Wonders Of The U.S. HighwaysChapter 5: Baseball And Bikinis free porn video

I found a nice place to camp on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Unbelievably beautiful. I looked out at the white sand and blue water. The beach was empty. It was January and even Mississippi’s spring break bonanza wouldn’t start for another two months.

I’d received a flood of love after the final chapter of The Prodigal posted in September. That was pretty cool. I got good response from The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality. Redtail was getting a good response and would end this week. I’d released the eBook in January. A lot of people were grabbing it so they didn’t have to wait for each installment on SOL. Clever, but there was something about teasing readers to buy the book before it finished posting that I wasn’t that enthused about. My readers on SOL had been good to me.

They’d saved my life.

I got home from my 2011 book tour determined to save my marriage. It wasn’t just for Maddie’s sake. She was an adult now and while I would always give her whatever help I could, she was really doing well at making her own way. But Treasure was the love of my life. The second book I’d published, Steven George & The Dragon, was a collection of adult fairy tales that led a hapless dragon slayer from adventure to adventure as he sought his dragon. Not a kids’ book, I kept reminding people who bought it. I’d dedicated it to my wife, without whom there would be no happy endings.

Writing gets under my skin, though. Deep under it. I’d just finished writing For Money or Mayhem and was depressed over the way I’d once again treated perfectly fine people who were near happiness. Mystery solved, life wrecked. I needed some TLC. That’s when Treasure told me things just weren’t working and we needed to figure out what our next steps would be.

Fuck!

Dad, words are our opium.

I went digging through my files and found a locked and password protected story that I’d written fifteen years earlier. I’d abandoned the story because ‘I don’t write that kind of stuff!’ Miraculously, I remembered the password.

It wasn’t bad. Not finished, by a long shot, but it had the makings for the one thing that I desperately wanted. I wanted to have a happy ending. I did some rewriting, cleanup, and editing. Five days after my wife’s announcement, I posted the first chapter of The Art and Science of Love. I’d been reading stories on SOL for a couple years, but had never considered posting a story there. Still, it seemed like a good thing at the time. I kept writing more chapters of ASL and when the second chapter posted, email started coming in. My first fan mail was from the ubiquitous ‘Anonymous’ who wrote, “An excellent start. I find the characters believable and the plot interesting. I hope to read much more like this from you in future. Thank you for making your efforts available.” I framed it and put it on a wall like the first dollar bill earned by a new restaurant.

But the notes kept coming. Several authors that I’d read responded to the story. InvidFan. Crumbly Writer. GentleButFirm. They were all encouraging. By the eleventh chapter, the email was all over the map, but mostly positive. If you can call this positive: “Fah-h-h-h-h-k! The sex in this chapter is so-o-o-o hot! I would give my right nut to be the man meat in that sandwich just once. Thanks for sharing.” One even wrote to thank me for correcting his technique for a particular sex act! Aroslav: sex therapist.

After the story finished posting, I got a raft of messages. In general, it seemed that people appreciated my style, my understanding of art, and believable sex scenes. Imagine that. I seriously considered letting Treasure see what she was missing out on. “Wow. A piece of erudite, brain-seducing erotica. What a treat. Thanks so much. I trust more of your finely-crafted and believable erotica will grace this site before too long.”

I was determined that it would. No one had ever responded to my mysteries and thrillers so enthusiastically. I started in on a sequel to The Art and Science of Love based on the book I’d originally planned to include it in. But it was going to take a long time to get the story written—or rewritten so it would make sense. I figured I should write a piece just to keep my name in the market. The ill-fated Art School was the result. I realized as soon as I posted and reread it that I’d made a huge mistake. The very reason I’d started writing erotica in the first place was to have a happy ending. I’d betrayed the promise in Art School. Even though I quickly changed the ending so it wasn’t as miserable as my ‘reality-based’ mysteries, the damage was done and scores were poor.

