Chapter 8

If you've ever been in a situation where you were having a whale of a good time, but it also caused some problems, then you know what I was going through. I knew Lynne didn't approve of what was going on. And that made me want to shy away from her. In the good old days, I'd see her every other day for this or that reason, or sometimes for no reason at all. Having that strain between us was one of the unhappy parts of the relationship with Jill that I still couldn't categorize. Nowadays there's a term called "fuck buddies" and looking back on things, that's kind of what we were doing. She had discovered and loved sex, and I was handy and interested too, despite myself.

But you don't tell a fuck buddy you love her.

There was no talk about the future, and that was another down side of things, because I was the kind of guy who thought about the future. As you get older, and there's less future to think about, you think about it more often. From Jill's perspective, she was going to go off to college, which was exciting and interesting. But that meant I was going to return to being celibate, and while I had adapted to that lifestyle pretty easily after Vicky died, I was pretty sure the adaptation would be a bit rockier this time.

Lynne must have been thinking about the future too, because she called me and asked me to come over one day. When I got there it turned out Jill was in town shopping for last minute items to furnish her dorm room with.

"You've been avoiding me," Lynne accused as I came in.

"Guilty as charged," I admitted. "I was afraid things would be awkward."

"She isn't working you out of her system, Bob."

"Yeah, I kind of noticed that too," I said.

"I have an idea."

"Really?" I didn't know whether to be interested or not.

"Ask her to marry you."

I gawked, with my mouth hanging open.

"This isn't some motherly plan to make things the way I think they should be," she said quickly. "I just don't think she's really thought things out. But she'll have to if you ask her to marry you. She might begin to understand that this isn't all just fun and games, and that there are responsibilities that go along with this kind of thing."

"What if she says yes?" Do not ask my why that was my first question. I have no idea where it came from.

"She won't," said Lynne, who apparently missed the possibility that while I was willing to fuck her little girl's socks off, I might be reluctant to make an honest woman of her. Lynne went on without a pause. "It will blow her mind. She's never mentioned marriage to me, in any way, at any time. I don't think she's really thought about it at all. Maybe we can get her attention this way, because I KNOW her initial reaction will be negative, and that will cool her off a little."

"I'm not so sure about this," I said slowly. It seemed like a really crazy idea to me. I mean sex with Jill was unreal enough, but a proposal? From me? That was just plain ludicrous.

It occurred to me then that maybe Lynne was right. It WAS ludicrous, and surely Jill would see that as quickly as her mother and I had.

"I'll think about it," I said.

"You'd better hurry then," she said. "You only have three days left, and if she leaves here feeling the same way about things that she does now, she's going to be distracted at school and neither of us want that."

Things, as it turned out, played right into our hand. When Jill got back and found me there, she told me she wanted to have a picnic, and that she wanted to have it in her old tree house. She'd brought a bucket of chicken back with her, and was ready to go right then and there. She handed me a plastic bag that was too heavy to be holding only chicken, but I didn't find out what was in it until I had followed her up the ladder into the structure. What had seemed so large when it was first built, now seemed cramped, or would have for two people in a different kind of relationship. I found out why the bag was heavy when she pulled out a bottle of wine. Apparently she knew somebody in town who was willing to sell it to her.

We ate in silence for a few minutes before I asked the obvious question.

"Why a picnic here?"

"This is the first place I had a daydream about sex," she said calmly.

"I see," I said, smiling.

"It was about you," she said.

"I see," I said again.

"I was twelve, and I thought everybody would know what I had been thinking. I was sure they would see it on my face. I ran home and didn't come back for almost a week. Do you remember that?"

I shook my head. That had been a long time ago.

"Well I do. I didn't know what sex was, back then, and what I wished for was something smoky and hazy, but I knew it was sex, somehow. When my mother didn't say anything to me, and I finally realized that it didn't show after all, I was amazed. Then one day I saw you looking at me with this half smile on your face, and I wondered if you were thinking that too ... about me. Later I saw you look at Mom the same way. I asked her about it. It was the first time we talked about you as a man, instead of just Bob."

"Wow," I said softly. "Clear back then?"

