At the Summit

Copyright 2004, All rights reserved

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Contributed by Richard Williams for the enjoyment of Literorica's readers. This fictional story is copyrighted and may only be used for your personal pleasure. It may not be sold, distributed, or posted on another website without the author's permission.

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AT THE SUMMIT

by Prof. Richard W. (formerly of the University of ____________)

Part 3

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1997 - After the Summit

Drowsily, I awoke to the sound of Sophia typing on her laptop computer. It was plugged into the hotel's phone jack, so I guessed that she was running her e-mail. I lay there for several minutes, watching her as she peered intently into the fold-up screen. The fingers which had pressed red marks into my back in our passion of the night before were now delicately tapping at the keyboard: exchanging information, placing orders, and setting up meetings.

The whole scene was made more interesting by the fact that Sophia had just pulled her robe on over her shoulders, and was sitting cross-legged on the bed next to me. Her skin still glowed from our lovemaking, and her breasts, emerging from the loosely flung gown, were all the more beautiful to me for it. Cradled between her legs, the laptop provided inadvertent modesty.

"Oh, you're awake!" she finally noticed me watching her when she had given the Send All/Disconnect command. "I'm canceling my meeting this morning."

"And why would that be?" I had an idea of what was coming.

"Because you've done it again! You've gotten me hooked on this story, and now I have so many questions about it that I want you to finish it!!!" She made a playful grab at her pillow and whacked me with it.

"It was going to be a slow day, anyway," she admitted. She set the laptop carefully aside, in doing so revealing the dark curls which hid the place where I had spent so much of myself last night.

"What do I have to do to get the rest of the story out of you?" She grinned, and bent over so her long hair and her ample breasts brushed against me. Her scent and the grazing touches filled my senses.

"You could order breakfast. I'm starving. You burned every calorie out of my system!"

"So that's why I felt so warm last night!" Sophia grinned and reached for the phone.

In a few moments she had headed to the shower. I walked into the bathroom and scrubbed myself.

"You wouldn't like some help in there, would you?" I called out optimistically.

"You need to eat breakfast first, remember? And besides, that won't get the story told, will it?" I had to admit that it would not.

Half reluctantly, half in recognition of my spent condition, and half in recognition of how determined Sophia could be -- yes, I know that adds to more than a whole -- I put current fun aside in favor of future gain.

I tossed on a sport shirt and some slacks, and was ready when Room Service arrived. The domed covers hid a variety of delicious dishes-- I had let Sophia order for both of us, and in her combination of post-coital euphoria and hunger, she had been very imaginative and seemed to have taken one or two of everything on the menu.

"What other Army is coming in here to have breakfast with us?" The shower had stopped now, so she could hear without me shouting. "We'll be here all day eating this."

Sophia stepped halfway out of the bathroom, her generous figure now in my favorite flowered panties and bra. She had an arch grin on her face. She knew that I liked the way that the flowers colorfully emphasized her curves.

"That thought already had occurred to me when I ordered it. We're going to be busy with you finishing that story. And if it continues the way it has been, my appetite is going to stay up."

"I need to run downstairs for a minute then. I've got to ask Boggs, the doorman a question." Sophia assented through the again closed door, and I headed downstairs.

The tall, Lincolnesque Boggs was on duty at the front door, as I had hoped. I checked some facts about the Summit with him, things which were within the range that he could discuss.

"It's like a lawyer-client relationship, the doorman and the guests in a multi-star hotel like this" he reminded me when I ventured beyond the bounds as to who had been where or arrived and left at certain times. He stuck to the public information, but that got certain facts straight in my head. I went back upstairs two at a time.

Sophia was sitting at the small table, sorting reddish-black berries into a chinaware bowl. She was wearing her dance practice outfit-- athletic training cottons. I watched her gracefully pouring cream from the little pitcher onto the berries, and then she sprinkled powdered sugar over them.

"Those make my mouth water," I commented.

She looked down at her outthrust breasts, and then grinned at me.

