This is the second chapter in a series of postings about a young woman, Melissa, who returns from college with her new boyfriend, Jamie, for a visit to her home, a ranch in a remote corner of Southeastern Oregon, and discovers that her parents, Lisa and Luke, have drastically changed their sex lives. It will work better if you have read the prior Chapter.
By the time breakfast was done and cleaned up, a lunch packed for the saddlebags, horses saddled, and Luke and Jamie dispatched to their chore of splitting and stacking firewood, it was nearing 10:00 o'clock. Chores done, Lisa and Melissa saddled up and rode through the gate at the upper end of the pasture and then up the trail that ran along the ridge towards the big peak to the South.
The morning was warm and clear, as most summer days are in the Owyhee country. They rode along in silence, each woman lost in her own thoughts. Lisa struggling to decide just how much to tell her daughter about how she and her father, Luke had changed their personal lives since Melissa had gone away to college, Melissa puzzling over just what it was that Lisa was going to tell her that would explain why she had been fondling her father's cock during dinner last night. Neither was yet ready to ask questions or offer explanations.
An hour later they were high on the ridge approaching the point where the trail would take horses no further toward the peak looming before them. Lisa turned her mount to the left and followed the trail down a steep hill toward a clump of aspen growing in a cirque at the base of the sheer cliffs of the peak. In the center of the aspen grove there was a spring and a small lake, more a shallow pond, but it was clear and cool. This was the headwaters of Antelope creek, the water source for the irrigated bottom land that had made the AA Ranch viable for over a century. Melissa had been here more times than she could count. As a teenager it was the place she had gone to get away from her parents when she was in conflict with them during the summers.
They swung out of the saddle and stretched. Melissa hadn't done any riding for months and she knew she was going to be sore. Besides she was already a bit sore from the fucking Jamie had given her last night while they watched her parents from the haymow of the barn. As soon as Lisa had pulled the lunch from the saddle bags Melissa led the horses to a patch of grass twenty or thirty yards away and hobbled them. While the women ate and talked, the horses could graze and keep their flies to themselves. She walked back through the trees and found her mother sitting with her bare feet in the lake, the lunch spread out beside her. Lisa had shed the blue work shirt she was wearing and was naked from the waist up.
"Come join me," Lisa said looking over her shoulder at Melissa and patting the soft grass beside her.
"Do I have to strip down?" Melissa asked.
"Only if you wish too," Lisa responded. "The water is cool on my feet and the breeze feels lovely on my breasts. It's so nice up here because it's still green. I swear summer comes earlier each year.
"You know," she continued, "your Father and I often ride up here and make love these days. At least when there isn't anyone else around and sometimes when there are others with us, depending on who they are."
"You have sex with other people up here?" Melissa asked, shocked again.
"Yes. Sometimes there are three or four other couples up here with us. The partnering gets pretty . . . shall I say 'casual,' with a group that size." She smiled thinking of a time when she had been fucked by four different men here on the banks of this little lake and been eaten by their partners. Each of them had driven her to a climax, although by the time they finished with her she wasn't sure she had the energy for the ride back down the ridge to the ranch. It was a birthday celebration for her. Much better than a cake with too many candles, she thought with a secret little smile.
"Sit down Melissa, and let me tell you about it. Your father and I have changed." On the ride up Lisa had decided that she was going to tell her daughter everything about her and Luke's new life. There was just no way to tell only part of it. But where to start, that was the challenge.
Melissa sat down and pulled her boots and socks off. The cool water felt delicious. She looked at her mother, leaning back with her eyes closed, her head back and her hands holding her breasts out to the warm sun.
"God, I love it up here," Lisa said. She looked over at her daughter and said, "You know sometimes when Luke's not around and I have this place to myself, I ride up here, strip down so I'm naked and masturbate." She giggled. "I pack a vibrator along with the lunch. I can make all the noise I want when I climax. The horse doesn't seem to mind. He's always busy grazing over there where you hobbled them today."
Melissa was no stranger to using this aspen glade as a place to masturbate. She had done it frequently in the summer before she left for college. But it was this business of swingers that she needed to know about. She stripped off her shirt and then, thinking, "in for a penny, in for a pound," she shucked off her jeans and her panties and sat naked next to her mother, her feet in the water. It was far from the first time she had been naked here.
"Okay Mom," she said. "Tell me what's been going on."
"Sure, but I think we need a beer first." She rose and walked a few feet to where she had left a six pack cooling in the pond, returning with a can of reasonably cold beer for each of them. "I guess I better catch up with you too," she said, handing Melissa both beers and then stripping off the rest of her clothes before she sat down.
The only sound beyond the rustling of the aspens in the light breeze was the popping of the snap tabs on the two beers as Melissa sat waiting for her mother to begin and Lisa struggled with how to go about telling her daughter how things had changed.
"Hmmm. Where to start?" she said. She thought for a minute and then said "I have to go all the way back to the beginning for this to make sense. It'll work best if you let me tell the whole story. Then you can ask questions and pass judgement if you will."
Melissa responded with silence and Lisa began to talk:
"Our problems began even before you went off to college, but you were a teenager, so there was no reason to expect you to notice. Besides, our problems revolved around our sex life, or really our lack of sex life, and we weren't exactly open about such things with our children in those days, or even with each other for that matter, which turned out to be the core of the problem.
"Luke was spending a lot of time in Salem politicking and when he wasn't there he was obsessed with trying to run three ranches on his own. And I was. . . how do I put it?
. . .I was bored, lonely, and feeling sorry for myself. Yes all of those, and oh yeah, I was horny too. The summer before you left, I just about wore out a vibrator up here. She laughed. But the vibrator just wasn't the same as Luke. We weren't in a good place. Even worse we weren't talking about it.
"Now I don't want you to get the idea that we weren't still in love. I loved your father passionately, right from the day I met him, and I still loved him then, despite our troubles. I still love him today, even though we both have sex with others. We've just learned how to separate love and lust. Love is exclusive and mutual, but not lust.
"I would learn later that Luke wasn't a happy man either. He was sick of politics, the rain in Salem was depressing, and he missed his wife and lover.
"It all came to a head when I learned that he was having an affair with a woman over in Salem. We had a huge fight and I threatened to divorce him, even though that was the last thing in the world I wanted. I wanted my lover back, but I had this idea that having my lover back meant it had to be exclusive. I thought he wouldn't be back, if he was still fucking Sally when he was in Salem.
"But the things Luke was trying to do in Salem, the political things, frustrating as they were to him, were still things he thought he should be treating as important. And Sally? I think she just helped take the edge off his frustration, or at least that is how their affair had started.
