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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Chapter 34
After Susie left and the weekend passed, things got back to normal. I was still mostly working in the kitchen and a little out on the fuel dock. I still got out in the Chinook III a couple times a week, usually but not always with Rachel. The two of us got out in the Pixie a few times, but the schedule never let up to the point where I could take a few days to go somewhere with it. There was just too much going on.
As the month of July wound down Rachel’s birthday came around. You could still buy liquor at eighteen in those days, so rather than having a birthday party and a cake in the snack bar, the usual crowd of us took her down to Dot’s Bar for her first legal drink – and, I suspect pretty close to her first one, anyway. She said she’d tried beer once and didn’t like it, so someone suggested a wine cooler and she said it wasn’t too bad, considering.
We all gave her gifts, of course; I gave her a Navy-style pea jacket like the one I often wore in the colder months, but in her size, naturally. Once we got done with the gift giving and the cake and the candles, somebody shouted “Speech!” and she took them up on it.
“I want to thank everybody for my special birthday party,” she said. “And of course, the presents and all. But there are a couple things I’d like to ask special for my eighteenth birthday to really celebrate my being an adult. First, Barb, would you give Jake the day off, and go out with Dad tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Barb said. “You want to do something with Jake?”
“Yes,” she grinned. “That’s the second thing I want to ask. Jake, can we take the Pixie and go out to Gull Island tomorrow?”
I was just finishing up with making our picnic lunch in the kitchen of the snack bar the next morning when Rachel walked in, carrying a large barrel bag. It was clear that it was going to be a hot day; she was wearing short white shorts and a dark polo shirt. I could see the strings of a swimsuit top sticking out the back of her collar. “Are we about ready to go?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” I told her. “I just have to get some ice and some soft drinks in the cooler.”
“Good,” she smiled. “I can’t wait!”
“Wow! You sound eager. This is just another trip out to Gull Island, after all.”
“This one is special,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”
It didn’t take me long to finish up. In only a couple minutes I was carrying the cooler down to the end of the dock where the Pixie was moored. She walked along beside me carrying the big barrel bag, still seeming exceptionally excited, even for her.
By now, we had preparing and launching the Pixie down to a science. I set the cooler and the barrel bag down on the bunk in the cabin, where it would be out of the way, while she got the covers off of the sails. “Boy, it’s dead,” I said. “There’s not a breath of air stirring. We’re going to have to use the kicker to get out of the channel.”
“It’s fine with me,” she said, looking around at the sky. “Maybe there’ll be a breeze offshore. I don’t want to wait around. I just want to get going.”
“Then let’s do it,” I told her as I turned to get the Evinrude started. As always, it started with only two or three pulls, so I let it warm up while Rachel took the lines off the cleats on the dock, then got aboard. I took the motor out of neutral and started easing away from the dock, and she went up alongside the cabin to the front deck to coil up the mooring line and put the sails up.
In only a couple minutes, we were motoring down the channel, the sails hanging loose. Rachel sat down on the cockpit seat opposite me, with a huge smile on her face. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on behind it, but something told me that maybe it was better not to ask.
We motored out between the breakwaters and found there wasn’t much happening on the big lake. There were some long, slow swells probably left over from the day before, but little else. I turned the Pixie toward Gull Island, and before too long a hint of a breeze sprang up from out of the west. “It’s not much,” I commented. “Maybe we’d better motor for a while longer.”
“No,” she said. “Let’s break out the jennie. That might move us along a little better. It’s so much better to have the motor off, even if we’re only creeping.”
“Fine with me,” I told her. “You’re going to have to be the one to do the work.”
That was all it took to get her working at it. The genoa wasn’t a hard sail to fly, but it took some messing around on the foredeck, though nothing difficult in the barely moving air. Once it was up, we moved along a little faster, but still at the speed of a slow walk.
“Wow,” she said after she rejoined me in the cockpit. “It’s going to be warm today. I think maybe I’d better get down to my swimsuit.”
Before I could say anything, she pulled the polo shirt over her head and slipped her shorts off, revealing an extremely tiny white string bikini. It was thin enough to almost see through. I had never seen her wear anything even close to that before. This one was even more daring than some of those I had seen on some of the teeny-bopper boaters. “Wow,” I said. “That doesn’t leave much to the imagination.”
“I take it you like it, then?” she said with a grin.
“Well, yeah,” I admitted. “But does your father know you’re wearing it out here with me?”
“We never talked about it,” she said seriously. “After all, I’m an adult now, so it’s not like I have to ask his permission.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, helpless to take my eyes off her barely covered body. “I can just imagine the shit fit my mother would throw if she were to catch Julie, or even Lisa wearing something like that, and Lisa is a lot older than you are.”
“I’ve seen Lisa wearing bikinis about like this,” she giggled. “At least she’s smart enough to not let your mother catch her.”
