For the
Summer Lovin'
contest, see
Auto Erotic
for the precursor tale.
****
"How about tomorrow afternoon?" I hoped my inner excitement, along with an ardent wish for a positive response, wasn't obvious in my tone of voice.
Barb turned to me from the pantry and raised an eyebrow. With her dark hair, streaked in a couple places with gray, held back in a suburban ponytail, and steely hazel eyes that didn't miss much, she was never an easy person to surprise.
The apogee of summer was here in all its glory. Saturday at 9 a.m. was too early to be uncomfortably warm but heat was on its way, sun slanting sharply through the kitchen windows of our 19th century farmhouse, the grass still green out in the backyard.
I wasn't sure what she would say, although we had talked about this event enough over the last few weeks.
Timing, as usual, meant everything.
She looked at me with those level eyes which for twenty years had seen my best and worst. Seen me not only completely unclothed but also all gussied up for our sons' graduations. She'd watched me accidentally bang my thumb with a hammer and cuss wildly in the garage but also raise a memorable toast at her sister's wedding.
The corners of her mouth barely crept upward, but it was a good sight. The gears had turned in the right direction.
"In the bus." A question that was a statement.
"Yes."
"With your new rigging." Right again. I nodded.
"Roger's okay with this?"
I had to laugh at this one. "I think he's more excited than a passel of puppies."
"It might rain. July sun doesn't go on forever and Sunday's forecast doesn't look near as nice as today." She gestured towards the sun speckled backyard.
I shrugged. "Doesn't matter. We'll be set regardless of the weather, that's the whole idea."
She paused, striking a dramatic pose, and looked at me.
"Yeah. Okay." A twinkle of the eye and she turned back to sorting spices in the pantry.
I went outside and called Roger.
"Can you talk?"
"Just a moment, let me go into the next room."
"She's good for tomorrow." I spoke breathlessly.
I heard him inhale deeply.
"For sure?"
"Yep."
A long pause.
"I'm going to be thinking, hard, for the next twenty-four hours, Clay. Tomorrow's gonna take forever to arrive."
"Don't imagine you'll mind, bud. I'll wager not just the thinking will be hard."
So it was just after noon when we picked up Roger the next day, pulling himself up into the ancient VW cab. Untucked plaid shirt, jeans, your regular Berkshire backwoods schlump. But he had a broad face and an easy smile. Besides, I knew what treasure he carried underneath his briefs.
Barb slid over on the bench seat right next to me, I'd have to reach over her left knee to get to the gear shift. Uncharacteristically, and truly a sign that summer was in full song, she was wearing shorts, so her knee was bare. Overhead the New England cloud cover was low, humidity high, but the air was not uncomfortably warm.
It was the first time Barb had deigned to ride in our "project" car, the archaic 1966 red and white VW microbus that Roger and I had restored. She always thought it was just a guy thing, car stuff, an indulgence that she allowed but could not fathom herself. I likened it to knitting and sewing, two of her own amusements, but I wasn't able to make the comparison work for her. But of course the "project" embraced multiple facets, as she would discover.
I tried to do small talk as we drove out of town and to a favorite trysting spot, off a bumpy fire trail up in the Berkshire hills.
But neither of them put much effort into responding, and we each settled into our own private thoughts. We'd indulged as a threesome exactly once before, but today's adventures would be quite different and bring us to the edge of our imaginations. My own mind was crowded with the possibilities. The air in the cab felt charged with silent electricity.
"This thing rides like a truck," Barb finally said as we hit a rut in the road. Roger almost chuckled.
"That's what I said the first time I rode with Clay."
I suppose I should have been defensive, since the whole project had been my idea.
But I just said, "Well it's over fifty years old and was basically meant to be a truck anyway. Unlike most other 60s vans and trucks, it's got full four-wheel independent suspension."
Barb shot me a dubious look and peered out one of the front split-windshields.
"Well, at least it doesn't have a hood up front. You can see pretty good."
Indeed each lump in the rutted fire road was clear enough to spot and avoid as best I could. I sawed the steering wheel back and forth.
After we'd parked, behind a hemlock grove maybe fifty yards off the road that mostly screened sight of the bus, I tried to keep my excitement in check.
This would be the second time the three of us would all be together and intimate. And wildly different from the first. Daylight for one thing, in the back of the van for a second, with some new equipment, only just bench-tested a couple weeks ago. Not a bedroom, but outside, with some risk, however slight, of being discovered.
After moving to the back of the bus, closing the windows to keep the insects out, and drawing the curtains, Barb examined our rig with both an amused smile and a wide-eyed look of wonder, the first time she'd seen our latest handiwork.
I spread out the thin camping mattress with its cotton casing we kept in the bus, which pretty much covered the middle section of the vehicle, long enough to stretch out on, thick enough to be comfortable, thin enough to roll up easy and stow to the side when unneeded.
She'd seen the inside of the bus before, and the sweet wooden cladding Roger and I had crafted to overlay the otherwise spartan VW interior. She'd even sewn the window curtains that Roger had now pulled closed, shielding the view from any prying eyes, not that there would be anyone here off the trail.
But she hadn't seen our new additions, the eye-bolts we'd installed at the corners of the inside to hold the restraining ropes.
She looked up at each of us, wonder written all over her face. I don't think she'd ever have imagined that me and my meathead buddy would get this carried away and creative with our sex life. But wonder had been a big part of her world for the last six months. Roger and I were now "above-board"—with some limitations—and Barb had become tolerant, even intrigued, by the sexual diversions me and my man-buddy had managed to concoct.
She was in for an even greater surprise when I removed the cover to the long, full-length mirror I'd found at a yard sale and attached to the interior left side of the van. If you were lying down on the mattress you could see yourself and whatever your partner in lust was doing to you. Maybe watch his cock waving around, view your own from a different angle. I found the doubling of imagery great fun—Four erections instead of two! Eight sperm-filled balls not four!—Roger less so. He said it was sorta like being a voyeur on yourself. But of course that was exactly the reason I enjoyed it.
Her eyes got big when she examined the mirror and deduced its purpose.
We were all a bit nervous, like the first time you're going to jump off a three meter diving-board. Not tense, but not relaxed either.
We had a brief talk about ground rules. She was astonished that we hadn't developed "safe words."
"I thought that was an elemental, essential part of this sort of activity? BDSM and all that?" She gestured at the eye-bolts and the coils of rope.
Roger and I looked at each other. I had a sense that she was right and probably knew more about this whole business in the abstract than the two of us. We'd never considered anything like "safe words." We were as green at this as the tree leaves outside the van.
"I maybe shouldn't speak for Roger, but I guess we just figured if someone was doing something we didn't like, they'd just say so."
Roger nodded in agreement like an over-eager golden retriever.
"Not like we're using gags or anything."
As soon as I said that I knew how ridiculous it sounded. If someone was gagged there weren't going to be any "safe words" uttered anyway.
I waved a hand. "You know what I mean."
Barb looked at us like we were daft but was okay with this.
"So if I just say 'no' or 'stop' that will be enough for you guys? What if, say, I have something in my mouth?"