Storiesonline.net
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                           The Perfect Visitor
                               by Lubrican

Copyright© 2011 by Lubrican


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Description: I was retired. My ex wife hardly ever bothered me. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. Life was good. Then I got a call from my ex-wife's niece, asking if she could come visit for a week. I hadn't actually ever met her. But I had the room. She needed a place to crash while she did something or other. It wouldn't intrude on my life that much. And it was hard to say no. After all, she WAS family of a sort. And she WAS just a visitor.

Codes: MF rom inc oral
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Foreword


Foreword by Lubrican

This book, statistically, is the 200th story or book I have written and posted for the world to see. That being a milestone of sorts, I wrote this one to be number 200, for a specific reason.

Along in 2007, after I had been writing and posting for a couple of years, I got some feedback from a female reader. I always perk up a little bit when the feedback is from an alleged female. I'm a guy, and guys like it when women pay attention to them. She basically told me that "The Last Wish Blues" was the first story she'd read, in which a teenaged girl got pregnant, that she felt anywhere near good about. She also said she'd gotten pregnant as a teenager, and it hadn't been a happy thing.

We exchanged a few emails, and then a few more, until we evolved into chatting on line. She was intelligent, funny, and critical of my writing in helpful ways. She made it quite clear that there were only a limited number of my stories that she liked, and that some of them she had never read because the teaser and codes convinced her she would not be interested in them. We got to know each other better, and I found out she was a web developer. She had read stories at my website, which I had painstakingly created from self-taught mistakes and corrections. I was proud of it. It was colorful, easy to read, and easy to navigate. She thought it was garish, clumsy and amateur in appearance.

Some men would have (and probably do) labled her picky and opinionated. Call me a closet masochist, but I was smitten. It isn't often I talk to a human being who is blatantly truthful about what she thinks ... and still likes me.

She said she couldn't stand my website, and offered to come up with something simple and elegant to take its place. I wanted to resist, but couldn't, because she already had me wrapped around her little finger. It was good I didn't. The site she built for me is far superior. I couldn't pay her for her work, though, so I wrote her a story instead. It was a story about one of my fantasies about her. She was in the neighborhood of 25 at the time, which would have put me in my very late fifties. Most women would have laughed, called me a dreamer and quite possibly a pervert, and never written to me again.

She was kinder than that.

In fact, she offered to edit the story I'd written for her, since it was chock full of errors, distractions and mistakes.

So I let her do that, even though I didn't want to work with an editor. These little things were my inventions, and editors, in my experience, tried to change too much.

But I was impressed with the results. Everything she changed needed to be changed. Everything she corrected needed to be corrected. The distractions were gone, and now the story read smoothly. It was sweet. She was sweet. I started calling her Peaches. She started calling me Gramps.

I am not a stupid man. I recognized a good thing when I saw it, and I'm not talking about the flirting we did. So I asked her to edit the next story ... and the one after that, and the one after that, which included some long stories. And since I still couldn't pay her anything, I wrote her another story, and then a few more after that, including one that was HER fantasy and which, regrettably, did not include me. But that was okay. At one point, though, she began getting more work, which meant she had less time to edit for me, and I was writing things that didn't interest her anyway, so I gave her a break.

All this is so the reader will understand that, over the last three years, this woman has had a tremendous impact on my writing and my life. I know that my fantasies about her will never come true. I still wish we lived next door to each other, though, because she has become one of my best friends, and I love her like that.

So I wrote story number 200 to be about her. And me. It is as close to being autobiographical as I've ever written, in terms of what she and I are really like, in real life. The fantasy overlays that, but the curmudgeon you will be introduced to is pretty much me, and the quirky, off beat woman you will meet is pretty much like her. There are a few differences, of course. The plot required that both of us do things we wouldn't normally do. But if you ever wished you could sit and drink a beer with either of us, this will be pretty close to what that could be like.

So this one is for Peaches. She has been special in my life. I hope I get to know her for a long, long time. I always assumed I'd smoke and drink myself to death by the time I was sixty-five, and that was fine with me, back then.

But the chance to hang out with Peaches has changed all that. I'm willing to push it to seventy-five now, and do what it takes to get there.

That is how special she is to me.

Bob

PS: She edited this story, and it being a special story and all, I asked her to write a foreword too. She resisted, but caved, eventually. That's the next thing you'll read.

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Foreword by Peaches

For some reason, Gramps thought it would be a good idea to ask me to write a foreword for this little tale as well. A possible sign that he's lost his mind once and for all. It's safe to say that it's been addled by old age, at the least.

He is almost entirely full of shit (you didn't notice?) and seemingly incapable of actually remembering the real story of how our relationship began and progressed, beyond that one remark I made about The Last Wish Blues. The story is different every time he tells it. But I tend to enjoy his versions of events, even when they're vastly inaccurate, so I choose not to correct him now. I already feel like I'm under enough pressure--because this is my first time actually 'talking' to most of you--without trying to relate to you how exactly it is that I became this muleheaded man's editor.

I asked him what I should write for this thing, and the only advice he had to offer was "Just write about me." That's super helpful, Gramps. And because he wasn't specific, I take that to mean I can just type out whatever pops into my head.

I can hear him in my headphones right now, and he just made a remark about me being a dirty girl (after I said I needed to wash my face, which I swear I don't do nearly as often as he makes out in this story). Can you believe how this guy talks to me? The nerve. And he's breathing heavily. Typical.

My favorite thing about when Gramps starts telling stories about me is when he references his old website. He just makes it sound like I stomped all over his delicate little feelings when I offered to build him a new one. I like to think I was a little more subtle about it, but I know me, and I do tend to be pretty blunt (tactless) about many things. But seriously, did you see what it used to look like? Every single page had a different tiled background image behind the text, and one or the other was usually neon-colored. Like this:



It's probably best not to reopen that wound by saying what I thought of it again. He's very sensitive, you know.

And now he's telling me that I should try to work in something about why this story is special to me. That's easy. It's special because it's ABOUT ME. And all of my favorite stories of his are the ones about me. Shocking, isn't it? This one was actually my idea as well, which naturally makes it about a million times better. He does his best work when he's doing it with me. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

I really don't know where to go with this. As I already told him, it's not my job to do the writing, it's my job to do the editing. And I promise I will be back in the swing of that in 2011. Unless he continues to write crap that he knows I don't want to read, where icky things are happening, like older women banging younger men. I just can't be doing with that nonsense. I'm strictly a fan of dirty old men. And word is, they LOVE me.



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Chapter 1


I grew up in the fifties and sixties, which is why I believe I have such an independent spirit. I'm sure there are those who would argue with me—my ex-wife would have been one of them. She always said I was an antisocial, cranky, irascible bullshitter. In reality, I'm a really sweet guy who cares about people. Well, I care about the ones worth caring about. My motto is live and let live. If those who can't abide minding their own business like that were gassed, the world would be a better place.

I heard a few assholes slam shut just then, as some of you bleeding hearts out there thought, 'Oh, he's just another prick who thinks his opinions count more than mine, and who doesn't celebrate all life, like I do.' Well, here's what I have to say to you: You're sanctimonious shitheads with no sense of survival or the natural order of things. And you're fucking up the planet.

See? I'm not irascible or cranky. I just tell it like it is.

Now that the airheads and what, in the good old days, would have been called pinko commie fags have gone off in a huff the rest of us can get on with the story, which is about reality and survival--things genuine human beings have to come to grips with daily. I went to the school of hard knocks, and learned a few things. But you don't have to go through the same class; what I learned, I'll tell a few potential friends for free.

See there? I'm not even antisocial.

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One of three kids, I had a brother four years older than me and a sister four years younger. Dale, the eldest, joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. He came back in a body bag, and it tore my mother up to the point that it pretty well unhinged her. That affected the way she tried to raise the rest of us, particularly Wanda. I think maybe she tried to make sure Wanda wouldn't choose a man like Dale, whom she felt had punished her by dying thoughtlessly. I thought that was pretty stupid, but then most kids think their parents are stupid.

Wanda went with a guy named Phil all through high school, then dumped him when he announced he was going to be a firefighter. Mom said that firefighting was dangerous, and anybody who did that should have the common decency not to get married. So, Wanda ended up with another guy named Phil (it's a common name), who couldn't have been more different. He's a psychologist now, and he can't help but practice his profession, no matter where he is or what he's doing. I think it's kind of interesting that doctors and lawyers all "practice" their professions. Maybe it's because they keep getting it wrong.

Anyway, even though I'm not the psychologist, I'd decided that Mom probably had a mental illness brought on by the death of her older son. So I pretty much ignored her, and her advice ... with the exception of the girl I picked to marry.

I should have been consistent.

I was dating two girls, and Mom said that Sherry was the practical one. So I married Sherry and as the years went on, she became a vegetarian (because cows have feelings) and joined Save The Whales (because whales have feelings), sending political contributions (of my money) to candidates who wanted to set limits on whaling. Stuff like that. I mean nothing has feelings after it's dead, so for me the only issue is: was it a clean kill? And if you want to save the whales, then stop people from killing them. You don't ask somebody to stop killing them and you don't suggest that they stop killing them. You say, "Look, the whales are my friends, and if you kill any more of my friends, I'm going to sink every fucking whaling ship I see on the seven seas. Got it?"

Of course that will never happen because of politics. Politics is why the human race will eventually go extinct. We didn't evolve any politicians for three hundred thousand years, which means for three hundred thousand years we were doing just fine ... getting better even. And then some motherfucker who didn't want to do any of the hard work decided he needed to be the first politician, so he could make decisions on behalf of everybody else, so they could keep doing all the hard work. And nobody saw the danger until it was too late and the politicians had passed some laws against killing them off.

But I digress. The point of this story is to share with you good folks what I learned from the marriage.

I'm big on vows and promises and all that kind of thing. A man's word is his bond. So when I said, "I do," I meant it. Sherry, apparently, thought it was negotiable. I didn't care what she believed or who she supported politically, but when she started giving me ultimatums, requiring me to support those beliefs, things got rocky. I had joined the Army three years after we got married, at which time she didn't say a word. Then, ten years into things, she got the equivalent of religion for an Atheist Liberal and demanded that I get out and get a real job that didn't involve murdering innocent civilians who just happened to be sheltering, feeding and arming the enemy. I think some of her new liberal friends were telling her I was a baby killer. It wouldn't surprise me.

So when I said I was going to finish the twenty years, she divorced me.

If I'd ignored my mother on who to marry, like I did on everything else, I'd probably be growing old with a good woman.

Sherry was married again within six months, which told me a lot. I wasn't. In fact, I didn't even go on a date for five years after the divorce. I had a hot little fling with a coworker, but office romances are a bad idea, so we called it off. Then she got transferred, and the temptation was gone.

Sherry was a sad case, and I didn't actually miss her all that much after a while. What I missed was her family, who I liked a lot. Her mother was a normal mother, and I liked her sister Debby a lot. I still get Christmas cards and the family newsletter from Debby every year, and Sherry's been gone for fifteen now.

Patience is rewarded. So those of you who have been patient long enough to get to this point will be rewarded, because, now that you have enough background, this is where the story actually begins. This story is about what I learned when Debby's daughter called me one day and asked if she could come stay with me for a week.

Actually, to give Debby a nod, it's about what I learned while Anna, my niece, was staying with me. Debby is an editor, and she can nitpick a man to death. She would be most happy to point out that I didn't learn these things when Anna called me, which is what she'd say that last paragraph implied. I like her, but she can drive me crazy sometimes.

Anyway, there I was enjoying my retirement, contemplating playing a round of golf, when the phone rang. I still use a rotary phone. My fingers are big and those itsy bitsy Dick Tracy phones nickel and dime you to death anyway, so I never got one. I picked up my heavy, substantial receiver, capable of being turned into a weapon upon need, and answered it in my usual crystal clear manner: "This is Bob. What the fuck do you want?"

"That's just rude!" came a sweet sounding female voice on the other end.

Because I had been without sex for a long time, I moderated my response to that, which would normally have been something like, "Why is it rude for me to ask what the fuck you want when you're the one who interrupted my day by calling?"

But before I tell you what I actually said to her next, let's just examine that last sentence a bit. Call it a nod to Debby, the editor. A lot of people would cringe if you said something like that in public. Why? It's just the truth. Wanda, and certainly Phil, would suggest that it's uncouth, impolite and crude to say things like that. And yet, they would say that if I altered my response based on my libido that would be even worse. Where the fuck did that come from? Sex makes the world go round. It's a biological fact. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be overpopulated like a motherfucker. In fact, the world is full of motherfuckers, which is how they get to be mothers in the first place. And the fact is that when I heard that voice I thought of a pretty girl who I might be more than willing to bed.

Now if she'd have announced that she was Mother Theresa, I'd have started thinking in different ways, out of respect for a woman who deserves respect for sacrificing her own pleasures for the benefit of others. It could be argued she was misguided, but the fact is that she had moxie and was twice the woman Raquel Welch, or Jane Fonda, or any other movie star you can think of was. Mother Theresa actually made some of the world a better place, even if other people kept fucking it back up again.

The point is, that's how men think, whether they want to admit it in public or not. We're wired to think that way by Mother Nature. So don't yell at me for being normal, okay?

I responded to this sweet young voice thusly: "You called me; I didn't ask you to call. You're interrupting my peaceful day and asking me to spend my precious time on you. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask you what you want in terms that might create a sense of urgency and brevity."

There was silence on the other end, which made me pretty sure it wasn't a telemarketer. They have a programmed and scripted answer for every eventuality, including "Goodbye!"

"I want to come stay with you for a week," was the urgent and brief reply.

"Really?" I was actually interested. Who on Earth—who sounded like that—would want to come stay with me?

"Really."

I had to give it to her, she took the brevity thing to heart.

"In that case, when should I expect you?" I asked.

"Don't you want to know who this is?" Her voice took on a tinge of uncertainty.

"Sweet thing, if you look anything like you sound I'll be ecstatic to see you, regardless of who you are."

"Oh." Now her voice sounded a little worried.

"Don't sweat it," I said. "I'm actually harmless."

"That's not what Mom says about you."

That kind of comment might worry some men, men who play around and take the biological imperative to its original levels, scattering their seed as widely as possible. That only works when there are too many women and not enough men. Once a cultural population stabilizes, that kind of thing becomes more negative than positive, culturally speaking. I mean the urge to be the alpha male is still there, but it can be controlled for the good of your future. It was one of the hardest lessons humans learned. Alpha males always die. Always. And they die a lot sooner than the Beta males.

"Well, if your mother told you I'm your father, she is sadly mistaken," I said. "I never strayed once in the ten years I was unlucky enough to be married."

"What about since then?" she asked.

Now that was interesting. This girl had moxy. She also recovered quickly. The male in me was still interested.

"Women don't seem to respond to my sterling qualities, perhaps because they refuse to look beneath my admittedly crusty and abusive exterior. I haven't had sex in over five years. You sound a bit older than that," I said. "Fifteen at the most, but still too old."

"I'm twenty-six," she said.

"Definitely not my daughter," I said.

"You have a daughter," she came back.

"Oh come on," I said. "You think I wouldn't recognize my own daughter's voice?"

"And you have two sons," she said. "Aren't you interested in how I know that?"

"It's not exactly top secret information," I said. "Now, are you going to come stay with me or not? It's a beautiful day and the golf course awaits."

"It will just be for a week," she said. "I need to spend some time at the court house."

"Are you a felon, going on trial?" I asked bluntly.

"Shouldn't that be alleged felon?" she asked.

"Technically I suppose it should be accused felon," I admitted. "But I can tell you right now, if you're all about being politically correct you're not going to enjoy staying with me."

"I'm not all about being politically correct," she said firmly.

"Well then we'll get along splendidly, especially if your physical appearance is as delectable as your voice."

"Perhaps it would be of value to you to know who this is," she said, a bit of a chill in her voice.

"Well it's pretty obvious that's important to you, so fire away," I said.

"It's Anna."

It didn't click. And I was in high-having-fun-flirting mode. Not that it's fun for the female I'm flirting with, but it's fun for me. I don't mind admitting it. The girls get to say no, so I feel like it's my right to at least give it a try.

"I'm happy for you, Anna," I said. "Are you going to stay in my room, or the guest room?"

"Anna," she said again. "Your niece? You used to be married to my mother's sister? Debby's daughter?"

Talk about tossing cold water on a poor old man's warm dream. I hadn't actually ever met Anna. She was born in '84, the year I got stationed in Korea, and two years after Sherry left me. I'd only seen a few pictures of her over the years, enclosed in Christmas cards. Was Debby still my sister-in-law? Had the divorce broken that semi-legal bond too?

The last picture I'd seen of her, if I was remembering correctly, was the eleven or twelve-year-old Anna, who looked bright and inquisitive and had a beautiful smile. She'd looked to be at that very awkward stage of life where she was so obviously female, but didn't really know what that meant yet. Some girls at that age are like a chrysalis, with a gorgeous butterfly inside. If you have enough experience you can tell what kind of butterfly she's likely to come out as, and you can appreciate the beauty of that butterfly, even though it isn't actually formed yet. I remembered thinking she was going to be a heartbreaker some day.

"All right then," I said quietly. "I'll get the guest room ready."

"Thank you," she said, her voice cool. Then, with more warmth, "I mean that. This will save me a lot of money."

"You're not in trouble, are you?" I asked, remembering her comment about the court house.

"No, it's nothing like that. I'll explain it when I get there. That will be Tuesday. Is that okay?"

That gave me two days to spruce things up. Not that I'd scrub the place down or anything, but at least I could police up the dirty clothes and dishes and clean the counter. Basic sanitation is generally a good idea.

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On Tuesday, around eleven, I heard a car pull into the driveway and glanced out to see a seven or eight-year-old Malibu come to a stop. The curtains prevented me from seeing the driver, but I'd see her soon enough. I looked around the house again. All my porn was policed up. At least all I could find, which had turned out to be a significant amount of the stuff. Since I had taken up writing porn in my retirement, you'd think I wouldn't have so much of other people's stuff lying around. Most people are convinced that what they do is the cream of the crop, but I know better. There are a lot of people out there, both male and female, who write stuff as good as or better than I do. I just do it for fun, and to get off now and then. Anyway, I doubted little Anna would appreciate pictures of naked women in garter belts, stockings and six inch fuck-me heels lying around, so I picked them up.

The doorbell rang.

I opened the door, trying to put a smile on my face. It had been a long time since I'd tried to be pleasant, but I thought I was up to it.

I might have slipped just a little on the welcoming face, though.

