The Mountains Trilogy (Boxed Set)

by Phoebe Alexander

  “God, Landon, yes!” she shouted, a hint of desperation in her voice.

  She swore she saw him smiling even in the darkness. He rose to his knees and began to unfasten his pants. “Really sure?” he asked again.

  “Now you’re just teasing me!” Abby squealed. She could feel the cool breeze blowing over her scorching hot pussy, almost tickling her with the contrast in temperatures.

  “I just want to make sure you really want this.” She could see his engorged organ, the one she had been so curious about, spring toward her as he released it from his shorts. She couldn’t make out the size or shape, but her desire for it to be inside her was not in any way diminished. “I want to make sure that you really want me,” he added.

  “More than I thought possible,” she said just loud enough for him to hear over the crashing surf.

  With that, he steadied himself on the pile of clothes he’d spread out below him and sank down onto her body. The weight of him only made her crazier with desire, and the stiff cock she longed for was now only inches away from where she wanted it to be. So close and yet so far away, she lamented.

  He lifted himself onto his knees grasping his manhood in one hand. He produced a condom that must have come from his discarded shorts and rolled it down onto his shaft. He parted the lips of her sex with the other hand while he attempted to guide himself in. Despite her being so wet, it was a very tight fit.

  “God, Abby,” he breathed as he struggled to work himself inside. She lifted her legs up, her hands propping them from the backside, hoping to give him better access. The sensation was somewhere between pain and pleasure, rapidly shifting between the two extremes.

  Finally he slid the last few inches inside and then stopped, the only motion him gently rocking back and forth, only tiny movements from his pelvis. “Feel okay?” he whispered as he lowered his body onto hers. His breath fell across her neck as her lips sought his.

  She answered in kisses, their tongues dancing an exquisite tango as he began to move inside her, very shallow strokes at first and then working up to deep, delicious thrusts. It was like nothing Abby had experienced before. Her sex with Tyler had been an abysmal failure of him getting so excited that he pumped his cock in her a few times and then exploded. Sex with girls was a different rhythm, a different pace, a give and take. This was a completely new world of symbiosis: two bodies moving both with and against each other at the same time. She couldn’t believe how good it felt to be filled, to have his weight on her, to have his mouth on hers as he stroked in and out of her pussy.

  When she came, it wasn’t the slow, agonizing build up that happened under Mia’s talented tongue. It was a gush, a geyser erupting, the element of surprise at least a fraction of the thrill. She could scarcely believe it was happening, through no power of her own, as if her body had gone and done its own thing, requiring no effort from her brain.

  Landon held her close to him as she surrendered to the rhythmic waves rushing through every corner of her body, from the hairs on her head to the very tips of her toes. He held her until the very last spasms subsided. “That was amazing,” he whispered into her ear. She couldn’t help but agree.

  “Your turn,” was all she could manage. She wanted to make him come, make him lose control, all the while knowing it was because she felt so good, her pussy wrapped around him like a glove.

  Needing no extra encouragement, he began to thrust harder and faster into her, so hard and so fast that it nearly stole her breath. Her body was still tingling with the remnants of her orgasm and the sensations of his cock slamming into her were nearly too much for her to take. She cried out into the dark, cool night just as his body fiercely jerked, announcing his release. His cry intertwined with hers, but the sound was swallowed up by the ocean roaring onto land.

  ***

  Chapter Nineteen

  Moving On

  Abby hated to return to the reality of packing for school. As much as she longed for her mountains and the smiling faces of her sisters, she was not looking forward to the consuming loneliness she would feel in her dorm room or the tension she was sure to feel with her dad and Bobbi. She texted Maddy to ask if she was ready for school to start again.

  But Maddy texted back: I’m very sorry to say I had to transfer to the local community college. My parents said they couldn’t afford sending me out of state this year. I’m sad. Miss you.

