Chapter 9

We did talk about it what would happen if she got pregnant. It was odd for two reasons. First off we were having a serious conversation about things and were sitting there buck naked. But it was also odd because neither of us had really thought about planning for such an eventuality. I think it all boiled down to the idea that she wanted to know that I wouldn't abandon her if it happened, and that I'd try to make the best of things. That she even contemplated I might react negatively hurt my feelings, but I didn't tell her that. I just said that I'd never leave her until she told me to go and left it at that.

It about blew my mind when she said we were finished talking and would I please come back and finish what I had started.

UMKC had a placement office at the college, and part of Heather's last year of school involved visiting that office to see if she could already have a job waiting when she graduated. She described it as being a little like a real estate office, where there were pictures of hospitals and clinics on the bulletin board and notices of job openings. The vast majority of them were time sensitive, meaning that there were specific hiring dates. Before her last semester, all those job openings seemed pretty superfluous by virtue of the fact that whoever was hiring needed a RN on such and such a date, which was always before her graduation date. But in her last semester that all changed.

She brought home copies of the ones that looked interesting to her. She did that for two reasons. First, it was fun for her to dream about having a job in her chosen field. She'd look up information about the city on the net. She always started with cultural offerings, and ended with cost of living, prices on housing and all that sort of thing. But the other reason she brought them home was so that I could make enquiries about job openings on fire departments in the same location.

From January to March we looked at possibilities that always seemed to fall through for one reason or another. With the economy on the skids, a lot of fire departments were under hiring freezes. Heather was fine, because the medical field was booming. We had a near miss in Philadelphia, where both of us could seek a job, but the cost of living was prohibitive. She started talking about staying in Kansas City. She could probably get employment, but with all the competition from all the recent graduates, that wasn't a sure thing. I told her not to worry about it. We were comfortable and could live on my salary until she found something.

Then, only three weeks from graduation, she walked in the door one night with a paper in her hand and a strange look on her face. I knew her so well now that I knew something was up.

"Good or bad?" I asked.

"Good ... I think," she said. Her voice quivered.

"Hit me," I said, opening my arms to give her a hug and kiss.

The kiss I got was full of passion. Not that she ever skimped on feeling when we exchanged love, but this was a little more passionate than usual. It lasted a long time and I could feel the yearning in her body as she crushed it to mine. There was all the time in the world to get her naked and impaled, so I reminded myself to be patient and listen. When she was finished with the kiss she pushed me to the kitchen table and sat me down. She sat across from me and slid the paper across the table.

There were RN positions available in Anchorage, Alaska. The starting pay was astonishing. Underneath that announcement was a copy of another job announcement from the U.S. Forest Service in Anchorage, listing more than twenty jobs associated with wilderness fire fighting operations. The salary for most of them wasn't very impressive - barely more than I was now getting from the Lenexa department.

Then I read the part about how the position was only active for eight months out of the year, with a four month break during the winter. The employee was still on the payroll, but inactive, and was free to pursue other types of employment for those four months. That meant if I was working there, I'd make more than what I was making all year here in just eight months.

"Alaska?" I said, looking up at her.

"I thought of something while I was reading over the RN announcements," she said. "That's why I did a search for positions for you."

"What?" I asked.

She licked her lips. I couldn't imagine what she could be nervous about.

"If we showed up in Alaska ... where nobody knows us ... with the same last name ... how could anybody know we weren't married?"

I thought about that. I tried to think about it critically, but that was really hard. "I guess they could ask us for a marriage license," I said.

"How often does somebody ask for a marriage license?" she asked.

"I have no idea," I said.

"I think we should try to find out," was her reply.

I was a little stunned by the possibility she was suggesting. "Okay," I said.

"You don't think I'm insane?" she asked.

"I've known you were insane ever since you woke up from your coma," I said, grinning weakly. "But who cares whether people think we're married or not? It doesn't make any difference here."

"Yes, it does," she said. "I can't kiss you in public. I can't talk about my husband, and how he makes me feel. We have to hide our love."

