The Sisters

This is the first part of a two-part recounting of my relationship with two magnificent women - my 'wives'. I wrote the first part several years ago so I wouldn't forget the details of how we met. Part 2 gives an update to our lives and answers many questions people have e-mailed me about our life style and us. If you want some erotic passages they're in here, but not right at the beginning of either part. I could post this under Romance, Incest, Group, Erotic Couplings, or Mature -- all reflect our life style and how we live; I chose the later since I still stand in amazement that a guy my age could keep two young and fascinating women happy. (Edited by Jeriscol. My thanks to him.)

*

I heard someone crying from a distance.

The afternoon had a bite to it, crispness in the air that hadn't been there for months. The sun's rays were more slanted too, as I'd run along on the Boston side of the Charles River. Surprisingly, there were few people out for this beautiful late Friday afternoon. I'd already put in six miles and had another mile to go to get back across the river to where I worked in Cambridge.

But getting there was problematic. Today was what I called "sprint day"; that meant I would run as fast and as hard as I could until my body throbbed in pain, then I'd slow to even a walk until I could again bear the punishment. "No pain, no gain" I kept telling myself. I hadn't done a 'sprint day' in months.

I had just finished the longest sprint yet that afternoon, possibly a quarter mile. I'd pulled up in pain -- a side stitch under my left ribs warning how out of shape I was to be putting my 45-year old body through this kind of torture. I tried to walk it off but the pain persisted. I'd decided lying in the grass and gasping in pain for a few minutes was the best plan of the day when I heard the crying again.

As I lay there panting, I looked around and saw the source of the crying was a young woman by a tree about a hundred feet further off the foot path from me. My first instinct was to leave the poor girl in peace, and so I just lay back and continued gasping for air and massaging my side.

Gradually my body accepted its fate, and my pain subsided. My young friend was still sobbing mightily into a Kleenex. Several other people that went by noticed her too, but left her alone.

Involvement is my middle name. I have to be involved. My ex-wife had often told me that there were some things that were better left alone; she was one of them. My approach was if it were happening, and I saw it, I wanted to be involved, to help, to know the details.

I finally got up and walked across the space that separated us until I was in her view. She continued to cry.

"Can I help? Are you O.K?" I said to her as I tentatively approached and stooped to make eye contact with her.

She looked at me through her tears and sobbed even harder, throwing her face down into her hands as she sat cross-legged on the ground.

She was young, perhaps a college undergrad. She was a light brunette with some pretend blond streaked into her very disorderly locks. She had sneakers, shorts, and a Red Sox sweatshirt on, and had a small pocketbook around her neck. A cell phone lay at her side.

I tried to talk to her again, "I just need to know whether you're O.K. Do you need help for any reason? Are you in pain?"

She looked up at me again through her sobs and somehow managed to haltingly say, "No," sob, "I'm," sob, "O.K," wild sobbing. "My," sob, "boyfriend," sob, "just broke," sob "upwithme."

Wild sobbing again prevailed. I kneeled down about six feet in front of her afraid if I got any closer she'd get a whiff of my body odor, keel over and die. After a minute, when she started to try to get some control over herself, I dared to say a little more.

"You're beautiful; probably more so when your face isn't all screwed up crying. I can introduce you to a dozen guys that would fall all over themselves to be your boyfriend -- probably including me. Whoever tossed you to the curb just doesn't realize what a catch you are. His loss will be someone else's gain. I'd just bet you'll find someone so much better than your ex, you just wait and see."

I paused to see whether the words were having any effect. The crying was dying down, and the sniffling and nose-blowing phase were starting.

She looked over at me, and snuffled out a big "Why?" Then burst in a crying jag again.

I answered, "Guys can be really callous and careless. Sometimes shit just happens. Sometimes I guess it's necessary for guys to get all macho and tell someone we really care about that we don't love them anymore. We push away the thing we love. Maybe it's a statement about our independence from women, or maybe we feel that we're not worthy of being loved by someone as nice as you. Sometimes we rationalize that the other person made us do it too, although they didn't."

She blinked rapidly and dabbed eyes and nose with the shredded remnants of her tissue. Still snuffling she said, "Did you do that?" Her face screwed up again, and she let out a single long sob.

