Chapter 5

Getting Kathy dressed the next morning took awhile as she just wanted to cuddle in bed, but I eventually got her moving and dressed, after I allowed her to give me a long and slow blowjob. I returned the favor and she then wanted another round of around the world in bed but I kept protesting that we really had a lot that needed to be done today! As usual after sex she wasn't really in the mood for talking but I kept trying to force the issue during the drive to her apartment. Mostly she just remained silent.

First of all we needed to stop at the local box store to get moving boxes and packing tape. I'd never seen her place before and didn't really know what she'd really need and Kathy wasn't entirely sure herself, so we bought a lot of everything just in case. We ended up using nearly everything and even had to return to get even more empty boxes later.

Externally, her small apartment complex was nothing special. It was just across on the north side of the river and fairly close to UT, so it catered to mostly students and young professionals. It didn't offer a lot of amenities but the place wasn't a dump or an obvious firetrap. Heck, it looked better than my old apartment and more than adequate for a young woman on her own but I did note that the apartment complex did not provide extra security.

She kept insisting that her apartment was kind of small and dumpy but really I found it quite nice and very homey, if a little restricted for space. The place was small but well kept. Everything was neat and organized nearly to point of being obsessive-compulsive but there was just enough irregularity to be on the 'normal' side of side of civilized neat nick behavior.

"Trust me, it doesn't usually look this neat and pristine!" She promised. "I'm mostly a slob during the week, just throwing my clothes over chairs and letting the dishes and laundry pile up. I cleaned up in here like a mad-woman last Friday afternoon before I met you at the gun shop range. I knew that you didn't have a livable house yet and I admit that I was already considering the possibility of inviting you back here that evening for a nightcap. So anyway, I cleaned through this place insanely like a tornado ... so now let's rumple up the bed!"

"Down girl! Heel!" I commanded, and she did in fact then suddenly drop down to her knees in a rather cute and obedient fashion. "Fun later, pack now unfortunately. I really don't want to be here after dark ... or back here at all if the gang realizes that we're here. You thought that they already knew where you lived, remember? Yeah ... so you start packing as fast as you can and I'll start porting boxes out to the truck. It's going to take at least three trips in the truck, maybe more depending how much of the furniture you'll want to keep. That's your call ... if you want it, then I'll lug it, but that will add another round-trip or two!"

The very real thought of more gang trouble here was a very suitable inducement for Kathy keeping her clothes on. Her face went from ardor to anguish in a moment and she gritted her teeth and lips together before giving my cheek a kiss. She then got to the task at hand and we stayed remarkably distraction free for several long hours of extremely productive packing.

We concentrated first upon packing and moving her bedroom items, clothes and other necessary stuff and then the kitchen, especially the canned food and boxes and other perishable stuff from the refrigerator that we could add to Garry's rather limited bachelor dining choices. Nearly the very first item that Kathy gathered up for transport from underneath the bed was a fairly large sized suitcase that she seem somewhat embarrassed about and tried at first to hide from me.

"Let me guess, all full of sex toys?" I joked, but she nodded and the pulled out from the closet another even larger case that was nearly the size of an old steamer trunk. It was clearly labeled 'costumes', so I didn't need to strain any brain cells figuring that part out. I sneaked a peek inside of the case of marital aids and it was stuffed full of interesting intimate devices and a disturbingly comprehensive collection of vibrators, dildos and butt plugs, not to mention some bondage items, including some expensive leather hospital type restraints for both her wrists and ankles and other fetish gear. A lot of this stuff looked fairly well used, but real good quality though.

Hell, I wished I'd had a suitcase full of this stuff back when I was married! I'd have made sure that my ex, the former Ms. Kelly 'Frigid' Freihof received the opportunity to spend a great many hours of quality time with them. She had to have a G-Spot somewhere, but in nearly a decade of marriage I'd never found it!

"I'm assuming that you're expecting that your little box of toys continues to get frequently used?" I suggested as I returned to pick up the next load of boxes and she nodded and turned away without another word to gather up a big handful of her suits that she wore for work placing them neatly into a large clean plastic trash bag to keep them free from dirt, dust and crap from the bed of my old truck.

My girlfriend was determined to share my life permanently now but she was also equally determined to keep her secrets, likely involving a very sordid past, entirely secret. Still, with just a small portion of the toys and equipment in that suitcase, I was someday going to string her up in our new basement dungeon room and I was going to extract some confessions ... even if I had to use a few of her very interesting toys to get them!

