The Outsiders

Jackie had spent a year saying no to this cretin, with a growing impatience, and now she gave him every kind of insult she could think of that used clean language.

Nathanson, the creep, went and hid at his desk after that. David seemed a little embarrassed by what she had said about him, though she certainly wasn't about to apologize for it.

Jackie found herself with little left to do toward moving on that Friday night, and perhaps partly for that reason she spent a lot of time thinking about her life and the way that it had been lately. At nine o'clock, she called Maggie. Not so much to ask for advice as just wanting someone sensible to bounce her thoughts off of. They were on the phone until eleven, but even Maggie's strong opinion on the subject did not settle the question that was bothering her.

When she got up the next morning, she put on hiking boots, a thick shirt, and jeans, and then tied up her hair in a scarf. Everything light had already been packed and moved, so the apartment looked half-empty. Jackie was waiting on the street for David when he came to get her at eight. She looked very different and quite pretty to David, and her eyes lit up when she saw him.

The state park they went to was one that Jackie had never heard of, or she would have become very familiar with it. It was lusher and greener than she expected any place on the east coast to be, more like what she saw back in Indiana.

They climbed all over it for four hours. They held hands walking down to the river and they tried to coming back. Jackie was very glad to sit down and eat lunch when they did, but she was also very glad to have been through what had made her tired.

They had been talking a lot, and they did more of it at lunch. Jackie leaned the side of her head against a tree, looked down at a bit of clover, and while her fingers played with it, she said: "You know, there are people who would be scandalized to see the two of us together."

"The race thing, you mean. That might be a problem for them, but, well, that's their problem. I wouldn't mind being seen with a woman like you -- or anything else, I guess. Er, I'm not putting that well, am I?"

Jackie smiled and took his hand for a moment and said: "I know what you mean."

"I can't honestly say I even thought about it much until recently, but I have a high enough opinion of my own opinions that I wouldn't care what people might say about something like that. I've always been sort of an outsider, I guess."

"Exactly the word I use for myself," Jackie said. "It's something that I have thought about a very great deal over the years. I've told you that I've dated white men. I haven't told you that there was one three years ago whom I was engaged to be married to."

"What happened... I mean, if you want to talk about it. I certainly hope that he didn't just drop you."

"No," she said with a hint of tears. "He left me, but only by dying. Almost in my arms."

David grew silent at this, then he suddenly turned to her and said:

"The sad thing is, you are a nicer person than I thought, and I thought you were pretty nice to start with. I wish I had gotten to know you earlier and a lot better, Jackie."

"I feel the same way, David. I wish I'd gotten to know you in a couple of ways, and sometimes the hardest part of these last few months was thinking it might interfere with the work if I did."

He looked over at her and a bunch of things fell into place for both of them. They felt very good there. He leaned over toward her, folded her in his arms, took a long look into her eyes, and then he kissed her.

He was still kind of hesitant in his kissing, but that went away very quickly with some feedback. He had her leaned back against a tree while she luxuriated in the way his tongue was exploring the inside of her mouth. When his hand began to rub the bottom of one breast, Jackie straightened up with a great effort.

"This would be better than a drafty computer room floor, but not enough. There's a lot of the day left. We should get going." And she got up to let herself cool down. There were some boy scouts in the distance who didn't need the temptation to watch.

The rest of that day seemed more beautiful than ever, but she couldn't pin down what the difference was. It may not have been in nature. They moved slower now, and at least on her part it was because she was thinking about how far and how fast she wanted to go with this man in a way other than walking. They stopped more often, and it kept getting more difficult to start moving again, and not just from weariness. They were both acting like teenagers, some people would say, but Jackie didn't remember being this happy as a teenager.

Jackie was not without experience with men by this time, but David was still something new to her in a lot of ways. She had never had one sneak up and hit her so hard before (and so gently). While they had spent a lot of time together, this was still sort of a first date, and now they were going to be leaving each other.

They ate dinner in a steak house on the way back into town, and they both had good appetites from all the hiking. When they got back into the car, Jackie felt drowsy. She wanted to go on to the movie even if she did fall asleep there. She didn't want to say goodbye now, and she didn't want to decide quite yet on the other thing she was thinking of doing.

