Snow Boot

Once he started he couldn’t stop. This little accident. And then he felt the sizzle of the cosmos sliding onto his page.

Jonathan had a heavy heart. His life had been sinking into a cesspool and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

Oh sure, he knew long ago living was going to get heavy someday but he didn’t know the right thing to do to protect himself.

Before he married Joyce already there were problems, like not really loving her with all his heart, for example. That little problem. But all his life he’d had bad luck with anyone he really loved... showed his feelings way too much - goggle-eyed, wobbly-voiced - scared them all away. Same story, a bouncing ball. So what could he expect of life?

And then there was this optimistic, “giving” point of view he inherited from his poet mother and Unitarian minister father. Giving of the self - something like that. He gave himself, alright, right into the downward slide. “Well, I can put up with most anything,” he said to no one in particular upon the occasion of his ill-considered proposal to Joyce. “If it gets too bad I can always get out.” He said.

Wrong. Both ways. Meanwhile, what he had to put up with from his spouse was anger, frustration, and a desperate form of irrational behavior which had him backing into a corner against tidal waves of criticism and rage. Not that he was perfect. But he couldn’t reason with insanity. What affection remained just slowly eroded. “Can’t make love to a thistle,” he said.

Time to leave. Past time. But there was this baby thing. This love-of-his life high-spirited little boy that stole his heart and kept him from going anywhere. Joyce would be the worst single parent ever and visitation rights.... forget it!

He resigned himself to his fate. Developed fantasies, elaborate intimate dreams of women loving him, touching him, interludes filled with deep longings that turned increasingly in the direction of lust. “I’ll get a mistress,” he said. “A little something on the side.”

Not easy.

From whence commeth this glorious gift? Work? Not hardly. Lawyers and legal secretaries and an environment so contentious it would singe your hair. How the hell had he managed to surround himself with such a bunch of blood-suckers?

He developed his “other” life.

There had been this story buzzing around in his head about a farm boy who gave up a career playing short stop with the Boston Red Sox to go to college and got called back when the Red Sox got into a pennant race. Classic story but there were personal insights he’d gained from playing baseball himself. The accident was that he had to wait in a doctor’s office - emergency or some convenient excuse - and having nothing to do, and quickly tiring of New Yorker magazines, he began to sketch out the story on the back of a smoking cessation brochure.

Late at night he wrote more. Something mysterious made him force himself, sleepy-eyed, unaccustomed to the delayed rewards of writing, to sit in front of his computer well into the wee hours and narrow this complex architecture of emotion and memory into the funnel of words, Words. It gave him such a thrill to see it unfold on the page that he enrolled himself in a creative writing class at the adult education center.

Writing, who would have thunk it!

Well, he was addicted. A viable part of being was emerging out of numbness. He was better. He had an outlet but not a solution. His heart was still a bag of longing. Then things started looking up.

His creative writing teacher suggested he submit work to a writers workshop to be held in the resort town of Snow Boot, Colorado. Immediately, he had the feeling that this was one of those events that was destined to happen. As he gathered and chose samples of his work to send to George Kingfisher, the course director, he felt that a precious avenue to his idol, the person who, in his own estimation was the best living short story writer, had suddenly opened like a personal telephone line. What’s more, Kingfisher would read his work. This would be an opportunity to work with the best, to get away from his problems at home, and to meet, far from his connections to responsibility, new people. It was too good not to happen.

The letter of acceptance came as casually as the morning sun.

Perfect, he thought, like the click of a roulette ball dropping in its slot. Months before the mid-summer gathering he was daydreaming workshops, the faces of the nameless, shapeless 49 participants who would assemble there. How many would be women? How good looking? How young?

It was not a long drive from Rothestown, Mo. to Snow Boot Colorado, and he reasoned the drive would give him time to shift his social operating systems from the hard-driving aggressive edge of the ice cold litigant to that of an open, multi-layered creative person. A change of clothes. A change of town. A change of oxygen. Time to imagine how spending a week at high altitude doing the thing he had come to love most might be like. And to imagine the women from all over the United States come to open themselves to art... it was almost too much to bear.