"Oh, er, you mean the berries, eh?" We laughed and I dug into the high cholesterol side of the breakfast. My system was telling me that it needed those sausages.

When I was clearing away the last of the sticky plates, Sophia poured coffee, and then she smiled, Cheshire-like.

"Now, let's see, where were you in the story?" We laughed and teased a bit, but then I began.

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1997 - Before the Summit

Dean and Laetitia met in mid-morning at her mother's room in the Westin. Michelle was already off somewhere on her job. Dean only stepped into the entryway, but from there he could see that the room had a hastily-put-together look.

"What happened to your room?" He frowned as he noticed a mirror which hung askew.

"Someone came while we were at breakfast and looked through all our things." Laetitia shivered a bit when she said that. Perhaps she had never been through this before.

"There was nothing for them to find," she continued. Before he could ask, she gave the same nodding motion with her head that he associated with her mother's gesture, indicating that the room was bugged.

"Let's go out into the sunshine," Dean urged, and Laetitia gladly grabbed her purse and joined him. He let his eye take her in as she almost skipped past him to punch the elevator button. She wore a light blue top that came down to just above her waist, buttoned in front. Below her slender waist was a pair of jeans-like denims, fastened with a string-tie, rather than snaps. He did not quite understand the engineering of it, but she looked much more ready for a picnic this morning than she had yesterday. A fanny pack left her hands free, and served to emphasize the curve of her hips. When she turned, the top rode up a bit and showed her smooth tummy up to her navel.

Dean carried a blanket borrowed from the Oxford (yes, he had gotten an okay from them). They definitely looked like picnickers.

They rode down in elevator-silence, but Dean felt, or at least imagined, that he could feel electric anticipation that he had not noticed in the evening before. Or perhaps that was just in his own mind? He wondered.

"I'm very much looking forward to this whole day," Laetitia said, as they stepped out into the ground floor lobby. "Even just talking with you as adult with adult will be a chance to mature 'un peu' and perhaps you will enjoy it, also." It was kind of a breathless statement, as if she had lain awake composing this formula. Dean noted the fact that the day was still open-ended, but that they were still on the "just talking" level. That was okay, he thought, because he was prepared to stay even with her, just float along as the day unfolded.

"You have no picnic basket!" she suddenly realized, as they turned onto 16th Street.

"We're going to pick up our picnic at a place over by the park, My Brother's Bar."

"Your brother has a bar in Denver?" Laetitia was surprised. He had not mentioned his family.

"No, that's the name of the place. I called over and ordered some things for us. It's a bit of a walk from here, though," Dean cautioned. "We'll walk and talk, if you like."

"I have lots of energy today," she smiled.

As they walked down past the Tattered Cover bookstore and the thundering conveyor belts of the Terminal Annex post office, he learned more about her school, her studies and her life. Michelle and her father had been good parents, but since her father's death and her mother's return to work, she had thrown herself into her studies. She had excellent grades, and in the French system, excellent prospects.

"Mother says that you know a lot about life. Why does she think that?" Laetitia asked her own question as they stopped at the big mosaic relief tile along 15th Street. She ran her hand gently over the smooth, anti-graffiti tiles.

"They look wet," she interrupted herself. Then she paused, pulling her hand away from the tiles, and looking at him seriously.

It was dawning on Dean that she was unaware of precisely what his relationship with Michelle had been.

"We worked very closely together in Germany. We depended on each other, perhaps for our lives, at one time. And she knew that I had a pretty wide social life before my marriage." Dean skirted the key fact. Perhaps the daughter did not wish to learn more, as she changed the subject. The "why" was more important to women than the "what," he mused.

"What does your wife think of you doing this?"

"That's an open question. I don't think she is thinking very much about this at all." Dean paused and thought for a moment. "I think she's grown tired of me." He described their domestic situation, and what had happened in their life. He tried to be honest about it, and that was hard, because it made him turn his thoughts to the nagging question as to what he could have done differently.

"That's terrible!" Laetitia was upset by this information. She could not understand how Dean could not still be interesting.

