by Amy Star
“Yeah,” said Jaxon. “It’s like being in a bubble, and you think you’re always gonna be right there.”
“But sooner or later, you know you can’t stay there. Especially when prom comes up and you know graduation is right after, and you just feel everything changing. And you know your lives are going to start going in different directions. Then, you start seeing the bubble for what it really is.”
“That’s how it was for me too. Those times toward the end, when we’d be in bed just holding each other after going on for hours, and it’d be so quiet… I didn’t want to say anything then, because it was so good I didn’t want to break the mood, but also because I could feel it was getting near the end. I didn’t want to talk about it being near the end. I just wanted it to feel like it felt then, forever, you know?”
Sherry’s eyes were filled with times gone by. “Forever,” she said.
“Or at least ’til I got hard again,” he said mischievously.
“Which you always did, you bear.” She nudged his arm, and he gave a little laugh.
“Always,” he chuckled. “But we knew the time was coming to move on. And I think maybe, knowing the time was coming made it…”
“Sweeter?”
“Maybe ‘sweeter.’ But deep down, kind of sadder, because we knew every time was a little closer to the last time. Like that last night, when I got us back the room where we went after the prom. Neither one of us said anything for the longest time. We just got naked and got in bed, and I went on all night long. I did it that night like I’d never fuck again as long as I lived.”
“And the last time that night,” said Sherry, the memories in her eyes now clouded with sadness, “I’ll never forget just holding each other…and crying.” She studied his face and found her own feelings reflected back at her. “I’d never seen a boy cry before. I’ve never seen a boy cry since then.”
“I loved you, Sherry,” he said.
“And I loved you.”
They said nothing else for a moment, letting that simple acknowledgement of the deepest feelings of their young lives linger there, warming them both.
“The next morning before we had to check out,” Jaxon finally continued, “those were our last times.”
Sherry nodded and smiled a bit. “Our last three times.”
“Four,” he said, holding up that number of fingers.
She furrowed her brow a bit. “It was three, wasn’t it? Twice in bed, once in the shower…”
“And then one more time across the bed after we got out of the shower, because I really, really didn’t want it to be over.”
“Oh, right,” she remembered. “Four. And if we hadn’t had to check out…”
“I never wanted to leave that room,” Jaxon said.
“Outside that room was the future—where we weren’t going to be together. I wanted to live in that room with you.”
“Yeah,” said Jaxon. “But when the future comes, you get on board or it goes on without you. We knew that much. We were eighteen and thought we knew everything. But that was the only thing we really knew. You don’t let the future pull away without you.”
“No,” she said softly. “No, you don’t.”
Jaxon reached across the table and touched Sherry’s hand. Sherry accepted his touch and let their fingers lace together almost as if they’d never been apart.
“You know,” said Jaxon, “every time I look at a fishbowl, I see it full of condoms, and I think, ‘There’s Friday night and Saturday night with Sherry.’”
Sherry giggled as if she were still a teenager. “It was some school nights too, remember, when we could be really sneaky about it.”
“Yeah,” said Jaxon, grinning. “Come to think of it, there were some pretty hot Wednesday nights.”
And they both laughed.
“Every time I hear the word ‘fishing,’” Jaxon admitted, “a little voice in my head whispers, ‘fucking.’”
She touched his handsome, stubbly face. He was as delicious to touch now as he had been back then.
“But I only see you,” he said. “We’ve both moved on since then. But you’re still the only girl I’ve ever ‘gone fishing’ with. ‘Fishing’—that’s just ours. That only belongs to us.”
“Oh, Jaxon,” she sighed.
Though they stayed exactly as they were, holding hands across the kitchen table, in spirit they drew closer, and in spirit Jaxon kissed her, a long and deep kiss, the kiss of teenagers for whom not a day had gone by.
Chapter5
In the town square in the middle of Smithintown stood a tree that had been there since the first settlers arrived. No one could ever bring himself to cut it down, so they had just built around it. The tree, surrounded by an immaculately kept garden, itself surrounded by a pristine lawn, presided over the square. The only thing that anyone had ever done with the tree, besides pruning it when required, was to set a commemorative brass and pewter plaque into the trunk. The plaque, with an inscription and an engraving of a bear paw, was in honor of the young couple who back in the early 1800s had entered into the very first “peace marriage.” The plaque was worded carefully so that out-of-towners would not read about a boy werebear and a human girl marrying to broker a peace between their feuding families, but people who knew the town’s unspoken history—at least unspoken to humans passing through—knew what it meant.
On some level, in some way, Sherry McCabe and Jaxon Michaels had thought of themselves as perhaps being the reincarnations of that very first young peace-married pair. They imagined themselves, in some unexamined corner of their hearts, as carrying on the love across the boundary of species that had defied hatred and fear and hostility and made one family from a family of Ursans and a family of humans. That was the beginning of a tradition that had essentially made the history of Smithintown possible. Without that tradition, neither Sherry nor Jaxon might even exist.
