Chapter 5

An hour later, Bob suggested they give trying to get some sleep another try.

“Ohhhh, I guess so,” moaned Brenda. “Can Dammit sleep with me?” she asked. Dammit had spent the majority of time sitting or lying beside Brenda’s legs while she tried to think up lies, and Bob told her stories that were true, but which she thought were lies.

“That dog sleeps wherever she wants to,” said Bob. “You can invite her, but don’t get your hopes up.”

Brenda stood up and stretched. Her muscles felt sore, but it was a good kind of sore. She went to the opening of her tent and called the dog, which ran happily to her and sat down, tail wagging. She looked back at Bob.

“I can’t get undressed in that tiny thing,” she said, pointing at the tent. “Promise you won’t watch me?”

“I could help you,” said Bob, twirling imaginary moustaches.

“You’re awful!” laughed the teenager. “Just don’t watch me. You’ve already seen more of my skin than most men.” She snatched off the cap he’d given her and bent over to point her bald pate at him.

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Bob, his voice in an exaggerated groan. “I am the worst of the whole lot. The only reason they sent me with you was so that you wouldn’t mind leaving this poor earth.”

She stood back up, and looked at him, her gaze level.

“You know, you talk to me differently than anybody else. Nobody else would make a joke about me dying.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding sorry. “I didn’t mean to cause you pain.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she said. “I know I’m going to die. Everybody else knows it too, but they all tiptoe around it like they can wish it away or something. But you’re different. I like that.”

She walked over to him and leaned up on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she said, dropping back to her heels.

Bob stared at her. She really was pretty amazing, regardless of her age. The maturity with which she accepted the inevitable was admirable.

“My pleasure,” he said softly. “Especially if it gets me more kisses.” He grinned. “I don’t get many kisses from sexy young girls.”

“That’s just because you’re the worst of the whole lot.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “And you’re ugly ... and you smell bad ... and you scare the girls by talking about bears.” She put her hands on her hips as he assumed a wounded look. “I can think of more if you want. I’m just trying to help.”

Bob turned to his dog, who was sitting, her head swiveling back and forth between the speakers.

“I’m going to bed now, Dammit. This shy little filly won’t let me watch her get naked, so you watch for me, okay, girl? You can tell me all about it in the morning.”

Ignoring Brenda, who tried to dredge up an outraged look, but managed only a grin, he crawled into his tent.

Brenda shivered as she dropped her shirt, and bent to step out of her jeans. Dressed only in bra and panties, she realized that he hadn’t put out the fire. It had burned low, but the glow still lit up the side of her orange tent. She wondered if he was peeking at her.

“Should I put the fire out?” she called to his tent.

His muffled reply came from the end of the tent opposite of the entry. “No, it’ll be okay. We’ll be up in three or four hours anyway.”

Feeling somehow unsatisfied - that he wasn’t peeking - she unhooked her bra and skinned her panties down. Then, shivering, she crawled into her tent and arranged herself in her sleeping bag. She whispered to Dammit, who nosed through the opening of the tent. She held the top of the bag open, and the dog crawled in with her, turning around, her sharp claws treading on Brenda’s stomach. Then the dog flopped down alongside Brenda’s side, and laid her head on Brenda’s shoulder. Brenda tugged the cap back on her head, and felt warmer immediately. Dammit gave a long sigh and licked Brenda’s shoulder once.

She heard him come back out of his tent, and then the rustle of what she imagined was him removing his own clothing. She felt a wicked thrill as she realized she wanted to peek at him. But to do that would mean twisting around and disturbing Dammit. She was already beginning to feel warm and comfy, and didn’t want to move. Instead, she tried to just imagine what the tall man might look like, standing there in the light of the fire.
All her diseased brain could come up with were pictures she’d seen, and she didn’t want to apply those to this man. Instead, what she concentrated on was how his rough cheek had felt when she kissed it. The feel of the stubble on his cheek reminded her of how her head felt between chemo sessions. He’d smelled good, too, not antiseptic like all the doctors and nurses.

Dammit took in a big breath and gave out a long sigh of what was obviously contentment.

Her last conscious thought was drowsy amazement at how safe a little, scruffy dog could make her feel.

Within minutes, everyone in the camp was asleep.

Bob got up around five, but didn’t wake the girl. They had time to do what she wanted, even if that was sleep. The trip was planned for three days, but if it extended, that was fine. He was sure her parents wouldn’t mind. Hadn’t they said they took two weeks off?

As soon as he was out of his tent, he saw Dammit wiggle through the flaps of the girl’s tent and trot over to nose at him.

“Morning, traitor,” Bob whispered softly. Dammit wagged her tail.

