KOI 13: Dusky Rose

Dusky Rose (KOI 13)

Columbia. June, 1974

"I don't know," Gary smiled softly. "Some of it's sort of kinky. But Sherrie asked for you to have it.

"I... don't think I want to keep any of it," he added.

It was one of those watershed weeks provided by baroque collegiate logistics. With about twenty credits left toward his comp sci baccalaureate, Danny the redneck programming prodigy had been nominated and accepted for a fall semester's paid internship way out in sunny south California. It would delay his graduation by six months, and the incidental expenses would wipe out his scant savings, but the internship had the strong probability of leading to a real job... not to mention sending Danny to the Promised Land his Okie heritage made irresistible.

But Danny and Candi's trailer court lease ran through December. Not one to voluntarily lose their rent deposit, Danny hustled to make his interim arrangements. There was a small house in town that a departing friend had leased through July. It was a one-bedroom dump, but rented at no more cost than the trailer. Danny and Candi subleased the rest of the term on the house. I subleased the rest of the term on their trailer. After landing a clerical job on her very first Columbia interview, Becca rode in with her new Gremlin to provide the wheels to span the distance between the trailer court and College Town.

Our wedding had been set for the following Christmas. It was a shame Sherrie couldn't be one of the wedding party.

Sher's cancer had reappeared with terrible virulence in the winter of 1974. It was all over in little more than a month. Gary and she had lived with death for so many years, Sherrie's departure left her husband with a dull grief, but no sense of shock. He wasn't the sort of guy to carry grudges against powers as big as Death. Gary just quietly withdrew from the circle he and Sherrie had claimed as friends, and started applying for jobs five hundred miles from Monroe County.

Prepping for the move to the job he finally landed, Gary offered to help Becca shift her own closet, clothes and hope chest from her parents' house to Columbia. It would be the last time we would see him.

With Becca's boxes moved to the trailer and their contents stowed, Gary was seated on "our" couch, slugging away at what he said was his first bottle of Hearty Burgundy in months. Relaxing, he seemed to be regaining some of his gentle good spirits.

"I left the box back in my car," Gary said.

"Sherrie's... stuff?" Becca asked.

"Here... I'll just bring it in." Gary got off the broke-down couch and made the four strides to the trailer's entranceway.

"Shoot," sighed Becca as the door closed behind Gary. The outer, screened door slapped shut. "I thought this all was over with."

Becca was working on a half-jug of stale but sweet pink wine that Danny and Candi had left in the fridge. I was helping Gary manage the several bottles of red.

The trailer doors banged open again, and Gary bumped in carrying a cardboard box that had once held a pretty massive air conditioner. The box was light for him, but he dropped it to the floor in front of us like it was a lead weight.

"Huggy Bear," said Becca. The old stuffed animal's head was peeping out of the loose flaps at the top of the carton.

"All her Barbies," Becca continued to observe.

"I dunno, I tried to find them all for her," said Gary. The sadness in the room had a nostalgic tinge, not really unpleasant. I refilled Gary's tumbler.

A smaller box within the carton held a jumble of stuff. Gary or the families had disposed of most of Sherrie's incidental cosmetics and clothes soon after the funeral. These things, apparently, were held out for Becca by special request of the deceased.

Gary picked through the bottles and spritzers in the smaller box, and found what he was looking for. He sort of chuckled.

"I have no idea what this is doing here," he said.

They were a pair of powderblue panties, a couple sizes smaller than I'd seen of late.

"Oh, migod!" Becca's entire face brightened. "Sherrie's finally given them back to me!

"That stinker! She told me she'd lost them in the weeds. Instead, she musta been keeping them for a souvenir!"

We were laughing.

"Doggone her.

"Doggone her."

Dumpf. There was a sudden hollowness in the room. I refilled my own glass, and Becca stretched her arm though a jumble of Barbie clothes to search the bottom of the carton.

She pulled out a plastic baggie containing a thick lock of gray-tinged black hair. There was a tag neatly tied to the ringlet. The handwriting on the tag was clearly Sherrie's, but I couldn't make out the message from where I sat on the floor. Becca read the note, blinked, and set the package to one side. She reached back into the carton.

"Vi-bray-tor," Becca murmured. She pulled out the cheap drugstore rod, and its loose cord slurped rattling to the floor.

"I guess she wanted you to have it," Gary said. "I don't think I'll have much need for it."

Gary had been celibate, we knew, since late February. It seemed a natural enough inclination, considering...

