancient church!' But then I thought of those petroglyphs we looked at a while ago, and of what we're here to see. I don't think I should use the word 'ancient' in this canyon when it refers to something that isn't even a century and a half old."

She looked up at me, into my eyes. Looking back at her, I saw a trickle of tears leak from hers. She said, "I can feel the weight of the ages here. It makes me sad, but I'm really glad we came."

"Me, too!" I agreed. "And we haven't even gotten to what we came for!"

She took my arm again and gave me a pitiable substitute for a smile. "Can we move on now?" she asked. "Before I start sobbing?" 

I smiled back, probably as bleakly, and said "Sure!" And so we did.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Neither of us felt like walking very vigorously in that heat, so we took our time—a commodity we were sure we had plenty of. We reached the site of the dinosaur tracks at about half past four. They were on the south side of the river, opposite us, on a broad, gently sloping rock shelf at the water's edge. The river had apparently scoured it out of the canyon floor, which here was about three feet above the water level. There was a display on our side of the river that explained some of the natural history behind the tracks. We scanned the text of the display and encountered nothing we didn't already know. Then it was time to cross the river.

We hadn't known that we would have to do that, but the discovery didn't bother us. The river was only about twenty feet wide and the brown, muddy-looking water was almost calf-deep. It flowed, of course, but not even at a good walking speed. We just took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our jeans, and waded across, feeling carefully to avoid stepping on hidden rocks. (In the East, I'm told, the Purgatoire would be called a "creek." In the arid Southwest, if wading across a stream gets you wet above the ankles, it's a "river".) 

I'm not sure just how long we spent looking at the tracks. They enthralled us both. According to the Forest Service, there are about 1300 of them there, and they fascinated us. I think we looked at each and every one of them, except for a few that were probably hidden under dried mud. They engrossed us so much, in fact, that we failed to notice that the river rose considerably while we were looking at them. We paid so little attention to the water that we didn't even notice as it rose over some of the lower tracks—the ones we had looked at first.

It was nearly five-thirty when we decided that we'd better head back to the car; we got a rude shock when we saw that the gentle stream we'd waded only a bit earlier was now a raging torrent. Still not much more than twenty feet wide, it was angry, churning, roaring, turbulent, and more than two feet deeper than it had been when we had crossed it earlier! 

Wordlessly, we looked at each other and back at the river. At length, Lynne said, "What're we gonna do, Jase? We can't wade that!"

We weren't outdoors people, but we'd read news stories—there are several every year in Colorado—about people who had died after stepping into streams like the one that we were looking at, and we both understood the danger.

I answered her, "I guess we're going to find a place to sit and wait for it to go back down. I don't see what else we can do. Except maybe stand somewhere and wait for it to go down!"

We found a waist-high boulder on the canyon floor and sat down against its north face, where there was some cover from the still-brilliant sun and we could see the river. We were both exasperated at this delay, but we had no idea that things were going to get a lot worse. We discussed the dinosaur prints and what the news article and the Forest Service display had said about them. When we'd exhausted that topic, we turned to what it must have been like for the Nineteenth Century settlers who'd made their homes in the canyon. We agreed that what we'd just learned about the river's behavior added a dimension to the hardships—and the dolores—that they must have experienced.

It was about an hour later, around six, when we walked around that little boulder and separated to look for places to take a leaks. The river was still swollen—perhaps even more so than it had been when we'd first noticed. I looked up while I peed, and I saw a towering dark cloud in the southwest. Knowing from our Colorado roadmap that the river flowed from southwest to northeast, I said to myself That certainly explains where the extra water came from! Looking at it carefully, I convinced myself that it was going to pass to the south of us. When Lynne rejoined me, I mentioned the storm cloud; she'd seen it, too, and she also thought that it would pass to our south.

So the thunderstorm that broke at about seven didn't exactly take us by surprise. But it might as well have, because we hadn't thought things through well enough to guess that our weather forecast might have been wrong or to anticipate the danger that might attend facing a thunderstorm in the open. So we weren't prepared. And the boulder we were resting against was close enough to the river that the roar of the flood prevented us from hearing the approaching thunder until the wind shifted, the sun faded behind the clouds, and it was about to start raining. 

We were just thinking about finding shelter when the storm broke. Luckily, the bulk of the storm did stay south of us, and only its northern fringe passed over our location. The canyon walls and the buttes scattered about on the canyon floor were high enough to attract the lightning away from us. But they didn't shield us from the sudden drop in temperature. Nor did they protect us from the deluge that the howling wind now drove at us from the east. 

Briefly, we huddled in what shelter the boulder we'd been resting against provided. Belatedly, we concluded that its protection wasn't even close to enough. Crossing the river was out of the question. We would have to find better shelter there on its south side.

Some buttes rose from the canyon floor a few hundred yards south of us, and we scurried through the cold wind and the driving rain, heading south and west to get into their lee.

The wind and the rain intensified as we approached the boulder field at the base of the nearest butte. We were soaked through by the time we were, maybe, halfway there. The temperature must have dropped at least 45° from the afternoon's 95°.

Lynne spotted it. "There!" she shouted through the storm's uproar. "At the base of that boulder!" And she pointed to a house-sized boulder a few feet above us and thirty yards away, off to the left of the direction we were running. I saw in its western face, once she had pointed it out, the dark shadow of an opening big enough to shelter us. Hand in hand, we ran for its promise.

==||||==

Sleep didn't come to me. We'd been lying there for a little while, relaxing against each other, each grateful for the other's warmth, when she shifted a bit. "Jase?" she whispered.

"What, Lynne?" I asked.

She raised her hand from my chest to my face, and she stroked my cheek gently. Her fingers rasped against the stubble of my beard, and she gasped as she jerked her hand away in surprise. 

"I forgot!" she exclaimed a second later. "Guys have beards!" 

I could understand that; I'd had a beard for only a couple of years, and sometimes I still forgot that I had one.

Her hand returned to stroke and rasp again. 

She shifted, and before I could figure out what she was doing, she pressed her lips against mine, softly, sweetly.

Hesitantly but instinctively, I responded. I had never kissed a girl before, and I'm pretty sure she had never kissed a guy. That kiss was awkward, clumsy, because neither of us was at all sure of what we were doing. But she got her meaning across! I opened my mouth under the gentle pressure of her lips and our tongues engaged for an interminable moment of divine, though tentative, sharing. She backed away, removing her hand at the same time.

But she remained in my arms. "Was that okay, Jase?" she asked, as her hand dropped from my cheek. 

Her voice quavered a bit, and I felt her body tighten with new tension. I guessed that she had acted impulsively, and that now she was afraid that she had crossed a line, that she had violated the unspoken rules that governed the way we conducted our tight friendship. After those childhood games and the sex ed discussions, and except for the societal conventions that mandated that we each conceal certain body parts from the other, we had never acknowledged our complementary sexualities, even to ourselves, let alone to each other. So this was uncertain ground for us both.

But that kiss caused something to snap inside me. 

'Snap'? 

No. 

'Pop'? 

No, that doesn't do it either. 

'Explode' is more like it! 

The exigencies of survival were no longer paramount, and my body had begun to understand that the body that now pressed against me offered more than warmth—a lot more. Awareness that I was holding a girl in my arms exploded inside me! It wasn't just a girl, either. It was a girl of whom I thought a lot! A girl who thought a lot of me! A very attractive girl with a runner's slender figure, firm, lithe, and shapely. A girl who had just kissed me!

I tightened my arms around her. "Yes," I assured her, "that was okay." I paused, and she relaxed a little in my arms. "But 'okay' is the best we can say for it." I paused again; her tension began to return. And then I went on, "I think we need more practice!"

"Oh, Jason! You dope!" was all that she said.

Neither of us could see a thing, there in the darkness, but each of us found the other's cheek with a searching hand; and we guided our lips to each other a second time. Our re-engaged tongues danced, in and out, in and out of each other's mouths. This kiss was much less clumsy than our first one had been. Nor was it the least bit tentative, though I knew, well before it was over, that we were going to need more practice! A lot more practice!

As our second kiss extended, awareness rose in me, for the first time since I had looked the other way before dark, and in a completely different way, of her tits. Separated from me only by our fleece warm-up jackets, they pressed against me. And, I realized, her crotch pressed against my thigh. Yes! I told myself, Lynne is definitely a girl! 

My cock stiffened and expanded so that my otherwise loose-fitting warm-up pants, which had ridden up as I sat there on the ground, now constricted it. When we broke off that second kiss—a kiss we would both remember for the rest of our lives—I unthinkingly reached down to adjust myself more comfortably.

She felt me move, and she guessed what I was doing. She asked, "Did that… Did I give you an erection? What do guys call it? A 'stiffy-on'?"

"Yeah," I said, "It did! You did!" There'd been no embarrassment in her voice—only curiosity. We really could talk to each other about anything. This was just something we'd never found any reason to discuss before. So I wasn't embarrassed, either, and I had answered her clinically. I went on, still clinically, "And guys call it a 'hard-on' or a 'stiffy.' but not usually both at once. A 'boner' is another thing we call it sometimes." 

Well, maybe there was an undertone of lechery in the clinical tone of my voice… But this conversation should surely eliminate any remaining doubts that we were both nerds. 

"I've never made a guy have a stiffy before," she said, unnecessarily. I knew that her love life was just as non-existent as my own. "Is it bad for you? It makes me feel good to know that I made that happen to you." 

"No," I answered, "it isn't a problem. It makes me feel… well, pretty good, too. And I'm glad that you wanted to kiss me. That makes me feel good, too."

"I'm glad!" she said. "I'm happy that you wanted to, too. But I think you were right about practicing." And she reached to kiss me again.

Our lips met another time, and we kissed enthusiastically. As our tongues played with each other, I reached, almost automatically, for one of her tits. I found it and cupped the mound of firm flesh through her jacket; I could feel her nipple through the soft material. She moaned into my mouth at the touch and caressed my cheek. Encouraged by her response, I explored her tit with my fingers. Finding her nipple again, I tweaked it gently through the fleece. She moaned again, and pressed herself more tightly against me.

When that kiss ended and we separated a bit, we were both breathing heavily, whether from excitement or lack of oxygen, I didn't know. "Jase," she said, breathlessly, "when you touch my boob that way, it feels really good!"

"I like it, too! You feel really nice," I said. My cock throbbed in my pants as I thought about how good her tit felt. "Maybe I should…" I stroked down along her side from her boob to the bottom of the jacket, reached under, and began to reach upward. She yelped as I touched her skin. Chagrined, afraid that now I had overstepped, I started to pull back.

She grabbed that trespassing hand before I could remove it and clamped it against her belly, effectively stopping my withdrawal. "It's okay, Jase! But your hand is cold. It surprised me, and I yelled. But I like it when you touch me! Can you just keep your hand where it is for a little while? Until it warms up?" 

And, as she clasped my hand to her body, she reached to kiss me another time. As our tongues encountered each other again, the thought occurred to me that I was living one of my fondest dreams. I was making out with a girl! Making out! With a girl! And it was a girl who seemed to think that making out with me was a good idea!

She moved a bit, releasing my hand from her grasp while trapping it between our bodies and under her jacket; I delighted in the feel of her soft, smooth skin. Only a few minutes could have passed before my hand warmed up, but it seemed forever. As if to compensate me for the delay, she kissed me repeatedly while her hand stroked my cheek. When my hand seemed warm, I again undertook my interrupted reach. She made no objection this time, and it was only another moment until I had achieved my goal: Her naked tit filled my hand. The firm button of her nipple pressed against the center of my palm. I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven! 




Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 01



She seemed to enjoy what we were doing: She moaned again into my mouth as she pressed her body against me. Eventually, we broke from our kiss and she moaned again. "Oh, Jase!" she whispered, "that's so good! I really like feeling your hand on my boob!"

I slid my hand sideways a bit, until I could grasp her nipple between my thumb and my index finger. Immediately, instinctively, I began to knead the little lump of flesh.

"That's even better!" she breathed. And, reaching for my lips again, she pleaded, "Kiss me again, Jase!" 

I thought that was a very good idea, and we engaged in another of those heart-stopping kisses as I explored that hemisphere of naked flesh. In return, her hand had dropped from my face and now explored my neck and, through my own jacket, my chest. Our mutual touching brought me welcome sensations—sensations that I had not known I could have. My cock stiffened fully in response.