George Kingfisher was everything he had imagined - articulate, charismatic, perfectly at ease with himself and his craft. During the introductory session Jonathan hung on his every word: the living quarters, the workshops, the faculty, how everyone was to be respectful of everyone else’s work. We were here not to find fault but to find the perfect path for the life of the story.

Jonathan let his eyes drift around the room. He estimated that there were about two-thirds women here, mostly young, mostly attractive. He found himself torn between concentrating on Kingfisher’s words and imagining if that woman across the room with moon eyes and moon breasts was as soft and pliable as she seemed. Mendocino, California, she said when it was her turn to say a little bit

about herself. Sarah. Ran a flower shop. Painted with watercolors. Flowers, California. Perfect, thought Jonathan. A flower child. How excellent!

His other immediate curiosity was a long tall blond with fine thin legs which she crossed and uncrossed as if to signal judges at a beauty contest. Gazelle, he thought. Grace. Just the suggestion of curves. Supermodel. She’ll be tough. Way above his class. Her voice when she spoke was softer than he imagined, more fragile than her Vogue-perfect appearance might suggest. Less self-confidence than it appeared. Oregon. Portland. Book-store employee. Casey. Owned pedigree Dalmatians. This one is a short story herself.

The meeting broke. Flower Child drifted another direction. Supermodel was immediately surrounded. Jonathan’s roommate found him and introduced himself: Richard, a Texan already with a growing reputation in the field and a participant in several previous workshops. He was brilliant, knew the genre and its artists well. Had a sensitive side he got from working as a councilor in a mental institute for disadvantaged kids and a no-nonsense tough side he got, Jonathan supposed, just from living in El Paso. Jonathan would learn a lot from this guy.

Casey was a pervasive presence. Jonathan studied her. He concluded she was only partly aware of the effect she had on men, or maybe because of the outrageous power of enchantment she possessed, chose not to operate from there. Her beauty was unselfconscious. She wore it as naturally as breath. She didn’t dress it, it dressed her.

Jonathan didn’t try for her. The prospect was too daunting. “What will happen will happen,” he said to himself, and meanwhile, “get to know Flower Child.”

That turned out to be easy. She was in his first workshop. They quickly discovered they were of like mind that the short story of the day, a eulogy for a departed wife, was better served by placing it in the third person, so as to distance the too-strong emotion from the reader. The conversation between them continued after the workshop and into lunch. She was passionate about development. They spent an hour reworking the elements of the story into a more organized sequence.

They agreed the new sequence had possibility. They agreed to have dinner.

Jonathan returned to his room with the afternoon half gone and several writing assignments to do before workshop, next day. He opened the door to find two people, half naked, lying on one of the beds. In the astonished moment when perception is thrown off and struggling for its bearings he flashed on himself there, lying with someone. It stirred the excitement of imitation, of impossible possibility opened by someone leading the way.

He turned to go but was stopped by one of them. “Jonathan, don’t leave,” it said.

It was Richard. My god, Richard.

“Hey, don’t leave. I want you to meet Vicky. She drives here every year from Arizona just for this conference. She’s a professional writer.”

Vicky was saucy, a little overweight and definitely on the make. She took her time putting on her bra and blouse, enjoying the exposure. She wrote erotic stories, it turned out, and sold them, quite nicely. She was married to a rancher out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by Indian reservations but she and Richard had a thing going that renewed itself like the flowering lupine during summers in Snow Boot.

“How are you doing so far?” asked Richard.

“Fine. Workshop was great. Nice to be around people who worry about the same things I do: tense, language, point of view...”

“No, I mean love life. I saw you with Saucer-Eyes.”

Jonathan laughed the kind of free feeling laugh he’d not let loose in a long time. He was among friends here, writers, members of the over-sexed, under-nourished passionate elite with real honest-to-god longings. And - pinch me awake - an unstated permission to be that way. “Well,” he said, unable to suppress a grin. “Nothing much yet.”