Jackie didn't make it through. Between the steak and the hiking and the darkened theatre, she was out of it quickly. As she dozed off, it occurred to her that it was a good omen that David was so comfortable to fall sleep beside.

He wasn't sure that he stayed awake all the way either, or perhaps the spy-movie didn't completely make sense. That plane- crash at the end seemed to him to come out of nowhere, and perhaps it woke him up. When he in turn woke her with a kiss as the lights came on, she knew what she was going to do.

Jackie felt much better for her nap and when he drove her back to her apartment to let her off, she invited him in.

When he closed the door behind them, she reached for the scarf she had put on that morning and she shook her hair loose. He reached to kiss her and stroke her hair, and this time she held nothing at all back in her response. But she didn't have to hold back now; there were no campers, no boy scouts, and nowhere she wanted to go that wasn't in her apartment. There was no one to see them, and her decision had been made and was as firm as what she felt pressing against her fairly soon.

She said to him, "I've been thinking about this for months, first as daydreams, but lately, especially today... David, I want you very much. Stay with me."

"I want to. Very much," he said to her.

David lowered his hands and inserted them into the pockets on the back of her jeans, then used his thumbs to knead the small of her back. She reacted by raising herself on her toes to rub against the rigid cylinder that was tantalizingly almost between her legs. He started to pull the shirt up from her jeans and touch the skin of her back there directly, and she said to him, smiling softly:

"David, after this long day, I really need a shower. But... I have plenty of towels."

He said yes, but his kiss spoke louder to her than his voice and more firmly.

They took each other's clothes off and put them directly into her washer, to be clean and ready in the morning. Prosaic, maybe, but having David here with her was all the romance she really needed, and she needed her clothes for tomorrow. Everything she would use next week was at her sister's place near Philadelphia.

Jackie found that there was more to admire about David than she had thought. She had already known that his face was handsome in its way, and now she could see that a lot of him was.

For his part, David found that somehow being naked with Jackie, and even making her so, was easier to endure than just being with her had been earlier in the day. The pressure was off, and they could relax and enjoy each other.

Which they did. A slower stronger passion grew up now. Some women may dress to hide their defects, but Jackie had never been one of them; she accepted her body as it was, without undue vanity, and David certainly seemed to appreciate it that way. She gathered her hair again into a plastic cap and they went under the running water together. He put his arms around her brown body and held her close as he soaped her back, and by the time he got around to her front, the aureoles on her breasts were hard and responded to his touch. Her hand went down between his legs and gently circled his erection, then she lathered it with soap. They were on a voyage of mutual discovery, with delight on (and beneath) every hand.

Then Jackie began to discourage his touches and to quickly wash herself. She changed her attitude and left him alone in the shower with a fast passionate kiss because an idea had come to her.

That idea had been to dry off as fast as possible and to put on a peach-colored silk nightie, then wait by the bathroom door for him, with her hair down her back again. When he opened it she raised her arms toward him, and when he saw her more than his arms rose toward her in return.

David carried her into the bedroom, then he lay beside her and began to caress her. He whispered: "You look beautiful in the panties and nightgown, but there seems to have been little point in putting them on, except for decoration, and a body like yours needs no decoration."

She replied, "I realized that there was a great deal of point to it. I want to have you take them off of me, to have you undress me again, but this time in my bed."

The sheer eroticism of this simple statement overwhelmed him, and he kissed Jackie again, pressing his hips against her as they lay. When they broke from that, they stared into each other's eyes for long minutes, with their hands making little journeys and caresses.

Her reactions were very strong, but she was nervous about being touched in the regions that brought the strong reactions. So he became slower and gentler to calm her, and she gradually relaxed.

He said to her: "I certainly don't want to pry, but you seem out of practice at this sort of thing. You must not have had much luck with men in the year since you moved in from Indiana."

"I would say that there my luck has all been bad, in different ways," she said in a small voice. "But I felt that you are a very sweet and kind man, and someone whom I could trust. I want to be with you more than any other man I have ever known, almost -- maybe entirely, I don't know, I feel mixed up.

"I could force myself to be calm while we undressed and while we showered, but now... Please, David, keep being gentle. I am nervous, but I want you, I want you to have me."