When we broke from that kiss, she asked, "Is your dick still hard, Jase?"

"Harder than ever," I replied. "Kissing you and touching you makes it get really hard!"

"Kissing you and touching you and having you touch me makes my pussy get hot and wet," she said. She wiggled in close, and I held her tightly with the arm that wasn't engaged in exploring her tit. Her hand moved from my face, where it had continued to caress me, down to my chest. Then, tentatively, it began to move down across my belly. "I've never felt a boy's dick. Can I… Can I touch it?" she asked.

"Sure," I answered. "That sounds really good! Can I…" I paused, and started to move my exploring hand, tentatively, too, from her tit toward her mound, where it pressed against my thigh.

"…touch my pussy?" she finished for me. She hummed a little moan and continued, "Yeah! I think I'd like that!" As she spoke, she rolled her lower body away from me a bit, making some space between her mound and the thigh she'd had it pressed against. 

We reached together for another kiss, and our lips welcomed each other again as we each fumbled in the pitch darkness, blindly, one-handed, with the drawstring that held the other's warm-up pants on. Both knots came undone at the same time, and we both reached inside. Her hand must have been chilly, but I was in such a state that I didn't even notice that aspect of her touch against the skin of my lower belly as, together, we each sought what we had so long forgotten was there—the center of the other's sexuality.

She, too, I learned then, had taken off her underwear when she'd gotten out of her wet clothing, and my fingers quested through a thicket of short, wiry curls in search of her cleft. I found my goal just as her hand began to explore my rod, which throbbed its response. At my touch, her hips rocked a bit, driving my fingers deeper between her outer lips so that they grazed her clit. She rocked her hips even more strongly at that, and she moaned again into my mouth as our tongues played with each other.

My understanding of girls' anatomy was purely theoretical, being based on what I'd learned from those sex ed classes, from furtive reading in hidden corners of school and public libraries, and from what I'd seen in some porn videos I'd found on the internet when no parents were at home. So I did know what I was touching and why it felt so hot, so wet, and so slippery. I knew what and where her clitoris was, and where her entrance should be. So I recognized those things when I encountered them for the first time on her body—the body of a living, breathing girl. But her pussy seemed much more complicated than I had ever imagined—wondrously more complicated. And I lost myself in new sensations—the feel of her mouth on mine, the touch of her hand on my cock, and the wet, slick, warmth of her pussy against my fingers.

Our kiss ended, and she moaned. Her voice thick with emotion, she breathed, "Jason! Your dick feels so hot… and so hard… It feels so good to touch it. But it's so big! Do you think it will fit into someone? Without hurting her?"

"I think I'm pretty average," I answered. "Other guys don't look very different from me. At least in the locker room." And, as I answered her, I suddenly realized how very much I wanted, at that moment, to fit my cock into someone.

"Do you really think so?" she asked. "It feels like it's as big as the ones I've seen in porn on the Web."

I was flattered, but, "Oh, shit!" I said. "Those guys are huge! I'm nothing like that! If you could see it…" 

And then it sank in; Lynne had watched internet porn! "Wait!" I went on. "You mean you've watched…" I let the question hang.

"You must have watched it, too, or you couldn't say that those guys' dicks are 'huge'," she replied.

"Well, yeah," I offered, "but I'm a b…" And, realizing, in the nick of time, what I was about to say, I chopped it off.

"You're a what?" she asked. I couldn't see her expression, but there was a dangerous tone in her voice. "A boy? Girls can't watch what boys watch?" Meanwhile, she'd wrapped her hand around my cock and was stroking gently: Up; down; up; down…

Distracting as the action of her hand was, I recognized the tone in her voice and I backpedaled frantically. "Uhh! I didn't say it!" I pointed out. "I started to but as it was about to come out, I realized how wrong I was. I'm sorry I even thought it! Of course girls can do anything that boys can!" My own hand continued to explore, stroking what I found. 

She moaned before saying, "You're doing something now that I don't think I'd especially want a girl to do. It feels so nice!" The dangerous tone was gone.

"I like touching you there," I said. "And I like the way you're touching me. I'm glad—really glad—that you're a girl!"

She moaned again. "And I'm glad you're a boy!" she said as she reached for still another kiss. Our lips connected again; our hands continued their explorations. Her hips continued their gentle rocking.

Several deep kisses later, she pulled back a bit from me. "I want to sit on you and feel your dick against me," she said, "…against my pussy!" She gave my cock a last squeeze and left it against my lower belly, pointing up toward my bellybutton. She pulled her hand out of my pants and moved to straddle me. 

I didn't really want to stop fingering her, but she'd just suggested a pretty interesting experiment. So I pulled my hand out of her warm-ups and scooted my ass forward to make room for her knees. 

Placing both hands around her little waist, I helped her center herself over me; she lowered her body so that her mound settled on the bulge in my warm-ups, trapping my cock between my belly and her pussy. And suddenly, I was very aware that only two thicknesses of fleece separated my cock from her pussy.

Immediately, she began to rock against me, and a low moan escaped from her. "That really feels good!" she exclaimed. "You really feel good!"

"It does feel good!" I agreed. "Really good!" I was breathing raggedly now, and my own hips rocked in response to hers as I slid my hands under her jacket again in search of her naked boobs. I guess that one of my hands was still pretty chilly, but this time she didn't seem to mind.

She rested her hands on my shoulders as she rubbed herself against me, and she leaned into me for still another kiss. Joyfully, our tongues danced with each other, and we both moaned anew. Our rubbing continued as I touched and caressed her naked tits. Quietly, then, we lay against each other, rocking gently, lost in ourselves and each other.

The way her pussy rubbed against my cock through our fleece pants made me think of the warmth and moisture—the hot slipperiness—my fingers had found a few minutes earlier, and when we broke that kiss, I said, "I want to feel you against me like this without our pants in the way."

Her lips pressed against mine again, briefly, and withdrew. She moaned in reply and said, "Yeah! That would be so hot!" And she stood up beside me. In the darkness, I heard her taking off her warm-up pants. 

As I lowered my own pants to mid-thigh, exposing my boner to the chill night air, an idea came to me. "I'm going to turn and move a little away from the rock, so we'll have more room," I said. And I did just that, leaving about a foot between me and the back of our alcove.

She found me in the darkness, lying in my new position, and she straddled me again. As she lowered herself to her knees over me, one of her hands grasped my cock and stroked it several times. Then she hinged it upward against my belly. And the cleft of her pussy descended to cradle my length, trapping cock against belly and transmitting the warmth and moisture of her feminine treasure to me. I found her waist again with my hands, and, as I did, she began to rock her hips. 

Her furrow delivered hot, wet, slick friction as she slid along the bottom and the sides of my cock, and I moaned at the new sensations. She seemed to like what we were doing, too; she moaned in concert with me. And, as we moaned together, I found the bottom of her jacket and slid my hands upward under it to capture her boobs again. 

She leaned forward once more, and pressed her lips against my own. We moaned into each other's mouths again as our tongues re-engaged. By the time we ended that kiss, both of us were breathing heavily and unevenly. She slid her hands under my shoulders, placed her head on my shoulder, and began to plant little kisses on my neck. Her hips kept rocking, and I kept exploring the hemispheres of naked flesh under her jacket. 

Desire built in me as she continued to slide, back and forth, back and forth, against me. My pressing need for her grew, increased, until I blurted, "Lynne, I really want to… to …" In spite of the passion that nearly overpowered me, I couldn't quite say what I wanted.

I didn't need to; she knew. "I want to, too!" she replied. "I want to feel you inside me! I want it so much! Do you think we should?"

I wanted her, more than I'd ever wanted anything, but a spark of sanity still glowed deep inside me, and I answered her, "I don't know, Lynne! You're my friend! My best friend! I don't want to hurt you! And I don't want to get you pregnant!" 

She chuckled as she raised her upper body, keeping her pussy against my cock. She wiggled against me, and then she raised her hips, allowing my cock to stand away from my body. I stroked down along her sides to her waist as she found and grasped my cock. She slid my crown, several times, along her hot, slippery cleft; and then she guided it back, so that my tip engaged the hot wet cavity of her entrance. She paused just long enough to ask, "What are best friends for, if not for this?" And she lowered herself.

Slippery wet heat enveloped the whole length of my cock, clasping it tightly, tightly, and I groaned as her pubic bone came to rest on mine. It was like nothing I had ever felt before. "Oh, shit!" The words seemed to form themselves in my mouth. "Lynne! You feel so good!"

She groaned in response and replied, "You stretch me so! You feel wonderful inside me!" As she said it, her sheath momentarily tightened its hold.

I moaned in response to that clasping grip, and my cock throbbed inside her. "You're making me throb!" I told her. "It's so good! I've never felt anything like this before!"

"Shit!" she exclaimed. "It felt like you grew inside me!" And she began rocking her hips very gently. She barely moved, and, in spite of the powerful sensations that slight motion of her channel brought me, I could tell that she was rubbing her clit against me where it was pressed between our bodies. 

Her gentle motion made me want something more robust; I began rocking my own hips in rhythm with her, drawing my cock in and out of her, back and forth, in and out, back and forth, in and… 

"Oh, Jase!" she cried. "That's so…" She trailed off as her own motion intensified.

I was beyond words myself, as I plunged into her, withdrew, plunged again, continued. We found our rhythm and pounded ourselves relentlessly against each other. The wet, hot, sliding friction of her sheath wrapped around me demanded all of my awareness. Our moans and groans became euphoric shouts and whoops of pleasure as our bodies responded joyfully to each other.

Sublime pressure grew, and I could think only of the forces that her body had awakened inside me—the forces that were converging within my groin. Soon, soon, I knew, they would release themselves—and me—in a shattering explosion, and I sought that release with all of my energy.

I teetered on the brink! "Lynne!" I shouted. "Lynne! I'm going to come! You have to get off!" I could still think, barely, about the possibility of pregnancy.

She continued to pump, furiously, single-mindedly. "No!" she grunted. "I want you to come inside me!" I tried to lever her off of me. Tried and failed! She yelled, almost frantic, herself, as her own climax began: "It's okay! Trust me!" 

We each surrendered then to our own desires and to the other's—and to the swelling tides of paroxysm and emotion. Ecstasy engulfed me! She collapsed onto me, shuddering and convulsing in her own ecstasy as we rammed our lower bodies together in a final stroke. My self flowed into hers, while her self enfolded mine, and we were, at long last and for real, together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A period of timeless awareness of nothing but self, spent but not exhausted, passed: I was who I was and nothing else existed. Then awareness expanded to encompass things outside of self, and I began to regain control of mind and body. 

She lay on me, face down, still writhing, her arms folded between us. My first volitional act was to slide my hands upward from where they rested on her hips, upward under her jacket, along the smooth warm skin of her back. She was shuddering in the throes of her orgasm, and her body transmitted its internal clamor to me through her sheath, which contracted rhythmically about the cock it still enveloped, still caressed with her random movements. I held her tightly with one arm and stroked gently with the other hand, as my breath returned. 

Her head rested on my shoulder, and, as she subsided, I kissed her forehead gently, repeatedly. Soon, she raised her head purposefully. Moaning gently, she reached for my lips with her own; we kissed. It was a gentle kiss, in which we each thanked the other for what we, together again, together at last, had just given ourselves.

When the kiss ended, she put her head back on my shoulder. She unfolded her arms from where they rested between our bodies, and stroked gently, repeatedly, up and down my sides. I continued to hold her and stroke her back. Silently, we communed with each other, enjoying our bodies' closeness, and their lingering connection.

As we lay there, I realized that I could see her and our refuge, though very dimly. The moon had risen while we were otherwise occupied, and in its cloud-filtered light I could also see parts of the canyon outside our alcove.

At length, she whispered, "Jase, I'm really glad we did that!"

"I am, too, Lynne," I answered. "It was wonderful! You were wonderful! But I shouldn't have come inside you. I hope I didn't make you pregnant." Now that I remembered, I started to worry about that.

"I guess there's a chance," she replied, "but it's really a long shot. If I am, we'll deal with it."

