The Possibilities - Desire - A Collection of Short Stories (7 page)

CAMPING

Brian’s eyes widened as he turned to
see his companion.  He had spent two days in the nursing home with his
father, and he had left for Fort Bragg.  He hadn’t been assigned to an
area where there were many women, either military or civilian…and he had been a
very, very long time without a woman.  He was very much afraid that he was
going to have to retreat into the swamps and commit the sin of Onan before much
longer.  Married or not, this woman was seething with repressed
sexuality.  Forcing himself to look away from the enticing movement of her
unfettered breasts beneath the thin tee shirt, Brian set about building up
their meager store of firewood.

Pat slipped on her tennis shoes and
went to help him…she was no helpless shrinking violet.  They spent the
rest of the afternoon making their ‘campsite’ better, as much to occupy their
minds as for comfort.  Brian had gone back to the wreckage one last time
to see if he had missed anything useful, and he had draped jackets over the
dead.  His search turned up a twenty two caliber nine shot top break
revolver and a box of ammunition beneath the pilot’s seat in a small carryon
bag.  Brian smiled to himself…he had just assured their food supply for a
couple of weeks, if necessary.

The light was beginning to dim when
he took Pat out into the swamp, showing her which plants were edible.  He
had taken the pistol and holster, attaching them to the webbed belt of his
trousers, but he hadn’t needed them.  A sharpened stick had enabled him to
spear a few very large bluegills, along with a handful of large
bullfrogs.  Pat looked on with alarm as he prepared the bullfrog legs, but
the smell of the roasting fish that Brian had enclosed in a cover of foil along
with wild onions, wild carrots, and the roots of some palmetto that Brian had
laboriously dug from the ground with the survival axe from the plane was damned
appetizing.  He spitted the frog legs and stuck the sticks in the ground
near the fire.

When he removed the cover from the
fish, careful not to tear the foil so that they could reuse it, Brian showed
Pat why it was important to save all the condiments from the M.R.E.s.  The
fish was delicious, as were the wild vegetables.  Pat couldn’t remember a
meal she had enjoyed this much, despite the miserable circumstances.

As soon as the sun dropped behind
the horizon, the temperature began to drop.  By the time the frog legs
were ready (they smelled so good that Pat mastered her revulsion and tasted
one…which was so good that she ate four more) clouds had obscured the moon and
rain was virtually assured.  Brian quickly cut a shallow trench around the
shelter, and then laid a military poncho from inside his duffel bag onto the
ground atop a pile of ferns as a ground cover.  They hung the blanket up
to air out before the rain started.

As the rain started to fall, the two
of them found themselves very close together under the shelter.  Brian
produced a waterproof bag from his duffel, emptying it of its contents. 
He explained its purpose to Pat apologetically.  “Stuff your clothes into
this bag for the night.  If you try to sleep in them, water from your body
and from the damp air will collect in them.  You’ll be cold and miserable
long before you’re ready to wake up, and before the sun dries you out in the
morning.”

”But I’m not wearing…” Pat shut her
mouth abruptly.

Brian laughed.  “It’s okay Pat,
I can sit up out here, and you go ahead and wrap up in the blanket.”  He
had suffered through much worse than this, and if he got really tired, he could
catch up on his sleep in the daytime.  He lay down beside her after she
had removed her tee shirt and jeans.  She put them in the waterproof bag
and slipped the bag under her head as a pillow. Guilt kept her from talking to
him, so she rolled over and backed up to the solidity of his body.

THE DECISION

Sometime in the night she awakened,
cold in spite of all the precautions.  Rain was pouring down outside the
shelter, but the trench Brian had dug was keeping the water from coming
inside.  He was facing away from her, and he was shivering from the
cold.  “Fuck it,” she said aloud, tossing the blanket back and sitting up,
began to tug at his clothes.  Even in the dark he could see she was naked.

“But…”

“Shut up Brian, give me your clothes
and get under the damned blanket.”   He did as he was told. 
When he climbed anxiously under the blanket, trying not to touch her, Pat threw
her arm and leg over his shivering body and pulled him close. She felt the
hardness of him under her thigh, and she felt him tense up. In a very few
seconds she felt his manhood jump against her heated skin and felt the warm
wetness seep through his briefs.

