Camp Story

The wind moved through the pine trees and ruffled the water on the surface of the lake. I shivered a little and pulled my hoodie tighter around my round body, looking out over the water.

It was the final night of the week-long church camp my parents had sent me on, and I was trying to figure out how I was feeling about it.

I had refused to go at first, arguing that I was eighteen and they couldn't make me, but the day I learned that Alex Fetterwain was going to go, I'd told my mom to sign me up, trying to give the impression that I was giving in entirely to please her and dad.

I'd had an enormous crush on Alex for years, and the thought of being near him in a romantic mountain forest, with so many excuses to get close and make him see that I wasn't just the nerdy fat girl from Spanish class, that I had spiritual and intellectual depths and that -- although I might be sexually inexperienced in physical terms -- I had read a lot of fic and was willing to do anything to please him.

And on that front the week had turned out to be a gigantic disappointment. Alex had given as little indication that he knew I existed here in this pine-woods retreat space, surrounded by some fifty or sixty campers and counselors, as he had ever done back in school, surrounded by fifteen hundred or so students and faculty.

But it hadn't been all a horrible, tragic waste of time. One of the counselors, a college senior named Melissa, had seemed to make it her particular mission to draw me out of my shell, asking me questions about the anime boys I was doodling in my notebook and, when she had eventually dug far enough to learn that I was interested in poetry, she had been so excited to hear me read it, and so genuinely complimentary once I did, that I could feel myself starting to develop a little bit of a crush on her as well.

And that, maybe, was ultimately why I was out here on the narrow, rickety dock looking over the lake while the dining hall-slash-auditorium up the hill behind me echoed with giddy laughter and shouts and the clang of folding chairs being either set up or put away or both -- I wasn't entirely sure what was next on the schedule, and didn't care: I had come out here to be alone, and try to make sense of my thoughts.

My crush on Alex had always been safely impractical in the sense that I never had really had to risk anything, since there was such a small chance that he would ever notice my adoration, much less return it. But as long as it had lasted, it meant that I didn't have to waste time thinking about any other romantic thoughts or feelings; my loyalty to Alex gave me permission to ignore anyone that I could conceive of as lesser, which had been anyone else in the high school.

But Melissa was not lesser. Not just in terms of age, either, although her friendly, open smile and easy sense of authority undoubtedly made him look like a sullen, self-absorbed, posturing teenager by comparison. She was also taller than he was by several inches -- it was with a little bit of a shock that I realized early on in the camp week that he was actually a little short for a senior, since in my dreamy-eyed gazing from a distance he had always seemed to loom so large -- and in the campers versus counselors basketball game on Wednesday, she and the other counselors had cleaned the clocks of the high school boys who had cockily refused to let any girls play. Alex had been a superstar in JV basketball when we were freshmen, but he had switched to football since then, and ended up looking clumsy and red-faced on the court. Melissa's smile, on the other hand, seemed to only glow more strongly as the sweat gathered in a sheen on her light brown skin.

Oh, that's right -- Melissa was also black. Our suburban high school had very few students of color, and none of them were on this church trip. My parents had never explicitly brought up race in the household, but I had an uneasy feeling that, as disapproving as they would undoubtedly be if I were to mention that I might be harboring a crush on another girl, they would be all the more bewildered, and wonder where they had gone wrong with me, when they saw what she looked like.

Not that Melissa was not stunningly beautiful. Her matte black natural hair was springy and curly, blossoming out from her head in a manner that resembled fireworks, although she usually wore a bandana tying it down in front so that it only puffed out the back, like a peacock's tail. Her brown eyes were kind, and quick to take in everything that was going on, and her body was strong and athletic, with supple curves that made me feel almost dirty when I looked at her walking from behind in shorts.

And however my parents might react, it wasn't that I was feeling particularly horrified about having feelings for a girl. I had always kind of expected to be a little bit bisexual, ever since I got involved in my first online fandoms as a pre-teen. But I had never actually experienced bisexual feelings before, and the social consequences were looming very urgently in my mind, far more so than any angsty questions about identity. This was, after all, a church camp.