“Keep it up,” Vicki said. “You can never tell.”

Jesus, that’s the best, thought Jonathan. A girl urging me onto another girl. I may never give up writing.

Dinner that evening was not up to expectation. It wasn’t the food, it was Sarah, Miss Moon Eyes. She was there all right, but she was already sitting with that over-bronzed Californian - Redondo Beach or something like that - who everybody knew by now because he announced in his little self-introduction that he had just won the Upchurch Prize for most promising young writer. It’s a good prize. Golly-jeeze, and all that.

Jonathan had joined this table because Sarah had agreed to have dinner. That turned out to be a mistake. There was conversation enough but it always turned on everything Mr. Redondo Beach had to say. Jonathan didn’t mind so much because he was, after all, celebrated and all that. The problem was that Miss Flower Child practically drooled all over him.

The talk was about changes in point of view - is it permissible to shift from third person to first person in the middle of a story? Redondo was a formalist. Traditional. No deal, he said. Sarah was on the fence, believing it might be permissible if the situation dictated. Jonathan took the unpopular line, partly for effect, making up his argument as he went along, about how if the energy of a story needed, at some point - because of action or emotional content, to make a shift toward immediacy, intimacy, personal suffering - that, like moving from past tense to present tense, a certain lift in the language might occur. He got so animated he knocked over a cup of coffee. He resolved to prove his point by incorporating the technique into a story.

Just before desert, and so as to not miss the opportunity, Sarah reached deliberately across the table and squeezed Mr. Redondo’s hand. It didn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to know where this was going. I politely excused myself and left soft eyes to her new lover.

After that failure it was time to concentrate on the tangible, do the work ... I came here to do and leave speculation to take care of itself.

Each of us got to present two of our stories during the week. The workshop members changed daily and the faculty rotated so as to get the most varied exposure. My first story came up on the second day, the baseball story. It was a modest success, which was, in my estimation, acceptable for a first-timer and drew favorable comments from Grace, a pert little teen-age looking 25 year-old from Nebraska. Her story, same day, was about how all the men who made love to her rolled off her when they were done. Weird story. I couldn’t tell if my attraction to it (and to her) was academic or psychiatric. To hell with it. She moved me in ways I enjoyed.

Grace and I decided to do our assignments together the next two days. I was hesitant because she seemed like a child and I didn’t want to be perceived as robbing the cradle. I decided that I was being too wimpy and I planned to rush her, soon.

The fourth evening had come, the big gathering in which the faculty read their stuff before a wildly appreciative audience. Everybody looked forward to it and we were all in rare moods. Casey was there, as always, like the gentle passing of magic through the rooms. She had been surrounded by potential suitors all week but none took hold. She seemed neither interested nor disinterested.

I sat by a new person that night, Samantha, a naturalist for the forest service. She was a strident vegetarian, smelled vaguely of garlic and rutabaga. Short, a little homely but with a nice rounded figure, narrow waist and clothes like yards and yards of flowery see-through curtains draped over her body. I had my mind on the infant sex-pot or I might have been more interested. It was, undoubtedly, my disinterest that attracted her most, for she wouldn’t let me go from her conversations about naturalist writers and the fusion of man and nature. She spoke with urgency as if she were trying to convince me of something.

There was a party after the reading and Grace and I had agreed to meet there. My mind was probably on the conversation by the stream that afternoon when she agreed to a rendezvous. I was a excited. Every time I thought about is my penis quivered.

The reading finished. Party commenced. I played it cool, thinking not to give to the public evidence of Grace and my covenant together. She must have thought differently because afterward she was pissed that I didn’t pay more attention to her and just wanted to fuck her and not take any public notice. She stormed away. Later that night Lewis borrowed my car to go spend time with Grace. Perfect! Just like always.

I found Richard on his bunk wrapped around a six-pack of Pearl Beer. Vicky had a surge of conscience, guilty or lonesome or something... called up her hubby and made up. Nothing more for Richard.

