Chapter 2

Desiree told Richard about her new friend that night as they ate dinner. She told him everything about how they'd met, why they'd kept in communication with each other after that first meeting, how they'd come to meet at Sundollars that morning, and her wishes for him to get her bike into operational status so she could join Peggy for a ride on the bike trail. The only thing she left out was the fact that her new friend was a lesbian and had assumed that she, Desiree, was one as well. She never told Richard about the various women who hit on her.

"Sounds cool, babe," he told her, sipping from his water glass. "It's nice to see you making new friends. You've been kind of a loner ever since Cindy moved."

"So you'll fix my bike for me?" she asked, trying not to sound like a nag.

"Sure," he said. "I'll do it on Saturday. Are you sure it's safe for two women to be out on the bike trail alone?"

"Did I mention that Peggy is six foot eight?" she asked.

This was enough to make Richard stop chewing his food. "Six-eight?" he asked. "No shit?"

"No shit," she confirmed. "She's the tallest woman I've ever seen."

"Wow. That's hard to even imagine."

"She carries it well. She's very pretty."

"I'd love to meet her sometime. I've never met a woman taller than me before. It must be something to see."

"You talk about her like she's a freak or something," Desiree said, a little sharper than intended.

Richard gave her a strange look. "I didn't say she was a freak," he said carefully. "Are you feeling okay?"

"Yeah," she said after a moment. "I'm sorry. I've been a little on edge lately for some reason."

"It's okay," he said. "And I'll get your bike working as good as new on Saturday morning."

"Thanks," she told him, leaning over and giving him a kiss. The kiss quickly turned from friendly to passionate.

"Mmm," he said when it finally broke. "What was that for?"

"A little preview of what you get when the kids go to bed."

"Nice," he said, caressing her cheek. "You've certainly had quite an appetite lately."

"Are you complaining?" she asked.

"Not in the least," he assured her.

Desiree and Peggy talked several times on the phone over the next two days, engaging further in the game of getting to know each other. Peggy stayed away from the topic of her sexuality or her attraction to Desiree. Desiree was grateful for this. It seemed her new friend understood that she did not like her in that way.

This was not to say that their chat remained sterile and dry. On Sunday night, the day after Richard had put her bike back in operational mode, the day before they planned their first bike ride, the subject of masturbatory devices came up in conversation. Desiree gigglingly admitted to owning several such devices, including an eight-inch vibrating dildo and a vibrating clitoral egg.

"Does your husband know you have them?" Peggy asked.

"He does," she said. "He's the one that bought the vibrator for me. I don't think he realizes just how much I use them, though."

"Oh yeah?" Peggy asked. "What are we talking here? A set of batteries a month?"

Desiree giggled. "Okay, we'll go with that," she said.

After hanging up the phone following that conversation she found that talking about her "toys" had made her want to use one. Her panties were wet and she had an itch between her legs. She took a quick peek at Richard and found he was engrossed in a college basketball game. The two girls were on the other television watching a Disney movie on the DVD. Perfect. She retrieved both of her toys from a shelf in the closet and went into the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and did not emerge for almost twenty minutes.

"Are you ready for some fun?" Peggy asked the next morning as Desiree unloaded her bicycle from the minivan. They were at Bellingraph Park, one of about forty access points for the Heritage River Bike Trail. Peggy was dressed pretty much the same as she had been at the Sundollars, except this time her bike shorts were dark blue and her top was red and white.

"I've been looking forward to it," Desiree replied. She didn't own any spandex bike wear (or any spandex at all, for that matter). Instead, she'd donned a pair of loose fitting cotton running shorts and a black sports bra, over which she'd thrown a white t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a local gym.

"Since you're new to this," Peggy suggested, "I thought we'd start with only fifteen miles?"

"Okay," Desiree said.

"We'll go upstream from here instead of downstream. There are fewer hills that way, just one mother of one as we get close to the turnaround point."

"Where is the turnaround point?"

"The Dawn Boulevard bridge," Peggy said. "It's about seven and a half miles there and then seven and a half back."