Well, there had been that weekend alone with Becca, just after Sherrie had made her last trip to the hospital. But that had been pretty awful, from Becca's account.

"Oh, here," said Gary. "I guess these are from me..."

Another scoot into the perfume box that had held Becky's pubie panties. Gary pulled out a handful of plastic things.

"Cockrings?" I took a stab at identifying them.

"Cockrings, collars, ticklers... whatever you want to call them," said Gary.

Gary's face was flushed. "I dunno. You guys were good to us this last year. Maybe I should've just thrown these away. Sher and I hardly ever used them. But I guess they're sort of... I mean, they're from me, sort of, and maybe you guys would rather not..."

I thought I understood. For him, it had been Gary-and-Sherrie relating to Rich-and-Becca. Our friendship -- our love -- had been bound up in our mutual couplehood. Gary wasn't sure we had seen it that way.

"I understand, man," I told Gary, and let him drop the rings into my hand.

"How the heck do these things work?"

While listening to the two of us, Becca had absentmindedly dipped into the perfume box and sampled the contents of one of the bottles. Kind of a bad move. Sherrie's signature scent filled the air.

In her last months, Sherrie had taken to wearing altogether too much "Dusky Rose." It was as if she were trying to make up for something missing in herself, something which only she had felt was missing.

Now it was Sherrie that was missing. But her scent filled the trailer.

Gary just smiled at Becca, who was rapidly screwing back the bottlecap and ineffectually trying to rub off the perfume she'd applied to her neck. When I took the cockrings from him, Gary had lost the embarrassment he'd brought in with the carton of dolls.

Gary seated himself on the couch, again. Stretched. Sighed.

"It's like Sherrie was right here, just now," Gary said.

"Corny," he mumbled.

Becca huffed, sympathetically.

"The back bedroom's made up for you," she told Gary.

"I guess I'll start dinner now," she said.

*****

More wine along with Becca's spaghetti. We were all drinking too much, though not crazily. Sherrie's perfume lingered, despite the air conditioner's ventilation and the garlic of the spaghetti sauce.

"Becca said Danny and Candi are gone to Kansas City for the week," Gary said. "I wish I could have seen them again, before I move to Atlanta."

" 'Again'? " I asked. I knew that Gary knew Danny from the days Danny spent hanging around Becca's sister. But when did Gary ever meet Danny's new wife?

" 'Seen them again'? " I clarified my question.

"Sherrie and I caught up with them a couple of times, just before they was legal," drawled Gary.

"At Joe 'n' Judy's," he went on.

Becca and I looked at one another. Amazed, I guess.

"You're kidding," I said.

It was Gary's turn to be amazed.

"You mean you guys don't know about Danny and Candi?" he asked, incredulously.

*****

We had decided as dinner cooked that we were growing too sloshed to drive to town and find something to do. But the wine ran out about the same time as the last forkful of spaghetti sauce. It seemed reasonable, therefore, that we drive to town and get more wine.

I volunteered to go. It would leave Becca doing the dishes on the first night she'd spend in domicile. It would make good precedent, I figured. Gary insisted that I'd need a co-pilot, and that he'd come along.

The buff warm breeze through the open Gremlin woke us up a bit.

"I hope I can make it back for your wedding," Gary spoke loudly through the wind inside the car.

"I hope so, too," I said. "I just hope your crazy family doesn't turn it into some orgiastic bacchanale."

"Ha," agreed Gary. "But they're pretty good at keeping it in when they're in public. Just don't look too close at their eyes."

We rode on in silence for a while.

"Becky's one of the smart ones, though," went Gary. "As smart as Sherrie was."

"Faster, though," I said.

"Younger," said Gary.

"Don't know... Sherrie had a sort of a," I stuttered, "a magic. She challenged you, sometimes, and then brought you in to her... And then it was like the, the love was coming from outside both of us, but it was all ours..."

"Becky's like that," argued Gary.

I paused.

"Sometimes," I agreed.

Too heavy. I was approaching a stoplight, out in the middle of nowhere, and I slowed down as it turned yellow.

"Wish she'd go for more buttplay, though," I remarked at the stop, trying to get on to a lighter theme. "It's like she flinches every time I poke around down there."

"Some women just don't like it," Gary shrugged. "Sherrie asked me to start. She had to teach me how.

"You've got to catch them in the right mood, I guess. Start out easy. Don't move too fast. Now that you're living with her, it might give you the time you need."

The light turned green.

"You up for anything, tonight?" I asked.

"Well, since you asked..."

"Maybe we should ask Becky," I said, remembering my manners.