  She had added a frowny face and a face with tears flying out. Abby was shattered. Then moments later another text came through. It came from an unrecognized number and had a photo attached. She stared at the screen trying to make sense of it for several seconds until finally it crystallized.

  It was a picture of a newborn all wrapped up in a blue, white, and pink striped blanket. Then another text came through moments later that read like a birth announcement: Jacob Andrew Clark – 7 pounds, 7 ounces – 20 inches long. Born 8-25-14.

  Clark was Mia’s last name. She was shocked by the physical response of her body to the photo, her nerves frazzling as bolts of electricity coursed through her body. I guess the question of whether or not she was having the baby is now answered, Abby thought. He had a scrunched up little face, swollen and red but otherwise delicate features: a tiny nose, tiny mouth. She scanned the photo searching for a likeness to his mother but found none. And, naturally, she wondered who his father might be.

  So now I’m going back to Colorado and my best friend won’t be there, my dad may not let me see my sisters, and my ex-girlfriend has a baby. What the hell is this world coming to? She felt like she was about to start all over again, as if she hadn’t gained any ground the year before.

  And heaped onto the trepidation about returning to school was her sadness over leaving Landon. She missed him already, and she hadn’t even left yet. The conversation they had the morning after their sandy rendezvous still echoed in her mind.

  “So about last night…” she had said, her voice trailing off as she realized she was perpetuating the movie cliché from the night before.

  “Yeah, what in the world got into us?” he asked, grinning. “Crazy, right?”

  Once he saw how serious she was, his smile faded. She watched the corners of his mouth drop until his face was completely expressionless. “Landon, I think you’re awesome,” she said.

  “But?”

  “But I’m going back to Colorado and you’re staying here and…well…and I’m gay and you’re not a girl and –“

  He cut her off with his finger pressed to her lips. Another classic movie star maneuver. “It’s okay, Abby. Let’s not ruin what was a perfectly wonderful evening with a lot of second guessing, okay? It is what it is.”

  She was stunned. Once again he managed to make what had felt like the hardest, most confusing thing in the world seem like a walk in the park, just like he did with dance steps when she had two left feet. She smiled and wrapped her arms around him, happy to feel his body pressed against hers again.

  She told her mother. Sarah’s eyes were wide and attentive, even though Abby left out the “sex on the beach” part of the story. She started with, “So I think I like this boy.”

  Every mother feels a certain thrill when her daughter confides in her and seeks her advice. “So what’s the big deal?” Sarah asked.

  “Um, I’m supposed to be gay?” Abby smirked.

  “What if you’re not?”

  “But I am. I mean I really like girls. Landon is the first guy I’ve even looked at since I was with Tyler.”

  “Abby, sexuality is not an all or nothing thing. You can like both boys and girls. It’s fine,” Sarah said, hoping to put her firstborn at ease.

  She buried her face in her palms and when she removed them, her face was red and scrunched with frustration. “But I feel like I’m a lesbian,” she insisted.

  “So maybe you’re a lesbian who likes men every once in a while,” Sarah suggested. “Look, I know I’ve never really come out and said this…but I’m a mostly straight woman who likes women every o
nce in a while. It’s all good, sweetie, you’re stressing too much over labels!”

  Her mother’s confession did not come as a surprise to Abby, who had long suspected, especially in light of the lifestyle she knew her mother practiced. Was this sort of sexual wanderlust hereditary? Abby wondered. Was her grandmother bisexual too?

  “The sociologist is telling me not to label myself,” Abby scoffed. “I’m not a fan of the whole bisexual thing. Why do we need these narrow designations anyway?”

  “Well,” Sarah explained, “humans are complex creatures who continually try to simplify things – take shortcuts. Having labels means our brains do less work. We can just lump people into categories and think of them as a whole instead of individually. Think about how much mental energy that saves!”

  “So basically we’re just mentally lazy,” Abby clarified.

  “Yep, that pretty much sums it up. Why is ‘bisexual’ so off-putting to you?”