In the meantime, I was bogged down in details of my intended story and decided once again that I needed to get my name out there with another story. Since people seemed to really like stories set in the art world, I thought maybe I could jot off a quick story about an art student who found love on the other side of the easel when a classmate asks him to pose for her. It would be a simple couple of chapters. I posted the first chapter of Model Student before I’d even begun writing the second.

“I’m looking forward to the next chapter. I hope there are many more. Thank you!” Well, I definitely thought there would be a second chapter, because having a slightly older supermodel athlete as the third part of a threesome would be pretty damned hot. But the notes kept coming asking for ‘the next chapter.’ I was writing as fast as I could and posting as soon as the chapter was finished. They were pretty long (7,000-word) chapters and I was getting one a week out. It wasn’t until the fifth one posted and Tony had just painted the mural that I realized I was in this for the long haul. And I’d just introduced the enigmatic Kate. Funny how I’d started thinking about her just at this time. It wasn’t even going to be enough to end the story at the end of Tony’s freshman year in college. I was going to have to take this all the way through to graduation.

“My God. I have just read 5 and 6. Now I understand your blog and the forum when you talk about the feedback you’ve been getting. Your work is amazing! You have a gift. You really don’t need hints on where the story should go next, because these characters inside you will tell you exactly what you need to do, and which step to take next. That they are so alive on paper (well, on the screen), means they are living and breathing inside you, and there is no skin between them and the words you write. Oh my god. Thank you for daring to do this, to open your heart like this. I don’t know whether these people exist in real life or not, but they for sure exist inside you, and now they live for us. Incredible, and thank you.”

The black depression that had descended on me at the end of November when Treasure told me we were through was gradually lifting. It took a while. It took figuring out how to divide the property, when to put the house on the market, where we would each live. But throughout that year, I wrote chapter after chapter and posted them. Black Irish read and reviewed the story and volunteered to help me with some editing. He could only help temporarily because Jay Cantrell was his first priority and a new tome was coming out from the master. But close on his heels, Old Rotorhead volunteered to help with the editing and proofreading. My work was definitely benefiting from the added eyes before it was posted.

And email kept coming in, thanking me—thanking me!—for writing this story. A publisher expressed interest in taking on the book, but wanted me to stop posting it on SOL. I delayed the second half of Triptych two months while I negotiated with the publisher and eventually withdrew the manuscript from consideration. I’d committed to the readers to put this story out on SOL for free. I’d publish the books as eBooks so people could buy them, but SOL readers had saved my life.

I was going to be okay.

Even though I was alone and traveling the country in a truck and sixteen-foot trailer, I was trying to figure out how I could thank my readers. The answer was obvious.

Write a story for them.

I had the trailer parked somewhere near ‘Lambert’s Throwed Rolls.’ I needed to take a few days to edit and design a book for one of my clients and having the famous restaurant so close was a big bonus. I was also near a white sand beach on the edge of the Gulf. I drove out onto the beach, which was packed solid enough to support the truck. In fact, several trucks parked or cruising along the shore. Popular place. I went wading.

I like to be by the water. I’m not so wild about being in the water. My ideal homestead would be camped next to a small river where I could hear the water and sit next to it. But I’d determined that I would dip my feet in the waters of all four U.S. coasts. I’d waded in the Pacific at Malibu. Now the Gulf. Eventually I would get to the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Today was South Coast Day.

After I’d fulfilled my objective, I sat in the truck watching the sun go down and listening to ‘The 70s on 7’ on my satellite radio. Smokie came on. I’ve looked this group up and I think they only ever had one song hit the charts. It was ‘Living Next Door to Alice.’ Sweet song about a guy who grows up next door to the love of his life, but never tells her. The song ends with the words, ‘Now I’ll just have to get used to not living next door to Alice.’ My ears tend to pick and choose what they hear and how they hear it. What I heard was ‘Living Next Door to Heaven.’

I had the title for my new story.

Now I just needed a location and a cast of characters.