Next to be packed from the floor of Kathy's closet was a great number of shoes that could be easily described as 'fetish wear' with some extremely high heeled shoes and boots. Most of them very expensive looking. She might pretend that Trixie the Slut was a lowdown cheap and dirty little whore, but none of Kathy's lingerie, bondage and other play outfits looked like cheap bargain basement material. Kathy had said that she earned good money in her professional banking job and clearly didn't spend much of it on her rent. Accordingly, it seemed fairly obvious that she indulged her passions at some of the more upscale erotic boutiques and Internet mail order companies. This was a woman who took her erotic fetishes seriously and out of her stupendous collection I could hardly decide which of the many interesting and arousing items I first wanted Kathy to model for me.

We'd filled up the truck already once and delivered it to Garry's house and returned for a second load after another round of box purchases at the moving supply store. It always takes twice as many boxes as you estimate! Then we returned to her place and packed and loaded up the truck yet again to finish a second delivery back home before dark.

I was leaving her apartment for one of the final trips to my truck with one of the last of today's boxes when I noticed that someone was covertly watching us. He might have been there earlier, maybe even most of the day, but I'd been in too much of rush to get her boxes moved to pay much attention around me. I couldn't get a clear look at him, as he was pretty decently concealed and also at least fifty yards away from me, but he appeared to be a Hispanic kid.

That did sort of fit the profile of one of the multi-racial gangs that had an interest in us, but on the other hand our racially diverse collection of assembled gangsters seem to have black, Hispanic and white members. Equal opportunity treasure hunters, I assumed. Now, if a new Asian gang were to also join this group, their multi-ethnic partnership would become complete! This already made it much harder to be alert for trouble as it was!

Right now, our watcher was all wrapped up in a hoodie that covered most of his face and lurking behind some bushes that disguised the rest of his appearance. I think he realized that I'd spotted him because I stopped dead in my tracks and gave the rest of my surroundings a very hard and sharp look. The kid seemed to be our only watcher, and he wasn't close enough to us on the opposite end of the apartment parking lot to be an immediate threat. I tried not to let him know that he'd been spotted for sure, so I loaded up the box as normal and walked back to her apartment pretending that nothing had happened.

On the next return trip I noticed that he'd adjusted his hiding spot to another set of bushes that were a little closer, but thicker, providing slightly better cover so that he could keep an eye on Kathy's front door. The top of his black hoodie gave him away, but it was a better hiding spot to watch us from.

Being late in the afternoon, I was tired and now annoyed enough to be almost distracted by Kathy's hints for a quickie on her bed, but we kept to the agenda and packed up a few more boxes instead to kill some time. I wanted to see if our semi-hidden watcher remained out there keeping tabs on us, and after a long wait of nearly an hour I spotted him right away. Nothing had changed.

I reluctantly decided to call it a day here. We'd gotten a lot done, with maybe a bit over half of her stuff packed up and my truck now completely loaded up again. Enough packed boxes were left over for at least another trip back home, but I certainly wasn't going to leave Kathy here alone, or even out of sight.

We drove away from her apartment, leaving the rest of her remaining stuff still to be packed and moved tomorrow. Two more full trips in the truck, I thought, but maybe three. Kathy did want to keep most of her old furniture, and it wasn't like I owned much of any. It was fairly cheap commercial stuff but functional for a young woman living on her own, and better than having nothing for a couple at the start of a relationship.

"I saw that grimace!" She laughed as I carried her pair of small nightstands to rope them down on top of the boxes already on the truck as we got ready to leave. "You're the antique guy, so when you find stuff that's nicer, you've got my OK to start upgrading! None of that weird French Empire style gold trimmed stuff though, we want to live with it and not just show it off like some museum!"

That was fine, I didn't like Empire style much either, nor Louis XIV, Rococo, or even the simpler Louis XVI styles much either. All tended to have way too much 'bling' and were not really suited to normal everyday living. That's stuff to put in a palace or some fancy executive suite for CEO's with no sense of taste. English Regency, maybe ... but my personal tastes run to later Victorian or Edwardian. Even later Arc Deco too, within reason.

Our secret watcher stayed hidden and we didn't notice anyone obviously following us as we drove away. I stopped twice to check behind us for tails, but nothing seemed obvious. Heck, the gang undoubtedly knew where we lived these days ... but perhaps they might not have figured out that we were roughing it with the next door neighbor. Also, they just might not know that Garry was a cop, and since the trouble began he was wearing his own concealed carry weapon pretty much all of the time now. And so were we!

