A couple of minutes after getting the email, I went on a local website and searched for someone to share the ride with me. I remembered well, the drive would take a day. Day and a half if I stuck to the speed limits. The funeral wasn't for a couple of days, so maybe I'd be law abiding for once in my life. My name's Kate. I'm in my mid-forties, fairly fit. Proud of how I'm handling aging, I suppose. Checking the rideshare ads, I spotted one that seemed just right. 20-something Daryl definitely fit the bill. She was traveling to the same town as me and wrote: 'Can't provide gas money, will provide tunes and chat.' That was just about all I needed to keep my mind on the road and off the funeral ahead. That, and keep my mind of a family I hadn't seen in years. Best of all, as she was going to the same town, I wouldn't have to go out of my way to drop her off. I replied to her post. We agreed a pickup time and place the next day.
She was standing out front of her building when I pulled up 5 minutes ahead of the time we had agreed. Good start. She must have been early twenties, I guess. Incredibly pretty and with a sensuous swagger that had me forcing myself to remember we were ridesharing and nothing more. There was something about the way she looked that looked almost familiar and made me yearn to be young again. Hell, I thought in the cutoff jeans, cowboy boots and a flannel shirt tied over a bare midriff she could well have been me when I was young. All that was missing was the cowboy hat. She had a small bag slung over her shoulder like they were all her worldly possessions. We introduced ourselves and I was immediately taken by her deep gravely drawl. This could be the best and worst car journey of my life, I thought.
"I'll aim to keep you on the straight and narrow, if you agree to take me to my door." She smiled, warm, welcoming with a hint of something ... dangerous. The thought skittered out of my brain as soon as it entered it. The girl would do just fine. We took off, heading south, and Daryl, as promised plugged a cassette on a wire into my old radio so she could play the tunes straight from her phone. I was pleasantly surprised at her choice. Her playlist comprised a lot of new tunes I barely knew but also plenty from my vintage. I never had to suffer the spat rap stuff for long. There'd be something more mellow I remembered from my own youth coming right behind it.
Daryl, it turns out I suppose obviously, grew up in the same shithole town I did. We shared a lot of similar stories, just a generation or so apart. Her parents were deeply square religious types. The same kind I'd escaped from for the big city years before. She had been a bit of a loner, an outsider, in our one-horse town, but found herself with a big clique in the big city we both now shared. As an early disbeliever and rebel myself, I understood her journey more than most. She was dropping home to visit with relatives -- as quick a trip as she could make it. I didn't offer the return trip just then, but figured I would probably do so by the time I dropped her off, unless she turned out to be a sociopath.
The morning went by as sweetly as any I'd had on a long trip driving. We got out of the city and followed the Interstate, sharing lanes and good-natured curses with the big rig drivers. We sang along together to every second or third song, and she went solo on the ones I wasn't familiar with. She'd also gave me a bit of background on those, so I would arrive slightly less square then when I set off. Seemed a fair exchange.
Conversation veered wildly between an avant garde scene I never knew existed in our city, to my life as an orthodontist. From art and music to movies and men. I was surprised that she seemed to be far more clued into the wiles of what she referred to as 'fuck boys' than I had been at her age. Hell, probably than I was right now. She had a worldly wisdom that belied her years, but without a hint of cynicism. We soon strayed into swapping relationship war stories, and I found myself enjoying her frankness rather than being offended by it.
In fact, I found myself opening up to her with more honesty that I would with my closest friends. I guess maybe I felt she was a stranger that I'd never see again, and that any secrets I divulged wouldn't be taken down and used against me. I never really noticed that as we touched on each subject, the next topic would be more taboo, each of us sharing more of the deep fantasies and desires that certainly I would normally barely share even with myself.
Nothing seemed off limits to this girl. I put it down to a generational openness. She was younger, freer and more open to new things than I had ever been. And stuck in the mud Miggins here didn't want to appear fusty, so I began to compete with more and more hairy, personal stories. It was almost like I was craving her approval of my openness and liberal attitudes to sex. I won't say I wasn't shocked. But I did try to hide it. And probably shared a lot of my own stories that it would have been better to have left untold.
Case in point, and I can tell you lot this because you're all strangers, when I was twenty and still stuck in that aforementioned shithole, I was sent to stay with my cousins for a summer while my mother went into hospital. Even back then, I knew she was drying out, though it was never said. My aunt and uncle were good people. Pretty button-down religious types, like my own folks. Their kids were older than me and mostly gone. Uncle Pete was a gruff man. A farmer, he spent sixteen out of every twenty-four hours on the farm or at farming things in nearby towns. My aunt was a good thirty years my senior and fairly beaten down. She was a lovely woman, just meek and came across like any gumption she possessed had been eradicated along with her dreams on this bleak flat farm.
One day, Aunty Ivy was in the kitchen as usual, baking and keeping busy with a thousand chores like she always did. I had been out with the horses all morning and when I rocked up starving, I accepted some stew which I ate hungrily. After that, and some stilted conversation, I took myself off to the sole shower in the house. After a few minutes washing off the smell of horses, I began to feel a bit amorous as I always did after being out riding. Long story short, I was playing with the showerhead when I happened to look up, thinking I heard something. The door to the room had been shut, I was sure, but now it was ajar. I could make out Aunty Ivy standing just outside it, dress pulled up, and with a hand playing with herself as she watched me playing with myself.
I almost went ass over tit on the slippy surface with shock. My aunt, realizing she'd been spotted, took off like a frightened goat. Later, she couldn't look me in the eye. Being the free-spirit-in-making that I was, I was determined to discover more about this hidden side of my landlady. Besides, there was something deeply dirty about the idea of an older woman, even -- or especially -- my own aunt being turned on by the sight of plain old me.
A week or more went by with nothing happening. I'd occasionally make out sounds in the night that appeared to be what counted as lovemaking on the farm. A whispered conversation, a few squeaks of the bed frame and a muffled guttural shout from my uncle. Then silence. Less than a minute by my reckoning. I took to spending more time away from the horses and more in the company of my aunt. Our conversations, stilted at first, became warmer and freer. I would never say we were intimate in our chats, as my aunt was a closed book, but we skittered off feelings here and there. One day, as we were putting away the things we'd just washed after dinner, her hand happened to rest momentarily on mine. I felt her pause a moment longer than necessary, then jolt away as if electrocuted. She made a big deal about fussing with something and talking about the weather to distract us both from something that felt almost desperately intimate. I decided I needed to do something to bring my aunt out of her shell.
Now, I'd never been into women, not at that stage anyway. The thought had never crossed my mind. Horses and cowboys were my obsession. But I was innately drawn towards this lonely, desiccated woman who was being so kind to me. I rocked out to the stables that morning and did my chores. I didn't go for a ride. Instead, I took the bailing knife and drew it across my upper thigh, slicing my jeans and just grazing the skin enough to hurt like a bugger and draw a little blood. I raced back to the house and was in full flood by the time I met my aunt who'd been drawn to the door by my cries.
Going into full maternal mode, she ordered me to sit down, asking what had happened. I explained (lied) that I'd caught myself climbing between stalls and fallen, cutting my leg in the process. As I talked, I wheedled my way out of my jeans, and plonked into the chair, legs akimbo, presenting my cut and my panties to my aunt. I could see she was conflicted at once. She saw the blood, of course, which had her worried, but she could also see the shadow of pubic hair coving my mons pressed tightly against the material of my white panties. Hell, she could probably make out the shape of my pussy lips through the material.
