I wouldn’t stop even if I could.
I jog to the car to drive to her house to run on the beach and then to be with her. Again, and again, and again, no matter what the cost.
Shannon and Joe
“
So let’s jog to the pier, then I’m going to go hard for fifteen minutes, and you can take it easy, and then I’ll pick you up on the way back and we can jog it in?” she says.
“
Works for me,” he says.
“
You alright?” she asks.
“
I hurt in all the right places,” he answers.
“
Oh really,” she says. “And where would that be?”
“
My lower back, my butt, my knees, my johnson.”
“
Your dick hurts?” she asks.
“
It’s worth it,” he answers. “Trust me, it’s worth it.”
“
Glad to hear it,” she says.
They set off towards the pier at a leisurely pace. A conversational pace.
“
I love fucking you,” she blurts out.
He cannot believe his ears.
“
Ditto,” he answers.
“
Because that’s what we’re doing. We’re fucking. And I like it.”
“
Yes. We’re fucking. But I’m also falling in love with you,” he says.
“
Don’t confuse fucking with love,” she says.
“
I’m not. I’ve never felt this way before.”
She does not answer.
“
I don’t need you to be in love with me,” he says. “It’s enough that you let me love you.”
They continue their jog to the pier. She looks over at him, winks, and then is gone in what she calls “going hard.” Instantly he slows to a walk and watches her perfect lithe form pull away from him. Tired and sore as he is, he responds. “My God,” he says. “Is there no end to what this woman can do to me?”
She returns to him twenty five minutes later. She is sweating freely and obviously pleased with her effort.
“
I might enter a race,” she says. “Just to see what it feels like to compete at forty.”
“
A race?” he asks.
“
Yes. A race. I’m thinking a 5k first time out, then maybe a 10k in the fall.”
“
There’s a 5k in Wilmington next weekend,” he says. “We could go down there, do some work for the Foundation, do the race, eat at a few nice restaurants, make a nice weekend out of it,” he says.
She has not thought about spending the night with him. She always sends him home. A weekend in Wilmington would be different though. It would be neither her place nor his. It would be a place they might never have to visit again. It would not move any boundary, not destroy any routine or tradition or custom. And, if it works out, she thinks she could accommodate this new custom of a weekend in Wilmington before she returns home.
“
Sounds good,” she says. “Now let’s get back to the beach house. I want to shower and I want you inside me.”
“
Deal,” he answers.
They emerge from the shower and towel off then head towards the bed, as has become their morning routine, their morning ritual. Still fresh, not yet a repetitive task, still a luxury and exploration. He kisses her and waits for her to sit on the bed so that he can lay atop her.
“
You first,” she says.
He raises an eyebrow, wondering what this newness is. He complies, lays down, reaches out his hands for her.
She is unsure how to begin, no amount of Internet research could prepare her for this.
“
I want to have you like you have me,” she says. “But I’ve never done this before. I hope it’s okay.”
“
I’m sure it will be fine,” he says. He smiles, puts his hands behind his head, closes his eyes, and accepts this new gift.
She kisses all round him, on the front, the back, the sides. She slides her tongue in little circles. She feels his hardness intensify. Can feel his heart beating through his dick. She takes the end of him in her mouth and works her tongue. He groans. She decides she must be doing it right. She begins to bob up and down slowly, unsure how far into her mouth she can take him. He picks up the rhythm, tries to not force himself.
She wraps her tiny hand around him and begins to use her hand in time with her mouth. He raises up his hips, ready to convulse.
She stops.
He opens his eyes in amazement.
“
Not yet,” she says.
He takes several deep breaths, retreats from the edge, wonders what she will do next.
She straddles him, takes him in her hand, and guides him into her. Once again she starts to bob up and down. Just a half an inch at first, and very slowly. Then the urgency comes on her and she takes him as deeply as she can. She feels him touch her bottom and feels his entire body tensing, readying for the release. She is far from coming but hurries and hurries until he bucks and rocks and empties himself and screams and screams and screams while she continues to ride even while he blows and blows in great wracking jerks and contractions.
She feels him start to soften and so she slows and then stops. She has not come. She is not close to coming. But she feels a different release, a different satisfaction. She has made him surrender like he has made her surrender day after day during their January of sex.
She keeps him inside her while he pants and tries to recover his heart rate.
“
You are amazing,” he says.
She does not answer. She feels him beginning to shrink inside her. After a few minutes she reaches down, begins touching his sack while he is still inside her. Feels him respond, feels him start to get more firm, start to expand to his full size while still inside her. She feels a power like she has never felt. This is her first time being in control. She has always submitted to sex. In all the years with her ex, though there were some enjoyable fucks at the start, she has always submitted. Never sought it out, and never controlled or dominated. The power is very erotic to her. She continues to stroke his balls.
He cannot take it any longer. He rolls her over and gives himself over to abandon and desire that he has never experienced. He rides and thrusts and pulses powerfully and in control in the way a man can only do in the first moments after the minutes it takes to refresh from coming the first time in a day.
She takes him, all of him, arches her hips up and now begins to moan herself. Her moans turn to yells that turn to shrieks as she rolls through one then another and then a third release. Finally he comes again and rolls off her, exhausted, raw, unable to move, barely able to breath, feeling his heart trying to bust out of his chest.