  She had thought of this before, but not exactly how to articulate it in words. Young women, particularly college-aged women, were encouraged to be “bisexual.” It was all the rage, to the point of becoming a huge cliché. And Abby was no fan of clichés. “It implies one of two things,” she finally explained. “Either I can’t make up my mind, or I’m just trying to lure men into thinking I’m cool and popular.” The thought of Bree and Mark stung in the back of her mind.

  “I get it,” Sarah said. “Trust me, I do. Have you ever heard of the Kinsey Scale? It’s a spectrum that goes from 0, which is exclusively heterosexual to 6, which is exclusively homosexual. Not very many people are at 0 or 6, if that helps you.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing!” Sarah smiled. “Meeting people and seeing if you click. Maybe you’ll click with a girl, maybe with a guy. Maybe with someone transgender! It doesn’t matter. You know we will love you no matter what, right?”

  Abby couldn’t prevent her eyes from welling up with tears as she knew the “we” only included her mother, James, her grandmother and Adam. Only her mother’s side. She had a whole other side of the family who couldn’t say the same.

  ***

  Labor Day, Sarah thought. Abby will leave tomorrow and next thing I know it will be Labor Day and then the start of classes. Summer is over and what do I have to show for it? She glanced down at her belly and found her answer.

  Then she looked over at Owen, who was entranced by something on his phone. A game, she suspected, faintly hearing the little squirks and bleeps emitted from the device. She was glad to have him home, but he seemed like he’d aged another two years just in the course of the summer. His dad had not made him get his hair cut, and his normally dark brown color had bleached out in the sun while his skin had turned the color of bronze.

  “How did you get so tan?” Abby had asked him, looking down at her own milky white skin.

  “Dad put up a pool in the backyard so I was out there with Sam and Nikki almost every day. It was so much fun!”

  Sarah hadn’t seen him get so excited about anything in at least a year. For a second she saw the little freckle-faced boy sitting there from a few summers ago. He was still straddling that fuzzy line between boyhood and manhood, and she was resistant to letting him cross over. As if she had a choice in the matter. But I get to start all over again soon, she considered. Adding his or her own two cents, the baby inside her delivered a wallop of a kick to her ribcage. “Oy!” she exclaimed aloud.

  Owen looked up from his game with a concerned look on his face. “You okay, Mom?” Despite his self-imposed isolation and obsession with his phone and video games, he had become very protective of his mother since she became pregnant. Even James had noticed. He seemed very in tune with whenever Sarah felt ill or tired, and had many times implored her to rest. Sometimes she felt like he showed more concern for her and the baby’s well-being than her own husband.

  Speaking of whom, things had not changed. He was still seeing Vanessa on Friday nights, but he was also working a lot, trying to prepare for fall classes he was taking and teaching, in addition to the other duties he had a Ft. Meade. Sarah felt like they had settled into a pattern of wordless intersections as they took care of their respective responsibilities. It was almost beginning to feel normal, which scared her as much as the rift between them.

  “This is not the life I imagined,” Sarah told her mother one afternoon. “I feel like I have lost him and won’t ever get him back.”

  “I think things will change once the baby is here,” Kathy predicted. “Just wait and see. He’s going to fall in love with his little one and you all over again.”

  The chasm between the two was a dark cloud hanging over the entire house. Owen picked up the vibe as soon as he arrived home from Colorado, and Abby felt it as well. In some ways, Sarah was glad Abby was going back to school. She seemed to be suffering from post-show depression, not to mention she was sad to be leaving Landon. Negativity from James and Sarah was the last thing she needed.

  But Abby grew even more agitated after she received two items of correspondence: one, the text from Mia with the birth announcement and two, an invitation to her father and Bobbi’s wedding. Sarah had counseled her daughter to try to find peace in their happiness.

