Road Trip - California

This is a stand-alone story as well as the thirty-sixth and final episode in my Road Trip Series. At the end of this episode, are a few author's comments. This episode is a little longer than earlier episodes, a fitting end to the epic road trip. In this story, Jim's past experiences are referred, but not in detail that reading those stories would provide. A list of all episodes (in order) appears at the end of this posting. Read, enjoy, vote, and comment.

Road Trip -- California

Endings and Beginnings With Sister, Sister-In-Law, and Lover

I started the morning in Reno after a sex-filled day or two with Crystal, Daisy, Julia, and Craig. I'd visited Lake Tahoe, saw the western edge of Yosemite, verified that Tioga Pass was closed for the season, and used Mono Lake as a rest stop. I rode my Harley motorcycle in the arid valley on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevadas, admiring the towering mountain vistas at every turn. The weather was clear but cold.

Bishop, California, where I stayed overnight, had little to offer me. The town catered to fishermen and my motel room even had a slight taint of rotten fish in it. After I stopped, I went for a run and did additional exercises in a field behind the motel including four-hundred sit-ups. After a dinner at a greasy spoon, I practiced my guitar, worked on my journal, and sent my usual erotic emails detailing the sexual romps in Reno to Lauren and Anna -- my sister-in-law and sister. We have unique relationships.

The music I chose to practice had been mellow verging on the melancholy, and it put me in a thoughtful mood that carried over into the next day when I continued beside the Sierra Nevada mountains down the Owens Valley. I crossed part of the desert east of San Bernardino and aimed for Anna's home in San Diego.

I thought about Lauren, my sister-in-law, as I started my ride from Bishop -- sexy, erotic, horny, and competent Lauren. She taught nursing at a hospital in Vermont, and if I ever got sick she'd be the nurse I'd want: curvy in all the right places, blond, blue eyes, fun, and flirty, plus I knew she'd look out for my best interests. Lauren also bore an uncanny resemblance to her sister -- my late wife Karen. She looked so much like her that I had to question my motives for visiting her, and later for falling in love with her more than I had when her sister was alive.

When I'd started my road trip across the country, Lauren had been my first stop. I spent several days with her, and to my surprise we made love incessantly. I guess our feelings for one another had simmered beneath the surface while I'd been married, and then when I showed up in Vermont they exploded into flames in the open air.

I loved Lauren. I found I had the same warm, protective, deep, and loving feelings for her that I'd had for Karen. She felt the same way about me. She was divorced, and not at all ready to leap back into any dedicated, long-term 'thing' -- as she put it. That said, she went out of her way to be in touch, to excite me, to love me, and to appreciate me. She even flew out to Indianapolis for one night to see one of my first concerts as a country music star.

Lauren willingly flaunted her sexual nature, joining in a small orgy after the concert, and expressing her pleasure over the email and phone sex we shared. As she requested, I'd sent her vivid and detailed descriptions of most of my sexual activities as my trip progressed. She turned me on when she told me she masturbated with her 'pet' vibrator to most of them. She often replied and gave me some ideas or techniques to explore -- sexual ones.

Lauren also had disclosed to me some secrets about Karen that my wife had never shared with me: her bisexual nature -- including incestuous interactions with Lauren, her past living in a group situation based on a lot of partner sharing, and even her occasional predilection to pick up a stranger and fuck his brains out -- mostly before we married. Lauren teased me that she might have other secrets, but she'd never shared anything further with me. At this point, I couldn't think what might surprise me about her.

My road trip on the 1988 Harley Davidson Heritage Softail had started with the goal to assuage the pain I felt over losing Karen. As I went along, I also struggled with those secrets until I finally gave up and accepted that I loved Karen anyway, and that her past actions hadn't changed anything about our marriage. As I did this, I realized my own mores had changed.

I'd been a geek -- a computer nerd who made good money creating systems and websites that got results for the clients of the company I worked for. But, I'd had little sexual experience, mostly in college, and thought of the world in stereotypical conservative terms. Thus, when Lauren told me about Karen's pre-marital activities, I was shocked since they were so far outside my sphere of acceptance at the time. I couldn't imagine anyone doing those things -- and that was only ten months ago.

