Endless Summer...Or Is It?

(Note to readers: This is an entry in the Summer Lovin' Story Contest 2022, and there is indeed plenty of [physical] lovin', and a whole lot of summer. The story's premise is that climate change is happening, and it will be really bad. Anyone who takes offense at this premise may choose not to read the story. As for the momentous decision made by the main character, between two currently-unlikely choices, the author has no horse in this race. It's the MC's call, in this specific situation, in keeping with his own thinking and feelings. All characters are 18 or older. The sex includes interracial, male-to-female anal, and mild F-F contact within an MFFM foursome.)

***

Rumbling noise surrounded him, ringing his ears and vibrating his limbs. Even through his KevMesh suit he felt stinging, maybe wind-driven ice crystals. The iceberg's plunge towards the thawed slope thrilled him with vertigo, as he flexed his knees and ankles to keep the snowboard in steady contact. Then he saw, just below him, a gush of meltwater, escaping the glacier's innards. The front of the berg splashed into this flood, then the whole thing jerked up and to the left, and he lost contact, upside down, spinning.

The data feed stopped, and without pressure from his suit, he lurched against the foam struts that averted a fall to the floor and possible injury. The headset informed his eyes: The snowboarder construct you rented is no longer able to provide input.

Skylar yanked off the headset, while still leaning awkwardly against the struts. He hadn't been able to ride the berg all the way down, but he huffed hard and fast to fill his lungs. His heart rate had zoomed, the adrenaline rush still thrilled him.

The suit was snug, even when it wasn't applying pressure. He felt his sweat wick into the thin layers. His only discomfort was the grip on his erection.

He pulled the strap at his waist, and the lower half of the suit slid down his legs. When he boarded the bergs that calved, as Greenland become more land and less glacier, the ride usually lasted long enough for him both to get hard and get off. The interruptus of his coitus, which had been happening in the Pussleeve around his cock, left him with a boner. Should I jerk it? he thought in self-mockery. How pre-industrial!

Instead, he let his body slide down to sit on the floor of the strut cage, and thumbed a spot on the Pussleeve that started an auto mode. Bare-ass on the carpet, he let technology pleasure his schwanz.

This is the least of the energy waste I'm causing, he thought. A drone copter in Greenland is now scavenging what's left of the snowboarding bot. The storage shed will then reassemble, repair, and test the bot, all while consuming fuel and spewing waste heat. Hastening even more the opportunities for real estate investing in Greenland.

His self-criticism went no further, as his putz pleasure ramped up. Too late, Skylar thought of getting more stimuli. He'd have to scramble to pick up the headset, then start some porn. But the first rush of his orgasm kept him slumped against the struts. He let it play out, spasm after spurting spasm.

It felt okay. Nowhere near as good as at the finish of a berg ride. Not even as good as sex with a woman.

Skylar got to his feet. His legs wobbled a bit as he left the strut cage. In the bathroom he peeled down the Pussleeve and dropped it in the autosink. As he pissed at the waste niche, he pulled the top of the suit off over his head. With his skin fully exposed, comforted by the cool air for which he paid a fortune, he took stock of how he felt.

Still horny, despite his progress to flaccidity.

Still getting his lungs and heart back to normal.

He decided he'd seek no more physical thrills from virtual input, for the rest of this day. Skylar was 48. His health was at a decent baseline, and while his looks and build were the standardized prime for his genes, he'd had some recent instances of not bouncing back quickly after excessive thrill-seeking. Despite appearances, he was no longer 25. The nanobots in his body should not be overtaxed.

So, then... he thought. Sex with a woman?

He knew that if he removed a filter from his message queue, there would be at least twenty 'invitations' from women who were very attractive, even interesting and witty, and eager to entertain him however he liked. But they were all Uncool.

He had dated four Uncools. He then promised himself he'd never do it again. What these women wanted, and needed, was more than he was willing to give them: The opportunity to spend the rest of their lives in his air conditioning.

Returning to his centerspace, he picked up his black rectangular handheld, and set it in a wall sconce. He enabled the wall to its left to show the real-time video image he would send. He adjusted it vertically from thirty millies above his head to halfway between his navel and the cock base.

