Please remember, as with all my stories, should you be looking for 'Realism', just move on. I aim for 'Ridiculously Plausible'. All named characters in this story are eighteen or much older.
This is the third in a four-part series. I hope you like it.
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Elaine and I had a marvelous time fucking our way through the end of the second session of Camp Dickinger that summer. I mean, we didn't screw every day. I think we'd have both been up for it, but we couldn't both miss lunch together every day. We only stayed on the range and screwed, like, six more times over the remaining weeks. I even managed to take my shirt off before having sex a time or two...
But while we limited our actual sexcapades enough that no one knew that we were doing it, it still became clear from other indications that she and I were becoming 'an Item'." Couples among the counselors were not unheard of, but rare enough that we could both see everyone talking about how often we ate lunch together, how we mostly only danced with each other during Friday dances, that sort of thing. We talked a lot, just like good couples do, I thought. My world was great, and the only real hitch was that the second session was ending and we would no longer have the opportunities presented by working together on riflery the next session.
Then, on the way out to the last Campfire of the session, Elaine stopped me on the path in the dark.
"Listen, Caspar, I'm just going to say this," she spoke quickly. I might not have been that old, but I knew an ominous opening line when I heard it. "This has been great, but I think we should just call it quits now, here at the end of this session."
"What?" I almost cried. I was floored. "I thought... wait, I
know
that you have been having as much fun as I have. What gives?"
She looked around to make sure that all the nearby people were headed smoothly on toward the Campfire clearing and not eavesdropping. "It's just... we won't have the rifle range to go to any more."
"I know. It sucks. But we can still hang..."
"Casper," she interrupted. "Listen. You are a god damned amazing lay. Memories of fucking you will keep me warm at night all winter. But as for you and me, here, without the sex..." she said suddenly hesitant. "Without the sex, I just cannot stand one more of your dissertations on Batman, or the Avengers, or the fucking Green Bay Packers." She squeezed my hand. "If we ever have another opportunity for sex, believe me, I am down. But we just don't have enough in common to be together in an abstinence situation."
I was speechless and she was suddenly rescued by another of the counselors calling her name as they passed us toward Campfire. Elaine smiled sheepishly at me and strode off to join her.
The quick break between the second and third sessions was not much of an improvement. The prior break, I had been on Check-In prep, with it's low-energy stuffing of envelopes inside with the air-conditioning, along with the side benefit of checking out the camp director Carol's rack whenever she wasn't looking. I know it sounds like I was hung up on Carol, but I really wasn't. She was much older, married, and my boss. It was like she was an alien as far as I was concerned... an alien with really nice forty year-old tits and ass. But this break, I got a different special assignment. My cabin team-mate Van and I got detailed to work with Carol's husband Bob, the camp's facilities manager, on repairing screens. Bob is pretty cool, just like Carol, but screen work entails a lot of sweat, fairly long hours, and lots of pricked fingertips. And while none of us wore shirts while we worked, and Bob is every bit as good-looking as his wife, my interests do not swing in that direction. Still, Van was my buddy as well as my cabin-mate, and Bob is both cool and funny.
The upper half of all four walls of each cabin at Camp Dickinger are nothing but screen. That makes for a lot of screens which have to try to stand up to a camp full of rambunctious teenagers with no phones or other electronics. After every summer at camp with no electronics, I'm surprised anew that any building on Earth over fifty years old is still standing, since kids back then had no screens to tranquilize them. Shit gets thrown around the cabins every day, and the screens take a beating. We had more than enough stapling and nailing to keep us busy before the last session of the summer.
It is pretty mindless work though, once you get going, so the three of us had plenty of time to jaw the day away. Once Van and I had exhausted all our war stories about first and second sessions... that we were willing to share with Bob anyway, the next subject caught me off guard.
"So, Casper," Bob asked as he ripped loose a window frame so we could tighten up a screen torn almost completely free by a stray volleyball a sixteen year-old girl had hurled at her cabin-mate, "I understand that yours and Elaine's turned out not to be a romance destined to stand the test of time."
"No," I replied curtly. I was not wanting to talk about Elaine.
"Yeah," put in Van, the world-champion cocksucker, "she dumped his ass. I guess that without guns, the two maniacs had nothing in common."
"Oh yeah," Bob replied casually. "You two were working under Craig last session, weren't you? Don't take it too hard, kid. Camp romances never last."
"You and Carol do okay," I replied in attempt at humor.
"We are a
workplace
romance," replied Bob fondly, hammering the frame back into place. "Workplace romances are all fraught and forbidden and shit.
They
are awesome," he said firmly. He emphasized again, "You will be fine, Casper."
