On Display Ch. 02

Patti started to worry. I tried to reassure her. I shouldn't have. The announcement finally came on August 1. The new deputy was a white male transferred from a park in northern Ohio. That was unusual because, I understood, ODNR rarely moved people around. According to Patti, it was more unusual because management of a forest differed materially from managing a park. She thought she was passed over because she was black and female. I couldn't refute that.

I helped Patti send out resumes. I decided I'd cross the bridge of what to do if she got a job out-of-state if we got there. It didn't take long. Patti went to an interview with the Colorado Department of Parks and Wildlife and came back with a job offer. The only downside, to Patti, was that the job was in the main office in Denver. The upside was that it offered substantially more responsibility, and pay, than she was likely to get in Ohio. It was a major move up the career ladder.

We talked for hours. We brought Soluna and Belinda into the conversation (our only living family was Patti's brother who was an Army officer stationed in Korea). Patti said she would turn the job down and stay if that's what I wanted. I couldn't do that to her. I also couldn't move to Denver.

I bought Patti a new SUV as a going away present. It was painful as we loaded her things into it, and she started her drive to Denver. I could not erase the image of Patti in in the driver's seat as she pulled out of her complex for the last time. I really didn't want to lose that image, but it wasn't doing me any good. I felt worse than I had when Gail had dumped me.

Patti left at the end of August. I moped around the house, not even returning calls, for a week. Patti had left on a Saturday morning. Sunday a week later, I heard a car with a bad muffler coming up my track. The car stopped out front, but it was a few minutes before Soluna came through the front door. She no longer needed to knock. She was nude except for running shoes. To illustrate how hard Patti's departure had hit me, I was dressed when she came in.

"Get naked and let's run," Soluna instructed. I didn't move from my chair. Soluna came over and stood in front of me. She looked exquisite, as always. After a moment, she said, "you don't look like you can handle a run." I nodded morosely. "Come on," Soluna said, "get your clothes off. We'll take a walk. You need it."

Slowly, I stripped off my clothes and put on the shoes I wore to run in the woods. Soluna took my hand and led me outside. It was a gorgeous early September day. Where the sunlight struck my bare skin through the trees, it felt warm and good. Birds sang. Squirrels played in the branches. Soluna kept my hand in hers. We walked slowly side-by-side.

After, maybe, eight or nine minutes of silence, Soluna said, "wouldn't it be nice if it can always be this way?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Us, naked in the woods, Soluna replied. I had nothing to say in response.

We walked to the same glade we had run to the first time Soluna had run nude with Patti and me. Soluna led me to a large tree trunk lying on its side. We sat down on our bare asses. Soluna looked in my eyes for a time. "Will," she finally said, "I love Patti too. I miss her too. My mother has told me I have a special insight into people, that I can see what they have in here." She placed her right hand on her left breast. "When I first met you and Patti, I knew the three of us would have a special relationship, and we have. Patti will always be a dear and unique friend, to both of us. What has changed is how we enjoy that friendship."

Soluna looked at me as if I didn't understand her. A butterfly landed briefly on her shoulder. Soluna smiled. The butterfly flew off. "I'm glad," Soluna said, "that I will be a writer."

I didn't see how that statement connected to what she had been saying. "Why?" I asked.

"Because," Soluna replied, "I will work for myself. What people will have to judge me on are my words, not my skin color or my heritage or my lifestyle. They won't see that I'm Latina and won't be able to impose their ideas of what that means on me. Patti doesn't have that. She must work with people. The people she worked with here judged her based on their ideas about a black woman."

Soluna could see that I still wasn't following her exactly. "Will," she said, "our relationship with Patti hasn't ended, but it's changed. That change creates room for the relationship between you and me to grow. Our relationship won't change because of how people judge me."

Soluna stood. "Ready to head back?" she asked. I stood up. "Brush off my ass please," Soluna said and turned her back to me. There were some dirt and leaves stuck to her gorgeous buttocks. With an open hand, I gently brushed them off. Soluna turned to face me. "You have a nice touch," she said. She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. I put my arms around her bare body and held her to me.

