“Well, I suppose,” she said. “The problem is that I could get so addicted to what we’ve been doing that I wouldn’t want to give it up when I ought to be giving it up and heading for that something else.”

“I can’t answer that,” he said. “Sharon, I know you’re a free spirit, and when you get right down to it, I’m not. I’m kind of set in my ways and I like my life about as much as you seem to like yours. About all I can say is that I’ll do my best to promise to not tie you down. We can’t know how things are going to work out, all we can do is to try and find out. I’d like to have you come out to Colorado and see if we can make it work. If we can, fine. If we can’t, no hard feelings, we can remain friends. Even friends with benefits if we feel like it, often or occasional. Sharon, I’d like to offer you the moon, but I don’t think you’d take it with the strings that would have to be attached, so that’s about all I can say about it.”

“I don’t think I can ask for much more than that,” she nodded. “I guess I really don’t have the right to ask much more than that, anyway. Like I said, I’m going to have to think about it and I’m going to have to have a long talk with Ralph and see what he thinks. I know that sounds crazy, but it always works for me, so there it is. Bob, I promise you I’ll really give it serious consideration. I’m leaning toward it at the moment, but I’ve leaned back and forth about it so much today that I really don’t even want to think about it until I can get away by myself for a while. I hope you understand that, it’s how it has to be, and I may not be able to give you an answer for a while.”

“I understand,” he replied, feeling like her answer sounded like she was preparing to turn him down. It was a disappointment; more and more he’d been looking forward to have her out in Colorado with him, showing her some of the sights, having fun together, building a life … and yes, having sex. But a relationship had to be built on more than sex, and that had been one of his concerns right from the beginning, whether they had enough in common besides the sex to really consider a longer term relationship. And, obviously, she had the same concerns. “Just understand the offer is open, and it’ll stay open, however long it takes you to make up your mind,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have you out there and I think there’s a chance we can make it work out, but honestly, I think we’ve explored all the possibilities as well as we could in the time we have available to us. Anything we can’t settle in a motel outside the Detroit airport is going to have to be in Colorado.”

“I think you’re right,” she smiled, twisting her body a little and snuggled up under his arm, letting one hand trace around his chest in a leisurely manner. “Bob, you’re very sweet,” she said. “And I think you’re very understanding. I’ve had relationships break up because guys can’t understand that I have to maintain my flexibility, and I wouldn’t let myself get tied down to what they seem to think I should be. That’s part of who I am. You seem to be doing your best to allow me to do it and still have the best of everything else. That’s a little scary, too, and I’m not sure about how I feel about it, either. That’s something else I’m going to have to try to get in perspective.”

“Do what you have to do,” he said, starting to tire of the subject. More and more it seemed like it wasn’t going to work, that she wouldn’t come, that before too long she’d be in China, half a world away. “I agree, let’s try to not talk about it anymore. What do you say if we just head up to the room and crash? It was a short night followed by a long day, and at this hour it’s going to be a short night before I have to be up again and on my way to Denver. You at least can sleep in half the day, you cute little bugger. You don’t have an airliner to meet, and Ralph won’t complain if you’re running a little late.”

“I suppose,” she said. “After all, if I’m on the road by noon and cut through Canada I can still be back in Buffalo by dark. I’m glad I brought my passport, I thought I might like to go back that way just for the sake of a new route and different scenery. And I can use the sleep. But Bob?”

“Yes?”

“I’m still horny. Do you think we could do it again?”

“We can try,” he smiled. “You’ve come pretty close to wringing me dry, but I’ll give it my best effort.”

“Oh, goody,” she grinned. “I never like to leave a man until he’s given me all he has to give. I’m going to go up there and wring you drier than the Sahara Desert.”

“Just so I can walk enough to get on the plane in the morning,” he smiled. “That’s all I ask. If this should turn out to be the end of it I want all of you I can get.”

She disengaged herself from him, stood up, and headed up the steps out of the hot tub as he followed. He pulled on his polo shirt and stepped into his flip-flops, while she pulled on her sandals, ignoring the cover up. He waited for a moment for her to put it on. “No, I don’t think I’ll bother,” she replied to the wordless question he asked with his eyes. “It’s late, there aren’t that many people up, and I want to wiggle my butt in front of you and see how turned on I can get you. Besides, maybe we’ll get lucky and run into that stuck up family and really blow their minds.”