"Are you going to be able to get a good workout with me tagging along?"

"Don't worry about that," she told her. "I'm not one of the hard core bicyclists like some of the idiots out here. The company will be a novelty for me."

"All right then," Desiree said. "Are we ready?"

"Let's stretch out a little first. It'll keep you from getting sore later."

"We wouldn't want that," Desiree agreed.

Peggy led her through a series of leg stretches designed to loosen up the calves, inner groin, and, especially, the thigh muscles. She then retrieved a bottle of water and a towel from her Subaru. The water she stored in a holder on the frame of her bike. The towel she folded and put into a nylon pack mounted on the back of her seat post. Desiree got her own water bottle and stowed it. She had not though to bring a towel.

I guess I'll just have to stay sweaty, she thought.

They mounted their bikes and headed out, riding through the parking lot, down an access road, and finally reaching the main trail — a six-foot wide path of black asphalt with yellow lane markers painted down the middle. It was, in short, a miniature version of a two-lane highway. They had to pause here as a group of nine men in their twenties, all riding expensive looking road bikes, shot by at well over twenty miles an hour. They were grouped in a tight formation, the riders in the rear drafting off the riders in front of them. They all wore matching yellow bike uniforms, red and blue helmets, and were bent forward over their handlebars with serious, competitive expressions upon their faces.

"Who were they?" Desiree asked as the group disappeared over a rise in the trail.

"Some of those hard core bicyclists I mentioned," she said. "I call them Lance Armstrong wanna-be's. There are a lot of them out here. They ride in pairs, in groups of ten or more, sometimes individually. They all think they own the trail and that casual users like us shouldn't be out here because we slow them down."

"Do they ever give you any trouble?"

"No, they would have to slow down to give anyone trouble. And besides, I'm six-eight, remember?"

How could I forget? She wondered, realizing she was not just staring at her friend's bare legs but contemplating how it would feel to stroke her hands up and down on them. She forced herself to drag her eyes away. The thoughts did not go as easily.

Peggy turned right onto the trail and started picking up speed. Desiree followed her, taking up position next to her, on the inside. They settled in at a nice, fairly easy fourteen miles per hour (Peggy had a speedometer and an odometer on her bike).

"This is a good pace for a beginner," she told Desiree. "It'll get your heart rate up and work your legs without burning you out. Let me know if you need to slow down a bit."

"This is doable for now," Desiree told her.

They hadn't even gone a mile before Desiree fell in love with the bike trail. The Heritage River Parkway — as it was called — had been placed off limits to development decades before and, as such, there was nothing but oak trees, scrub brush, blackberry bushes, and other natural vegetation for almost half a mile on either side of the river. Except for the bike trail itself and the occasional patch of parkland where the access points met the trail, the area was basically the same as it had been in the 1800s, before civilization and development had encroached. Wildlife was abundant on the parkway. There were squirrels by the thousands, coyotes, deer, flocks of wild turkeys, and even the occasional sighting of a mountain lion. Hawks and turkey vultures circled overhead. There was no traffic noise, only the babbling of the river, the chattering of birds, and the sound of the wind in the trees. There was a sense of peaceful isolation out here. It felt like you were riding through a primitive forest, miles from civilization, instead of directly through the heart of a densely populated urban area.

They encountered other bikers as they rode, most of who appeared to be "casual users" as Peggy had termed it. Most of these were heading in the opposite direction. The custom seemed to be that you would make eye contact and give a friendly nod as you passed each other. They also encountered more than a few of the Lance Armstrong wanna-be's. As Peggy had said, they came singly, in pairs, and in groups as large as ten. Sometimes they came from the opposite direction, shooting by so fast you barely had time to be cognizant of them, but sometimes they swept in from behind, since they tended to move much faster than the casual bikers. The LAWBs (as Desiree started to think of them) never nodded in greeting and rarely made eye contact. When they came from behind, one would always bark out "on your left" just before passing, usually in a voice that managed to convey irritation and contempt simultaneously. There was also a fair amount of joggers and walkers using the trail, although these types tended to stay on the left shoulder respective of the direction they were traveling.