Soluna finally broke our kiss and backed away slightly, creating enough space between us for her hand. She wrapped her hand gently around my dick. "This," she said, "has never been in my body in the place it is supposed to go." That was true. Patti, Soluna, and I had a lot of sex together, but I'd never had intercourse with Soluna. Soluna began rubbing her fingers over my dickhead. "Let's fix that now," Soluna said.

Soluna led me to a mossy patch of ground. As she stroked my dick with one hand, she spread her legs and guided my hand between her thighs with the other. I began tracing her lips with my finger. As Soluna made me erect, I slid a finger in her and began rubbing her clit. All the time, we were looking in each other's eyes. When we were both ready, Soluna said softly, "Patti told me about her first time with you, how you trusted her. I want you to trust me too. I promise you will never regret it."

Soluna lay down on the moss. She spread her legs. I got down above her, lowered my hips, and slid my dick into her. The look on Soluna's face as I entered her was a look of satisfaction and accomplishment.

Writers, me included, often make it sound like a couple has intercourse for the first time and everything just falls into place: they intuitively know how to bring each other to monumental orgasms. Of course, that is not how it really happens. It takes trial and error to learn what is most gratifying for a new partner. Soluna was wonderful because she told me how what I was doing felt to her. She asked how what she was doing felt to me. She suggested small changes that enhanced the sensations for her and for me. It sounds districting, but her constant verbalization of what she was feeling and what she wanted me to do next was extremely erotic.

Soluna had a strong, flexible body. She seemed to have complete control over every muscle. Not that I'd had intercourse with a huge number of women, but I felt the walls of Soluna's vagina doing things to my dick which I had never felt before. They all felt great.

Most endearing, Soluna was patient. At one point, I started thrusting into her faster. "Will," she said, "relax. You don't have to impress me. We'll both come, but what we're doing right now also feels wonderful. Let's enjoy it, not rush." I slowed down and tried to focus more on savoring that instant rather than planning my next move.

We made love on the moss for a long time. Our orgasms built slowly. When we came, however, it was explosive. I started to come first. My first shot inside Soluna was painfully hard. She, of course, felt me spurt and said "good," which soon morphed into "gooood!" Suddenly, her strong legs were locked around me and her pelvis was bucking into me violently. Her fingers dug into my back as she took short, fast, deep breaths. Finally, she squeezed her arms and legs powerfully and emitted a loud "uuuuuuuugh, oh, uuuuum." I shot my last semen on "oh."

I'd had orgasms before, but not like this one. I had been in women when they orgasmed before, but nothing like Soluna coming beneath me. I thought this was part of what Soluna had meant when she promised to be "here for you always" and I loved it.

After a long time, we stood up and brushed each other off. Soluna took my hand. "We'll shower when we get back to your house," she said.

In all the time Patti and I and Patti, Soluna, and I had run naked in those woods, we had never encountered other people. As Soluna and I walked home from our first intercourse, we met a young couple going the other way at a point where there were evergreens close on both sides of the trail. The other couple was, of course, clothed. There was no space for any of us to step off the trail and let the others pass, so we had to brush by each other. The clothed young man and woman gave us thorough looks. As close as we were, it would have been almost impossible for them not to. They smiled at our nudity but didn't say anything.

After we came out of the evergreens, Soluna stopped and faced me. "They could see we had just made love," she said with a smile. "I'm proud." She kissed me again.

Soluna had class four days a week so she had kept her apartment in Athens. There were days we didn't see each other. We did talk by phone every day. Although Soluna had just turned 21, talking to her was like talking to any other fully formed adult. Maybe there was something to the "old soul" thing.

Patti called a few days after Soluna and I made love in the woods. "I'm sorry Will," she said. "I should have called sooner but I've been busy getting my feet on the ground and, honestly, it was too painful." She paused before saying, "please tell me you and Soluna have fucked by now." I had always been completely honest with Patti, so I admitted that we had. "Good," Patti said. "When I was leaving, I thought about telling you to hook up with her, but I didn't think I could run out on you and tell you what to do with your life going forward. Hang on to Soluna. She's one of a kind. I know you and I'm fairly sure I know her. She's young, but she's the best partner you'll ever find."