“That would be fun,” he grinned, imagining the reaction. “It’s awful late, though. They’re probably the early-to-bed, early-to-rise types.”

“Fine,” she said. “I hope their room is next to ours. I don’t intend to hold back this time, I want you to make me scream and moan and scream some more. Maybe that’ll give them some inspiration like it gave Scott and Sonja.”

She turned and walked slowly across the courtyard, giving an exaggerated wiggle to her butt, barely covered, if you could call it that, with the black strip of the thong bikini. It moved in an interesting manner, and Bob could feel another hard on rising in his swimsuit. God almighty damn, he thought as he turned to follow her, where is that coming from? I mean, a good reason, that cute ass of hers is really sexy, but after a workout like I’ve had today I would have thought that I wouldn’t get hard again for a week.

By the time they got back up to the room he was all but ready to toss her on the nearest bed and ravish her there, but they decided to get in the shower and have a thorough washing to get the chlorine off their bodies again before diving into the sack. Of course, that took a while; it was a long, slow shower that was very sensual, one that found them rubbing their wet and soap slippery bodies against each other. They took a long time drying each other off, thoroughly this time; once again, he took the hair dryer to her hair, combing it out, playing in it, luxuriating in it. It seemed so soft and silky to the touch, so wonderful a mass of softness to play with. Once he had it thoroughly dry, they turned and kissed some more, their nude bodies pressed up against each other desperately trying to get as close as they could to savor the experience.

Somehow, as hot as they were to once again climb into bed and ravish each other, Sharon managed to remember to set her travel clock. There were not many hours left before Bob would have to be up and running if he was to make it to the airport on time to make the security check-in. He was very tired by now, running on pure adrenaline and raging hormones, but he was determined to make what might be their final efforts the most rewarding he could.

Finally ready, he took her by the hand as they headed toward the bed. Since they had really messed up the other one in the room in their earlier exertions, they decided wordlessly to use the other one. She opened up the covers and sat down on the bed, rolled onto her back, and waited as he lay down beside her. “Oh, God,” he said, looking once again at the dark loveliness of the areolas of her breasts. “Have I ever told you that those are far and away the most beautiful I’ve ever dreamed of? I love playing with them, kissing them, sucking them so I can prove it to you.”

“They’re getting sore from you proving it already,” she replied with a grin. “But I won’t mind a bit if you make it worse.”

It was a busy hour or more before Bob wound up falling asleep. He probably wasn’t at his best after everything that had gone on in the last day, but he wasn’t complaining and she didn’t either.

All too soon he was aware of Sharon’s travel clock going off, and then of her shaking him. He wanted to go right back to sleep, but she wouldn’t let him: “Bob, Bob, wake up, you’ve got to catch your plane.”

Only slowly did he come around, and then not completely, just barely enough to stagger to the bathroom, piss, and start to get dressed. Tired herself, she helped to get him dressed while she stayed in the nude. Slowly he came around enough to navigate, if not at full power; before long he was standing by the door, his arms around her one last time, holding her tight, not wanting to let her go. “Bob,” she said softly, “You’re going to have to get it together and go or you’re never going to catch your plane.”

“But I don’t want to go,” he said. “I want to stay here with you, or I want to take you with me, I don’t want to have to leave you here.”

“Bob,” she said. “I don’t want you to go either, but you have to go. I told you that I’d think about it and talk it over with Ralph, and I promise you I will. Don’t expect me to be quick about it, and expect to see me when you see me. I hope it won’t be long, but Bob?”

“Yes?”

“If for some reason it doesn’t work out, let’s make a pact to go to the reunion in five years or ten years or whatever it is and think about it again.”

“I don’t want to put it off,” he said, his composure and his reserve stolen from him by his lack of sleep. “I’m already too old, I don’t want to lose more time with you.”

“I know, Bob, and I’ve got to think about that part of it, too. Now you get going, I’m going to try and get some sleep before I have to get my poor aching body on the road. But, believe me, all the time I’m thinking about that ache I’ll be thinking of you, and how much I want you to do it to me again.”

It was not easy for Sharon to get him out the door, and she might have gone down to the lobby with him if she had put on any clothes, which she hadn’t. His last sight of her was her nude body in the open door of the hotel room, a smile on her tired face, her crotch obviously red and sore from all he had done to it in the last day and a few hours. If there had to be a last sight, he thought somewhere in the dim recesses of his tired mind, that would be a pretty good one.

