A few years ago... Eh, wait. Actually, it was just over a decade ago now.
Well, damn. Now, I feel old.
Any road, I was entangled with a young woman. I was not quite yet forty. She was thirty-six. That qualifies as young to me.
I suppose I could tell some tales of the mad, passionate sex that we had in places we probably shouldn't have in order to titillate those so inclined. But, this isn't really about that. Maybe I'll do that some other time. Or maybe I won't.
But, no. Suffice to say that she wore my collar on her heart and soul and my marks on her body. She was mine.
OR so she said.
On this particular day, she had been called to the central office and was feeling trepidatious. At her request, I took leave from my own job and rode over to wait outside. To be there for her.
She burst out of the building as I watched and ran to her car with her face in her hands. Started it up. And left a rooster tail of gravel as she left the parking lot.
What the ever loving fuck?
I cranked over and took off after her.
Now, maybe there are riders who will push a cruiser configuration bike (as opposed to a crotch rocket) to try to keep up with a mustang. But, I knew my limits. After ten miles of watching her pull further away, I slowed, pulled off the highway, turned around and headed home to wait.
Over the next twenty-four hours, I left three messages. At that point, I stopped. And waited. And waited some more.
After three days, she reached out to me.
She had been fired. Just as she had suspected she would be.
"Ok. So, why didn't you stop and talk to me?"
"Oh! Were you there?"
"You asked me to be. I said I would be."
"I didn't see you. Why didn't you follow me?"
"I did for ten miles. But, I'm not going to push Jenny over a hundred. So, I came back home."
"Oh." She paused for several seconds. "Why did you stop reaching out to me?"
"Why didn't you respond to any of my three messages?"
What followed doesn't bear repeating. Suffice to say that it was a long conversation. One that I didn't see or hear from her for several more days after.
She felt I should have chased after her. I felt I had until we reached a point where consent was absent.
She felt I should have kept reaching out to her. I felt I had until we reached a point where consent was absent.
She felt that I should have cared about her hurt. I felt that you run toward your safe place when you are hurting, not away from it.
It was several days before she once again came to me. When she did, she saw me spread my arms wide, waiting for her to take that final step into my waiting embrace.
However...
However, when she indicated that she wanted to be fucked, to be reclaimed, I pointedly told her no.
"You are more to me than a fucktoy. And I should be more to you than a dildo on legs. If you can not trust me to have your back, if you can not trust me to be here when you are hurting, if you can not trust me enough to seek my shelter when the storms of your life batter you, if you do not trust me with your heart, your mind, and your soul, then you can keep your body and I will keep mine. We obviously have some more trust building to do before we go down that particular garden path again."
It took another week for her to come back. And another week after that for her to understand that I meant exactly what I said. That we would be spending a lot of time in conversation, in sharing, in becoming, in mending, in trusting, before ever she saw me nude or showed herself to me again.
The day I felt we had rebuilt enough and reclaimed her...
Well, let's not get prurient at this point.
Sadly, we did not have just too much longer together before life, and health issues, ripped us apart.
Last July, when we buried my father, after most everyone had left the graveside, I took the opportunity to limp over on my walking stick to her gravestone and leave a rose bearing a drop of my blood and a single teardrop atop it.
