Our Private Eden

Today was time to get to know each other, to see more of what life may have in store for us together. And I'll gladly take that.

She showered first, tossed on a robe and had whipped up a sumptuous breakfast of Western omelets, buttered English muffins, fresh strawberries with whipped cream, tomato juice and coffee. Wearing only bath robes (mine far too short), we sat in rocking chairs and ate breakfast on her veranda, where our lovemaking had begun the night before under a silvery moon. Now, it was awash in brilliant morning sunlight, illuminating the vivid blues and greens of the valley and the Current River below.

I took both our coffee cups and refilled them and, with both hands fully, the belt to the scant terrycloth robe came undone and the robe fell open, exposing my frontside. I set Holly's cup on the accent table as her as she looked me up and down.

"Well, if that's the way we want it," she said as she untied and completely shed her robe, sitting naked in her rocker in full daylight.

I looked around guardedly.

"Aw just go with it. I suppose somebody could see with a telescope halfway up the ridge on the other side of the river, but that's more than a mile away, nobody lives over there and if someone's hard enough to want to climb up there with a telescope to get a free peep, then he's earned it," Holly said.

I shrugged, doffed my robe and draped it over the rocker as she had and we drank our coffee, au naturel, working on our full-body tan on her veranda. As long as I didn't fix my gaze on her body, Mr. Hollywood minded his manners and kept his head down. So we lazed away most of Saturday morning in the warm sun and breeze, talking and drinking coffee.

In doing so, I learned about Holly. She was totally a daddy's girl and, because of that, grew up a bit of a tomboy. Because she was a girl, she wasn't allowed to play Van Buren's Little League teams, even though she could outpitch and out-hit any boy on any of the teams. Just for spite, Conway Raymer took his daughter for a tryout in a nearby town in the late 1950s the summer before she entered fourth grade and, with her hair tucked under a baseball cap she never removed, she made the team. In fact, the coaches for two teams, the Rotary Club Braves and the Kiwanis Yankees, were arguing over who should have first dibs on her. At the end of the tryout when teams announced their selection, "Hollis Raymer" was chosen as a pitcher for the Lions. She had never misled anyone about her name, but the coaches heard what they wanted to hear. But when she took her cap off and her auburn curls fell to her shoulders, the embarrassed coaches angrily accused her and Conway of deception and disqualified her.

Her dad was seething with anger and sorrow at that moment, but he remained a gentleman. She recalled her dad's calm response.

"Daddy said, 'OK, y'all can disqualify her, but you just saw that she can strike out any one of your boys and she can scatter hits and RBIs off any of your pitchers. She might not be playing here, but y'all will always have to remember when you're looking at your boys that you turned down a player who was better than all of them.' He told them that he can leave with a clear conscience."

Holly's closeness to her dad wasn't just a matter of choice. Her mother abandoned them both when she was just 2 years old. She never explained why. Once, years later just before Holly turned 18, a letter postmarked in Hanford, California, arrived for Holly with no return address. In it was a handwritten letter in which her mother apologized to her for leaving, saying she hoped to one day see her again and that she hoped she might eventually understand. The letter never explained why she disappeared other than she was seeking the kind of life she couldn't get in southern, rural Missouri. But the fact that the letter was postmarked in a central California town known for row-crop farms and swarms of migrant workers suggested that she hadn't moved her condition much.

"I never heard anything else from her and hope I never do," Holly said. "My daddy is the strongest man I ever knew. A good man. What a good man should be. He devoted his life to raising me, being dad and mom as best he knew how. I wouldn't have blamed him if he married again, but he didn't want that. I think he was afraid of getting abandoned again, so he devoted every moment to giving me as much as he could in life."

"Evidently, he did," I said. "And raised a little girl into a strong, lovely, independent woman."

After Holly was grown and living on her own, she said, he would date a little but never planned to marry because he didn't want to risk diluting her inheritance. He passed away the day before his 78th birthday of a heart attack he suffered while in his car at a four-way stop. Even then, he had the consideration to put the car in park before he lost consciousness to avoid wrecking his car and maybe someone else's.

