To My Senses Ch. 11

How was that girl so serious at that age?

I headed back after them, ducking branches, weaving through dead brush and under low hanging branches as they scurried down the hill. So cute.

Nina was the first one to see her, and I could hear her call out "Mommy!" from somewhere ahead. I trudged through the thick branches just in time to hear Jessie ask where we were.

"Right here. Got home and decided we should go for a walk."

I looked her over as she hugged the children and listened to them talk about their day. She looked tired, a full day at the county hospital would do that to her. She was still beautiful though, even tired and dressed in a winter coat over her scrubs. The freckles stood out on her pale face, and she'd gathered her mid-back-length hair into a thick ponytail. Occasionally her eyes would flick towards me and I could see humor and lust and love dancing in them.

I cleared my throat. "Why don't you kids get headed home. Your mother and I will be right behind." I nodded at Jane and she nodded back, took Nina's hand, and headed down the hill, the other kids racing after.

"How was your day?" I asked my black-haired lover.

"Good. Got some new ice cream. Got to smart off to an old farmer who should really be more careful with an axe, and be way nicer to his nurse. Good day."

I stepped over and hugged her, tight and powerful. "I waited all day to see you. Feels like forever."

"I missed you too."

"Wanna dance?"

Jessie laughed. "Here?"

"Yeah, why not?"

We swayed in place for a moment and I buried my face in her thick black hair and half-whispered, half-sang Dance With You. She melted into me, relaxing despite the cold wind clacking the branches overhead and cutting through her scrub bottoms.

"C'mon, let's head back home."

"Uh, daddy? You forgot something?"

"Hmmm?"

Jessie reached into her winter jacket and retrieved her "indoor necklace," handed it to me. It was identical to Sienna's, but with black details where hers had green. She looked for a clean patch of ground that wouldn't dirty her scrubs, and knelt.

I slid the necklace around her delicate pale throat, and she beamed as I latched it. I took her hand, pulled her to her feet, and kissed her. "I love you."

We descended the hills, hand in hand.

###

Sienna told us over dinner that Jessie had gotten a letter from McKenna today. It still amused and surprised me that despite the basic lack of functioning in the country, the Post Office could still be reasonably counted on. That lack of functioning was in no small way due to McKenna.

She'd dropped a fucking cultural and political A-bomb the night that Jessie had killed Morgan and very nearly bled out at my side before I'd woken up.

And then McKenna, and her boyfriend Don had vanished.

They had the money to vanish, and I had no doubt there were shadowy bad actors looking for them after she sent every major news organization, political subreddit, WikiLeaks editor, and FourChan poster a copy Morgan's blackmail tapes.

The day after she disappeared, the world had basically exploded. The cold hard proof that many of the key players in politics and entertainment were not just fucking dirty but viciously criminal shitbirds practically unraveled the social contract nationwide.

Once McKenna returned to society after an extended anonymous tour of the western United States, she invested enough money in her boyfriend's company to free him up from the day to day operations, and then the two of them began disappearing off to who-knows-where fairly regularly for the next seven years.

Probably trying to avoid hit squads, I figured.

Jessie read her letter aloud at the table while we munched on vegetables, elk meat, gravy, and some kind of cornmeal crust. McKenna was doing fine, meeting lots of cool people, seeing cool sights, and indulging her favorite hobbies quite regularly -- visiting all the gas stations in the west, and dynamiting the abandoned staircases she found popping up more and more in the American countryside.

She also said she and Don would meet us in Jackson Hole next week. Jessie smirked at me over the top of the letter when she read that part.

I WASN'T looking forward to going to Jackson Hole next week.

But I would.

I'd transferred out to the town of Black River, Wyoming, about six years ago. Milwaukee was simply too...MUCH. Too many bad memories, too violent, too many people pissed at me and mine. Jessie and I had discussed moving somewhere smaller for years, and my bank was willing to send me somewhere no one else would want to go. They made me regional manager of a region with two banks and about twenty-five hundred people in the county.

And then four years ago, the bank went under. Debts transferred to another bank in another area, buildings for sale, employees laid off.

I'd gone to the mayor, the county board, and said we needed to start our own bank, one to serve the town and the farms in the area.