I was three years younger than Jessica. She was the second oldest of the kids on our section of the road. Mitch was the oldest. His sister, Betts, was a year younger than Jessica. Jessica’s brother Drew was next. In spite of the character I turned him into, he wasn’t a bad guy and I was happy to count him among my friends. All the rest of us on that stretch of road were in the same grade except Geoff’s brother, John, who was a year younger. That meant my best friend Carl, Geoff, Liz, Cassie, and I were in the same class. Our section of Mosquito Road was about half a mile long. We represented every family that lived along it. The next person in our school lived nearly half a mile farther on in either direction. So, of course, the ten of us did stuff together. Mitch and Jessica were both considerably more advanced than the rest of us. But Betts and Drew were just young enough that they considered it okay to hang out with the rest of us.

One of our favorite pastimes was to play softball in Geoff’s pasture or mine. Mine had the ‘advantage’ of not having horses or ponies in it like Geoff’s and Carl’s. If they weren’t busy doing older kid stuff—Mitch had to help his Grandpa with the farming and Jessica ... well, who knows?—then we could field two full teams of five for softball. If everybody couldn’t play, we had a rotation game. It was hard to keep score, but we all got to play all positions. We had to keep skipping up so the rotation didn’t stay exactly the same. Nobody wanted me to pitch to them because I pitched on the church team. Nobody wanted Carl to play first base because he was so tall he could stretch halfway to second. If he ever made contact with the ball, you could about guarantee we’d have to chase it into the next field. Fortunately, he didn’t hit it very often.

Anyway, there was this lake a few miles away. We’d all been to it on occasion, but for whatever reason, the parents got together one summer when we all thought we’d die of the heat and told all of us to get our bathing suits on because we were going swimming. It took half the parents to drive us all to the lake and the other half brought food a little later on.

Any of this sound familiar? Yeah. This was pretty much the cast that started shaping up for Living Next Door to Heaven.

At fifteen, Jessica was the most well-developed of our group and I’d observed her from afar as she sprouted a pretty nice set of breasts. I thought she was beautiful. Of course, it was Betts who was the first girl who had let me look and touch between her legs in the infamous horse barn hayloft. She was just as fascinated when she played with the bell on top of my ding-dong and I got my first ever erection. Neither of us knew what to do with it, but we had fun. Her brother, my best friend Carl, told on us and that put a quick end to the explorations.

Suffice it to say, Jessica had the tightest swimsuit that day. She might have still been trying to fit into last year’s. I’ve never understood what drew us together, but Jessica wanted to play with me. Really play. We swam together and when we were out deep enough, she kept brushing against me. I mean brushing really interesting parts against me. We played ‘toss’ where I’d put my hands on her waist and throw her up into the air. Then she’d swim up to me and while we were getting ready for the next toss, she’d make sure that my hands got a chance to explore her burgeoning breasts before they slid down to her waist. I was totally lost in the moment. She did a good amount of groping as well until Betts put a stop to it.

“You guys!” she hissed at us. “You’re going to get caught doing that stuff. Quit it!” I think, really, that she was a little jealous that I was getting to feel Jessica up so thoroughly and wasn’t touching Betts. Well, Betts hadn’t really developed quite the handholds that Jessica had.

As things go, though, that was the extent of my relationship with Jessica. We never got a chance to do anything else. Well, she was a sophomore in high school and could date real guys.

After my freshman year, my family moved to a new school district. I got my first ever yearbook and the big thing was to have as many kids as possible sign it. Because I was approaching a reunion year, I’d had my daughter bring me my yearbooks from the store room when she came down to visit me. I was leafing through that first one and looking at all the pictures. Cassie had written a very nice little note wishing me luck and signed it ‘Love, Cassie.’ I had to think back fondly on those times we met in the woods that joined our two properties.

But when I turned to the last page of the yearbook, I saw a note that just brought back a flood of memories. The longest note anyone had written. Jessica had graduated and was headed for Purdue. She admonished me to think of her sometimes as she was slaving away. “And always remember the crazy times we had, like that time at the lake,” she concluded. There was a little heart drawn next to her name. Three years after the event, she was remembering us playing in the lake and exploring the mysteries of our young bodies. And she was asking me to always remember it, too. Well, I did. And that became the basis for the story I was about to write.