From me, Holly discovered that I am two years her junior, though I look much older. She froze for an instant when she found out, certain that it would poison any possibility of a relationship.

"Does that bother you, seeing an older woman?"

"No."

"Are you sure? I mean, tell me now."

I shook my head. "No. It does not. We're biologically the same age. Actuarily, you're younger than I am based on average life expectancies for gender. You're remarkably fit -- you could pass for a woman 10 years younger. But all that is beside the point: I very much like you, and the more I learn about you, the more I like you and the more I want to see of you and to be with you. And our ages are utterly meaningless to me."

She learned that I had received my bachelor's degree in business management at Kansas. She also learned that the company I work for was in part begun by my grandfather before the start of the Great Depression with two bulldozers, a dump truck and a road grader. He survived the Depression taking any work he could find, from driveways and replacing culverts for county governments to helping build earthen reservoirs. Business picked up under President Franklin Roosevelt when the New Deal put America back to work building all sorts of public works, particularly highway and waterway systems. During World War II, his business had grown significantly and developed a prized specialty of leveling and building airfields across the heartland for the fast-developing Army Air Corps. After the war, business was plentiful and only got better when the Interstate Highway System was commenced during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. In the late 1950s, a large construction conglomerate based in Ohio bought up granddad's company and two others, consolidating its dominance in earth-moving and highway projects in the eastern half of the United States.

"So let me ask you just like you asked me -- why are you still working a low-level management job on a road construction crew when it appears you're going to be pretty well off yourself?" Holly said.

"Well, granddad created a living trust before he died that went to my farther and his brother, who lived in Detroit. In grandpa's will, the estate was divided among the two brothers. Well, Uncle Will decided that somehow he should be entitled to a larger share of the will than dad and sued to try to get it. That happened in 1969. Dad countersued, claiming tortious interference, and is trying to claim a large share of his brother's half. The court ordered both sides into mediation, and just when it looked like the two sides were about to reach a deal, Uncle Will dies. So my cousins -- greedy, pampered pricks that they are -- took over Uncle Will's estate and backed out of the deal three or four years ago. All those years of mediation went right down the tubes," I explained.

"The federal judge overseeing the case in Kansas City retired a couple of years ago, and now a new judge has taken it over and he's trying to thin out this huge docket of civil cases years old and told both parties to reach a settlement by the end of this year or he'll enter an order doing it for them. But he's made it known that he has no patience with my cousins for poisoning the mediated deal after Uncle Will died. So the pressure's on their side. But the bottom line is I have no idea how much will come to dad and, assuming I survive him, how much of that my sister and I would inherit. All things equal, I'm in no rush to get the money. I'd rather have my dad."

The reason I work as a shift supervisor is I enjoy the work and it pays pretty well -- at least as well as most jobs being cooped up in some 22nd floor office pushing paper all day, I explained. "The wide open space is my office and I get to push thousands of tons of earth every week, not paper. And the pay... it's not bad."

By the time we retreated inside the house, we had almost lost sight of the fact that we were naked as the days we were born. Until we stood up, completely forgetting the robes we had draped on the rockers behind us. We looked at each other with an almost oops! reaction, grabbing our robes only as an afterthought but not putting them back on.

Back inside the house, Holly was the first to notice evidence of sunburn, particularly on my pasty skin except for my face, neck and hands. Likewise, she showed a mild blush on her bikini areas. The cure, she said: baby oil. This could turn erotic fast.

Holly laid a large beach towel on the floor of her great room and instructed me to lie on my back. She squirted a generous amount into her palm, rubbed it on her hands and began lightly applying it to the skin of my chest, legs, and even the tops of my feet. She deliberately avoided my crotch, though my cock and scrotum -- for the first time in my life -- had endured extended exposure to the sun.

"OK, try to let me do what I need to do to your, um... delicate area," she said, slowly drizzling oil from my navel south to my cock, already showing signs of tumescence.

She began rubbing the oil into my lower abdomen, but then it was time to move on to my genitalia. With her palm open, she smoothed the oil over my shaft, my pouch and -- very gently -- over its flared head. She avoided grasping it or even cupping it, certain that it would lead to another round of intense sucking and/or fucking. Even so, she noticed a bead of precum form at the tip of my cock and stream down its oiled shaft, disappearing somewhere in the hair covering my scrotum.