Sitting on the outdoor patio of the cafe across the street from the tree, sipping on an iced tea and nibbling on a sandwich, Sherry looked over at the old tree and contemplated everything that it stood for. And perhaps, she thought, that was the real reason that Humbert Michaels wanted her to marry his grandson. Perhaps it was not only to create the sense of continuity from past to present to future that he had talked about, but rather to keep alive by the joining of their two families a connection to that past event, the event that had been more or less the founding of the town and the beginning of all the lives that had ever been lived there.
Still, Sherry thought, wasn’t the memory of that relationship and those times enough? Wasn’t the mere existence of Smithintown a living link to that first marriage of peace and reconciliation? Did she and Jaxon really have to trade a piece of their lives for it?
The whole idea was archaic. It was backward. It had no place in a modern life and an advanced society. It ought to be done away with, abolished. And yet…
In her mind still rang Jaxon’s words: I loved you, Sherry.
If she knew nothing else, Sherry knew that Jaxon truly had loved her, and she him.
The expression of that love first happened one evening in the forest in the hills overlooking the Michaels house.
They were taking a chance going there, they knew, because members of Jaxon’s family and other Ursans that they knew frequented that forest when they spent time in their bear forms. They were running the risk of being found and called out. But it was a familiar place to Jaxon, a place that he knew, where he felt at home and could make Sherry feel not just wanted but safe and protected. It was his family’s forest—his forest. And he wanted their first time to be there.
So, they took a big bedroll from Jaxon’s attic, and a lantern, and a Thermos full of hot cocoa, and an old radio that they tuned to a station that played romantic old songs, out to one spot in the forest where the trees were sparse, and the surrounding underbrush gave them at least a bit of seclusion. And they lit the lantern, rolled out the bedroll, and set the radio and the Thermos on an old stump
next to the bedroll. They also had a backpack with them, into which they stuffed their clothing when they undressed—and saw each other naked for the first time by the waning daylight sifting through the trees and the glow of the lantern on the stump. And Jaxon Michaels, naked with an erection, holding out his hand to her, was the most beautiful thing that Sherry had ever seen in her young life.
She took his hand, and he pulled her into a long and tender kiss. He guided her hand down to touch and feel his cock for the first time, while at the same time, he slipped his own hand between Sherry’s legs to feel the moistening petals of her sex, to feel her getting ready for him. Kissing, getting the first amazing feel of each other’s privates, they sank down onto the bedroll and began to discover each other.
Every dream that Sherry ever had of being intimate and sexual with Jaxon came to wondrous life there in the cool dimness of the darkening forest. His kisses covered her lips, her cheeks, her neck, her shoulders. The hairs of his chest rustled across Sherry’s bosom, his pecs pressing against her breasts. Her nipples became like tingling little pebbles. His tool throbbed in her grasp, a hot piece of woody flesh, and she felt a slickness of his pre-seed on her fingers. Being an Ursan, Jaxon had his full foreskin, and Sherry delighted in the feeling of it slipping up and down over the sensitive crown of his glans while she stroked at him. His balls were warm and round, jacketed in the soft and hair-bristled sac of his scrotum. Jaxon’s fingers slipped and slid along the petals of her sex, where she felt a moist warmth and a tingle. Carefully, he felt for the tender little nub of her clit and softly teased it with his fingertip. Sherry gasped in mid-kiss, his finger on the spot of her greatest pleasure making a sudden bump of delight inside her. Jaxon smiled sweetly and kissed her again, affectionately, meaningfully, telling her with the slide of their lips and tongues together that she was truly becoming his, and he was truly becoming hers.
Jaxon pulled himself from their embrace and lay down on his back on the bedroll, presenting his splendid nakedness. His erection stood upright and proud at his crotch. He took her hand in his one hand, and with the fingertips of the other hand he reached up and touched them to her lips. She kissed his fingers. Then Jaxon took the fingers that she had kissed and touched them to the tip of his cock, gazing up at her, telling her without words what she wanted him to do. With a breath of anticipation, Sherry honored Jaxon’s unspeaking request. She crouched down and lowered her face between his legs, and for the first time, she began to run her tongue slowly and sensuously up and down the rigid and fleshy pole of her boyfriend’s dick.
The feeling of Jaxon’s member on her tongue, and the taste of his pre-cum when she swept her tongue over the head of it, made Sherry’s desire blossom like an unfolding flower. She both heard and felt Jaxon’s rumble of delight when she took the head of his cock in her mouth and slowly slid down the pole with her lips and tongue to fill her mouth with it. Finding it the most wonderful thing she’d ever done, she moved with her mouth up and down Jaxon’s pulsing shaft and fed herself his erection. She consumed both his meat and the sounds that he made while she took it in with one smooth stroke after another and made cooing noises that sent vibrations of her pleasure into him, mixing with the pleasure that he felt at her sucking.