He walked into the woods to empty his bladder, and then took a walk around, to see what had changed since he was last in this area. It had been on his mourning tour, so he didn’t expect to find anything of interest. He didn’t, but he enjoyed his walk, stretching his muscles. He hadn’t shaved, and the girl’s offhand comment about him smelling was probably true. He could deal with that later in the day, when it was warmer.

He found bear sign. It was relatively fresh, only three or four days old. He cast about, and found three sets of prints, one larger, and two small sets. He estimated the she-bear weighed maybe three hundred pounds. The cubs were very young. Knowing they’d made it through the winter made him feel good. He didn’t begrudge her this mountain. Unlike a lot of ranchers, Bob felt like there was still room for all of them. The bears rarely bothered his herd, and stayed shy of people. They didn’t hurt anything, and he didn’t want to hurt them. Wolves were a different proposition, but there weren’t many on his property. Since being reintroduced into the wild, they’d spread beyond the borders of the national park that had brought them back. He was keeping an eye on them. He’d heard some stories from other ranchers. Wolves did more damage to cattle than bears. They did damage to bears too, for that matter. Many a cub had been taken by a pack of wolves, while the mother bellowed and snarled, unable to protect more than one cub at a time. So far, he’d only seen sign of two or three wolves on his property. He hoped it stayed that way. It would bear watching.

He approached the campsite silently, as he always moved. He was startled to see Brenda, standing outside her tent. She must have just awakened, because she was bent over, her back to him, shimmying into a pair of panties. He stopped, staring. Part of his mind wandered, as he watched her do the same thing as he had seen Dannie do countless times. As she pulled at the waistband, she wiggled her hips in a way only women could wiggle, as if she were lowering her pussy and hips into them, rather than pulling them up. She ran her thumbs around the waist, settling it where she wanted it, and then bent to pick up a bra. Her clothing was neatly piled at her feet.

Dammit, who had sat down, when her master stopped, barked. It was a “Why are we standing here?” kind of bark.

Brenda turned, startled, and Bob saw her teenaged breasts, capped with rosy pink nipples. Her eyes went wide, and her hands came up to cover each breast. Turned at the waist like that, with not a hair showing on her body, her hands drew attention to her nakedness in a way that sent a streak of almost pain through Bob’s balls.

“Sorry,” he said, turning around to face away from her. “I didn’t know you’d be up.”

Brenda scrambled to get her clothes on. She was so discombobulated by the situation that she dropped her bra and pulled on her fresh shirt without it. She climbed into her clean jeans. Had Bob been watching, he’d have seen that little hip wiggle he’d seen before. It would have made him harder than he already was. Right now he realized he was glad he’d turned around, because he was mostly hard. That had happened almost instantly, without any conscious thought to it. He was almost shocked by the eroticism of what he’d just seen, and its effect on him.

“I’m really sorry,” he said to the trees he was facing.

“It’s ... okay...” she panted, buttoning the jeans. They fit tightly enough that she didn’t need a belt. She stood there, barefoot, looking at his back. “You can turn around now.”

Bob, trying to lighten the mood, tried a joke. “You made me promise I wouldn’t watch while you got un-dressed. You didn’t say anything about when you were getting dressed again.”

Brenda didn’t quite know how to feel. At least twenty doctors had seen her naked. She’d always felt a little strange, as they poked and prodded, taking blood samples, and CAT scans, and everything else they did. Half of it didn’t have anything to do with her head. They were always testing things to see if the cancer had spread from there. But they didn’t act like they noticed her nakedness. The doctors were always aloof and distant. She was always just a patient to them. Having this man see her naked was different somehow. She realized she was flushed, and excited, and tried to examine that reaction. She didn’t feel embarrassed, exactly. It was something different than that.

She remembered his eyes, when she had realized he was there, and turned to see them. They had looked different, somehow bigger, as if he were seeing something amazing to him. But she was just a girl. He’d been married. He’d seen a real woman naked ... lots of times. Why had he looked at her like that? Her mind flickered to his comment that she was “sexy.” She’d wanted to believe that, but it was impossible. She was a skinny bald girl, with two or three months to live, if she was lucky. Everybody had told her that when she started going downhill, it would happen fast. She’d get very, very sick, and then die. It would probably only take a week or two.

Yet, he had looked at her like she was a woman ... maybe even a sexy woman.

He still hadn’t turned around.

“It’s okay, really,” she said. She sat down to pull on socks and tennis shoes.

He finally turned. He was walking funny, and his hands were hovering over his groin, like he was the naked one, and he was hiding himself from her.

“I’ll just get breakfast back down here,” he said, going to the rope that the saddle bags were suspended from.

It was when he reached for the rope that she saw the bulge he had been hiding. She may have been inexperienced, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew what an erect penis looked like. She and her friends had surfed the net plenty of times, giggling and clicking on pictures that they squealed over. Most of those pictures were fakes, of course. No man could have a penis that big. It would stick out all the time, even when it wasn’t hard. They had checked out plenty of men, peeking at the front of their pants, and hadn’t seen bulges like that. It had been fun, but it wasn’t real. They all knew that.