Next to the image was a handheld-provided list of his female neighbors who were Cools, and lived alone. Data showed who was at home and willing to receive calls.

He said, "Meredith."

As he waited, facing a spinning circle to the right of the sconce, he flexed his abs, getting sharper definition from the overhead light. Middle-aged men in this generation are like all those who have gone before, he thought. Vain, yet insecure.

The wall bloomed with a life-sized image of a lean, long-limbed woman, seated in a chair both softened for luxury and supported for desk work. Strawberry-blonde tresses tumbled to her shoulders, giving way to a multicolored tunic. She smiled and said, "What a fine load of beefcake! Poor Skylar, is your aircon failing, forcing you to shed heat from your skin?"

He returned a lips-only smile. "The thought of you always heats me excessively. And prompts me to seek your interest in mutual, in-person diversion."

She gave a slight nod. "True, I do enjoy that with you. Even if it means having to cool my air even more to counteract two exerting bodies."

He tried a dig of his own. "Is your aircon failing? I would welcome you into mine."

"Oh no," she said. "A single woman must uphold her safety. We will tryst here, with my home security primed to respond to my alerts."

His nod was mock-obsequious. "As you prefer." He had never been on the wrong side of her home security, and expected that their usual sex need not worry him.

"Bring wine," said Meredith. "I want proof that you're making an effort. Also, I'm going to invite other people."

His brow knit. "Who?"

"I doubt you know them. One man, one woman. I find them quite desirable."

His smile returned. "I see no harm in that."

Meredith's gaze on him was sharp. "And they're Uncool."

His smile vanished. "Why?"

She laughed. "I'll take that to mean, 'Why am I consorting with such people?' And not, 'Why are they Uncool?' They interest me, intellectually as well as physically. Now you will join them as yet another supplicant, placing need above principles." She raised an eyebrow. "Unless these conditions drive you away from me."

He tried to make venom drip from his voice. "You enchant me so much, that your choice of desperate paramours is irrelevant."

"Goodness, you must truly need to sink your dong in a pussy. Bring enough wine for four people to go off the rails."

She ended the call.

***

As his car rolled out of the garage, Skylar ordered the roof to retract. The air temperature was 35 Celsius, which as a boy he had known as 95 Fahrenheit. This was below the recent normal for late August, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

He had decided that in order to appreciate fully what he had, he needed the occasional immersion in what his dwelling held at bay. The direct exposure to the sun wasn't a huge hardship, at this latitude, for the amount of time he'd spend in it.

He told the car to drive to his usual liquor store. The store was one of the structures that was here before the housing boom of refugees from climate change.

There were still isolated moments of 'winter' in the Upper Peninsula. Sometimes in January, jet-stream buckles brought in snow from what was left of the Arctic ice fields. The melt-off counteracted evaporation from the open water of Lake Superior, where the bottom now contained heat exchanger inputs that assisted the air conditioning of the new residents.

Some of the new residents. Abundance did not make cool air cheap, for the swarms of Uncools, who had also migrated here, as much of America became less habitable.

Skylar settled in to the expression affected by most Cools when they were out in the open: Face devoid of emotion, sunglasses totally opaque. He looked up at a stark blue sky, given depth by a few cumulus clouds. Heavy industry in Duluth had collapsed long ago, so the air in the U.P. was among the purest on Earth. So the Uncools get something good from being here, he told himself.

He keyed in his order to the liquor store while still in transit, but specified in-person pickup. Skylar flattered himself that he hadn't cut off completely from human contact in uncontrolled spaces, as so many Cools had done. And when I arrive at Meredith's, he thought in amused mischief, her aircon will have to work that much harder to draw off my heat.

He parked on heat-shimmering concrete and walked perhaps fifteen steps, then manually opened the store's glass door. Hot air gusted with him into the air-conditioned space, and he hauled the door shut more quickly than the pneumatic closer would have.

"Thanks," came a male voice. Skylar took this as recognition of the courtesy of his quick closure. Yet the tone also suggested that the door never should have opened at all, and the customer should have picked up the order from the loading dock.

Despite this, Skylar smiled as he approached the counter, removing his shades. "Hello, Arnold. How's everything?"

