Chapter 19: Sold Down The River

Lydia

To the end of my days I will probably never understand the change in grandpa Ernst. He had never been affectionate by any stretch of the imagination. All my life I had known him as a benevolent grouch. When it came to showering us kids with affection – that had always been granny Aurelia’s job. But seeing the gentleness with which he handled Regina’s daughter Jenny was like witnessing a miracle.

The day after Mark had come home from his trip to Dresden and Berlin, it was time for grandpa Ernst to return home. Jenny was of course inconsolable when she had to say goodbye to her new honorary grandfather, but Bea reacted quickly and let Jenny crawl in with her again, cradling the crying girl.

Leaving Mark to watch over them, Regina and I got on our way to bring grandpa home. We went together so we could share driving duties and, as an added bonus, Regina would get to know where his retirement home was. It didn’t take a fortune teller to know that little Jenny would soon start to pester her mom about visiting grandpa Ernst.

Since I was the main guardian of grandpa, I had to go there too. Regina and Jenny were not related to him, so I would need to issue my authorization for them to visit.

Since the way there went through our old hometown, we made a short stop at grandpa Ernst’s old house, which now belonged to a cousin of mine, Sabine. She was the daughter of my aunt Ruthi, the youngest daughter of gramps and granny Aurelia. We had never been very close, because Ruthi’s branch of the family was scattered over several counties and had only ever been around during large family gatherings. They had also maintained strict neutrality during the intra-family civil war, after I had been disowned.

The talk was friendly and gramps was happy to see his old home in good condition and well taken care of. Although I was bound to spend more time in Germany from now on, we all agreed that Sabine and her siblings would visit gramps once in a while too.

Soon it was time to say goodbye to grandpa, and I promised him we would drop by whenever time allowed, a promise that he had gotten from Jenny during their tearful goodbye as well.

Regina drove the return leg and we arrived back in Stralsund in the middle of the night, making a bee-line for our rooms, especially Regina, as she would have to drive all the way to Cottbus the next day.

For me, however, the night wasn’t over yet.

Mark

Dreaming that your better half is giving you the best blowjob you’d ever had is impractical when you are in a hotel bed, because it leaves stains when you nut in your sleep. That was my first thought when I woke up, just at the moment I was about to cum. Except, it hadn’t been a rather short dream, and my payload didn’t soil the sheets. It went straight down the gullet of the woman in my dreams, a drop-dead gorgeous, and very naked, marathon runner.

“Did I wake you up?” she asked ‘innocently’ while washing down my sperm donation with a glass of water.

Still only half awake, I pulled her into the bed, spooning behind. Judging by how wet she was, my gorgeous beauty had apparently already ‘plowed the field’ with her fingers while blowing me awake, so I could easily push in, or at least easy by our standards, considering that I wasn’t exactly a pygmy and my better half was fairly tight.

Gently kneading one half of my favorite pair of boobs, I pushed back and forth luxuriously slowly. I was only half awake and we were in no hurry at all. Granted, she tried to cheer me on to go faster, but I decided to play it slow. If I was to be woken up and forcefully pleasured beyond imagination, it was only fair to return the favor of administrating some sweet torture.

Alas, I wasn’t getting to enjoy my position of power for very long as she soon covered her face with the thick pillow and screamed. Thankfully my gorgeous love angel had remembered to use the makeshift muffler, as the room to the left was definitely occupied.

Glad to be in each other’s company, we fell asleep in a well-sated pile of entangled naked bodies.

Regina

I know a well-shagged look if I see one, and when Lydia and Mark came down the stairs for breakfast, they were practically glowing.

“That must have been a good one,” I ribbed them as they sat down. “The two of you could light up a room.”

“I really need those dark shades,” Mark groaned in good spirits.

“Right now you would both need them,” I said and couldn’t suppress a giggle. “But if it is any consolation, having been an avid fan of Lydia for years, I’m quite familiar with the coverage you’re getting. Except for the Vienna race that didn’t get much coverage to begin with, nobody knows what Mark looks like, and he looks a lot different now. Being a hunk and all.”

