Chapter 2

Please, if you haven’t done so already, I suggest you read ‘The Borrowing Game’ first. That story was intended to be a stand-alone story, but with the requests, I decided to tell, as the late, great Paul Harvey used to say, ‘The Rest of the Story’. This is chapter two of three, total.

“Honey, you need to go, anyway, you know you want to, and I insist.”

We’d been planning a trip down into Oregon, sightseeing, camping, and my husband had gotten tied up in a case. Pro-bono for a nineteen-year-old kid, DeAndre, no parents, accused of a stabbing he insists he’d seen and was trying to help. He was bloodied and his fingerprints were the only ones on the knife, no witnesses, arrested and charged with murder. It hadn’t helped that the kid was black and wearing a hoodie.

We’d spent many hours with the kid and were a hundred percent convinced he was telling the truth, despite what seemed like inscrutable evidence against him. Before this, he’d had two misdemeanor convictions, nothing violent. Maybe with the evidence it wasn’t racial profiling, but it sure seemed like it.

This two-plus-week trip had been planned for several months. We’d even bought a two-year-old, used camper van.

The kid was still in jail because of the capital murder charge. We still had plenty time to prepare for the trial, still over four months away, but Aaron didn’t want to leave him alone in jail with no family, and it seemed no friends, either. It had become very personal for us, he seemed like a nice kid caught up trying to help a victim.

I was an eighteen-year-old, barely out of high school working in Macy’s, in Denver, the lingerie and makeup departments, and a little Macy’s modeling, too. I knew I was above average pretty; long red hair, green eyes, perky boobs just right for my 127-pound frame, and my very best parts, or so I was told – my smile and my long legs, five feet, nine and three-quarters inches tall. I was also a bit of, shall I say, ‘free spirit’. I didn’t mind, enjoyed – a lot, using my looks to enjoy life, i.e. sex. I had a VERY active sex life.

Then I got hooked on a television series that changed everything, The Good Wife. Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), unbeknownst to her, convinced me that I wanted to be an attorney. Eight years and thousands of hard work hours later, I passed the bar exam and began my job search. I was still enjoying the perks of being an attractive female, but it had taken on a lot less prominence in my life with all the work and stress of earning my law degree.

Then I met Aaron, he was looking for a paralegal in his little one-man firm in Manitou Springs, Colorado, pop 4,832, just outside Colorado Springs. He hired me on the spot, not as the paralegal he’d advertised for, but as an attorney, working side-by-side with him. I couldn’t have been more thrilled, it hadn’t been my looks that impressed him but my legal expertise. We’d done a lot of mock trials in law school, and like Alicia, I discovered I was very good. It didn’t hurt, either, that I was number three in my class of two-hundred-thirteen at Sturm Law School, Denver.

Aaron was thirty-three, a very fit and good-looking man, an avid skier and bicyclist, same as me, and I was twenty-six when he hired me, and as we worked together, a mutual attraction developed. To be honest, I was smitten at that first interview. It took sixteen months for our first date. Twenty-eight months, nineteen days after I stepped foot in his office the first time, we were married. My days of sexual proclivities were over, but that didn’t mean my libido had diminished. If anything, being around Aaron so much ... Also, my husband has a very high sex drive, giving us a very satisfying life. Our work is very high-stress, and sex, along with being very enjoyable, is a huge relief valve. We make love at least eight or nine times a week, more often than not a hard fuck. I’ve heard that men think about sex on average nineteen times a day. That’s me in reverse, except a lot more, it seems like I’m almost always horny.

I also work hard to keep my body in shape. Since I started work, five-plus years ago, I gained a total of three pounds, seven ounces, every ounce, I think, to my boobs, much of it nerve endings in my nipples connected directly to my pussy.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a nympho but the line would be pretty close.

The night before I left for my trip, Aaron and I had a very satisfying evening, we fucked and we fucked hard pretty much all night. By morning we were both exhausted, not that it prevented one last fuck in our oversized shower (it’s why we had that shower put in). This was going to be the first time we’d been apart for any significant time since our marriage three years earlier.

The first ten days were enjoyable but pretty unremarkable. I visited The Painted Hills, Smith Rock, Crater Lake, the Lava Bed National Monument just across the California border south of Klamath Falls, and on the eleventh day, the flat, dry Alvord Desert on the eastern side of the Steens Mountains.

Why, you might ask, was I traveling around Oregon instead of the beautiful National Parks and monuments of Colorado and Utah? I’m glad you asked, my parents – it’s where they grew up and I’d always wanted to see the places they talked about so much. Besides, every place I visited was beautiful in its own way.