What stood in front of me was female, there was no doubt about that. It was dressed in jeans with silver studs decorating them. The denim was worn in many places, clear through in a few. Above them was a T-shirt emblazoned with the words SQUEEZE FOR GOOD LUCK across respectable swells. On her feet were bright pink Converse All Stars.

But I noticed all that later. What took in my full attention upon opening the door was from the neck up. There was a shock of hair so pink it hurt my eyes. It turned out to be the same shade as her shoes. The hair looked lopsided, like it had slid over her scalp. On the right side it covered the whole side of her face, including her eye, while on the left there was bare skin from her neck all the way up past the top of her ear. That startlingly pink hair began there in a line that went up and over her head like a waterfall. It looked like half of a mohawk, except it wasn't standing up on top of her head. The edge of the bare ear glistened with metal that had been driven through the cartilage.

I looked down to her feet and back up. Somewhere in the dim reaches of my mind, the caveman that lived there said, "Yummmm?" Even the caveman wasn't sure ... and the caveman would settle for just about anything.

My eyes came to rest on the face, or more correctly, a little more than half the face. A single eye peered at me. It was swirling with colors, from brown to green to blue, an almost hypnotic effect. While the rest of her might be from a carnival side show, that eye was worth staring into. The nose, slightly bent, as if broken at one point and having healed badly, was above lush lips that were parted enough to show brilliant white, if slightly crooked teeth. They weren't hag crooked ... just not perfect teeth. The skin of that face was both perfect and unadorned by anything God hadn't given her at birth.

All in all, I got the impression she was Goth, but had lost her makeup kit.

"I give at the office, I found Jesus decades ago, and I love my vacuum cleaner," I said.

"How nice for you," said the voice of the fifteen-year-old who wasn't standing at my doorstep. "I'm Anna."

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I hadn't learned anything yet, except that she wasn't what I expected. Any sane man would know she wouldn't be that cute little ten-year-old I remembered, but give a guy a break, here.

"Sadly, I didn't get a chance to observe your development," I said. "If I had been able to do that I might have recognized you."

"So do I get to come in ... or is there something about me you haven't ogled?" she asked.

Ogled? I hadn't ogled her. I just looked. Who could help it?

"You don't gussy yourself up like that so people will look somewhere else," I suggested. "Where am I supposed to look when someone like you sashays up to my door?"

Now, I wasn't being flip or sarcastic. I mean that's why these people get themselves up like that. They want attention, right? I mean it's obvious. Why else would you dye your hair pussy pink? It's not like you stand around looking at yourself all day. Other people do, but not you. And you also don't dye your hair pussy pink and then expect people not to notice it. I wondered what her psychosis was. Debby seemed completely normal while I knew her. I couldn't imagine her being a bad mom. Debby was one of the few people I knew who actually improved on the air she breathed, instead of possibly wasting it.

That hair assaulted my eyes again, and I suddenly wondered if there was any other hair on her body that was dyed pussy pink. Then I remembered she was my niece and put that out of my mind.

"Mom always said you were cool," she said, sounding slightly annoyed, and making it clear that her mother had obviously been wrong.

"And she always told me you were doing fine and she was proud of you," I countered, communicating the same concept.

"I am doing fine," she said.

"In that case, I have a couple of friends on the local police force, I can call one of them if you want to report the assault."

"What assault?" she asked.

"The assault in which some clown dumped dye on your head and tried to kill you with lawn clippers," I said.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to be mean. But if you go that far away from the norm, you're obliged to be willing to take the heat. That's my motto. I was willing to take the heat for anything I did, normal or not. I'm big on personal responsibility. I had twenty years experience in enforcing it too.

"That's not what happened and you know it," she said darkly.

"Then the sorority sisters who hazed you should be thrown out of school and the sorority punished. There's no call for that kind of abuse."

"I bet you think you're funny," she said, looking me straight in the eye. "I did this myself and I like the way I look," she said. "Besides, it's none of your business, now is it?"

"It will be my business when the neighbors want to know why I have invited a psychotic drug addict, who is probably some Hell's Angel's backseat driver, into the neighborhood."

"Is that what you think I am?" she asked, her voice suddenly cool.

"Not really," I said. "But the neighbors will. And they'll be all nervous and antsy about you, and watch this place like a hawk, and I won't be able to go out and get the paper naked anymore."

Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. She recovered pretty quickly though, and those lush pixie lips turned up at the corners.

"You're teasing me," she accused.

I really didn't want to hurt her feelings. I mean she was kin, after all ... sort of. And Debby would be unhappy with me if I made her baby cry. Even if her baby was over a quarter of a century old and should know better than to alienate the eighty percent of humanity that was possibly worth leaving alive.

"I don't mean anything by it," I said. That wasn't true. I meant everything I had thought. But I'd learned to lie convincingly a long time ago. It's a valuable skill. I even went the extra mile. "Welcome to your temporary home away from home." I stood back.

She didn't just step into the house, though. She stopped along the way and gave me a hug.

You know those air kisses that silly people exchange? They have air hugs, too, where the only thing that touches each other are fingertips on the shoulders. For some reason they "hug" both sides of the body, just like they "kiss" both cheeks. It looks like an inane and meaningless dance of some sort, even when done between members of the opposite sex.

This wasn't one of those. She actually hugged me.

"Thank you," she said in that fifteen-year-old voice. "This is from my mom." Then she let go of me and started looking over the house.

I looked over her backside as that amazing head swiveled. There was a hole in the back of her exceptionally well-packed jeans, just below the right rear pocket. That hole was maybe an inch and a half in diameter, and skin showed through where panties should have. Unless she was wearing a thong. I only had real experience with one woman's underwear, and none of it had come anywhere close to being a thong.

She bent over to set down the small bag I hadn't even realized she had carried from the car and the T-shirt rose, exposing tattooed skin. I couldn't tell what it was, but it didn't appear to be a tramp stamp. It was part of a picture, rather than merely a design, and only black ink showed. It had been there for a while too, I could tell. Then she stood and it was gone. She started to turn and I looked away so she wouldn't catch me ogling her bubble butt.

"It's not what I expected," she said. "I thought it would look like a bachelor pad."

I didn't tell her she looked different than I expected her to, too.

I was about to give her my opinion of the dangers of stereotyping, when a bolt of blinding clarity highlighted the fact that I had been stereotyping her since I first laid eyes on her. It was a problem I'd developed while I was in the Army. I had met basically two types of people there. One was strack troops and family members who behaved themselves. The other was my customers ... those who didn't care what happened to others, took what they wanted by stealth or force, or had no conscience. They really were only about a percent or two of the population, but after arresting and investigating them for twenty years, and then testifying to send them to Leavenworth, one had a tendency to project a lot of their attributes onto more than one or two percent of the population. I was paid to be suspicious, but not of everybody. It was something I'd had to work hard to overcome, and one of the first things Anna taught me was that I hadn't completely overcome it yet. I needed to give her the benefit of the doubt.

"You have more in the car?" I asked. "I'll go get it."

"Do you read minds?" she asked, completing her turn. "I'll go with you."

Like a woman, she had brought way too much if she was only staying for a week. Unlike a woman, she didn't stand there helplessly and make the man tote and carry. She lifted what looked like the limit she could carry and staggered towards the house. During that process, I got to see another tat. It was a vivid Rolling Stone tongue on the inside of her right wrist. I admit I wondered what that wrist, and the tat, might taste like. Blame it on the tongue. By the time I got my load in she had already sniffed out the guest room. Hell, for all I know she was still a little worried that I might take her to my room.

I don't know about most men, but when my wife left and created all that extra space, I managed to fill it up with other stuff. In my case it was souvenirs of foreign lands, and old uniforms and equipment. I had clothes that didn't fit me anymore, and a ton of papers I kept just in case I decided to teach law enforcement at the local college.

So when I found out I'd have a visitor I'd boxed up some stuff to make room for Anna to store some things. It was only temporary, so I made her about as much room as the average motel would provide. I left her to see to her stuff and went to the kitchen to rustle us up some lunch.

When you've spent twenty years in the Army, assuming you're married the whole time, it actually equates to being away from your family and home for an average of eight years. That consists of overseas unaccompanied tours, schools and TDY (temporary duty away from your permanent duty station). I'd been in seventeen countries and had to fend for myself during those eight years. What that meant was that I could eat just about anything ... and would. Of course when you're cooking for someone else, especially a young woman for whom, as far as I knew, sushi was an exotic dish, you don't go for the roasted Australian grub, or monkey brains, or even skunk or rattlesnake.

I fixed us mac and cheese, with celery loaded down with peanut butter and raisins. I also stirred up a pitcher of pink lemonade. I set it out on the table and waited.

She wandered in about ten minutes later.

"All the drawers and closets are already full of stuff," she said.

"Actually, I cleaned out two drawers and a quarter of one closet," I said.

"And that took care of about half my things," she informed me.

"Be right there," I said.

"And do you have a broom? There are dust bunnies everywhere."

"A man has to have pets," I growled. But I got her the broom and dust pan. I wondered if she'd dust off the dust pan first. It was pretty dusty already.

I found some more boxes and cleaned out two more drawers. I just moved two handfuls of hanging clothes to my own closet.

"You have a lot of stuff," she commented.

"This is America, I'm allowed," I said.

"I just don't understand why guys want to collect so much junk."

"It's for the same reason a man buys a roll of duct tape, thinking it would be a great thing to gag a noisy woman with. It just seems like a good idea at the time," I said.

"Do you want me to leave?" she asked, getting upset. "Because I'll be happy to leave, if that's what you want. All I was trying to do was save some money. I'm not rich and I just thought..." She didn't finish. Thank God she didn't cry. Crying women are one of my weak points.

"Hey," I said, reaching out to touch her elbow. "Ignore me most of the time. It's been a long time since I was civil to anybody, and even longer since I had family around. I'm just not used to it yet."

"I'll leave if you want me to," she said again. I thought that was interesting, because her body was poised to fight, not flee.

"I don't want you to leave," I said. "I've been looking forward to having you here. You just can't tell it because I'm a cranky, irascible old man."

"You can say that again," she mumbled.

"What?" I cupped an ear, deciding to test her. "Frequent gunfire has taken its toll on my hearing, but it isn't too bad as long as people speak clearly," I said.

"If you're sure it's all right," she said, clearly.

I grinned. She'd handled her embarrassment well.

What was more interesting was that she still wanted to stay.



-------

Chapter 2

"Thirty seconds in the microwave and it will be fine," I said, reaching for her plate of congealed mac and cheese.

She ate like foreigners usually eat when they come to America—slowly and carefully, as though what they're eating might explode at any second. She didn't look like a carnivore, but I reminded myself that I'd already stereotyped her once, and she'd probably make her wishes known. If not, she'd eat what I served her or nothing at all.

"So, tell me about what happened all those years I didn't get to watch you grow up," I suggested.

She took a tiny bite. She actually bit a single macaroni elbow in half and chewed thoughtfully.

"I don't know. I read a lot, and went roller skating and rode my bike a lot. I went to high school and graduated. I couldn't afford to go to college, and I met this guy and did stupid things and had a little boy. He's six now, and will start second grade this fall. His name is Spencer. That's pretty much it."

"Hmmm," I said. "Twenty-six years summed up in seven sentences. I was hoping for a bit more detail."

"My life has been boring," she said. She started picking the raisins off of the ants-on-a-log and putting them on the edge of her plate. I reached for them and popped them in my mouth. "Sorry," she said. "I don't like raisins."

"Everyone has a flaw or two," I said. "Not liking raisins is a pretty harmless one."

"It's not a flaw, I just don't like them."

"Anna, dear, if you keep getting upset at the things I say, you're going to spend a lot of your time here upset, and that could make you break out and destroy that glorious skin on your face. We wouldn't want that, now would we?"

"You could just not talk," she suggested, deadpan. I honestly didn't know if she was joking or not.

"Never happen," I said. "Besides, I suspect most men babble around you."

"No they don't," she said.

I sighed. "Do you ever agree with anybody?"

"When they say something that makes sense ... yes, I do."

It was beginning to appear as though this completely unconventional, wild and crazy, throw-her-differences-in-your-face woman wasn't as unconventional or wild and crazy as she looked.

I decided this might be an interesting visit after all.

-------

"So, you're divorced," I said.

We were sitting in the living room. There was still a sense of strain in our budding relationship.

"I didn't say that," she said, looking at me out of that one exposed eye. I thought of sheep dogs.

I let my eyes drift to take in her whole body. She was sitting in an overstuffed chair, leaning on one arm with her legs drawn up under her. It was a singularly feminine position. I could see her nipples pushing through the T-shirt.

"You said you made mistakes and had Spencer," I said. "Perhaps I jumped to a conclusion."

"Perhaps," she said. I was astonished that she'd actually agreed with something I had said. "I'm not the marrying kind," she added.

"I see."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"I understand. You're not the marrying kind," I said.

"Do you have any alcohol?" she asked.

I was a little taken aback at the sudden subject change. "Not at the moment," I said. "Should I get some?"

"No," she said. "I don't drink. Well, not usually. I like some ales and flavored beers. And I get wasted once in a while, but I usually wish I hadn't."

"So you were thinking about getting wasted, but now you can't, and that's a good thing," I said.

"Something like that," she said.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"I told you," she said, looking up at me. "It will save me some money."

"I mean why did you need to come here in the first place?" I asked.

"Oh that," she said. "I got interested in genealogy, and Mom didn't know a whole lot, except that her side of the family was here for a long time, and came here from Pennsylvania. I did some research online about exposing one's roots and one of the recommendations was to go through old property and marriage records at what's called a nexus. This is a nexus for our family. The idea is that the records sometimes contain information that can lead you backwards to another nexus, and on and on."

"Really," I said, grinning.

"Yes, really," she said. "Why are you smiling? Do you think that's funny?"

"Not at all," I said. "I just think it's interesting. While I was in the Army I did something like that. Whenever I was overseas, I tried to find evidence of our ancestors. I'm pretty sure I hit pay dirt in Germany, but I've never had the time to make the bridge between here and there."

"You're kidding!" she said, leaning forward.

"Not at all. Some of it is on Sherry's side—your side—of the family. Want to see my notebooks?"

"Of course I do!" she yipped, unfolding her legs and jumping to her feet.

"Attic," I said. "Follow me."

It was late afternoon by then, in July, and the attic was an oven. I'd insulated below there, but I hadn't gone to the trouble of insulating the roof itself. I was sweating freely within fifteen seconds of climbing through the trap door. Anna followed and exclaimed about the heat. The box containing my genealogy notebooks was on the bottom of a stack, of course, and dust flew as I moved the other boxes rapidly. She sneezed as I unfolded the lid of the genealogy box and peered inside. My genealogical research had always been a hobby at best, and a low priority one at that. When I got into it I did as much as I could. When a vein of information was mined out I usually lost interest for a while. I grabbed the three spiral bound notebooks and turned around.

Anna was fanning herself with her T shirt, held at the waist. She had raised it high enough that I could see the undersides of her naked breasts as she moved the material. I stopped and stared. The tantalizing edges of her breast flesh, above a flat, slim belly and the beginnings of the swell of her hips, were also singularly female in appearance. It wasn't at odds with her "look" necessarily. It was just that what she showed the world on the outside tended to distract the viewer from the fact that she had all the parts of an attractive woman underneath.

"What?" she asked, staring at me. "It's fucking hot in here!"

I don't know what made me say it. It just slipped out. "You could just take it off," I suggested.

Her hands stopped for a few seconds, and then waved the cloth ... lower ... more slowly.

"Are you a dirty old man, Uncle Bob?" she asked. Her tone wasn't angry. In fact I couldn't quite nail down exactly what her tone was, which was odd because I was usually pretty good at reading people's emotions.

"Have been for years," I said. I was trying to joke and lessen any strain I might have caused. I didn't know if I actually liked this girl or not, but I did know that she didn't set off any of the bells, whistles or radar that would make me wish she was gone. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but that's the way my mind works. It is still tuned to spotting the problem person, even though I retired from law enforcement years ago. "All men are," I added.

"Which agrees with my own assessment," she said. She didn't sound upset at all.

"About me?"

"About men in general," she said.

"Smart girl," I said, grinning. "These are what we were looking for. Care to get somewhere cooler?"

"Desperately," she said. She dropped the shirt and descended the fold-down stairway.

When I got down, I handed her the notebooks while I folded up the ladder and closed the trap door. I turned to see her leafing through the top book. Her shirt, like mine was damp with sweat. Her nipples, having just come from 120 degree weather to 78 degrees of air conditioning, were spiked hard. I licked my lips before I realized I'd done it. Then I lifted my eyes to find that single green/brown/blue eye examining my face. She looked down at her chest.

"Is that why you took me up there?" she asked. "So this would happen when we came back down?"

Again, her tone of voice was unreadable. But she was quick on her feet, and she didn't react like a lot of women would have, huffing and puffing and making a scene. It was another tick for her on the positive side of the scoreboard.

"Sadly, no," I said, trying to sound sad. "If I'd have thought of it, maybe, but I didn't. I should have thought of that. A younger man would have thought of it. I'm sure of it. You don't suppose dementia is setting in do you? Maybe I should go lie down." I didn't look at her, but I changed my voice to hopeful. "You could lie down with me. That might help."

She laughed.

An interesting thing happened when she laughed. I've always liked to hear a woman laugh, particularly when I was responsible for it. Laughing women are inherently sexy. Or maybe it's the knowledge that she's happy with you that makes a man feel so good when he can make a woman laugh. But when Anna laughed, it was like icicles were shot into my body all over. My prick actually began to stiffen. It was incredible. I could count the number of times on one hand that a woman had had that effect on me. And it hadn't happened in over a decade. In the space of the few split seconds that she laughed, my ambivalence about her vanished. I wanted her to stay.

"Well, if you're a dirty old man, at least you're the relatively sweet, harmless kind."

My first instinct was to bridle at being called harmless and sweet. I didn't mind the dirty old man part. I was, after all. But I didn't respond. Instead, I just turned her around so she was facing back towards the dining room and gave her a two-fingered shove in her lower back, right on top of that tattoo. As she walked away from me, the hips in those tightly-packed jeans rose and fell in the classic feminine runway walk.

I definitely wanted her to stay.

In fact, a week wasn't going to be long enough.

-------

"You want to look at these now, or maybe cool off in the pool first?" I asked.

"You have a pool?" she sounded wistful.

"Right out back," I said.

She frowned. "Are you going swimming?" she asked.

"Why would that possibly matter?" I asked.

"Because I didn't think to bring a swimsuit," she said.

"No need," I said. "It's surrounded by a tall privacy fence. You don't actually need a suit."

"That's what I figured you'd say," she said darkly.