"I guess you're right," I said.

"And..." she added softly, licking her lips again, "if people know we're brother and sister ... I can't let you get me pregnant."

I'd like to say that, after my sister suggested she wanted to get pregnant with my baby, I took it calmly and was not ruffled. You know ... like maybe I said "Well, I'm honored!"

It wasn't anything like that.

Jangled was a better word. I was jangled. Every nerve ending in my body lit up like Fourth of July fireworks in the night sky. I think I actually vibrated all over for ten or fifteen seconds. I had very conflicting thoughts about this. The primary one was familiar, because I'd had it before, back when Heather and I first started living together. I was quite sure that we could never pull it off, and that people would know something was going on between us. I mean a brother and sister living together isn't really any big deal, but I was sure people would be able to see how we felt about each other.

Actually, nobody paid any attention to it. The guys I worked with all wanted me to get them dates with her, but when I told them she already had a boyfriend, they let it go. A few of her friends were interested in me, but the same tactic produced the same result. Nobody paid any attention to our status.

And, over the next few weeks, as we both made quiet and discreet inquiries about what marriage licenses were used for, we found out that, basically, other than the minister who's going to perform the ceremony and some agencies involved in effecting the bride's name change, such as the Social Security Administration ... nobody ever asked to see a marriage license.

Nobody.

I talked to at least ten or fifteen guys who not only had never been asked to prove they were married, but weren't even sure they still had their original marriage license or could prove they were married.

And with each day of research, Heather got more and more excited. On the night when we sat, staring into each other's eyes over a single candle on the table, we sipped wine and held hands, I finally said "Do you really want to do this?"

"Yes." She said it softly, but firmly.

"So ... if you could ... you'd marry me?" I asked.

"Yes." It was an instant response, and her eyes welled up.

"Me too," I said.

"We'll start the application process tomorrow," she said.

Now it was my turn to give a one word response. "Yes."

The Alaska/Canada highway, or ALCAN, as it is known, was built during World War II with a gravel surface, to enable the Army to get supplies and equipment to Alaska to repel the Japanese invasion in the Aleutian Islands. It is still the primary (and only) means of getting goods to The North Star State by land transportation. Since 1943, when it was finished, parts of it have been paved and straightened, but it is still basically a drive through "the country" of fourteen hundred miles. That's from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, AK.

By a drive through "the country" I mean you can expect the same kind and amount of services you'd find on two lane county roads in the continental United States. Except the county roads are probably in better shape, and will definitely have more services available.

Of course Dawson Creek is in Canada. It's about a thousand miles north of Seattle as the crow flies, and you have to get there first before you can even contemplate driving the ALCAN. From Kansas City to Dawson Creek is about almost 1,500 miles, through North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, Canada. I don't know what the population of Canada is, but they're not crowded. I can tell you that.

We chose to drive for a couple of reasons. First off, it costs an arm and both legs to ship a car up there. According to our research, if you buy a new car up there, the shipping is just as bad. So we got us a Subaru 4WD in Kansas City, hooked a small trailer up to it, and tent camped all the way to Delta Junction. We originally planned on taking twelve days, but more research suggested that if we wanted to enjoy the trip to allow for more. Twenty days seemed like an awfully long time, but turned out to be too short. There were a dozen places along the way I wish we could have stayed for a week or more. I can't even begin to do the scenery justice.

We made the trip in July, which was a recommended time to travel based on the book Milepost which is a sort of guide book for the trip. If you ever decide to make that trip - and you should - you must have a copy of that book. It tells you everything you could ever want or need to know to make the trip a success. And considering there are places where gas stations are 350 miles apart, sometimes the listing of where they are can prevent trials and tribulation. This road is so remote after you leave Dawson Creek that automobile wrecks are often just left where they lay. It's neither cost effective nor even intelligent to recover them, sometimes.

