by Amy Star
“Well, we haven’t had any kind of trouble like that since then, glad to say. Little pissers with nothing else to do, they learned better. After Glen and I caught the punks, everything quieted down again. Just in time for you to come home and your grandfather to pull this.”
Jaxon chuckled, pulling on his own mug of mead. “Raising a different kind of hell.” After a hard swallow, Jaxon waved a hand, dismissing what he’d just said. “That’s not what I meant. Sherry and me getting back together, there’s no ‘hell’ about that.” He looked into the distance, but really into the distant past and the last few nights. Denny read Jaxon’s expression and understood.
“No ‘hell’ about that at all,” Denny agreed. “More like Pleasure Island.”
An intoxicated grin spread on Jaxon’s face, and not from what he was drinking.
“Tell me to shut the hell up and butt out,” said Denny, “but…is it as good now as it was then? You two, that is…,” he paused meaningfully. “Is it still…?”
Jaxon looked over at him from the corners of his eyes, wickedly, mischievously. “Is it as good?” He chuckled a little more. “It’s better. Way better. It’s better, not being kids any more, but doing it the way we did. It’s…I don’t know. I think the feeling is…I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just…better.” He looked off into the distance and into his memories again. His eyes were full of Sherry.
“And now you’re really going through with this. Marriage, Jaxon. Marriage. You say you’ve got an ‘out’ from it, that you’re just marrying for Humbert’s sake and you’re gonna annul it after a while. But still: Marriage. Even doing it knowing it’s not meant to last, doesn’t it still feel…”
“‘Permanent’?” Jaxon finished for him.
“Yeah. Doesn’t it?”
Giving the question serious thought, Jaxon answered, “What it feels like is… It feels important. It feels like it matters. We both know what we really want and we both know what we really mean. But it still feels important. It feels important because… I guess because of what we were to each other.” He looked seriously at the Deputy. “Sherry and me, that’s something you don’t forget. You don’t forget your first.”
“As long as you know what you’re doing, then,” said Denny.
“We know,” said Jaxon.
Denny topped off his glass from the pitcher, then did the same for Jaxon. He raised his glass and said, “To knowing what you’re doing.”
The voice of Chief Wilson boomed over from the next table: “Was that another toast I heard over there?”
His glass still raised, Denny answered, “Yeah. Jaxon and I were both toasting that him and Sherry know exactly what they’re doing!”
“Everybody knows exactly what they’ve been doing!” called Ethan, tauntingly. “They’ve been doing some of it in his room at our house at all hours of the night!”
“Oh, piss off!” Jaxon taunted his brother back.
Denny stood up, glass held high, and called, “Everybody! To knowing exactly what you’re doing!”
“Five times last night!” added Ethan, his father laughing and shaking his head nearby. Jaxon flipped the middle finger at his brother, and together the men drank another toast.
_______________
After dinner came the celebratory nighttime swim.
The group took themselves from the firehouse across a small patch of forest to Smithins Pond. On the shore of the pond, they lit a big bonfire and other fires in metal barrels and standing torches. They had a keg of mead by a picnic table and a set of glasses already set on the table. They brought a boom box with them. And with music playing, fires burning, and glasses and bellies full, they all stripped naked.
With clothes cast off, the Ursans present all went to bear forms, and it was Gary and Brett, surrounded by bears. The two human firefighters didn’t mind all the bears around them. Truth to tell, they were accustomed to “bears” of a different sort. This was just another kind. They did not mind the company, and the company did not mind them. People were people, in whatever shape they happened to be. And so, the lot of them, naked to the night air under the stars, made their way together to the edge of Smithins Pond—and jumped in.
They swam and splashed and paddled about, Gary and Brett laughing at the bears in the water with them, and the bears grunting and growling in their Ursan version of human laughter. Swimming among his own kind and the humans, Jaxon went back in his mind to times when he and Sherry had come down to the pond and gone swimming naked—and the things they’d done during and after drying off. There was even one time they had on top of the very picnic table where the glasses of mead now rested, though Jaxon was hardly about to tell any of his friends, or his father, brother, and uncle, about that. It was all well and good to share and have camaraderie, but even in a group of friends who were not ashamed to be naked and morph in front of each other, there had to be some limits.
After a while, the group climbed out of the water, and the bears shook the water from their fur while Gary and Brett refreshed the bonfire and huddled next to it. And the bears all settled down in the grass beside the lake. Most of them just lay down and gazed out into the night, watching the fireflies flash and dance over the grass and the reeds and the cattails. Jaxon sat up on his bottom and cast his eyes up to the stars. He searched the field of glitter splashed across the indigo sky and found the constellation of the Big Dipper—Ursa Major, “the Great Bear.” And he groaned a happy, husky, bearish groan of contentment at the familiar shape the stars made, which had since ancient times been associated with the form his body now held.