"Yea. I guess I did in some ways. That's how you get to be my age and single again."

"Huh? Oh dear, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry." Sniffle! "I mean you're a stranger. What's your name?"

"I'm Jim Allen. I work over there," and I pointed across the river to a fifteen-story building I spent most of my waking hours in. "And you are?"

"I'm Kim. Kim Windsor. I live back there a couple of blocks," and she gestured over her shoulder towards some of the brownstones on the other side of Storrow Drive in Back Bay.

"Are you in college?" I asked.

She actually smiled through her sorrowful face. "I graduated about five years ago; I just look young." She put her legs straight out in front of her, pulled her sweatshirt from her body and leaned down and wiped her entire face with it. I think she was through crying. She managed one long, loud sigh and took in a huge amount of air then slowly expelled it and shuddered. She was emotionally drained.

"Walk with me," I suggested. "You pick the direction. The act of moving will help you feel better. At least you'll be doing something."

Kim looked up at me with watery eyes and a questioning look. I stepped closer and offered a hand up. She took it and I pulled her to her feet. She gathered her purse and phone.

"I apologize for my sweaty condition. I probably smell like a camel. I'll understand if you want to walk the other way. Just tell me and I'll get lost."

"No. I'll walk with you." She hesitated with a weak smile. "I'd like to talk to someone and not be alone."

We started to walk slowly along the river towards the Half Shell -- the outdoor stage where the Boston Pops gives summer concerts.

"What do you do over there?" Kim asked through some sniffles and pointed towards my office building.

"I run a small design and engineering shop. There are fifty of us. I started it about ten years ago. Somehow we ended up here in Cambridge. The rent was right at the time; we did a long-term lease. I couldn't afford the rates they're charging today. We'll probably have to move the business to the 'burbs in another ten when the lease runs out." I was babbling. She was looking better.

A few hundred feet past the Half Shell we came to the base of the Longfellow Bridge.

"If you walk me across the bridge, I can shower. I'll buy you coffee or a glass of wine." I paused. "At least I'll be out of my running togs and smell better." I gestured towards my odoriferous body.

Kim smiled and started up the steps to the walk across the bridge. The evening runners were starting to appear in larger numbers now. Mostly we had to walk single file as we kept dodging them all the way across the bridge.

"What do you do?" I asked Kim near the Cambridge side of the bridge.

"I work in an ad agency just off Boylston Street. It's small too, but we have the Macy's and Fidelity Investment accounts along with some smaller ones. I'm a computer nut, so I end up doing a lot of the art and presentation stuff."

"What'd you major in?"

"Art history, of course," she smiled over her shoulder as she walked along.

I was paying obvious attention to Kim's perky backend that was swaying along in front of me when she turned around to ask me something and caught me. I was toast. Instead, she just turned back with a slight smile again on her pretty face.

"Do you always rescue crying maidens from along the Charles?" she asked over her shoulder.

"Don't find enough to make a career of it," I replied. After a few seconds, "I'm so glad you're feeling better, at least on the outside. It'll work its way inside too."

Kim shot me a grateful glance.

"I like to be involved, to know what's happening and why. In another life I'm probably the inquiring reporter on the six o'clock news." We walked along about thirty feet. "Besides, I'm a sucker for damsels crying in distress."

When we got to my office building, I left her in the lobby and told I'd be back in flash. I headed off to the locker room our landlord so generously provided the tenants.

Twenty minutes later the elevator doors opened and let me back into the lobby. Kim was seated beside the lobby fountain and waiting for me. She'd pulled herself together, washed her face in the ladies room, and somehow managed to brush out some of the kinks in her gorgeous crop of hair. She smiled as I walked up to her.

"Much more presentable," she said as she sized me up.

"I clean up well, and you look gorgeous," I offered. "Are you warm enough to sit outside?"

"Yes. Where?"

"About two-minutes that way," I gestured. We headed off in temporary silence as I led the way through the maze of walkways and alleys near my building. I was trying to gage what I could say that would make her feel better about being dumped. She seemed level headed so I thought a direct approach might be best.