The grouper sandwiches that Dual Writer talks about in his Florida Friends series are not the only reason to go to Florida. They are a sufficient reason, though. Nor are the ‘Tampa Twins’ at the Harley store, though I’m glad to say I got to see them even if not to touch.

No, there are really only two reasons to be in Florida in March. Spring Training and Spring Break. Baseball and Bikinis.

I’d managed to stake out a prime slot for my trailer in Fort Myers Beach for two months from mid-February to mid-April. It was high season and I paid as much for those two months as I had for all the camping sites I’d stayed at so far in the eight months of this trip. And what did I get for it? When I say a ‘slot’ that’s exactly what I mean. My trailer was parked on a cement slab twelve feet wide. With the slide-out extended, the trailer is a little over eleven feet wide. On either side of the slab is a strip of grass, four feet wide, separating my slab from my neighbor’s. I couldn’t fully extend my awning without hitting the next trailer.

And the awning was necessary if I wanted any shade. There were four trees in the RV park and they bordered the mostly unused play area.

When I was young, I had a tendency toward religious fervor. I’d fortunately outgrown it by the time I finished my degrees. It is humorous to me in retrospect that all the classmates who scorned me in grade school because of my firmly held religious beliefs and ‘goodie-two-shoes’ attitude have now become hyper-religious bigots who are willing to condemn anyone for anything that is different than what they happen to believe at the moment. I know that’s harsh. Most of them are still good people. Some of those who weren’t are now. We all tend to remember our childhood as miserable and blame everyone else for it. In my blissful state as a born-again pagan, I’ve become both socially and morally liberal. Kind of wish I could get my hands on some of those girls the way they were when we were growing up.

Some of those people live in Florida. At least part of the year. They have condos, trailers, winter homes, or for all I know, tents on the beach. Winter can be hard in northern Indiana, so why not retire to warm and sunny Florida?

I’ll tell you why not.

I cannot understand why old people want to flock to a state where the State Bird is a vulture! These huge black birds are everywhere. Including on the unused playground equipment in the center of the RV park. There are no children living in the RV park and when one comes to visit a grandparent, he avoids the playground. The vultures perch on the jungle gym watching the benches around the edge. Old folks go out for their daily walks—usually with some yappy little dog—and take a break to sit on the benches around the playground where the four trees provide a little shade. The vultures eye them the entire time they sit there, as if to say, ‘Are you dead yet?’ If a vulture hops down from the bars to the ground, you’ve sat still too long. There are actually warning signs at the entrance to the park that admonish caution because the vultures will eat the rubber on your car. Door seals, tires, bumper guards. Camping World does a brisk business in covers for tires to protect them from the sun while you are parked. We know it is really to protect them from vultures.

Maddie visited me in Florida, anxious to get her own bikini time in on the beach. I sat and watched the scenery while she went wading and swimming in the salt water. Then we’d sit in the evening and go over the plots for our newest book projects. She loved the concept of Redtail and was happy that it had done so well on SOL. We have an agreement, however, that she doesn’t read her father’s porn, though I found out later that she cheated and read Redtail. She said she liked it.

She spotted the potential business in the park immediately. With the same enthusiasm that she plots a novel, she plotted a business strategy: Pimp My Golf Cart. It seemed as though everyone in the park had a golf cart. Aside from the required twice-a-day walk around the park with the dog, no one walked anyplace. Walmart was half a mile away. They had a special parking area for golf carts. Maddie had the idea of doing custom paint jobs on carts. She even went so far as to suggest kits to put a Rolls Royce grill and ornament on the front of them like they used to do with customization kits for Volkswagen Beetles. (Back in the old days, she said. Grr!) She could do custom canopies to keep the sun off delicate skin. She even suggested a tattoo parlor where you could get yourself decorated to match the paint job on the cart. She pulled up so many designs for 1950s and 60s muscle cars on her computer to manipulate onto pictures of golf carts that she exceeded my data allowance for the month.