Once again down the elevator to the lobby, this time dressed. He didn’t really have time for breakfast and the restaurant wasn’t open yet, anyway, so he told the clerk that he was ready for the airport bus and killed time waiting for it by getting a large Styrofoam cup of coffee and eating some dry and nearly tasteless pastries from a courtesy counter in the lobby. The coffee was just starting to take hold when he saw Dale and Dawn come out of the elevator and through the lobby. He was wearing a suit and tie, and she a long skirt that hung down nearly to her ankles. Helpless to stop, he looked at her, and thought that she was walking more than a little tenderly, but didn’t say anything while he wondered if she’d really had the courage to do what Sharon had suggested.

“How are you guys today?” he asked as the two headed for the courtesy counter to scavenge some coffee and pastries while they waited for the bus.

“Very tired,” Dale said. “That was a short night.”

“Sure was for me,” Bob replied, the coffee starting to bring him to something a little more like wakefulness. “If I got any sleep, it was darn little.”

“Same here,” he said. “Look, we, uh, we talked a lot about what you and Sharon told us last night. I mean what both of you told us.”

“I don’t know if Sharon told you what she told me,” Dawn nodded. “But it really helped. It was actually kind of fun.”

“Well, whatever winds your clock,” Bob said, with enough presence of mind to not reveal what Sharon had told him about what she’d advised Dawn to do. “But I’m glad it worked out.”

“Yeah, it did,” Dale replied. “I think I feel a little better about it, too. Look, like I said, we’ve spent the last several hours talking about all of that, and what it comes down to is that you guys were dead right. We have to declare our independence, and it’s not going to be easy. We still haven’t totally made up our minds about everything, but we’re going to at least go down and see if we can get our money back. If we can, that’s enough to give us some funds to get started with. I don’t think that we’re going to St. Maarten’s, it’s going to cost too much money either way, but we think we can manage a couple days at Disney World. That’ll make at least something of a real honeymoon.”

“We talked about it, and we really would like to do that beach, though,” Dawn smiled. “We think Sharon is right, a photo like that would be a perfect nuclear weapon to declare our independence with.”

“You don’t have to go to St. Maarten’s for that,” he smiled. “If you’re going to be at Disney World and Orlando, it’s not far from there over to Cape Canaveral. There are some neat things to see there, I’m told. And if you head out to a place called Apollo Beach in Canaveral National Seashore, you’ll find a beach just like what Sharon was talking about, just not with all the hotels.”

“Really?” she grinned. “I think I’m going to enjoy it there then.”

“So are you kids still thinking about coming out to Colorado?” Bob asked.

“It looks like a good choice from our viewpoint, especially considering the time we have to set things up,” Dale said. “That is, of course, if you’re still planning on helping us.”

“I said I would and I will,” he replied. He reached into his wallet, dug out a business card, wrote his home number on the back and handed it to the younger man.

“Thank you,” Dale said. “We really appreciate your help.”

“Right,” Dawn added. “I still can’t believe that you and Sharon weren’t angels sent to help us out last night.”

“Sharon and I may be a number of things,” Bob grinned. “But I guarantee you that we’re not angels.”

“You are to us,” Dawn grinned. “Oh, hey, is that the bus?”

It was. All three of them headed out to it, carrying their bags. Bob could not help but wonder if maybe the kids were carrying all they would have to start a new life, but if so they had the courage to do it. Maybe he and Sharon had helped with that, it would be hard to say, but he was glad he’d been able to do that much, anyway.

They got onto the bus and sat down. It was still dark, although there was the faint hint of light in the east. There was enough light coming into the bus from streetlights and whatnot that Bob could see that Dawn was sitting gingerly, rocked over onto one side of her butt. That told him just about what he wanted to know about that, he thought, wondering just how gingerly Sharon was going to be sitting on the seat of her car as she drove eastward later in the day, rattling on to Ralph about the decision that faced her.