We went out on the balcony. Full moon. It was beer and blues and the two of us. Richard threw back his head and yowled at the moon. I threw back my head and Yowled. We yowled like two jilted members of the tribe, out in the cold and making noise about it.

The yowls felt good.

The body trembled with release.

We were brothers with wolves.

It was the next to last day. All this conference had done for my sex life was to intensify my sense of depravity. And on top or that my next story was unfinished. It was a tribute to my father whom I had not written about since his death ten years ago. I didn’t have an ending.

Samantha asked if she could have a ride as far as Denver where she lived when the conference was over. Yes. Well, what do you know. A little light of possibility in the waning twilight. In the car alone with a woman. Just that would be a major success by current standards.

I had to concentrate on my story. The workshop leader for the next day was none other than Kingfisher himself. I wanted badly to impress him. But try as I may the ending wouldn’t come. Everything I wrote was vapid, meaningless. This went on till 2 AM when Richard insisted I go to bed. “Nothing more will come after 1.” he said.

I went to sleep in emptiness, no ending, no fucking, no nothing.

I woke at six. Sat down. Wrote the ending - three flowing paragraphs as if by ease of dictation. Perfect. Why could that not have happened before? I rushed to the workshop media center to add the ending to the manuscript and coasted to workshop.

Everyone was pleased. George, as he autographed my copy of his book, wrote: “Thanks for your presence and the poetry of the morning’s story.” God what a feeling! It made the whole week, notwithstanding its ups and downs, spectacular.

I ran into Samantha on the way to the workshop center where everyone was to gather for brief good-byes. She said she had invited a girlfriend to come along with us to Denver, if I didn’t mind. This person had to catch a train and the shuttle wouldn’t get her there in time. She didn’t have much baggage. Would that be OK?

It meant the end to any hopes for privacy with a woman but what could I say? I said OK. I imagined the acerbic, hawk-eyed crone from Minneapolis. Crone. Curmudgeon. Chaperone. Ah well, I was still high from George’s inscription in my book. At least I had that to take back with me.

A few good-byes, see you’s next summer perhapses, and I went to round my car up to the loading dock. I had to admit that Samantha was looking pretty good. I decided she was the sleeper of the group. I began to wonder what it would be like...

Samantha was waiting at the dock with her and her friend’s luggage. When I arrived she called out to a group of people still lingering by the flagpole.

Then someone broke from the group and came forward. My god, it was Casey. Casey, wearing the shortest pair of short shorts I’d ever seen. I couldn’t believe it. I had expected loss by this addition, someone with wizened face and abrasive countenance, but no. Out of all the people she could have invited this was the best. The pinnacle. The supermodel. Maybe my luck was changing.

We decided to make a shop for food for the trip. On the way we talked about the piece Richard wrote that centered around things about normal human behavior he had learned from working with and watching inmates at the mental institution. The transcendent piece about fantasias during piano practice on a sunny spring day the ballet dancer from Connecticut wrote. How so many couples paired off during the week but none of us had. We laughed at Grace’s piece about the men rolling off her. We were talking as if out of old friendships, in which intimate subjects are as comfortable as kitchen table wisdom in winter. Such a quick advance. Such a short time.

We stopped at the summit for gas and a little snack to carry us through. I finished first and Casey followed close behind out to the curb where I sat facing the gas pumps, busy with their duty.

“Tell me the story of your piece and George Kingfisher again,” Casey said. I relished her rapt attention as I recounted my anxiety not being able to finish the story, the magic of the morning write, his luminous eyes hearing it, his comments in my book.

She was sitting, squatting rather, opposite me and slightly off to one side. Her legs were apart, her extremely short shorts tight as a thin layer of velum pulled over her, squeezing and bracing her. I wondered if she was conscious of her body language, or if it took over, or if it was directed by a subconscious heat... or was this just a god given gift to torment men. I resisted looking at her folds, drawn into vision by the tight stretch made tighter by the spread of her legs and the slow rocking back and forth of her pelvis to the rhythm of my words. I kept direct eye contact as I recited the story and learned I could see and imagine what I wanted without deflecting my eyes.

