Dear readers, this is a long slow build of a story. I hope you like the effort at a realistic scene setting. As for the realism, perhaps it is a bit idealistic, but I hope credible?
Please comment, and if it does well? I promise to return and finish Unca B off in a slightly more unreal way. Heh heh heh.
This is fiction from beginning to end, no real people are portrayed.
The fire is down to mostly embers and a few small flames as the last of the night's logs fall together. I am sitting on the rug in front of the sofa that faces the fire place, thinking about moods, how right at that moment my mood is tranquil, neither desiring something nor feeling a need to be active. A good end to a day of thinking and writing, which is my job when I am not editing.
My first appreciation of moods came about six years ago.
I was twenty eight and Rozlyn turned twenty two on April 17.
She had a tight curly blonde head of hair, and was kind of big at five eight, but that's OK, I am a big man, just over six two. I am moderately ugly to my way of thinking but she sure wasn't.
Her hips were wide; her legs slim, with a tiny amount of soft swimmer's smoothness to everything. Her breasts were heavy. They hung long and low under her usual sweaters. Her almost invariable costume was some sort of skirt and sweater.
I like the look of breasts low on the rib cage. Humans can have up to six nipples and breasts, and some girls are born with extras which are usually removed to present a normal double breasted appearance. I sometimes wonder what a multiple wood look like, and the bra construction problems. Will that be one quad bra or two doubles, madam? I am sometimes accused of having a wild imagination.
This is my theory of why some girls have breasts higher on their chests than others: it depends on which pair express themselves during the development stages as a fetus.
Back to Roz's low hung breasts.
I looked at them often. Even harnessed in a sturdy bra they moved with an enchanting bob and sway. She hated it when men stared.
Men stared a lot.
At least that's what she told me later, after we met and became closer friends.
Hers were definitely my kind of breasts. I stared too but I am way sneaky and I didn't think she noticed me looking all that often, and I never actually stared. She would say how much she hated it, "when they stare at me." I would reply, "It isn't you it's your udderly magnificent breasts they are staring at. It has nothing to do with you the owner/operator." Pronunciation is important sometimes.
Then she would slug me on the arm.
No actual bruises, but not love taps either.
I was doing my doctorate in Am Lit. and she was a scientific sort of soc. psych major who needed an English credit. She was a little vague about her work on sexual stress in various levels of crowded rat populations for her Master's. Some other stuff like imprinting situations affecting behaviors was part of her work. She was trying to understand how fetishes and aberrant behavior of sex offenders began. Her investigations had to do with imprinting from first experiences however random they might be.
I was NOT her Prof, nor was I her tutor.
The relationship began when we met in the cafeteria and were introduced by her tutor and my faculty friend Bill. It was cool.
She said she needed a tutor, but Bill told me she was plenty bright and just needed someone to guide the readings and help with notes because she wanted to skip the early morning English lectures and do psych lab stuff instead. She could afford it; Bill was tutoring her by supplying notes and study guides. He told me her daddy was rich and could afford it for the whole term. He also told me he was trying to develop eyeballs on stalks. Wasn't gonna work, I said.
She and I ended up talking a lot about social changes and how they were reflected in literature. Her face was square and intelligent; her eyes under her thick blond eyebrows had flecks of green in the blue. The talk sometimes got passionate and lubricated by beer. Roz talked about the same thing – with rat behavior for examples. It seems people are a lot like rats.
I liked her passion and the fact that she was not vainly plucking eyebrows nor concerned with surface appearances. She dressed for comfort, ignoring fashion. For us guys who are not classically handsome those are good signs.
The closest thing we got to intimacy was one night after some sort of Arts faculty film presentation; we had some late night latte on the way back to her residence and did some canoodling under the stars. My hand was sliding up under her sweater as I was nibbling on her neck when she mentioned she was still a virgin in a sort of off handed way. It slowed me right down to a stop. I asked her why.
She replied, "Nobody ever got me in to the mood, and I never thought to go out and seduce some guy just for a test drive of my equipment. It would be unfair."
It sort of killed any mood I was working up at the time. Afterward, I couldn't think of a smooth way to bring up that mood thing again. But I really liked her a lot, considered her a great friend for stupid, sometimes drunken conversations late into the night.