I steered the conversation to Patti's new job and her new life in Denver. Both seemed to have started well. Before she ended the call, Patti circled back to Soluna. "I want you two to fuck a lot," Patti said. "I'm hoping you'll discover some things you can show me when I come back to visit." Unfortunately, when Patti finally did visit, she had her own lover.

As I said, Soluna's aspired to be a writer, in both English and Spanish. Soluna gave me a couple of pieces she had written. One was a longish short story for a class about a young girl from El Salvador who is adopted by a childless couple in Central Ohio, obviously somewhat autobiographical. It took the girl's life through the start of high school and, I thought, painted a vivid picture of someone from one culture growing up in another culture which she hadn't chosen with no roots to her origins.

Soluna gave me the other piece with the explanation, "this is my only piece of erotica so far. I wrote it in high school. You're the first person, besides me, to read it."

Soluna's erotica told the story of a young woman, Inez, who was walking in a field and was abducted by aliens. They took Inez into their spaceship, stripped her naked, and tied her spreadeagle to a table in the main compartment of the ship. The entire crew of aliens inspected and probed her pussy before deciding Inez was worth taking home. The aliens threw her clothes out of the ship and took off, leaving her tied naked on the table. The rest of the story told of the journey to the aliens' planet. The aliens, who had both male and female genitalia, would either fuck Inez at will with their unnaturally thick dicks ("I must have been imagining you," Soluna teased me) or force her to eat their pussies. By the time Inez reached the alien planet, she understood she had been abducted because constant sex with both male and female was her purpose in life.

Soluna's senior year of college was a lot of fun for both of us and cemented our relationship. Soluna graduated with honors. She would stay at the university two more years to get her master's degree. As a grad student, Soluna spent less time in classrooms, so she moved in with me.

We met Soluna's parents for lunch in Columbus one Saturday. I had met them briefly at Soluna's graduation. Soluna was close to her parents. Since Soluna was now living with me, everyone thought I and her parents should get to know each other.

When Patti and I first met Soluna, she had described her mother as exceptionally beautiful when her parents met. From what I saw at graduation, that description still applied in the present tense. Adria Warren looked much like her daughter. Adria was older, about my age, and carried a few more pounds than Soluna, but she was a strikingly beautiful woman. My impression of Soluna's father, Keith, had been of a quiet man, a typical farmer. I got that one wrong.

When we met at a Columbus restaurant, I refined my impressions. Keith Warren didn't talk a lot, but he was articulate and well-informed when he did speak. Adria was more loquacious. She was also articulate and intelligent, with only a hint of an accent. Like Soluna, Adria had a quality that made almost everything she did, down to picking up her fork, seem slightly erotic. She seemed aware that she had that effect and seemed to enjoy it.

Adria and Keith asked me a lot about myself. They were pleasant and polite, but the questioning was comprehensive. When they seemed satisfied with me, the conversation shifted, as it often does in that kind of situation, to stories about Soluna when she was younger. There was nothing surprising until Adria made a passing comment about "you kids skinny dipping in the pond every summer."

I looked at Soluna. She had told me that her parents didn't know about her skinny dipping with other kids in the neighborhood. Soluna's mouth fell open. Finally, she stammered out, "you knew we were skinny dipping?"

"Of course, dear," her mother replied. "Most of the parents knew. No one thought anything of it. You were old enough, we thought. We all knew you weren't getting into trouble. I won't say it was a more innocent time because it wasn't that long ago. It was a more innocent place."

"How did you find out?" Soluna asked.

"It made sense," Keith said. "That's a great pond. Adults in the neighborhood skinny dipped there. It seemed likely you kids weren't wearing suits either."

"When you came home with wet hair but basically dry clothes, and I knew you hadn't taken a swimsuit, I could figure it out," Adria said.

"Your mother and I still skinny dip in that pond," Keith said. "The two of you should come to the farm some weekend this summer and join us."

Now, it was my turn for shock and amazement. Had I just heard Soluna's father invite us to swim naked with him and his wife?

Apparently, I had. Soluna replied, "That would be great. I hate swimming with anything on and it would be nice to get us all together in the altogether."

"Any weekend Dear," Keith replied. "Just give me a few days' advance warning so I can get the weekend chores done early."