"I have my dirty old man reputation to uphold," I said, smiling.

"I think a shower would probably be better." She sounded a little sad.

"We'll get you a swimsuit tomorrow."

"I look terrible in swimsuits," she said.

"But who will see? The fence makes it perfectly private."

"Except from you."

"Well who cares what a doddering old fart like me thinks?" I asked.

"You're not doddering. You're not even that old."

"Can I at least be a fart?" I asked, making my voice sound agonized.

-------

While she took a shower, I pulled out a frozen pan of lasagna. Once it was in the oven I threw together a salad, opened a can of green beans and put them in a microwavable bowl. I warmed them up and left them in the microwave. That would have been plenty to make me happy, but since I had a guest I got a loaf of sourdough bread out of the freezer—the unsliced kind I can get cheap at Wal-Mart on the day-old rack—and tried to find something in one of the cookbooks Sherry had abandoned on how to make garlic bread. I ended up just buttering the slices and sprinkling garlic salt on them. I put them on a pizza pan and shoved them in with the lasagna. I didn't know how long to leave them there. I decided to just keep an eye on them.

She came back wearing gym shorts and a tank top, with a lightning bolt striking vertically down between her breasts, and the phrase ELECTRIFY ME below it, across her stomach. I decided her nipples must always be hard, because I could see them again, struggling to break through the cloth. She was drying her hair with a towel the way I used to dry one of my dogs after a bath, when all the dog wanted was to break free and run in circles.

She hung the towel over the back of a chair and sat down. I realized she had a comb in one hand. With four or five practiced sweeps, her pink hair was lying where it should and the comb was abandoned on the table as her hands reached for a notebook. I saw a circle of red, orange and yellow on one shoulder. It was a tattoo of a fairy-like female in a ball of fire.

"Hey," I said.

She looked up. I could see her whole face, because the damp hair hadn't fallen forward yet.

"What?" she asked, after I just stared at her for a few seconds.

"I just wondered if you actually had another eye," I said.

She stuck her tongue out at me and dropped her eyes back to the notebook.

I told her what my codes meant, and how I had arranged the data I'd recorded. A lot of it was raw data, gathered from dusty tomes in the basements of cathedrals and government offices in faraway places. There were lists of names and dates, both from the old books and from tombstones in the cemeteries I'd visited. I had written descriptions of the towns I'd visited, and included any tourist pamphlets if they existed. While I explained all this, I made trips from the stove to the table and back again. I managed to get the bread out with only a few black edges; the lasagna was still frozen in the center.

"I'm not much of a cook," I said.

"Neither am I." She didn't look up.

Eventually I managed to get all the food hot at the same time and served it. She ate lasagna, bread and maybe two forkfuls of green beans, but didn't say anything. She was turning pages during the whole meal.

"This is a lot of information," she finally said, closing the first notebook. "It will take a long time to extract what I need."

"You're young," I said carelessly.

"I can't stay here that long," she said.

"Then take them with you when you leave," I suggested.

"You'd let me do that?" She was back to only having only one eye, which widened as she stared at me.

"Sure," I said. "I'm not doing anything with it, and you're interested. I just hope it can fill in some of your blanks."

"That would be so cool," she said.

-------

After the supper dishes were policed up, I offered to drive her around town. Right after she'd graduated from high school her parents had had to move to find work, when her father's job was outsourced. I gathered that was when she'd chosen to go with her boyfriend, who ended up being Spencer's father. So she'd only been gone from town for about eight years.

We went by her old house, which had been re-sided and was a different color. The high school had been added onto, and various other buildings she wanted to see had either changed or been torn down to make way for progress. A lot can change in a short time, when the economy is going well. The ice cream place she was salivating to revisit was one that was no longer there. It was a drive-up bank branch these days. So we stopped at the market right down the street from the house, and she got a half gallon of mint chocolate chip. I don't care what flavor it is—ice cream is one of the few things they haven't figured out how to fuck up yet.

When we got home she said she had some work to do and set her laptop up on the dining room table. I watched TV until I got sleepy, and headed off to bed.

"Night," I said.

"Night night," she returned, without looking up. It looked like she was visiting some website that sold gift baskets of some kind.

As I climbed into bed, I reflected on how nice it was to hear someone wish me good night. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed that.

-------

Ever since Desert Storm, I wake up several times in the middle of the night. I usually just listen for anything that sounds wrong, never hear it, and then go back to sleep. The first time I woke up that night I didn't hear anything, but I could tell by the light under the door that Anna was still up. I looked at the clock and saw it was 0230 hours. She must have just left the light on when she went to bed.

I got up, opened my door and, with my eyes closed to preserve my night vision, felt my way to the dining room. I fumbled for the switch and flipped it. The orange I could see through my eyelids went black.

"Hey!" said a fifteen-year-old female voice.

My eyes popped open. Anna was still sitting there, half turned to look at me. The computer screen lit up the front of her body, casting shadows that reminded me of the kinds of stark light and dark you see in photos of the moon. Apparently it lit me up too.

"Are you naked?" she asked. She didn't sound shocked, but she didn't sound impressed either.

"It's how I sleep. I thought you'd gone to bed and left the light on," I said.

"Well I was sitting right here. Why'd you turn the light off?"

"I had my eyes closed."

"What? Why?"

"Never mind," I said. "I'll just go back to bed."

"Are you going to turn the light back on first?" she asked.

"Are you trying to ogle me?" I have no idea why I asked her that question. I certainly didn't suspect she had any intentions in that direction at all.

She didn't say anything. That wasn't what I expected. This girl seemed to do that often--things I didn't expect.

"I'll just go on back to bed, now," I said.

"Okay," she finally answered.

I flipped the switch again, and went back to bed.

-------

I get up early. Well not as early as when I was on active duty, but early compared to most people. I figured Anna would sleep in, since she'd been up so late, so I fixed a quick egg and cheese quiche in the microwave and put on half a pot of coffee. I was reading the latest Clive Cussler book and finishing my second cup of coffee, when she came into the kitchen. I looked at my watch. It was seven.

"I'm astonished," I said.

"Why?" she asked.

"You were up late."

"I don't sleep very much," she said.

"What would you like for breakfast? It's one of the few meals I can cook reasonably well."

"Cereal is fine," she said.

This morning she was dressed in more jeans, though newer than the last pair, and a T shirt that was black with white letters. It said GRAVITY across her breasts, with a short arrow pointing down to IT'S THE LAW, across her stomach.

"Sorry about last night," I said.

"It's your house."

"Yeah, but it isn't polite to flash the guest."

"Did you do it on purpose?"

"Well ... no."

"Okay then. No harm done. I've actually seen several men naked before this, and as best I can tell it didn't warp me at all."

I looked at that pink hair, and the shaved side of her head. It looked really smooth, which isn't what you expect on a woman's head. I've seen women who were bald because of chemo and their skin is like that, just smooth as smooth can be. It doesn't bother me, but I haven't met a woman yet who was willing to believe that a man could find anything attractive about it. Still, pink hair or not, she wasn't warped. I was pretty sure of that. In fact she was much more normal than I'd expected. Even so, I couldn't just let her dismiss my nudity so casually.

"So if it happens again you won't scream?"

"Are you planning on it happening again?" she asked archly.

"The only reason I'm wearing clothes right now is because you're here," I said.

"You're a nudist?" Apparently she thought I was full of surprises.

"Not in the sense you're thinking of. Just here at home. I like the feel of being free of clothes. That's all. It's just a habit by now. But I'm pretty sure I'll be able to remember to put something on when you're going to be around."

"Gee," she said, dead pan. "I wouldn't want to put you to any huge trouble or anything."

"It's no trouble," I said. "I have to wear clothes when I go out." I thought about the last time I'd gone out after dark to check the mailbox ... naked. "Most of the time, anyway," I added.

"Maybe I should just get one of those back-up alarm things, so whenever I'm moving around in the house you'll hear me coming."

I laughed. "I'll be good. I promise."

"Why do I find that hard to believe?" she asked.

She finished her cereal and took the bowl to the sink.

"I'm off to plumb the depths of the records in the courthouse," she said.

I waved. "See you when you get back."



-------

Chapter 3


I was fixing myself a grilled cheese sandwich when she returned from tilting at the local government windmill.

"I'm surprised you got done that quickly," I commented.

"I didn't, really," she said. She sounded tired. "It's a lot of work and there are so many records to go through."

"Yeah," I said.

"I did get some leads on graves, though. Have you ever heard of some place called Chapel Hill?"

"Maybe," I said. I was thinking of a little plot of land that was fenced with rusted wrought iron. It had a few dozen gravestones in it and was on private land. There was a buffer of trees around it, maybe twenty feet wide, with plowed fields beyond that. Nobody kept it up, exactly, but somebody at least kept the trees from taking it over. I was pretty sure the arching metal work over the entrance had the word CHAPEL on it. It was one of those things you think you remember, but you also know you never paid actual attention to before.

She hadn't eaten yet, so I put the grilled cheese sandwich in the fridge. I could always nuke it later for a snack. I asked her if fast food was okay and she said she didn't usually eat fast food.

Sherry had started shunning fast food early in the marriage, but it was because of immigrant wages or something like that. But Anna had also exhibited a couple of other signs that she might be--give me strength, Lord--a vegetarian.

So I asked her what she did eat and she said, "Real food."

I bit my tongue. I also curbed the impulse to take her over my knee and turn that bubble butt of hers bright red. She knew what I meant. She was just as stubborn as I was.

"Do you eat meat?" I asked.

"I eat chicken if it's prepared properly, fish, especially salmon, and once in a long while some ground beef in a taco salad."

"Tell me some of the places you like to eat back home, and what you order there," I said.

The list I got sounded very un-American. Not that I think there's a patriotic food or anything. It's just a lot more common to hear, "burger and fries," in America than, "Panang curry with coconut milk, bell pepper, kefir lime leaves and bamboo shoots."

"All right then," I said. "It's The Harvest Moon instead of Wendy's."

"I don't remember The Harvest Moon," she said.

"That's because they built it after you left."

"What if I don't like anything there either? That sounds vaguely Chinese, and I prefer Thai or Indian over Chinese."

I looked her up and down. "It's a buffet. If you can't find anything there you like, then you deserve to starve, and you don't look like you're starving. I'm not going to worry about it. On the other hand, if you're really worried about it, I'll stay here and eat grilled cheese with pork and beans while you go search high and low for some establishment that will meet your culinary standards. It's just food, Anna ... fuel for the body."

"Yes," she said coolly. "But there is good fuel and polluted fuel. Which would you use if you had the choice?"

"Okay, bad analogy."

"No it's not. You just don't like having to admit you're wrong."

"That's not true at all."

"Right," she snorted. "You're a typical male, who can't stand the idea that your hallowed grip on bloody meat and greasy fried foods might turn into the hug of death, as that millstone drags you to the bottom."

"Perhaps," I admitted. "But at least I'll die happy."

"I'm happy!" she snapped.

"I don't mind admitting when I'm wrong," I said, trying to pull one on her. "Like with you, for instance. The first time I saw you I thought you were a wacked out weirdo who was going to turn my life upside down."

"I get a lot of practice noticing that reaction," she said.

"Hmmmm. I thought I was better at shielding things like that. I'll have to work on it." I smiled. "Anyway, I'm most happy to announce that I was wrong, and that you're actually a delightful young woman with some very fetching attributes."

"You are so full of shit," she sighed. "Is that the kind of line you tried to use on girls back in the dark ages?"

I was a little alarmed that she'd seen through me so quickly. I had to change tactics, and my gut said that just the plain truth was the way to go. "It worked really well back then."

"Well, in case you hadn't noticed, this isn't back then. We've made strides since then, and today women actually have this thing called a brain that they actually use to think with." She sounded disgusted, but she didn't look disgusted. This woman was a lot harder to read than most. She was a tough nut to crack.

But then I've always loved a challenge.

"Noted," I said. "In order to appeal to your libido I need to pay attention to and appreciate your intellect, rather than your more feminine attributes."

"Be still my beating heart," she said. "The dirty old man wants to appeal to my libido." She raised one eyebrow. "Isn't that incest or something?"

"I doubt it," I said. "I mean there's no blood connection."

"Be that as it may," she said. "I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to get the hots for someone people call your niece."

"I know that," I said, frowning. "But you're also a woman, and I'm a man, and things biological often go much deeper than things cultural. I can't help but notice you are female. Humans are wired to tell the difference. Why do you think it bothers people so much when they look at someone and can't identify what gender that person it?"

"Okay, I get that," she said. "But what is it that makes you think that the average female gets wiggly at the thought of grandpa lusting after her?"

"Wiggly?"

She rolled her eyes. "Excited ... disposed to the attentions of a male ... turned on."

It sounded like my playful attempt to compliment her had backfired.

"Look," I said soothingly. "It was just a bad turn of the phrase. I'm not trying to get into those lusciously filled jeans, and I promise not to go all caveman on you without warning. Culture can control biology once it's given a chance. All I'm saying is that I was wrong in my first assessment that you were a weirdo with no appealing traits. Now that I've gotten to know you a bit, I hardly even see that pink hair. I like having you around, and I hope you like being here."

"This just feels weird because I came here thinking of you as an uncle, rather than some random man," she said.

"I am a man, Dear Heart. That's the whole point. It's why I act like a man."

Her eyes, blue at the moment, stared into mine. I tried to put on a disarming smile. She shivered. It was just a quick little shudder, but it worried me. Shudders could mean several things, some good, some bad, and some ... well I didn't think it was that kind of shudder. It was pretty obvious that her cultural compass was pointed due north.

I decided we'd had enough of this particular philosophical discussion. "If you're not hungry at all we can just go straight to the graveyard."

She blinked. "I am hungry," she said.

-------

The Harvest Moon turned out to have things she liked. I was greatly relieved, especially since they have a takeout and delivery service. That gave me at least one safe source of victuals for this fascinating and picky woman. No ... picky wasn't a fair word, because it has negative connotations. She was simply particular, and knew her own likes and dislikes. Nobody chooses something they dislike.

She didn't skimp on her plate either. She got something labeled Chicken Pakora, and then a helping of Salmon Tikka. She piled on Punjabi Chole and, I swear, something called Aloo Gobi Masala, or something like that. I was fascinated, because it was the first time I had actually looked at a lot of the labels. I'm the kind of guy who looks at everything and tries what looks good. If I like it, I get more. If not, I generally remember the next time and pass it by. I don't really care what it's called. She added a bowl of rice to her tray and gave it a bath of the yellow curry sauce I liked and had given the nickname "Bit-o-sun," because it was so hot.

While we ate, I interrogated her. She didn't know it, of course, but I coaxed the details out of her about her life that she'd declined to provide previously. Getting to the relationship that resulted in Spencer was delicate, and I only probed very lightly. I could sense some unhappiness there, and I didn't want her to dwell on that.

When we got around to jobs, I was astonished by what my questions revealed. She'd only had two, one of which she was currently making a living at. She'd worked in one of the big box toy stores until she got pregnant. Then she'd taught herself web development and she had been a fully qualified webmaster ... or webmistress ... for over five years. She had been web mistressing the previous night on her laptop, when I saw what I thought was her shopping. Whenever the company came up with a new product, she arranged the web page to display it for sale. I was fascinated.

We finished lunch and drove to the place I had told her about. Sure enough the big arching sign said, CHAPEL HILL. The grass was two feet high. Some of the stones were darkened by moss or some other growth, and a few were leaning drunkenly. Two were broken off midway up the stone.

"Oh my," she said, looking at the sea of weeds. "I hate bugs."

"Well bugs love you," I said.

We only got ten feet inside the gate when she exclaimed and went down on one knee in front of a stone.

"Oh look!" Her voice sounded tragic. "This is one of the ones I read about at the courthouse. He was a baby, and he only lived five days."

I bent over to see a small, flat stone with grass sprouting all around it. There were carved letters: "Henry Paul Strickland" above the set of dates, "Jan 6 1878 - Jan 11 1878."

"Strickland was my grandmother's maiden name," she said. "It's so sad that a baby died like that."

"It is," I agreed.

We walked around for a while. The place was in really bad shape, but we found fifteen graves that were related to her family in some way, shape or form. There were several others that couldn't be read until they were cleaned up. I suggested we go home to get some sandpaper and something to take rubbings with and she agreed. Then, while there, she saw my weed whip and said we should take it with us to cut around the stones and make it easier to see them.

It turned into a full blown maintenance mission. I threw everything that I thought we might possibly need into the bed of the pickup. By seven in the evening the weeds were cut back almost to the fence and we had straightened eleven stones, most of them not related to our search. I heard a car door slam and looked up to see Bill Springfield, one of the deputies I knew pretty well, walking toward the gate. He examined the chain, which I had cut with bolt cutters, rather than the ancient padlock that had held the chain around the bars of the gate for decades. I walked over to him.

"Guilty as charged," I said, holding out both wrists.

He glanced at me, and then over at Anna.

"She with you?"

The first thing that came to mind was, "What was your first clue, Sherlock?" I said, "Yup," instead.

"Really." He sounded like he didn't quite believe me.

"She's my niece," I said. "We have relatives here and she's doing family research."

"Really!" He sounded interested now. "Your niece?"

"On my ex-wife's side," I said. "You can't see the family resemblance?"

He laughed. Then he frowned.

"I know it's a graveyard, but technically it's private property now. The county gave it up years ago."

"Yeah," I said. "We could tell. Hasn't been kept up at all, except that the trees haven't been allowed to take hold."

"Howard Simpson owns it now."

"You think he'll make a fuss?"

"You should have checked with him first."

"Well I didn't. Originally we were just going to look at stones. Seemed like more needed to be done once we got a look at the place."

Anna walked up to us to see what was going on.

"Deputy Springfield, I'd like to introduce you to my niece, Anna Rawlins."

"Ma'am," said Bill, touching the brim of his uniform cap.

"Hi," she said.

He looked her over rather thoroughly. I could understand why, though. Her tank top was wet with sweat and clung to her like a second skin. We could see the shape of her breasts, including those lovely ever-erect nipples. Her face was smudged and the gardening gloves I'd given her were dirty and green with the blood of cut grass. Suddenly she didn't look like a freakish Goth girl, she just looked like a very attractive young woman with an odd hairdo.

"Are we in trouble?" she asked.

"I kind of doubt it," said Bill, who looked back at me. "Technically you're trespassing, but I don't think anybody will care."

"That's good," she said. "I hate being all sweaty, and if I was in trouble on top of that, I'd get cranky." She sniffed. "Plus, I don't think this was at all good for my allergies."