He kissed her and he began again to fondle her. He raised the nightgown to kiss her soft breasts and her hard nipples. His fingers and his lips manipulated her there until she gave soft cries of passion and he moved to her soft flat stomach.

Soon he took the waistband of her silk panties and he tugged them down to expose the soft curls of hair under them. Jackie trembled in his arms with passion. He touched her there; she was ready for him.

"I've been dreaming about this for months," Jackie whispered to him. "I can't believe how wonderful it is to lie here with you. I want you."

He was a very tender and gentle lover as he bared her body to his hands again. But he proved a very vigorous one after he had entered her. He lifted his body over hers, and Jackie opened herself to him. When his erection touched her labia and parted them for a fraction of an inch, her knees lifted and parted, perhaps in reflex. As she raised her knees, he entered her. She gave a shudder of satisfied desire as he sank into her liquid depths and tested her capacity. He moved slowly at first, but he built in force and speed. They followed their impulses until those impulses reached their height, a long and wonderful one. Her legs wrapped around him and her hips crashed into his with great force and her hands pulled on his buttocks until they met in orgasm. When that happened, her eyes opened wide and looked into his.

He thought that the sight of Jackie's face, drawn in passion and surrounded by that cloud of hair, was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He rejoiced that the expression was caused by him. He said to her afterward, "Now I know that there is more than one thing that you are very good at."

"I thought that we had worked well together before," Jackie replied, "but that could never have prepared me for this."

Jackie was very happy as she fell asleep beside David for the second time that night.

David stayed with her for most of Sunday and he helped her with last-minute things before saying goodbye. And that was not goodbye.

Jackie spent the next week with her sister and brother-in- law's apartment with their two babies, in very close quarters. When her own apartment was ready, David was there to help her move in.

Her sister's husband Ronald brought his younger brother, but it had seemed better to have Lucille stay home with the children. Ronald watched the way David moved and the way Jackie acted around him and he talked to him some. As he was leaving he turned to Jackie and said: "Maybe it's better for another reason that Lucille didn't come today. She might have been upset. But I wish you all the luck I can with what you are doing. Like they say, a good man is hard to find. You take good care of your friend there."

Jackie made dinner for the two of them, but afterward when they lay on her bed together they fell asleep before they could do anything that would even be noticed in the middle of the street. Some hours later Jackie woke and took a long hot shower and returned to find David still asleep. She lay beside him naked and curled around his body. She drank in the odor of his body, of his maleness, as she dozed again.

He woke not long after to find a warm, clean, naked and desirable woman beside him. When he rose to stumble into the bathroom himself, she woke. When he started the shower, she got out sheets for the bed and put them on, then put blankets at the foot and lay back down to wait for him.

When he came back, David saw by the changes that Jackie had been awake, though she was not quite so now. He decided to awaken her with a kiss. But not on her mouth.

He wanted to give her another sort of kiss, and this was as good an opportunity as he would ever have to do it and awaken her in two ways at once.

She was dreaming about David -- which was nothing new -- but this time it was much more powerful than usual. As the pleasure grew enough to bring her to consciousness, she reached down to touch herself where she did when these dreams came and she found David. Her hands held on to his head as he applied it to take her higher and higher until she begged him to stop and move his body up so that she could feel him fill her.

This time their lovemaking was slow and deliberate, David using his skill to bring Jackie to the brink of fulfillment time and time again. He aroused her to a complete awareness of her own sexual potential, and when her thrusting hips tumbled her into the heady chasm he had created for her she was mindless, exhausted and totally content.

They slept again.

Really, two hundred miles was only a few hours on a train, and that's not much on a weekend. Having him in Washington and her in Philadelphia even had advantages, in a way. Nobody could make comments about their scheduling three-day weekends that coincided, because nobody knew. This might seem wearing, going always between his apartment and hers, but it was the periods when they were apart that were difficult. And this life was a vast improvement over what either of them had before.

Not that they wanted it to last much longer that way. Sometime in the next three weekends, without either of them being quite aware of it at the time, they found that they were planning on marrying. From there they backed up and started to discuss the wedding. From there they went forward to talk about both of them leaving Carrolton Life to open a computer consulting firm, working out of their married home, and after that Jackie wanted to go to work with David on other projects. At least a boy and a girl.