There was a “forever” quality about the stars. Jaxon knew that even they, up there, millions and billions of miles away, were not immortal; that they would all run their course as everything did. But the billions of years of a star’s life reminded him of what he and Denny had talked about at the firehouse: the “permanent” quality of marriage. People usually married with the intent of it being forever. He and Sherry were different, of course, but it still felt to Jaxon as if it had that same “forever” quality. The vows they were going to say were intended to last a lifetime, not for just a summer. He wondered if Sherry right now was feeling the things he was feeling, thinking and wondering the same things. Was Sherry at this moment pondering the fact that they were about to do a “forever” thing without really meaning it to last beyond the turning of the leaves?
And in some corner of his mind, Jaxon could not help but wonder how it would be if it were really going to be forever. Was Sherry wondering that as well? Perhaps he would ask her when he saw her later. Or perhaps not. In all likelihood, they would just climb into bed, and Jaxon would do to her the things they both loved, and they would fall happily asleep in each other’s arms.
Still…would forever really be such a bad thing? It was probably only all the mead that made him wonder.
Chapter10
For her part, Sherry decided to forgo the usual custom of the bridal shower. She decided she didn’t want her mother and aunts and all of her friends buying her all kinds of gifts for a marriage that wasn’t meant to go on past September. So instead, there was a dinner with her girlfriends and the women in her family, and then her girlfriends took her out for a night in the city, where they drank and danced—and her girlfriends convinced her to let them take her to a male strip club.
Truth be told, Sherry did not exactly need all the convincing in the world. She only needed to be coaxed through the guilt that she felt about going to watch inhumanly gorgeous men dance about in states of increasing undress, when she had been so relieved that Jaxon’s bachelor sendoff would not involve the same activities with gyrating, stripping women. She felt a bit of a hypocrite for that, and all she really needed was her friends to get her over it. Which they did. And with them, Sherry went to a place full of dozens of screaming, howling women, with a stage where enough scorching-hot men to fill the cast of two soap operas strutted and flexed and cavorted and shook, and had eager, wailing women
stuffing paper money into their thongs. And Sherry found herself actually enjoying the whole thing. All that made her feel guilty now was that she had no intention of breathing a word of it to Jaxon—but she had herself a proper blast.
Especially when one of her girlfriends called up to the stage, “My friend here is getting married!”—and pointed right at Sherry, whose mouth fell open and eyes bulged at her friend’s impulsive act.
The dancer on stage came to a dead stop in his strutting and shaking, and the music stopped. He fixed his eyes right on Sherry, who felt every bit like the deer in the headlights. The man, make no mistake, was six feet and two inches of sheer magnificence, dressed only in a black leather vest, short-shorts, and cap. He smiled a smile of pure seduction at Sherry and struck a pose for her with his thumbs in the belt loops of his short-shorts and his crotched angled in her direction. The room erupted in female howling. Sherry felt ready to keel over.
Next, the dancer gestured off stage, and one of his fellow hunks came out with a chair. He set the chair down on the stage and walked off again. The leather lad took off his hat and tossed it to one side. He stripped off his vest and sent it the way of the cap. The stage lighting shone on his hair, which was as dark as Jaxon’s, but shorter than Jaxon had let his hair grow out to be since leaving the Air Force. Then he pointed to the chair, and he pointed to Sherry, and he crooked his finger at her, wordlessly commanding her, Get yourself up here.
The women filled the place with another explosion of howls. As Sherry could hardly move, her girlfriends got her up from her seat and nudged her towards the stage. Like a sleepwalker, Sherry advanced to the little stairway leading from the floor up to where the performers worked. Still beaming that seductive smile at her, the dancer reached out and took her by the hand, and almost as if leading her in a dance, he sat her down in the chair.
“So, you’re getting married, sweetheart, is that it?” said the lad with nothing on now but his leather short-shorts.
Sherry stared up at his male magnificence, trembling, and nodded. Her voice came like the squeak of a mouse: “Yes…”
“Then while you’re still a free woman…,” the hottie began, and the music rose up again. The audience squealed as he finished, “…I say let’s give you something to remember your freedom by!” And the audience burst into claps and wailing, and the hunk started to dance his way closer to the transfixed Sherry.
What followed was a display of male sensuality that, for Sherry, was like reliving every time she’d been with a man—including Jaxon—all rolled into one. The man in the leather short-shorts danced towards her like a living, towering tsunami of sinews. Sherry could swear she felt his rippling, super-cut abs make waves in the air in her direction. His bending arms and twisting legs were like the parts of a mighty engine of muscles. He crossed the distance from where he’d been standing to where she was sitting in a few undulating steps, and there he was, practically in her space—almost as completely in her space as she was used to Jaxon being. She hardly knew where to look: up the gyrating tower of his abs and pecs to his blindingly handsome face, or down below those almost impossibly rippling abs to the tight, shiny black leather shorts that fit him almost as snugly as a pair of boxer briefs and swiveled sexily right at the level of her eyes, right in her wide-eyed face. What might she find in those shorts if he dared to rip them off right in front of her?
And then…he ripped them off right in front of her.