Wanting to know every sensation of Jaxon’s sex, Sherry let his prong slip from her mouth and dove lower between his hairy thighs, bringing her tongue to the pouch of his balls. She made circular licks all over his sac, sensing how his head must be tossing above her and his toes flexing below her. With the greatest care, she drew one of his testes into her mouth, felt his whole body flex, and heard him moan up to the treetops ecstatically. She did the same to his other testicle, bringing a similar response, then took the fullness of his entire scrotum past her lips and onto her tongue and held it there. Jaxon grunted— “UUHHH…!” and slapped the palms of his hands on the bedroll. At her continued sucking of his balls, he pressed his eyes shut and rubbed at the hairy slabs of his pecs, filling his being with the joy of what his girlfriend was doing between his legs. He let her go on and reveled in what she did to him, until at last he reached down and stroked the hair on the top of her head and half-gasped, “Suck my dick some more…please…”
Sherry honored his most welcome request. She returned to feeding herself the luscious, throbbing hardness of Jaxon’s boner, having her tongue pull the foreskin up and down over the crown, letting them both revel in the sensation, until Jaxon, groggy with ecstasy, brought himself up on one shoulder, stroked her hair again, and said, “I want to taste you now. Lie down; let me taste you.”
Almost reluctantly, Sherry released his cock with one long, parting suck, making him grunt at the pit of his stomach. She rose to meet his lips and his kiss. Then, with one arm around her, Jaxon eased her down onto the bedroll and slipped a hand between her soft, warm thighs, which she instinctively spread to grant him access to what he wanted. She gazed up at the treetops, which were now silhouettes of limbs and foliage with deep blue-violet night and emerging stars between them. She closed her eyes, took a breath, felt the rustle of Jaxon’s fingertips on her pubic hair and her mound, and prepared herself for the next wonderful thing.
Jaxon delicately used the fingers of both hands to open the flower of Sherry’s sex, and in the flicker of the lantern light he saw the pink glistening of her maidenhood. He lay there between her parted thighs, just looking at it in a quiet awe, picturing the moment when his eager dick would pass between her curtains, and with one stroke burst through the seal of Sherry’s womanhood and turn him fully from a cub to a bear. But that was not for this moment. For this moment, Jaxon wanted to know the taste of Sherry’s most intimate place, the place that would belong completely to him this night. As tenderly as he opened Sherry’s curtains, he closed them up between his index and middle fingers and brought his face forward and down to lick her sex.
Sherry squirmed at the touch of his tongue on the secret regions that she now yielded up to Jaxon. She suddenly felt drunk without benefit of wine or liquor. She was receiving a giddy and elated feeling which she knew that no alcohol, which she had never even had, could ever give her. No intoxication could ever be as rich as what Jaxon was now doing with his fingers and tongue in the place that was meant only for someone who loved her. She felt her body grow as hot as the fire in the lantern, and felt her spirit dance like the flame, under the wet caress of Jaxon’s tongue up and down her sex. Even more wonderful was what he did next. Releasing her folds from the enclosure of his fingers, he took her labia fully into her mouth and sucked them long and deeply. Sherry’s back arched, and she released a cry of rising bliss that she feared could be heard in the Michaels house down the hill and in the town beyond. But in the next second, as Jaxon continued to suck at her sex, she did not care. Suddenly, Sherry did not care if the whole world knew what Jaxon was doing to her. It was too wonderful. Everyone should know how wonderful this was.
Jaxon had still more joy in store for her. Carefully again as not to let himself penetrate her virginity, he spread Sherry’s entrance open again and found her clit once more. And carefully, he moved his tongue to that tingling nub and began to lick and flick away at it. Sherry squirmed from this new pleasuring, making delirious and dreamy sounds, a song ringing out to the forest that matched the song that Jaxon made to play inside her body. The pleasure sang from her sex to her core to every cell of her being. Jaxon’s tongue was wet and quick and agile, strumming nimbly at her clit and making Sherry vibrate all over and deep inside. She whimpered and almost sobbed at it. How was this possible? How was it even possible for anything to feel this fantastic? She bent her knees up and pushed herself into Jaxon’s face, and he went from licking her clit to sucking it, drawing moans of pleasure beyond description from Sherry—and heightening his own desire for the ultimate feeling of joy and the ultimate expression of their feelings.
He licked Sherry’s flower with the width of his tongue, not letting it pass beyond her outer folds. A wave of further pleasure rolled through Sh
erry’s body. Now they were both ready. Now it was time. Jaxon came up on his knees, keeping her legs apart. He leaned over to where they’d left the backpack beside the bedroll and unzipped a pocket on it. From inside the pocket, he pulled out one of the fistfuls of condoms that he’d taken from the fishbowl in the cafe men’s room. Quickly, he broke open the seal, anticipating the seal he was about to break, and rolled the latex sleeve down the length of his boner. Then, he moved his boner to where his lips and tongue had been. Sherry and Jaxon breathed in unison and locked eyes together. He leaned down and kissed her tenderly, one last kiss before the moment of truth. Then, smoothly and easily, he moved the tip of his condom-covered cock to Sherry’s opening and slipped it into her.
In the same unison as they had breathed, Jaxon and Sherry moaned at the feeling of his hard, thick length going into her passage. In his mind, Jaxon pictured what must be happening inside her, the pink barrier of Sherry’s cherry giving way to that first magical stroke of his dick. In a heartbeat, he was in her all the way to his balls. Sherry moaned in a new delirium, and Jaxon moaned with her, laying himself down on top of her to kiss her once again, telling her with his kiss, It’s okay. We’re good. I love you.