"We're done for the day anyway," I said, making the decision I knew Bill wanted us to make. As long as we left, it would be easy for him to look the other way and hope the subject never came up officially. We were friends, but the law is black and white and it rarely makes any adjustment for the shades of gray that real life inevitably consists of.

Bill only had one other thing to say as we walked back to our vehicles.

"Nice shirt," he said, leaning forward to peer past me at her chest again. "I just wish people would respect all the other laws too."

She laughed that fifteen-year-old laugh.

I'd bet money that Bill's reaction was just like my own. Suffice it to say, I was glad to be sitting down when she had a chance to glimpse the front of my pants.

-------

We had eaten heavily for lunch, and neither of us was in any kind of shape to go into a restaurant. But that didn't count for regular stores.

On the way home, I stopped at Target.

"What are we doing here?" asked Anna.

"Swimsuit for you," I said.

"You're crazy!" she barked. "I'm all sweaty and dirty, I can't try on any swimsuits!"

"Then we'll get a variety. One of them will fit. I'll bring the rest back."

"You have very odd ways of doing things sometimes," she said.

"You coming?"

"I really don't think I should. This is not a good idea."

"Okay, I'll just guess." I got out of the truck.

"Wait!" she yelled.

-------

The first suit she picked was a one piece. It was dirty old mannish of me, but I wanted to see her in less than that. So I picked a string bikini and held it up. It was hot pink, like her hair. Just thinking about her in that little fluff of cloth made my cock stir in my pants.

"Yeah, right," she said, rolling her eyes. "Not in this century, buster."

"All right then," I said. "In the negotiations thus far, you have made a conservative offer, and I've made a liberal counter-offer. Now all we need to do is find some common ground."

"This is a swimsuit for me, not common ground," she pointed out.

"Yes, but I have to look at you in it."

"No you don't. You can stay inside." She folded her arms under her breasts. "In fact, it might be better if you stayed inside no matter what I get."

"Now, now. I'm a harmless dirty old man, remember?"

"I'm not so sure about that anymore," she said.

"I assure you," I said. "I am, in fact, as harmless as a puppy."

"Puppies have sharp teeth," she muttered.

But she kept looking. She ended up choosing a lavender two piece that had what she called "boy shorts" bottoms and a very utilitarian top. It was, in fact, about halfway between the one I'd chosen and the one piece. When she announced her choice, I bundled the other two suits under my arm and said, "Let's go. The pool awaits."

"What about those?" she asked, pointing at the cloth under my arm.

"Spares," I said.

She tilted her head at me and the hair fell away from her right eye.

"You're going to try to talk me into wearing the little one."

"Well I wouldn't object if you did," I said.

"Naughty, naughty," she said, gravely.

"You'll notice that I have the conservative one too."

"Yes ... but I suspect you have some devious ulterior motive concerning that one, too."

She was right, but it was an aimless motive, more attuned to having a fantasy. Still, you never knew, and it was better to be prepared and not need it, than to need it and not be prepared.

"I'm wearing this one," she said, holding up the lavender one.

"I know that."

She shrugged. "It's your money."

"I know that too."

"I mean for those," she said. "I'll pay for mine."

"I couldn't possibly allow it," I said. "Think of all those birthdays I missed."

"Think of all those birthday parties I didn't invite you to," she countered.

"You would have if I'd been around, and in your life."

"You have a mighty high opinion of yourself," she said.

"Are we going to stand here and keep trying to one up each other, or go jump in cool, clear water?" I asked.

She actually appeared to think about that. Then she handed me the lavender suit.

"You go pay. There are a couple of other things I need. I'll meet you at the truck."

Ten minutes later, carrying a small bag, she climbed into the passenger side.

"Let's go," she said.



-------

Chapter 4


She was good at picking a swimsuit that was really a swimsuit, rather than being primarily adornment for a woman at the pool. A lot of swimsuits aren't really utilitarian, in terms of actually working out in them. The one piece would have been very utilitarian, but of course she'd picked that one too. The one I chose wasn't for swimming. It was for sex. I knew that, and she did too, which was probably why she turned it down out of hand.

Of course that made sense. She wasn't here for sex, after all. And the suit she'd chosen, while it looked nice on her, was just that--nice--as opposed to revealing or sexy or whatever. It actually made it possible to swim with her (she relented and allowed me in the pool) without thinking constantly about the fact that she was female. Unless I saw her ass, anyway. Those boy shorts bottoms exhibited her ass to fine advantage. I also got to see the tattoo on her back, which was like a pen and ink drawing of a woman. She identified the woman as Mother Nature. The strap of the top made it look like Mother Nature was wearing a lavender sweat band across her forehead, but it was all right.

We swam some laps together, side by side, using various strokes and not paying attention to each other at all, except for the fact that we moderated our speed and stayed side by side. She had clean, smooth strokes, the same as mine, and designed to produce the most thrust with the least effort. She was a good swimmer.

We were both breathing deeply when we stopped. We got out and lay down on chaise lounges on the lawn, our towels used primarily to wipe face and head. It was nice to relax and just sit there, and we didn't spoil the comfortable silence with inane chatter. Eventually she sat up.

"Shower," she said.

"Knock yourself out," I replied.

"Might take me a while," she said.

"No problem," I said. "I have things I can do."

I didn't mind a little chlorine on my skin, so I just changed into a pair of gym shorts and sat down at the computer to do a little work of my own. I write stories as a hobby. After my wife left I'd basically decided not to get back into the romance game. I was a little bitter at first, and my preference was for younger women anyway. Younger women usually aren't much interested in horny geezers, except in my imagination, which was still quite buff, even if my body wasn't so much anymore. There was nothing wrong with my penis, however, and I had worked out with it pretty regularly over the years, usually aided by a book instead of a real live woman. It was quick and easy, whereas romance is neither.

There were plenty of places to get the kind of books that floated around in the Army, particularly overseas, and which were about as down and dirty as it was possible to get, and I spent some time in them. But the subject matter wasn't in tune with my own turn-ons. It seemed that secretary and motel maid sex was all the rage, unless you were into bondage or gay sex, and I wasn't. I knew there were websites that catered to just about any kink out there. I'd arrested a Major for having over two thousand pictures on his computer--his government computer--of girls having sex. The pictures themselves were a problem because it was a government computer, of course, but the real issue was that none of the girls were old enough to have grown breasts or body hair. And some of them were crying. It was pretty rough stuff and he got twenty-two years in Leavenworth by the time it was all over. He also got his asshole enlarged, and he was incarcerated in an all officer population. I didn't feel too bad for him. If you can't do the time...

But that didn't make all sex wrong, and I still had a healthy sex drive. So I did some snooping around on the internet and found more stories than could be read in ten lifetimes. Most of them were pure junk. It was literally like looking for a pearl in pig shit--which I did as part of a contest in Cambodia one time. I found that pearl, by the way, so I know what I'm talking about. And yes, I was drunk.

Anyway, I couldn't find many pearls amongst the shit on the net, so I just started writing out my own fantasies. I had about sixty or seventy of them in my little personal library when I happened upon a website that stood head and shoulders above any of the others I'd seen, both in terms of the kind of stories available and the quality of the writing. So, on a whim, I posted a few of the things I'd written. Since those were well received, I posted a few more. I'd been writing and posting ever since. It was both fun and relaxing. Plus I'd made a few friends. They were 'friends' in a new sense of the word, a sense that was unique to the electronic age, but one of the American military mottos is "Adapt, Improvise, Overcome," so I accepted these odd, very intimate but impersonal relationships in stride.

I was currently attempting to write a story in which a family was trying intentionally to film a video clip that would win the hundred thousand dollars on America's Funniest Home Videos. Somebody had postulated that the best videos had to do with sexy things, so they were trying to engineer something innocently sexy. First they tried the teenage girls dancing, and falling off of a coffee table, with their skirts flipping up embarrassingly. Which led to falling on Daddy's lap, the required squealing and squirming included. Somebody else thought that was going too far, so they gave up the dancing idea and went to practical jokes on sleeping people that caused them to leap out of bed naked. Of course they had to be naked for that, and since dad was filming the girls in his boxers (I hadn't figured out how to explain that part yet), when he got excited, his level of excitement protruded through the fly of his shorts and things got out of hand. It was supposed to get to the orgy stage, whereupon the baby would unknowingly and accidentally turn the webcam on and the family orgy would be broadcast for anyone interested to see and record.

I wasn't at all sure it was going to actually make it to the editing folder. I had at least a dozen stories half written that had hit snags too big to resolve, but I never threw anything away. It was all spare parts, the way I looked at things. And I hated to give up on something once I'd begun, even if it was a thoroughly bad idea, which this one was starting to resemble.

So I was hammering away at the keys, trying to make the thing stink a little less, when Anna came into the room. I glanced at the computer clock. I was somewhat astonished to find that two hours had passed. It was for that reason that I didn't look at her and find out that, in the intervening time, she had just dyed ... or maybe it was re-dyed ... her hair.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Nothing you'd be interested in," I said.

"How do you know?"

I wondered if there would ever be a time that she didn't question something I said.

"It's dirty old man stuff," I said. I was searching for a particular word. I knew it existed. I was pretty sure it started with a "P," but it was just beyond my reach. If she would leave me alone for another thirty seconds I was sure I could get it.

Of course she did anything but leave me alone.

"Let me see," she said.

I gave up on the "P" word and turned to face her.

"No." Then I saw the dark purple hair she was combing down over the right side of her face. "That's different."

"Why can't I see?"

"You'd be disgusted and think I was a pervert."

"I already know you're a pervert," she said calmly.

"You know no such thing," I said, insulted. "All you know is I like to go naked in my own house and that I consider my male urges normal."

"I know you look at my breasts every chance you get and you think about making me wiggly!" she said, her chin jutted forward.

I looked at her breasts. The new T-shirt said ACTUAL SIZE right across her breasts. I grinned.

"I repeat: I consider my male urges normal."

"I'm not a prude," she said, leaning forward to look at the screen.

"I know that," I said. "But that doesn't mean you're as kinky as I am."

"Oh, so you're not a pervert, but you're kinky?" she said. I closed the screen, but that didn't stop her. "That looked like lines of dialog. What is it? Why were you writing that?"

"Why do you insist on going where you don't really want to go?"

"Because you have no idea where I do and do not want to go."

She was as hardheaded as some of the officers I'd had to serve under. And just as clueless. Those officers often had to learn things the hard way.

I hit the OPEN button and searched for a particular title. I clicked on it and the story came up. I stood up and turned the chair towards her. At least she didn't gloat. She just sat down, leaned forward and started to read. I went to pour myself two fingers of whiskey, then remembered I didn't have any. Actually, as long as she wasn't a prude, the story I'd pulled up for her wasn't all that risky. It was about a sixteen-year-old girl with a brain tumor who goes to a sort of cowboy resort place as part of a last fling before she dies. A romance develops and she ends up pregnant, which bathes the tumor in hormones that cause it to go into remission. As fantasies go, it stretched things a bit, but it wasn't all that kinky.

I went back to see how far she'd gotten. I had plenty of time.

"I'm going to run to the store. I'll be back in a bit," I said.

She waved one hand at me and kept her eyes on the screen.

I decided to splurge and got a bottle of The Glenlivet. I also picked up a six pack of what I hoped she would consider beer interesting enough to drink, if she was so inclined.

When I got back she was still reading. I put the beer in the fridge and the Scotch in the cabinet. I thought about making Belgian waffles for a late dinner, since I probably didn't have much else she'd find appealing. I was pretty sure hotdogs were out and rare steaks would probably send her into tears, if the story she was reading didn't.

She appeared in the doorway. Her eyes were, in fact, a little red.

"That was beautiful," she said.

"Well thank you," I said, pleased beyond measure.

"But it was full of errors. Who is your editor?"

"It's not that serious," I said.

"I agree," she said. "But they distract the reader, and why do that if they can be repaired?"

"I meant my writing isn't that serious," I said.

"Your writing is fine," she said. "You just need an editor."

"The only editor I know is your mother, and I sort of suspect she'd look askance at text that describes sex scenes in such graphic detail."

"That was part of what made me like it," she said.

I wasn't used to women her age being quite as honest about things as I liked to be. I thought it was interesting that I often tried to shock people with my honesty, and had just been a little shocked by hers.

"Besides," I said, unconsciously veering away from things intimate, "editors always want to change things. If I had an editor we'd knock heads."

"I could be your editor," she said.

I blinked. The story she'd read had been pretty tame, compared to some of the others I'd written. I wrote a lot of incest. And I couldn't think of a single story I'd written where there was any safe sex and somebody didn't get pregnant. Like I said, these were all about my fantasies, and while I might recommend one thing in real life and mean it, all bets were off in a fantasy.

"Thank you for the offer," I said, for lack of anything else to say. "But the fact is that very few people see these, and I'm sure you're busy and have better things to do than pore through the equivalent of dusty old manuscripts."

"I liked that story, Uncle Bob," she said. "It made me wiggly."

-------

The only way I could end the discussion was to just ignore her. She got the message after a while and quit trying. She moved from my computer to her laptop and started working again. I went over to watch and she said, "Go away!"

So I watched TV again, until I started nodding off and got up to go to bed.

"Good night," I mumbled.

"Are you going to check on me later?" she asked.

"What?"

"Are you going to run around naked in the night, turning off lights again?"

I sighed. "No."

"Why not?" she asked. "What if I fall asleep? I'll get a crick in my back."

"So now you want me to run around naked in the night, checking to make sure you haven't fallen asleep?"

"You can get dressed first if you want to. I mean that would be the polite thing to do," she said, as if that were a reasonable thing to say in a reasonable conversation ... which was not what was going on.

I woke up a bit. What was going on? Why was she talking like this? The dirty old man in me had an idea, but the conservative pillar-in-the-community uncle in me pooh-poohed that idea instantly. She was probably still trying to needle me because I wouldn't immediately adopt her as the editor I didn't need.

"I'll wear a cowbell," I said. "The noise will wake you up."

She giggled, which just about floored me. That giggle was completely out of character for a woman trying to torture a man. Unless, of course, she judged that she had been successful.

"Good night," she said in that fifteen-year-old voice.

-------

I woke up in that alert way that told me something had caused me to wake. I listened, and heard the music. She probably thought it was soft enough, but that line I'd laid on her about losing my hearing because of gunfire was pure bull. My hearing was perfect.

The only stereo I owned was in my bedroom, so I wondered what was playing the music. And I heard other noises too, but couldn't identify them. I got up quietly and tiptoed into the hallway. I edged along the wall, where there were fewer squeaks. I was halfway down the hall when I remembered I was naked. But all I was going to do was peek to see what was going on. When I first looked into the dining room, I almost got whiplash when I saw sudden movement and jerked my head back. Then she sailed across my view through the open doorway, dancing.

She was wearing the string bikini.

I remembered laying the plastic bag with the two swimsuits in it on the table just inside the front door. It's about the size of an end table and was a handy place to put mail and keys. Obviously she'd seen the bag and looked inside.

The music was coming from her laptop. I didn't recognize it, but it had a beat and she was whirling and dancing to that beat. I couldn't see her without putting my head inside the doorway, and with her whirling like that, she'd see me for sure if I did. But the glimpse of her in that bikini was burned into the back of my eyes.

I wanted to see more of it.

The suit was very brief, which is why I had picked it. To be honest, I hadn't even tried to figure out if it was her size or not, because I was pretty sure her response would be just what it had been.

She sailed by again. There was another tattoo I hadn't seen yet. It was on her right hip, where the suit did nothing to cover it. All I saw was a blur of red, white and black, and the fleeting image of what might have been a flower.

I leaned forward automatically to keep her in view and hoped that the darkness of the hallway, and the fact that her night vision was nonexistent, would protect me from detection.

The top consisted of two triangles linked together by dental floss. Okay, it wasn't that bad, but if I squinted just a little, all I could see were the triangles. Still, they covered the good bits. I wasn't any good at estimating cup sizes and all that. There were two very nice handfuls under those triangles, though.

The bottoms were just patently indecent. This suit wasn't for swimming. It had a long slender triangle front and back, with more dental floss going up and over the hips to connect them.

She suddenly threw her arms out wide and struck a pose. In the process her breasts barely trembled. I could tell by the shape of things that she had what I called "pushups." It had nothing to do with the bra. Pushup breasts were the kind where, if you imagine a woman having a taut, flat chest, and then imagine inserting something round, like a lemon or orange, or maybe even a baseball under that skin, it will push the skin away from the chest. Drop a nipple on the tip of each hump, and you have a pair of pushups. There is no hang or sag to them ... not even a hint.

There are other kinds of breasts, of course, such as the "hangons," which sag significantly, and the "ski jumps," which slope down to upturned nipples. I kind of liked googly eyes, which had nipples looking off in different directions. There are dozens of types of breasts. I've always taken Will Rogers's philosophy to heart, and adapted it to suit myself; I never met a breast I didn't like.

Anna didn't have an hourglass shape, though she wasn't anywhere near plump. Her hips were probably a little wide to be in proportion to her breasts. She had oranges under her pushups, and she needed softballs to make them fit the delightful swelling of her hips.

The pink of the suit had been chosen to go with her pink hair, but it also complemented the dark purple of her new dye job. I'd never gotten around to asking her what that was about, come to think of it. We'd gotten sidetracked on my writing.

She was whirling again, and dancing with steps that didn't look coordinated or practiced to me--like in the old black and white Tarzan movies, where they had "Africans" dancing to drums that were slightly out of sync. They looked like they were trying to kill ants or something. She wasn't quite like that. She was light on her feet, in fact. It looked slightly uncoordinated, but there was a joy to her gyrations that made me grin.

My cock reminded me it was there, and I looked down to see a magnificent erection straining out of my pubic hair. Don't laugh. Every erection is magnificent to its owner. Ask any man.

The disaster struck so quickly that it took us both entirely by surprise. During a whirl, she got too close to the dining room table and her hand grazed the rim of the glass of water sitting beside her laptop. It started to tip as, in the middle of another whirl, her mind registered what had just happened. As a result, she was off balance when she tried to stop and reach for the water. She missed it, which made her lean too far forward and she sprawled across the chair in front of the laptop. The chair went to the side and backwards, balancing for a split second on one leg, and then she and the chair crashed to the floor. It hurt. It had to hurt, because all those soft curves landed on very hard corners.

I was in the room to help her before I could think it through.

I heard her sudden shriek as her body hit hard and bounced off to one side. The chair made noise too. I'll never forget seeing some of that dental floss stretch around a protrusion on the chair back as she kept rolling. Pink triangles flipped up and flopped across one shoulder as she hit the floor beneath the edge of the table, with a thud and a very unladylike curse.