"Yeah, right."
"Aw, fuck Elaine," Van added sagely.
'Already did that,' I thought inwardly with grim but immense satisfaction. I had done that indeed. What I said out loud was, "Geez you two! Is it Swearapalooza with the worms gone?"
"Don't call the worms, 'worms', Casper," corrected Bob automatically, but with a grin. "And yes, while we have a brief break from teenagers around whom we can't swear, I like to fucking swear up a goddamned storm!"
Just then, Van missed with his hammer and started jumping around, indulging freely in the no repercussion swearing opportunity as he squeezed his outraged thumb. Bob and I laughed evilly at his expense.
When Van's little floor show was over, and we moved on to another cabin, I started thinking about Elaine some more.
Don't think with your mouth, kids.
"Still..." I mused out loud as Bob was cutting a new sheet of screen, "I do have all of this last session to see if I can fix things with Elaine."
"Oh for Christ's sake!" groaned Van. "Give it up already!"
"I have to agree with Van," sighed Bob. He hesitated. "Look, you know I'm always a big one for encouraging kids to
not
give up, so I applaud you in principle. But the life lesson I think you need to concentrate on here is: When and how to Move On. I hear that this will definitely be your last summer working here. Don't waste the rest of it chasing after a girl who does not want to be caught. Chase the next girl."
"It really isn't that easy to find the time to spend with the girls you are interested in around here, Bob," I almost snapped.
"Pull that tighter, Casper," said Bob, "and lift your side, Van, so the grain will run straight... There." He fretted a bit with the staple gun, then as he began fastening the screen panel in place he said to me, "Look, assuming we get all this done by six, I will be the one finishing the activity assignments for next session, not Carol. I'll do you a solid. Who do you want to work with for your last few weeks?" Van whistled low. That would be a solid. The assignments were randomly drawn, or were
supposed to be
, precisely to keep counselors from badgering the senior staff with requests. Bob then hastened to add, "Other than Elaine, obviously. How about the new girl, Lisa? It would be inappropriate for me to notice, or I'd add that she is extremely hot."
It was tempting. Lisa was indeed hot as blazes, but I had been there and done that already, and, while for different reasons than Elaine, the opportunity for further adventures with her was also closed. I paused, and I don't really know why. As I've said, I think rating women on a one to ten scale is silly and unproductive. I just classify them as NOs, YESes, and OH GOD PLEASEs. There were only three OH GOD PLEASEs among my fellow counselors. Elaine and Lisa off the list meant only...
"Wendy?" I asked hesitantly.
Bob laughed, "Yeah, I can see how she might encourage you to move your attention on." He paused a moment. "Done. Now, hold the damned screen still!"
We were done by four thirty. The next morning, the assignments were posted, and true to his word, there I was, teamed with Wendy on Ceramics... Fucking. Pottery.
Shit.
Then, I caught myself grumping and laughed. I thought of Wendy's tits and realized that I'd have happily taken goddamned macrame to spend four weeks around Wendy.
I found my mind racing as I walked over toward the ceramics shed the first morning. It is a small, open-fronted building near the chow hall. It occurred to me that about all I knew about Wendy was that she had a sleekly curvy body, surmounted by an outstanding rack. We had danced once or twice, but I could not think of a single conversation I had ever had with her.
Please don't let her be stupid.
Please don't let her have a boyfriend.
Please let her like me.
I saw her approaching our workplace at the same time as I did. We smiled, waved, met, and shook hands at the entrance.
"So, Pottery, huh?" Wendy said with a grimace that told me we at least had our feelings about how dull this particular activity was in common.
I suppressed an undeserved feeling of guilt that she was stuck here. I had only asked for her, not Pottery, after all. "Yeah," I replied. "And here I thought I had dodged this bullet for another year." We laughed in commiseration and went in to await the arrival of the worms.
All worries I had had about Wendy vanished in that first morning. She was anything but stupid. She did not drop that mention of a boyfriend that girls always do if they have one (at least one that they intend to be faithful to). And she appeared to like me well enough that we were soon laughing and trading jokes with each other and the worms as they got started producing laughably awful pieces of clay art.
I did get a new worry. Working with kids in the pottery shed involved a lot of bending over by Wendy and me as we worked with the sitting worms and their projects. When she was facing away, it was hard to keep my eyes off her tight, curvy ass. (It wasn't the work of art that Elaine boasted, but it was danced nice.) And when Wendy was facing toward me, it was fucking impossible to keep my eyes out of her magnificent cleavage. I resolved that I was going to wear my shirt untucked the rest of the summer, to provide at least a little bit of cover for all the unauthorized boners I was going to experience.