Chapter 10

Gee’s turn:

This has been a lot of changes in a very few days. I’ve gone from single to married, from employed to unemployed, and now ‘home’ is a forty by sixteen foot houseboat. I’m sitting in a captain’s chair eight feet above the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, sipping a soft drink, watching the banks slide by at a stately pace.

And I’m smiling. The guy sitting next to me has hauled me head over heels in love, taken me out of my standardized lifestyle, and he’s got us on the first day of a journey that, frankly, has no schedule nor destination. I think it’s mighty brave of me. People are supposed to have jobs and schedules and plans. That’s the way I was raised. So yes – just a little bit scared. I reach over next to me and grab Josh’s hand. The fright goes away.

“So where did you go? You were far away...”

“Oh, just trying to unlearn some things.”

“What things?” he asked.

“Nine to five mentality. Work days on the calendar. Those kinds of things.”

“I know. Was a big step for me, too, for a while. I thought it was nice to wake up on a blustery December day and decide that I didn’t need to do anything at all besides make sure the house batteries were charged and I had plenty of fuel for the cabin heater. Me ‘n’ Pickles learned how to spend a day or two tied to a tree on the riverbank.”

“You did that by yourself. Are we going to be able to do that?”

“You’re a lot better companion than Pickles in many, many ways.”

“I should hope so,” I snickered. “You don’t have to hose off the corner of the deck where I do my business.”

“But you leave sticky spots on the sheet, so that’s a draw...”

“You’re a beast.”

“You knew that and STILL married me.”

“I did. I’ve been deluded before.” ‘And this is the BEST one’, I thought to myself. We have traffic in the canal with us, a towboat with a couple of barges headed in the direction opposite us, west-bound to our east-bound. He was getting close enough. “Let me do this one, baby,” I said.

“Go for it.”

I pulled down the microphone for our marine band radio and keyed it. “West-bound tow at the Mermentau, this is Dorable, east-bound.”

“Dorable, this is the Henry Goss. Go ahead, Cap’n.”

“Thank you, Cap’n,” I said. “We’re gonna swing close to the bank, red to red, if you don’t mind. You can keep the channel.”

“Thank you, Cap’n,” came the reply. “We’ll be careful.”

“Roj,” I said. I glanced at Josh. He was smiling, like watching a kid’s first ride on a bicycle.

“Do it, then,” he told me. “Hug the bank. Don’t ground us. It looks bad when we have an audience.”

“I got this,” I said. I learn, you know. This isn’t a sports car. It’s best that you think way ahead of yourself. I turned the wheel a quarter turn to the right. Starboard. Dorable made a leisurely response toward the bank. I centered the wheel. When I got just about where I wanted to be, I repeated the maneuver to the left. Port. Because ‘left’ and ‘port’ both have four letters. Oh, and the navigation light on the port side is red, because port wine is red. I’m learning all manner of nautical lore, me.

I took my hat off, too, as the Henry Goss passed us, shaking my head. I know that the guys in the wheelhouse up there were putting a female face to go with my voice on the radio.

“You do that very much and you’re going to be a legend on the waterways,” Josh laughed.

“Maybe I should be wearing a bikini,” I laughed back.

“Sunburn,” he countered.

“There is that. But you and me, I could almost see us naked together, away from civilization. You ever do that?”

“Frightens the cat. Might get a bug bite on a sensitive bit.”

“Well, that leaves us with either broad daylight or behind the screens at night.”

“Nah ... Just have to wait until fall, after the first frost. No bugs then.”

“Chilly, though.”

He grinned. “And I think I’ll like what it does to your nipples.”

I squealed. “You’re imagining my nipples.”

“Little pink works of art, lady.”

I looked around. There are miles and miles of this canal that are uninhabited. There’s nothing visible on the waterway. And I’m thinking.

“You steer,” I said.

He had a questioning look when he stood up, but I think he started getting a clue when I yanked his shorts down. “Gee!”

“Hush. I got this. Just turn a little bit sideways...”

I’ve NEVER – repeat – NEVER done anything like this in broad daylight, but he’s MY Josh and I love ‘im and this is part of the adventure.

My head bobs as I savor that shaft of his, using my tongue to squeeze and massage that soft purple head, tasting the drops of juice he’s producing. And balls. I love his balls.

I can tell by his breathing, by the jerking of that wonderful piece I have in my mouth. His hands gently trace my hair.

“Oh god, Gee...”

“Mmmmm.”

“Gee ... I...”

“Mmm-hmmm...” and I keep doing him, sliding my lips down his shaft, a little bite at the bottom, then suck gently as I pull back, my fingers cradling his balls, heavy, so much fun. I feel his sack start to draw up. I know...

“Geeeeee...”

And I keep sucking through my little giggle as he pulses jets of his essence into my mouth. Spit or swallow? Definitely swallow. And suck and milk every last drop from him.