I finished the story and there was a pause and a sigh. She was dreamy. In a gesture that felt in the moment totally natural, I was about to reach out and touch her leg when Samantha came out of the store and sat next to me on the curb, nestling up to my side like she wanted in on whatever we were doing.

“I made him tell me the story again,” Casey said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

This I didn’t expect. Something about me or my story was the object of attention that came pretty close to adoration. Would have been satisfied with a fraction of that anytime this week and now look what’s happened. I supposed it came more from camaraderie and affection that the merit of the story. If that was true we were getting along.

We returned to the car. The baggage had filled the trunk and the left side of the back seat in such a manner that I could glance back at Casey’s legs from time to time. She would probably recognize what I was doing it but at this point I, didn’t give a damn. The way she’s been acting lately she might enjoy it.

“You must be real satisfied how the week turned out,” Casey said.

It was a statement with many layers - my unplanned celibacy, the story of my father, Kingfisher, frustrations on the friendship front. I chose the high road.

“Yeah,” I said. “I feel great.”

Then a sudden urge hit me. A completion of a previous gesture. I decided to go with it.

I reached back and stroked Casey’s leg. “And with such great company, who wouldn’t be,” I said.

I didn’t know what to expect so I was withdrawing my hand when she grabbed hold and squeezed it, pressing it into her leg. I squeezed her, rubbed her and then, possibly haunted by past failures, withdrew.

I was disappointed the moment I did. How was I going to get back there again?

Within minutes I found a way. We were talking about success and remembering Casey’s touching story about her grandmother’s struggle with Parkinsonism when I reached back and patted her leg saying, “Well, I heard some great things about your Tuesday story too. You must be very pleased.”

This time I stayed. Slowly caressing her in little arcs up and down her thigh, mid-way up.

“Yes,” she said. “Very pleased.”

I waited a while to catch her eye in the rear view mirror and when I did she was smiling, eyes half-closed.

We continued. Conversation lulled. Road noise swelled. Samantha looked uneasy. “What’s going on?” she asked.

In another life I might have retreated, making some lame excuse. Things were different now. We were in a universe apart drifting along in the isolating shell of our automobile. I decided to go for broke.

“I’m feeling up Casey, “I said.

Casey laughed.

“No!” Samantha said.

“Sure,” I said. “See for yourself.”

Samantha hesitated. I imagined her mixed feelings. Curiosity and then a little something like her own wish to be involved in something risky, exciting, maybe together all these swirling thoughts would be strong enough to push her a little.

“Turn and look,” I said.

As she did I placed the palm of my hand on Casey’s lower abdomen and just as Samantha’s eyes fell on the two of us, I dropped my thumb into the crease between Casey’s legs and pressed.

Casey snapped her legs together, reflexly, cocked her pelvis backward, paused then pressed forward again, forward, back and forward again. The she let her legs fall open, my hand still on her.

Samantha gasped and turned to the front. She drooped her head over as if overtaken by a swoon. Her breathing rippled upward into the nodding of her head. She pressed her own hands together between her thighs and squeezed closed on them, real hard.

I had returned to Casey’s mid thigh a little unsure how she would take the recent events. I treaded water there, vamping as it were, ready to retreat if she wanted me to. I felt her hand touch mine, stroking it, stroking it toward her as if to direct me by suggestion. I began working my way back to the valley I came from. She rose to meet me.

Driving had become interesting.

I was aware I had slowed our car speed during the more intense moments, so I corrected myself periodically by speeding up, gradually, so as not to startle anyone or admit impediment. I paid attention to trucks with high cabs that could look over in to the back seat. I passed them rapidly, slowed down later.

I wanted Samantha not to feel left out. I considered various ways to keep her in. Perhaps she was a voyeur. Everybody is, to some extent.