"Before you try to solve my problems," he said with a wry grin, "let's remember that we have one day to give you whatever you need. THEN you can come back and help me."

Laetitia smiled and nodded.

They were on the bridge over the South Platte River; it was already getting warm, and neighborhood kids were beginning to turn up to splash in the rapids at Confluence Park. A kayaker bobbed and twisted as he practiced in the tiny whitewater area.

"This is beautiful," she said. "How much further shall we go?"

That was a question that Dean wanted the answer to as well, but he let the potent pun slide by.

In a few minutes, they were in the dark, old bar. Classical music and the lack of television monitors marked it as an unusual place.

"Jack Kerouac drank here," Dean commented.

"Who?"

"He was a writer back in the 1950's. Your mother and I talked about his work a long time ago." Dean felt a flash of age.

"How did you know about this place?" she queried.

"I called a friend to ask about where we could get some good sandwiches for a picnic. He told me about something else good, too. We're going for a trolley ride."

She looked blankly at him for a moment.

"Ahhh," she smiled, "le tramway."

In a few minutes they were back at the riverbank, this time boarding a bright yellow trolley car. The conductor collected fares from them and a dozen tourists of various nationalities, and, Dean suddenly realized, from an older man with a vaguely European look to his clothing who had been in My Brother's Bar when they picked up their picnic food. Dean noticed that the man was asking the conductor what the fare was, when the car would be leaving, and so forth. This man had not planned his trolley ride.

They were being shadowed.

The trolley rolled out along the South Platte River, past the kayakers' practice area, on past the Elitch's Amusement Park, and then slipped through a narrow opening into a ravine parkland. As the passengers were spread out through the car, Dean and Laetitia continued to talk openly -- she seemed to be unaware of their tail.

Something about the trolley's motion, the passing river scene, or perhaps their symbolic passage through the brush-sheltered arch upward into the lush curves of the ravine brought them closer together. Now they were discussing Laetitia's life in intimate details. Dean had told her that they would need to do that, but had not pushed her this morning.

Rocking from side to side, their thighs touched gently, and each felt the other's warmth as she confided in him. She had been immersed in her studies, had little social life, but that had not kept her virginity intact. She wanted Dean to know that she was not as inexperienced as her mother might want to believe.

Laetitia and Roland, classmates, had found themselves at a student get-together one night. Her friend, Rochelle, had dragged her away from her books for her own good. Laetitia had worked with Roland on lab projects before, so they found themselves talking easily-- perhaps helped along by the cheap red wine which flowed so abundantly. She found his attempts at petting to be an enjoyable, if also amusing, escape from the problem paper she had been digging into.

Somehow, they had ended up in the darkened bedroom of the student flat. Other couples had come and gone from the room, and even as Laetitia and her friend had entered the room, another couple had pushed past them and disappeared into a pile of coats in the corner.

Driven by unleashed lust, Laetitia and Roland ignored the unseen others. Hearing the occasional sighs and other sounds from the coats only drove their own passion forward. Laetitia recalled the mad rush to strip each other, of belatedly realizing that he could get her panties off more easily if she arched her back.

"These useful things they do not teach in school!" she laughed now. The trolley rumbled over a bubbling creek on a wooden trestle.

"Did you want Roland for himself, or was there something else in your mind?"

"How did you know?" Laetitia paused and then said that slowly, with an expanding grin across her face. It was a question which she answered herself. "I liked him, but I think it also was that my need for a man was so great. I had been growing up in my body, but my mind had been concentrating on other things."

She had not had a complete orgasm, she later realized, in that first time, but it had been so interesting that she had not thought about that. She had enjoyed Roland's eagerness for her, and as she stretched out to accept him, she folded her arms over him and found that she liked the sensation of feeling his rhythmic muscles at work. His man-smell swept over them as his youthful body built toward a quick climax in the short, sharp thrusts of his inexperienced penis, and as she inhaled his presence, new sensations flowed through her system.