"I can't get over how pretty it is out here," Desiree said as they began their second mile. "It's quiet and it even smells good."

"You've never been out here before?" Peggy asked.

"No," she said. "I've been to a few of the parks before but never out on the trail between the parks."

"I fell in love with the trail the first time I came out here. I used to just run on it but I took up biking because I get to see more of the trail that way. It beats the hell out of running on a treadmill, doesn't it?"

"It sure does."

They rode on, passing through densely forested area that resembled an enchanted forest. They went up and down some small hills and then the trail wound around until they were edging along the bank of the river. Desiree began to gradually warm up, her legs tightening in the thighs and calves, her perspiration starting to flow. They kept up an easy conversation as they went, at first sticking to benign topics but eventually moving to things a little more personal. Uncharacteristically, it was Desiree who first touched on the subject of sexuality.

"So I was just wondering," she said, her voice hesitant and a little embarrassed. "Did you always know you were... you know... a lesbian?"

Peggy looked over at her, a hint of a smile on her face. "Why do you ask?"

Desiree was not really sure why she asked. Her general rule was to avoid such topics. There was something inside of her, however, that wanted to hear Peggy's story, that was excited at the thought of talking to an actual lesbian. "Just curious," she said. "If it's too personal of a question, just tell me to mind my own business. I won't be offended."

"No, I don't mind," Peggy said. "I've always known something was different about me, at least since I started to develop. I was just never into boys like the other girls were. I always got along better with girls. When I was around fourteen or fifteen, I started having sexual feelings for other girls. I tried to ignore them, to pretend I wasn't dreaming about touching another girl's boobs, about kissing them, about running my hands all over their bodies."

"Wow," Desiree said, a bit more breathless than the bike ride could account for alone. She had not expected Peggy to be so... so open about it. "That must've been... you know... weird."

"It was upsetting," Peggy said. "I tried to make myself like guys. I did the classic overcompensation thing and became something of a slut. I went out with boy after boy. I would make out with them. I would let them feel my tits. I'd let them finger me. I jerked a lot of them off and even blew a few. One of them took my virginity when I was just about to turn sixteen. I was very experienced with boys for my age and none of this did anything at all for me."

"Nothing at all?" Desiree asked, remembering the first time she'd let a boy put his hand under her shirt, how nervous and excited she'd been. Or the first time she'd held a hard cock in her hand, had made it spurt semen all over her wrist just because of her touch. It had been messy but very sexy.

"Well," Peggy amended (reluctantly, it seemed), "some of the encounters were dimly pleasurable in a physical sense. Don't get me wrong about that. Emotionally, however, there was nothing there at all. I never cared to do it twice with any of them. I never cared about any of them as people. I just had no use for boys. The first time I did anything with a woman though..." She shook her head. "It was just amazing. It was the most erotic, sensual sensation I ever felt."

"How old were you?" Desiree asked, trying to sound casual. She felt a strong tingle in her nether regions and told herself it was the way the bicycle seat was rubbing on her.

"I was sixteen," Peggy said simply, not offering any more explanation.

They rode on in silence for almost two minutes, passing two more joggers, three more casual bikers, and being passed themselves by a duet of LAWBs ("on your left," came the snotty, impatient call). It was only when they were alone again that Desiree could stand it no longer.

"So how did it happen?" she asked.

"How did what happen?" Peggy responded casually.

"Your first time with a woman," Desiree said. "Was she one of your friends? Someone you just met?"

Peggy looked at her with a smile on her face. "Are you sure you want to hear this?" she asked. "I don't want to gross you out or anything."

Desiree blushed, embarrassed. "It won't gross me out," she said. "I find this... well... interesting."

"I can see that," Peggy said, glancing down at Desiree's large breasts.

Desiree looked down and saw that her nipples were erect enough to protrude through both the sports bra and the t-shirt that covered it. She blushed even darker, finally admitting to herself that this discussion was turning her on — in a strictly clinical way, of course. "Oops," she said. "I guess I'm more interested than I thought."