To add insult to injury, the water, which had spilled beside the laptop, ran off the table and splattered all over her shoulder.

I had a daughter. She'd gotten hurt occasionally. And I'd done what dads do everywhere. I held her and comforted her and told her it would be all right. It's like riding a bike. You never forget how.

Of course I had never held my daughter while I was naked ... with a boner ... and while she was mostly naked too. I might write about that stuff, but remember, it's just fantasy. I never lusted after my own daughter. To be perfectly honest, there were times when I couldn't understand how any male could lust after her. Girls are born with the ability to be bitches sometimes. Now ... her friends? That's different.

Never mind. I digress ... again.

I found myself kneeling next to a half-naked woman who was definitely not my daughter, despite being the same age. Nor was I thinking of her as any kind of relative. I was naked, and I did have a hardon. And it didn't go away because she was cursing like a sailor and in no mood to have any hardons of any kind around her.

She was holding her elbow with one hand, but the hand attached to the injured arm was also rubbing her stomach where the chair had dug in.

"You okay?"

"Of course I'm not okay!" she yelled. She looked at me. "You're naked!" Her hand came up and touched a naked breast. "I'm naked!"

"Only almost," I said. If she was concentrating on our nudity, nothing hurt enough to require a hospital. "Let's get you up off the floor, what do you say?"

She didn't cover her breasts, and she let me help her stand up, both of which I perceived as positive signs. I had no idea what was going to happen next, but I didn't think it would be ugly. I tried not to inspect her breasts, but failed miserably.

"You're ogling me again," she muttered.

"Sorry," I said. "You're rather beautiful."

"I bet you say that to all the naked women in your house."

"Beautiful and intelligent," I sighed.

"Intelligent enough to know you probably have grandchildren," she said, rubbing her elbow. "Owwwww."

"What does my having grandchildren have to do with the price of tea in China?" I asked.

"Because that makes you a gramps, and it helps to think of you that way when I see that."

I noticed she was looking at my groin, and when I looked too, I saw Old Faithful standing proud, bouncing slightly. He was shameless in trying to get attention.

"And what is it that is particularly appealing about thinking of my stout friend here as being part of a gramps?" I asked.

"It makes it slightly easier to resist wanting to do naughty things with you," she said.

My mouth dropped open. It's not all that often I'm lost for words, but she'd just done it.

"Oh, get over yourself," she said. She started trying to find the bikini top. When she did she began pulling it back into place. I was about to ask her not to, when I saw that some of the dental floss hadn't been up to the challenge.

"I knew this was a bad idea," she muttered. She pulled the remains off her neck. Standing, she looked more than delicious. I could feel my pulse in my penis as it continued to do her homage.

I finally got my voice back as my mind started working again. Unfortunately it was the caveman who got first control. He had finally made up his mind and his "Yummmm?" had altered to a "Yummmmm!"

"It was a wonderful idea," I argued.

Apparently thinking about me as a grandfather worked better for her than I wanted it to.

"Did the water spill on my laptop?" she asked, suddenly alarmed.

I admit I was a little disappointed that her laptop had a higher priority than my straining manhood. Then I reminded myself that just because we were naked didn't mean anything was going to happen.

"I don't think so," I said. "I think it landed beside it."

"Ohhhh," she sighed and went to confirm the prognosis.

She fussed with cleaning up the water. I just watched that marvelous almost naked body moving around.

"Are you going to stand there looking at me all night?" she asked, without looking at me.

"If there's any possible way I can get away with it ... yes," I sighed.

"You're not making this easy, Gramps," she growled.

"Making what easy?"

"Resisting the urge."

"You're resisting the urge?"

"You're not exactly an unattractive man, Gramps," she said. "And I haven't been laid in practically forever."

"I thought you were irritated by me," I said. I immediately wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

"I'm only irritated when you behave in an irritating manner," she said. Suddenly her head swiveled and one eye stared at me. "How did you get here so quickly? Were you peeking at me?"

"Me? Spying?" I shrugged my shoulders ... and felt my prick bob.

"You were in here right after I fell. You couldn't have gotten here from your bedroom that quickly."

"Umm, I was on the way to the bathroom," I said.

"Don't lie," she said darkly. "You're not good at it."

Now that stung. I take great pride in being a convincing liar. Still, when you're caught, you're caught. Hitler had tried the big lie and stuck by it until he was in a burning pile outside his bunker. I wasn't much interested in ending up like that.

"All right, I was watching you. I heard the music." I decided a little guilt on her part couldn't hurt. "The music woke me up, and I got here just about the time you fell." I let my eyes linger on those reddish areolas with their delightfully erect nipples. "I was right, by the way. That suit looks fantastic on you."

"Now you're being irritating," she said.

"Welcome to the next century," I shot back.

"What?"

"You said you wouldn't wear that in this century."

"Now you're being very irritating."

"Would you care to remove the rest of it and join me in bed?" I asked, boldly.

"It doesn't matter if I'd care to or not," she barked. "It's not going to happen."

"Why not?" I whined.

"Because you want it!"

"So do you," I pointed out.

"Good night, Gramps," she said sternly.

I stared at her. I honestly didn't know what to do. The cave man kept grunting, "Grab her! Put her over your shoulder and take her to the cave! Put her on that soft stuff you sleep on! Uh! Uh! Uh!" But despite the very interesting and tantalizing things she'd said, another part of my brain cautioned patience instead.

"Do you need any ice to put on anything?" I asked, trying to sound dignified. It's hard to do when you're standing there naked with your pot belly shading a prick that has lost some of its iron.

"No."

The look on her face was unreadable. I think that was the most disturbing part about how things turned out. I couldn't tell whether she was happy I was desisting ... or not.

It's the not knowing that's the hardest part.

-------

I lay in bed, thinking.

The urge to beat off was tempered by the likelihood that my interpretation of her comments was way off base. Besides, I was suddenly tired. Sparring with her took a lot of energy. My prick stayed half hard, though, because I kept replaying the image of her standing there. It was amazing how good a half bald woman with purple hair could look if she was only wearing pink bikini bottoms.

I was in that place between being awake and starting a dream when I heard the creak of the bedroom door. The light didn't change, though, so I assumed that it was some part of the dream to come.

When the bed beside me depressed, though, the dream fled. I smelled her, and realized that she had a scent I'd catalogued without realizing it.

Her body settled down next to mine. I felt an arm drop on my chest and a warm, naked body cuddle up to my left arm, which was trapped between us. I started to move it and the hand on my chest moved to stop it.

"Go to sleep," she said softly.

"You're insane," I said.

"Go to sleep," she insisted. "If you don't go to sleep I'll have to leave, and I don't want to leave."

Suddenly I wasn't tired any more. The urge to beat off was now only tempered by the fact that she'd know what I was doing. My prick was iron hard again. Her hand drifted down, across my belly. It found my prick and the fingers molded around it, squeezing gently, before dropping lower to explore my balls briefly. Then that hand, performing an amazingly sweet torture, slipped slowly back up to lie limp on my chest.

"Go to sleep," she murmured.

Her face lay against my shoulder, her breath hot on my arm. I turned my head. I could smell the dye in her hair, and was surprised to find it was slightly fruity.

I lay in bed, thinking.

One of the things I remember thinking was that sleep couldn't possibly come. Somehow it did. Sparring with her really was an energy intensive pursuit.




-------

Chapter 5


I woke with the naked girl still pressed against me. My cock was soft again. It was just delightful lying there and knowing what I was feeling was real.

But I needed to hit the latrine, and based on last night, there wasn't going to be any morning delight, so I just got up and went to the bathroom. When I finished, she was still lying there, pulled into a modified fetal position. I admired her naked hip and bottom, picked up a pair of gym shorts off the dresser, and went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. I put the shorts on while it perked, and went outside to see if the paper was there yet. It wasn't, but it was a nice morning. The sun wasn't up yet, but was close, which at this time of year meant it was about six.

My mind went back to the bedroom. She was a different kind of woman than I was used to. That much was a given. It wasn't odd that she acted differently than other kinds of women. That wasn't stereotyping. There are many different kinds of women.

Sex is a biological urge. Left alone, we'd all have sex as often as we could find acceptable partners. Over the millennia, however, most cultures have recognized that having sex as early as the body wants it is counterproductive. So the optimum situation is for children to wait until sex is no longer counterproductive. Unfortunately, children only have a limited capacity for reasoning. So many adults attempt to prevent counterproductive sex between children, by teaching the child that sex is bad, dirty, unwise, or undesirable. It is treated like that hot pan on the stove. "No! Don't touch!"

That's fine for hot pans. The prohibition on touching them lasts a lifetime. Not so with sex, though. The problem is that all those adults who were so intent on stopping kids from having sex, never explained that it was the only way to get through the non-reasoning childhood times, and that when the child is all grown up, sex is fine, great, wonderful, and should be a favorite pastime. And if they do try to explain it, they fuck it up by saying, "Only after marriage, and only in the missionary position."

Some kinds of women never come into the adult world of sex. They have sex, but only from necessity, and feel guilty about it. Some women believe the part about how, once you're married, sex is okay as long as you follow the rules. Some women break the rules and endure feeling guilty about liking something other than missionary sex. Then there are a few women who figure things out on their own. They flaunt convention and just enjoy sex. It doesn't mean they're stupid about it (though there is a kind of woman who is), or that they'll have sex with anything male (though there is a kind of woman who will).

I had a feeling that Anna had figured things out. That was fascinating, because I had only met two or three of those women in my entire life. Sad to say, they had all been in committed relationships with other men. But they were still special, because of their basic attitudes. The woman who is hung up about sex is like an animal. She goes into heat occasionally, and will accept the male under just the right circumstances. But the woman who is not hung up about sex is "available" most of the time, instead of just occasionally. True, she might not be available to you, but you know she's available, and that makes her sexy. It's the secret of making millions selling magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. To millions of men, the look in the eyes of those models is "I'm available." Of course the difference is that the model in the magazine is also saying, "Are you interested?" The kind of real woman I'm talking about doesn't necessarily do that. She might tease a close male friend, because it's fun, but she's not a slut. She's just available ... to her man.

Anna had exposed herself to be ... available.

The problem was that I didn't have enough experience with such women to know if she was available to me or not.

I hear men out there guffawing, and saying, "Are you fucking stupid? She crawled into bed with you, you idiot." These are men who are looking at the situation like they look at a magazine model. The fantasy is that she's available to you.

But she's not ... now is she, guys? Yeah. Turn the testosterone down a notch, fellas. We're talking reality here. Yes, the indication that she's available to me is there. The signals are good. The stars are lining up. But it's not a done deal. And this resource is precious and rare. The last thing I wanted to do was blow it by doing the wrong thing.

What was agonizing was that I didn't know what the wrong thing was.

-------

I sat there until the sun was too bright to be comfortable to my eyes. I stood up just as the guy who delivers the paper came driving slowly up the street, slipping papers into the blue plastic boxes attached to the mailbox posts. I walked out and he handed mine to me with a nod as he drove slowly by.

I went back in the house and found Anna sitting at her laptop, her fingers flickering across the keys like tap dancers. She was wearing a tank top and panties.

When in doubt, go for acting normal.

"Hungry?" I asked.

"Not really," she said, and kept on typing.

I thought about asking how she slept. I thought about asking, "What now?" I thought about groveling at her feet and moaning, "Pleeeeeaaaaase."

Instead I heated up the skillet and put some strips of bacon in it. When it was done enough, I added two eggs.

She appeared at my elbow suddenly. "How can you eat that? It's dead pig, and aborted chickens that came out of a chicken's ass."

"I'm at the top of the food chain," I said, on familiar ground again. "I get to eat what I want."

"Yuck."

I stepped away from her. The tank top said IF I HAD BALLS, THEY'D BE BIGGER THAN YOURS.

"You can't possibly think you're going to get away with that," I said.

"Get away with what?"

I reached out and pinched the top of the shirt between her breasts.

"Wearing this," I said.

"I'm at the top of the food chain," she mimicked. "I get to wear what I want."

I snorted and stabbed a strip of bacon with my fork. I lifted it to see if it was done yet.

"Don't you dare eat that yet," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because then you'll taste like bacon, and I won't want to kiss you."

"You want to kiss me?"

"I didn't say that."

Instinct whispered in my ear, and I listened.

I turned the stove off and moved the pan to a cold burner. I turned to face her, invading her personal space. She didn't back up.

"You want to kiss me," I said. It was a statement this time.

"Who says?" she argued.

"You did," I said.

"What I said was that if you ate that bacon, you'd taste like bacon. Are your poor decrepit old ears failing?"

I suddenly had a glimmer of what might be going on. If I was wrong, I was screwed. Well not screwed. Un-screwed, in fact. But she was too tempting, and I'd waited too long and my patience was at an end.

"My decrepit old ears heard exactly what you wanted them to hear, little girl. And now you're going to put up or shut up."

Her face was right in front of mine. Those lush lips were only inches from my own.

"You need to shut up right now," she almost whispered.

"I'm not going to shut up," I whispered back. "You are."

"No I'm not."

"Yes you..."

I didn't get to finish, because she kissed me.

-------

The brain produces a substance called dopamine to control various functions within it. Say, for instance, your body tells the brain you need water. The brain sends a signal to the area that controls thirst and a little squirt of dopamine is released. Presto, you feel thirsty. Then, when you drink, the dopamine stops being produced, and that feeling no longer takes precedence over everything else. But sometimes there's a glitch in the system. If the dopamine doesn't get shut off, you still feel thirsty. In that circumstance, you can drink until you hurt yourself.

That kiss resulted in a dopamine release in the area that controls the urge to engage in things sexual. In both of us. And it blasted right past the little-squirt-of-dopamine stage of things, and went directly to the open-the-floodgates-or-the-damn-will-burst phenomenon.

Within seconds our bodies were welded together, following the example of our lips. Tongues flicked and heartbeats soared. Her hands went to my hips and pulled my cock (when did it get that hard again?) into her pelvic triangle, where she ground her own pubis against it.

My hands pulled her shirt up and she slid her arms out, but wouldn't stop kissing me long enough for me to remove it completely. I didn't care. Her breasts were hot against my chest. I slid my hands into the back of her panties and helped her rub against my prick.

A sound came from her throat, into my mouth, that turned on a fire hydrant of dopamine in my brain. I pushed her panties down and then my shorts. Her hand came down to grip my cock and squeezed it. She stroked it slowly.

I broke the kiss.

"Bedroom!" I gasped.

"Here!" she panted back, sinking to the floor on her back.

She bent her knees and removed her panties fully. Her knees opened and, completely unashamed, she exhibited her sex to her chosen mate. She was shaved as close between her legs as she was on her head.

Thoughts of bed flew from my head and I sank to my knees.

It had been a long, long time for me. Even longer since I had done it hard and fast and violent. But I sensed that was what she wanted. She wanted to be taken ... handled ... dominated. At the same time my brain registered that she didn't want to be used or humiliated. She was much too proud for that. And I didn't know how to do that anyway. It had never appealed to me.

So I sank down onto her. Her hand reached for my prod again, and she guided it where she wanted it. She teased us both by stroking it up and down between slippery pussy lips. I waited until it was right in the middle and then gave it to her hard, because I knew she was well lubricated. She barely got her hand away before it was crushed. Her grunt of completion was music in my ears. I strained forward, and heard skin squeak on the tiled floor as she slid. She bit my shoulder, but gently.

"Don't you dare stop," she panted.

"Not a chance," I rasped back. "I want this to last forever."

Her arms went around me and her hips pushed up at me.

"Ohhhhh Gramps," she moaned.

-------

The aftermath of sex can be awkward. Most people have gone through that. To be honest, I was so happy with the fact that I could still perform that I was still high as we caught our breath.

"I'm all sweaty," she complained. Obviously she wasn't feeling awkward either.

"There's a nice cool pool out back."

"Good idea."

"Wear the pink bikini?" I asked.

"Not in this century," she said, but I could hear the smile in her voice.

Instead of belaboring the point, I just pulled her up and tugged her, naked, toward the patio door.

"Is it really private?" she asked. She'd been out there before, but obviously hadn't assessed whether or not it was safe to go naked. The fact that she was now going naked shot very pleasant things through me, because it meant she hadn't meant to but was anyway. I know that sounds odd, but the short way of looking at it was that she had suddenly chosen to do things with me, as opposed to having an extended plan, say of conquest or something. I liked that I could spur spontaneity in her.

"It's really private," I said.

"But I'm leaking," she said, still pulling at my hand.

"That's what the filter is for," I said.

"Men!" she snorted.

"Gotta love 'em," I said, pulling her outdoors.

She resisted for another ten feet, and then the cloak of the water was closer, so she passed me and dove cleanly into the pool. Her ass looked fantastic as the water spread for it and then closed over it.

I dove in and we swam laps together again. I didn't swim nearly so smoothly this time. I kept trying to get peeks at her body. Finally she stood up in the shallow end. I bent my knees and let the water support my upper body, and put those delicious breasts right at eye level.

"You're a thoroughly dangerous man," she said, using her hands to squeegee her hair and get it laid down on the right side of her head. That made her breasts lift, and I wanted to play with them again.

"That's not what you said yesterday," I said.

"Yesterday I was a foolish young girl, trusting my bumbling old uncle to be a gentleman."

"You remember things very differently than I do," I said. "I distinctly remember you calling me a harmless dirty old man."

"You're a dirty old man, all right," she said. "Harmless? Not so much."

That made me think of something.

"Speaking of harmless ... what's the state of your birth control?"

"Now he asks," she muttered.

"I don't recall you yelling to be let go," I said.

"How can a girl complain when her breath is literally being sucked from her lungs?" She put her hands on her hips. "You're a strong, dangerous, dirty old man!"

"Gawrsh," I hammed. "You're gonna make me blush and stuff."

I reached for her and pulled her toward me. She tried to resist, but I was strong.

"Just spread your legs," I said, balancing on one foot and spearing the other between her legs. I pulled her onto my knee. "Put them around me and I'll make you a nice chair to sit on."

"What are you, a satyr?" she complained, but her legs drifted apart and wrapped around my waist. I brought the other knee up and let her sit on them. "I suppose you want to go again."

"Perish the thought," I said. "I just want to do some more of this."

I kissed her. She kissed me back. We spent ten minutes just exploring each others' mouths before she spoke again.

"I didn't mean to do this."

"Here's to losing control regularly," I quipped.

"I didn't come here to seduce you," she said.

"I know." I kissed her again. "I didn't invite you here to be seduced."

She squeezed my middle with strong thighs.

"I read some more of your stories last night."

"Oh? What's the verdict?"

"Isn't the verdict rather obvious?"