Alberta was the last province where the heat was oppressive, and after that, every night was spent cuddled together in our double sleeping bag, which up to that point had just been a mattress upon which we made love and slept.

Part of the reason we took our time was because Heather had this silly notion that she wanted to make love in every state or province we went through. That meant we had to stop and find places to have sex outdoors, because we went through three states the first day to get to our first KOA campsite. The first stop was River Bluffs State Park in St. Joseph, Missouri, where we took a blanket into the middle of a copse of trees and rutted like animals in the woods. It was exhilarating, because we knew people were just outside the screen of leaves.

Just before Council Bluffs, Iowa, we stopped at Manawa State Park, where we got under a foot bridge over a rushing stream and I sat with my butt perched on a rock while she straddled me and rode us both to orgasm.

Then it was back in the car for a 45 minute drive to Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, where we took a tour and managed to slip away from the tour group. Standing up in a closet, with her impaled on my rampant prick and her toes barely touching the ground, she asked if I thought some soldier had taken a girl in this closet a hundred years ago and done what we were doing. It was odd to think of the ghosts of past lovers floating above us, watching something being recreated.

We stopped for our first night of camping in Sioux Falls and, of course, she wanted to be pinned to the ground of that state that night, with my weight on her and my cock filling her pussy.

"I'm so glad we're doing this," she moaned as I slid into her in the dark tent. There were other tents around, but we couldn't hear them, so we hoped they couldn't hear us.

"Me too," I groaned, going in deep and rotating.

"I can't wait to get there," she gasped, bucking her hips up at me. "I can't wait to tell someone you're my husband."

"What about the bald guy who checked us in?" I said, starting to move in her. "We registered as husband and wife."

"But we didn't say we were married," she panted. "He just assumed it."

North Dakota was beautiful, but there were very few places for a couple of perverts to pull off the road and fuck up a storm. There was private property, of course, but nothing to screen what we would be doing. At one point I suggested that we just park where we could see a mile or so in each direction and do it standing up against the car. She told me to be patient and selected Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge as the site of our next tryst. We had to leave I-29 to get there, but it wasn't that far. We parked in a picnic area near the river and went through a screen of trees to the bank. I couldn't believe it when Heather started stripping down right there in the open. She laughed at me. We ended up on the blanket with the sun shining down on our naked bodies as we mated. Anyone who happened to come along would have been able to see us easily. It was ecstatic.

Once we got into Canada we were a bit more circumspect about making love out in the open. There was one exception. As we went through Alberta, and drove literally for hours through nothing but wheat fields, we stopped once to trample a small area of some poor farmer's wheat. With a wall of wheat hiding us from the road, we got naked and coupled.

"Cum in me," she whispered into my ear as she hugged me tightly.

"We just started," I said, thrusting gently.

"I don't care. I want to feel you spurting in me."

"I can wait for you," I said.

"I'll cum tonight," she said. "Bobby, honey, just give me your seed. That's what I want right now. I want to feel you filling my belly with your love."

"What's this all about?" I asked. She'd been voraciously horny since we left Kansas City. I had chalked it up to the novelty of what we were doing. And taken advantage of it, of course. I was always horny for Heather.

"You'll be mad if I tell you," she said, humping up at me.

"I will not."

"You might be, and I don't want to argue on this trip."

"Try me."

"I'll tell you tonight," she countered. "Just love me now."

"I'll always love you," I whispered.

"Then cum in me, Bobby," she moaned.

It's pretty hard to resist an invitation like that. It tends to push the buttons that are associated with a man's balls.

That night we camped in Dawson Creek, along a waterway of some kind that was swarming with clouds of mosquitoes so dense that we had to stay in the tent as much as possible. We got in fairly late, around eight-thirty, but even so it stayed light outside the tent for another two hours. We were far enough north to begin experiencing the longer days.

The night was mild, so we lay on top of the sleeping bags, on our stomachs, side by side, reading the Milepost book together by the light of a Coleman lantern. We would start climbing tomorrow and the unknown of the ALCAN made us both a little excited.