This confirmed to me that someone, probably the gang, was still keeping tabs on us and now would learn for certain that Kathy and I were living together! She took the news calmly, almost resigned to the fact that our lives were still going to be a living hell while waiting for them to make their move. She'd keep her 'Baby Glock' close at hand on her person and I gave her explicit permission to blast away at the next set of intruders we caught looking at us with belligerent intent! My gun was going to stay with me at all times too, and I was fairly surprised at how soon we'd actually need to use them!

Thursday night we'd been so tired from moving that we crashed into bed and went right to sleep without any sex whatsoever. We made up for it the next morning by enjoying a long sixty-nine bout. I stuffed her bottom holes with toys from her suitcase and gave her clit a good tongue-lashing until I'd cum twice into her throat.

I didn't mind her buzzing my balls and around my asshole with her own hand held vibrator but when she started to swirl it around just inside my sphincter as a prelude to going spelunking for my prostate gland, I quickly cut her fun short. Some guys might like a finger (or a dildo) in the butt while being sucked, but I'm not one of them. I promised to return the favor by lubing her up with Vaseline and then double-fisting both of her orifices, but this didn't have the desired result of deterring her! Yet more fun for later, I promised!

Once again later that Friday morning we returned to her old apartment and finished cleaning and boxing the place out to the bare walls. It ended up taking three more trips with the truck to get everything loaded into Garry's garage and we were nearly already exhausted when we finished. Her place had been leased unfurnished and everything except the stove, refrigerator and kitchen sink had been hers and left with us, except for her old bed, which we set outside next to a dumpster for some poor student to rescue. Nearly all of her stuff was going to have to remain stored away for the next month or two, but we filled up the small guest room closet with her work (and play) clothes. Her casual stuff was unpacked in a pair of matching dressers and also an armoire wardrobe that I claimed from my divorce furniture split. Kelly had tolerated antiques, but she'd never loved them and didn't claim a single one as part of her household furniture property division.

The costume trunk went into the closet as well, along with an assortment of her shoes, both practical and fetish wear. Another two large boxes of shoes had to remain in storage in the garage. What is it about women and their love of shoes?

We took one long final look around Kathy's old place to check for forgotten and overlooked items and then I escorted her to the rental office so that she could turn in her keys and leave a forwarding address so that she could receive her security deposit back. We were both poor enough at the moment that getting that $400 dollars returned in a week or two was worth the extremely minimal risk of leaving the address of our new house. We were 99% sure that the gang already had it anyway.

I thought I saw our same hidden watcher reappear for a moment behind a parked car to watch us as we drove away, but once again no one appeared to be immediately on our trail, at least then. We arrived back at Garry's without any further incidents to unload the last items into the garage and take a short but very necessary rest from our labors, but I couldn't stay long. My last CHL class was in just less than an hour and I needed to also get ready for our evening at the gun club.

An hour later, while loading up some extra ammo into the front cab of my truck, three bullets suddenly whizzed by somewhere over my head. Another dozen or two more rounds flew in other directions that weren't particularly near us, as the driver of the slowly moving car near the entrance to our cul-de-sac suddenly sped off.

This was another warning from the gang. Of that we were all sure. Spray and pray gunfire is notoriously inaccurate but these bullets were fired high enough (well most of them anyway) that I didn't really think that the shooter had actually been aiming at us.

That's the trouble with drive-by shootings, unless you're really close to your intended victims when you open up full-automatic weapons fire, it's the casual bystanders that are usually more at risk from biting a bullet than your target. This was certain one such example, with a stray bullet striking the living room window of the lady and her daughter that lived next door to me on the right hand side. I was going to have to have Jason repair that window ... and offer something of an apology that would make more sense than, 'Sorry, the folks who tried to buy the house next door but screwed up, are still more than a little pissed at us!'

Kathy had been intending to wait at the house for an hour or so while I finished up my earlier conceal carry class (my final one necessary for the permit), and Garry had agreed to take her, and even shoot with us tonight at the range. Now, my girlfriend just flung herself into my truck and clung next to me. Garry was now going to need to stay and wait for responding Village Police units, and then fill out reports and then also wait for some responding deputies from the Sheriff's office. It had been his house that had sort of been the target, and not really mine, and he was plenty pissed about it ... but fortunately he didn't blame me!