"OK, take a few deep breaths, Romeo, and try to calm down," she said. "You're covered."

I nodded that my comprehension even if I couldn't conceal my need, having been brought to the edge twice since sun-up.

"Maybe I should oil myself," she said, pushing up her right breast for a better look at how much sunburn she had accrued. "My pussy's still sore from this morning and if I let you get your hands in the cookie jar..."

"Good point, Holly. You rub. I'll watch."

She shook her head and then, still standing, poured a small amount of oil into her palm and smoothed it gently onto her breasts, again, keeping her hands as flat as possible and avoiding the sensual tingle of a cupped hand and what her pouting nipples might construe as fondling. By the time she was done, her areolae were bloated and begging for attention, and I was dying to oblige, but Holly shot me a side-eye that warned me away.

For the rest, she lay on the towel, just as I had, to avoid oil -- or any other secretions -- from dribbling off her nether bits and onto the hardwood floor. Again, she applied a modest amount to her palm, warmed it and began to spread it across her bikini line, from the point of one hip to the other, including her reddish-blonde pubic patch.

"How does it look," she said, seeking an initial appraisal of her coverage.

"Looks like the top area is pretty well oiled, but I think you may need a little on your pussy -- at least your outer lips," I said, leaning down and squinting between her slightly parted legs, motioning her to widen them. "It's a little rosy, but I don't know if that's from the sun or... something else."

She nodded, then squeezed a tiny amount into her hand. She parted her legs widely, and my cock instantly began to swell at the sight of it. She dabbed the oil gingerly on her outer lips as her inner lips began to poke through, their own moisture evident.

"That cover it?" she asked.

"Well, I think so. But I have no way of knowing how much sun the rest of you was exposed to, your... you know, inner lips and your clit hood."

She rolled her eyes. "One way to be sure. If I wind up jilling off here, you're cleaning up the mess."

Holly put a little more oil on the tips of her fingers and patted them lightly around the hood of her clit and her swelling inner lips. At one point, gasping at the sensation.

From just watching her, precum drooled from the tip of my erection, and Holly saw it. She watched me catch it in my right hand as it stretched from a viscous stringer and just before it plunged to the floor. I looked back at her to see her eyes transfixed on my cock and a wild look of lust starting to take hold of her. I turned and walked back toward the veranda, stopping just short of the door.

"Holly, baby, more than anything, I want to plunge Sir Hollywood into you right now, but I will do my best to hold off if that's what you want," I said, forcing my hands to stay on my hips rather that toy with my boner as it pleaded for relief.

Holly rolled onto her belly and moaned, "I can't spend the whole day fucking you, much as I want to. So let's just wait a minute and see if this passes."

I deliberately stared out into the verdant hillside and stream below to divert my attention, only to become aware of the reflection of her legs leading up to the crack of her perfect ass as she remained lying prone. So I walked into the kitchen, careful not to let my hair-trigger boner anywhere close to food preparation surfaces. That seemed to help: a cold granite countertop; a gas range with four burners and an oven; a toaster; a rack of wine bottles, a dozen or so liquor bottles inside a glassed cabinet with an assortment of clean glass mugs and tumblers. Yeah, that's it. Food, the other elemental animal passion. Mr. Hollywood was beginning to lower himself -- and his expectations for immediate gratification. But I knew it would take next to nothing to stir him right back into defiant, outright rebellion. I just hoped it would be an occasion a little more opportune than now.

"What say we take a little ride around town, Holly? Beautiful day to be in a convertible."

"Gimme a second," she said. "Stay in the kitchen for right now."

I did as she asked, but then heard muffled whimpering from the great room. Not wanting to think about what was going on just around the corner, I opened the liquor cabinet, grabbed a fifth of Jack Daniel's and poured myself two fingers into a short glass. I needed a distraction, preferably 80 proof or greater, to blot out what might be happening on the beach towel. It was gone in three gulps and I poured myself another. Seemed to be working.