I stand up, bend over and kiss him a peck. He loops a hand around the back of my head and gives me a real kiss.

“Good lord, lady ... I owe you one. It’s a miracle I didn’t put us in the mud...”

“Look around us, baby – green horizons as far as the eye can see. We’re sharing this wonderful creation and I just got the urge...”

He sighed. “If this is what it takes, we can run this section every day.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’ve heard about the Atchafalaya Basin. That’s gonna make me want to nose up into the bank and get naked – both of us, and...”

“Hold that thought.”

“That’s not my only thought, love. I expect great things tonight.”

“Always.”

“Pull your pants up, then,” I giggled. “You’ll get a very inconvenient sunburn.”

He stood, dragging his trousers up. “My knees are still weak, lady.”

“Well, sir,” I countered, “Perhaps this is an activity you need to practice more often.”

He looked at me, wry smile on his face. “God, I love you, Gee.”

When the sun started getting low in the sky behind us, it was time to start looking for a spot for the night.

“We aren’t going to push it,” Josh said. “Mosquitoes are getting ready to come out. In this marsh, they’d carry us off.”

A look at Google Maps on an iPad gave us a satellite view of our location. We cross-referenced that against our progress on an actual marine chart of the waterway, looking for a cut leading away from the Intracoastal Canal, but not a major one – just something we could poke our nose into so we’d be out of the way.

We found one, a little meander that broke into a marsh. Dorable fit nicely, tied up to one bank, secured by two Danforth anchors into the soft soil. Josh handled getting the anchors into the bank. I started dinner – a couple of little steaks – knowing that they were a luxury from our recent departure. In a couple of days, refrigeration was going to be entirely up to our little refrigerator and space in it was at a premium.

One burner of the stove does a pilaf, the other gets a cast iron pan for the steaks. And today we have FRESH vegetables. That may last a few days, but then it will depend on how ambitious we get about mooring and taking a trip to a nearby town.

As Josh prepared the steaks, Pickles was right there near him, standing on his hind legs, patting Josh’s leg. Pickles isn’t looking for attention, Pickles is looking for meat. Josh obliges by slicing off a bit of ribeye and dangling it for Pickles to capture. Pickles grabs his prize and darts out the door to the bow of the boat to enjoy his spoils.

“You’re reinforcing bad behavior,” I giggled.

“He’s a cat. All he has is bad behavior. I call it ‘personality’.”

The pilaf and some zucchini were simmering in separate pans on the back burners. A cast iron skillet was heating on the front one. When Josh dropped a drop of water in the skillet, it danced across the hot surface. Steak time!

Fifteen minutes later we’re seated inside the screened back deck of the boat enjoying our meal. We’re not quite far enough from civilization for it to be devoid of human sound, but it was way down in volume – predominantly the sound of the last towboat that passed us a bit ago. Sounds of the marsh were much more prominent.

Nor were we too far away for manmade light, either. There were glows on the horizon as the sun set. We added our own.

Don’t necessarily have to turn it on. We’re out of the channel and this isn’t a navigable waterway where we’re moored, but an anchor light is just a good thing to have. It’s at the top of Dorable‘s stubby mast, though, and has a Fresnel lens that directs its light sideways. That stuff far away isn’t lighting us. We don’t have the lights lit on the boat – no sense in attracting any more bugs than can find their way here on wafting odors.

Rising moon. Enough light. How fragile that light was, was demonstrated when the moon went behind a cloud. Things got really dark. I was startled almost to the point of screaming when Pickles jumped up into my lap during a period of sublime tranquility.

Josh noted my discomfiture.

“Go ahead, laugh. You’re the one teaching him bad habits.” I told him. Pickles’ purr was loud in the silence between the sounds of insects and frogs and night birds. And no, this wasn’t the first time I’d experienced this sort of scene with Josh, but this is perhaps the most isolated.

The lack of trees here in the coastal marshes gives a different ambience than the cathedrals of cypress of the swamps where we first overnighted, building our understanding of each other. Still, though, the whisper of a light breeze in the reeds, the chorus of insects and frogs, underscored by the basso profundo of a few bullfrogs off in the distance.

I said something about the croaking of a bullfrog not terribly far away.

“Those are Cajun frogs,” Josh said.

“How so?”

“In contemporary Parisian French, a frog is grenouille. In Cajun, that bullfrog is ouaouaron.” He spelled it for me. “And that’s the sound he’s making – ‘wa-wa-roan’. Cajuns haven’t been ‘French’ for four hundred years. Our language developed on a different path.”

“I know some of the history. Never thought too much about the language, though.”

“Absorb it. These prairies and marshes are the heart and soul of Cajuns. We may be pretty watered down now, but I still get a tug at my heartstrings over some of this.”