Note:
This is a revised version of my first story with changes made based on feedback.
Note:
This is part one of the "Summer of '96" series.
"I hold just one breath here within my chest...
Just like innocence."
Pearl Jam once sang, "I don't want to think I want to feel". The summer of 1996 was this time for me. A time when I felt the most new and the most deep. A time I will always remember as the most important in my life.
I had graduated high school a couple of weeks earlier, and most of my thoughts were focusing on August and the new experiences I expected college to bring. While high school had been fun, I hadn't had much luck in the sex or romance department. I had a few dates, but most of my high school sexual experience could be chalked up to masturbating to stolen porn magazines and mail order vhs tapes. I was hoping college would be different.
Trying to find something to do to kill time over the summer, I decided to go hiking in some woods on the far side of my hometown. The area was good for a leisurely hike, as it wasn't too hilly and the tree coverage was pretty dense. I had always found it be a good spot to spend time in and get lost from the world.
I drove over to a lot where I could park near the woods, hooked my water bottle to my belt, and headed into the trees. There was a mixture of trails that cut through the woods, some purposely cut and others created from where enough traffic had worn a path. I was about 10 minutes into my journey when I came across a girl sitting next to a tree drinking from a water bottle. She looked familiar but I knew I hadn't recently graduated with her.
She turned towards me. "Adam?"
"Sammi?" I answered. Sammi was a girl I had gone to school with for years but she had moved away in our sophomore year. The rumors were something bad happened with her dad, but we weren't close and I didn't know much more.
At the mention of her name, she stood up. "It's great to see you," she said and reached out to hug me.
I hugged her and stepped back. I don't know if it was the time spent apart or that my memory just wasn't that good, but Sammi was far more gorgeous than I remembered. She had her hair in a long pixie cut, and it looked as if the sun had bleached the brown to a lighter shade of blonde, not evenly, but in streaks. The cut perfectly framed her face and the dark shadowed eyes and deep purple-colored lips that punctuated the pale white of her skin. How she had achieved what looked to be hair colored by endless time spent in the sun while retaining a complete lack of a tan was beyond my comprehension. I only knew that I was in rapture.
We talked for a bit about the final years of high school and our loose plans for the future, and I asked her what she was doing out here.
"I guess I was just trying to get away from the world for a bit. My mom and I just came back to town, and I used to play in these woods when I was little. I wanted to see if they were the same. I was just having a drink before heading to find this tree I used to climb.
"Do you want to come with me?" she asked.
I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do more right then.
"Sure," I said, trying not to sound too eager.
"Follow me then. I think I remember where it is."
We headed down one of the trails, Sammi leading the way and me following close behind.
Sammi was dressed for a summer day...a Pearl Jam t-shirt, khaki shorts, Nikes and a small backpack. Either her body had further matured over the past two years or my memory was hazy; I couldn't keep my eyes off her as she hiked in front of me. Sammi was deliciously thick...not too thin with curvy hips and a prominent butt. And it was that which I couldn't keep my eyes off. As she climbed the trail, the movement of her legs caused her ass to both flex and jiggle. It seemed like her shorts were actually too tight and short for hiking. I felt myself start to stir as I imagined how each step was causing her pants to ride slightly higher up her thighs and how underneath, her panties must be pulling tighter into the folds of her pussy, slightly damp from the exertion and heat of the day. I imagined the scent would be intoxicating.
I tried to nonchallantly adjust my growing erection in my pants. I was so engrossed in my thoughts and watching her ass jiggle as she hiked that I didn't notice a root sticking up in the path. My toe caught and I went head first into the dirt. After the initial shock of falling and realizing nothing was hurt, I rolled from my stomach to my back and leaned up on my elbows.
"Are you okay?" Sammi asked.
"Yeah," though my ego had taken a hit. "I guess a root ran out from nowhere," I said, trying to act like I wasn't embarassed.
I noticed Sammi smirking a bit and when I looked down, I realized my shorts were noticeably tented. The fall didn't seem to have dulled my arousal.