“Jesus Pat, I’m so sorry…” she could
sense his embarrassment in the darkness.

“Shhhh,” she whispered, reaching to
remove the damp briefs, “they’ll dry out.  It’s not like I’ve never made a
man cum before.”  She giggled to herself, pleased that she had gotten such
a reaction from him.  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s a natural
thing.”  She lifted the wet briefs from under the blanket after using them
to dry him off, flinging them to the edge of the poncho.  Neither of them was
shivering anymore.  Deliberately, she laid her thigh right where it had
been before the ‘accident’.  He was still hard.  Pleased with
herself, Pat pressed her breasts against his bare skin, breathed deeply of the
man smell of his skin, and promptly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

He had tried to hold back as best he
could, but Brian had another emission about an hour after the first one. 
Pat had stirred at the feel of it, but she refused to wake up, she had simply
curled her hand around his throbbing stiffness and cuddled closer.

Pat awakened before Brian did,
astounded and then thrilled as she realized where she was and why.  It had
not felt unusual at all to wake up nude with a man’s penis in her hands, it was
how she woke up with her husband every morning.  It took every ounce of
her self-restraint to keep from climbing on top of this gorgeous soldier and
waking him up the way she used to wake Paul up…providing Paul was in the
mood.  It had been a
very
long time since she had awakened
this
hard
in her hand.   Instead of pulling her hand away like she should have,
she squeezed him.  In seconds, she was asleep again and breathing deeply,
a wide smile on her pretty face.

Brian awakened and groaned at the
ache in his groin. He could feel her hand on him and the urgency of his need
made him slip out from under the blanket and head for the edge of the
hummock.  It was cold and damp, and a thick fog lay over the swamp. 
He grabbed himself and managed to stroke only twice before he spilled into the
dark waters.  Relieved, he stood a moment longer and emptied his bladder
into the water.

He crept back to the bed and stared
down at the beautiful tousled hair of Pat’s head before lifting the waterproof
bag containing their clothes.  They were a tad damp, but not like they
would have been if they’d worn them to bed.  In no time at all he was
dressed and tending the fire, digging deep beneath the wet embers on top for
the living coals at the base of the fire.  Soon, he had a merry flame
going, with some of the bottled water boiling for instant coffee from the
M.R.E.s.

Pat smelled the instant coffee
through the morning mist and sat up, the blanket puddling around her
waist.  She shook her hair out and ran her fingers through the tangled
strands, catching Brian’s stare out of the corner of her eye.  “Good
morning hotshot,” she said teasingly.  When she got the expected blush,
she patted the blanket next to her.  “Come here Brian,” she said, “I’m
afraid we need to talk…and besides, I want a sip of that coffee, it smells
good.”

It was good, in spite of its
strength.  Brian was no longer even pretending not to look at her bare
breasts.  “Look Brian,” she said, handing him the tin canteen cup of
coffee back to him and leaning back on her hands, “we’re going to be in close
quarters for the next few days.  I’m not going to turn my head every time
you have to pee and I don’t expect you to do it for me.  This little piece
of dirt is not very big, and I’m not fond of or used to the critters hanging
out in this dark water.  Yes, I’m married, and yes, in spite of that you
make me horny as a teenager.  I don’t know where this is going, but I want
you to know right this minute…no matter what happens, I won’t be blaming you.”

It was a long speech for her, and
she was amazed that she got it out without choking.  Pat Ames loved her
husband, and she had no intention of leaving him…but she knew deep inside
herself that she had no intention of leaving this swamp without making love to
this handsome soldier. There was no way to explain why she felt the way she
did, it just was.

Brian simply stared at her in
amazement.  Pat gave him a few minutes to absorb what she had told him,
and then she leaned forward and she kissed him.  It was not the hard
passionate kiss of a lover, nor was it the quick affectionate peck of a
wife.  It was the deep, soulful kiss of a woman who knew what she wanted
and was determined to have it.  It left Brian breathless as Pat got up and
walked casually to the edge of the hummock to relieve herself into the water.