I knew that she was right about the latter. If she was pregnant, we would deal with it. After all, we'd spent our lives doing things together. But that didn't diminish my worry. "I know we'll deal with it together," I replied. "But what do you mean 'really a long shot'?" We continued our mutual stroking, each rejoicing in the other's touch.

"Trust me, Nerd," she said. "Who's the biology expert here? I know my cycle pretty well, and I shouldn't ovulate for another ten days. So it really is a long shot."

"Gotcha, Nerdette," I answered. I did trust her, and I'd been through those sex ed classes, so I knew what the word "ovulate" means. A wave of relief passed through me. 

She reached for another kiss, which I was more than happy to share with her. My cock was softening inside her now, but that didn't keep me from feeling her channel's contractions as we kissed.

After the kiss and some more stroking, she asked, "Do you know what they call couples who depend on the Rhythm Method for birth control?"

I thought for a moment, and then I admitted, "No…"

"They call them 'parents'!" she replied. "I'm going to start on the Pill as soon as we get home!"

There was a promise implicit in that statement, and I picked up on it right away. "You mean…"

"Yup! That's what I mean. We both just learned that we've each had a love life for a long time! Even though we didn't know it! What neither of us had was a sex life!"

She was right! Again! The epiphany stunned me! Her words had struck a Chinese gong inside my skull, and the reverberation filled my head with tumult. 

But the revelation filled my heart with joy! And that joy was as much for her, as for me.

"Lynne," I murmured. The light from the moon was a bit stronger now, and I could see, but barely, her eyes as she raised her head to look at me. Looking into the shadows that were her eyes, eyes that I knew smiled at me, I said, "I love you!"

Her voice smiled at me, too, as she replied, "I know! And I love you, Jason!"

And I found that, just as she had known that I loved her, I knew that she loved me.

I reached for her lips again, and, again, we kissed lengthily and deeply. Again, her contractions made it really interesting, but I continued to shrink inside her. Evidently, I was done for the night.

"Jase?" she said, when our mouths parted again. "My legs and my butt are getting pretty chilly. I think I'd better put my pants back on."

"Yeah, you'd better!" I agreed, reluctantly. And she stood up, releasing my cock from her body's clasp. 

We found the wet shirts we'd set aside when we changed, and we used them as cold (very cold!) washrags to clean ourselves up a bit before restoring our pants to their more customary positions. I resumed my seat against the boulder at the back of our alcove, and she placed herself against me again. We still had a long night to get through, and our bodies' heat was still precious—though now we had even more reason than that to share it.

(To be continued.)

* * * * * * * * * *

I will try to respond to non-anonymous comments. But all comments are welcome.



Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 02



You will probably enjoy this more if you've already read the first chapter so that you'll know what's going on.

* * * * * * * * * *

We slept, fitfully for the most part, in close contact with each other, through the next six hours or so. I think that at least one of us was awake most of the time. I, at least, was never quite warm enough. On several occasions, I felt her trying to wriggle in a little bit closer, and I guessed that she wasn't quite warm enough either. There wasn't anything I could do about that except for what I was already doing—and was doing with a will, because I enjoyed the feel of her body against mine!

Our boulder, as I'd hoped, retained a good bit of heat through the night, and that may have saved us. It certainly kept us from being supremely uncomfortable! It probably also helped that the storm had brought cloud cover that didn't clear away until nearly daybreak, and that kept the temperature from dropping very far during the night.

I think I'd been asleep for an hour when I awoke a bit after five. Lynne rested against me, breathing slowly and regularly; she was fast asleep. The overcast was gone and sunrise was still a good half hour away. But dawn had broken, and there was enough light that I could see the colors in our warm-ups. 

We had made it!

I waited a bit, and confirmed that it was getting lighter, before I shook Lynne gently. "Wake up, Nerdette," I murmured to her. "It's time to go home!"

She woke, slowly, but surely, and, once she was aware, she looked into my eyes. She greeted me sleepily, "Hi, Nerd! I had the nicest dream!"

"Oh?" I said.

"Yeah! I was in love with the world's most wonderful guy!"

"Yup," I said, "must've been a dream. I'm in love with the world's most wonderful girl! We can't both be in love with the world's best!"

"Hmmm…" she smiled at me in the growing light. "Maybe it wasn't a dream. Is it morning?"

"The sun isn't up yet, but there's enough light to travel. And it's only gonna get lighter! Let's get ready to head for home!"

We kissed, gently and lovingly, before we helped each other to our feet. We stepped into the open, stretched, and ran in place for a few minutes, to shake off the night's persistent chill, stretch aching muscles, and move stagnant blood. We hadn't yet realized that, although we had yet to see each other's bodies in anything but cloud-filtered moonlight, we had nothing left to hide. So after we had walked twenty or thirty yards from our boulder, we hid behind other, separate, boulders, and emptied our bladders. Once back in our alcove, we dug the remaining two power bars out my pack, along with a bottle of water, and ate what had to pass for breakfast. 

Then, hand in hand, our cold, soggy jeans and shirts now in our packs along with our baseball caps, we walked down to the river, hoping fervently that it had gone back down. Our fears were groundless; it looked very much as it had when we had crossed it the afternoon before. We took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our pants, and crossed it as effortlessly as we had when we'd come the other direction.

Once we were back on its north bank, we used the river to rinse out the shirts we'd cleaned ourselves up with the night before. It was still chilly in the canyon, but the sun was about to peek over the horizon, and we didn't know how hot it would get before we reached the car. We didn't relish the idea of having only our warm-ups to wear in heat anything like yesterday's! Wet cotton, on the other hand… But maybe not sticky wet cotton! 

We had learned, the day before, something about preparation.

Then we considered jogging back to the car. It was only five miles or so, and neither of us thought that a difficult distance. But we had also learned something about taking chances, and we decided that we shouldn't expose ourselves to the attendant risks: exhausting ourselves in the soft sand, twisting an ankle, stumbling into a cactus, falling, or—worst of all!—taking a rattlesnake by surprise at close range. At long last, we were thinking ahead. Instead of jogging, we walked briskly. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We'd passed the mission and its cemetery when I remembered the doubts I'd had the night before, right before everything had changed—before, that is, we had changed everything. I had to know if we had really changed everything, or if one thing, the one most important thing of all, was still the same. "Lynne," I asked doubtfully, hesitantly, "are we still friends?"

She stopped in her tracks and pulled me into her arms. Putting her arms around me and pressing her body tightly against me, she looked into my eyes, and I read the love—steadfast love, sure and certain—in hers. "We've never been better friends, Jase!" she assured me before she kissed me. When she'd kissed me thoroughly, she broke our embrace and we started walking again. And she added, "You don't ever need to worry about that!"

"Thanks!" I said. "You don't need to worry about that, either! But there's one other thing." I had one more nagging worry.

"What's that?"

I stopped in my tracks; she took another step before she realized what I had done, and then she stopped, too. She turned and looked quizzically at me. I started, "Did I… Well, did I…" I was having trouble getting it out. Finally, I simply blurted: "Everybody says that a girl's first time hurts! Did I hurt you last night?" I waited, miserable now, eyes turned from her and cast down, dreading her answer and the possibility that I had caused pain for her.

"Jason!" she exclaimed. She reached for my chin and pulled my face up a bit and around toward her, so that I looked into her eyes again instead of at the ground. "No! You didn't hurt me! I wanted to feel you in me! And when you were, I loved it! Even if you had hurt me, it would have been worth it!" She was smiling, now, richly and sincerely. "And I meant exactly what I said about going on the Pill!"

I was still doubtful. "But what about… What about your…" I was having more trouble spitting out what I thought I needed to say.

Once again, she was ahead of me. "Do you mean 'What about my hymen?' Is that what you're trying to ask me?" 

Mutely, I nodded. I'm not sure whether I couldn't speak from shame at the question or from shame at being unable to to ask it.

"Oh, Jase!" she replied. "You're such a nerd! A sweet one, but a nerd! Yes, last night was my first time. But I'm a runner!"

"Hunh?" I said. I was in over my head, now.

She reached up to kiss me again, putting both her arms around my neck. In spite of my embarrassment, I took the opportunity to squeeze her against me. She didn't object; in fact, she squeezed back.

When that kiss ended, she backed up some, but we remained in each other's arms as she looked me in the eye. "Now that I think of it, I needed to have somebody make the connection for me, too," she said. She pulled me down and kissed me again, gently and quickly this time.

Then she went on, still holding me close, looking me again in the eye, smiling. 

"Last winter, Mom told me that going to a gynecologist was part of growing up and becoming a woman, and she took me to see hers. The doctor talked to us a bit about what we were there for. Then she threw Mom out of the room and examined me. While she was poking around down there, she told me that my sex life was nobody's business but mine and any partners' I might choose." 

She reached up and kissed me again, reaffirming the choice she had made in the darkness the night before. And then she continued, "She thought it would be wise for me to talk to her or to some other doctor about it, but that was up to me. By law, she said, doctors couldn't discuss anything I told them about it with anybody, including either of my parents, without my consent—which no one could obligate me to give. When she was sure I understood that, she asked me if I was, or ever had been, sexually active."

She was smiling, still, and she reached to kiss me again. I responded, but it was another short one, because she had more to say. 

"I told her I wasn't, of course, and never had been. Then she asked me if I exercised regularly, and how. I told her I was a long distance runner. And then she told me that my hymen had been stretched pretty much out of existence. That surprised me, because I knew I was a virgin, so I asked her how that could be. She said that it was probably caused by all that running, that it was no big deal, and that it was just one worry I needn't have about becoming sexually active!"

"So I really didn't…" I mumbled—too surprised to do much else.

She grinned at me, revealing what she felt about herself and about me. "No," she said. "You didn't. And after you told me that you're pretty average-sized, I knew you wouldn't, so I wasn't worried about it. But, like I said, it would have been worth it if you had hurt me! I love you, Nerd!"

I grinned back at her. "I love you, too, Nerdette!" I said. Things would never be the same between us, I knew. They would be better than ever. And they would get even better and better. 

I reached to kiss her again, but she interrupted me before our lips could touch. "Oh," she said, "and the doctor said that there was a worry she hoped I did have, but that when I felt the need, all I had to do was get in touch with her and she would put me on the Pill or discuss alternatives with me." The grin was still very much in place, but turning naughty, as she continued, "And I'm definitely feeling the need…" 

And with that, she surrendered to another lengthy, loving kiss. And we set out happily, hand in hand, for the parking lot and the car.

(To be continued)

The sun was well above the horizon when we got back to the car. It was about eight, and the canyon floor was heating up already, although it wasn't yet hot enough to make our warm-ups uncomfortable. It was noticeably cooler on the canyon rim.

The abandoned old campground was just as we had left it the day before; there was no evidence that anyone had visited it in the 18 hours or so since we'd been there. It didn't even look like the storm that had caused us so much trouble had reached this far—about three miles—north of where it had struck us. Spring storms in Colorado are like that; folks often say that during that in the spring it can be raining cats and dogs in your front yard while you enjoy a picnic in your back yard!

We were in very good spirits when we arrived. We'd overcome some significant problems; we were unhurt, if tired and hungry; our water had proved more than adequate; and, most of all, we were together. All that remained was to drive into town and find some food.

I fished in my pack and found the car keys. As I opened up the car, Lynne observed, "These warm-ups are pretty dirty, and it'll be too hot for them before long. We should probably put some clean clothes on before we head out."

"We should," I agreed. "I think we can just change here in the parking lot. There's no one around, and we'll hear anyone coming a long time before they get here."

I opened up the back compartment to get to the suitcases that had our extra clothing in them. As I was about to lift the suitcases out, Lynne pulled me away from the car and stepped up against me, front to front. She put her head on my chest, her arms around me and squeezed me as she said, "Thanks, Nerd! You got us through it!"

I squeezed her back and said, "You did every bit as much as I did to get us through, Nerdette! Thank you!"

She raised her head from my chest, stood on tiptoe, and reached for my lips. The kiss extended into deep time as our tongues again played hide-and-seek. Between our kiss and our full frontal contact, there was soon commotion in my pants. When the kiss broke, she grinned up at me, looked into my eyes, and stroked my sides as she said, "That gives me another idea! So does what I feel poking me in the gut!"