I quickly scampered to my feet, hoping Sammi was laughing at my fall and not my predicimate. Sammi stepped to me and helped brush the leaves and dirt from my shirt and shorts. She seemed to let her hand brush against my hard on and I swear her hand even lingered a moment. With my lack of sexual experience though, I wasn't sure, and rather than risk embarassment, I chalked it up to my imagination.
"Is the tree close?" I spit out, trying to move on from the moment.
"I don't think it's much farther."
As we resumed, I concentrated on the path ahead of me, trying to get my mind off Sammi's ass and get my situation under control.
It wasn't long before we were looking up at what seemed to be one of the taller trees in the woods.
"I used to love to come to this tree when I was little. I'd climb up as high as I dared to go and just sit and look at the world."
Sammi looked up the tree.
"Years ago the branches were thin enough for me to wrap my arms around and climb up. It looks like they're too thick to get a grip around now, though," she said wistfully.
"Step in my hands," I said as I moved beneath the lowest branch and cupped my hands together.
Sammi stepped into my homemade step, and instead of wrapping her arms around the branch, she threw her arms over. Pushing off my hands, Sammi was able to pull herself up and swing her body onto the branch.
Sammi laid on the branch and reached down with her arms.
"Grab my hands and I'll pull you up. You can use your feet to push off the trunk and swing yourself up," she said.
"I don't know..." I did as she said but I didn't think I'd have the strength to get myself up there. I wanted to, though.
Surprisingly, I was able to muster the strength, and in moments I was on the branch next to her.
"We can climb higher now," she remarked. With no hesitation, she began to effortlessly climb up the branches.
I'd always been afraid of heights, but I didn't want her to leave me behind. Being far more cautious than Sammi, I made my way up the tree behind her.
After a few minutes, we were what I thought was way too high in the tree, sitting next to each other on a branch as if we were on a park bench.
"You know when you grow up and go back to some place you remember from when you were little, it always seems so small," Sammi said as she looked out at the trees. "The woods seem as vast now as they did back then. It seems like we're all alone in the world.
"When it used to get bad at home, I could always come to my tree and things seemed okay."
She looked at me. "Thank you for helping me get up here."
My hand was holding onto the branch next to her, trying to keep me steady (and safe). She put her hand on top of mine while she looked at me.
All of a sudden there was a rustling to our right, and two squirrels darted out of some foliage and down the trunk. The sound broke the moment, and Sammi swung her leg over the branch, straddling it and inching back towards the trunk. "Let's head back down."
It seemed she was as fast as the squirrels as she swung down and descended branch to branch. I didn't want her to think I was a pussy, so I made my way down as fast as I could right behind her, all the while expecting to plummet to my death at any moment.
Once on solid ground and somehow alive, I tried to regain my composure.
"Let's head to the left," Sammi said. "If we follow the trail a little more, we'll come to a little valley with all this wild cane. I used to play down there when I was little."
It didn't take long to make it to the edge of the valley. No matter how large the woods may have seemed from up in the tree or how alone you might feel in the forest, nothing is that far away in a small town.
From the edge of the hill that led down to the valley, the cane didn't look that impressive or interesting, just an area of stalks instead of saplings.
Sammi took my hand to steady herself, and we descended the slopping incline to the base of the hill. Venturing farther into the valley of cane, my impression of the area completely changed. While it may not have appeared as much from above, being in the cane was like being in an entirely different place than the woods, like walking through a corn maze at dusk. Trees jutted up randomly among the canestalks, providing more cover and darkness than if we were in a corn field. And it was cooler and quieter than up the hill among the trees. The deeper we went into the cane forest, the more I felt we were alone in our own part of the world.
"This is surreal. I've lived in this town my entire life and I never knew this was here. It's like something from a book or on TV," I remarked.
"I spent the whole summer one year down here making a fort out of cane. Then one day, I came back to do more work and found the whole thing torn down by some of the older kids." Sammi had a look of sadness as she looked out at the cane. "People can be real assholes."
"I know," I replied quietly, not knowing what else to say.
"Just one of the joys of growing up I guess."
As we stood still among the cane, Sammi said, "You know I had a crush on you back in 9th grade."