Lauren had always urged me to 'get the stick out of my ass' and to go with the flow more -- to move into the new age. Maybe she got me in motion. She also predicted that my road trip would be filled with sexual adventures. I didn't believe her, and as I rode into the desert south of Bishop, I knew she'd been right. Not that I was keeping score, but I guessed I'd fucked over seventy-five women in the six months since I'd left Lauren's bed the first week in June.

Lauren gave me space to be myself and to come to grips with losing Karen -- and to come to grips with my new sexuality. She'd laid her 'secrets' out for me, and then let me figure out how to cope with them. She had her own 'head work' to do about her sister. She'd told me she'd be there for me if I wanted her at the end of my trip, not as a look-alike for Karen, but as Lauren, a woman I had to love as a unique individual on her own terms.

Some of my first sexual adventures on my trip were with women in polyamorous situations -- loving groups that extended their love to me. Over time, I learned the situations were far from unique; groups like those existed all across the country, most just chose not to flaunt it. Backward laws in some states even forbade such arrangements; I guess our legislators like to limit how much love we can have.

As I enjoyed the loving and sex in these situations, I also learned a lot about myself and my potential for expanded loving relationships. I slowly gave up the rigidly defined roles I'd held about relationships or marriage. I'd been using a model of what a husband and wife had to be that belonged in the 1940s and 1950s. Karen must have loved me so much to tolerate my mindset when she was so free thinking, knowledgeable, and experienced. We didn't talk about that stuff too much, yet, as I thought about it, she'd been working on loosening me up about sexual things.

A couple of times, Karen had tried to get me hyped up about her sister. We'd been making love, and she started to talk dirty to me, using words like fuck, cock, cunt, and cum, and so forth, over and over again. She'd describe a situation where I was fucking two women -- her and her sister Lauren. I let the moments roll away after our orgasms, but now I saw she might have been setting the stage for a threesome ... and then she got sick. After seeing Lauren in June, I knew she would have been an eager participant in that threesome.

As I rode, my thoughts drifted further into my trip to where I met Kim in North Carolina -- the sister of a woman named June who I made love to in Pennsylvania along with two other women. June had made my heart beat fast, but I fell in love with Kim -- a married woman. She was the kind of woman that men like me could easily worship. Kim taught me that relationships are flexible, that they should be defined by the people in them and not by society; however, others might try. She saw nothing wrong with loving many partners, and I adopted that philosophy as well. She also taught me about Tantric sex and practices that let me come multiple times and to extend intercourse indefinitely whenever I wanted. We practiced a lot. Ron, Kim's older husband, gave me a different role model as to how he thought about his sexy wife -- and all women; a very broad-minded view. He shared her views, and he shared Kim with me.

Kim taught me about exhibitionism. She and I made love on her pool deck as her husband watched us from an upstairs window and masturbated. Up to that point, I couldn't imagine having a man watch me have sex with his partner. Having another women around while I loved her friend or didn't bother me -- well, they inspired me. Kim made me stretch my boundaries, not to a gay experience, but to new experiences in the presence of others.

In Florida, I became part of another polyamorous group, and before I left, I'd made love to five different women and broadened my boundaries even further. Two of the women were a mother-daughter pair that had moved beyond that familial designation to be occasional lesbian lovers along with the other women. The men partook of the women as they wanted or as the women wanted. The place was so serene. The relationships carried no drama and jealousy.

* * * * *

The Harley hummed as I rode down a long curve in the highway. I had changed the oil and done a tune-up Reno; so I knew the machine was in top condition. I'd need another set of tires sometime soon.

After a rest stop, I thought about Crystal. She'd changed my life in more ways than I could count. She continued to loosen me up, building on what Karen and Lauren had started. After we'd known each other for a while, I called her my nymphomaniac, and she called me her man slut. We both admitted to slutdom -- loving sex in large doses without regrets, and positively without any guilt owed to the memes that society or the churches passed down about the subject.