"Hot," said the storekeeper, barely adding the smile that went with the years-old joke.

The aircon in the store was minimal, perhaps set higher than 25 C. A small amount of energy lit the video board that showed a calendar of August 2054, and this notice: 'You must be born on or before this day in 2033 to purchase alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, or psychoactives.'

"Nuclear fusion will save us all," said Skylar, extending the joke. "It should be here any day now."

"Fifty-one seventy-eight," said Arnold, glancing at the box of bottles on the counter.

Skylar knew enough to end the repartee. He tapped his left thumbnail with the index nail, enabling his payment chip. He swept the thumbnail across the counter. A chirp sounded. Skylar hefted the box in both hands.

"Let me," said Arnold, scurrying from behind the counter. Skylar waited until Arnold could open the door. Then, quickstepping out made it possible for Arnold to close the door rapidly.

Skylar shook his head as he stowed the box in the trunk. If the store's aircon exceeded an energy limit set by the corporate owner, either Arnold would have to pay a penalty, or the aircon could be cut back. The aircon was timed to the store's open hours only, so Arnold would gain nothing from trying to live there. That night he would return to his home, where he and his family would try to endure with perhaps an hour or two of low-level aircon, mixed in with each person shedding heat in a bathtub full of Lake Superior water.

Some commentators (all of them Cools, as far as Skylar knew) insisted that, a century and more ago, people survived without aircon, and thus should do so now. These statements tended to overlook how summer heat was much worse now, and lasted much longer in the 'temperate' zones, and that in the old days, death from heatstroke was seen as a normal part of life.

I can't do anything about this, Skylar insisted. The world is what it is. I was just born into it. Earlier generations should have prevented this.

***

As the cylindrical door rotated Skylar into the house, Meredith approached with a smile. "Oooh, yaah, welcome to my humble abode." Meredith Oliphant was from Philadelphia. The Yooper accent, voiced by the people who had lived here for generations, drove her giddy from the moment she first heard it. She delighted in trying to imitate it, no matter whom she offended.

Skylar set down the box. "Have your guests arrived?"

"Not yet," she said in her normal voice.

Her hands reached to the back of his neck, while his slid around her slender waist.

He asked, "Should we wait?"

"I don't mind if they find us in flagrante delicto." She closed in for a slow, deep kiss.

As callous and cynical as Meredith acted, Skylar knew she could be sweet and giving as a lover. She molded her lean, supple torso to his, one hand sending fingers through his hair while the other held his upper back, as if she needed his strength. To Skylar, in this initial phase, she seemed vulnerable. Later, if the action shifted to her kinks, she might become boisterous.

He dropped his right arm to the crook of her knees, and hefted her into a bride-carry. His impatience brought from her a surprised "Ohhh!" Also, a tighter grip on him.

He took her to a bedchamber, not caring if it was one she preferred. He set her gently on the wide bed, then straightened to disrobe. He gave her a stern look that belied his delight.

She gazed at him, stretching out on her back. "Yes, you brute," she hissed. "Take me!" Then, with a hint of a smile, "If you can!"

Stripped, erection bounding from his loins, he reached to her hips and pulled away her elastic-waisted trousers. She hefted her butt to assist. As he had found often in their past, she was without underwear.

He then leaned to tower over her and rub a thumb on her clit hood. He found it moist, even this far from her interior. Quickly, but not roughly, he pushed his glans between her labia.

"Yeeesssss," she whimpered, grabbing his sides and pulling him close. "Possess me, Skylar! Own me!"

The feeling of her walls on his driving cock, the slick warm pressure, woke him from a semi-slumber he hadn't realized. This had begun so routinely, Meredith snarky and then nice, but the reality that now immersed his muscles and nerves shocked him. Had his expectations been so low, after the loss of the iceberg ride? My body wants hers, he thought. A pussleeve can only do so much.

"Own you," he mumbled, drawn in to her roleplay. "So I can..."

He was interrupted by a huge rush, shuddering him just shy of climax. He felt her trunk squirm, and lift his.

"Tell me!" she said. "What will my owner do?"

While trying to hold back from orgasm, Skylar said, "Whenever you do something that is your choice, I will stop you, and have you do my bidding!" That was the right attitude, he thought, but too vague.