I grinned back. "You mean you think it should poke you a little lower?"

She answered me by backing out of my arms and reaching for the zipper on my warm-up jacket. By the time she had it lowered, I'd found the zipper on hers and was tugging it downward. Seconds later, I'd opened her jacket.

My first daylight view of her tits (actually, of any actual, living, girl's tits!) entranced me. I stared, of course. She was well aware of my reaction, but she didn't seem to know how to respond. Her hands hovered between us, her palms toward her body, as if she half-wanted to cover what I was enjoying so much. After a few seconds, she reached for my waist and said, "No guy's ever seen them before, so I'm kind of shy. Do you like them?"

"Like them?" I responded. "I love them. They're beautiful!" 

Yeah. I know. That wasn't especially original; in fact, it was about as trite as I can imagine. But it was what I said, and it was heartfelt. Her boobs were small, as you'd expect a runner's boobs to be. But they were perfectly shaped, I thought. And they were, undeniably, boobs! Adorned by nipples! Real nipples! These weren't the useless little doodads that interrupted the blankness of my own chest! I was looking at real nipples on real boobs that were part of a real girl! A real girl whom I loved and who loved me back!

My cock throbbed and my heart rate accelerated. I bent and kissed one of those lovely nipples. I heard her catch her breath, but I was beyond thought. That touch on my lips enchanted me, and, instinctively, I sucked her into my mouth. As my lips enfolded that nipple, I fondled it with my tongue.

The effect on her was electric! She moaned and said, "Oh, Jase! That's so good!" And she pressed herself against me, forcing her nipple even deeper into my mouth. 

I enjoyed it, too! I was mouthing a girl's nipple! For the first time! And it seemed to bring her pleasure! She didn't just allow me this intimacy, she encouraged it!

But, however much we both liked what we were doing for each other, it couldn't last; the desires my touch on her nipple brought us were too strong to be denied for long. Soon, I pulled back from her tit and raised my head to search for and find her lips with my own. 

We kissed again, deeply, and, as we did, I reached for her jacket to remove it. When it was gone, I shrugged out of my own and, placing my arms about her waist, I pulled her close. I held her, tightly, tightly, while we kissed. The mounds of her naked tits pressed against my bare chest as she caressed my back, making me quiver with delight and desire. We each moaned into the other's mouth as that kiss continued.

We ended our kiss, and she stared into my eyes for an endless moment. "Oh, Jase," she sighed, "I want you so!"

I breathed, "I want you, too, Lynne!" as I moved back a bit and reached for the drawstring that held her pants up.

She replied by kicking off her shoes and reaching for the drawstring of my own pants; I kicked off my own shoes.

Any remaining shyness or modesty was gone, now, for both of us. In a matter of seconds, we were both buck naked, each looking, frankly, delightedly, and hungrily at the other's body. My cock, already standing at full attention and projecting from my groin, throbbed—both at the sight of her body and at the knowledge that she was looking at mine. Not to mention the knowledge of what we were about to do!

I reached for her waist and pulled her close again, wanting to feel her delicious nakedness against my own. She evidently shared my impulse to be close, and, placing her own arms over mine, she stepped toward me until we again stood together, body to body. My cock hinged upward, trapped now between our bellies, and I reached for another kiss. We both moaned the joy we shared as our tongues re-encountered each other.

After another timeless moment, we stepped back a bit from each other but maintained our mutual embrace. I looked into her eyes for a moment, and then, thinking practically, I looked about us. "Where?" I asked. The ground around us was hard and sandy, spotted with clumps of that dry, brown, calf-high, spiky grass, so it wasn't very inviting for what we planned. 

She looked about us, too, and her eyes fell on the car. "The Outback's rear seats fold forward, don't they?" she asked. "We could throw our warm-ups on the platform they make…"

I grinned at her. "Even better!" I said. "In the back here's an old quilt that Mom uses to keep dog fur off the seat when Fred has to go the vet! We can throw that over the tent site over there!" I pointed at a flat area nearby where people had pitched tents in the days before the Forest Service closed the campground. 

Very soon, we found ourselves lying on our sides on that old quilt, facing each other, pressing our naked bodies together, as we embraced again and shared still another deep kiss. When that kiss broke and we looked once more into each other's eyes, she reached down between us to where my cock was again pressed between our bellies. Grabbing me, she moved her hips away from me and pulled me down between her thighs, so that my length came to rest against her hot, wet furrow as she moved her hips forward again. 

Then she rocked her hips against me repeatedly. My own hips answered her motion, so that I slid back and forth in her hot, lubricated groove. She closed her eyes and moaned. We rocked, hypnotically bound to each other, for a time. "That feels really nice," she whispered at length, and reached to kiss me again.

"It really does feel good!" I replied when my mouth was free again. I looked again into her eyes; I could see her love in them. I tried to let my own love shine from my eyes as I continued, "But I'll bet I know something that would feel even better!"

Our hips continued to drive the length of my cock back and forth along the length of her furrow, raising an almost intolerable need in me. She smiled at me, communicating her own need as she acknowledged mine. "I'll bet you do!" she replied. "We'd better! Rubbing against you this way has me so close! I might come when you enter me!" And, as she said that, she drew away from me, breaking that heavenly contact, but pulling me toward herself as she rolled onto her back.

I rolled toward her and to my knees between her thighs, which separated for me. I looked down and saw her pussy, spread in invitation. Dimly, I realized that it was my first real look at a pussy, and that I wanted to explore what I saw. But my desire overwhelmed me, and I could look only long enough to place the head of my cock at her entrance. I looked again into her eyes as I pressed forward and my cock glided easily into her. I closed my eyes at the intensity of the sensation, but not before I saw her close her own eyes. And, as I lowered my upper body onto my elbows, she wrapped each of her legs about one of my thighs, and she clasped me at the waist.

"Shit!" I uttered. "I wish I could tell you how good you feel!"

She moaned in response, and replied breathlessly, "You feel pretty good, yourself!"

She began again to rock her hips, and I knew that she was rubbing her clit against me where it nestled between our bodies. Her gentle rocking made the hot clasp of her channel caress the length of my cock. My hips answered her, driving my shaft in and out, in and out, in and out. The sweet friction of her body's grasp spurred my desire higher and higher, and that impelled me to drive my hips faster, faster, harder, harder into her welcoming body.

I opened my eyes and found that hers, too, were open, looking now into mine as our bodies responded to each other. We both grunted and moaned as we pounded our groins against each other; our lusts for each other grew beyond measure, pushing our bodies toward orgasmic peaks.




Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 02



Sweet agony overwhelmed me; impossibly welcome anguish overcame me! I expelled my breath in great sobs as my need pulsed into her, viscous and white hot; pulsed again, and again, and again—again and yet again—seemingly without end! Her need, hot and clasping, responded—embracing me with her love, welcoming mine. Then, barely aware that she thrashed, too, and sobbed with me in the grip of her own climax, I subsided into a state of nothingness.

A time passed, and two times, and more. Slowly, perception of things beyond my own consciousness returned. First, I knew that my body's desire was satisfied, at least for now: The driving compulsion for release was gone, though I still breathed heavily from the need for oxygen that I'd ignored when I'd exploded. (I didn't know when that explosion had happened. Was it mere moments ago? Ages ago?) Then I felt the loving embrace of her arms and her legs, and the softness of her warm, naked body under me and against me. She, too, breathed heavily. I felt her sheath contract rhythmically about my shaft as her orgasm subsided, and I realized that I still throbbed gently inside her.

My head had come to rest on the quilt, beside hers. I raised it and looked at her. She was relaxed, smiling faintly, her eyes closed. As though she had felt my gaze, her eyes fluttered open, and she looked into mine. Her smile deepened, as though with recognition, and she said, "I love you, Jason!"

I smiled back at her. "I love you, Lynne!" I said. "I love you so much!" And I kissed her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hungry as we were, we might have lain there, naked in each other's arms, for the rest of the morning. But it suddenly occurred to Lynne (who had always been the responsible one) that we needed to get in touch with our parents. They had probably expected us to call them from our motel the night before. They might be pissed off because we hadn't. They might even be super-pissed: If they'd tried to call us, they'd think we'd turned our phones off! 

It wasn't an emergency, we agreed, because parents are always looking for something to be pissed about. This was probably better than some other things we could think of. Like, for example, what we had just done with each other! So we kissed and squeezed, murmuring quietly, for a little while before we roused ourselves, dug into our suitcases, and got some clean clothes on.

It was nearly ten, and we had barely turned onto the main highway south of La Junta when my phone chirped its missed-message complaint. Lynne gave me her Time-To-Deal-With-The-'Rents look, and she had just dug my phone out of my pack when hers chirped, too. Having mine in her hand at the time, she dealt with that one first. There were several missed messages, but only one voice-mail. She accessed my voice-mail, turned up the volume, and we listened to my dad wondering, at about nine-thirty the evening before, why we hadn't called and why our phones were turned off.

Then she repeated the performance with her own phone. Her parents had been a little bit more patient. The voice-mail that wanted to know what was up had been posted at nine-forty the night before. We were trying to decide whom to call first when my phone rang. I started to pull off to the side of the highway to answer it, but Lynne stopped me: "Keep driving," she said. "I'll talk to them."

As I pulled back onto the highway, she answered the phone, listened for a few seconds, and said, "Hi, Julie!"

I could hear Mom's voice, but not what she was saying; Lynne had evidently turned the volume back down. Mom sounded concerned. 

"No," Lynne said. "We had a little problem. We were on the wrong side of the river when there was a storm upstream. There was a flash flood, and we couldn't get across to get back to the car. It got a little bit cold during the night, but we found some shelter, and we spent the night there. We even slept some. The river had gone down this morning, and now we're on the way home."

There was something more from the other end, still unintelligible, now sounding even more concerned.

"Neither of our phones would work down there! There was no reception, so we couldn't call you. Jase is fine. He's right here with me. I'm fine, too. I answered his phone because he's driving." That would get me some points, she knew; all four of our parents were dead set against having either of us use a phone while driving. She held the phone over toward me and said, "Say something, Jase!"

"Hi, Mom!" I said. "We're fine. We're just a little bit dirty, a little bit tired, and a little bit hungry." I left out and very much in love. "We should be home in four or five hours. We'll be in La Junta in a few minutes. We didn't have any supper last night or breakfast this morning, so we're going to stop there and get something to eat."

Lynne spoke into the phone again, quickly, before Mom could say anything. "See, we're fine. I'll bet my folks are worried about us, too. I tried my phone right before you called, and it wouldn't connect." As she said that, she reached for her phone and turned it off! I glanced over at her with a question in my eyes. She winked at me, and then she continued, "They're at work now, too. Will you call my Mom? She should have her cellphone with her. Could you tell her why we didn't call last night and that we're fine? Please?"

She paused. There was more noise from the other end, still meaningless from where I sat, but now sounding much less worried.

Lynne spoke again. "Thanks, Julie. The dinosaur tracks were wonderful. We'll tell you all about it tonight. 'Bye!"

Mom said something to her, and they cut the connection, evidently by mutual consent. We were just arriving in La Junta; a few minutes later, I pulled into the café where we'd eaten the day before. I smiled at her. "Umm…" I said, as I reached over and squeezed her thigh. "I think you left a few things out, Nerdette!" 

"I sure did, Nerd!" She smiled back at me and reached over to squeeze my thigh. "Like the doctor said, our sex lives aren't anybody's business but ours! And they don't need to know how much trouble we really had! We need to get our story straight," she said as I parked. "Then I'll talk to my own parents."

I agreed. Why tell parents the truth about the trouble your dumb mistakes caused when there's a good lie that leaves the worst of everything out? Everybody knows that parents react badly to dumb mistakes! They might even decide that you should expiate their guilt for approving those dumb mistakes in advance!

Then she observed, "Speaking of parents, we can't let any of them know that we're Doing That now. Or even that we're in love. Dad's always been so worried about protecting me from boys. He thinks they only have one thing in mind—but that I don't! He'll have a cow if he finds out!"

"What about me?" I asked. "I'm a boy. And I definitely have That in mind! But he let you come down here with me."

"It's a compliment, Nerd!" she pointed out. "He doesn't think you're a typical boy. And come to think of it, neither do I!"