This, she related to Dean, had led to a convenient relationship. When her studies had become too intense, it was so efficient to have Roland. She no longer needed to masturbate afterwards, as together they were gradually adjusting to each other's needs. Yet, somehow, this convenience never led further. It seemed that they had little in common outside of the classrooms and labs, other than their mutual discovery of sex. There was no passion in Roland, just weekly lust by the calendar.

The trolley rolled down the middle of a quiet street, and little children ran to from their porch to wave at it. Laetitia happily joined the other passengers in waving back. Dean noticed their shadow looking about, and then belatedly acknowledging the children.

"Someday I will have a child," she continued, perhaps reminded by the happy scene. "But I have so many things that I must do first."

"And marriage?"

"Yes, that, too! But not now, not in the near future." She smiled at him. "And when I marry, I want to be an excellent lover for my husband. He will not need a mistress."

"You sound very certain about that," Dean said wryly.

"You will help me with that, will you not?" she riposted. "If he does, it will be your fault!" They laughed together. Dean wondered what she meant.

It was the end of the line. The ravine had dwindled to being a flat spot by an arterial street, and the conductor and motorman walked back alongside the car to turn it.

"This is where we'll get off," Dean said. "I've told the crew that already." The conductor appeared at their seat in the open trolley, and assisted her down the drop onto the roadbed. Dean jumped down behind her, feeling the gravel sting his feet through his shoes on the impact. "This is not a regular stop."

"This is not a very attractive place," Laetitia worried. She looked around. Dean wondered if she saw or sensed their shadow now.

"We'll walk back down the ravine a ways," he said. "I saw a great spot for a picnic along the creek." They walked ahead of the stationary car along a paved trail.

No one else was getting off there, or rather, no one else was planning on getting off there. Looking very uncomfortable about being so exposed, their shadow alighted from the car as it began to roll; the conductor shouted a warning to the man too late. He stumbled on the gravel ballast, but picked himself up and tried to stay at a discrete distance behind the couple. The left knee of his pants was ripped from his fall, and he limped along.

Now Dean was sure that Laetitia was aware of their third-wheel "guest." He whispered to her to keep walking with him and not to worry. She nodded slightly-- reminding Dean of her mother.

"We'll just walk a bit further to that picnic area," he said in a normal voice.

Along the way, they passed other people who were enjoying the park, people who were living lives without concerns about being followed.

A young Mexican-American couple walked slowly side by side toward them on the long path, barely saying a word to each other. They were both dressed simply, he in a white shirt and black pants, she in a white blouse and black skirt. They did not hold hands, but moved in unison, as a couple would who had spent much time together. The woman looked adoringly at her man from time to time.

As they passed in silence, Laetitia saw the title of the book in the crook of the woman's arm: "Inspiration of the Virgin" was the Spanish-English translation she came up with. The man was carrying the sports page of a Spanish-language newspaper.

"Do you think you could be like that with the man you fall in love with?" Dean said it in such a way that Laetitia realized that he really wanted her to consider it to be an option.

"No!" She shuddered and laughed. "I can respect her decision, but that is not me." Dean smiled.

"I agree with you. But do you know what is you yet?"

"I guess not. That's why we are here." She looked up at Dean for a moment as a flash of self-understanding crossed her face. Dean caught himself enjoying the way her Gallic gestures emphasized this point -- and emphasized the movement of her breasts underneath her light top.

A couple of young men came toward them, and Laetitia instinctively took Dean's hand for a moment as they boldly scanned her figure with their dark eyes. Later on, she admitted to Dean that one of them had caught her own eye. She had responded by letting her gaze slip past his slim waist to his tight jeans and cowboy boots.

Dean spoke half a sentence to them as they passed without stopping. The taller and darkly handsome of the two stopped and turned his head to watch them-- to watch her. She knew that because she had turned back to watch him. Dean saw her blush.

"That's Tony," Dean told her, "a friend of a friend."

"How did you know that?" Laetitia questioned.

"Remember, I called some people and made some arrangements," Dean said quietly. "I have the phone number for his pager -- I'll bet that he would return your call."

Laetitia caught herself licking her lips.

"Later," she said. "First, I need to learn some things. For example...."