She led him to an example. "So, when I am crocheting, and at the most difficult moment--"

"I will slap it out of your hands and stuff my dick in your mouth!"

Meredith wailed. Her thighs slammed around his hips, and her torso jerked rapidly. Good enough, I guess, thought Skylar, maintaining his thrusts as her pressure nearly throttled his shaft.

She continued to writhe and spasm. His chest felt her nipples harden, even through her tunic. Her grip on his shoulders and hair raised doubt about who owned whom.

He couldn't recall her ever going this wild from their fucking. Is it because she has these other people on the way? he wondered. Is she excited about the sex, or something else?

He kept pumping as she moaned and flexed. He still drove to her full depth, but slowed, unsure if he could hold back until after she subsided.

He couldn't. But his spurts began while her ecstasy was easing. He yelped, repeatedly. Meredith, despite looking totally wrung out, bucked, repeatedly, to keep milking him.

Pleasure chemicals flooded his brain, overriding some of its other tasks. As the joy spiked through him, he was dimly aware that his mouth hung open, and drooled. It's the ecstasy I have now, he thought. Maybe not better, but different. Now I have feedback from a lover, her touch as surprising as the input from VR.

When his body went limp, he thought his voice might be gone. Meredith was just as limp, but then started chuckling.

"You're pretty lame, as a dom," she said, "but I never need very much of that. Now please get this sack of muscles off of me."

He rolled to the side and rasped, "Did you, um, 'prepare' for this?"

"Certainly. Your attitude on the call suggested that there might not be foreplay." She twiddled a few fingers in mid-air. "I gave my arena a warmup act, while awaiting the headliner."

She sat up, and pulled off her tunic. He appreciated her fully revealed form, sculpted by her own nanobots to defy a few decades of her past. "Stay as you are, including the slime," she told him. "I want us to be inappropriate for my guests."

***

They arrived together, a dark-skinned man and a light-skinned woman, dressed minimally for time spent outdoors. Skylar and Meredith, waiting in her centerspace, sat in loungers surfaced with something that wicked the detritus from Skylar's skin.

"Welcome," said Meredith. "You may help yourself to some wine, and give some to us also."

The man opened the box and the woman went to the kitchen, showing their familiarity with Meredith, and her house, and their acceptance of their roles here.

When Skylar and Meredith had been given their glasses, Meredith said, "Skylar, these are George Hempstead and Solange Duchamps." To the newcomers, "This is Skylar Mendenhall."

"Pleased to meet you," said Solange, from inside the tunic she was removing.

"Same here," said George, chuckling. "Please forgive the immediate garment removal. An Uncool like myself must shed heat whenever possible."

George's eyes flicked towards Solange. Skylar wondered if George's 'myself' had special meaning, with these two Uncools.

"Quite all right, George," said Meredith with a smile. "You are here, after all, to disport with us."

Solange, now nude, stood upright and fluffed out her curly brown hair. Despite Skylar's two recent orgasms, his eyes widened, drinking in what was clearly a display for his benefit. She was tall, long-legged and -necked, with creamy skin accented only by a brown pubic triangle, and tiny red nipples high on small, round breasts. Her face could be thought of as angelic, in the sense of Renaissance paintings, but no more fleshed than the rest of her body. Her blue eyes seemed to paralyze Skylar, without Solange appearing to make an effort.

"As far as I know," said Meredith, "Skylar is entirely straight. So it's no surprise, Solange, that you have the early advantage."

Skylar now had another statement to translate. If this is more of Meredith's role-play, he thought, I'll lose interest in a flash. When riding an iceberg, or space-walking in geosynch, I don't have to deal with mind games.

Meredith told Skylar, "George and Solange are academics. So many of the world's centers of learning have established what they call branch campuses up here, but George's posting is more traditional. He's actually on the faculty of Michigan Tech, leading much of the engineering research."

Noting that Meredith didn't continue, Skylar asked Solange, "And in what way are you not traditional?"

Solange settled on a chair next to Skylar's lounger. "My work is entirely in research and development," she said. With a smile towards George: "I don't have to maintain the fiction of attempting to teach students."