That had been rocky, as had helping Jessie with her pet project -- wind and solar power generation. Everyone was seeing the terrifying writing on the wall - business closures, utilities reducing services, decreasing product shipments, violence in the big cities, legislatures passing useless or destructive laws that were mostly ignored or maliciously and selectively enforced... the world was falling apart, and if our little region wanted to survive, we had to become as independent as possible.

Because of my wife, the county hospital was now on one hundred percent renewable energy, and the excess power generation was being bought cheap by the local businesses and homes.

Three years ago I'd been nominated for county Treasurer. There wasn't much of a voting process anymore. People just kind of...agreed. I suspected I didn't really have much of a say in the matter -- I'd stepped up, and now they needed me to step up again.

So I did.

And then the mayor, and the county board told me they needed me to step up again, last month.

Each county in Wyoming was sending representatives to a Constitutional Convention called by the western states, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, The Dakotas, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and strangely, blocks of Washington and California. They didn't have enough states to call a convention, but dammit, they were throwing one anyway. Wyoming was central to all the states, Jackson Hole was the best-looking place in the area, and Gary, they said, you're going with the mayor to represent the county.

I'd always been an anarchist, but somehow I'd found myself drafted by people I cared about to represent their interests to what was sounding like a new government. For not the first time, I marveled at the contradictions and weird twists and turns in my life.

But they were my people. My adopted family. They took care of me, and I took care of them.

I'd go.

Somehow, in the madness that was going to be transpiring in Jackson Hole, McKenna and Don were planning on finding us.

Jessie continued smirking after she put the letter down. "It's not gonna be nearly as fun as the last time we passed through there."

"No, no it's not," I said ruefully.

"Why was it fun last time?" Nancy asked.

"We were on vacation," I told her.

"And now your papa has to go to work there," Jessie added.

"Don't remind me."

Sienna wiped her mouth with a napkin, smiled ruefully at me. "You know they're gonna nominate you for something, Gary."

"Again, don't remind me."

###

The kids and I did dishes, with me calling out math problems the entire time. Right answers won them homemade hard candy for dessert. Of course, I didn't tell them there was already ice cream from town that they didn't need to earn.

Dishes dried and put away, the tired little troop headed into the greatroom. A fire was crackling in the fireplace, and with the exception of Mike who crawled up onto Jessie's lap, the kids flopped down onto beanbags around the hearth.

Well, except for Mike and Jane. Jane tugged at my sleeve and we headed for the basement. I pulled the chain at the base of the steps to turn on the light, and Jane dug through the chest of equipment for the boxing pads. "Here you go, dad."

Somehow, despite hearing my kids call me that about a billion times, it still made my heart feel warm.

We practiced boxing and kicks for half an hour, then moved on to her knife drills. I had become more convinced than ever that Morgan was, to an extent, hardcoded into his daughter -- she only ever wanted to train with the rubber Ka-bar. Maybe I could find a real one for her in Jackson Hole. It was around her age that I got my first knife...

Back and forth across the mats in the basement we blocked and parried and attacked, the much smaller girl moving fast as lightning with stabs and slashes and kicks and punches. Neither of us were under any illusion that she'd have much of a chance against an armed, adult opponent, but she was building muscle memory, practicing skills that could only be taken through disuse.

Eventually, I had to quit. She'd keep going for another four hours if I was up for it, but I wanted to see the rest of my kids.

The rest of my kids complained about my smell, sweat from the boxing and knife work, loudly and vociferously when I joined them on the floor before the fire, but still climbed into my lap, hung on my shoulders, or sat beside me so I could read and show them pictures from an illustrated version of A Tale Of Two Cities. I wanted my children to be intelligent and well-read, good scholars and thinkers, and every night we worked on a new classic novel.

This book in particular held special meaning for me, and I found myself glancing between Jessie and Sienna and Jane as I read. I'd thought, once I was giving my life up for See's daughter, Jessie watching.

I was really glad I hadn't died.

I was really glad none of us had died. Well, Jessie had, resuscitated on an operating table after expiring moments before I'd woken up. Morgan's bullet had played havoc with her intestine, and basically destroyed one of her kidneys and her uterus.

I'd fought a long and difficult battle with a systemic infection, just barely surviving.

We were all scarred now, me and Jessie and Sienna. Our many run-ins with violence, with evil, had left us all marked, permanently, with the tales of our battles.