But here was a bulge, and she knew what that bulge meant. It meant he’d been telling the truth! She was sexy ... beyond all doubt. At least to him. He had reacted to her, and had been embarrassed about it.

By fate, perhaps, the sun chose that exact moment to break into view, and brilliant sunbeams flitted through the trees around them to dapple the ground with spots of bright yellow light. Brenda felt like she might explode with joy, and that if she did, the pieces of her body would be like those bright yellow splotches of sunlight, glowing with happiness. He might be embarrassed about what had happened, but she now knew that a man did find her genuinely attractive ... desirable. It was like a new sun had come up in her life. It was a new day in Brenda Jean Ronson’s life, and she wanted to open up her arms to welcome it.

It may have been Bob’s embarrassment over getting a stiff prick in front of a teenage girl. Or maybe he kept thinking about what she looked like, standing there in panties, her hands covering her nipples. For whatever reason, he burned breakfast. Not that it mattered to him. He ate whatever he cooked on the trail, good or not.

Brenda’s reaction, though, was decidedly different.

“How can you eat that?” she gasped, after one bite. He was shoveling food into his mouth with the efficiency of a man on the trail, wanting to get done with the necessities, and be on his horse.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asked, taking time to actually taste, and answer his own question. Male pride kept him from voicing how badly it tasted, though.

“I’m surprised you’re alive if you eat like this all the time,” she said, putting her plate down.

“Nobody’s forcing it down your throat,” muttered Bob.

“I know who’s fixing lunch,” she said firmly. “And it’s not you!”

“I’ve done very well on my own cooking for the last month or so,” he said, sounding injured.

Brenda walked straight to him, and started feeling his arms. She moved on to his ribs and he jumped back. He was still mostly hard, and her touch felt intimate somehow.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m trying to figure out what you have under those clothes. It’s surely not flesh.” She giggled as he tried to get away from a mere girl and went after him, her fingers grabbing for where his love handles should be ... but weren’t. “If you’ve been eating that kind of cooking, you’re stuffing your clothes with rags or something. There’s no way eating that stuff could make muscle.”

Bob got a grip on her wrists, and proved that there was muscle in his arms.

“Behave!” he ordered.

“Says the man who sneaks up on poor innocent girls and watches them as they get dressed.” She stuck out her tongue at him again.

“Yeah, go ahead,” he growled. “Stick your tongue out.” He fell, by habit, into something he’d said before, but to his much older wife, when she did that. “I wouldn’t want that thing in my mouth either!”

He realized with a start, how inappropriate that kind of thing was, and let go of her. She hadn’t even noticed his sexual innuendo. She was still laughing at how uncomfortable she had made him feel. Then she felt a twinge of conscience at needling him, and stepped back. He was poised for flight, an unconscious reaction to the situation on his part. He wasn’t used to dealing with situations like this, and was very uncomfortable.

There was an awkward moment of silence. It was broken when both, at the same time, said “I’m sorry.”

Bob felt a surge of affection for this slip of a girl, who had only months to live. It made him uncomfortable. Affection, along with the fact that he couldn’t get the image of her slim body, standing there almost naked, out of his mind made him feel like a pervert of some kind. He turned away as he realized his prick was getting harder, rather than softer, and busied himself with getting things packed.

Brenda watched him for a moment, her brain agile, despite the tumor that was pressing against parts of it. She recognized, on an unconscious level, that she bothered him, and associated it with what had happened. Thinking about her body “bothering” a man was something new and interesting ... a subject she had never really spent any time reflecting on before.

Every woman arrives at a time in her life when she realizes she has power of a sexual nature. She sees, usually in a man’s eyes, something that tells her on a basic level that she can influence a man... control a man ... at least to some extent, based on that sexual aspect she has just discovered in herself.

That epiphany usually results in one of two reactions. One is that she doesn’t understand that power and it scares her. It’s a little like holding raw energy in one’s hands that feels dangerous. Some women back away from that power and refuse to embrace it or use it. It becomes something “other women” use ... but not her ... at least not right then. The other routine reaction is that she sees it as a new toy, exciting and interesting ... something to be played with ... something for fun and amazement or amusement.

In neither case does the woman fully understand what’s going on. If she embraces the new power, it will take years, usually, to turn that into a force that will affect her life in only positive ways. If she pushes it away, it will be years before she realizes, if she ever does, that she has turned her back on something that could have affected her life in positive ways.

With Brenda Jean Ronson, though, who measured life in weeks, instead of years, the reaction was different. She had a way of examining things much more deeply than other girls her age. Life was short, from her perspective... very short ... and each new thing she discovered had to be examined closely, to see if it was worth incorporating into the short time she had left to explore things with.

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