My Summer with Atya

I was nineteen and had just returned home from my junior year at boarding school. I was old for a junior, but home-schooling doesn't always prepare you for the world like it should. I was primarily just relieved to have successfully completed the first of the two years my parents had planned for me to attend. All things said, it had been the most tumultuous period of my life, outpacing the rest of my short existence by a significant margin. In that one year I'd fallen in love, had my heart broken, and repeated that process twice more. Those are stories for another time. This story is from the interlude, the time between those years, a few weeks completely separated from that chaos.

Many of the details escape me, but I was working at the local church school that summer, mostly maintenance and cleaning of some sort, preparing it for the upcoming year. There were a few of us working there, eighteen and nineteen year olds, home for the summer, some like me from boarding school, others from college. Most of us were just trying to save up some spending money for the school year ahead. I remember almost none of those people, only Katya remains clear in my mind.

I was a year ahead of her, but we had been in the same classroom in that two classroom school my freshman and sophomore years. As usual, during those two years, there were no more than thirty students in the entire school, but we were still leagues apart socially. I was the home-schooled kid, awkward, clumsy, a bit chubby. She was an only child, but her older cousins were like sisters to her, all whom had gone to this school. As their extended family was the largest and widest spread, they had become the "popular" clique by default. In a school that small, that is of course all relative, but to my mind it was an enormous divide.

So there we were, two people, who in my mind would've likely never have talked otherwise, working side by side, joking and chatting. It felt amazing. She was cute, adorable even, but with a mouth that wouldn't quit and a personality to match. The term "firecracker" was practically coined just for her. She was mouthy, bossy, and completely unladylike. I loved every minute of it. She was an unapologetic flirt, with all the guys, and in retrospect, probably some of the girls.

I missed the signals she was sending me for almost too long because of this. I didn't think I was anything special. After all, she said all the same things to the other guys. Looking back it should have been painfully obvious. I was the only one she made excuses to work with, I was the one that she touched, smacking my arm when I got talked back, bumping into more times than could be explained by simple clumsiness. When the day was done and I was waiting for my ride, she was the one that lounged with me on the playground equipment, just talking like we'd been best friends forever. I was oblivious, and I would have gone the whole summer like that if fate hadn't had different plans.

My dad worked long hours, and as we were poor, we just had the one vehicle. He'd drop me off early in the morning on his way to the mill, and pick me up in the evening on his way home. It was one of those early mornings that I found her waiting there. It wasn't unusual for her to be there early, though I never questioned as to why that was. It was a bright sunny day, and it felt like the entire world was right in its place, right where it belonged.

I saw her out on the swings, and headed over. The staff wouldn't be here for another hour to unlock the buildings, so this was usually one of our times to hang out, just the two of us. The moment I saw her face, that bright sunny feeling was shattered and my world instantly turned dark and stormy. It wasn't just the fact that she had a purple bruise under her eye, or the fact that her lip looked cut and swollen. It was the look she gave me. To this day I still get a shiver when I think of it. So many feelings welled up in me at that moment. Sympathy, rage, disbelief, all warring with each other to take top billing.

Her eyes looked far away, and the bossy, mouthy bitch who'd become my best friend was gone. In her place was a broken girl, too broken for tears, just staring ahead. I don't know how long I stood there, it seemed like an eternity. Once I realized that the silence had hung on for far too long, I broke myself out of it and went to her. I knelt next to her, completely unsure what to do or what to say. Nothing seemed adequate. So being the thoughtful, caring, and empathetic soul I was, I blurted out, "What the fuck happened?" That did get a reaction, and I'm not sure if she was on the edge of crying or laughing, the sound was so quick and faint, and the look gone from her so fast. She hung her head as if ashamed and then the dam broke, she started to cry, sobbing. It was heartbreaking and tore at me, right to my very core.

I was an awkward kid, I didn't have any experience with anything like this, but I had to do something, anything. My family had never been a hugging family. Physical affection was something I'd rarely seen modeled growing up. So when I tried to hug her, it didn't feel natural, it didn't feel right. I felt like one of those novelty claw machines, clumsily trying to hang onto a stuffed animal and going about it all wrong. Somehow, that didn't matter to her. It was what she needed, and she hugged me right back. I remember having a momentary detached thought that this hugging thing was definitely underrated. It felt so good to feel so close to someone, to have the mutual feeling of caring about someone so much that you had to be touching to express it properly.

So I held her, she held me, and she cried. I didn't know what else to do, so I let her, and eventually, she began to calm down, and finally stopped. Still holding her I asked, "What can I do?", and she looked up at me and by God she smiled. I will never forget that. After all of that, with all the pain she was obviously in, she smiled at me. It was like being trapped in a pitch black room in a strange house, and someone had just lit a match. The room may have still been dark, but that light was all you could see, all you cared about in that moment.

We stayed like that for a bit, and when she'd calmed down some I finally got the story, in bits and pieces. One of those other guys had taken the flirting really personal, and decided she should only have eyes for him. Being lonely, she took him up on his offer, and they'd gone out the night before. As you can plainly guess, it hadn't ended well. She'd had enough, he hadn't, she tried to get away, and he expressed his displeasure with his fists.