“Well, yeah,” I laughed. “But that’s Lisa. You’d better be careful about getting it wet or you’re going to be showing off just about everything you have.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she smiled. “Maybe I ought to go swimming right now.”
I shook my head. “Something tells me that this is going to be a long day,” I said.
The breeze came up steadily, and before long we were ripping along about as fast as I’d ever gone with the Pixie. It was an exhilarating ride, and we both enjoyed it immensely. At that rate, we came up on Gull Island quickly. “You just want to give stopping at the island a pass?” I asked. “It’s hard to give up a sail like this.”
“No, I want to spend the day on the island,” she said. “And if we’re going to, I guess maybe we’d better get the jennie in.”
“Yeah, if we don’t we’re going to blow right past the island.”
Rachel got on a life jacket and life line to go up on the front deck to bring the sail down. By then we were getting close enough to the island for me to tell her to get ready to bring the main in, too.
Normally we beached the Pixie on Gull Island, but only if the wind was right. Today it wasn’t. The best beach on the leeward side of the island was rocky, and those big long swells we’d seen earlier were still coming in, their direction opposite to the ripples of the offshore wind. If we beached the boat in those conditions, it would bounce around on the rocks, so I had Rachel set the anchor in the shallow water a little ways offshore, then had her start taking the mainsail down. “We’re going to have to wade ashore,” I told her. “Maybe you ought to put your shorts back on so I can’t see through your swimsuit.”
“I’m not going to worry about it,” she teased as she turned to working on the mainsail; I helped her bungee it to the boom. “What if I want you to see what I’ve got?”
“Rachel, you are really full of shit today, you know that?”
I got the cooler and barrel bag up from the cabin, stripped down to my swimsuit and put my outer clothes in the barrel bag, then eased myself overboard into the waist deep water. Rachel handed the cooler to me, and I put it on my shoulder, but before I could start for shore she said, “You’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t get my swimsuit wet.”
Before I could say anything, she’d pulled the strings to untie first the top of her bikini, then the bottom. She stood there fully nude as she stuffed the two tiny bits of cloth into the barrel bag. I didn’t get a lot of time to look just then, but I saw a nicely-trimmed patch of light brown pubic hair and the cute little pink nipples on her breasts. She jumped off the Pixie into the lake, which came up higher on her than it did on me but still not enough to cover her breasts, and put the barrel bag on her shoulder.
I couldn’t think of a thing to say; I just stood there with my jaw hanging open. “What?” she said with a wide grin. “You were the one who said I shouldn’t get my swimsuit wet.”
I just turned and started toward shore, shaking my head. Just what the hell was she thinking of? This really had the makings of a long day.
It didn’t take us long to wade up to the beach. It was only fifty yards or so. We found a nice patch of sand toward the edge of the few trees on the island, a spot where we’d been before. We put our loads down; Rachel pulled a couple towels from the bag, and handed one to me. I dried my lower half off, still unable to take my eyes off her, and still unable to think of anything sensible to say.
Rachel spread the damp towels out on a couple handy bushes, then spread out the blanket on the sand. Finally I managed to say, “Rachel! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Working on my tan, silly,” she grinned. She pulled a bottle of suntan lotion out of the bag and said, “Put this on me, would you? And I mean all of me.”
I let out a big sigh. “Rachel,” I said. “You’re making things very hard for me.”
“That’s the general idea. I want you nice and hard. Remember I said that there was something I wanted you to do for me?”
“I thought that was to come out here.”
“Well, that was part of it,” she said after a laugh. “But what I really want you to do is make me a woman.”
“Huh? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t want to be a virgin any longer. And I want you to be the one to do the honors.”
“Rachel, I shouldn’t,” I said, still reaching for words. “I mean, you’re still, uh . . . ”
“Jake,” she said with a tone of exasperation in her voice as she rolled over to present her nude front side to me. “I’m not a little girl any longer, like I was when I fell in love with you while we sailed the Mary Sue down to Sandusky. I’m legally an adult now. You even bought me a drink legally last night! I love you, Jake! I’ve waited for two years for this, and I don’t intend to wait any longer.”
“Rachel,” I said as I kneeled down on the blanket next to her nude body. “I, well, this is awful sudden.”
“It may be for you,” she said sounding a bit exasperated. “But it’s been two damn long years for me. Do you know what you did to me back when we were on the Mary Sue? You made me fall in love with you, that’s what!”
“I didn’t do anything,” I protested. “At least I don’t think I did.”
“Oh, the hell you didn’t. You were just being you, and that was what made me fall in love with you. You don’t even see it, do you?”
“See what? You’ve lost me, Rachel.”
“Jake, think about it. A what? Twenty-two-, twenty-three-year-old guy, whatever it was, and a fifteen-year-old girl. I was the one who knew what I was doing and you didn’t, right?”