Fuck ... so much for the hope that the gang didn't know that we were living next door to our house for right now! Now I was positive that they were keeping a quiet but careful watch on us!

For awhile, with a pistol or assault rifle in hand, Kathy gave every appearance of being the confident and secure woman that I had met last Friday night. Her face was filled with determination and she'd already fired several hundred rounds of pistol ammunition even before I joined her at the shooting range, once my final class was over.

She gave me a quick hug that revealed that her outward appearance of calm and collected concentration was mostly a sham. Her internal emotions nearly at once began to boil out from her hard pressed core of reserved determination. The eyes displayed every emotion that she felt, angry swirling torrents of rage and frustration. This was a different persona that Kathy had never released before, a woman of anger but purpose, strong and still independent but still feminine, and wanting a strong male shoulder to lean against and perhaps cry upon. But despite her weaknesses this was a woman who was not going to be defeated and yet still had the will to fight.

I decided that I liked this particular unseen aspect of Kathy very, very much! My lover might have an extreme submissive streak and an obviously troubled past that hinted that Trixie the Slut might have had a long prior career history, but this new role that my troubled sweetheart was now exhibiting displayed that beneath everything else inside of her, that there was in fact a determined core of steel within her. I guessed she'd needed this core before, to put most of her past behind her, to eventually transform herself into Kathy the successful executive.

More than ever, this demonstrated to me that way beyond whatever erotic games my dear Kathy might like to play upon occasion, there was a real 'Kathy' still left within her. I still wondered if Kathy the Banker was just another more conventional role-playing act for her. That Kathy had limits and boundaries ... ones that I wanted to lovingly encourage and foster, but her personality was limited and evaporated like fog in a crisis, reverting to the comfort of an older role. This new persona, that I impulsively decided to call 'Katherine', had some steel to her backbone and this was a woman that I could build a life with!

"Those assholes are going to pay." She calmly stated as she gave me another less emotionally needy hug and then a moderately loving kiss on the mouth. "I'm done being afraid and frightened and the next time they show up I'll be the one shooting first! I stupidly had left my purse on Garry's sofa because I was only going outside for a moment. That was my mistake and I won't make it again! Mr. Torrence says he's got a small hip holster that will fit the Baby Glock and from now on that's where I'm wearing it. That includes while at work too, and if corporate doesn't like it then they can stuff it! Now my love, get your ass up to that firing line because I'm going to shoot circles around you tonight!"

And she did! Garry outshot me as well, but I showed some slight improvement this week from my poorer performance the previous week. James Torrence was delighted to find that I would be taking my target practice far more seriously from now. Truly, this was going to become a matter of life and death in the future!

The bad news of the early drive-by shooting quite alarmed the rest of the members of the shooting club and later that evening at Louis' there was a good deal of talk about restarting up the local neighborhood watch program, which had sort of fizzled and died off a few years ago due to neglect by the local HOA boards. I was due for a meeting with them on Monday afternoon anyway, and this was just something else to add to the agenda. We were certain to get off entirely on the wrong foot right from our first meeting and I wanted to make sure I had all of my ducks in a row before I marched into the proverbial lion's den.

We didn't get much drinking done and the Ranger Heights residents (about half of the club) promised to back my ass 110%, if things became too ugly with the HOA. Most of the rest lived in our sister subdivision Ranger Meadows just to the west and they related similar problems with their own HOA. Tentatively we agreed that both nearby subdivisions should pool their resources together and act in unison to form a consolidated watch.

Our particular out-of-town gang was just one local problem, as the crime rate in the area had been significantly increasing lately. Mostly burglaries, but also a few armed robberies. The primary suspects were the Section-8 folks, down the country road to the east, close to I-35. The Village Police knew this and tried to keep an eye on the road where it entered the incorporated area of the county. This deterrence helped, but wasn't a complete solution.

The more we talked, the better the idea of an official authorized neighborhood watch sounded, and the vote to reestablish it was unanimous. We already had enough members so that we could do two watches a night with a once-a-week duty rotation schedule. Enough to get the job done without burn-out, and even a few extra volunteers left over so that no one would get permanently stuck on weekend duty. We were sure we could get another dozen volunteers soon, especially once we'd rammed it down the HOA's throat and could either post a notice in the village newsletter or hand out fliers door to door.