The only thing I wasn’t enjoying was the lack of companionship and especially, the lack of ... you know. At least I was calling my husband every night, telling him about my adventures and just hearing his voice. Nights alone were lonely, to say the least. We learned that phone sex could be quite enjoyable, but still, neither it nor my vibrator was a substitute for the real thing. I was in a constant state of arousal, getting more acute every day.

On that fateful eleventh day, I ran into trouble, spending much of the day hiking up a beautiful canyon into the Steens Mountain, getting pictures of several Bighorn Sheep and the scenery. Unfortunately, out there, where I hadn’t seen another car for the entire day, I got back to my van and the damned battery was dead. I had no idea what I’d left on, but it didn’t matter.

I had no idea what to do, my van was dead, I hadn’t seen another vehicle all day, no cell phone service, and it was over twenty miles back to a highway where there even MIGHT be a passing car, about the same distance to the tiny town of Fields. The only other sign of civilization had been an abandoned ranch seven or eight miles back up the road.

I could only think of two options, hike the twenty miles to Fields or sit in my stifling hot van and cry. I chose the latter, it was too late in the day and too hot to start that kind of hike. At least in the van, I had cold drinks and food. I also had the presence of mind to prop the engine’s hood open as a distress signal, just in case someone came by, which I highly doubted. I was wishing I’d brought my bicycle like I wanted, it would have been an easy ride on the bike. If only we’d gotten around to putting a trailer hitch on the van for the bike carrier.

I don’t know how long I’d been there feeling sorry for myself, wishing my husband was with me, three-four hours at least, until I heard a car pull into my little wide spot. I tried to get my tears under control again, they’d been coming and going ever since I discovered the dead battery.

Then the fear hit me. I knew it probably wasn’t rational, but ... what if...? I didn’t even want to think it but couldn’t help it. I was a woman alone on a nearly abandoned road, miles from anywhere. This person could be a rapist, ax-murderer or whatever, and there wouldn’t be a thing I could do to defend myself. I was wishing I had a gun but oh-no, it hadn’t even crossed my mind until that instant.

The knock on the door, the feelings of relief and fear were dueling in my head. I wiped the most recent tears from my cheeks with a tissue, got up on my buttery legs, and peeked out the window. There was a woman sitting in a pickup behind my van, which seemed to me to be a good sign. I didn’t think most serial killers traveled with a calm woman in the passenger seat (Bonnie and Clyde, notwithstanding), so I opened my door. The guy looked a little older than me and didn’t seem threatening with that smile on his face, kind of (a lot) cute, too.

I did notice his eyes quickly traveling up and down my body. I guess I wasn’t surprised, my shorts were just a bit ... short, and I think he might have noticed my braless nipples poking through my thin blouse as well.

I found myself returning his look, apprising him like he was me.

“Hi, you having troubles?” he asked me.

I told him about my dead battery and he said he had jumper cables. The relief was washing through me, maybe I wouldn’t have a twenty-mile hike to Fields tomorrow.

He went back to his pickup, and his wife, I guessed it was his wife, drove the pickup alongside the van, he opened his hood and connected the cables, telling me to try it.

I can’t even begin to tell you what a relief it was when my van roared to life. I closed my eyes, breathed a huge sigh of relief, and stepped outside.

The first thing that went through my mind was that I wanted to kiss this guy! But first ... ask his wife, didn’t want to have her going off on me, maybe deciding that a murder was justified, after all.

What she said floored me, put my head in a jumble, “Honey, you do whatever with him,” and something like, “Whatever you’re woman enough for.” Those might not have been her exact words, but that was the gist of it. She’d just given me permission to ... I wasn’t even sure what.

If she was only kidding, she’d picked the wrong woman and the wrong time. Her husband was freakin’ hot, (and he was MALE) and you already know what state I was in (in case it needs spelled out a bit clearer, I was FUCKING HORNY!). And I saw the look on her husband’s face too, shock, but something else too, like he knew exactly what she’d meant, as if ... was there something there that I didn’t know?

The first thing that went through my mind when she said that was my husband, the last thing he’d said to me after kissing me goodbye that morning eleven days ago. He told me he loved me, then chuckled and said, “You know ... if an opportunity arises...”

That was all, no elaboration on meaning, just laughing it off. The thing was, he’d been teasing me for a long time about how hot it’d be for his pretty, lawyer-wife to ‘make out’ with some guy.

My savior was about three steps away from me, stowing the cables in the back of their pickup. I made those steps in very short order and wrapped my arms around him, planting my lips on his. It took about a nanosecond for his stiff lips to soften, and when my tongue pressed against them, he didn’t hesitate to open his mouth and welcome it. Much, much better than the peck on the cheek I’d originally planned.