When I met her, Crystal Lee had reached her stardom as a country music singer. She'd had several hit songs including Flirty, Flirty Cowgirl that were still on the charts. I played good samaritan to help her stranded tour bus, and the next I knew she had me in a studio doing a duet with her on a new song, Texas Dawn. That was four months ago. Sony Music rushed the song to market along with Crystal's album by the same name on which I sang a couple of other songs with her. The song skyrocketed in the charts and hasn't come down yet. When I talked to Terry, our agent, he told me it had set all sorts of sales records in every kind of media outlet.

I liked to sing, and still feel awed that so many other people like to listen to me too. Sony had also done an album of my songs that catapulted into one of the top selling recordings. That said, I was still learning the guitar, and had a repertoire of about twenty songs I could play that I didn't think embarrassed me. Being in music jolted me further out of the conservative 'computer geek' existence I'd had. As I passed another scenic vista, I knew I could never go back to that old life.

The day Crystal and I met, she and I had been asked by a couple of paparazzi near the studio whether we were an 'item.' In movies, TV, and music, to name three, an 'item' means a couple worth reporting on. We were both in a flippant mood, and so we responded as though we were. Crystal later admitted that she knew what the fallout might be. Overnight, apparently on a slow news week, we became the couple that everyone wanted to know something about. We were even featured on the cover and discussed in a long article in People magazine. Suddenly, I became famous, albeit in Crystal's aura. Crystal and I spent a lot of time together, and even when we were apart we talked, texted, or emailed each other incessantly. We fell in love and became a real 'item.'

Crystal and I enjoyed a robust sex life from the time we first met. She 'got off' on hearing about my sexual exploits, and nothing I'd done seemed to shock her -- she told me she wanted more, more, more! We did more, more, more! Along with Lauren, she became the second person I shared my erotic experiences with as I continued across the country, usually in phone calls at night.

Having been open about our sexual experiences and fantasies, involving her sister Ellen, proved to be nothing but natural and fun. Ellen was younger, but just as loveable. Crystal and Ellen openly enjoyed a sexual relationship with each other, and I became a willing party to their open relationship. Around the time I met Crystal, Ellen, and Terry, our agent, formed a relationship as open to sexual play as Crystal and I were.

The four of us were having a sexual foursome in the back of a boat on a lake outside Branson, when we were photographed by a paparazzo. We'd been deep into private property, yet I felt violated when we saw him. He ran, but with a Herculean effort, we tracked him down, and that night I did a stealth raid on his motel room and removed the memory card from his camera. We were lucky; he hadn't done anything with the pictures yet. He made an accurate guess about who had robbed him of his big scoop, and so he started stalking Crystal and me, making trouble at one of our press events, pestering us in other ways, and even taking a pot shot at me. Less than a week earlier in the middle of the night in a motel in Reno, some buddies from my days in the Army Special Operations helped me put an end to his shenanigans in a relatively peaceful manner.

I left the Army over ten years earlier, yet retained many of the skills I'd picked up as a Green Beret. I remained fit, still pushing my body to its limits. I maintained contact with many of guys who had been in my company the way a guy often does, a rare email or phone call, but we always picked up where we left off. When you train together and go on missions together -- possibly life ending missions, you form deep bonds that last forever. We would always move to help one of our brethren.

On a stopover visit in Ohio with one of my ex-brothers-in-arms, George asked me to father a child with his beautiful wife Summer. He was sterile, possibly because of damage sustained on one of the missions we'd been on. After much thought, I helped. Summer and I became close and loving. Now, she was four months pregnant with my child, and the couple was ecstatic about the coming birth. I would be the godfather after the birth. When I told Crystal about what I'd done, she got all mushy, and I could tell I'd triggered some mothering hormones.

* * * * *

I rode through the small berg of Lone Pine. Off to my right, I could see the snow-capped top of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the lower forty-eight. In between, dozens of other mountains proved that this had been a rough place on earth in some prehistoric time. The Sierras were beautiful.

I took a rest stop in the middle of the Owens Valley, right across from what had once been Owens Lake. Now, the lake was only a dry salt bed, the waters flowing into it long diverted to quench the thirst of Los Angeles, almost two hundred miles away.