It was only a few minutes ride over to the terminal from the motel. Bob, Dale, and Dawn didn’t talk about a lot, but they wished each other luck. Bob figured he’d be seeing them before too long, anyway. In fact, the more he thought about it he figured that there was a lot better chance that he’d be seeing them before he saw Sharon, if he ever even saw her again. She seemed to get increasingly negative about the idea of moving to Colorado as things progressed last night, or maybe that was just his exhaustion talking. He didn’t know; this whole weekend seemed more and more like it had been out of a dream. Maybe the dream was coming to an end now, had come to an end. He hoped not, but there was no way to know.

One advantage of leaving this early in the morning, Bob thought, was that the lines at the security check in were not long, and he was able to get through them easily. He wasn’t carrying anything, having checked in his luggage, so that simplified matters a lot. Dale and Dawn were going through the security check in with him, and they made it through without any problems, too.

They walked on down through the terminal to the main concourse, where Bob had to go one way, and the young couple the other. They stopped for a final handshake, which turned into a hug with both the kids before they went their way and he went his. He hoped things would go well for them, but at this point there was no way of telling.

It was about this point that the logic for getting to the check-in early began to break down. Bob had not had much sleep, and was extremely tired. He would have to sit and wait for at least two hours before boarding, and he wished that he’d had those two hours to be in bed with Sharon, whether they were making love or whatever. He knew damn well that if he sat down he was going to fall asleep, and while he had a travel alarm it was in his checked luggage. Finally, he did the next best thing – he found a restaurant in the concourse, ordered a cup of coffee and gave the cashier an extra ten dollars to wake him up in an hour and a half. He went out and sat down in one of the chairs at a table in front of the restaurant, set down his coffee, sat down himself, and never touched it; he was asleep within minutes.

Fortunately the ten bucks was incentive enough to get the cashier to come and wake him in time to get to the gate just before they started to call for boarding. It still took a while for Bob to get on the plane, since he was flying coach, but he no more than got into his seat before he was nodding off again.

He was wakened by a large woman sitting down next to him. He said good morning, and immediately started to nod back off, when it became clear that this woman was as much of a talker as Sharon, except what she wanted to talk to him was nothing he wanted to hear. She started in with a big salvation pitch, right off the bat, which was an extremely rude thing to do under any circumstances. Bob tried to ignore her and hoped she’d get the message, but she didn’t until he said, “Look, Lady, I’m the son of a Disciples of the Savior deacon, and I’ve heard it all before. Believe me, I’ve heard it ALL before, and a hell of a lot more of it than you have to offer. I’ve had two extremely long days and two very short nights, so I have no desire to listen to even be polite. I’m going to go to sleep, and don’t bother me again.”

“Well, I never …” she huffed.

“No, but maybe you should have,” he said as he closed his eyes and tried to get back to sleep, envying Sharon being able to sleep late, then drive home with a seatmate as companionable as Ralph. He would a whole lot rather have had Ralph for a seatmate than this contemptible bitch. Oh, well, he only had to sit with her for a couple hours and she’d be gone from his life forever.

He was still so pissed off at the contempt of this woman that he couldn’t get to sleep while they were still on the ground. He left his head rolled sideways, away from her and mostly looked out the window at the airport, which looked pretty much like any airport, anywhere. Somewhere in there he did manage to fall asleep, because the next thing he knew the seat was empty and the stewardess was waking him up to ask him if he was getting off in Denver.

Somehow, on the plane he’d gotten enough sleep to allow him to stay awake as he drove through the horrendous Monday morning Denver traffic and then up I-25 to Fort Collins, although it took continual coffee drinking and some concentration to manage even that. He got off at the exit, and drove through town to his home, wondering for a moment if Sharon would like it here if she ever came at all. Right at the moment he knew she was far away and was going to be farther away before she got closer, if she ever did. Home looked good, though, if stolid and dull, like he felt himself to be except for the wild hours of the previous weekend.

He was shedding clothes as he went in the door, and stopped only to call his office, to tell them that he was back but extremely tired and going to get a few hours sleep before he came in. He then collapsed on his bed, still in his underwear, and didn’t wake up until evening. He went out to the kitchen, found something to fill a sandwich, ate it, and headed back to bed. He didn’t remember any dreams from his sleep during the day, but he did remember dreams of Sharon that night – Sharon nude, or wearing that black thong bikini, Sharon screaming as she came, or waiting on the bed. He was just about convinced, now that the whole weekend had been a dream and could only hope that it hadn’t been after he finally woke up.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.