"It wasn't obvious at all," I said. "I didn't know until twenty minutes ago that anything like this was going to happen."

"What about last night?" she asked. "Didn't that mean anything?"

"That you came to my bed naked and told me to go to sleep? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Oh that," she said. She licked my cheek. "That was just a test to see if you were really as thoughtful as you make yourself out to be in your stories."

"Those aren't stories about me," I said.

"Yes they are."

"Are we going to argue now?"

"Probably. You seem to like to argue." She kissed me again.

"Have you ever done it in a pool?" I asked.

"Yes. It's never been comfortable."

"Curses."

"What? You've never done it in a pool?"

"I led a very sheltered marriage," I said.

"You write like you've done it practically everywhere."

"You've heard the old maxim: Those who cannot do ... teach," I said. "In my case, those who have never done it ... bullshit about it."

"That's hilarious," she laughed. "You're a fraud!"

"Was I a fraud back there?" I tossed my head toward the house.

Her eyes went from green to brown.

"Mmmmm ... no, I can't say you were."

"You have no idea how good that makes me feel," I sighed. "It really has been a long time. I wasn't at all sure I could ... um ... give a hundred percent."

She frenched me and bit my lip, pulling at it gently.

"If that wasn't a hundred percent, I'm going to be a very happy girl," she whispered.

-------

While she might be anticipating happiness, she wasn't greedy. When we got out of the pool, she held my fingertips as we walked back in, but she didn't pull me to her room or push me to mine. When I headed for the kitchen she simply parted from me and went into the guest room. I picked up my shorts off the floor and put them back on. I carried her T shirt and panties to her room and knocked on the open door. She was dressed in another set of panties, going through the drawers.

She turned around. These were more of the favored boy shorts type panties and these had printing on the front, just over what I now knew was her bare vulva: HUMID RESOURCES.

I held out her clothing and she pointed to the bed.

"Do I really need to put anything else on?" she asked, lifting a T-shirt out of the open drawer in front of her.

"That all depends on what you intend to do for the next hour or so," I said.

"I need to get the names from your notebooks into a spreadsheet so I can have them at my fingertips the next time I go to the courthouse," she said.

"Then you need both a shirt and pants to cover your humid resources," I said.

"Really? You have no self control?"

"None whatsoever," I said.

"And all I have to do is get naked and give you a come-hither look and you'll come panting?"

"Without fail," I said. "I am completely shameless."

She cocked her head at me. I stared at her breasts. She turned and got out a pair of jeans. I watched her wiggle into them. She put on a show for me, teasing me by shaking everything she had. The new shirt said GOOD GIRLS NEED SPANKINGS TOO.

"No bra?" I teased.

"I only own two," she said, feigning exasperation. "I didn't think I'd need them or my chastity belt when I came here."

"I will attempt to exert the maximum of self control," I said heavily.

What I did was read to her while she created the spreadsheet and filled it in with the information I had about her side of the family. When that was done, she got up and said she'd grab some lunch in town, asking me what was near the courthouse.

"You gonna wear that T-shirt to the courthouse?" I asked.

"Of course," she said.

"All righty then," I said. "I'll just do some writing while you're gone."

"Do you have anything to work on besides that game show thing?" she asked. "It's really awful."

"There's one about a young woman who gets off a train in a cowboy town to use the outhouse, and some kids try to tip it over, and drag it half a mile by accident. She has amnesia as a result, and every lonely cowboy in the territory tries to claim he's her beau."

"So she has to fight off fifty horny cowboys?"

"No. The town doctor takes her under his wing. She's supposed to end up falling in love with him. His name is Bob."

"Of course it is," she said dryly. "And I suppose she's young ... say twenty-six ... and he's an old grampsy fart of advanced age."

"He's somewhere in his middle forties," I said, trying to sound injured.

"Work on that then," she said. "If it makes me wiggly, you might get laid again."

I grinned. "Oh, trust me. I'm gonna get laid anyway."

"So you have a girlfriend coming over tonight?" she asked, forcing the innocent voice.

"Something like that." I smiled. I pointed at her cheek. "You have something right there."

Her hand came up as I stepped closer to her. "What?"

I reached for her waist and said, "My mistake, nothing there." I pulled her loins against mine. Our banter had made me thick again ... not fully hard, but big enough to be felt. I rubbed shamelessly.

"You don't play fair," she said, taking a deep breath.

"Take all the time you need," I said. "I'll be here. If my girlfriend shows up, I'll kick her out when you get back."

She pushed her hips back at me, but only rested her hands on my shoulders.

"Take a nap, old man," she said, her voice husky. "And you better not let her wear you out."



-------

Chapter 6


I had been motivated to write, and had four chapters roughed out by the time I heard her come in the front door. I saved the file and got up to stretch. She stared at me.

"Are you just going to be naked the rest of the time I'm here now?" she asked.

"I told you, I like to be comfortable when I'm at home."

She had a pizza with her and the aroma of it filled the house when she opened the box.

"It pained me, but I got you half with meat on it," she said.

I looked at the pie. One half was heaped with mushrooms, bell peppers, onions and black olives, and even broccoli. The other half looked like standard pepperoni with extra cheese.

"I thought you didn't like bacon on a man's breath," I said.

"This is pepperoni, not bacon," she said smugly.

She took a piece and bit off perhaps a third of it, chewing industriously. When she was finished she swallowed and went to the fridge. She opened it and pulled out one of the bottles of apricot ale I'd bought for her. After a healthy swallow of that, she got a plate for the rest of her pizza and sat down at the table.

"Do you know somebody named Cody Banks?" she asked.

I had been just about to bite into a piece of my own pie, but halted.

"Where did you meet Cody Banks?" I asked carefully. Cody had been a JAG lawyer I worked with extensively during my first two years as an Agent. He prosecuted my first ten cases and got me my first ten convictions. He had been within three or four years of retirement back then, but had taken on prosecutions because he had plans for after he got out of the Army. Those plans had come to fruition over the years and he was now a senior State Judge.

"He was at the courthouse. He came in and asked Merilee for something, and then hung around and asked me some questions. He offered to help me look things up. He was very nice."

"Cody Banks is one of the Superior Court judges," I said. "He doesn't offer to help strangers look up their genealogy."

"He helped me," she said.

"I bet he found out who you are," I said.

"Of course he did. He was very interested in me, even when Merilee told him I was a nice young woman and your niece and not to bother me."

"She said that to Judge Banks?" I asked, slightly amazed. Merilee Hawkins was the county Registrar of Deeds. She'd been reelected at least a dozen times, and no one ever ran against her anymore.

"There's something going on between those two," she said, conspiratorially. "They were making goo-goo eyes at each other when he first got there."

"And then he abandoned her to come sniff around you," I said. "What makes you think they're sneaking around behind the public's back?"

"Why would they have to sneak around?" she asked, taking another huge bite of pizza. She held up a finger to stop me from answering until she swallowed and took another sip of beer. "Are they married or something?"

"No. He's a widower and she's a widow, but he's in his seventies and she's only something like forty-five."

"So? The fact that you're old and decrepit doesn't bother me," she said easily. She polished off the last of her first piece and picked another one out of the box. That girl could eat when she was motivated.

"If he spent time with you, he had a motive," I said. "He's a pretty busy man."

"Well he didn't hit on me, if that's what you mean," she said, grinning.

"Did he say anything about me?"

"Only in passing," she said.

She ate another piece of pizza and made me ask her what she meant.

"He just said that when I got back here I should tell you I'd been a very good girl."

-------

I ambushed her as she came out of the bathroom, where she'd just taken a shower. I was to learn Anna took a lot of showers. In fact, during the summer time, she'd take a shower at the drop of a hat. HUMID RESOURCES had been replaced by panties that were white with red lacy edges and tiny red hearts all over them. I captured her by simply bending over and putting my shoulder in her stomach, with my arm around her back, and standing up.

She kicked and squirmed, but her own weight made it too uncomfortable to resist very much. She got indignant with me then, demanding to be let go. I sat on the bed and manhandled her across my lap.

"Don't you dare!" she yelled.

"Judge Banks is a very important man in this town," I said. "People generally snap to when he makes a suggestion."

"He was flirting with me!" she objected.

"Oh, he meant exactly what he said," I said mournfully. "This is going to hurt you much more than it hurts me."

I gave her a couple of firm smacks on her nicely rounded, cushioned butt cheeks.

"Damn you!" she yelled.

I noticed, however, that she wasn't fighting very hard to get away anymore.

I gave her two more smacks on each ass cheek, and tried to make them sting.

"Bastard!" she gasped. "You're bruising me!"

"Let's see?" I said eagerly, pulling the back of her panties down.

"Don't rip them!" she yelped.

"I can't tell for sure," I said, rubbing the skin of her now bright red backside. "Maybe we should pull those panties down just a little farther."

"You are such a shit!" she said and started "struggling" again. I noticed that all she did was rock back and forth, which allowed me to pull each side of her panties down with no trouble, as long as I timed it right.

The skin before my eyes had a mottled look. It bothered me a little, because it looked like it might actually bruise.

"Don't you dare hit me again, you pervert," she rasped.

"You mean here?" I asked, slapping one bare cheek.

"You're poking me," she complained, trying to reach for my cock, which was rock hard.

"If only you'd been a bad girl," I said sadly. "Judge Banks wouldn't have sentenced you to this punishment."

"Let me up," she moaned. "You hurt meeeee."

She might have been convincing except the shift from outraged to whiner was much too swift.

"Do you promise to be bad?" I asked, slapping the other cheek. The skin jiggled and I felt my cock try to get even harder. I almost felt bad because this was so much fun.

"Yes!" she yelled.

Then, as if she'd been planning it all along, she rolled suddenly away from my body. She landed on the floor, but jumped up much too quickly for me to have recaptured her. She stood, feet spread shoulder width apart, upper chest and face flushed. Somehow her lips looked even fuller than before. She took a step toward me with her index finger pointed right at me. It hit my chest and dug in deep. I either had to fall back on the bed or get punctured, so I fell back.

I felt my knees being wrenched apart and my hips complained. Then wet heat engulfed my prick and I looked up just in time to see it completely disappear into her mouth before the scene was hidden by purple hair.

-------

I had exactly one blowjob before I got married. Danielle Huston, on prom night, said she was going to make sure I never forgot her. I hadn't, but since then the scuttlebutt between buddies had suggested that she wasn't as proficient as she thought she was. Of course I'd had ample opportunities to get professional blow jobs since then. In Korea the singsong "Hey GI--suckee, fuckee, five buckee," followed you down all the streets in the off limits areas. At least on my first tour. In the seven years between it and my second Korean tour, the girls' self esteem had apparently improved and they then wanted twenty bucks instead.

But I'd never been interested in fly-by-night sexual escapades. I'd seen the results, and it didn't get me going at all. And my lovely wife, being of blue blood, would never have considered soiling her lips on male anatomy.

So basically, the only thing I had to actually compare with Danielle Huston's prom night efforts was what was happening to me at that moment.

How can one communicate appropriately the differences?

As a B-B gun is to a 105 mm howitzer ... Danielle was to Anna.
As the light of the keyhole finder thing on your key chain is to the Saharan sun ... Danielle was to Anna.
As a tricycle is to a fully loaded Hummer ... Danielle was to Anna.

In fact, I finally understood what a hummer was.

I begged her not to stop. Then, when I was about to shoot, she squeezed off the base of my cock and sucked hard on the knob and I begged her to stop.

She did, but only long enough to poke and prod me into the position on the bed she wanted me in, which was in the middle, on my back, with my arms raised like I was surrendering to the OPFOR. With startling grace and balance, she stepped up onto the bed and put her left foot by my right hip. Her right toe landed in the middle of my sternum.

"Don't move," she said. She was panting slightly

I wasn't going anywhere. I just lay there, wondering if the pain in my balls would go away. I raised my head, thinking my cock had sucked clear back inside my body, but it was right there, straining upwards, as hard as ever. Why couldn't I feel it then?

"I said don't move!" she growled.

She put her right foot on the bed beside my left hip and bent her knees slightly, jutting her loins forward. She spread her knees and reached to pull her vulva apart.

"I'm going to let you in here," she said. "You are not to squirt. Is that clear?"

I blinked. I couldn't even feel my cock.

"Is that clear?" she asked, bending her knees more.

"Yes!" I said.

She sank down and, like she'd done this a hundred times, captured my prick, slotted it and let her weight fall on my loins.

"Ahhhhh," she groaned.

Then she started rocking forward and back.

-------

She knew what she was doing. I'll give her that. She had desensitized my penis, so that it remained hard while she used it. And that's what she did. She used it. She used me. I was merely a living dildo at that moment.

Maybe that's not fair, but it's close enough to the truth that I'll still say it. What was going on at that moment was not for my benefit. There were side effects, of course, and I enjoyed them immensely. But I understood that she wanted something from me, and I wanted to give it to her.

The first orgasm took her almost five full minutes to achieve. I didn't even think she was really trying at first. Instead she seemed to be experimenting. Imagine a situation in which medicine needs to be applied to the interior of the vagina. All of it. Every square inch needs some of this medicine. So it is slathered on a penis, which she then sits on and moves in such a way that every square inch of her vagina comes into some kind of rubbing contact with that medicated penis.

That's what it was like for the first two or three minutes.

Then she began making soft noises, deep in her throat, which rose, bit by bit, until their source was higher. They were sounds of pleasure that I knew I was responsible for and, if anything, they made me harder yet. I still didn't feel enough that I wanted to cum, though. It was like watching her pleasure herself was more fun than my own completion.

There was an "Oh fuck, Gramps!" and some rhythmic high pitched noises, and her eyes closed, but then they opened and she started going all over again.

"I could get used to this, Gramps," she sighed.

"I hope you do," I said, breathing deeply.

Then she was off again, working up to those high pitched sounds that are so hard to describe, but which are the supreme sign of what a great time she's having.

After her third one she slowly rocked to a stop, her head drooping.

"That will do for now," she said. "I want you on top now. Will you do that for me?"

I was more than willing. I confess that as she had used me, I used her, because now that I was able to move, I could make that feeling build in the pit of my balls ... that urge to unload and feel the sweet torture of semen jetting through my penis and into my chosen woman.

"You can cum in me now, Gramps," she whispered, urging me on.

"In you," I gasped.

"Yes," she hissed. "In my pussy, Gramps ... way up inside me."

"Oh baby," I moaned. "You feel so good."

"Give it to me, Gramps," she urged. Her hands fluttered on my back. "Be my man and give me your cum."

Then it was there, and the little death was upon me. I went insane for a few short seconds as my body went on autopilot and flushed the soothing fluid through my penis and into her belly. I loved her at that moment, and wanted to say it ... shout it ... but I also knew that the speaking of such words, the first time said, should be at a time chosen by the heart and not the gonads. I had known my lover for only a short time. I yearned to know her better and for many years, but I knew that was unlikely.

So I submerged myself in her passion and felt her legs squeeze me, welcoming the semen I so desperately wanted to give her. Her own words sufficed.

"Oh Gramps, yes," she whispered.

-------

Most teenagers manage to get involved in makeout sessions. I did. I'm sure you did too. They're important because they fire up the libido and move us onward, sexually. It's sad, though, that most couples, after they become fully a sexual pair, tend to slack off on the preparation for sex and, all too often, get straight to the main event. Eventually couples don't make out at all, and even their foreplay is perfunctory.

That's too bad. They don't remember what they're missing.

But Anna loved to kiss and cuddle and fondle and touch. She reminded me of how much fun that was, and how amazingly erotic it can be to build and build and build, sometimes taking hours, to the culmination of making love.

I worried for a few days that she'd decide to go stay in a motel, just to get some peace and quiet, because I couldn't keep my hands off of her. But as often as not, she was the one to let fingers drift across my butt, or goose me, which she knew would result in me goosing her back, which she never resisted.

She was in heat all the time. And I had never been happier.

She had but one oddity I could never figure out. While she loved to have my mouth glued to her bald pussy lips, and kept telling me that I was quite good at doing that, she always warned me not to start unless I was going to be able to fill her pussy with prick when she'd had enough licking and sucking. Cunnilingus was foreplay for her, rather than an end in itself. Not to say she didn't enjoy it. She'd let me go for an hour or more, having orgasms one after another. But sooner or later she'd pull at my ears and say something along the lines of "I need you in me Gramps ... fill me up."

I really was as happy as I'd ever been ... but there was a fly in the ointment.

You may remember that I mentioned I'm big on vows. I've never been the kind of guy who chased skirts just to broadcast a little seed. Part of good sex, for me, is feeling something for the woman ... choosing her and knowing that she has chosen me. I could never patronize a hooker, because I'd know she didn't care who I was or what I was doing, as long as I gave her the money. It would be like fucking an ATM that takes money instead of giving it. For me, sex is an exchange of precious gifts. What I offer a woman during sex is the potential for life itself. What she does by accepting it is acknowledge that she is willing to bear my offspring.

Which means that when I commit to a sexual relationship ... I commit in other ways as well. Let's just call a spade a spade. I fell in love with Anna. And I fall in love rarely, so when I do it, I sort of go whole hog.

And that was the fly in this particular ointment. I'm fully aware that not all people who engage in things sexual do it for the same reasons I do. I know that most women don't look at sex as "Am I willing to have this man's baby? Yes? Then let's go for it." Not on a conscious level, at least. A lot of women don't want to get pregnant at all, but they still enjoy sex. Personally, I think that's like eating plastic, but if you enjoy the taste of plastic, then hell, more power to you. Tons of people love diet soda, and it has exactly the same nutritional value as plastic.

So, while I knew I loved Anna, and had already committed to her in major ways, there was every likelihood that, for her, this was a one or two week stand, in which she was getting enough sex to keep her going until she found the next guy she felt like hopping into bed with.

In theory, when you are this intimate with someone, you get to know them well enough to judge how serious they are about the relationship. But while we were incredibly intimate, for long portions of each day, we never got to do the dating thing, which is where a lot of the personal knowledge we gather about each other is traded.

So I didn't really know what she was looking for, other than my prick three or four times a day, spurting in her pussy, and occasionally her mouth.

Part of that was because every time I asked her what kind of birth control she was on, she evaded answering the question. I heard "Don't worry about that now, Gramps," at least a dozen times. At one point she said, "Stop talking and keep fucking, Gramps."

I could have just asked her if she was interested in having more children, but that's the kind of thing you ask a woman who you think is going to hang around for a while, and as far as I knew, Anna was still planning on leaving sometime soon. I was already feeling the pain of that impending separation.

And yet, I knew she felt something for me. While we lay limp and sweating in each other's arms one night I said, "You know that wherever you are, I'm going to have to come see you occasionally."