To this day I don't know what exactly transpired there, but whatever it was it hurt her and shamed her. She wasn't sure what to do, because at the time her mom was more than a little nuts, and really didn't have a great grip on reality, so she'd have been of no help. Her dad was always in a world all his own and would never have noticed, always caught up in his own little happy bubble, oblivious to everything but his cars and his tinkering. She was confused, hurt, and through no fault of her own, ashamed. So she'd said nothing, to nobody, and just gone about like everything was fine.

So there we were. We didn't do much work that day, and nobody seemed to really care. The others seemed to know something was up, and the staff barely payed attention as it was, so we were just given our space. We just spent the rest of the day talking, me trying to cheer her up and distract her, trying to draw her out of her shell, and her letting me. I could tell she was still hurting, but she became more and more like herself as the day went on.

By evening, when everyone else had left, and it was just the two of us, she was back to being her spunky, mouthy self, and life seemed almost normal again. We were basically inseparable from that point on. We never spelled it out, I don't know if we'd have had the words to if we'd tried. But we were more than friends now, we were partners, but damned if we knew what that even meant.

The hugging was something powerfully addictive though, so we kept doing that, a lot. I'm sure if our parents had seen us, we'd have been in deep trouble. But they didn't. Mine were too busy surviving and raising my brothers, hers were too busy being lost in their own little worlds, leaving us both to our own devices.

Over the days the bruises faded, the scars healed, and our hugging started being more than just holding each other. Our hands got to have a mind of their own and before I knew it, she was kissing me and I was kissing her right back. We weren't being lewd, but it was thrilling nonetheless. Weekends came along, and she started coming over to visit. We'd go on long walks down by the creek, I'd show her all the little hidden paths in the forest that I'd explored as a boy. Mostly it was just an excuse to hurry off somewhere private and get back to using our lips for something other than talking.

It all happened so fast, but it felt so natural, so neither of us minded one bit. I like to think I made her feel safe, I was a tall, heavily built guy, and while I was no swimsuit model or bodybuilder, nor ever would be, a couple years of manual labor had given me some very solid muscle, underneath a layer of chubby padding.

She was a tomboy, from her head to her toes. She had a smiling face full of freckles, and reddish-blond hair that was always slightly askew. She was short, but very athletically built. The first time I saw her fully naked I was struck nearly speechless. She was beautiful. Her arms and calves were tanned and well muscled, but undeniably feminine. She wasn't thin, and she had some stretch marks that she was very self conscious about. I reassured her that I thought they resembled tiger stripes and made me think of her as a ferocious beast, completely untamed. I meant every word, and I could tell she liked hearing it.

Her freckles ran down to her breasts, which were small, but well formed, with tiny pink nipples that practically begged for my lips to touch them. There was a bit of peach fuzz, leading down from her navel to a tidy thatch of dark blond hair, disappearing between her thighs. Her hips were curvy in all the right ways and she had a cute little butt that I'd already been admiring in her tight jeans.

When she overcame her shyness I marveled at her lips, which were bigger than I expected, but I thought they were even more beautiful for it. As with everything else, she was of course self conscious of them, but I did my best to reassure her, in words and deeds that they were perfect. I've been with other attractive women since, but right then, she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever set my eyes on. Falling in love with her and all of her features shaped my ideal image of a female body for the rest of my life.

I loved her, heart and soul, and I did everything in my power to show her that. We were both nervous as hell the first time, and I was scared to death I'd hurt her, but once the gates were open, and there was nothing between us, that was all forgotten. She loved being on top, and that was how we both lost our virginity, my hands on her hips as she slowly lowered herself onto me, her eyes closed, biting at her lip. Once she was comfortable and got going, I was glad we were away from anyone else, as she was very vocally expressive, and the noises she made practically set my blood to boiling.

The first time was slow and cautious, but rippling with electricity. After that, and for the rest of the summer, we became ravenous animals, hungrily going after each other with reckless abandon. Neither of us had any experience, and our missteps and clumsy fumbling would often send us both into fits of giggles, before we would settle down and go right back at it to try again. Between that and our unhindered lust, we both had new bruises and scratches every day, in all sorts of places, but those did nothing but make us even crazier about each other.

I loved the smell of her, and the first time I went down on her, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. She didn't seem much put out by it either, and that became one of our favorite activities. We spent hours doing nothing but laying in the grass, tasting each other, exploring each other, and just plain loving each other. Most times with our lips and tongues, but if we were feeling feisty, as she often was, our teeth got involved as well. I loved her body, every square inch of it, and told her so again and again without ever saying a word.

The flame between us blazed hot and fierce, but the summer ended too quickly, and I went back to boarding school while she stayed behind to finish up her senior year at the local high school. As we parted, we both seemed to understand that this had been something temporary, that the fire wouldn't have lasted much longer without consuming us both. Of course we talked about getting back together when next we saw each other, but it wasn't to be.

I heard through mutual friends that she'd gotten involved with a nice guy at her new school, and after him she'd gotten involved with a not so nice guy. But the girl after him was quite a bit better, though that caused a scandal all it's own. She had a hole in her heart I'd been able to fill for a short time, but I could never hope to fill it forever. We lost touch, and I've never heard if she found what she was looking for, but I truly hope she did. The memories she left me with though will last a lifetime, and there will always be a part of me that will love her and remember her.