Those last two sentences were things for me to ponder during the rest of the drive back to Denver.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We got home just as our parents started arriving home from work. We had concluded, over that welcome meal, that we only needed to skip two minor details about our trip. They didn't need to know, we thought, that Lynne might have been very close to dying from being too cold, or that we'd found a very… umm… engaging way to reward ourselves for warming her up. 

The flash flood, which my mom already knew about, and the warm boulder should suffice to explain away what they knew about the events of the past twenty-four hours. It was obvious from our appearances that we'd gotten soaked, but we could account for that with a rain-shower that had been a good bit less severe, and a good bit warmer, than the storm we had really experienced. We agreed that that lesser shower had hit shortly after the water had risen. It might actually have happened that way if the storm had tracked just a bit farther to the south. And there had been no one else in the canyon, no one who might someday tell a different story. Moreover, we each did our own laundry, so we wouldn't need to explain away the sodden clothing we'd hidden in our packs.

Up until that incident, we'd resented our laundry responsibilities. They were, we had thought, an unpleasant consequence of both having two working parents. We had some second thoughts about that on this occasion. 

Lynne told our sanitized story when she called her mother as we left La Junta, and we told it again when everyone was back at home. We were obviously in good health, and, because we had given them no reason to believe that it might have been otherwise, our parents bought our story at face value, displaying admirable sympathy for the hardships we'd overcome as we spent a long night hiding under the big rock we'd found during the shower. 

After Lynne and I had cleaned up and gotten naps, Robin had us all over for a late dinner. There, Lynne and I got the opportunity we needed to tell everyone about what we'd seen. Lynne was at her sparkling best when she did so; she hadn't forgotten at all how interesting she'd found those tracks. I thought it was something of an anticlimax, but I flatter myself that I carried my own weight in telling that part of our tale.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The following day was the first of the Memorial Day weekend. Those three days seemed a lot longer than than they needed to be! We didn't have to worry about explaining why we spent a lot of time together over those three days—we had always spent a lot of time together. We'd probably have been pestered for an explanation if we hadn't spent most of that weekend with each other.

No, the hard part (Well, the metaphorical hard part! Not the hard part of my body!) was keeping hands, lips, and other parts of our bodies all where parents were likely to think they belonged, and away from places where parents might think that they didn't belong. Of course we managed to spend some time alone with each other. We had always done that, and now we enjoyed it more than ever. But there was always a parent, if not two or more, not too far away. So we had to defer an important part of the love lives we'd just discovered. Not that we were completely unable to sneak in looks, words, hugs, kisses, and feels, but we couldn't carry things beyond that—much as we wanted to.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was about half past eight on Tuesday morning, after that long weekend, and our parents had all left for work. I had just gotten up, and I was finishing my shower when I heard someone pulling the shower curtain open behind me. I knew who it was. "Is that you, Nerdette?" I asked as I stepped into the shower stream and soap began to sluice off of my face.

"No!" she said. "I'm your other girlfriend!" as she stepped into the shower with me.

"Well," I said, "I'm happy that you're here, Other Girlfriend! But I wish it was Lynne!"

"You'd better 'wish it was Lynne,' Nerd!" she replied as she swatted me on the ass. It stung and I yelped! I shook the water out of my eyes and turned to look at her. She was smiling up at me; she, too, was naked, as is only fitting if you're going to join somebody in a shower. "I've already had my shower this morning," she continued, "but another one won't hurt!" 

I pulled her against me, turning us so that her back was to the shower head. "A person can't be too clean," I said, solemnly.

Still smiling, she reached for a kiss, saying, "No… a person can't!"

We stood there, holding each other close, enjoying a deep kiss, as the flowing water drenched her. It wasn't long before the kiss and the double armful of slippery, wet, naked, willing girl gave me a boner. As the kiss broke, she reached down and grasped me. "We'd better do something about this," she allowed.

"My very thought!" I said.

"But first," she replied, "there's something I've want to try on a boy for a long time!" She sank to her knees without warning, kissed the head of my cock, and slipped half of it into her mouth.

Her unexpected action startled me, and the resulting sensations staggered me. Knees wobbling a bit, I think I yelled something inarticulate. Then she bobbed her head gently, sliding me in and out, in and out. Forces began to gather in my groin, and I shouted something that must have been even more incomprehensible than whatever my first utterance had been. I looked down; she looked back up at me, eyes smiling, as my shaft glided in and out between her loving lips.

She kept it up for a dozen strokes, paralyzing me with delight. Taking me from her mouth well before I could build up critical mass, she grinned up at me. When that stimulation ended, my volition returned, and I reached down to pull her up where I could hold her and kiss her again. She came happily, saying, "You liked that, didn't you!" She'd phrased it as a question, but it was a statement of fact!

"Oh, Lynne!" I answered. "I wish I could tell you!"

As she moved into my arms, she put her own arms around my waist. My boner slid up between our bellies; she wiggled against it and I throbbed in response. "I'm glad," she said. "I've heard girls say that guys like that. And the woman always seems to do that in the porn I've seen. So I thought we should try it. I liked it, too! Having your dick in my mouth was really hot!"

I was thinking of another place to put my dick, then. I grasped her wrist and pulled her out of the shower. As I turned off the water, I took a towel off the stack of clean ones with my other hand. "I'm going to dry you off, now," I announced, "so that you won't get my bed wet!" As I spoke, I saw the pile of clothes that she'd left beside the shower when she'd stripped to join me, and I pulled her away from them so we wouldn't drip all over them.

She renewed her grin and reached for another clean towel. "I'd better dry you off, too," she replied. "Our you will get your bed wet!"

We set to work. We still didn't know each other's bodies very well, so we probably accomplished a good bit more in the way of exploration than of drying in the minutes that followed. I think that there was a towel between a dry-er's hand and a dry-ee's skin no more than a third of the time! But, somehow, we did manage to get ourselves mostly dry.

At length, we threw the towels into the hamper. I took her hand to lead her into my room, but she pulled me against herself and reached up for another kiss. Then, hand in hand, we scampered into my bedroom. We both seemed to have the same activity in mind.

When we reached my room, I stopped and turned her around, so that she faced me with her back to my bed. I took her into my arms again, and we kissed, deeply, at length. Her naked skin against my own inflamed me; and, slowly, continuing that divine kiss, I pushed her backward, until her legs were against the bed. I pulled back and looked into her eyes, smiling. She smiled back at me; and I gave her a gentle push, tripping her. She whooped and landed on the bed on her back; her legs splayed as she fell. 

Moments passed while I drank in the glory of her feminine nakedness, and then I bent slowly forward. A hand on top of each of her thighs, I leaned a bit to the side and kissed the tender sweet meat of an inner thigh, just a few inches from her groin. As I turned to kiss the other thigh, the scent of her feminine treasure wafted into my nose for the first time. She had just showered (Twice!), and her pussy's natural perfume was consequently subdued. I did not know that, then, because I had no experience with the stronger, more assertive fragrance she was capable of giving off. It was just as well; even suppressed as it was, her feminine aroma captivated me. Thought ceased, and there was nothing but the body—the feminine body—naked, spread in front of me. 

Enthralled, I succeeded in kissing her other thigh before I turned back to her center and slowly, slowly, brought my lips to her. Gently, I kissed her clit where it protruded, very slightly, from the upper end of her cleft, and I heard her sharp intake of breath in response. "No, Jase!" she began pleadingly. "You don't have to…" The last part of her statement was lost in another sharp intake of breath, followed by a deep moan, as I dug into her cleft with my tongue, right above the entrance to her body, and stroked upward slowly.

She was hot, wet, slick; and my tongue moved joyfully in her furrow, stroking up and down and side to side, concentrating on her clit but not ignoring the other structures it found. Her pussy was still unfamiliar; it seemed even more complicated than it had when I'd fingered her before, but I wasn't going to let that distract me! Immediately she placed her hands on my head and held me tightly against herself as though she was suddenly afraid that I might stop because she'd said "You don't have to…."

"Oh, God! Jase! That's so… so…" she exclaimed, and, apparently unable to find a word that described what she felt, dissolved into another deep moan. And, a few minutes later, she thrashed and squealed under my tongue as her climax took her.

When she had returned to herself, she held me close. After a bit, she asked, "You haven't come yet, have you?"

"No," I admitted.

"I think," she said, "that you'd better put it in me, then. After what you did for me, I can't leave you hanging!"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After lust had run its course, we lay naked together in each other's arms, enjoying our bodies' touch. We'd been there a few minutes, sharing quietly, when she raised her head and looked into my eyes. "Jase?" she asked.

"Yeah, Lynne?"

"Why you didn't stop when I told you that you didn't have to eat me?"

"Did you really want me to stop?" I asked.

"Well…" she allowed, "I guess I didn't really want you to stop. It felt so good! And you made me come so hard! But…" Doubtfully, she gave up, not quite able to find the words that would mean what she wanted to say.

"Didn't you like eating me?" I asked after I'd figured out that she wasn't going to continue.

She grinned and nodded her head. "That was so hot! I liked tasting your dick and feeling it in my mouth. And it made you feel so good! I liked that, too! And it turned me on so!"

"I liked tasting your pussy. And exploring it with my tongue and making you come that way! And that turned me on!"

Her grin was gone. "It didn't…" she started, and paused. She tried again: "It didn't… uhh… It didn't turn you off?"

"Why would your pussy turn me off? I think it's supposed to do the opposite! And it does! Did my dick turn you off?"

"I guess I am supposed to turn you on, now that I think about it. It's just that, well… that the thought of licking a pussy has always seemed kind of, uhh… well… dirty to me. I don't think doing that to someone would turn me on at all!"

"Maybe that's because you're a girl," I suggested. "Now that you mention it, I've never been very attracted or excited at the thought of—"

"Eating a dick!" she interrupted. "Yeah! I can see that! And I sure am glad that you never have been!"

She lay back down against me, and we lay there, happy in each other's arms, for a while. 

We were still enjoying each other's naked bodies together when she spoke again: "Jase?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to get in touch with the gynecologist later today, to go on the Pill," she said. "But it'll take me a day or two to get started, and it takes about a week before I can be sure it's effective."

"Does that mean we won't be able to—" I began.

She shushed me. "No," she replied. "But we'll have to use condoms for a week. We need to start by Thursday, because I'm due to ovulate about Sunday. We probably need to allow a few days either way."




Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 02



I could see where this was going. Or, rather, I could see where I was going! I was going to a drugstore! I wasn't thrilled at the idea of marching into a drugstore, finding the condoms, putting some on the checkout counter so that everyone would see that I was buying rubbers, and then paying for them while the world watched. "Umm…" I mumbled. And then, knowing that this was my job, I gulped audibly before continuing, half-heartedly, "I'll get us some."

"It's not so bad,' she said, picking up on my discomfort. "Girls have to buy personal things like that all the time. You know, girl stuff like Tampax. I think you'll survive." She squeezed me, raised her head from where it lay on my shoulder, and kissed me. "You know," she went on, "there's always abstinence. That would work, too!"

I squeezed her back. "Is that the way you want to go?" I asked. I think it was clear from my intonation that it wasn't the way I wanted to go.

She grinned at me. "No more than you do, Nerd!" she answered me, with another squeeze and a lengthy kiss.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was cleaning day for Lynne's house. Our mothers both had the same cleaning lady, named "Gert." We all called her "Dirty Gerty" among ourselves because she was a grumpy, disagreeable older woman who made it clear that she hated children and teenagers. But she was a very good cleaning lady. She cleaned Lynne's house on Tuesday afternoons and mine on Wednesday afternoons. So, to give her room to work and to preserve our sanity, Lynne and I gave up the right to hang out in her house on Tuesdays; and on Wednesday afternoons, we stayed out of my house. Naturally, we resented those galling impositions almost as much as we hated her attitude toward us. The crowning indignity was that our moms had told us, in no uncertain terms, that if Dirty Gerty were to quit because of something either of us did, we would find ourselves doing the house-cleaning!

That Tuesday, in defiance of the impending banishment, we asserted our ownership by having lunch at Lynne's before Dirty Gertie arrived. After lunch we moved back to my house. After half an hour or so, I left Lynne there and walked, glumly and nervously, to the Rite-Aid drugstore on Colfax Avenue a few blocks from home. The closer I got the more glum, not to mention the more nervous! 