Her reply was "I'll keep a light on for you," and then she started kissing me ardently.

I wasn't receiving mixed signals. I was just receiving incomplete ones.

But at the end of the week, she didn't go home.

-------

Of course I wasn't about to point out that she had stayed longer than originally planned. Things came to a head on the tenth day of the visit. She had spent long days gathering data and was just about finished. She was spending more and more time on work, and less and less on her purpose for coming. I still went to bed earlier than she did, but she almost always woke me when she got there.

On this particular evening we were skinny-dipping in the pool, cuddling in the shallow end. She pulled herself out of the water and sat on the edge of the deck, with her heels beside her butt and her knees spread wide. I didn't have to be told what to do. I sucked on her clit for four or five minutes, alternating between putting pressure on it with my lips and teeth and sucking it gently. She was very appreciative. I stopped and looked up at the green eyes watching me pleasure her.

"You know I'm retired," I said. "I can go wherever I want ... even sell the house and move somewhere else if I felt like it."

"You're a sweet dirty old man," she said, and reached to push my face back into her sex.

After she had an orgasm, I took her to a pad we had laid on the grass for this purpose, and put her heels up by her ears. We both groaned as I slid slowly deep into her pussy. She sighed, "I love this, Gramps. Fuck me good."

The surge of emotion I felt at her welcome tipped me past the point of patience.

"How much trouble would I be in if I told you I love you?" I breathed, pulling out and moving slowly back in.

"You wouldn't be in any trouble at all, silly," she gasped. Folded up like that, it was hard for her to breathe.

I stopped halfway in ... or out ... depends on your point of view. Just like that, my worries of driving her away with serious words were rendered ... silly.

"Really? That's really good, because I've fallen for you like a motherfucker."

"How fortunate," she gasped as I thrust back in hard. "Because I'm a mother and I need fucking right now."

Knowing my love was welcome kind of made me a little crazy, and I started pounding the poor girl hard. She took me in this position because she knew I loved to get as deep in her as I could, and this position was good for that. But it wasn't so good for the stimulation of her clit, and I wanted to hear those high pitched chirping sounds she made when she came. So I let her feet off my shoulders and started pounding her clit with my pubic bone. Her pussy squeezed and grasped my cock, and those sounds started coming until I knew she was there. I couldn't have kept from cumming if there'd been a gun to my head. I went in deep and writhed on top of her, whimpering like a little boy. I almost cried with the joy of spurting in her.

Then there was the agony of it being over, mixed with the joy of still having her naked body pressed to mine, her arms still around me. I knew that if my lips sought hers she'd happily kiss me.

"I love you so much," I whispered into her hair.

"That's good," she whispered back. "Because I love you, too."

-------

Those three little words change a lot ... at least in me. I don't offer that kind of love on a temporary basis. I knew I'd love this woman for as long as she let me. It had been that way with Sherry too, though, so I also knew how tenuous love can be. As beautiful and strong as it is, it can still be shattered, like fine crystal, which will last a thousand years unless abused. It can also be strained.

We sat across the table from each other. We were dressed. We actually got dressed routinely, because it was so much fun to undress each other.

"I love you," I said firmly.

"You said that," she noted.

"What are we going to do about it?" I asked.

There was a pause ... a fairly long one. "I vote we keep on loving each other," she said, smiling.

"How?" I asked. "You leave in a few days."

Again there was a long pause. "Yes."

"I'm not so good at long distance relationships," I said. "My last one didn't work out very well."

"They're very difficult," she agreed.

"Do you have to go back?" I had to ask it, but of course I already knew the answer.

"I have an apartment ... a little boy," she said.

"Which is too small for me to live in too," I said with conviction.

Another long pause. "Yes."

"I don't get it!" I said, frustrated. "How can you just go off like that without a care in the world?"

"Who says I don't have a care in the world?" she asked sharply.

"Well you're leaving," I accused.

"I have to leave," she said. "You know that. Why are you beating me up about it?"

"Because I'm frustrated," I sighed. "I'm sorry. I don't think I can live without you."

"You've lived fifty-odd years without me, Gramps."

"That's like watching a baby take milk from its mother's breast for the first time and then saying he lived without milk ever since he was born, so it's no big deal to go without it."

"You're very dramatic sometimes, Gramps," she said softly.

"I'm passionate about things," I said, defensively.

"I'm very aware of that."

Now the pause was on my end. My emotions still roiled, though. I wasn't yet quite under control.

"I can't believe you want to leave," I said.

"I never said I wanted to leave," she said sharply.

Something in her voice stabbed through the self-pity and misery I was wallowing in. I blinked.

"So you don't want to leave?"

"Of course not, you foolish man. I love you!"

"Then why are you leaving?"

She rolled her eyes. "For a man who has lived long enough to have amassed great knowledge, you can be very ignorant, Gramps. One, I have a son. I'm not going to abandon him. Two, I have an apartment, with a lease. Three, before I make important decisions I talk about them with Spencer, especially if they'll impact him. And four, nobody has asked me to stay here."

"Of course I did," I said, zeroing in on the last thing she'd said.

"When did you ask me to stay here?" she asked.

"When I told you I couldn't live without you," I said.

"That's not asking me to stay," she insisted. "That's just trying to make me feel guilty."

"Marry me!" I yelped.

"I told you I'm not the marrying kind, Gramps!" she shot back.

"What do you want from me?" I pleaded.

She leaned forward. "I want you to tell me what you want. I want you to tell me what you'd expect from me. I want you to ask me how I feel about things."

My impulse was to gush that I loved her, but I held it in check. I assembled my thoughts, and took deep breaths.

"All right," I said. "What I want is for us to live together. It can be here, or anywhere. I'm not fussy about where. I can afford someplace that will serve all our needs. If I can't marry you, I want to feel married ... that I'm your man and that you're my woman. I want to have children with you. I want to see you hold them and love them. I want to be the kind of man Spencer will respect and seek out for friendship and advice. I want you to be so happy that you'll put up with the things I do that annoy you. I want to be able to touch you every day and love you until I forget how to love."

She sat still. "Hmmmm," she finally said. "How about if I just come and see you once in a while and you fuck my socks off?"

My mouth dropped open and I felt heat suffuse my face. I had tried to be as serious as possible, and she was playing around. She held up one finger just as I took breath to scream at her.

"All right," she said in a businesslike tone. "In the negotiations thus far, you have made a conservative offer, and I've made a liberal one. Now all we need to do is find some common ground."

I blinked. I felt the heat in my face gel into tears in my eyes.

She was giving me a chance.

-------

Actually, to call them negotiations would be inflating them beyond what they actually were. The only sticking points were that she wasn't excited about having more children. Her first pregnancy had apparently been extremely difficult and she wasn't eager to go through that again. I had to settle for her saying, "I might change my mind. The thought of you getting me pregnant doesn't drive me quite as crazy as I would have expected before I met you."

The other issue was Spencer. He would have to change schools, and he was about to go into second grade with the only school friends he'd ever known. Then again, he was only going into second grade, where it's fairly easy to make new friends because the cliques the older kids invariably create haven't formed yet. Anna, of course, knew what the schools were like here in town.

In fact, that was one thing in my favor. She missed her home town, even though it had changed quite a bit. And moving wouldn't be a problem, simply because I'd do all the hauling and carrying.

But Spencer's opinion, young as he was, counted for something. She wasn't coming to live with me. They would be coming to live with me. She voiced another concern about that.

"I get you, Gramps. You're passionate and opinionated, while being fair. You like to sound rough and dangerous, and say things that might start arguments. At the same time, you'll listen to the opposing side. I get that. It's even something I like about you. But a young, impressionable boy can't necessarily tell when you're being full of shit and when you're not."

"And you're worried I'll have him running around with an imaginary gun shooting people and learning to detest politicians, liberals and criminals."

"Well ... yes ... I guess so," she admitted.

"He's your son," I said. "You call the shots. If there's a disagreement, your vote wins."

"I know that, Gramps, but you'll still have an effect on him. You affect everyone you interact with. It's just who you are."

"So I'll teach him to be fair. That covers most situations."

"I think that if I'm sure you remember I'm concerned about it, that will be enough," she said. "I trust you to do the right thing ... if you think about it first."

"No guns until he's at least eleven," I said soberly.

"Gramps!"

"Twelve, then," I said. "And only small bore pistols and rifles. No machine guns. I promise."

"Are you teasing me? You'd better be teasing me." She stood up and turned around, sticking the ass out that she knew I loved so much. "Because if you're not teasing, you'll never get another piece of this ass." She slapped her butt. I stood, lunged and tried to smack the same cheek, but she saw me coming and skipped away, laughing.

I stalked her. She scrambled for the utensil drawer, which had knives galore in it, but she pulled out a wooden spoon instead. She brandished it at me.

"Doan come no closer," she slurred. "I cut you, old man!"

I pounded my chest with both hands. "Me fuck you now!" I growled.

She danced around, repeatedly threatening to cut me with the wooden spoon.

"Me bend you over couch and fuck you pussy hard!" I said, letting my arms hang and swing as I hunched over.

She stopped. "Oh! I forgot! I have a surprise for you! Hang on a sec." Casually she laid the spoon on the counter, looked at me and said "Be right back. Hold that thought." Then she turned, walked casually to the back door and opened it. She looked over her shoulder and stuck out her tongue. "Bye, suckahhhhhh."

Then, laughing, she took off running.

-------

Of course, she had made a grievous error, even if she didn't know it yet. She had left the home turf undefended, and given the enemy all the time in the world to prepare an ambush. And she had to return, sooner or later. I had plastic pitchers of water balanced over every entrance into the house. Unless she came in a window, she was going to get wet. Then there were the trip wires that went to what I dubbed 'flour cannons.' They were simple toilet paper roll tubes with one end taped closed. I taped the tube to one end of a dowel and taped the other end of the dowel down to a handy flat surface. I put two on tables and three more on floors and camouflaged them. String was tied to the bottom of the tube, which was half filled with flour. The string transitioned into clear fishing line, which was stretched all over the place. If a foot caught the line, the dowel would whip towards the person tripping it and centrifugal force would fling the flour a good four or five feet.

I thought about a skim of soap on the tiled floors, but she might actually hurt herself if she fell hard and landed wrong, so I passed on that idea. But I couldn't resist cutting the water supply long enough to unscrew the outlet from the water heater and dump in a package of red Rit dye I had left over from Halloween. Whoever took the first shower was in for a surprise when the water got warm.

To bait the trap, I left the house and drove west, as if I were going to the store. I circled around, parking on the opposite side of the block from my house and went through the Kennedy's yard. I went in the window I'd left open for that reason ... and waited.

I don't know where she went. Maybe for a slurpee or something, but she didn't come back for another thirty-five minutes. I watched her walk tentatively up the driveway. She looked in the window of the garage to see if the car was in there, since it was missing from the driveway where I usually parked it. Then, much too confidently, she approached the side door that led into the kitchen. It was the one we both usually used.

The pitcher of water worked flawlessly, dumping two quarts square on top of her purple-dyed hair.

"Dammit, Gramps!" she yelled. She stood dripping. Her T-shirt, which said BAD INFLUENCE in old English script, was wet on one shoulder and down the front. "Gramps?" She called out. "Ha ha. You got me. Now bring me a towel!"

I waited until she was almost to the first fishing line and then stepped out of the pantry and yelled, "Boo!"

She tripped two of the flour cannons before she stopped. They also worked perfectly and now she was covered with flour that stuck to the moisture on her skin, hair and clothing.

"Not funny, you prick!" she yelled.

"Looks funny to me," I said. "That will teach you to mess with a pro."

"Oh yeah?" She started toward me and then ran to plaster herself against me, trying to rub the slimy flour all over me. I laughed and copped feels until she danced away from me, disgusted that I wasn't trying to get away.

"You could really use a shower today," I said, grinning.

"You'll pay for this," she said, trying to sound dangerous. "I'll find a way to make you pay, buster."

I hunched over and swung my arms again. "Me fuck you after you take shower and all clean. Grrrrrr."

She stuck her tongue out at me again. "You fuck me maybe a year from now if I nice to you."

Then she ran for the shower. She tripped two more flour cannons while I laughed.

She slammed the bathroom door and locked it, thinking I might come in after her. I would have too, though I wouldn't have actually interrupted the shower. So I waited outside the door.

It didn't take long.

"Graaaaamps ... you fucking prick!"



-------

Chapter 7


She looked like she had the mother of all sunburns. The dye had diluted enough by the time it got to the actual shower head that it had created a smooth, unbroken stain that covered her whole upper body. She'd stepped out of the shower when she realized what was happening, which was why there were only streaks of dripping red down her legs.

"You fucker!" she yelled, standing there naked, wet and mad.

"Me fuck you now?" I said in a high voice.

"This is permanent, Gramps!" she complained. "It'll take forever to wear off."

"Good thing you decided not to marry me. That would look really funny in a wedding gown," I said.

"You know you'll pay for this," she said, her voice firm and suddenly calm.

"Probably," I said. "But you're an amateur, and it was worth it anyway. You look hot." I chuckled. "It actually goes with your hair kind of nice.

She glowered at me. "I'm going to the store to get some hydrogen peroxide," she said. "Maybe I can get some of it off with that."

"I'm buying," I said. "Let me get my keys."

"No, I think you've helped quite enough for one day. Get us something to eat while I'm gone," she said.

She left and I called The Harvest Moon to get some takeout. She was already back by the time I returned with the food. I was alert and careful, but there were no booby traps waiting for me. She was in the bathroom, scrubbing away at her skin.

She didn't say anything during supper, except that she wasn't used to being on the receiving end of things like that. The peroxide hadn't worked. She grumbled, but eventually said, "You got me. I admit it."

It made me over confident. I should have known she'd never cave like that.

-------

Later that night, I was getting what she billed as the winner's blow job, which was a very good blow job She had also gotten a can of whipped cream at the store, and had been squirting little dabs of whipped cream here and there, and then sucking them up. I loved it when she covered the knob of my cock and then sucked it clean. So when I heard the sound of a long release from an aerosol can, and felt something cool being spread all over my groin and balls, I just thought she was going all out with the whipped cream. Then the odor struck me and I sat up like a shot. She was kneeling between my legs, grinning, her hands covered with white. My groin started to burn, and within seconds I felt like my crotch was on fire. I jumped for the bathroom and turned on the cold water.

Nothing happened.

I let out a strangled scream and staggered out of the bathroom.

"Don't be a pussy," she said, standing there wiping her hands on a towel. "It's only Nair."

-------

She went and turned the water back on, but it was already too late for my manly hair. It still burned as she pushed me into the shower and knelt in front of me, but her fingers cleaning me off didn't hurt.

When I was nice and clean, she finished the blow job, right there in the shower. She deep throated me until I came, and then pulled back to suck the knob as I squirted. I forgave her right in the middle of that.

We dried off and went back to bed.

"We're finished now ... right?" she asked as she cuddled up to me.

"I'll never be finished with you," I said. My balls still ached from trying to spurt more than was there.

"I mean with being mean to each other," she said.

"I can't promise I'll never tease you again," I said.

"But we're finished for now," she insisted.

"Yes."

"Good, because all I want to concentrate on for the next few days is making you too weak to walk."

It was much too soon, but my cock tried really hard to stiffen up just then.

-------

It was very strange seeing a part of my body that had had hair for as long as I could remember, now bald as an egg. I also learned something. I had always thought that men who shaved that area were odd, maybe even a little funny, if you know what I mean. But Anna loved the soft, smooth feel of my cock and balls. She spent a lot more time moving her lips around down there, sucking this or that, and playing. And, of course, that got me hard, which meant, of course, that I got laid. It was also very interesting to watch my baldness pressing up against her baldness. And the skin covering my pubic bone slid effortlessly around her slippery slot, which made it feel completely different.

In other words, men ... I'm rethinking whether it's all that macho to hang onto body hair so tenaciously.

If my early life with Sherry had been anything like this, I'd have fought hard to keep her. Maybe that's not fair. It suggests that I wanted Anna just for sex, but it went much deeper than that. I wasn't sure it had ever gone very deep with Sherry, now that I had something to compare it to.

Time of day didn't matter to Anna. The morning before she left, she came into the kitchen naked. I had gotten up before her, which I pretty much always did, and was reading the paper and sipping coffee when she came in. She came to the table, pushed it away from me, sat on my lap sideways and kissed me until I was hard. Then she stood up, pulled my shorts down and straddled me, filling herself when she sat back down. She pushed a nipple against my lips and said, "Nipple love, please." They were the first words she'd spoken that morning.

Television didn't seem to interest her. We'd sit down to watch something, but within ten minutes she was nibbling on my ear, or trying to pull my penis out to suck on it. She would, however, watch TV if she could sit on me, impaled, leaning back against my chest. She'd wiggle while she slowly stroked her clitty, just happy to have me in her. She could sit like that for an hour or more and not even go for an orgasm.

-------

The day came when we hauled her suitcases back to her car. She had agreed to let me follow her home, though we both understood I wasn't going to stay. She wanted me to meet Spencer.

That actually went very well, at least from my viewpoint. It turned out Debby and her husband had moved back into the state when the company he worked for opened a branch there, and Spencer had been staying with Grandma. So we went to Grandma's first. Debby was both surprised and pleased to see me again. I wondered how pleased she'd be when she found out what was going on.

"You're weathering rather nicely," she said, looking me up and down. "As opposed to my daughter, who you have returned to me with red skin for some reason. Do I want to know?"

"Accident," I said. "A practical joke that went awry." I didn't want to dwell on that, so I said "You're as lovely as ever."

"You heard from Sherry recently?" she asked me while Anna and Spencer loaded his things into her car. He was touching her face and I heard her tell him she'd explain later.

"Not for years," I said.

"She's getting divorced again," said Debby.

"Oh," I said. I didn't really care what Sherry did.

"She whines that he didn't respect her individuality." She snorted. "Whatever that means. She should have been happy with you." She shook her head. "But she'll never be happy. Sometimes I wonder what went wrong in her brain."

"I don't know," I said.

"So what are you doing with yourself these days?"

"I play at being retired," I said. "I've gotten into golf, and I like it a lot."

"Any romance in your life?"

I looked away from her. "There are some prospects I'm hoping will work out," I said carefully.

"Those prospects wouldn't happen to involve a very unconventional young woman with a six-year-old little boy, now would they?"

I looked at her. She didn't look hostile, only interested.

"What would make you think that?" I asked.

"Ohhh, little things, I guess," she said carelessly. "Like how her little investigative trip was only supposed to last a week, but she called right in the middle of it and asked if I'd keep Spencer a little longer. She said she'd run into something very interesting and wanted to explore it thoroughly. When I pried she told me to mind my own business."

