Did I Cause This?

Part of the credit for this story goes to Randi! She contacted me about possibly writing in a St Patrick's Day feature. I declined to commit to it, primarily because I hate writing to a deadline -- something I really suck at doing -- but the St Patrick's Day theme stuck in my head.

This is a one-off, not part of any series, and the St Patrick's Day theme is more incidental than anything; I could have substituted any party holiday and made it work. Randi has not seen this or critiqued it, and all the fault for any errors is mine alone.

The description of places in this story are real, and yes, Jim Thorpe does have a big St Patrick's Day parade, but all of the usual disclaimers about characters apply: any resemblance to persons living, dead or undead is entirely coincidental.

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Monday, March 19, 2018:

After yesterday, I just couldn't sleep. Sunday had been our annual St Patrick's Day Parade in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, the biggest event of the year in our little tourist trap town. It had been 47º F and sunny, fortunately with little wind, because the Parade is really a huge block party. Broadway, the main drag through town, is closed, and full of revelers in various states of intoxication, including a lot of girls for whom the wearing of the green means the wearing of as little green as possible. Lots of leg and lots of cleavage, and a good time was had by (almost) all.

Me? Well, we're lucky: my law office is on Broadway, and my wife and I live on the second and third floors. It's an old Victorian row house, which was in not-so-great shape when we bought it, but after eight years of renovations, it's one of the best houses in a town with a lot of nice houses.

Jim Thorpe was, in the early nineteenth century, a millionaires' town, with fortunes made in anthracite coal mining, and luxury row homes built along Broadway and what is now called Stone Row, on Race Street. Some of those houses have fallen on hard times, with more than a couple still standing only because the termites are holding hands. Fortunately, while our house needed work, termites hadn't been the problem.

Our bedroom is on the third floor, with a bay window projecting three feet out over the sidewalk; the front of the house is at the edge of the sidewalk, and the windows face west. There was another bay window below it, on the second floor, the perfect place from which to watch the parade if it was too cold to go outside, but Sunday had been warm enough.

Ellen was asleep beside me. My wife of 38 years, she's a registered nurse, and had to work the weekend; she missed the parade, which didn't really bother her that much. And for once, I was damned glad she had missed the parade, because that was where I saw Cindy.

Damn it, Cindy was hard to forget. I hadn't seen her in sixteen years, but even though she was 66 now, her smile was unmistakable.

Saturday, June 8, 2002:

I had only been living in Jim Thorpe for a month. Wandering around town, I had been looking at the architecture, but I also found myself looking at a woman, who was looking at the buildings as well. That's where I made my mistake: "I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who likes to look at Victorian buildings."

"Oh, hi," she said, and I can't remember too much of the actual conversation at that point. But we started walking together, and as Race Street made a right hand turn to merge into West Broadway, I could see where this was going, and I made it clear: "Look, before this goes the wrong way, I need to tell you that I'm married."

"Oh, that's OK, I'm married, too."

That took the pressure off, but we continued to walk together, chatting about really meaningless stuff. On reaching West Broadway, we turned left, going up the hill. It was still about half a mile to the end of the houses, and we stopped at the last house on the right. The Millway, a stream which runs partly above ground and partly underground through town, plunged underground at that point, but the homeowners had developed a long, narrow grassy area before the hillside cut it down to nothing, and they had set up a natural home which had attracted ducks to make the place their home. We stopped and watched the ducks, and the stream as it babbled over the rocks, and when we turned to walk away, we still headed up the hill.

The woman's name was Cindy, and I was impressed by her physical fitness: I walk a lot, and can cover long distances, but she was right there, keeping up with me with no sign of excess exertion. Another half mile, and we reached the drinking water treatment center.

At that point, Cindy had something in one of her shoes, so she put her foot up on the guardrail to remove it. She was a fairly short girl, only about 5'3" or so, but she had nice legs. She was wearing shorts already, but this action put tension on her leg muscles, and, coupled with her removing her shoe and sock, really looked awesome, and yes, she caught me looking. I don't remember her exact words, but they were something along the line of, "You like what you see?" with a really big smile.