I arrived and walked right past the store, trying to pretend that it wasn't the reason I was in that neighborhood. An intelligent man always makes an adequate reconnaissance, I assured myself, before undertaking a mission into enemy territory. When I got to the end of the block, I turned around and strolled past the store again in the other direction. Gotta be thorough about reconnaissance! And, reaching the other end of the block, I turned around again and moseyed back! And so on, for several iterations. Mighta missed something the first few times past!

Eventually, I worked up the courage to enter the establishment. Glancing about me, I saw that three or four folks were lined up at the only checkout counter in operation. The clerk at the cash register was a woman. A young woman! A good-looking young woman! A cute, sexy, good-looking young woman!

As a general rule, I liked dealing with sexy young women, though I always tried to pretend disinterest because I was too self-conscious to act any other way. If I'd been planning to buy aspirin, a pair of cheap sunglasses, or something equally innocuous, I'd have been glad to see that woman there. 

But this was a different story! I was here to buy condoms, and taking them to that young woman would amount to walking up to her and saying "I'm planning to get laid! A lot! So I need these to put on my dick!" Or, maybe, to announcing that I had some execrable perversion in mind! (A perversion so despicable, in fact, that I couldn't even imagine what it might be!) At any rate, I was sure that placing condoms on the counter in front of her would make her think about my dick! (Awkward!) And she would certainly guess that I was thinking about her pussy! (More awkward! I would be!) She might even believe that I was thinking about putting my dick into her pussy! (Very awkward! I would be thinking about that, too!)

Slightly panicked, I looked around the store and tried to assume the manner of someone who's forgotten something. Muttering (a little too loudly) a remark or two about leaving my wallet at home, I turned around and walked back out of the store.

Not knowing what else to do, I walked several blocks east on Colfax, turned around, and walked back. That should give them enough time to put a different clerk behind the register, I thought, irrationally. It didn't occur to me that a different clerk might also be a woman. Or that the store might not rotate cash-register duty every ten minutes. Screwing up my courage again, I re-entered the building.

The same person was still at the register. She was still a woman, still young, still sexy, although the line now comprised different people. Shit! I said to myself. A customer who had just completed a transaction turned to leave; the clerk looked directly at me and smiled. I returned what must have been a sickly excuse for a smile before she turned to the next person in line. Damn! I continued to myself. She's noticed me! Now she knows I'm here! I was desperate, but, try as I might, I couldn't think of a plausible reason why a person might leave the store a second time and return. I guessed I was stuck in the store, now.

Trying to pretend that I wasn't there at all, or, at least, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, I walked past the counter and into the aisles of shelving, upon which were displayed various goods. Among those goods, I expected I would find condoms. As I moved, the store's public address system squawked. Convinced that I'd been detected and that someone was going to say something about my mission, I jumped about a foot into the air. But it was nothing to do with me: A woman's voice said "Anita, dry clean-up in Aisle Four. Anita, dry clean-up in Aisle Four," and the system lapsed into silence. I knew that had nothing to do with me, because I hadn't been in Aisle Four.

Although I'd been in the store several times in the past, I didn't know it very well, so, beginning with Aisle One, I slouched up and down the aisles, looking, looking, looking, moving only my eyes, trying not to move my head from side to side. If I just look like I know what I'm after and where I'm going, I thought, everything will be okay…

A minute or two later, in Aisle Four, I encountered another store clerk. I was looking for a product to put on my cock, so it was another woman. Naturally. She wore a name tag that read "Anita W" on her Rite-Aid smock and she wielded a broom, a dustpan, and a wastebasket as she removed shards of a broken bottle, and the tan powder that had once been in the bottle, from the floor. Anita was middle-aged, and therefore (as far as I was concerned) unattractive and ineligible. And she reminded me of my mother! That was wrong—so wrong!—at this point in my life and for what I needed.

"Good afternoon, sir," she said with a smile. "Are you finding what you need?"

I wasn't, but I wasn't about to tell her that! If I did, she would ask what I was looking for, and then, when I left, two women—she and the check-out woman—would know what I had come for. They would talk about that with each other. And, of course, why. Not to mention what part of me I planned to put them on, and what part of a girl I hoped to use them in. There was no doubt in mind about those things. They would laugh together at the nerdy stripling and his naïve presumption that some girl, somewhere, would do That with him. And do it not just once, but multiple times!

It didn't help that one of those women reminded me of my mother.

"Yes!" I mumbled in answer to her question. 

Well, actually, I squeaked the word. And then, trying to act as though I'd just unexpectedly found a frog (a bullfrog!) in my throat, I coughed and repeated the word in the deepest, most masculine tones I could muster. I continued on past her, kept looking. 

I was pale, now, and sweating, in spite of the air conditioning that kept the store cool. Nerd that I was, and because of the interests of my girlfriend (My girlfriend! I had a real, honest-to-goodness girlfriend! And she was the reason I was here—the only thing that could make this search worth the trouble!) I even knew the word for that condition. I'm in diaphoresis! I thought to myself as I kept searching.

I went through the whole store without finding any condoms. 

This was serious! Surely, I wasn't going to have to ask for condoms at the checkout counter! In a store that seemed to have only female employees! Asking for something in a store is a lot like stopping to ask directions; it's unmanly. And, because of what I wanted and the people who worked here, this would be even worse than unmanly; it would be genuinely humiliating. I didn't know if I had the courage to do it! So I reversed course and slunk back along the path I'd already covered, trying to look even more carefully—and even more unobtrusively.

I was back in the Aisle Four on that second trip through the store when I encountered Anita again, finishing her clean-up and picking up her wastebasket. "Are you sure I can't help you, sir?" she asked.

"Uhh… No!" I said, managing not to squeak this time. "I'm doing fine." Accepting my refusal of her offer at face value, she disappeared into the depths of the store with her broom, dustpan, and wastebasket. But, I noticed, the air in the store seemed mighty thin, even for the Mile-High City. I was decidedly short of breath. I knew the name for that condition, too, except that my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen to remember it. But I knew for sure that the air was thin: A normal level of oxygen would have made my ears burst into flame by now.

I was halfway back through Aisle Two when the store's public address system emitted another squawk. I jumped again, a little higher than the first time. Anita's amplified voice announced, "Customer needs assistance with picnic supplies. Customer needs assistance with picnic supplies." That didn't have anything to do with me: I didn't want assistance, and I wasn't looking for picnic supplies. I kept looking. 

Soon, I reached the end of Aisle One, completing my second tour of the store without success. I wasn't ready to admit defeat, principally because I wasn't ready for the consequences. So I turned around and began a third pass through the shelves, moving, this time, in my original direction.

I was skulking around the corner from Aisle Three to Aisle Four when I encountered a man of about Anita's age coming forward from the rear of the store. He was wearing a Rite-Aid name tag that read "Phillip H, RPh" on a pharmacist's white jacket. "Good afternoon, sir," he said quietly and politely. He continued in the same tone, "The condoms are at the other end of Aisle Six. They're right next to the personal lubricants. I recommend that you purchase a lubricant at the same time. Most men find that they obtain the best results by using a little bit of lubricant inside their condoms. If you'll step this way, please…"

He turned around and headed for Aisle Six. I nearly fainted at this unexpected discovery of my purpose. But I recovered myself without collapsing, or otherwise making a scene. Meekly, I followed him, grateful for his discretion in approaching me in a confidential way. I pondered the hint about the lubricant. They hadn't mentioned that in sex ed, but it made perfect sense. I wondered how he'd figured out what I was there for.

When we arrived, he pointed out the region on the shelves where the condoms were stocked. I don't know how I'd missed them (Twice!) unless it was because I had expected to see them marketed individually, in the familiar little tinfoil packets I'd seen guys displaying as badges of their alleged masculinity. These were in boxes of one dozen, two dozen, or five dozen.

I looked over the display, awed by the amount of safe sex its contents would support. Evidently, a lot of people indulged in the activity that Lynne and I had just discovered! And there was a lot of variety, but Trojan was a brandname I recognized. A box of a dozen would be, I thought, plenty for eight or nine days. Then, being hopeful, libidinous, and—most importantly—an optimist, I decided that two dozen would be better. If I got that many, I thought, I might not have to repeat this exercise any time soon. Before Phillip returned to his pharmacy enclosure, he asked, "Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?"

"No," I said. "Thank you." 

He turned to leave, saying, as he did so, "If you'll just bring your selection to the pharmacy counter, I can ring you up at the register there."

Two minutes later, I was at his counter with a box of two dozen Trojans and a tube of "K-Y Warming Jelly Personal Lubricant." As I paid, my curiosity temporarily overcame my embarrassment, and I asked, "How did you…" Embarrassment reasserted itself,and I had to let the question trail off.

"How did I know what you were looking for?" he asked with a smile. And then he answered himself: "You're not the first nervous young man to be embarrassed at making a purchase of this kind, you know. It happens often enough that we call it the 'picnic supplies' problem." 

A minute after that, I was back out of the store with my purchases safely concealed in a Rite-Aid sack. My equilibrium was almost intact.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Lynne was waiting for me in my living room—right where I'd left her—when I got back. "Did you get what you went for? You don't seem to have any visible injuries," she said with a dirty smile. 

I smiled back at her, just as dirtily. "The injuries are all psychic. They're internal and invisible," I replied. "I'll need years of therapy to recover. But, yes. I got us a couple of dozen condoms and some lubricant to use with them."

She stepped up close and put her arms around my neck; her soft femininity pressed against me. My cock responded. I put my own arms around her as she said, "Appropriate therapy, administered as soon as possible, should heal those injuries quickly. But I might go ahead and administer 'years of therapy' anyway!" And she reached for a kiss.

It turned into a deep, lengthy kiss, and when it was over, I was fully hard. She looked up at me from within my embrace and I replied happily, "Good therapy might help, at that! And you're just the therapist I need!"

Still smiling dirtily, she asked, "Did you get the right size?" And then she went on before I could reply, "Maybe we should try one of them on you. We want to be sure that they'll fit when we need them!"

"Umm… I think there's only one size," I answered. "So I think they'll fit."

"We'd better be sure," she allowed. "We wouldn't want to find out at the wrong moment that they don't!" Her smile was a little dirtier.

"Why do I get the impression," I asked, "that you're just looking for an excuse to play with my dick?"

An expression of wide-eyed innocence appeared on her face. "Why, Jase! I'm surprised that you would think something like that of me! I'm just looking out for our best interests!" But her hands had gone to my belt buckle; she undid it as she spoke.

"I shouldn't doubt you! I don't know what came over me," I replied, as she unbuttoned my jeans and pulled the zipper down. "We'd be very disappointed if we found that they don't fit just as we were—" Powerful sensations interrupted me; she had pulled my rod out of my pants, wrapped a hand around it, and started to stroke. My hips rocked in response and I moaned.

She stopped after a moment or two, so that she could look into the Rite-Aid sack. I regained enough of my composure to speak: "Let's…" I began. Taking her by the elbow and directing her toward the stairs, I trailed off.

"…head for your room," she finished for me. And, sack still in her hands, she led the way to the stairs and started up. I followed, my boner projecting proudly from my jeans.

We were only about halfway up, and she was still leading the way, when her ass, swaying now in front of my face, gave me an idea. She had lean thighs, runner's thighs, and there was a gap between them. Through that gap, beyond that hypnotizing ass, I could see the shape of her mound as it, too, wiggled its way up the stairs. Saying, "If you're going to play with my dick, it's only fair that I…" And I slid a hand between her thighs, to cup her pussy. 

She stopped in her tracks, and, as I stopped behind her, she wiggled herself more firmly into my hand. I rocked my hand against her; she rocked her hips in reply. "It's only fair," she whispered, as though something preoccupied her. She paused; wiggled again. "Only fair!" she murmured again, barely audibly.

After a few moments, she moaned, and began to move up the stairs again, slowly. She said, "If you don't stop that, we'll never get upstairs to find out if the condoms fit!" She moaned again and tried to wiggle herself even deeper into my grasp as I continued to move my hand against her. She seemed to enjoy what I was doing at least as much as I did.

