Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Two Two Three: Kayak

I'll be trying to end the year with stories lovely young friends have told me of their adventures. And why not? Memories matter, just as details do. And good stories deserve to be written down, to be kept for the future.

So, then. By way of introduction, this is a story told to me by a very lovely and much-admired friend who's been sharing her December with me. We'll call her Liberty. She's tallish and gifted with lovely grey-blue eyes and a mass of strawberry-blonde hair.  I've known her for a couple of years, actually. We met when she poured drinks at an oyster bar I've been known to frequent downtown. She was rather young--- just on the edge of graduating university ---and for some reason found me interesting. We had a brief fling before she went off to Florida and back to her old haunts in New Mexico. A few months ago I ran into her again, tending bar at a new place near my rooms. She remembered me--- she was wearing a sweater that used to be mine, after all ---and we've been keeping company.

I knew that I wasn't the first older gentleman of her acquaintance, and one night not long ago I pulled her close and asked her about her first older lover. She laughed and tapped her glass--- a Negroni ---on mine and told me this...

Her first encounter with an Older Man happened when she was sixteen. Her family lived in the Pacific Northwest in those days. Her parents were hippies, and while they weren't posh, her dad owned a successful landscaping business and her mom ran a greenhouse/plant nursery. So when she was sixteen, they told her she could have her own kayak. She'd been kayaking on the local rivers and streams since she was small, but they finally gave her money to buy her own. She went to a couple of the outdoor life and river sports places near where she lived. One of the places was a shop that specialized in kayaks and kayak tours, and the guy running it was supposed to be very good.

She went over one summertime morning early--- drove up in a battered old SUV from her father's company. When she went in, the owner was there, and when he saw she was serious about kayaking, he started talking with her and showing her boats.

At sixteen, Liberty was no virgin. She'd been fucked (halfway consensually, she says) at fourteen, and she'd fucked boys at house parties and after school. But she hadn't had anyone older than maybe 20. The owner of the shop was in his early or mid-30s--- she says she guessed at like 32 or 34 ---and apparently good-looking: tall, in good shape, stubbly, handsome. So she liked talking with him and started thinking he was interesting. She has really never been shy or coy about sex. She's always been very straightforward and earnest and serious. Her hippie upbringing, maybe. She just stood really close and kept making eye contact and holding herself to make being bra-less obvious. Summertime, and  she was wearing short shorts and a racer-back tank. She was a full 34C at 16 and she had (and still has) very good legs, so he at least was looking.

She told me that the idea of trying an older man was really appealing as a challenge. She asked if he could show her some of the kayaks in the back, and he took her back to where the boats were on racks. She hopped up on a work table and listened to him talk about places he'd been kayaking and how she really needed to learn sea kayaking. He was clearly looking at her legs and clearly trying to impress her with stories of kayaking in the Andes and the Yukon.

Anyway, the shop owner asked if she smoked weed, and when she laughed and said sure, he took a joint out of the pocket of his denim shirt and lit up. It was a weekday summer morning, and she thinks there may only have been one or two other people in the store--- people who worked for the owner. So they smoked and laughed and he flirted with her. He started touching her hair and tracing a finger along her legs. She said she slid forward on the table and started kissing him.

He told her that he knew she was underage and she couldn't tell anyone about this. She  just shrugged and said that was cool. They kissed and she kicked off her little flip-flops and got her legs round him. He played with her soft breasts and pushed up her singlet. Liberty said she just reached down and pulled it over her head and told him to kiss her tits. She squeezed him through his jeans and got him out. She remembers telling him that she didn't care if anyone came back into the rack area, and he just said no one would anyway. She stroked him and got off the table to take him in her mouth. Once she had him down her throat he played with her hair and tits and took a couple more hits on the joint, Then he picked her up and put her back on the table and got her shorts open. I thought she'd probably be in tiny, ragged, faded cut-off jeans shorts, but she told me they were khaki shorts--- short and probably old and dirty, but khaki not denim.

She wasn't wearing underwear ("I know you'll like that part," she told me) and the owner laughed and asked if she'd forgotten something that morning. Liberty just told him no. In the summer,  she told me, back in her teens, she mostly didn't bother--- too hot  once the sun got up, and mostly in the mornings she just showered and pulled on shorts and a t-shirt or a singlet and didn't much care about shoes, underwear, or bras. Anyway, he got her shorts off and tossed them on the floor and leaned over her while he pulled her into the right angle for entry.

He didn't ask her about condoms or being on the Pill, and she was pretty unconcerned about things like that anyway.  She got her legs back round him and he pushed into her while they kissed and he squeezed her breasts. She told me it was rough in the good way--- she felt taken but still appreciated. Good fuck, she said. Good size, good thickness, good hip motion. He pushed her legs up and got them over his shoulders. He had two fingers in her mouth, which was probably good--- she is seriously loud when she has sex, and there were at least a couple of people out in the front of the store.

He came in her, which felt good. She wanted him to turn her over and fuck her from behind, but they both worried about time. He finally apologised for not using a condom, and she told him not to worry, that it was no big deal. She told me she remembered that while he was fucking her, she could look up at the closest rack and see the label on the kayak--- a Riot Kayak 11-LV Day Tourer. She still remembered that eight years later, and I wrote it down in my Moleskine. Anyway...she got her singlet back on and found her shorts on the floor and stepped back into them. She kissed his cock and kissed him and thanked him.

She said she stepped into one flip-flop but couldn't find the other--- it must've gone under one of the racks. They were $5 cheap rubber ones, so she just took the one she had and tossed it in a trash can and stayed barefoot the rest of the day. He laughed at her and told her she should come see him again and buy a boat.

She told me she did come back, and she did buy her first kayak there--- the 11-ft. Riot Day Tourer model just like the one on the rack. That's about a $US 700 boat, and she used it for a long time. She took it with her the next year when she fell out with her newly-religious parents (another story)  and moved in with her then-boyfriend's family. She fucked the owner off and on most of that summer. She'd come by the shop  or meet him at his house or down at one of the docks on the local rivers. She said it was all very casual--- she had other things in her life that kept her busy, and she dated a few people or hooked up at parties. She said the best time was once when she and her best friend April went kayak camping  and she arranged for the owner to meet them where they'd be camping. They all drank lots of whiskey and smoked weed and he spent the night in a sleeping bag with Liberty. Did she and April do a 3-way with the man?  She elbowed me when I asked and told that of course they had, both that night and few other nights, that it was all about learning new things and enjoying the summer. She loved driving to the store and just hanging out, being the barefoot girl with headphones sitting on the owner's desk with her iPod and a smoothie...and a flask hidden in her little daypack.

Anyway, she decided she liked Older Men, or at least was comfortable with them. That made it easy when she and I first started talking a couple of years ago, when she was at the oyster bar. She thought I was interesting and the age thing meant pretty much zero to her. When I told her my age--- she just shrugged.  What mattered, she said, was that I was interesting.  We'll use each other for the stories, she said. We'll trade stories and we'll learn things. Something I was very comfortable with.

Well, Liberty herself is very, very interesting. Her stories range from the Pacific Northwest to New Mexico and Colorado, to North Carolina and Florida. She has a degree in environmental sciences and is looking forward to doing an master's in coastal wetlands management. I can be there with her in the dark  and listen to her tell me tales of her past and her thoughts, and she's taught me kayaking and how to play pétanque. I should like to keep her in my life, and I very much hope she'll whisper more things to me on winter nights.

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