“Right,” I said. “I’d been on a sailboat once before in my life, and you had a hell of a lot more experience.”
“That’s the point, silly,” she grinned. “Ninety-nine guys out of a hundred would have tried to take charge, even if they didn’t know shit about what they were doing. After all, a twenty-three-year-old guy just about automatically has to know more about everything than a fifteen-year-old girl, right? But no, you sat back and let me take charge like I was supposed to.”
“I never thought about it that way,” I admitted.
“Maybe not,” she replied. “But I sure as hell did. Hell, I kept thinking what it would have been like if Darryl had been with me instead of you, not that I would have gone on a trip like that with Darryl anyway. He would have been all over me and wouldn’t have given even a little thought to what we were supposed to have been doing. It would have been a wrestling match every inch of the way, if we’d even been able to get outside the channel.”
“I’ll admit to that much. I wouldn’t have trusted that little turd as far as I could have thrown a fit.”
“You’re starting to get it,” she said. “But you, well, you just did what you were supposed to do, and as far as I could tell you never even had a thought about touching me. As far as I can tell, you still don’t, and that’s something we’ve got to change. I’m not fifteen any longer, Jake. You’re just going to have to realize that.”
“But . . . part of the reason that I didn’t try anything was that you were fifteen,” I told her. “Your dad would have killed me if I’d tried something.”
“Yeah, it wouldn’t have been right, at least not back then,” she agreed. “But I’ll tell you what. Do you remember when we got off the boat in Sandusky? When I kissed you?”
“I do,” I smiled. “I thought it was a cute and a sweet thing for you to do.”
“You could have had me right then,” she grinned. “Even though I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. But you just grinned at me and called me your boating buddy, and it was the right thing to do, though not what I wanted at the time. I guess I’m just as glad you didn’t try anything, but I’ve known you were the guy for me ever since. Now, I’m going to lie down on my back. You can either make love to me or you can spread some suntan lotion on me, but you are damn well going to do both before the day is over.”
This was going to take a little time to get my head around, I thought as I flipped the cap open on the plastic bottle of suntan lotion. This would buy me some time, though it was going to be time that it would be hard to concentrate, I realized as I checked out her nude body again. “I still can’t quite believe it,” I said as I squeezed a wad of it out onto my hand. “This comes as a hell of a big surprise to me. I guess I’m still thinking of you as my boating buddy.”
“I know,” she said and sighed as I started rubbing the suntan lotion on her belly. “God, there have been times that it’s really sucked for me, too. Mom and I had a long talk about it, and we decided it would be best if I waited until I got out of high school and turned eighteen. There have been times that it was hard to keep my promise. You remember when you brought me out here the first time last year?”
“Sure,” I grinned. “You wore that wine-colored one-piece sort-of-bikini that I thought was really cute.”
“You could have had it off me if you’d have made the slightest move, you know?”
“News to me,” I said. Why the hell hadn’t I seen this coming? Because I thought of Rachel as my boating buddy, a co-worker? “Rachel, for oh, hell, a year or more now, I’ve thought of you as my best friend, especially after Susie left and Debby went to John, but I guess I never thought of you as a girlfriend. To have it come out of nowhere is going to take some getting used to.”
“Get used to it, and spread that suntan lotion around real good, especially on my white parts. You know, the parts that my swimsuit has covered up. I really want to feel your hands there.”
“All right,” I said, moving my hands up to her breasts. They felt, well, like a woman’s breasts for some reason, not a girl’s. This was going to be hard, and in more ways than one.
“Oh, God, I love that,” she said as I got started on them. I couldn’t help myself. I took my time. “Jake, you have no idea how bad it’s been to wait to have you do that to me. God, it really hurt last winter when I thought I’d lost you. When you went to Florida, I was so scared you weren’t going to come back. I was really pissed when you took off without telling me.” Her voice got a hitch in it like she was holding back a tear, but she went on. “All you would have had to do was to say the word and I’d have been with you, high school or no high school.”
“I knew that part of it,” I said as I spread suntan lotion on one of her arms. I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to get to some really sensitive parts, but I wanted to hold that off as long as I could. “I knew you would really enjoy the trip, and I was right. You’d have had a ball. But I figured it would be awkward with the two of us being so close on the Pixie for months.”
“Yeah, I knew that,” she said. “But I wasn’t looking at it quite the same way you were. I wanted to be a lot closer to you than you were probably thinking.”
“No question about it,” I said. “Once again, I never thought that you were looking at it that way.”
“You still thought of me as a little girl, as your boating buddy, and that was about it, right?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Like I said, I never picked up that you felt any differently about it.”