That was why we were in Wyoming. Not as many people, and arguably a better class of people than in the big cities we were used to.

It was my turn to get the children ready for bed after the book and the ice cream, and wrangling the little ones into pajamas and brushing their teeth -- even with their older sisters' help -- took the better part of an hour. They wanted candy, drinks of water, to play, to go outside, a million silly wishes that made me smile even as I looked sternly down on Bear trying to hide from me in a cardboard castle. They trooped downstairs in their PJs to hug Jessie and Sienna goodnight, and then we all trooped back upstairs, the women to get ready for bed, me to tuck the kids in. They all shared a massive room on the third floor, sectioned off into large cubicles for privacy, to give each child their own space. As they grew, the cubes would be turned into proper bedrooms, the entire floor rearranged.

Neit followed us up, padding up the steps on his gigantic paws, settling down in a big furry pile on the floor in front of the cubicles. I tucked my kids in one by one, youngest to oldest. Jane didn't need to be tucked in -- she grabbed the blanket off her bed and lay down on the floor, head on Neit's side. The two had quite the bond, both of them guarding the younger kids all through the night.

Not for the first time, I wondered what impulses were at work in my oldest daughter's head to make her sleep on the floor between the door and her siblings.

Door locked behind me, I headed downstairs to make sure the doors were locked and the lights turned off. The fire was burning safe and low behind the grate, and I nearly tripped over Carman in the dark. Neit's mate patrolled the house at night with the same vigilance that she patrolled the property during the day. I was still surprised that the giant Russian Shepherd moved so stealthily in the dark. Woe to anyone who entered the house without my consent.

Satisfied that the house was secure, I headed up to my floor, let myself into the bedroom. I sat on the bed and pulled off my boots, flopped back. Dammit, it felt good to relax. I felt like I could just sink into the bed, be enveloped by and surrender to tiredness and softness and just...rest.

I was woken up by two laughing women, damp from their shower and wrapped in fluffy towels. "You're gonna sleep? Really?" Jessie asked incredulously.

"Just for a minute."

"If you want to go to bed, I mean, we can have some fun tomorrow..." Sienna suggested.

I stood. "I'm gonna shower, and then yes, I want to go to bed. In the carnal sense, not the restful sense." I growled my desire at my women, pulled them one at a time into kisses deep and wet and lustful, then headed for the bathroom.

A towel hit me in the back of the head. "Who did tha -- oh."

Both women were on the edge of the bed, on their hands and knees, bottoms stuck out towards me. See still had her emerald plug in, and I was surprised to see Jessie's onyx gem glittering between her buttcheeks.

"This is what's waiting for you when you get out of the shower," Sienna announced, her voice low and dark.

I meant to shower quickly and return to my women, but the hot water felt too good, and I stood beneath the spray for a long while, letting the driving force pummel my skin with a boiling sensation. Dammit, that felt good...

I toweled off when the water ran cold, dressed in boxers, brushed my teeth at the triple-sink vanity. The collection of scars on my body still surprised me -- my mangled bicep, the wax-smear bullet hole in my side, the surgical scars on my hairline and abdomen and hip and back. Still muscular though, could still do heavy work or throw a punch. And my two women thought I was attractive, so who cared if my body looked like it had gone through a woodchipper.

I heard sounds of feminine pleasure as I put my hand on the bathroom doorknob, opened it, observed the sapphic scene on the bed. Both girls had dressed in white cotton nighties and white cotton thongs. Sienna lay between Jessie's widespread legs, one hand slowly working a vibrator inside her own pussy, the other reaching up to grope her lover's flat tits as she ate her out.

I approached, savoring the sound of my girls enjoying themselves. Jessie looked lazily up at me as I stood by the side of the bed. "Ready to join us, daddy?"

"What do you think?"

She reached up and ran a hand over the bulge in my shorts. "I think you're ready to fuck our brains out. OH FUCK!" Jessie arched her head back into the pillows, torso rising up off the bed, and See had to pull her back into place to continue eating.

"I think that counts as telling you she came," the blonde said, satisfaction in her voice.

All Jessie was saying was "uh uh uh" over and over as her hips rolled and she tried to pull her lovers blonde head against her cunt with her thighs.