*****

"It's funny," Becca mused, late Sunday after Gary had left.

"After you went for the wine," she said. "This strange... feeling... came over me while I was doing the dishes. It was kind of like the times I told you about, with Molly the Witch."

Becca had brushed up against a teenaged coven back in highschool, in a day long before such things were popular. Molly the Witch was probably her best friend for a while, and Molly's entire family would make for a classic study of religious atavism in white rural America. But they were too smart to publicize themselves. The "coven" remained a secret, which Becky only stumbled upon. Molly and her younger coreligionists took Becky for a couple of recklessly wild rides, then older minds got wind of it and Molly became unwilling to talk to Becky about anything more occult than herbs and animal lore. Becky's adolescent curiosity was piqued, but her preeminent practicality reasserted itself and she let the experiences fade.

Her preternatural proclivities reemerged sometimes, when she'd turn into an animal during sexplay. But these childlike fantasies of hers hadn't prepared us for the woman Gary and I found when we'd returned to the trailer.

More rosemusk filled the tin box than before. But it was the girl on the couch that recalled... someone besides Becca.

Becca had taken a shower while we were shopping for chablis in town. And most, but not all, of her hair was pulled back loosely by a charmingly tattered silk bow. I don't know where she had found the ribbon; presumably, the Barbie box contained more than just dolls, old lingerie and perfume.

The girl's newly-shampooed hair was curly, just dipping to the curve of her jaw. And she wore eyeliner; Becca never wore eyeliner.

The girl smiled oddly at our stares. She moved oddly -- or, not like Becca would move. She was wearing a nightgown I had seen before... But not on Becca.

The girl's smile turned to a chimpanzeelike pucker.

"What do you want to do tonight, luvs?" she asked.

Gary and I were drawn to the couch. Becca wasn't the same to the touch as Sherry. She was harder, smoother, younger. But it wasn't Becca inside the body.

"I want you both," the girl murmured.

Gary and I were to either side of the melting girl. She'd taken our forearms in her hands, holding us firmly, but letting us decide which was to be first.

"Becky?" Gary curled over Becca in a strong embrace, his left hand smoothing the hem of her short nightgown, then gathering it into the tuck of her waist, above her hip, and he lifted her from the couch. Raised from the floor, Becca flexed her feet, straight legs seeking balance. Glimmer-slip of dark bush, and Gary and she were squirming together back in the cushions, kissing deeply. Becca was pulling at Gary's clothes, thumbs into beltloops, fingers tugging ineffectually at the shirt fabric tight over his strong, broad back.

I was self-unbuckled on the floor now, mouthing Becca's feet. The tendons of their high insteps were straining, toes curling with pedal desire. My hands were tendering Becca's strong and shapely legs as Gary engaged her hands, breasts, belly and mouth.

It feels as if we're all on stage right now. But who is the audience?

"Come on, Garrry, do me like old times," Becca is cooing, cooing unnaturally. "Oh, babe..."

Gary's relieving his quickening strain, his bejeanned left leg nestled between Becca's thighs, his bound crotch already humping the ridge of her hard right hip. He's palming her belly, stretching it taut, pulling the flesh upward. The gown is a shambles, folds creeping above Becca's midriff, clumping in her sweating armpits, snagging around the undercleft of her tits. Becca's almost clawing at Gary's buttons. Any buttons, shirt or fly.

I'm swooned against Becca's left thigh, stroking her left leg with both hands. Gary's holding out on her, and the tension in her legs communicate her impatience. I reach one hand deep inside her crotch, half-covered by Gary's rocking denim bulge, and I find the leaves of her twat, hot and working. I knuckle into the button where the leaves join.

Becca's body jumps into the new sensation, momentarily fixing on the pressure I've applied.

"Ohh! Gimme..."

It isn't enough for her, but Gary has to get off the sofa to undress. I use the opening to try the play thing. I move my ring finger into Becca's tight asshole. It is fully oiled, with the same young juice that's flowing down Becca's inner thighs. I tuck the middle finger in, and the pinky, leaving just my forefinger and flicking thumb inside her twat.

Chin on Becca's thigh, her hands in my hair, I'm staring drunkenly at my manual efforts. My dizzy thoughts aren't of love or sex right now; this is just brute exploration. There's more flesh inside Becca's anal sphincter right now than she's ever had before, and my fingers are bonier than my tongue could ever be. But the usual flinch is not there. The hot cleft of Becca's hip-to-belly is pressing against my cheek, now, and she's actually hunching into my half-fist, helping me punch my way into her rectum. I screw my hand into the rubbery tube, losing the rest of my penetration into her twat. The free, juicy forefinger quickly makes its entrance into the tortured netherhole.