I didn't need to answer the question; she knew that I did.

At that point, we started heading back downhill, into town. Again, it was mostly mindless chatter that I can't recall clearly, but I found out some of the facts. She was 50 years old, a year older than me, and lived about thirty miles away. We kept walking, and since I already knew more about the town than she did, I pointed out some of the architectural attractions. Jim Thorpe is a tourist-trap town, and the architecture is one of the drawing points.

We got to the Asa Packer mansion, but didn't take the inside tour. Instead, we walked through the lawns, which are terraced, and a one point I put out my hand to help Cindy up a short stone wall; once she was up, I didn't let go of her hand, and she seemed to like walking hand-in-hand with me. Something was definitely happening, but I didn't make a move to push it further.

Well, maybe I didn't, but finally, at the end of the day, when Cindy had to head home, she made the move. "I hope that you don't think this is too forward, but I'd like to see you again some time." We exchanged e-mail addresses, which I knew was a mistake, but I made the mistake anyway.

Saturday, June 22, 2002:

It was two weekends later, but after arranging another meeting, we met at Mauch Chunk Lake Park, where there are some decent hiking trails, as well as a large man-made lake. We walked along the trail by the lake, heading in the direction toward town (which was several miles away), and down the beginning of the Switchback Gravity Railroad Trail. It's peaceful and quiet in there, and when I once again had to help her over a large obstacle, we kept holding hands after that help was no longer needed. I knew that this was going somewhere, but I wasn't exactly certain just where.

Turning around, heading back toward the lake - we had already passed the end of it - we then turned along the dam which created the lake. It was wide and flat, but it ended in a heavily forested bank. We walked into that forest, which immediately started going uphill, when I turned to face Cindy, was took both of her hands in mine, and kissed her.

And kissed her.

And kissed her.

Cindy responded ardently and eagerly, and that was when I discovered a major erogenous zone on this woman: if you kiss or gently bite her ears, she just absolutely melts, she quivers, she shakes, and she holds on as though her life depended on it. She could feel my erection through our shorts and put her hand down to caress it. I knew that we should stop, we both knew that we should stop, and should walk away and never see each other again, but we didn't.

I don't know how long we just stood there, holding and kissing and caressing each other; it seemed like an hour, though it was surely far less. Cindy and I pretty much made the next move at the same time: she started to pull off my t-shirt just as I was reaching to unbutton her blouse. We were still kissing, and while I had her blouse open, it took a long time to actually get it off her, because we kept kissing through the whole thing. Finally, Cindy stepped back to pull off her blouse and I pulled my t-shirt the rest of the way off.

Cindy was a mature woman, and while her figure looked really trim, no one would mistake her for a teenager; she was a woman, not a girl. She had lost 70 pounds over the last year or so, and that left her with some loose belly-flesh, something no one could see while she was wearing a shirt, but I could tell she was a bit concerned about me seeing. But I am a mature man, and my body isn't perfect either, and I wasn't turned off in the slightest. We came together and kissed again, and while I had my arms around her, I was taking my time reaching to undo her bra. I think that she was nervous about that, too, because her breasts sagged like any fifty-year-old woman's breasts would have sagged. We kissed some more, when she reached down to undo my shorts, and there she got a surprise: I had gone commando, like I always do. That got a smile, and an even bigger smile came from the fact that my cock was already purple-headed hard. As I was kicking away my shorts, she stepped back and pulled down her khaki hiking shorts and ugly granny panties.

Cindy apologized for having a wild, untamed black bush, but I didn't care. Yeah, I know: it's the in thing for women to shave their pussies these days, but I was never used to that. I simply dropped to my knees and buried my face in her pussy, eating her for all I was worth.