I stepped further down the side of the bed, firmly removed the vibrator from Sienna's hand, and began pumping out in and out of her. She did an admirable job of trying to continue her oral assault on the brunette, but eventually just lowered her face to the sheets and twitched. She came loudly, a high-pitched keening wail as her body tightened and relaxed, waves of pleasure rolling through her and receding.

Jessie carefully swung her legs over Sienna's head, stood up unsteadily. She stroked the blonde's hair as she came down, then pulled her up. Both looked angelic in their white nighties, with flushed skin and messy hair. "How do you want us?"

"Go get some water."

"Ok." They sprinted for the bathroom, and I heard the faucet run. I smiled and sat on the edge of the bed.

My two white-dressed beauties returned, and I looked them up and down, my hunger for them growing. Dammit, they were gorgeous.

I made them kneel for me first, unbuckling their "indoor necklaces" and replacing them with their actual leather collars, taking my time to memorize every detail of the edges sliding against damp soft skin, the curves of one girl's neck or the way the other lifted her chin and the play of muscle beneath the surface.

As usual, Jessie bent over my lap first, and I skimmed her nightie up her back. The onyx stone of her plug was plainly visible behind the slim strap of her thong, and she sighed when my hand "accidentally" rubbed it while pulling her panties down. She spread her legs to keep the flimsy garment hanging between her knees, shivered again when I ran my hand over her exposed pussy. "You're wet," I stated quietly.

"Just looking forward to tonight."

My hand came down on her asscheek loudly, and she grunted, pushed back after involuntarily bucking forward. Jessie didn't like a lot of warm-up, and my hard spanks reddened her buns quickly, making her yelp and shift. When she looked back at me, there was a feral sneer curling her lips. I gave her firm, wide-handed smacks up and down her asscheeks and upper thighs, and she actually started laughing at the sensation, in between hisses at the sting of pain.

Sienna stood and watched, awaiting her turn, and I decided to give her something to do. "See, go and get our favorite paddle from the toybox."

Jessie looked back with a bemused smile. "Oh, did I do something wrong?"

"Not at all."

The blonde returned from sorting through the impact drawer of the dresser with the silicone paddle I'd had since Minnesota. Shaped roughly like a shoe-sole or figure eight, it was made to be flexible and sting. I took it from See and rubbed it over Jessie's booty, giving her time to think about what was coming, then pulled back and brought it down in a slap on her right cheek.

Jessie yelped and kind of hopped forward, glared back at me then returned to her bottom-raised position. The next few made her inhale, but she didn't move, instead focusing on breathing.

Finished, I slid the edge of the paddle between her legs, rubbing her slit with the velvety-soft silicone. She shifted and squirmed on my lap as I teased her, and when I pulled the toy away, the black material glistened with her juices.

I felt a sense of satisfaction at the visible proof of her arousal. I'd used this toy when I first met her, and her response hadn't changed.

I gave her bottom a pat to let her know I was done, and she kicked off her panties, did a graceful twirl to straddle my lap. Her lips pressed to mine, and her tongue forced its way into my mouth as she kissed me frantically.

Pulling away, she sucked in air. "Fuck, I love you."

"I love you too."

She slid off my lap and guided Sienna down to take her place, peeling the white cotton thong down to her knees, motioning them apart to give me my preferred view. I rubbed the flat of the paddle over See's bottom, the pink receding. "You're not gonna get very many, because you already got some discipline this afternoon."

Jessie giggled, leaned in to plant a kiss on the blonde's bare butt. "I can see that. I'm kinda jealous."

"Don't be," Sienna said, her voice rising to a sigh as I grazed my hand against her plump, wet pussy.

I let her enjoy the gentleness a moment more, then brought the silicone down. She yelped, lurched, and reached out for Jessie's hand. The brunette moved to kneel at her shoulder, kissing it, then her cheek, their knuckles tightening white together as Sienna gave another loud cry at the stinging impact to her bottom.

I watched the two of them together as I paddled the blonde. Sienna had always - in whatever relationship she was in -- taken the submissive role, even with other women. She looked to me to lead, had deferred to Tori, now deferred to Jessie. Her lover crouched by her head, squeezing her hand when I spanked her, when she cried out, kissing her gently and whispering dirty in her ear about what a naughty girl she was for touching herself without daddy's permission, how she deserved to have her bottom spanked red and fucked roughly.