Sherry gasped, and the audience squealed and shrieked with approval, when the dancer took hold of his shorts and actually tore them away. He actually had breakaway leather shorts! Sherry’s exclamation of “Oh my God!” was completely drowned out in the raucous din of excitement blasting from the audience. She knew they wore breakaway clothes when they performed, but she’d never imagined one of them having breakaway leather. How much money stuffed into his thongs had it cost him to get a thing like that?
And speaking of thongs, the dancer had ripped away his short-shorts to reveal that underneath them lay his most manly prize—wrapped in a shiny black satin pouch in a G-string on his waist. From what Sherry could see—gaping in astonishment as he tossed his leather shorts to the stage floor—that pouch enclosed something at least as big as what Jaxon had. And there it was, exactly right in front her eyes, mere inches from her face, almost as close to her as Jaxon would bring the contents of his own trousers. Any moment now, Sherry thought, she would positively keel over from this chair right onto the performance floor. The dancing man with his prize in a pouch of black satin, however, was not about to give her the chance.
Being practically right on top of her, at least figuratively and almost literally, her dancing friend moved closer still. He leaned forward and braced his hands on the back of the chair, putting his pecs right to Sherry’s nose, bringing another howling din from the audience. He spread out his legs and bracketed them around the chair, enclosing Sherry between them. And, practically squatting in her lap, he straightened up enough to take her hands in his and move them to his hips.
The audience went insane, and Sherry feared she might lose her mind as well, between the outpouring of emotion from them and the way he now began to buck and pump and thrust his crotch in her face while she held on to his thrusting hips. She sat in sexual wonderment at this mass of male gorgeousness pretending to give her an oral fucking with his piece safely contained in its satin purse. But to her surprise, she neither went mad nor keeled over and fainted. Some impulse came over her that could only have happened in a moment like this, in a situation like this. Sherry held on, clutching his fast-pumping, naked hips as if he were a bronco that needed taming—and she laughed. Surprising and delighting herself, she laughed. And her friend in the thong looked down at the glee that had found its way to Sherry’s pretty face and laughed back.
Now, Sherry actually wondered how far she could take this. She knew better than to think she could get away with pulling off the thong and letting the prize fall free. It was against the house rules—and the law, no doubt—and he would never allow it. But how far could she go? She decided to test herself. Gazing up at the dancer with the most mischievous grin she had ever worn in her life, Sherry dared to let her hands slip from his hips back to his fully exposed buttocks into whose cleft the string of his thong ran. In response, her dancing friend sucked sexily at his lower lip, put his hands behind his neck, and changed the rhythm of the lap dance. Now, he began to gyrate his crotch in circles in Sherry’s face. And Sherry, testing the limits still further, actually squeezed the dancer’s rotating ass. It felt fantastic, and she felt just a twinge of guilt at thinking his ass felt almost as wonderful as Jaxon’s.
The dancer moved his hands from behind his neck down to Sherry’s arms and began to stroke them with his fingertips while alternately swiveling and pumping his crotch before her face. Sherry, in response, let her hands glide from his buttocks upward to his back to feel at the flexing muscles there. Did he have a girlfriend? How lucky was she? As lucky, Sherry thought, as she was to have a gorgeous, muscular Ursan waiting for her back home. Somehow, a lap dance from a magnificent stranger that she would never know again after tonight was making her appreciate all the better what she had, even if what she had would be hers for just the next few months. Whether because he was done or because he sensed Sherry had had enough, the hunk in the satin thong slowed the rhythm of his circling, pumping pelvis and ended his dance. He gallantly took a step back, helped Sherry up, kissed her on the back of each hand and on each wrist, and bowed to her. Sherry almost went into a dance of her own, grinning and laughing.
Such was the noise coming from the audience that the dancer could only see her mouth the words, “Thank you.”
And Sherry in turn saw him mouth back the words, “Thank you. And good luck and congratulations.”
Feeling as if her feet would stop touching the floor any second and she would start walking on air, Sherry stepped down from the stage and back into the mass of screaming, howling women in the audience, an
d rejoined her friends. She sat back at their table, and they all laughed and applauded and hugged her in the way that was reserved for a young woman’s best girlfriends, saying, “Good for you, girl! Good for you!”
Back outside, in the night, Sherry and her friends felt as if they had stepped from a summer evening to an evening in the fall, such was the difference between the heat in the club from that mass of enthused women and the coolness of the street. Their ears still rang with the bump-and-grind music and the screaming and howling in which they had been engulfed while in the audience. On their way back to the parking lot, Sherry felt almost as if her body were humming and vibrating post-coitally, and the dancer had not even actually done anything to her. There was only one thing that would settle her now.
She told her friends, who were still laughing at the display that they’d all witnessed in the club, “Everybody, this has been a really great night. I’ll never forget it. Thank you all for understanding I didn’t want a shower or any presents; I just wanted to be with all of you and just have fun tonight. And it was fun, so thank you. Thank you and I love you. Right now, would you mind taking me home? I’d really like to see Jaxon right now.”