For the longest time neither can speak, neither can move. They have topped everything that has come before. He falls asleep, and she soon follows.
Shannon and Joe
It is unusually warm for January. Especially because it is also unusually clear and still. The Atlantic is at peace this afternoon, as though Shannon and Joe absorbed all of its energy in their run and released all the absorbed energy in their lovemaking in the morning.
They are sitting on the upper back porch of her beach house. The deck rises ten feet above the dunes, twenty feet above the ocean. He has made coffee and they are drinking it while they watch dolphins cruise along the sandbar fishing the gentle swells. Pelicans drift along the small swell and then angle up, tip over, and plunge down into the ocean, a ritual usually reserved for warmer spring and summer and fall days.
They know this is a magical January day that needs to be absorbed in every way possible and stored up for the colder winter days that will undoubtedly arrive here on the island, and for the inevitable ice and snow and wind to which she will return in just a few days in Ohio.
“
What was she like?” Shannon asks.
“
Who?” Joe answers.
“
Caitlin.”
“
Oh,” he says. He drinks from his coffee, drinks again. Watches the ocean.
She waits while he collects his thoughts and decides how to answer. He understands how hard it was for her to ask, and he will honor her request with a complete telling.
“
I am convinced she was an angel. From the moment I first saw her in the hospital, when she was just hours old, I knew she was something special. She was bright. Not brilliant, but bright. Inquisitive. Always asking questions, not always understanding the answer the first time, but asking again and again until she would understand. So she was relentless.”
“
She was pretty. Not beautiful, I know that’s hard to believe that a father would say his daughter was pretty and not beautiful. But she was pretty. I think she was always going to be pretty. And her prettiness would grow on you, especially here on the beach.”
“
She loved the beach. Maybe as much as you love the beach. Maybe more. We would come here and she would do something on the beach for the entire day. She never wanted to leave. It was on the beach that I first suspected that something was wrong.”
“
We used to walk to the pier every day and then at some point when she thought I wasn’t paying attention she would sprint away from me and try to ‘win’ a race that only she knew about. She never let me catch up and win. Would declare ‘victory’ just as I was about to overtake her. But one day I caught up and beat her. I beat her the next day too. She would start to run and then would quickly slow down. After a week she stopped trying to sprint away from me. I could see that her color had changed too. Even though she had the prettiest tan and color from the summer I could tell that her color had changed. And then one day she just stopped in the sand and looked up at me and her nose was bleeding.”
“
She was scared. She knew something was wrong with her. She watched her nose drip onto the sand and looked up at me with the most scared eyes I have ever seen. She was pretty, and in the moment when she and I both realized that something was wrong, she was beautiful. She had that one beautiful moment on the beach, on the sand, here with me, not far from here actually, just down there, and then she died.”
“
It took until August. She just wasted away, losing weight, losing color. The nose bleeds came more often. We tried to find compatible people for bone marrow transplants, even though Colleen said she would never go through with it, that it wasn’t God’s will. I wanted to volunteer but parents are almost never suitable donors. And, when they tested me they discovered I carry the gene that causes leukemia. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now through the research and education at the Foundation I know that I have the inherited gene mutation that increases your risk for chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I will never have another child...”
He drifted off on that statement, waited for Shannon to respond, to weigh in on whether that was going to be an issue. He drank from his coffee, gave her more time to respond.
“
My child bearing years are over abnormally early,” she said. “I had so many hormones pumped into me when my husband was insisting on having a child that it changed my chemistry and I went through the change at thirty eight.”
“
I’m sorry,” he said.
“
I’m not,” she said. “At one time I wanted a child, but now I don’t. My nieces and nephews are what I have and what I want. I have a different purpose than being a mother. Aunt is fine for me.”
Joe nods his head and continues his story.
“
By some miracle we found a donor, a suitable match. To do a transplant you basically have to kill the patient and then do the transplant. You have to kill all their bone marrow, remove it, and then put in the new. They kill it with radiation and chemo. Doses and doses and doses of radiation and chemo. They do it differently now, twenty years later, but it’s still essentially the same, selectively killing a part of the patient so that it can be removed and replaced. Some patients die from the radiation, or just give up. They lose their hair, they can’t eat, they are susceptible to infections, their life is as miserable as any life anyone could ever imagine. She went through all the preparation. We had a donor. And then Colleen refused to go through with it.”
“
What?” Shannon asks.
“
Colleen refused. Said it was against God’s will. Said that we shouldn’t have put Shannon through the radiation in the first place. That I was trying to do anything I could because I was responsible and that I had put Caitlin through Hell first by giving her leukemia and then by forcing her to go through the radiation to get ready for the transplant. She said that I was making our child suffer so that I could assuage my own guilt for making her sick in the first place.”
“
Oh my God,” Shannon says.
“
It was her God,” Joe says. “Or at least her preacher, her church. They were so fundamentalist, like they were trying to prove something. The entire time that Caitlin was being treated, getting ready, they kept telling Colleen that the cancer was some sort of punishment for some sin of mine, or of Colleen’s, or of ours. She became convinced sex was one of our sins so we stopped having sex. Soon there was nothing between us except this horrible conflict over Caitlin.