The different speakers over the course of the week had all had slightly different attitudes, and none of them had actually said anything as direct as "gay people are going to hell," but one of them had used "woke" as a pejorative and another one had made a joke about God loving even liberals with blue hair. (One or two kids had glanced at me. There were still some purple highlights in my own hair from junior year, but they were hard to see against the fading black that I had dyed it since.) Melissa's own testimony, during the counselors' introductions in the first session, had been brief, referring to growing up in a church that loved like family and a family that loved like church. She was so friendly and open -- and she was a college senior! She wouldn't be scandalized by my being bisexual, I thought; although she might not appreciate being the object of a high school student's crush. In a way that I never had when I had mooned over the inaccessibly popular Alex, I felt embarrassed and shy about the difference in her and my social standing.

All of this was running through my head when I heard a creak on the dock behind me, and a slight wobble that meant someone else had stepped onto it. I turned around, squinting because the sun's orange glow, still shining over the lake, had already dropped into shadow behind me.

I could recognize the slim, taut body, poof of hair, and bright smile of Melissa, who gave a little wave. I smiled and waved back, but my gaze fell quickly. I felt a sudden pounding in my chest. She came up, the dock creaking under her.

"Hey Lydia," she said, and touched me on the shoulder, very gently, but I felt as though the very slight pressure I could feel through my hoodie would leave a mark like a scald. "We're getting ready for the last session. Everyone's putting in the songs they want to sing. Worship songs," she added, with another quick smile, and a kind of I-know-it's-silly-but-it's-church-camp-after-all shake of her head. "Did you want to join us?"

"Yeah," I said, hating how thick and stupid I found my voice in the moment. "Yeah, okay. I'll put in 'Awesome God,' if no one else has." I hesitated, and looked back at the lake, glowing pink in the reflection of the sunset above it. "I'll be up in a little bit."

She nodded, and stood for a little bit with her fingertips just grazing my shoulder, looking out over the pink lake with me.

"Beautiful," she said softly.

I almost said "No, you are," but I bit my lip and buried my chin in my chest instead. She gave my shoulder one last squeeze, and said,

"I'll hold a seat for you." The dock creaked as she moved away, and I balled my fists in my pockets and told myself how stupid I was, but without making it clear whether it was for not saying it out loud or for thinking it in the first place.

One the crunch of her tennis shoes in the gravel beyond the shore had faded into silence, I lay down on my back and looked up at the sky. The pink was already beginning to fade from the eastern sky, and I could already see the twinkle of stars in the desaturated gray-blue that wasn't quite black yet, because the sun hadn't quite gone down.

"God," I said out loud, not as a prayer but from a kind of impatience with my own overflowing emotions, "I just want to know."

What I meant by that was hard to articulate. I was feeling uncertain about so many different things, and maybe oddly the one that made me the most unhappy was a feeling of being disloyal to the years-long crush I had harbored on Alex. After all, he and I would both be going back to school, and he would be there to be mooned over again for the rest of the semester, and Melissa would be where? I only had the vaguest idea where the college she had mentioned in her introduction was. Out of sight, out of mind, surely; a camp crush, quickly inflamed, quickly extinguished. But I could still feel where her fingers had grazed my shoulder.

The dock shook again, but not behind me; from in front. Frowning, I raised up on my elbows to peer at the end of the dock, and saw Melissa climbing up the ladder that led down to the canoes. I stared at her in confusion: I had seen her and the other counselors pull all the canoes out of the water and put them in storage for the next campers. And there was no path, as far as I knew, down to the bottom of the dock. It was just water below us.

But it was definitely Melissa, smiling her brilliant smile, and approaching me. She knelt down in front of me and looked into my eyes.

"What----" I said, but she put a slim brown finger to my lips and shook her head softly. Her curls bounced in the dim light. Her finger remained on my lips; I felt both ecstatic and paralyzed. At last, shyly, looking at her for any hint that it would be received in the right spirit, I moved my lips and gave the finger the gentlest, least demanding kiss.

