I finally broke the hug and started to clean up the kitchen. Karen gave me more details about Bob and their breakup. It all amounted to her feeling stupid for believing his bullshit stories. I was surprised by some of the details, like the fact that she was a virgin on her wedding night and that they had only had sex 5 or 6 times in their brief marriage.
I assured her that buying Bob's line of crap was not her failure. She was in love and had always been such a trusting soul. I often worried about her falling for some asshole but was apparently powerless to recognize one for myself when it came down to it.
I finished putting things away and loaded the dishwasher as Karen wiped everything down. I said, "I'll get some things and sleep on the couch tonight. Tomorrow I'll get the upstairs cleaned up so you can make yourself at home for a while. I doubt you'll be back in Wilmington for over a week the way things are looking."
She looked at me with those pretty eyes and said, "Please stay with me at least for tonight, Billy. I'm not sure I can spend the night alone after what I've been through today."
I thought to myself, "...or the terrible past few months you've had."
"I'll do whatever you need me to do," I said honestly. "You're safe and dry now. We will both be forced to have a few days of downtime courtesy of Hurricane Florence"
"Downtime is something I haven't experienced since the summer before college," she said. "I'm not sure I'll know what to do."
We walked to the bedroom. I opened the closet to get a couple of extra pillows out and put fresh pillow cases on them. I went to the bathroom and got a new toothbrush out of the cabinet. I kept a few of them just in case.
Karen entered the bathroom and I showed her the toothbrush and where all of the hygiene items were stored then I started to brush my teeth as is my nightly routine. To my surprise she went over to the toilet and pulled down the pajama pants and boxers I had given her and sat down to pee as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
I guess my mouth had fallen open again and she laughed when she saw it. She said, "What's the matter, Billy?" in a sing-song voice. "You've seen a woman pee before, haven't you?"
This was completely true and it brought back a flood of memories. Our parents weren't hippies but nudity was pretty common around our house. In fairness, it was usually only partial nudity involving boxers for men and panties for women. Tops were always optional, especially in the summer months on the family homestead which had no air conditioning. Karen and I were quite close despite the age difference and only our own modesty at puberty caused a little more cover-up.
We touched frequently in our house and evening back rubs were not uncommon when we were in our adolescent years. Karen and I continued that until I went off to college and we lost the ability to spend much time together. The few times we saw one another we were very affectionate with respect to holding hands and kissing lightly on the lips. She seemed to look up to me and enjoy having me around.
The summer Karen turned 18 our parents took an extended trip to Canada to visit distant relatives and they left Karen home since she wanted to spend her last summer with her high school friends. That summer was as hot as any I remember and we were forced to revert to our old habits to cool off while our parents were away. My room was upstairs in the rear of our house and it got almost total shade due to the large, mature trees in the yard. My room had windows on opposite walls making it the only tolerable room in the house when the weather was like this. A gentle cross breeze was common in the summertime.
That summer Karen and I spent countless hours lying on my bed enjoying the breeze and getting to know one another more completely as (almost) adults. The sweltering heat meant that I was usually dressed only in boxers and Karen would only be wearing a thin tank top and panties. There was no other way to stay cool.
We would watch baseball games on TV while we would rub one another's backs and feet as many siblings do. Sometimes talk would turn to more personal things like sex and dating. Karen had been on a few dates but had not had sex yet. As for me, I'd only had sex with one girl at college and she turned out to be flaky so we parted ways soon afterwards. I learned little from it.
One weekend it was well over 100 degrees and Karen suggested (not quite seriously) that we just spend our evenings in the nude for some added relief. Never the one to back down I shucked off my boxers immediately and raised an eyebrow at her as a challenge to do the same. She did and we reverently regarded each other's bodies that first evening and as subsequent evenings came we would increase our examinations and began some light touching. Neither of us being experienced in sexual matters, it was a significant bonding experience for us.
She encouraged me to touch her breasts which were beautiful and quite firm. There were freckles on them and her nipples were almost invisible pink. She asked if men liked larger breasts, since it was almost universally accepted that this was true, and I told her that I considered the slightly smaller ones that stood up much sexier. She informed me that hers were B cups.
I was most fascinated with her thick, dark brown pubic hair. It was perfectly-shaped like a triangle and as dense as any I've seen even to this day. She encouraged me to lightly rub it and she would close her eyes and coo in the most adorable feminine way. I never strayed south of that because I just wasn't comfortable with the possibility of messing things up with someone so precious to me. I'm almost positive that she would have let me but the consequences could have been disastrous.
She loved my thick chest hair and six-pack abs. She had a thousand questions about my cock and I permitted her to ask anything she wished. She asked why it was soft sometimes and harder at other times and we talked about male sexual arousal in a very clinical way. This obviously meant that I divulged to her that she commonly aroused me by virtue of the fact that I was usually hard when we shared our special, private times. I allowed her to handle it as kind of an educational experience. She never got to touch it when it was soft, as was her desire, because it could never be soft when she showed the slightest interest in it. Again, she never asked for anything more than a curious examination and I'm not sure I could have told her "no" if she had.
One particularly hot afternoon we decided to skinny dip in the creek behind our house. Our closest neighbors were about a mile and a half away so we didn't worry about anyone seeing us, but the creek was about 100 yards from the back door and she insisted we run the entire way naked. I further challenged her to be brave enough to walk the entire length slowly, hand-in-hand. We giggled like the fools we were. The deepest part of the creek near our house was only about 4 feet deep so we had to bend our knees to stay mostly submerged.
Over the next few evenings we repeated this activity and we would hold onto one another in the creek which gave us ample opportunity for skin to skin contact. We would talk about school, family and even our life's ambitions. Our emotional bond grew stronger and I developed the opinion that she was quite a remarkable young lady.
Sometimes we would spoon in the water, staring off into nothing and just enjoying the sensations of touch. We talked about anything, everything and nothing as if we were the only people in the world. The smell of her shampoo and the feel of her skin as the water meandered slowly around us made me feel intoxicated. The coolness of the creek usually kept my cock soft but on occasion it would misbehave and Karen would poke fun at my discomfort.
One time she announced that she was going to pee and I cupped her vagina with my hand, reveling in the thick bushy curls or her pubis. This was absolutely the only time that I ever let my hand go down there. She squealed that she couldn't go with my hand there but I playfully refused to remove it telling her that if she really had to go then it wouldn't be a problem. After a while I felt the first bit of warmth escape her and then she was finally able to let loose after she relaxed a bit.