As I walked around and checked my motorcycle, my thoughts turned to one other important woman in my life -- my sister Anna. Younger by a year, she was a beauty, but her teenage rebellion resulted in her going to college as far away as she could go on the west coast, and she never made it back to Massachusetts after that except on a rare visit.

I'd been a year ahead of her in school, and went into Army Special Forces out of high school. I disappeared for almost ten years in the Army, and didn't see Anna at all. I think we might have talked on the phone a few times, and I sent cards on special occasions. I missed her wedding; as I recall, I was secretly involved in a small war in Chad.

Anna's marriage lasted just under ten years. They had two children -- a boy and a girl who were now around eleven and twelve. I'd only seen pictures of them, and sent them presents from strange places around the world. I'd been the missing uncle in their lives.

I saw Anna when my father died and about five years later when Karen and I got married. She came back to Dillon, Massachusetts for the funeral and to comfort our mother, and to be a matron of honor in the wedding. She stayed a few weeks each visit, and later I learned she was escaping from the crumbling relationship she was in. Anna described him as a good guy and an impeccable father, just a lousy husband.

I saw Anna three years after my wedding, again in Dillon, when our mother died. By then, Anna was happily divorced, had a budding career, and was struggling to get her life back in high gear. We spent hours talking, even sitting up all night with two bottles of wine reconnecting with each other. That night was so intimate, and it was as though it happened yesterday.

When Karen died, Anna had come to my side instantly. Her ex took the kids, and she flew back to Massachusetts. I'd been talking to her frequently after Karen got sick, and as she eroded away in her last month of life. After Karen's death, Anna held me for two days when all I could do was cry uncontrollably. She made the funeral and memorial service arrangements for me; I was too devastated. In that time, I could feel her love like never before, and on so many different levels.

Anna suggested the cross-country trip to her home in San Diego, partly as a way to get over my grief. I turned her suggestion into a twisted scribble across a map of the forty-eight that would take me to each state. Someday, I'd even do Alaska and Hawaii.

As she left to return to California, Anna gave me a kiss that burned the moment into my soul. No sister ever kissed her brother that way. The kiss shocked me, and upon reflection after she'd left for the airport gave me warm, loving, and sexual thoughts about her. In the middle of my road trip, I visited a shrink in Nebraska, and she bore right in on my relationship with Anna, including that I might be more than willing to change the basis of our relationship from brother-sister to that of lovers. Any strictures on incest didn't seem to bother me by then. I was loosening up.

Since Missouri, I had shared with Anna the same erotic details of my sexual adventures that I wrote to Lauren and Crystal. She hadn't asked, I just started to send the emails to her. For a long time, all I got was silence that I decided to take as acceptance and interest in what I sent her however, only a week or so earlier, Anna had told me on a call to not stop -- to keep sending them to her. She'd been so explicit in her interest, that I found myself pleasantly shocked, and I again felt that intimacy with her that I'd missed for so long.

I recall thinking that I'd find out what she really thought soon enough because by then I had only a few hours of travel to her home.

* * * * *

The valley I'd ridden in almost the entire way from Reno to Southern California was desert. Everyone knew the interesting coast of the state with magnificent views of the Pacific Ocean, but not the hidden beauty and desolation in the desert. For miles, I had been the only vehicle on the road.

The beautiful desolation changed near Palmdale when I started to see large tracts of land with housing developments on them. Soon, I was in high density California. The traffic increased. North of San Bernardino, I gave up on my informal rule about staying off Interstates, and I got on Interstate 15. Three hours later, the GPS on my iPhone deposited me in my sister's driveway in a San Diego subdivision.

I'd traveled over 15,000 miles on the Harley on this road trip. I stood in the driveway and for a moment admired the bike that had become a part of me in the six months since I started. The bike wasn't as pristine as it had been after I'd rebuilt it from the ground up; for instance, the nasty scrapes down the right side reminded me of the tornado in Kansas that I'd been lucky to survive. I had resisted anthropomorphizing the machine by giving it a name or talking to it. Yet, as I turned to go to Anna's front door, I patted the bike, and said aloud, "Thank You."