I reached around with my other hand and found her belt buckle. One-handed, I unfastened it, undid the waist button, and pulled her zipper down. "Do we need to get to my room?" I asked, a bit short of breath. "Really?"

"I guess not!" she answered, almost as breathlessly. "But let's get to the top of the stairs so we don't go tumbling down!"

Moving seemed to require her to concentrate intensely, but she managed to climb the remaining distance, and I climbed along behind, maintaining my grasp on her. In spite of the way my hand pressed against her mound, her jeans had begun to slide down over her hips as she climbed. My own jeans had already sunk to mid-thigh, and it was something of an effort, distracted as I was and with one hand occupied, to keep them from sliding all the way down and tripping me.

When she reached the top, I moved my hands to her waistband. Grasping both her jeans and her panties, I tugged downward; both slid down easily. She stepped out of them, pulling her shoes off as she did so, and she turned around to face me where I stood a couple of steps below her. My boner throbbed at the sight of her naked groin.

"Why don't you sit down here at the edge of the top step, and then lie back," I suggested. 

She wasted no time in lowering herself. And, once down, she lay back and spread her thighs. I sank to my knees between hers; I came to rest a step down from the top. The view I now had of her pussy mesmerized me. My cock throbbed again, and I stared.

She grinned up at me as I removed my own shoes and pants. "My pussy really does turn you on," she said, "doesn't it!" She reached for my waist.

"It sure does!" I admitted, taking my cock into my hand and directing it to the opening she was displaying in front of me. The slick wet heat of her entrance enveloped my tip, and I pushed. I slid into her, and my full length buried itself in that slick wet heat. We both moaned at the resulting sensations.

She smiled up at me from the floor and whispered, "Your dick sure turns me on! Especially when you put it in me!"

She wiggled her hips under me, and my own hips responded involuntarily with a bump. Seconds later came another bump, and another, and another, and…. Soon, we were slamming our groins against each other in abandon. All thought was gone but for the desire I felt for her culmination—and for my own.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Slowly, the tempest subsided, and I found that we were lying together, mostly on the wooden floor at the head of the stairs. I was still on top of her, my knees still on the next-to-top step, my cock still buried in her, her arms still about my waist. 




Track Meet in Purgatory Ch. 02



"I love you, Jason!" I heard her say as my awareness of the world outside of me returned. She stroked my cheek as she spoke.

I opened my eyes and found her looking into them. "I love you, Lynne," I replied. We kissed, gently and lovingly, and looked again into each other's eyes.

"Umm… I like having you where you are, but this floor's pretty hard. Maybe…"

"Yeah," I replied, "we'd better move." I kissed her again, quickly and lightly, and felt her sheath respond by contracting around me. Then I pulled myself out of her and stood. From my perch on the stairs, I observed, "I guess we'll have to wait until tomorrow to try a condom on me."

"Yeah," she said, laughing softly as she looked at my messy, shrinking cock. "They're guaranteed to be too large, now. But I'd better wash you off!"

I grinned at her and began, "You're just determined to—"

"Play with your dick!" she finished, interrupting me. "I sure am!"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Lynne had called the gynecologist's office while I was getting the condoms, and, as promised, she started on the Pill two days later—the same day that we started using those condoms. (Which, by the way, fit perfectly!) I'd heard that men weren't big fans of rubbers, and I'd had a pretty good suspicion of why that would be so. Personal experience confirmed that suspicion. Still, using one was better than the alternatives. So I was more than pleased when Lynne announced, as I "helped" her with her shower on the morning of the Thursday following, that the Pill was now doing it job and we could forget about the condoms, though there were still more than a dozen left. After we finally dried ourselves off, we celebrated that occasion in her bed—bareback, of course.

Commencement ceremonies were scheduled for the end of that week, during the morning of the first Saturday of June, just two weeks after we'd come to know what we really meant to each other. Those two weeks had gone by quickly; each of us lost in exploration of newly recognized love for the other—and, when parents were at work, in exploration of the other's newly discovered body. 

When we weren't doing That, we were at school to rehearse for the ceremony or to fulfill our other duties. To no one's surprise, Lynne and I had placed, respectively, first and second in our class. Thus, she was to be our class valedictorian and I, the class salutatorian. So we both had speeches to prepare and memorize, and to practice under the watchful eyes of the class sponsors. We supposed they were making sure that we didn't plan to say anything inappropriate.

Commencement came and went, and with it our speeches. (I'd found that mine was almost as nerve-wracking as my drugstore trip had been.) That evening, Lynne and I were going to a party at a classmate's house. We'd hung out together that afternoon, as we'd done for years. But we couldn't do what we wanted most to do with each other because it was a Saturday and the parents were all at home.

Mom, Dad, and I were eating supper when Dad made an announcement: "Jason, Mom and I have something special for you in honor of your graduation. We were very pleased with how well you did in your studies, so, as a graduation present, and as a reward, we've made arrangements for a place in Fort Collins where you can live while you're in school. Tomorrow afternoon, we'll drive you up so that you can look at it."

I was floored. "Oh, Dad! You didn't have to 'reward' me for anything! I was just doing what I do!"

He went on, "What you do, Jason, is among the best, and we're proud of you. So we're adding the cost of this place to the money we've already set aside for you for college. You can think of it as a 'mini-scholarship' if you like."

Mom got up, came around the table, and hugged me. "Yes," she said, "you've grown up to be a very smart, responsible young man. We love you and we couldn't have asked for a better son. When she finds you, you're going to make some young woman very happy!"

I sputtered something, as my ears almost burst into flames again. And then it hit me! Evidently, I was stuck with my parents' choice of apartments in Fort Collins! So Lynne and I would have to find her a place to live that wasn't too far away from that choice! 

A few minutes later, Lynne and I got into Mom's car, which I had borrowed for the evening, to drive to the party. Lynne was glad to see me, but she seemed a bit subdued. I found out why almost immediately. We'd just pulled out when she said, "Jase, I've got some iffy news. I don't know what to make of it."

"What's that, Lynne?"

"Mom and Dad told me this evening that they've rented me an apartment in Fort Collins for next year. I—"

I interrupted her, saying, "My parents just told me that they've done the same for me! I hope that yours isn't very far from mine!"

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes; neither of us knew what to say.

Finally, I broke the silence in exasperation: "Parents! They mean well, but sometimes I wish…" I paused.

"…they'd let us live our own lives!" she finished for me. "We'll just have to make the best of it. But, at least there's a silver lining: They're adding the money for the rent to what they had planned to give me! Because I was the class valedictorian!"

"My parents are doing the same thing!" I said. "The extra cash will come in handy! It'll mean that we'll have more spending money." 

"Yeah!" she observed. "We'll like having more spending money. And maybe, now, we'll be able to afford to share a car! For the rest of it, we'll just have to make the best of things. We'll both be in Fort Collins, and both apartments are probably pretty close to the campus. So we can't be too far apart! I'll know more tomorrow. We're driving to Fort Collins after lunch so that I can see the place."

"Us, too! We're going up there tomorrow, too. Do you suppose that they planned this together?" I asked. "To make sure we didn't sneak an apartment together?"

"I wouldn't be surprised!" she answered. "Dad said just the other day how glad he was that I'd never been very interested in boys, so he hadn't had to worry about me 'fooling around' and getting pregnant! Maybe he just figured out that you're a boy!" 

"Yeah, maybe!" I replied. I did't happen to think, then, that Lynne had only recently figured out that I was a boy, or that I'd just figured out that she was a girl. I took my eyes off the road for a moment, so that I could look at her. "Mom told me tonight that some young woman is going to find me, and that I'll make her very happy when she does."

She looked back at me and smiled. "I'm pretty interested in this boy!" she said. "I found you! Years ago! And you do make me very happy! Especially when we 'fool around' with each other!"

I reached over and stroked her thigh. "I'm very interested in this girl," I said. "Not to mention 'fooling around' with her!"

She replied, "Speaking of 'fooling around,' it's too light out now, but I'll bet that if we left the party a little early, we could find a dark, lonely spot in the bushes somewhere in City Park! And I'll bet Fred's blanket is still in the back seat! So we wouldn't have to worry about a cop spotting us doing That in a parked car!"

"The quilt's there, and I'll bet we could!" I answered. "That might help compensate for not being able to get together through the weekend because parents are home!" Traffic was a little too heavy for me to look at her, but my hand still rested on her thigh, and I gave it a squeeze. She reached over and squeezed my own thigh. We had a deal!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Leaving the party early didn't turn out to be a very big deal. Nobody there was important to either of us or was likely to notice that we'd left. Moreover, many of them seemed intent on getting drunk and/or stoned, and neither drinking nor smoking was our style. City Park did turn out to provide a dark, lonely spot surrounded by bushes and far enough from the street that a cop passing by wouldn't spot two naked teenagers doing what teenagers have done, whenever the opportunity arose, for thousands of years. So, although we didn't stay late at the party, we didn't get home early.

I didn't wake up until almost nine that Sunday. When I'd gotten dressed and had something to eat, I went next door to see what Lynne was up to. Commencement activities had evidently tired her out, too; I found her finishing her breakfast. We hung out for about an hour, and then we decided that we'd better separate to get lunch with our respective parents and get ready for our respective family trips to Fort Collins. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Mom, Dad, and I arrived on the CSU campus at about two that afternoon. We'd already checked it out when I was applying for admission to several schools, but, now that I knew that this was where I was going, we spent a couple of hours walking around and investigating in a little more depth. So it was late afternoon when they took me to a street in the neighborhood just east of the campus.

"This is the place," Dad said as we got out of the car in front of a small, older, one-story house. "What do you think?"

I was astonished. "Dad!" I exclaimed. "You rented a whole house?"

"Well, not exactly," he answered as he let us in through the front door. "We're buying it. You're going to be here for four years, and we thought buying would be a better investment than renting would be."

The house was in surprisingly good shape for its age, I saw as we walked through it. There was a living room, a second front room that could be used as a study, a dining room, a bedroom, a bathroom that looked like it had been redone several years earlier, and a kitchen that had been remodeled recently. I was speechless.

"This seemed like just the place for you," Mom said, "You'll have to get some furniture, but finding some decent second-hand furniture shouldn't be a problem in a university town like this. Students are coming and going all the time." She smiled at me. "Maybe that can be your summer project. You can spend some of the money you won't be spending on rent!"

We were in the kitchen, looking out at the back yard and the garage (A garage!) when we heard someone letting themselves in through the front door. "I'll bet that's them," Dad said with a grin.

"Them?" I asked.

And then I heard someone say, "Mom! Dad! This is too much!"

It was Lynne's voice.

And Dennis' voice replied, "We didn't think so. It'll be a good place to put our money. Better than paying rent for the next four years."

To which Robin replied, "I think someone is already here. We can go ahead with the rest of the surprise."

And Lynne said, questioningly, "The rest of the surprise?"

We stepped into the living room, where the three of them were standing. When she saw us, Lynne's eyes opened wide in shock. She put her hand to her mouth and shrieked! She looked as though she was about to fall over. 

I felt pretty much like she looked. For a bit, I could do nothing but stare at four grinning parents and one very shaken girl. 

Finding some of her composure, Lynne started, "You mean…" And, unable to find words, she left the question hanging.

"Yes, that's what we mean!" Dad said. "You and Jason have been inseparable since you were three, and we don't see any reason the two of you should separate just because you're going to college!"

Having a bit of trouble with my voice, I stammered, "But… But… But…" I swallowed and got a grip on myself so that, at last, I got it out: "But there's only one bedroom!"

"Well, yes," Dennis said. "that could be a problem! But, you see, we know that you've already solved it!"

"We were a little bit worried," Robin said, "until last week."

"Yes," Mom added, "You didn't seem to have noticed that Lynne is a girl, Jason. And she didn't seem to have figured out that you're a boy!"

Dad said, "We were afraid that one of you might be gay!"

"Not that there's anything wrong with that," Dennis said. "But you two seemed so perfect for each other in every other way!"

"It would have been such a shame if that part hadn't worked out, too!" Robin contributed.

Still stunned, but beginning to recover, I asked, "Until last week?"

"Yes, last week," Mom said. "We had some suspicions for a week before that, but last week we knew!"