On the drive home, Soluna laughed. "Will, your face went white when Dad invited us to go skinny dipping with him and Mom!"

"Well," I said, "your jaw dropped when your mother said they had known about your skinny dipping."

"Ok," Soluna replied, "we were both surprised. We're are going, aren't we?"

"Skinny dipping with your parents?" I asked to be clear.

"Yes," Soluna replied.

"Sure, if you want to," I said.

A couple weeks later, we made the long drive to Auglaize County. We got there about 7: 00 p.m. on a Friday night. The Warren farmhouse, about a quarter mile off the county road, looked prosperous. Soluna had warned me that her mother would insist on fixing dinner. In the event, dinner was waiting when we arrived. I have no idea what we ate. Adria said it was a traditional Guatemalan dish. It was good. After dinner, Adria and Soluna cleaned up while Keith gave me a quick tour of the farm. There was a pleasant breeze, so the four of us ended the evening with wine on the Warrens' massive front porch.

Soluna and I spent the night in her old room. Adria and Keith seemed happy that Soluna and I were sleeping together. "I've never had sex in my old bedroom," Soluna said. She did that night. She seemed particularly emotional as we made love and, after she came, I thought I saw a tear in her eye. I fell asleep wondering whether I'd done the right thing.

I pulled on shorts and Soluna pulled on a long tee shirt Saturday morning before she led me downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee. The coffee was brewing when Adria came in. Soluna and I were, momentarily, dumbfounded. Soluna's mother was completely naked. As I said, Adria was almost as beautiful as her daughter. Soluna finally said, "Mom?!"

"Well," Adria said, "we're spending the day skinny dipping at the pond. Why should I put clothes on just to take them off again?"

"Good point," Soluna conceded. She turned to me and pulled my shorts down. Getting the idea, I stepped out of them and tossed them on a chair. I took the bottom of Soluna's shirt in my hands, pulled it over her head, and tossed it on top of my shorts. Soluna gave me a quick kiss.

As Soluna was pouring the coffee, we heard Keith say from outside the kitchen, "I smell coffee. Save me a cup." A moment later, Keith walked in, also naked. I sensed that Soluna had never seen her father naked before. Keith looked at us and said, "everyone's ready for the pond, I see."

We drank coffee in the nude while Soluna helped Adria pack a picnic basket. Keith left the room and came back with towels and sunscreen. He looked at his daughter and me. "We'll be walking across the field," he said. "You might want to put shoes on." Soluna and I went upstairs, did that, and came back down, naked but for shoes.

The pond was roughly a mile from the Warren house. It struck me as both strange and wonderful to be walking across a field on a summer Saturday morning with my lover and her parents and all four of us were naked.

The pond was beautiful, shaded in a grove of trees. It was bigger than I'd expected, being roughly 150 yards long and about 70 yards across. Keith explained that the pond had been manmade many decades ago. It was fed by a spring and water flowed out through an old pipe to a nearby stream. The pond was lined with stones which were a bit slippery with age, but which felt more reassuring than standing in mud and who-knows-what.

Despite the hot day, the water was a little chilly. We spent more time on the bank than in the water. In other words, most of the time we were fully visible to each other. That seemed to generate a subtle competition between Adria and Soluna. Both women accentuated the sway of their bare hips when they walked. Both women sat with their legs apart. Both women seemed to seek out opportunities to bend over. Keith noticed it too. At one point in the afternoon, he whispered to me, "I hope you're enjoying the show as much as I am." I was.

We had been there a couple of hours when three clothed people suddenly appeared. There was an older man and woman and another woman who looked to be around 30. I had not seen or heard them coming. When he saw them, Keith called out, "Hello Kath, Bill. How are you?"

"Just fine Keith," the older woman said. "How are you Adria?"

Adria and Kath exchanged greetings Keith explained quietly to me, "that's Kath and Bill Wooster. They have the farm west of ours. I don't know who the younger woman is."

Bill said to everyone in general, "fine day for skinny dipping."

"It is that," Keith replied.

Kath put an arm around the younger woman and nudged her forward slightly. "You remember our daughter Yvonne, don't you? She's a lawyer in Chicago now." The younger woman raised a hand in timid greeting.