  “I wish I was as good of a person as you are, Mom,” Abby had replied.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Like the way you are just turning a blind eye to what James is doing. I know you’re unhappy, but you aren’t going to back down on your marriage vows.”

  Sarah felt her skin begin to burn with a rush of chemicals surging through her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, come on, Mom, you think I don’t know? He’s seeing someone else and not devoting any time or energy to you, and it’s making you completely miserable. It’s impossible to spend ten minutes in this house and not see what’s going on. And I don’t think your counselor friend in Baltimore is doing you any favors. Seems like she should be telling James to get his head out of his ass and pay attention to the woman who is carrying his child!”

  Sarah noticed that her mouth was still agape, stuck with no words able to come out, her tongue frozen in position. Her first instinct was to protest, to deny the accusations. But it was the truth, the pure, honest-to-god truth, and if Abby could see the situation so clearly, then she would also see right through Sarah’s claim to the contrary.

  It was then that James walked through the door from work. Abby was standing in the kitchen, her hands defiantly on her hips and her mouth cocked, loaded, and ready to take aim at her stepfather. Sarah glared at her, silently warning her to please not start anything, but it was too late.

  “What’s going on in here?” he roared, his immediate perception that his wife and stepdaughter were embroiled in a disagreement.

  “I’m telling my mother what a selfish asshole you’ve been, and how there is no way I would let someone I loved treat me that way,” Abby said, her feet firmly planted on the tile floor, hands still on her hips.

  Sarah could scarcely believe that those words came out of her daughter. She looked tiny standing there next to James, who was broad and tall, but her stance gave her much more of a presence than Sarah knew she was capable of displaying.

  “Oh, is that so?” James countered, looking down at Abby as if icy daggers were about to shoot out of his cold blue eyes.

  “Yeah. And as a matter of fact, I think if you’re not going to be a good husband to her, you should get the hell out of her house. She is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, you know. She did it for years and years before you came along.”

  James looked from Abby to her mother, who had her face buried in her hands, the tears beginning to flow. Just when she thought she’d run out of tears, her body would produce more. I thought I cried them all out over the miscarriage, she realized. But at least with that, when it was over, it was over, and it wasn’t going to get any worse. It could only get better. This pain seems to find
new and crueler ways to torture me every day.

  “Getting your daughter to fight your battles for you now?” James asked, a smirk showing on his face. “I thought this situation was between the two of us.”

  Sarah lurched up from her seat at the counter and stood next to her daughter facing him. “You think it’s just between us? You don’t think everyone sees what’s going on? How you come and go as you please and aren’t even part of this family anymore? James, everyone sees it. You’ve moved on. You’ve mentally moved out. Maybe Abby’s right. Maybe it’s time for you to physically move on as well.”

  He said nothing in response, just turned and walked up the stairs. Twenty minutes later, he left the house with his army-issued duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He did not say goodbye.

  ***

  The approaching dusk was a sad reminder that summer was fading into oblivion. The air was cool with a westerly wind blowing a change toward the east. Abby could nearly taste the pumpkin spice beverages that were sure to be popping up at Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts throughout the land any day. But as of now, sitting at Java the Hut, she settled for a mocha Frappuccino and Landon had ordered the caramel equivalent.

  She'd just finished her last day of work at the library, and they’d thrown a little end-of-the-summer party for all the departing student workers. She tried to make peace with the fact that she wouldn’t see her boss and awesome co-workers again the next day – if ever, really. She went to Java the Hut with red, puffy eyes already fully operational in tearful goodbye mode. A faint chorus of "so long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, goodnight" echoed in her head as she slowly sipped her Frappuccino and tried to avoid adding an "ice cream" headache to the list of her ailments.

  “Ailments” was not too strong of a word because her heart did ache. She was leaving all the warmth and comfort of people she knew and knew her, to travel back to Colorado where the only people she knew had rejected her. She had shared with Landon all about the ongoing saga with her father and the one with Mia, including the updated text with photo of her baby.