I was stroking Casey’s short shorts when an idea occurred to me.

“Samantha, why don’t you undo Casey’s shorts a little?”

Samantha trembled. Shook her head. Then as if by victory of one will over another turned to view Casey. Casey had her eyes closed, widening the angle of her legs and slipping down in the car seat making herself more accessible. Samantha watched as I worked my thumb up and down the cleft made by her sex against her shorts. Samantha kept watching. Casey was absorbed in pleasure. Samantha was free to follow her impulses, which, eventually, moved her hand, haltingly at first, to cover mine. Then to the single button at the top of Casey’s shorts which she played with a while as if in worshipful foreplay. Then with one swift gesture, unbuttoned and unzipped her.

Casey lifted her hips. She had given orders to release her. Together we slipped her shorts to the floor.

This would have been the time to stop the car and all of us pile into the back seat and let happen what would happen. But Casey’s connection to the train station was tight. So tight we could afford no stops, not even short ones. I kept driving.

My hand returned to Casey’s thigh, again working methodically toward her sex, this time, as everyone knew, it was going to be skin on skin. Samantha watched until the moment I made contact then turned to the front again, drooping her head forward, breathing deeply. She was as much in this as we were. Just no contact. No touching. I wanted to give her some.

“Show us something,” I said to her.

She straightened up. “What?”

“Your choice.”

“No, people can look in and see me.”

“Just turn toward me. They won’t see or care.”

She thought a minute.

Casey was getting excited. She was making small noises all of us could hear. They seemed to be having an effect on Samantha.

Slowly, Samantha unbuttoned her blouse, turning as she did, letting the leaves of silk fall open as if by their own undoing. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She paused, the blouse part way open, as if waiting for something.

Casey roused and sat forward, putting greater pressure against my hand, and leaned over the seat to look. This, apparently, was all Samantha needed.

She grasped the folds of blouse tenderly and opened them wide, revealing her round, full breasts, weaving and breathing as she moved. Casey let out a little sigh and leaned back. I traced the round tightness of her opening with my thumb and then pushed the tip in. She was very wet.

Still no contact for Samantha. I glanced at her and back to the road. I read her as feeling a little left out.

“You could feel me up,” I said. Then added, “if you want to.”

Casey barked out, “yes, yes, yes. Go for it, Samantha. Go.”

She hesitated. “What do you mean?” she said.

She knew but was too shy to make the move. “This,” I said, and removed my self briefly from Casey to take Samantha’s hand and place it directly on the crotch of my pants. I squeezed her fingers around my cock swollen in its inadequate wrapping. That should get her started, I thought. Then I returned to Casey.

Samantha was getting into it, gripping, pushing. She drew her upper teeth over her lower lip and sucked in her breath as if to contain the little lake of drool that had formed in the cleft of her lip.

“Take it out,” I said.

She unzipped me. She wriggled in through the gap in my boxers and grabbed hold.

She pulled but it was sideways and wouldn’t come out. The tip twisted down to one side.

“I don’t want to hurt it,” she said.

I was thumb deep into Casey by now and her hips were beginning to rock against me, sliding me in and out of her. This conversation roused her again.

“This I gotta see,” she said and leaned forward again, riding squarely on my thumb.

“Pull hard,” Casey said.

She pulled but too gently.

“No, no,” said Casey, reaching over to grasp Samantha’s hand and digging under my pants higher up the shaft, “like this.” She pulled hard, and if flipped out, and in the process, flung a small droplet of mucous from my tip directly onto Samantha’s cheek.

Samantha jumped.

“Oh,sweet,” said Casey.

Samantha laughed, lifted it off with two fingers, and to my amazement, placed the wetness on her tongue and giggled. She looked at me as she closed her lips around her fingers and then withdrew them, her lower lip following a brief distance, lower lip remaining apart, as in a moment of childlike reflection.