"Clear back then," she said. "I knew back then that you'd be the first man I had sex with."

This sounded like so much more than some thoughtless fling that I thought of what Lynne had suggested. Red flags popped up in my mind, but the feelings I was having for this woman demanded that some kind of resolution be arrived at. I had been worried that her heart would get broken, but now I was concerned about my own. I didn't work it all out in my head, though. It just came out, though not in the traditional way.

"Your mother thinks I should ask you to marry me," I said.

Her hand, moving a drumstick toward her face, stopped, but only briefly, maybe a second or two, before it continued to her mouth. White teeth tore at the flesh and she chewed while almond shaped eyes examined my face. She swallowed and, so help me, I thought of her swallowing a few days before, out in that pasture, with my prick in her mouth.

"That's not a proposal," she said.

"No, I guess it's not," I agreed.

She was quiet for a few seconds. "I'm glad it wasn't," she said. She looked away.

A breaking heart should make a loud cracking sound. I mean your stomach can announce itself loudly enough for people to hear five or six feet away, but a heart makes no noise at all when it is shattered.

"Oh," I said, my voice dull.

She looked back at me. "It's too soon for that."

I didn't feel quite so devastated.

"You and Mom both insist that I'm going to fall madly in love with some boy at college," she said. "What if that happens?"

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"I don't think it will," she said. "But you two seem so sure about it that I'm a little worried. Even if you had proposed, I don't think I would have given you an answer. Not now. I'll have to think about that for a while."

So much for Lynne thinking her daughter was going off on this sexual tangent willy nilly.

She blinked. "But it wasn't a proposal ... so I'd feel weird thinking about it." She tilted her head at me. "How do you feel about it?"

This wasn't going at all like Lynne had thought it would and I realized I was an idiot for even thinking about this goofy plan.

"I think it's a ludicrous idea," I said.

She grinned. "I figured that's what you'd think." She wiped her hands on a napkin and unbuttoned her blouse. She wasn't wearing a bra under it. "Right now, though, I want to find out what it feels like to have an orgasm in my tree house. Do you think you could help me with that?"

The last time I made love with Jill that summer was one of the most tumultuous things in my life, at least on an emotional level. For one thing I KNEW it was the last time it would happen that summer, and I suspected it was the last time ever. For another, one of my best friends was leaving the next morning, and might be gone forever. It's not unusual for a child to leave for college and never come back for more than the occasional short visit.

What made it so difficult was that I had, in fact, fallen deeply in love with this young woman. I wasn't sure when or how it happened, but I knew it was the case, and even as I held her naked body in my arms, and her frenzied panting was hot in my ear as she strained up against me, I was in some measure of pain.

She spent the last night with me, at my house, something she had never done before. When she got there she said she'd told her mother not to expect her before breakfast. I didn't ask how that had gone over, and she didn't give any clues. She said we'd eat later and simply got naked. She wanted to make love on the couch for some reason and I, in my emotional downsurge, wasn't going to argue.

I had gotten used to our habit of using timing and coitous interruptus as the only birth control we practiced, and I thought nothing of sliding my naked prick into her hot sheath.

Sometimes Jill just liked to fuck. By that I mean she wasn't looking for an orgasm for herself. She just wanted to make love and it didn't matter if either of us climaxed or not, as far as she was concerned. Then there were times when all she seemed to care about was reaching for that orgasmic ocean wave so she could surf in it for as long as possible. This time, on the couch, was one of those.

Her first orgasm took me by surprise, because it was causing her to whimper and buck up at me within a minute of sliding into her. I hadn't even gotten a rhythm going yet, and was still just enjoying the feeling of being inside her. When I realized what was going on I went in deep and rubbed her clitty with my pubes for a while. Her nails in my side told me to keep going and helped me in terms of choosing a direction in which to move.

Now a guy can't help but feel pretty good when his lover gets off that quickly. What made this one even better was that her eyes were wide open the whole time and she was just staring at my face. Both of us closed our eyes quite often during an orgasm. Maybe it was hard not to or something. But having her gaze into my eyes like that seemed to melt us together somehow. My own orgasm surprised me next. Suddenly I was there.