"Ohhwaho!" Becca's groan of pain is not without a note of heavy pleasure. But Gary's sturdy body is above us both now, and Becca is pulling what's left of the nightgown over her head, where it catches, briefly, on her cheap silken hair ribbon, and my fingers are expelled from her sticky butt with a fragrant airfart.

It smells like Dusky Rose.

I roll away onto my back, dizzily, and stare at the ceiling while undressing myself.

"Now! Hurry! Hurry hurrry hrrry!"

Gary's broad brown dick is cleaving Becca before I roll my gaze back towards them. Gary's feet are still on the floor for leverage, his legs spread wide, and he's pressing my fiancée into the back of the old sofa while she claws at his farmboy back, her legs still straining, feet still wriggling their signal of her whole body's desire.

"Oh, Garyfuck! I don't know what I'm doin'!"

Gary's slipping back on the floor, away from her. Becca grapples at his body, her arms slamming, thumping his sides until she gets a grip on his ass. Gary gets a new hook inside, shakes the twin-backed beast up further into the sofa. Then Becca's hands grab harder into the base of his gluteus. And her fingers strain, explore, and move into some space between Gary's buttcleft.

I'm staggered upright now. Gary's legs are sprawling, his feet still trying to get a grip on the livingroom's shaggy carpet. I move between his redbrown thighs, targeting my wavering cock along the line of Gary's backbone, and I dip to collect Becca's ankles, wheelbarrow-fashion, and lift her legs over the pair. I just lean my shoulders into Becca's calves, holding her body folded into the sofa.

Gary's ankles beat around my legs as he finds a final, full fix on the girl. Becca's calves wave rhythm into my shoulders as I watch Gary and her fuck. My arms are extended down the front of her legs, almost locking her knees straight. My cock waves in the air, the rose-scented air, and it's not unhappy just waving there. Just beneath it, Becca's hooked four fingers up Gary's ass. More fingers, and deeper, than she's ever seen fit to hook, before, and they are having their effect.

"Ooh, Becky! Watch out!" Gary's laughing almost. "OOO CUZZZIN!"

Two squealing country bumpkins on my trailer sofa.

"Oh, o DAR-lin'!"

Somewhere in the aether, a curtain was coming down.

I swear I could feel his ejaculation's force, through Becca's legs. Becca's face looked pained then, Gary's face turned aside and chuckling hard into her shoulder. I stepped back, away into the center of the room. My eyes focussed just in time to watch Becca's last buttpoking finger linger and twist, deep into Gary. It was like, finally, she really knew what she was doing there.

Gary was back on the floor, smiling goofily at us as Becca and I filed down the narrow hall to our bedroom. Becca's quivering body didn't need any time to return to its full-tilt, buzzing rev, but I managed to last seven or twenty minutes inside her on the soft mattress. Scent, sweat, and semen-enhanced slickness combined to encompass us inside the vibes her old friend had stirred, and it was fine to just missionary her, me and my memories -- of another's young, wise body.

Down the hall, we heard Gary fire up the shower.

"Hwhnn," Becca miouxed as we fucked, now on our sides, one of her legs tucked between mine to rub her round smooth thigh into my sac. Knowing just what she was asking for then, I tucked a middlefinger into her asshole.

"Hwhnn. Um, hmmm." Becca's rocking picked up against me, and I tucked another finger inside, hard.

"Uhmm!" Becca sang. I felt my fingers press through her, to touch my cock inside her, and Becca's basket seesawed between the two probes impaling it, and her post-Gary buzz was broken up, jigjig, jigjig, and my prostate tightened and released. Jigjigjigjig went Becca. Becca began singing little grunts, seesawing and contracting both holes at once. My prostate slipped another notch, and I was squirting a nice liquid needle of pleasurepain as my shot zipped through my urethra, over the bumps of probing fingers in Becca's constricted nethertube, and pow we seemed to go UP bigger than "she" had with Gary on the sofa.

Or maybe not.

We lay side by side, exhausted, while Gary's shower continued. The room no longer smelled like rosemusk. There was just the fruity smell of sweat, rectal mucus, cooling semen and girlslick.

Gary finally turned off the shower, and soon we heard him stepping into the hallway. Out in the hall, behind our closed bedroom door, Gary laughed with a strange sound of wonder. We couldn't tell what he was laughing at. It was just a quick, short laugh, anyway.