“I did, a lot Hell, I talked to Dad about it quite a bit. He said he was pretty sure you were going to be back, and that was what kept me going. If you hadn’t come back I’d be down there looking for you right now. I promised Mom that I’d hold off on telling you until I got out of high school and turned eighteen, and that was about all that kept me from going down there and looking for you at Christmas. That, and I didn’t have any idea where to look.”
“I would have been pretty hard to find. I moved around a lot, and I wasn’t exactly hanging around the marinas, you know that.”
“I realized that. All I could do was hope you’d make it back. God, when Barb said you’d called and were on your way back I was so happy I almost pissed my panties. Now that I’ve got you back, Jake, I don’t plan on letting you get away from me ever again.”
By then I’d finished her arms and had moved down to her legs. “You seem pretty sure of yourself,” I said, beginning to like the idea now that I was starting to get used to it. I won’t say that I’d been waiting for Rachel, since I hadn’t ever considered her as a girlfriend, and more, for that matter. But now that the idea had come out into the open, I found myself getting comfortable with the idea. Yes, Rachel was young, but maybe she wasn’t too young anymore. I could see plenty of upsides, and we were a fit in a lot of ways, like I hadn’t really been a fit with Susie, and not even close to it with Annette.
“If you think you can get away without doing anything, you’re going to find it’s not going to be easy,” she said with a grin, then added, “You can go a little further up on my legs than that, you know.”
“I know. But I’m going to save that for a little later, just to drag out the agony. Now roll over so I can do your back.”
“But I liked what you were doing,” she said with a pout.
“Hey. When we were out on the Mary Sue, you were the boss since you knew what you were doing. You’re going to have to concede that I know a little more than you do about what we’re doing now.”
“All right,” she said, rolling over, “But don’t think you’re going to get away from here while I’m still a virgin. I can wait a little while longer, but not much.”
“That remains to be seen,” I said in a teasing voice, squeezing out another wad of sunscreen and starting in on her shoulders. “Look, this is all well and good, but what’s your dad going to say?”
“You mean besides, ‘Great?’ He knows what my plans were for today. Hell, he’s known it for months.”
“Months?”
“Well, he’s known about it ever since Mom and I talked about it before she died last summer, and I’ve talked to him about it a lot since. When he left with Barb to go out fishing this morning, they both told me good luck.”
“God, both of them?” I shook my head. “And they’re cool with it?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said with a laugh. “Barb even took me to the doctor to get me on birth control pills a while back, so that’s something we won’t have to worry about just yet.”
“Jesus,” I said after a sigh. “Nobody ever tells me anything. Who else knows?”
“Oh, I’ve talked with Debby and Annette about it, too. Susie also knows, that’s part of the reason she put you off when she was home a few weeks ago. They all know you’re mine, now. Or, at least that you’re going to be mine. Debby and I have talked about it a lot, and she told me about some things you especially like. I can’t wait to try them with you! Annette told me some neat things I want to try, too. They seem a little weird, but I want to at least try some of them out.”
“That scares me a little, you know.”
“I think they would scare me, too, if I didn’t trust you so much, Jake,” she smiled. “I love you, after all, and I love you more than I could have ever dreamed possible.”
I spent a minute or two more spreading lotion on her backside, especially liking the feel of her soft white butt. “There you go,” I said. “All done.”
“You missed a spot,” she said with a pout.
“On purpose,” I told her. “I’ll get to it. Now you do me.”
“All right,” she said. “But get that swim suit off. I want to see what I’m going to be getting.”
I’ll admit that I still wasn’t totally comfortable with the idea, but my reservations were fading fast and I realized that unless something totally unexpected happened I was going to go through with it. But, I figured that I might as well make it as much fun as possible for us, and that she was going to have to learn to do some giving, rather than just receiving. I stood up long enough to slip off my swim trunks, and lay down on my belly to let her start rubbing suntan lotion onto me.
Her slippery hands felt incredible as she rubbed them on my body. I could get used to this! As I felt her work the lotion in, we teased each other a little, while my mind was concentrating on the strangeness of this. Again, I’d never planned on this, never really considered Rachel as a possible girlfriend – but now that the idea was in front of me, I liked it. We shared a lot of interests and had a lot in common.
“Jake,” she said after a sigh. “Do I have to wait any longer? I really want to feel you doing it to me.”
In seconds she was on her back, legs spread wide. As I got down into position to enter her, she said, “Jake, just one thing.”
“What?”
“I know from what Debby and Annette told me that you can really pound it into a girl when they want it, and I want to feel that sometime, maybe even a lot of the time. But, I don’t think I’m quite ready for that just yet. I think maybe we’d better take it easy the first few times, OK? Just be gentle with me.”
“All you have to do is ask,” I told her. “I can do it however you like.”
“Then do it to me, Jake. God, I love you.”
“I love you too, Rachel. I always will.”