"I see," I said.

"And, of course, there's the fact that you drove all the way here with her, and everything was packed in her car. I suppose you could be the kind of man who just wanted to make sure she got back safely ... what with your law enforcement background and all. And then there's the fact that she called you nice when I asked how the trip was going. We're not all that close, Bob, but I know enough about you to accept that people might call you smart, or funny, or dangerous, or even an asshole. But nice? The only person I can think of you were ever nice to was me, and even then I thought you might be flirting with me."

"I suppose I was," I sighed.

"But I think the giveaway was that since you arrived, she hasn't looked at you even once. She's completely ignored you the whole time we've been talking. I'm her mother. I think she's afraid I'll know what she's feeling if she looks at you." She looked at her daughter, who was strapping Spencer into the back seat. "You, on the other hand, have been looking at her almost constantly."

"We got along well," I said, trying to sound neutral.

"So you flirt with all the women in this family," she said.

"Let's just say most of the women in this family are worth flirting with," I said.

"You made a mistake with my sister," she said.

"Anna is nothing like your sister," I responded. "No offense."

"None taken. I know Sherry is a selfish bitch," she said calmly. "She always has been. She probably always will be."

Anna marched over, gave her mother a hug, said thank you and looked at me.

"We're ready to go."

"Be right there," I said. She walked off and I turned back to Debby. "You want to talk about this some more?" I asked.

She watched Anna get into the car and close the door.

"No. Maybe. She's a grown woman. She wouldn't listen to me anyway. She doesn't care what I think."

"I do," I said.

"That's why I'm not going to worry about it," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. "And lord knows she needs a good man in her life. I knew by the way Sherry complained that you must be a good man." She grinned. "I'm sure we'll be seeing more of each other. We can talk then."

"Got it," I said.

Then I got in my car to go meet Spencer on his home turf.

-------

Anna pulled into a parking spot in a lot with twenty-five or thirty other cars in it. I parked down the way a bit and got out. Spencer was standing behind her car, just staring at me as I approached. Anna had already gotten some things out of the car and was trying to hand Spencer his backpack. He wasn't paying any attention to her.

"Hey," I said to him, smiling. "I'm Bob."

"I know," he said. His face was as difficult to read as his mother's was sometimes.

"Want some help with that?" I pointed to his mother, who was now just holding his book bag, watching the two of us.

He looked up, took the bag from his mother and turned back to me.

"No."

"Okay then," I said. I ignored him and gave Anna my attention. "How about you? Want some help?"

"Yes," she said, and started handing me things.

It only took two trips. I got the feeling Spencer wanted some time to evaluate me, so I didn't force my attentions on him. He went back with us to the car on the second trip, and carried his pillow. When we got into her apartment, Anna said she was going to go wash her face, and told Spencer to show me around.

He did so, announcing what each room was before we entered. His room was last. Whether that was intentional or not, I couldn't tell.

"Nice room," I said.

"I guess." He seemed less than impressed, with both the room and me.

I went over to a drawing that somehow looked vaguely familiar.

"Did you do that?" I asked.

"Yes."

"It looks kind of like Van Gogh's Starry Night," I said.

"It is," he said. "I copied it from a book."

"Well how about that," I said, truly impressed. "Got any more like that?"

"I have lots of them," he said. "My mother says she likes you."

"Is that so?" I asked. "How do you feel about that?"

"I don't know."

"I like your mother too."

"Well duh," he said. He didn't sound seven. He sounded about thirteen.

I thought for a moment about how while this boy sounded older than he was, his mother sounded younger than she was. Interesting.

"What does that mean?" I asked, wondering what he'd say.

"How could you not like her?" he asked.

"You got a point there," I admitted.

"She says I have to be nice to you."

"Oh yeah?" I raised my eyebrows. "Tell you what. As long as you don't kick me and stuff, I'd rather you just acted like yourself."

"How can I act like anybody but myself?" he asked.

"Another good point," I said. "You're a smart little boy."

"I know," he said. "Mommy tells me that all the time."

"So can I see your other drawings?"

Instead of answering me verbally, he went to a drawer and opened it. He pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them to me. I sat down on the bed and started going through them. They were a mixture of normal small child line drawings and copies of a number of famous paintings. I saw what were undeniably the melting clocks of Dali, and a very good rendering of Whistler's Mother, among others. I was impressed. The kid had a lot of raw talent. I pulled out an exceptional rendering of M.C. Escher's Drawing Hands. I had no doubt it was better than what I could do, if I had the patience to sit and copy something like that ... which I didn't.

"I like Escher's drawings," he said, looking at what was in my hands. "He's so bizarre."

"You're a little bizarre yourself," I said. "I can count the seven-year-olds I know who use words like 'bizarre' on one finger."

"I'm not actually seven yet," he said. "I'll be seven in a month."

"Your mother corrects me all the time too," I sighed.

"She's like that," he said seriously. "I'm going to go help her."

I followed him to her bedroom, which we'd only stepped into just long enough for him to say, "This is where Mommy sleeps," before moving on with our tour. Anna was unpacking her suitcase and putting things away. We arrived just in time to see her pull something hot pink out of the suitcase and toss it to one side. Spencer went to the bed and picked up the damaged top to the pink bikini.

"You got new booby patches!" he exclaimed.

"Kind of," she said. She looked at me and then back at Spencer. "Did you show Bob your pirate eye patch?"

"Nope. We looked at art."

"Maybe you can show it to him later."

"Maybe."

-------

I only stayed another hour or so. Basically, while Spencer and I weren't best buddies when I said I had to leave, he didn't stand back and scowl at me either. Nor did he throw anything at me when I kissed his mother goodbye.

"Come live with me," I whispered to her after the kiss.

"I'll think about it," she said.

"I can't live without you," I said softly, trying to sound pathetic.

She poked me in the stomach with a finger. "I know." She grinned.

"He'll warm up to me," I said, glancing at Spencer, who was watching us.

"He already has," she said.

"How can you tell?" I asked.

"Go home," she said, pushing me. "I'll see you later."

"When?" I asked, actually pitiful this time.

She laughed. "When I've decided what to do."

-------

When I got back home, the house seemed empty.

I did a few things that needed doing, and then sat down and wrote an entire story nonstop. She was my muse, even though she wasn't there. When that was done, I decided to take a nap.

Her smell was still on the sheets, and I wallowed in it, masturbating slowly.

That night I got on the computer and signed into Gtalk like she'd shown me how to do before she left. Her name was there and her button was green. I clicked on it and the first thing she typed was, "Call me!" I put the headset on and clicked the button. That fifteen-year-old voice answered. She told me she was mad at me, because she missed me and I was so far away. We talked until two in the morning and then she said she needed to get some work done and made me hang up.

The next morning I went and played golf for the first time in two weeks. I was a regular, and the greens keeper had noticed I was missing in action. I didn't have a regular foursome, but if there was an opening for me he'd slip me in. If not, I'd hang around. Sometimes two or three people would have a tee time and he'd put me in with them. I met a lot of interesting people that way.

Even when you play 36 holes of golf every day, though, it doesn't take all day. I got better at golf over the next couple of weeks, but it was still lonely in the afternoons.

We talked on the headsets every night, but she also had work to do, so I could never spend as much time talking to her as I wanted to.

I got a package in the mail. It was a T-shirt, with the phrase UNCLE WITH BENEFITS on the chest.

Even though we talked every day, the topic of her decision never came up. I was afraid to ask ... more and more as the days and weeks went on, and she never brought it up herself. I was afraid she didn't want to have to say the dreaded words: "I don't think it's going to work out, Gramps," and she'd have to if I asked her.

There were odd, if not mixed signals. Her everyday banter was that of a lover. She sent me a picture through Gtalk of a new pair of panties she'd gotten. They were red, with small white letters right under the waistband in the front that said SPERM BANK DEPOSIT SLOT with an arrow pointing down to where her vulva made a deep, well defined camel toe. I immediately asked if I could come visit. Her response was "Now is not a good time. Be patient."

On the fifteenth of August, I came home from the course to find her car in the driveway. I had heart palpitations.

I left my clubs in my car and ran inside. There was a note lying on the floor, taped to one end of a length of yarn the same color as her hair was ... had been ... I didn't know what color her hair was at this point in time. The note said, "If I'd wanted to ambush you, you'd be all wet right now."

The fact that she'd known I would rush right in, thoughtless of any potential "danger," made me smile.

"Where are you?" I called out.

"Bathroom," came the faint fifteen-year-old voice.

I approached slowly, thinking about the monster backpack supplied water cannons they sold in the stores. She'd think something like that was funny after the note. I peeked into the bathroom and she was just finishing washing her face, which was back to its normal color. She washed her face a lot. Then again, she had the smoothest, most perfect face I'd ever seen. She could do commercials for facial creams, except for the faint spray of freckles across her nose that spilled onto both cheeks. Those looked perfectly normal to me, but the TV folks wouldn't like them. TV folks have never been known for their intelligence.

"Hey," I said. I noticed her hair was now bright red, and thought of the dye that her skin had been stained with. The two would have gone perfectly together.

She turned away from me and got a towel, which she patted her face dry with. When that was done, she hung the towel up and turned to face me.

"Hey," she said in return.

She was wearing what might have been called a T-shirt dress. It was long enough that it came to her mid thighs. It was green, with a large multi-colored graphic on it of a clown's smiling face and his two gloved hands. The head of the clown was right under her chin. The two hands were on her breasts, palms facing each other, and one might have thought the clown was trying to fondle those breasts except for the text under the graphic, written in circus font. It said YOU MUST BE THIS LONG TO RIDE. Those hands were a good ten inches apart.

"So, what's up?" I asked.

"Aren't you glad to see me?" she asked.

"Of course I am," I snorted. Then I frowned. "Depending on what you decided."

"So if I decided moving here won't work, but I came here to give you one final glorious hour of ecstasy, you're going to turn me down?"

"Probably not," I said. "But I doubt my heart would be in it."

"Awwww," she said.

She pulled the shirt up and over her head, to reveal she was wearing the pink bikini. It had obviously been repaired.

"Do you want to go swimming?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"Why not?" she teased.

"If you'll recall, I might have mentioned that suit was designed for sex, not swimming."

"I do recall you saying that," she said, with the ghost of a smile on her face.

"Then I don't think swimming is what you had in mind when you decided to wear that," I said confidently.

"Men always think they know so much," she said. "It can be so tiresome sometimes."

I bowed. "A thousand pardons, my lady," I said. "I beg your forgiveness for my impertinent attitude. Pray, tell me what you came here to enlighten me about."

"That's better," she said, sounding regal. "First, though, if you will be so kind as to fetch me a glass of refreshing fruit juice, perhaps we could complete our negotiations."

I thought it was a little odd that she'd ask for a glass of juice ... in the bathroom ... wearing that bikini ... but I had already been scolded once, and once was one too many times, in my opinion, so I went to get her some juice. When I came back with it, she wasn't in the bathroom. The pieces of the bikini were abandoned on the floor between the bathroom and the door to my bedroom, which was standing open. I walked to the doorway, holding the glass.

"You in here?" I asked, peering in.

"Took you long enough," she said.

She was naked, on all fours on my bed, looking over her shoulder. Her ass was facing me and her knees were about a foot and a half apart. She let her belly sag and wagged her ass at me slowly.

"Isn't this what the female does when she accepts the male as her mate?" asked the fifteen-year-old voice of the woman I loved. "Assuming you qualify, that is."

There was a ruler lying on the bed between her knees.

"I'm at least that long," I said.

"How do we know?" she asked.

"I suppose I'll have to measure myself then," I said.

"Well hurry up. I've already been waiting for hours."

I stood there, admiring the view. I realized we had never done it doggy style, and wondered why, briefly. She kept wagging her ass at me as I stripped and approached her. She moved backwards until her shins were hanging off the bed, so that I could get to her without climbing onto the bed. She let her arms down again, making her ass stick up in the air, and laid her head on the covers.

I nosed the tip of my cock between her pussy lips and swabbed it up and down.

"Is it long enough to qualify?" she asked, her voice slightly muffled.

"I haven't measured it yet," I said.

She reached between her legs and fumbled for the ruler. Once she had it in her hand she reached back and slapped my thigh.

"I thought I told you to hurry up!" she said.

I took the ruler from her hand. "You want me to measure it with this?" I slapped her right cheek, leaving a vivid red stripe there. She jerked, and lifted her head to look over her shoulder at me again.

"That's not why I came here today, Gramps," she growled.

I swabbed my prick between her dripping pussy lips again. She dropped back down as I scraped her clit with it and she wiggled. Her hand appeared and pressed the knob into her. I gripped her hips.

"I want to measure it this way," I said, and slammed forwards. She grunted, and I arched my back to get maximum penetration. "Is it long enough?"

She lifted her head again and looked at me over her shoulder. Her pussy squeezed my cock tightly.

"I guess you'll do until a real man comes along," she said.

Her head went back down again. I could feel her fingers working on her clit while I began fucking her.

It was fun, but it wasn't as satisfying as being able to see her and watch the emotions play across her face. I told her so and she tried to do a roll while keeping me inside her. She was very limber and was capable of lifting one leg into something like the splits. When she rolled, though, I couldn't keep up and I slipped out of her. She lay there, her knees at the edge of the bed, spread wide, her lower legs hanging limp. She looked so delicious I wanted to be back in her instantly.

"You are my mate," I said. "Mine alone." I moved forward until the tip of my cock rested on her mons, just above her split. "Can you live with that?"

"Yes," she said instantly.

I backed up enough that my cock dropped and was in position to slide into her again. I didn't slam into her this time though. I just pushed steadily and watched the corners of those lush lips turn upwards. Then I fell forward to cover her as I pushed hard. She brought her legs up and wrapped them around my back. At the same time, her arms snaked around my neck and she pulled me down. I pushed off of the bed with my arms and her head and back came off the covers. I got a knee on the bed and crawled, with her hanging below me, until we were fully in the middle. Then I fell on top of her and fucked her hard and fast, making the mattress bounce.

Her breathy voice came in my ear. "Ohhhh I like that."

She had offered herself, so I took her. I didn't' wait for her to have an orgasm. I could--and would--give her dozens later. Right now I wanted to claim my mate. When I felt it beginning to happen, I scooted my knees forward until they lifted her butt off the bed. I slid my hands under her shoulders and gripped them, palms up. I pulled her onto my prod hard. She was helpless to resist in that position. Not that I expected her to resist. It was more of a symbolic way of claiming this woman.

"Oh baby, I love you," I whined as my prick spat repeatedly into her belly.

She let her body speak for her, as her arms and legs tightened around me, and her pussy squeezed my prick rhythmically.

-------

"How long can you stay?" I asked as we lay in each other's arms.

"Well," she said, running one fingernail along my jaw line. "Once we go get all our stuff and bring Spencer back, I can stay forever."

She giggled as I went a little spastic.

Suddenly there were more important things than cuddling to do. I could cuddle with her anytime. She objected, initially, saying I had had my fun and now it was her turn. I said she could have her fun that night. She pointed out that we wouldn't have enough time to go rent a truck, drive it there, load it and still get back home before dark. She wanted to get the truck that day and start out early the next morning.

I realized the wisdom of her plan when she reminded me that, as soon as she and Spencer moved in, Spencer would be around, and my access to her womanly charms might become restricted.

So I made love to her with the express intent of giving her at least three orgasms. When that was finished, I pulled out, sucked her to one more, and then got dressed and went and rented a U-Haul. When I came back she was in the pool ... naked. So I hounded her until she climbed out of the pool, at which point she tried to run, but I caught her on the lawn and took her down. She complained she wasn't lubricated, so I pulled her over my lap and spanked her. That got her very wet, and she finally gave up and let me take her on the grass.

"If I get chigger bites, I'll never forgive you," she growled in my ear as I lunged into her.

I spurted in her, rolled us over and told her that chlorine got rid of chigger problems. Watching her stand up with my spunk running down her inner thighs made me want to put more in her, but I was finished for a while.

She might have rethought her position on things during the rest of that day and all of that night, when I wouldn't leave her alone. As soon as I could get it stiff again I was sniffing around her like she really was in heat. She never said a word, though, except to say things like "Is it your turn or mine?"

-------

I feel at a loss, now that we've been living together for a few months. That's because our life is really just like that of a million other happy couples. We've settled into a routine of sorts. She works at the times she's used to working, which is often at night when it's quiet and there are no distractions. I can sleep any time, so I don't care that when she's finished working, she comes to bed and wakes me up for some loving.

I still play golf sometimes, but now I also spend time teaching a little boy things I think it's helpful for little boys to know how to do. Using a hammer and saw, for instance, or the right way to lift something heavy. I offered to read him books, but was informed that he would read them to me instead. He's a brilliant kid, but he's still a kid. It's interesting.

It's also interesting to leave the house and be unable to wait to get back to it. It's sad that my marriage hadn't been like this. Of course if it had, I'd have never had this relationship with this amazing woman. And this relationship was critically important to me, because for the first time in my life I felt complete.

She insists she doesn't want to have more children, but then follows that up with "I have years and years left if I change my mind." And that keeps me interested, as if her svelte, soft body and her whines of passion wouldn't drive me to distraction anyway.

In some ways we may have deconstructed things a bit, from a sociological point of view. We're not nearly as civilized as I suspect many of our neighbors are. I know a lot of men in long-lasting relationships who say they just don't have sex anymore. They give a lot of reasons for it. "We went through that phase, but we're older now." "It's too much work these days." "The old machine has worn parts, and I don't want doctors tinkering with me."

I'm the same age as they are. But I feel driven to mount my mate daily. It's part of how we communicate. I can say I love her, and I think she believes that. But showing her I love her is more powerful.

After all ... she is my chosen mate, as I am hers.

And that, by definition, involves mating.

But earlier I said this was all to tell you what I learned. So perhaps I should do that before I go.

Well, I learned that very often we define ourselves based on what we routinely do, rather than on what we have the potential to do.

I learned that we think we enter phases of life that are more or less preordained for us by the culture in which we live, but that nowhere does it say that is set in stone.

I learned that life can start over, regardless of where you've been, or what you've done, or how old you are.

I learned you can find true love more than once.

And I learned that it's possible to grow old as a very, very happy man, who isn't rich, important, or particularly handsome.

I learned that life is full of possibilities. You just have to look for them.

Oh ... and by the way ... she still won't tell me the state of her birth control. She says life should have some mystery in it...

Thanks for reading.

Bob


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The End
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Posted:  2011-01-01
Last Modified: 2011-01-07 / 09:15:17 am
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