For Brian, the view was
spectacular.  He wondered if the trauma of the plane crash and the death
of the others had affected her somehow, but he was no psychologist. Other than
her decision to tantalize him with her nudity and to sleep with him the same
way, she seemed totally normal.  He shrugged.  It could be a lot
worse.

She put on her tennis shoes and the
wispy panties when the sun came up.  The temperature rose dramatically so
she crawled out of their makeshift bed and hung the ground cloth and blanket
across a simple rack Brian made for her.  She went about a simple
housekeeping routine while Brian went into the swamp for their morning meal.

He brought back dewberries and some
other late season fruits, as well as a pair of rabbits he had shot with the
pistol on another hummock some distance away. Pat took the fruits and washed
them off with water from the bottled water that was left.  Pat started to
throw the bottles into the fire when Brian stopped her.  “We need to
gather up all the bottles after we eat.  I’ve got a surprise for
you.”  He refused to tell her any more.  Pat was like a child
guessing at her birthday present, and Brian seemed to be enjoying every minute
of it. No matter how much she wheedled and pleaded, he wouldn’t tell her what
the surprise was.

The rabbit was delicious, roasted to
a golden brown over the coals, and then basted with a mixture of the Tabasco
sauce from tiny bottles in the M.R.E.s and salt and pepper from the remaining
condiment packs.  The fruit was tart and refreshing and Pat thought she
had never had such an interesting breakfast.

After breakfast, she slipped her tee
shirt on to help protect her a bit from the mosquitoes that seemed much less in
evidence in the cool air and daylight, and followed Brian into the
swamps.  He had emptied the duffle bag of his belongings and stuffed the
plastic bottles inside it.  The two straps affixed to the outside of the
duffel bag enabled him to carry  it like a backpack, and they soon arrived
at a much larger dry spot a couple of hundred yards wide and perhaps a quarter
of a mile long. There were giant water oaks in a grove at the center, and there
was evidence of deer, rabbit, opossum, squirrel, and what could have been fox
tracks. There was an artesian spring surrounded by moss near the north end of
the huge hummock, and the water was clear and cold.  Brian knelt and drank
straight from the spring, the taste of the water clean and good.  Pat
knelt beside him and took one of the bottles from the green duffel bag, filling
it first and drinking from it.  Water had never tasted so good.

“It’s gorgeous Brian,” Pat said,
“couldn’t we stay here and wait instead of on our little hummock? It was much
less crowded, and there was fresh water and trees…

Brian grinned.  “Yeah, we can,”
he said, “I thought it was too far away but I was disoriented…we’re almost as
close as we were at the other spot.”  He pointed.”If you look through
those trees right there you can just see the tip of the tail section.” 
Pat moved closer to him to try to follow his point and found that she was so
close she could see the details of his long eyelashes.  The eyes beneath
the lashes were an odd hazel that seemed to change with the light, and Pat was
suddenly lost in their depths.

They stood, face to face in the
depths of the Okefenokee, neither of them able to speak.  In that moment,
Pat knew she would never be able to explain the way she felt about this man to
anyone…she wasn’t sure she understood it herself.  Whatever it was, it was
earth moving, and it shattered her conceptions of fidelity, of honor, and even
of pride.  Nothing on earth was going to stop her from reaching out for
this moment in time.  At this instant, he was hers and hers alone. 
Her hand trembled as she reached out for his face and drew him to hers. 
His lips were full and soft, mating with hers in a ritual as old as man
himself. 

She felt the ineffable sweetness of
him as he trembled against her, not with fear or intimidation, but with desire
restrained by his own sense of honor.    It would not save him
this time.  Pat drew his hands to her exposed belly, and started them on
their journey up beneath her tee shirt.  She wriggled as they explored her
body, soft, but demanding.  When she was sure he was committed to what she
desired more than anything else in the world at this moment in time, she began
an exploration of her own.  Her hands, remembering his hardness from the
night before, returned to his heat, his manhood straining towards her
grasp.  Somehow their clothes were gone and it was just the two of them,
reclining on the incredible softness of the green moss surrounding the
spring.  She opened herself to him, guiding him with soft whimpers of approval
and hurried movements of her delicate hands until he began to fill her. 
His entry was excruciatingly slow, her eyes widening as the passion built in
both of them.