Casey reached over, squeezed my tip, rubbed her thumb in a circular motion over its moist precipice, then, seemingly content, leaned back again. I could feel the motions of her pelvis pumping against me. Samantha was pushing back my foreskin, leaning over me closer and closer, now pulling up the foreskin, twisting it round the head, pushing it back down again. My pelvis began to rock involuntarily against her motions, exaggerating the effect. I imagined I was reaching up to her mouth with each thrust, closer, then inside the lips, the teeth, the hollow of her tongue. I could almost feel her closing around me, her saliva, her cheeks, her heat.

Casey was leaning forward again, this time wrapping her arms around mine, humping my thumb and arm as if it were my whole body. Her head was level with my shoulder, her hand drooped loosely on Samantha’s back.

Suddenly I felt, actually felt, Samantha on me. Casey had put her hand on her head and pushed her onto me. As she did Casey cooed with delight.

My driving was losing quality.

I struggled to maintain continuum.

I watched for cops.

I was having the time of my life.

Casey gradually slowed her thrusts, trembling at the tip of my thumb before deepening the thrust again. Each tremble lasted a little longer. Each poised suspension above me, more taught with tension. Her breath came in choked sighs, out-in~pause-out~in-pause, gated, like sobs at the peak of crying. The trembles became shakes became chills became rigors until she came undone, seizing against me, scissoring her legs along my hand and arm, wetting me with her come.

Samantha bit.

I yelped, then quickly whispered, “don’t stop.” The pain ramped me up three levels, instantly.

Casey grabbed my hand with both of hers, pressing me against her and into her with such force I worried it might hurt her. She contorted and then went flaccid. I smeared her mucous over her lips, her thighs, her buttock, her body swaying passively with my motions.

Samantha nibbled at my shaft, my tip, my root. I winced. Casey moved over and began to put on her shorts.

I brought my hand forward, still wet with Casey’s come and slipped it under Samantha’s flowing breasts.

She bit me hard. This charged me to the rim. She sensed my excitement, pumped me three times and plunged me deep into her throat. My body lurched forward, cranking at the waist. I grunted. My feet, by some unseen will, pressed down, accelerating the car to 85 before I could gain control and slow back down.

Samantha sucked me. Then tucked me in. She sat up and casually buttoned her blouse.

We had come to the outskirts of Denver. We were 10 min from the train station. We rode silently. The journey was over. Passengers waiting to disembark.

A minute before the station I flashed a look in the rear view at Casey.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

I was feeling obnoxious. “To see your breasts,” I said.

She whiffed a sigh of disgust and snapped open her blouse and bra like French Doors to the morning sun.

She had child’s breasts. High. Tight. Gorgeous. Pointy and firm. “There, are you satisfied?”

“No,” I said, and reached to cradle the right one, stroking it gently, memorizing its form.

She closed her bra and blouse over my hand. I drug it out, bringing her nipple over the top. She tucked it back in and straightened herself. Put on some lipstick.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” she snapped, and gathered her things.

We had stopped at the curb. Samantha was out and I popped the trunk for her.

Casey clutched her two small bags and was on the sidewalk. She had ten minutes to make her train. Samantha would walk the two blocks home, alone.

I felt the trunk close. Heard footsteps away. The women were gone.

In the dreamy moment that followed I pondered the curious, wonderful end to my week. How could I have expected this amazing gift. Gratitude. Surprise. Reward after all.

Pleasure surrounded me with a halcyon so strong I couldn’t raise myself to drive. And there was something else. It felt like... a gift. Maybe this was the best outcome of that giving of the self thing my father always preached about. Wow!

But now I worried how the women might feel about this after they had time to reflect. I laughed. Just like a writer, I thought, always hung up on understanding. Just let the story tell itself, for Christ’s sake.

My trance was broken by a tapping at the passenger side window and I turned to see Casey and Samantha, bending over cheek to cheek, pressing their lips against the windowglass. They withdrew, laughed, waved goodbye, and bubbled like schoolgirls as they walked to the waiting train.

I put my car in gear and drove, heart lifted, breath easy, two ruby kisses on my window.