After we were seated in the sidewalk bar of the Marriott, and had ordered two Kendall Jackson chardonnays, I asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"

Kim looked deep into my eyes, almost pleading. I could see the wheels turning as she tested whether she did or not.

"No, not now. Maybe later."

"What can I say that would make you feel better?" I asked.

"Well, for one, you were doing a pretty good job when you first started talking to me. Nothing makes a girl feel wanted more than a handsome knight coming to her rescue, and then telling her she's the best."

I took the hint, "Well, those words certainly came easily. They're true. You're star quality. Look around. I'm the old guy lucky enough to be sitting with the most beautiful girl in the place, hell in Boston or maybe even the whole United States."

Kim actually blushed. She laughed and said, "More, more!" Then she put her hand up in a stop gesture to indicate that she was only kidding.

"Don't you see yourself?" I asked.

"Oh, I know I'm on the attractive side of the scale. But there's this personality that goes with it. You haven't judged that," she turned to me, "Or have you? Sometimes I'm too sensitive or too scared of my own shadow. I'm not the most secure person on the planet. I can be pushy too at other times."

"Yes, I did judge. I like scared, sensitive, pushy people."

Out of left field she asked, "What was your wife like ... your marriage ... kids?"

"Whoa!" I gasped. "That's a surprise." I was silent for a moment then offered more of an answer. "Megan and I were both twenty and in college when we married and twenty-one when Jeff came along and twenty-two when Meredith arrived. We struggled trying to keep it together for a decade, thinking that many of the problems we faced were just normal for young newlyweds going through college and then getting started. By then we'd really started to go in different directions."

Kim nodded to me to go on.

"We lasted five more years after than. Megan had found a new love during that time, and I'd fallen in love with my work. The kids were pretty well grown and accepted our separation and then a few years later our divorce -- we didn't do that until they'd both left the nest and started college. It was no surprise anyway."

"Where are they now?" Kim asked.

"Megan lives with her new hubby outside Hartford. They're both in insurance. We're actually still friends although I haven't seen her for several years. Jeff is twenty-four and works for a construction outfit in Florida. Meredith, I call 'Mer', is in Malawi, Africa, trying to solve world hunger and stop the tribes in neighboring countries from warring. Everyone landed on both feet; stable and prosperous bunch we are." I smiled.

"And did you remarry," Kim asked.

"No, not at all. I guess I've been gun shy for a long time. I seldom date. Even now I find it easier to lose myself in work than look for a new relationship. I'm not a 'hang around a bar' kinda guy, and the idea of Internet dating freaks me out. Speed dating has some appeal, but I've never tried it. What about you? You've had me doing most of the revealing."

Kim told me about herself, at least a little. She'd grown up and gone to college in Syracuse; her parents still lived on one of the Finger Lakes near there. She had a sister she was very close to that was a year younger who lived and worked just outside Boston. It seemed that the whole family was artistic in someway.

I went back and dug out more of my history too: grew up on Long Island, college in Delaware, lived and worked in Wilmington for the early married years, then we up and moved to a Boston suburb so I could take a job and a promotion at an engineering company. Picked up a masters degree at MIT along the way and started my own business ten years earlier. Parents retired in Bradenton, Florida. Dad had been a CPA and Mom a schoolteacher. Older brother a civil servant at NASA; he's married and living with his nice wife and two kids outside Baltimore.

More important to me than sharing our histories was that we were warming up to each other and Kim had regained control of herself. We'd shifted closer and were allowing some subtle touching, even flirting. I didn't want to push things as I might have since I figured Kim was still hurting from her afternoon breakup.

After our glasses were empty, I made a bold move and suggested dinner. "I live about two minutes from here. How about we get some take out and go and eat there? It'll be warmer, and it has a great view of the City."

"Where do you live?" Kim asked.

I pointed nearly straight up. "I have a condo in the building across the street, up on the top floor."

"Wow," was all Kim could muster. She mulled the idea over for about ten seconds, and then said, "Yes. Where do we get take out?"

"There's a food court over there between those buildings. Nothing great, but it'll get us started. I have some stuff to supplement with upstairs."