Then she flew back to Seattle.

If you are around Fort Myers, watch for a new business coming soon. The last I heard, she planned to promote it with a television show like ‘Chop Shop’ or something. Get the cart, the tattoo, and the video. Creative kid. She’ll get to that after she finishes her next novel.

When we weren’t plotting stories and business pipe dreams, we went to the beach—where she took great delight in pointing out to me the best bikini butts—or to the baseball game. I’d lived in Minnesota, and since the Seattle Mariners were in the Cactus League for spring training, I contented myself with going to Twins games, starting with the opener against the University of Minnesota Gophers. The Gophers gave the Twins a good run for the money and a close game. Mostly the players were the same age. Some of the pros were younger than the college kids. There wasn’t a name on the roster for either team that I recognized. Early training games are a testing ground for those who have been invited to spring training, but will probably end up on Double-A or Triple-A teams. You don’t really see the top players much until the last week of training.

You might have noticed that there isn’t much here about me getting laid. Well, since Angie left to go back to school, I really hadn’t felt like pursuing any opportunities. I was pouring all my energy into writing Living Next Door to Heaven and was churning out 4-5,000 words a day when I was camped. My characters were carrying on non-stop conversations in my head when I was traveling. The old adage is that if you hear voices in your head and they are ignoring you, you are probably a writer.

Pixel the Cat had joined my editorial team and he and Old Rotorhead were sending the chapters back to me almost as quickly as I wrote them. I was determined that I would not start posting until I had completed a full sub-arc of the story. It would be one long—very long—serial, but within it, there would be ten parts (later reduced to nine) that each had a distinct end-point. I’d start posting the first one while I wrote the second one, but I planned to be way ahead of the game before the chapters ever hit SOL. I absolutely hated stories that I followed only to have them fade away to nothing and eventually turn yellow with a note that says, ‘unfinished and inactive.’ That was not going to happen to one of my stories if I could help it.

It’s really hard to develop something with anyone when you are only camped for two days to a week. People come and go. I’ve never been all that good at pickup lines or identifying the fast movers. But I was in Florida for two months. I definitely had my eye peeled for opportunity. I never expected where it would come from.

I’d been accumulating more and more Facebook followers as I wrote about my travels. More relatives. Some old friends from my years in high school. Some relatives went to school with me in the early years and knew people on their friends lists with whom I’d grown up.

“Ari, are you coming to Indiana for the reunion this summer?” my third cousin twice removed asked in a post.

“Reunion? What reunion?” I responded.

It turned out that I would be just in time this summer to go to a class reunion for St. Joe Valley High, the school I’d left after my freshman year. The school where all the people I’d been making up stories about in LNDtH had gone. Well, shit. Why not? I wrote to the reunion organizer and asked if it was okay to attend, even though I didn’t graduate with the class. I’d gone through ten years of school with many of them. I was registered.

“Ari? Is that really you?” read the email note. “Are you really coming home for the party?” There was no signature. All I had was the return email address. Cassie Clinton Jones. My one-time next door neighbor and playmate in the woods that joined our houses. I still considered Cassie to be my first girlfriend, back before I understood what a girlfriend was.

Entertainment out in the country was whatever we could make of it. Like following Cassie’s father as he plowed the fields and breaking up dirt clods with our bare feet. Sometimes we’d find a worm stuck between our toes and giggle about how gross it was. It would take hours to scrub the dirt off our feet at night. At least it seemed like it. Neither of our mothers would allow us in the house until we’d been through the hose outside.

We were in kindergarten together and I was even invited to play at her house on occasion in the winter. Cassie was cool. Her mother allowed her to jump on the bed. We had our own circus with a trampoline!