She grinned even more broadly at that, and her hand went around my cheek and caressed it. I couldn't help uttering a little moan. I had no idea why she was doing this, what secrets of mind-reading she had access to -- none of it made any sense to my moonstruck teenage mind. And even as the shadow of the phrase "taking advantage of the weird loner fat girl who no one would believe" flittered across my mind, I felt her other hand on my thigh, and I didn't care. She could do whatever she wanted.

She stroked both my thigh and my cheek with smooth, gentle caresses, looking into my eyes. Her eyebrows raised with a question. I nodded. "Please," I whispered. Her hand moved up my thigh, towards my denim-clad crotch, and I trembled in anticipation.

As the last remnants of the sunset faded from the sky, and the stars twinkled overhead in brighter profusion than my suburb-reared eyes had ever seen in their life before, she unzipped my jeans and slipped her hand down the waistband of my panties. I bit my lip, watching her face, and she smiled, watching mine.

Very gently, her fingers stroked against the hairy, tender flesh of my young, uninitiated pussy. I blushed at the contrast between her slim, strong brown fingers and my soft, yielding, pallid loins; but she ran the tip of her tongue across her lips, and looked into my eyes with clear hunger on her face, and her finger slipped with the confidence of long practice between my labia and penetrated into my warm, moist depths. I let out a long, ragged breath, hardly able to believe this was happening, but almost sobbing with gratitude that it was.

The pressure of her hand against my pubic mound, the friction of her finger inside me, and the unbelievable heat caused by the fact that I could hear singing begin in the hall behind me, which meant that we were being the naughtiest, most reckless church camper and church counselor in the whole world at that moment, all combined to bring about the fastest and most intense orgasm I had ever experienced, at least as compared to the hundreds I had given myself ever since I discovered fanfic.

I lay back, panting, on the cool planks of the dock, and looked up at the stars, which twinkled brightly in a black velvet sky.

"Oh my God," I gasped. "Oh my God. Thank you. I can't believe it." There was no answer. When I finally recovered enough to look up at her, she was nowhere to be seen.

I blinked. I hadn't noticed the shaking of the dock in either direction that would indicate her walking away. There had been no splash to suggest she had fallen -- or jumped -- into the lake. She was simply gone.

Reasoning that I just hadn't noticed the dock shaking because of my own aftershocks, I zipped my pants back up and rose woozily to my feet. I felt all aglow; more certain of myself and happier than I could ever remember feeling before. The most unlikely thing in the world had happened, and it was exactly what I had wanted -- no, beyond that, what I had not even dared to dream was possible to want. I felt like I could run a marathon, fight a bear, write a bestseller, or jump to the moon.

The moon's silvery crescent was just beginning to peep over the tree line as I made my way uphill to the hall where fifty or sixty voices were raised in a chorus of "I Can Only Imagine," giggling to myself as I half-walked, half-skipped up the path with my hands in my hoodie pockets, as giddy as a colt.

Melissa's eyes were the first ones I found when I entered the room; her brilliant smile indicated an open seat next to her, and I almost ran to take it.

"Glad you could make it," she whispered between verses.

"Of course!" I said, beaming at her. I looked at her hand, sitting in her lap, and on impulse grabbed it in mine and pulled it up to my lips and kissed the back of the finger that had so recently been inside me. There was no scent or taste left on it, of course; she must have wiped herself clean before joining the crowd.

She looked at me with her head cocked curiously, her smile as bright as ever, while her eyes studied my glowing face. I gave her a confidential smile, and nodded, and then joined in singing the next verse as lustily as though I were filled with the Holy Spirit.

When "Awesome God" came up, she put her arm around my shoulder, and we sang together -- I was surprised to hear her pick out a perfect harmony to my not very accurate melody -- swaying in time to the music.

The rest of the night was a blur of music and feeling extremely happy just to be in physical proximity to her; when the session finally broke up for bedtime, she walked me to my cabin and said, again, that she was glad I had come for the singing. I didn't tell her that I had come for the chance to be close to her, but I squeezed her hand shyly and meant it.

In the morning, as everyone was lugging their bags out to the bus for the hours-long ride back to the church where our various parents and other rides were scheduled to pick us up in the early evening, she approached me one more time, a rucksack slung against one shoulder.