“We’ve tried all sorts of shit,” Mark replied, frustration clearly audible in his hushed voice. “Mom parading escorts around as boyfriends and whatnot to throw people off track, especially the yellow press rags.”

“Why not the other way round?” I asked, looking at Lydia. “Due to your aborted altitude training, you’ll probably have a fairly low-key season anyway. That means, the rags will be less interested. Why not parade a young escort as your son? They’ll do a story or two and forget about him afterwards, but people will have an image in their head of your son who doesn’t look like Mark.”

“Damn, that’s actually quite brilliant!” Lydia said and caught herself in time before she raised her voice too much. Then suddenly a somewhat serious look appeared on her features.

“Since you’re so adept at seeing what we’ve been up to, if it is not too direct, how is it for you? I remember going quite a few years without any.”

“Well, then you already know what it is like for me,” I sighed.

“Our relationship is not entirely exclusive when it comes to people we both trust,” Lydia said carefully and I felt the burn of a massive blush on my cheeks.

“Don’t go there, please,” I pleaded with them. “Don’t take it the wrong way, you are wonderful friends, too wonderful almost. With such an offer I would probably want both of you, and I would not be able to stay emotionally distanced, if you catch my drift.”

“So you’re into men and women,” Mark said with a reassuring smile.

I nodded, still feeling like my face was about to spontaneously combust.

As I looked up, Mark and Lydia grinned at each other and said just one word: “Meri”. I looked at them in confusion.

“Meredith Daxter, know her?” Mark asked.

“Isn’t she the one who was drafted into the 4-by-100 at the Olympics? The one with the huge rack?” I asked, making both of them giggle.

“Yep, she’s a friend of ours, and occasional visitor to both our beds,” Lydia said nonchalantly. “And she’s coming to Germany too. Should be landing in Amsterdam about right now if I’m not mistaken.”

“Great,” I mock-complained. “Now I have to drive all the way back to Cottbus, horny like a teenager. She’s gorgeous.”

“Erm, you are a teenager,” Mark said with a giggle, but quickly got serious again. “Long story short, we had a disastrous attempt at a ménage à trois last year that blew up in our faces. Thankfully with the help of really good friends we made things work without the emotional attachment.”

“That’s quite an awful lot to take in,” I said.

“That’s why you better think about it in a quiet moment, perhaps with a bit more distance to what happened to you and Jenny lately,” Lydia said. “Just know this. We’re there for you, in more ways than one. You may feel overwhelmed because you think we paid a bit of stuff for you, but what you have given us is beyond measure. Grandpa Ernst has, what, his fifth spring, because he now has the great grandchild he’ll never get from me or Bea, and my sister sees in Jenny that her love didn’t die in vain. No money in the world could achieve that.”

Halfway through her pep talk Lydia had actually started to cry a little, and I finally realized just how much this all meant, to all of us.

Mark

To call the goodbye emotional would be the understatement of the century. We were so worked up, mom and I went to the beach after Regina, Jenny and a ginormous teddy bear had set off towards Lusatia in a 190E Mercedes. We weren’t there for a spot of swimming, of course, it was January after all. We had walked silently, hand in hand, for what felt like hours, when mom finally broke the silence.

“I’m sorry, love.”

“What for?” I asked, slightly confused.

“When I told Regina that we weren’t entirely exclusive, I never bothered to ask your opinion beforehand. I made the same error again that nearly fucked up everything last year.”

“Don’t fret it,” I replied calmly and lightly squeezed her hand. “That only means, you know how I think. I would have to be completely dysfunctional not to think that she’s sexy as hell. The moment you sort of gave your okay, I had pictures of a very ungentlemanly nature in my head.”

“I admire your constraint,” mom said and planted a rather hot kiss on me.