You might think having a rich daddy would make her more attractive, but to me it was the reverse. I remember telling Bill if we did become serious and actually married, I just knew there would always be that accusation that I had married her for the dough. So I never really tried to get her into the mood. I wanted to have an honest relationship. I figured she would let me know when she thought the time came to get more intimate. She stayed in my friend zone. My really good friend zone of one occupant.
She just never did give off those vibes that she was in any sort of That Mood with me.
Then school ended and she successfully defended her thesis and left town.
I stayed at my office for a few weeks finishing up some research. I took some time off after that at my apartment and decided to go camping for a week in late August.
I packed several days of supplies, my bathing suit and my camping things under the old cap on my pickup, tied the canoe on top. I headed north to the lakes where I had rented a remote spot way off at the end of a dirt road. I use it often. There are only two spaces there, and a mile of lake to swim in. Moose, deer, beaver and loons roam free. It's bucolic by any standard, with a sandy beach for my canoe, trout in the water.
The owner said there might be a couple of women who reserved the other spot, but one of them had said she wasn't in the mood for camping. I had some hopes for solitude to think over my attraction to Roz and her moods.
I had the best site of the two available at the end of the little peninsula picked out. I parked with the pickup making a sort of visual shield to the road in. I put my cooking setup facing west across the lake. I like to sleep in, and watch sunsets over a low fire. West facing is my thing when I am in the mood to camp.
I set up my campsite the way I like, with my small tent on level ground shaded by a tree. I scraped a shallow drainage ditch to lead water from the high land around the tent in case of rain.
There was a small fire pit near the beach where I stacked the mixed hard and softwood I had purchased on the way up.
Things got to the point where it was time to go fishing. I was assembling my rod and reel when I heard a sound that was familiar. I stopped what I was doing and followed the sound as it came from the trees up the road. The fat orange shape of Roz's classic and ancient VW bug came out of the trees and slowed to an almost stop at the end of the road before swinging off to the other side, facing east. Two women got out and turned to see who was in the other site.
I approached from around my pickup and there was Roz and a smaller, thinner slightly older version of her looking back at me.
Roz said, "Oh no, I can't believe it!"
I waved and smiled a little at both of them.
"Alicia, this is the guy I told you about from University."
I walked closer, holding my hand out to the stranger, "I hope it wasn't horror stories."
She was a lot shorter than Roz, maybe five three and she looked to be just a little older than me.
I said, "Hank, Hank Benedict at your service, you must be Cousin Alicia, the artist?"
Alicia turned to Roz, "This is the double H? Hank. . ."
Roz shrieked, "Don't say it!" She covered her face with her palms and turned pink.
Alicia grinned, grabbed my hand, stepping close, "Nice to meet you – long pause - Hank."
Her voice was a lowered phony sultry southern drawl. She curtsied.
I knew I would like Alicia. She had a quick quip and comic timing. She had also stopped the H sentence right away. Savvy and courteous, she was sexy in an offhand way blithely ignoring her obvious appeal in her paint spattered jeans and a shirt just a bit too open. I observed most of a very pert breast as she curtsied and the shirt flared open. (Yes, I am a breast man when I am not being an ass or leg man, opportunism is me.)
I wondered what Roz's other H was. Hunter? Hero?
She knew I was a sort of out doors camping, hunting, fishing guy in my off times. I had also used the theme of the heroic figure in literature pretty often in our discussions.
Alicia said over her shoulder, walking to the Bug, "It's great to meet you, now come and help us set up the stuff."
She went to the front of the Bug and told Roz to pop the lid. Alicia was a bossy one all right. I figured that bossy babe with a very pert bum was going to complicate my relaxation. But I followed orders just to be closer to Roz.
A half hour later the basics were done. Their tent was sited and set, their stuff arranged and cooking arrangements set up.
I told them about how to place any food in tight containers and put them back in the car when they were un supervised.
"They don't have to be bear proof, as long as the bears can't get at them"
"Bears?" Both of them looked at me with big round eyes.
I shrugged, "Black bears. Small black bears. They avoid humans and love peanut butter."