And that didn't take long: it couldn't have been thirty seconds before she was thrashing around and screaming in a strong orgasm. She had already been soaking wet, way, way aroused before she ever stripped, and it really didn't take much to send her over the edge. I looked around for a spot where the ground wasn't too bad, put my t-shirt down, and Cindy laid back, waiting to be taken.

I don't remember any particular words being spoken, but I knelt down slowly and entered her, one smooth stroke until I was balls deep inside her. Cindy turned out to be one of the most sexual and sensual women I had ever met, and she put her head back, with her mouth wide open, as I slowly made love to her.

And that's exactly what I did. Sometimes you make love to a woman, and sometimes you just plain fuck her, and I was slowly making love to her right now. She was utterly wordless, but her arms reached around me, holding me, pulling me down into her, and again, she shuddered into an absolutely shattering orgasm. I'd like to think that I was an absolutely smashing lovemaking beast, but Cindy was so ready, so turned on, so desperate for love, that she was coming and coming and coming, with me going slowly and steadily, taking my time and not being all that vigorous about it.

Of course, going slow helped me, because I was able to hold back on my orgasm. Once she had had a few of her own, and was becoming a bit more communicative, I got up, and turned her onto her hands and knees. "Oh, God," she said, "I love it like this." I got behind her, and entered her warm, wet, amazingly soft pussy. I had made love to her before, but now it was just plain time to fuck, and that's exactly what we did. A few slow strokes, to get comfortable in the position, and then I started to speed up. It wasn't long before I put my hands on her hip bones and was slamming away, hard and fast. Cindy started screaming in orgasm again, and by then I was more than ready: encouraged by her vocal orgasms, I half grunted, half screamed as I emptied my load deep into her pussy. I stopped thrusting and was just holding myself in as deeply as I could, holding her hips hard and tight.

That was when the cheering began! We had been concentrating on each other so completely that we hadn't noticed the hikers. There were eight of them, four men and four women, all looking to be in their early twenties, whooping and hollering, not twenty feet away from us! They had obviously been watching for a while, since the guys all had one arm around each girl - they looked like four couples - and Cindy and I were embarrassed to have been caught screwing out in the woods, but we were so dumbfounded that neither one of us was scrambling for our clothes. One of the girls actually walked over, grabbed our hands to pull us up, and gave us the greatest compliment ever: "I just hope that we'll be half as great as you two are when we get to be your age! You two were absolutely awesome." She hugged Cindy and kissed me on the cheek, and then the hikers went on their merry way, laughing and playing not a little bit of grab-ass as they headed away.

Cindy started to blush, and we started getting dressed, though not all that quickly, hugging and kissing in an afterglow moment. We headed back to the dam and walked back to our vehicles back in the parking lot. That was when Cindy confessed: "I'd never have dreamed this, but I just loved getting caught like that." I had to admit it: so did I.

Monday, March 19, 2018:

If only it had ended there! If only we'd had the sense to make a two-time fling end with that, maybe I wouldn't feel so guilty.

For my part, I had gotten away with it. Being an attorney with my own practice, I can make time during weekdays, and I wound up taking Cindy to Gunnison Beach, a nude beach in the Sandy Hook National Seashore, in Jersey. I had found out the details behind why she was willing to have an affair: her husband, seven years older than her, hadn't touched her in over two years. Being the asshole that I am, I figured that if he wasn't taking care of business, he couldn't complain if someone else did it for him.

And Cindy felt the same way as well. Even worse, one afternoon she took me to her house, and I fucked Ross Meadows' wife in his house -- though not his bed; they were in separate bedrooms -- and, when she made me a sandwich after the hot stuff was over, I realized that I was eating the food he had bought on the table in his dining room. That was pretty fucked up!

It was after that day that my sense of guilt started getting to me. Yeah, the affair was still a secret from my wife, who as far as I knew had never cheated on me. The last thing I wanted was a divorce; we'd been together for so long, had three kids together, and, let me be frank about it, she was making good money herself, while Cindy was unemployed.