"Hey Lydia," she said, her fingers once more grazing my shoulder, but resting there just a touch more firmly than they had the night before. "I have an open spot in my car, if you want to ride with me, instead of on the bus."

I looked at her with astonished glee, the manic smile that broke out on my face saying yes long before I remembered to nod and use my words.

"Great," she said, indicating her beat-up compact. "Just toss your bags in the back there, and we can get going once everyone else is on the road."

The ride up the mountain had felt agonizingly long in the bus at the beginning of the week, but any time with Melissa felt all too short as she raced through switchback after switchback with the untroubled confidence of a masterful driver.

We talked for hours in that car, about my hopes and fears, what I was thinking about doing after high school, the family I had grown up in. She told me too about herself -- raised in a black Pentecostal church, singing in the choir, involved in the church's soup kitchens and prison outreach from a young age, sports in high school, her college studies. Nothing, all the way down the mountain, about her sexuality, or mine -- it was all the conversation that any curious and sympathetic church camp counselor would have with a church camper.

But once we hit the foothills and she could ramp up her car's speed on the highway and leave the bus far behind, she threw me a brilliant smile.

"So, Lydia," she said. "Got a boyfriend?"

I blushed, and looked adoringly at her.

"No."

She cocked an eyebrow. "Girlfriend?"

I blushed even more, and twisted my hands in my lap, not realizing that I was pushing my plump breasts together between my arms and giving myself a deep cleavage.

"Not yet," I whispered.

She gave no indication that she had heard me over the roar of the motor, but the next time she glanced over at me again her face wore, for the first time since, the expression it had had on the dock -- hungry.

"Listen," she said. "You're eighteen, right?"

I nodded quickly.

"And you like girls, right?"

I blushed furiously, but nodded.

She grinned.

"There's a motel diner," she said. "Three hours up the road. By the time we get there, the bus will be hours behind us. Feel like stopping?"

"Yes," I blurted out much more loudly than I had anticipated, but she only smiled.

"Thought so," she said. "I can always tell."

She put on a CD and introduced me to a smoky, angelic-voiced singer from somewhere in Africa -- I wasn't paying close attention -- who sang about sex and love over humid, rustling beats. I looked at her in the driver's seat in the glow of the morning sun and tried to find the contours of her body beneath her clothes.

The miles flew by. We talked less frequently, but with more depth. I confessed my crush on Alex, with the disdain of someone who had long since outgrown it. She laughed at my description of him compared to her, but reached over to me and we held hands as she drove a long flat dull stretch of highway. She told me that she was gay, but not out to her family or the church. She didn't appear to be bothered by it, and seemed to believe that it was none of their business.

The motel diner came up; she pulled into its lot and we stumbled out with the slightly seasick legs of people who have been in a car too long. We ate a quick and greasy diner lunch, and then she went up to the desk and asked for a room by the hour. She came back to me finishing my fries in the booth, dangling the key from one finger.

"Nervous?" she asked.

I looked up at her, surprised.

"Not with you," I said. She smiled, and took me to the room.

It was a dingy, musty little motel room, with the memory of decades-old cigarette smoke in the curtains and carpet, but the bed sheets were clean. She pulled her top -- shirt, jacket, and sports bra -- off in one clean motion, and I stared in wonder at the sudden appearance of her slim, bouncing brown breasts.

She grinned at my amazement while she worked her shorts down her thighs.

"Now you," she said. "I want to see that cute little body."

I flushed with surprised pleasure at being called cute, and began to shyly undress. I didn't get very far, though, before she crossed over to me and took my face in her hands and kissed me deeply.

"Hey Lydia," she said, in a breathless murmur once she broke the kiss -- I could barely hear her over the sound of my heart hammering -- "Did you know I wanted to do that since I saw you the first day?"

I looked up at her, dazed.

"You wanted me?"

She nodded, her smile wide.

"Goth church girl pussy is the best pussy," she said, and kissed me again. I felt myself melting under her, unable to do anything but respond to her vivid, confident touch and glowing, red-hot words -- and before long she had moved me onto the bed, removed all my clothes, and spread my plump white thighs wide to bury her face in my tender, flushed, curly-headed pussy.