Just then, I heard a stifled groan followed by staccato breathing. A gulp. Another gulp. Properly fortified, I walked around the corner and looked at her, still face down on the towel. Her right hand had disappeared beneath her, and her muscles of her ass were finally unclenching as she wafted down from the high of another orgasm, this one solo. Hoping to avoid temptation by lying on her tummy, she found it when she had inserted her fingers beneath her mound and began grinding on them. In barely five minutes, she had humped her fingers to an orgasm as she struggled mightily to conceal from me, knowing full well I would join in.

She lifted her head and looked at me as I stood there, a bourbon in one hand and my dick, somewhere between flaccid and turgid, pointing to the floor in Holly's general direction.

"I cheated. Sorry," she said.

"So I see, baby. Me and Sir Hollywood figured something like that might be happening out here, so we spent some time with your buddy Jack," I said. "It worked! But that means that while my dick is still fully loaded, I'm well on my way to getting loaded, too. Cheers!"

She hid her face as she laughed and withdrew her fingers from beneath. She rubbed her thumb against the fingers of her right hand, feeling her slick arousal still on them.

"Hon, I've got to hop back in the shower and rinse some of this off. Don't want to be riding all over Van Buren today smelling like pussy juice. Good news is I'm pretty sure my cunt isn't sunburned. At least none of the fun parts anyway."

"Thanks for the update, gorgeous. I'll go toss on my khakis and shirt and be waiting on you, but you might have to drive. I've put a way a right smart of your sippin' whiskey the past 10 minutes or so. Not sure I ought to be driving this beast down a winding mountain road."

I put on my pants and shirt, but damned if I could find my tighty-whities from the previous night. My guess is they went over the rail of the deck and are dangling from the branch of some tree or lining some raccoon's nest, so it's commando, at least til we can stop back by my room at the Big Springs Motel and I can get a fresh change of clothes.

Holly emerged from her bathroom in a sun dress held up by narrow straps that showed no sign of a brassiere underneath. She slipped on her sandals and reached out for my keys.

"Ain't got to twist my arm to drive a V-8 Mustang," she said.

"You know your way around a five-speed?"

"I learned to drive on one -- my daddy's old Ford pickup. I've driven farm tractors, tractor-trailers and even a bulldozer once. This girl knows her way around motor vehicles."

Sure enough, she did. I refreshed my Jack Daniel's before we left and struggled to keep the fragrant Tennessee whiskey in the glass as she cornered the winding downhill road like Mario Andretti on a grand prix course.

"Holly, let's stop by my room first so I can get some fresh clothes," I said. "You wouldn't know the whereabouts of the underwear I had on last night, by the way?"

She shot me an deadpan look over her sunglasses.

"Thought I'd ask."

Back in my musty motel room, I tossed on a Kansas Jayhawks t-shirt and a pair of baggy, gray Bermuda shorts sans undergarments because I found the feeling of freedom that free-balling it provided me, particularly on the mildly sunburned and freshly oiled parts the sun seldom sees.

While I had spent the better part of the past year and a half in the area on the road project, I had seen little of this part of Missouri that didn't lie between the motel, the job site and Conway's. Now, with the top down on a splendid, sunny June Saturday, I got the grand tour with Holly behind the wheel.

We took backroads through beautiful stretches of woodlands and hills, part of the Mark Twain National Forest. I feared that we might never find our way back to civilization, but these were roads Holly had grown up on, learning them alongside her dad. She took me to see the crystal water of what was reputed to be North America's largest natural artesian estuaries, Big Spring. I saw trout swimming against the strong current five or six feet deep as clearly as if they were in a glassed aquarium.

In mid-afternoon, she pulled the car into an abandoned apple orchard deep in the national forest that had once belonged to her grandfather. She navigated car carefully over a weed-covered crossing I couldn't see until we were on top of it and through a gap in the barbed-wire fence where a gate had once been. She parked it in an open area between rows of old trees, most of which had ceased producing fruit and many of which had either died of been felled for the aromatic firewood prized by the top barbecued rib chefs in St. Louis and Kansas City.

"Look. Here's one," Holly said, plucking a pinkish apple from a tree. She brushed if off against her sundress, took a bite and then offered me a bite.