That really kind of sucked, didn't it? Ross was working every day, pretty much overpaid I thought as a public school administrator, but still, he was working to support Cindy as a housewife, and I was the Other Man, fucking his wife on the down low.

Really, while sex with Cindy had started out really wild, including an outrageous fuck on this old driftwood log at the nude beach -- far enough down that we weren't visible, except by people taking long walks down the beach -- it had settled down to exciting enough, because it was illicit, but really no better than what Ellen and I had. I knew it: I had to end this stupidity, before Ellen found out and I wrecked my marriage.

It wasn't easy, but I did break it off. Cindy understood, and I figured that she'd find another lover soon enough: she was prettier than average, even at age 50, and more slender than most women her age.

It had been six weeks after we broke up that she e-mailed me, not to get together, but to tell me that she was divorcing her husband. She'd had a huge fight with him, had told him that she'd found someone else to take over the duties he had given up on, and she wanted out. She was still unemployed, of course, and I knew what that meant: Ross would wind up paying alimony to her, but she'd have to find a job and work herself. I figured that they'd sell the house in Luzerne County and she'd get half.

It was seeing her at the parade that brought all of this back to me. I didn't think that I was really the cause of her divorce, but I sure didn't help things, either. Her husband had been a dumbass, abandoning sex with a woman who was near menopause, just when women get to be their horniest, but I didn't know why; maybe he was having issues getting it up or something. Still, they'd been married for thirty years, and there's a lot more to marriage than just sex.

When I saw Cindy, it looked like she hadn't spotted me. I was close to my home, but she didn't know that it was my house; when we'd been having our affair, Ellen and I had lived across the bridge, on the east side of town. Of course, if she had looked, she'd have seen my firm name, Powers' Law Office, in gold leaf on the transom above the double front doors, though that wouldn't indicate that I lived in the same building.

As surreptitiously as I could, in that huge crowd, I made it back to my building and slinked inside; I'd watch the parade from the solitude of my living room window. I kept an eye out for Cindy, and spotted her a couple of times, and saw what I hoped I wouldn't see: she was alone.

That was a really bad feeling. Who knows, maybe Ross and Cindy would have gotten divorced anyway if she and I hadn't had our affair. But I had to think about it: the affair could have caused the blow up, could have caused Cindy to think that there was more for her out there, if only she wasn't tied down to Ross. She might be out there, watching our town's parade, maybe drinking some green beer from the Molly Maguire's restaurant or the Back to the 80s bar, but she was still alone.

Maybe, I thought, she had a new boyfriend, and he just couldn't make it, but the parade was on Sunday, when most people had off. Maybe she was living a decent enough life, nice place and enough money.

But, if so, I didn't see it. The Cindy I had known was fifty years old; now she was sixty-six. She was physically active at fifty, a strong hiker and really great in the sack. Today, from the glimpses I could get, she was thinner, in the stringy way some elderly ladies can get. I've seen far too many women in their sixties and seventies, alone, divorced or widowed, living lives that they really didn't want, by themselves, perhaps with friends for company but beds empty except for themselves and maybe a house cat.

Had I caused that? I had all sorts of reasons I could tell myself that I hadn't, that their divorce was inevitable, but in all honesty, that was lying to myself. I was at least contributory to it. Sure, maybe if it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else, probably would have been someone else, but that didn't mean it wasn't my fault.

I got out of bed, where Ellen was just starting to stir. She had today off, and Robert, my gay paralegal and office manager -- I hired him in part because he was gay, obviously gay, rather than a cute woman who I might be tempted to sleep with -- wouldn't open the office until 9:00 AM. I looked out the bay window in our bedroom, at the huge green white and orange Irish flag still suspended over Broadway, and did the only thing I could.

"Morning, sweetheart," I said, "would you like me to make us some bacon and eggs for breakfast?"