The first day of first grade was a catastrophe. The teacher seated us in alphabetical order. Cassie was heartbroken and cried because she couldn’t sit beside Ari. We got through it and sat next to each other at lunch. School does that to kids. In the summer, we continued to meet and go play in the woods. Sometimes we were joined by other kids from our part of Mosquito Road. Mitch and Betts often rode their horses out there. Sometimes we’d even see Geoff or John on their pony. Mostly, though, we just built tree forts, climbed for crab apples, and played hide and seek among the maple trees.

There was one instance between second and third grade where we met a couple older kids out in the woods. They scrambled around when they saw us and I thought they must have stopped to pee because he was pulling his pants closed. She was sweet and bubbly. I thought I recognized her as one of Shay’s friends.

“Look at the little boyfriend and girlfriend,” she said. “Are you having fun on your date in the woods?” Date? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Neither Cassie nor I had any concept of what she was talking about. We were just headed for the corral we were building so Betts could get off her horse and play when she came through the woods.

It wasn’t long after that, Cassie became a beautiful girl and I was just another stinky boy. But eight years later, she was the only one who signed my yearbook with the word ‘love.’

It turned out that Cassie and her husband lived in Orlando. We agreed to meet at the Strawberry Festival and it was great fun to get reacquainted. Her husband, Andy, was a nice guy, but quiet. He went to watch some Seminole dancers while Cassie and I walked around the fairgrounds catching up on everything that had happened since we last saw each other.

Her eyes got big when I gave her copies of my books. I’d had Redtail released as a paperback, but in spite of the fact that it sold pretty well as an eBook, no one bought the paperback. I just used it as a promotional.

“It’s got a different name than the others,” she said, pointing out the author name. “Ari, what’s going on? What kind of book is this? This couple on the cover is topless.” She quickly tucked the book between two of the others, but she didn’t offer to give it back.

“I’ve been writing a lot of erotica, Cassie. It’s fun. People like it. It makes people feel good. I enjoy writing it. Please don’t think ill of me. You might even enjoy it. Read it aloud with your husband,” I suggested.

“There’s more than this one?”

Well, it was a little like true confessions. Only I wasn’t writing them, I was confessing. We stopped for a strawberry shortcake and coffee and I told her all about how I got started writing erotica and what I’d written. I had ten stories out by then. And then I told her about Living Next Door to Heaven. I was in the final formatting of the first few chapters and expected to start posting by mid-April.

“And I’m in it?” she demanded.

“Well, it’s not like it’s really you. No one would recognize you from the descriptions. I mean, I didn’t even know you after freshman year. It’s all pretty much made up. I just based a few characteristics that I remember from when we were little kids and let fantasies take over from there,” I said. I’d never considered what would happen if one of my childhood friends actually got hold of the story and read it. I might have to change some names and places.

“Fantasies?” she said looking me in the eye. “Do we have sex?”

“Um ... Not yet. And it’s not us, exactly. For Pete’s sake, Cassie. It’s a story. There are scenes you might recognize. Places. But you won’t recognize the character that started out as my best friend in kindergarten. I mean, really, the Cassie in the story is a late bloomer and hyper religious. You were a freshman cheerleader!”

“Four years,” she sighed. She looked at me sternly. “If we have sex, it had better be damned good!” I think she meant in the story.

We rejoined her husband and then parted ways. I was going to go on out to Orlando to meet up with Writer Number Seven. I was enjoying meeting and connecting with other SOL writers and readers as I traveled. Cassie and I promised to meet at the reunion this summer in Indiana.

It was St. Patrick’s Day and I was going to a ballgame in the evening. The Twins were playing the Tigers. It promised to be a pretty good game—a preview of the season opener in Minneapolis. First, I planned to go out and look at the talent on the beach. A new crop had arrived over the weekend. They were always so bright and fresh at the beginning of the week. They started to look more sunburned and worn by the time they left on Saturday. There’s a website where you can look up what colleges are going to what beaches during what weeks. Fort Myers Beach seemed to be the most popular place for the beach-goers this year. I was just going to watch. Really.