We settled up for the wine, walked over to the food court, and ten minutes later got off the elevator on my floor of the condo. I suggested she set the food on the floor and close her eyes for minute while I walked her into the condo so she could get the full effect of the view. She did, and I led her with her eyes shut through the door and into the living room.

"Stand there while I pull the curtains back. Keep your eyes shut." I pulled the curtains wide open. Then I said, "OK, now look."

She blinked open. The entire Boston skyline was aglow in the fading sunset, but all the lights in the buildings were coming on and twinkled before her in a spectacular view.

"Oh my God," she said, "This is the most beautiful view I've ever seen."

I retrieved the food from the hallway and moved into the kitchen while Kim stood transfixed by the view, her arms folded across her chest. I'd laid out the Chinese dinners we'd bought in serving dishes and set two places on my dining room table. For once, it was amazingly clear of work and piles of paper. I also put on some Eva Cassidy music softly in background.

"We can move the table in front of the window," I said. "Would you like to?"

"Yes, yes, yes." Kim answered. "I love this view. All I look out on is an alley way."

We both carried the food-laden table over in front of the window and then two chairs. I'd opened some more wine, and she accepted when I gestured from the kitchen. We ate slowly and let our conversation wander where it would. I was enthralled with this young woman, both at her maturity, her work ethic, and her apparent resilience over how she'd been four hours ago. I thought I was probably having some effect on her, but couldn't be sure except for the body language and her eyes -- her beautiful green eyes that could look so deep into my soul.

After dinner, we cleaned up and put the leftovers in my fridge. For the first time in years, it felt comfortable to have a woman around.

I made some coffee and produced two small dishes of ice cream to serve as dessert. We put the table back in the corner and sat side by side on the sofa looking out at Boston at night and listening to the soft jazz. I'm not sure when it happened, but soon she was against me, and then my arm was around her and she was nestled into my neck. We didn't say much; we just sat like that for a long time.

Kim's breathing got heavy and I know she dozed off for a while. I could imagine how exhausted she was from the afternoon and turn of events I'd provided her for the evening. I nuzzled into her hair and kissed her gently. I guess we were both very comfortable with one another.

She sat up at one point and rubbed her eyes.

"Do you want to stay? I have a guest bedroom and a night shirt." I offered.

"Yes." She paused. "Can I sleep here looking at the City?"

"Of course." I rose and returned a minute later with a bath towel; one of my clean running shirts I thought might make a decent nightshirt, a pillow, and a fuzzy blanket. She gave me a sleepy smile and headed for the guest bath.

I headed to my bedroom to wash up. Later I heard her emerge from the bath and head back to the living room. I went in and said, "If you need anything, anything at all, just give me a shout." I paused, and then added softly, "Goodnight Sweetness." She waved from the sofa.

I curled up in my bed and went to sleep almost immediately.

About four o'clock in the morning, I became aware that Kim had climbed onto the bed and been sleeping next to me -- atop the covers but with her blanket and pillow. I smiled to myself and spooned up against her as best I could given the sheet and blankets between us. I put my arm around her and went back to my blissful dreams feeling like the knight in shining armor she'd called me earlier.

I awoke first at seven o'clock, my normal wake-up time. I lay in bed and studied Kim's sleeping face. A lock of hair lazily draped across her cheek, her breathing deep and dreamful, one hand across her chest. This was probably the most beautiful woman I'd ever met. Her face and stature were model quality. Even closed, her eyes looked seductive.

Deep inside you know when you're asleep and someone is watching you. You have the choice of integrating that knowledge into your dream of the moment or waking. Kim smiled in her sleep for a while to indicate she'd done the first. Then her breathing changed and finally about eight o'clock she opened her eyes squinting in the morning sunlight sneaking through the shades.

"Good morning Sweetness," I said softly.

"I wanted to be near you in the night. I hope it's OK that I came in."

I just nodded, then leaned over and kissed her cheek. She snuggled up against me more, and I wrapped my arms around her.

"I'm glad I'm here," Kim whispered, "I'm glad you're here."

"Me too." I kissed her again; this time she turned and our lips met for the first time. We lingered over the kiss and the ones that followed. They weren't particularly passionate, but they did convey the love and tenderness of the moment.