"After you two came home from your trip to see the dinosaur tracks, it was pretty clear that something was going on, " Robin said. "Neither of you was ever very forthcoming about what happened on that trip, but we could see that something had."

Mom added, "And whatever it was, we don't need to know the details. It seems to have been something that was good overall."

Lynne and I stared at each other, speechless, for a minute, while the 'rents looked on happily.

"Like I said a minute ago, you two have always been inseparable," Dad eventually observed. "But after you came back from that trip, something was different!"

"The way the two of you looked at each other," went on Robin, "the way you talked to each other, even the way you acted in each other's presence! All those things had changed. Julie and I could both see that Jason was acting a lot like he was suddenly thinking of Lynne as a girl!"

"And Lynne," Dennis added, "seemed to have noticed that Jason is a boy! She even started primping before she ran next door! I'd never seen her do that before!"

"So we were pretty sure! But Tuesday of last week confirmed it!" Robin pointed out. 

Lynne and I looked at each other in confusion. I didn't have a clue about what had happened that day, and she didn't seem to either.

Seeing our bafflement, Robin added. "We ran out of paper towels that afternoon."

That only confused us more.

"Dirty Gerty needed more paper towels than we had in the house," Dennis explained. "So she drove over to Rite-Aid to get some."

Suddenly, I knew what was coming. The expression on Lynne's face told me that she knew, too.

Dennis continued without a pause, "And as she looked for towels in the store, she saw someone, whose name we won't mention, standing in one of the aisles, looking at a couple of shelves full of a certain commodity—which we also won't need to mention. She watched from another aisle as this person chose a couple of items and paid for them at the pharmacy window." He looked directly at me, a dirty grin on his face.

I gulped. I knew who wasn't going to be named, what he'd been looking at, and exactly what he'd bought—even down to the brands. Not just my ears, but my whole head seemed about to burst into flame. I looked into Lynne's eyes. She gulped and looked back at me. The color of her face suggested that her head was about to burst into flame, too.

Robin picked up from there. "Dirty called me at work. For some reason, she thought I'd want to know about those purchases, and who made them. She seemed to think the incident might have some bearing on my daughter…"

"Actually," Dennis added, "she was right about that. It did have something to do with our daughter, but we didn't react quite the way Dirty Gertie thought we would! She thought she was ratting you out!"

"But we didn't see it the way she thought we would," Dad said. "What we saw was confirmation that a couple of bright teenagers had finally realized that a boy and a girl can be a lot more than 'just friends' to each other. And that they were protecting themselves! You made all four of us very happy! On both accounts."

"We are happy!" Robin said. "We're happy for both of you." Then, looking directly at me, she went on, "Jason, for most of the last 18 years you've meant nearly as much to us as Lynne does, and nothing could please us more than seeing the two of you come to love each other fully."

"We feel the same way about you, Lynne," Mom said. "That's why the four of us are buying this house for the two of you to share for the next four years. Two people who feel the way you two do about each other should live together."

Dennis, who was standing next to me, nudged me. "I think Lynne's looking a bit faint," he said. But there was an enigmatic smile on his face. I looked at Lynne. I could see that she was bewildered, but I didn't see any faintness. He went on, "If Robin looked like that, I'd revive her with a good healthy kiss!"

"Yes," Mom said. "I'd definitely say that's what she needs!"

Still bewildered, shaking her head, Lynne flowed into my arms. I held her and looked into her eyes. I could see that her composure was already improving. She returned my gaze and smiled up at me. "Yes, Nerd! That's what I need!" she said. "Kiss me!" Happily, she she threw her arms around my neck and reached for my lips.

I had just time to say, "Okay, Nerdette!" as I bent down to meet her halfway.

The End

* * * * * * * * * *

Comments are welcome. I will try to respond to non-anonymous comments.



Track Meet



Though I couldn't see her due to the scarf about my eyes; the thought of the closeness of her lips, her sweet mouth to my straining dick made me begin to beg. "Lick me please Cathy! Please do it. I'm about to erupt here... Mmmm PLEASE Girl?" 

The ice she then placed against my scrotum came as a shocking counter to the warm breath I had been enjoying; I yelped in surprise. But even before that sound had completely escaped me, I felt her hot tongue where the ice had been and heard her throaty chuckle. She laved at my sack for a time and then without warning reapplied the ice whilst scrupulously avoiding any attention to my swaying rod. This treatment continued; at one moment I'd enjoy her hot tongue licks and flicks on me, in the next it would be the bite of the ice on my sensitive sack. It felt as if bomb bursts were going off in my skull from the alternating sensations; my scrotum had drawn up tight from the cold and the need to cum. Then she changed up her tactics again and as she tongued my testicles, she also began to use her mouth more fully, kissing and sucking on them. Using her hand and what was left of the ice in it, she began to lightly stroke my shaft. The water of the melting ice mixed with my copious pre-cum and as it ran down to my balls, I could feel and hear Cathy lap it up. My impending orgasm was building again deep at the root of my genitals and my body was twisting dervish-like on the futon in its own unscripted dance. A near constant groan was all the vocalization I could manage, coherent words now being out of the question. I was going to cum and Cathy knew it, she had been very deliberate in bringing me there by learning my tune and then playing it; she was going to make me cum hard. The gathering energy felt like a bolt of lightning about to fly. 

Starting from my balls, Cathy zipped her tongue upwards along my shaft and gave the swollen head of my cock a quick swirling flourish. Then she opened her soft lips wide and dropped her hot and wet mouth onto my shaft; nearing the bottom she hesitated a moment, then I felt her lips meet my belly as she took me into her throat. Bobbing back upwards, she stopped and in rapid-fire, flicked her tongue all about the sweet spot just below the head of my cock. She must have felt the way I tensed up, and I involuntarily arched my back off the futon. Cathy slammed her mouth back down my length and took my balls into her hand, palming and squeezing them. That was it; emitting a loud bellow I began to erupt. It felt like my entire being was beginning to spasm in an effort to launch all the cum I ever would have out of my body. Cathy continued to coax my orgasm on by kneading my balls and swallowing my cum as it spilled out of me. 

I wish I could describe how it felt, but I don't really have the words. I knew Cathy was something unique when we met, but damn! I had never had an orgasm like that before, it was transcendent, the pleasure extending way past what I had been used to. I was already hoping that Cathy and I could spend a lot more time together, and was hoping she felt likewise. Well, too soon to worry about that. Those thoughts and many others raced through my head before they cleared and I regained some form of consciousness. It took about another five minutes before I could stop chuckling and was able to speak coherently again; I just felt that good. During that time, Cathy removed the blindfold and untied my arms which I then used to hug her to me. I kissed up her neck to her ear, nuzzling behind it and then gently began nibbling her ear lobe. 

I whispered, still somewhat breathlessly, "Cathy, that was so good, intense... I can't even believe it." 

She laughed at my momentary weariness. "Oh you'd better believe it, and had better believe in using this little cool-down I'm giving you to recover your hard on because I'm still horny; you've got more work to do!" 

"Oh! No doubt coach, no doubt," I answered laughingly. 

After languishing on the futon, snuggling and kissing for a time, Cathy went to the fridge and brought back a large glass of iced tea. 

"Gotta replace the fluids lost during a long run," she said with a wink. 

I sat up and she sat straddling my lap, her marvelous thighs bracketing my hips. We shared the tea and canoodled; then Cathy slid slightly to one side and began to suggestively rub her mound against my upper thigh and belly. As I put the iced tea aside she moved closer to bite and suck on my neck as she continued to hump on me; my cock took notice and began to spring back for duty. Cathy and I began to neck in earnest, our intensity level building again. Our hands were everywhere at once; our lips and tongues tasting and sucking at each other. Cathy reached down to take my erection in hand and rubbed it at her drenched entrance. She fitted my plumped mushroom head into her and slowly lowered herself on to me. The sensation of her hot tight canal yielding about me was extraordinary. We both moaned in satisfaction as I went deeper into her. I wrapped my arms around Cathy, pulling her to me as her body welcomed and engulfed me. As her head fell back in another long sigh, I nuzzled and sucked at her breasts. Our pelvises met and ground together strenuously in their primal need. Cathy's brown eyes locked with mine. 

"Hold still, hold still a moment," she breathlessly instructed me. 

Somehow I broke from the rhythm of our grinding and did as she asked. She began to tense and release her strong Kegal muscles; the feel of her sugar walls contracting and releasing around me was a subtle sensual treat. I pulled her head to mine, burying my face in her soft raven hair and grunting in my ecstasy. I took hold of her tight ass with both hands and stood up. She squealed and giggled as she tried to keep her balance. Locking her legs around me, we began to move against each other again. Her strong legs flexed to lift her upwards on my cock, then relaxed to let her weight move her back down on me. We kissed, we hugged and we fucked while giggling and stumbling about trying to keep our balance. Our acrobatics were awkward but fun and so very hot. It was another amazing moment in what was becoming a memorable series of them.

As our heat built, we became even more frenzied; after almost crashing to the floor more than once, Cathy popped off of me and took my hand. 

"C'mon over here," she said as she stepped outside onto the balcony. 

From the ground level I was pretty sure that no one was going to see us. But any in the buildings across the boulevard were sure to get a surprise if they happened to look out towards us. Cathy took a seat cushion off one of the lawn chairs and tossed it on top of her picnic table. She lay back on it drawing her legs up and back; using the fingers of one hand she spread her coral and pink flower open to beckon me to her. For a moment I was motionless as the thought of the good fortune and the good feelings I was having washed over me. The sultry heat of the day and the sunlight causing Cathy's athletic body to glow added to the moment, made it near intoxicating to me. 

"Get over here already," she told me waving her lower legs up and down in a mock tantrum.

"Where? Here?" I asked as I moved to her and slid fully into her still amply lubricated vagina. 

"Ummm Yesss!" she said throatily as I sheathed myself in her. 

I began to slowly stroke in and out; reaching down and softly massaging her clit with my thumb and fingers as I did. She rested her ankles on my shoulders, and one of her hands joined mine at her mound to help me play her just right. Her other hand, much to my visual pleasure, began to tug and toy with her nipples. I began to tease her with my cock, pulling completely out and hesitating before moving back into her with several quick staccato strokes. My position standing before her reclining form afforded me a perfect view of my shaft pistoning in and out of her welcoming pussy whilst our fingers busily flicked and rubbed at her swollen clit. My seeing, hearing, and feeling her responses to our union was becoming overwhelming and I wanted it to be the same for Cathy. I strained against the quickly growing need to cum again; I wanted this to last as long as possible and have both of us savor explosive orgasms. 

After a few minutes of our coupling, Cathy moved her legs down to around my waist. I bent over her and our lips met to kiss as the pace of our fucking increased; we began to ride together much harder and faster. A part of my consciousness was concerned that it was too hard, another part of it, well frankly that part didn't care, that part was a madman on an endorphin high at how incredible this woman made him feel. But to be sure, it was noted that Cathy's moans and sweet cries spoke of pleasure, not pain.

"Let me on top, I want to ride you... I want to fuck you now!" she cried out. 

We quickly swapped places. Before I was even seated on the edge of the table she was climbing astride me, sliding back down on my cock. Pulling her tight to me, I planted kisses on her face, neck, and tits. Her hips danced energetically over mine, moving fast and hard, causing us both to make sounds out of our control. As she rode downwards I would slam my hips up to meet her, our bodies audibly slapping together. I grabbed her ass, molding her cheeks with my fingers; sliding a finger into the soft crevice between them. I found her puckered rear hole and began to tease and probe at it as we continued to move against one another feverishly. 

Cathy bit and sucked on my neck, quite hard, and that muffled what would have been quite a loud moan from her. My orgasm slammed into me; my grunts signaling it to Cathy. She jammed her pelvis into mine one more time, grinding our sexes together and pushing herself over that edge again. As the pulsing of my ejaculation lessened in intensity, I could feel the strong contractions of her pussy as she was cumming, my cock being squeezed in a most delicious manner. A long sweet low sigh escaped from her as her head dropped onto my shoulder. With her body snug against mine, I could feel all of her tension being jettisoned away; it felt as if we were melting together.

Then, easy kisses, easy touches, easy and quiet words as we rested together. The smiles were inerasable as we felt the natural high that accompanies perfect moments and especially, perfect beginnings.