“By necessity,” I admitted, slightly out of breath. “I get were Regina is coming from when she says she couldn’t keep the emotional distance. I’m not sure, I could either. It would be Meri all over again, and you know how long it took us to sort that one out.”

Mom directed us to a bench and we sat down, looking at the sea in silence for what felt like a good solid half hour.

“How close did I come to losing you to Meri?” she suddenly asked.

“Do you want an answer that let’s you sleep comfortably at night, or the truth?” I asked back bluntly.

I could hear a muffled sob, but finally she demanded that I give her the full truth, no platitudes.

“Look, you’re it for me, my dream,” I explained. “But that dream comes at a cost. We have to be constantly on the guard, always in the shadows. I’m going to be a bit vulgar here, but it explains it best. One of my dreams is peeling you out of your clothes in a forest, pushing you against a tree and fucking the raw shit out of your gorgeous ass. If I did that and some paparazzi got a shot of it, we’d be dead, almost literally. If I did that with Meri and some hack published a story about it, there’d be a scandal, but we could soldier on somehow.”

I could hear her sob, but I continued.

“Meri would always only be the second choice. She’s gorgeous and then some, I like her a lot, but she doesn’t compare to you. The fear I’m constantly living in is that one day I might get weak and go for the second choice because it comes without the cost of loving the woman I really want, and that’s why I’m extremely wary of letting other women come into our intimate lives, because I don’t trust myself, and neither do you trust me.”

She suddenly looked up to me, tear stains on her face.

“Mom, let’s cut the crap. Part of your crazy-ass streak in sexual matters was exactly down to that. You know you can’t give me the happy married life, so you tried to keep me interested by ever more kinky stuff in the sack.”

By now she was crying hard and I hugged her close.

“You’re spot on,” she managed between sobs. “But damn, it hurts hearing it.”

“Then it is time we’re making hay proper,” I decreed. “Your season is shot anyway, at least the first half. I think we should go with Regina’s suggestion. Since we’re going to relocate to Germany anyway, this summer there will be a story of America’s fallen star relaxing on an East German nude beach with her son and her mysterious German boyfriend, the latter being me.”

“So I’ll be showing my tits, yet again,” she said with a mix of giggles and sobs.

“As if you have a problem with that, naked goddess of mine,” I proclaimed theatrically. “We’ll hire some foreign escort as your ‘son’ whom the rags will never find again, and then I, as your boyfriend will show up at your races. We’ve gone about this completely the wrong way. We’ve tried to hide me away. What we need to do is shove my mug in everybody’s face, but not as your son.”

“Won’t your highschool friends recognize you?” she argued. “Just one selling a story to the press would ruin everything.”

“Jonjo gave me the clue,” I said. “If it wasn’t for your tongue halfway down my throat at the airport, he wouldn’t have recognized me. He said, just the fact that my arms now look like my legs when we were in highschool makes me almost unrecognizable. Add a beard and dark shades to it, and perhaps a funny French hat and not even the Bachlmayer’s will know who I am.”

“Not sure about the beard,” she managed a lame attempt at a joke.

“I’m not planning on looking like Santa, but perhaps one of them ‘stache thingies, like a 1980s failed pimp,” I quipped.

Finally the sobbing had subsided and she actually laughed.

“By the way,” I said casually. “Did you know that one of Frank’s friends is an area ranger and that, if we ask nicely, we could get exclusive usage of 4 hectares of forest for a day?”

A sharp inhale of air was the response to my statement.

“You, in my bed, naked, now!” she commanded and pointed at the hotel in the distance.

We ran, hand in hand.

Lydia

Damn and blast! My extreme arousal had gotten the better of me yet again. Bless his heart, Mark had been as cautious as he could be while I was urging him to get a move on, but he surely had plundered my rear-end something fierce upon my incessant urging. At least Bea got a jolly ol’ guffaw out of it when she saw me waddling into her hospital room like a Geisha the next morning. Seeing her laugh for the first time since losing Rita was worth the self-inflicted pain in my poor backside.