The Kid (Part 5): Girl Meets Boy

[JSample]

The Kid: A Semi-Autobiographical, Somewhat Tongue-in-Cheek Journey of Self-Discovery
(Or, What Happens When I Write a Quicksand Story and Cast Myself as the Hero)

by Jason Sample
August 2017-November 2018

(If you haven't already read Part 4, it's at viewtopic.php?f=14&t=19545#p125817.)

Having witnessed the horrifying sight of Angela sinking helplessly into the choking depths of the quicksand despite all his efforts to save her, and following a startling, incomprehensible confrontation between himself and the Kid wherein the clear boundaries between himself and his monster had seemingly blurred, Jason has found within himself the strength of character to overcome his fear and risk his own life to rescue Angela from her miry grave... or die trying... because he promised.

Standard disclaimer: As always, this story is "semi-autobiographical"; in the course of it I touch on certain aspects of my own quicksand fetish, both positive and negative, that pertain solely to myself. I do not presume or pretend to speak to or about others' experiences of their quicksand fetishes, nor about quicksand fetishism in general. Your mileage may vary.

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The Kid (Part 5): Girl Meets Boy


Angela’s head collapsed against Jason’s left shoulder as she continued gulping air into her lungs to satisfy her body’s overdue demands for oxygen, her form heaving against his with her every breath. He let her lay against him in the muck, softly stroking her muddy hair and giving her time to recover from her fearful ordeal. After about a minute her labored breathing had moderated toward a more normal rhythm when she suddenly remembered where she was… and what had just happened to her. “But… but…” she objected in a new panic as she suddenly raised her head and looked around herself in gasping terror at the muddy surface just below her chin, “we’re still in the quicksand! Oh, my god! We’re still…!”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” Jason spoke softly and reassuringly to her. “I’ve got the rope.”

“But earlier you said there wasn’t…” Angela blurted out as she coughed again, “there wasn’t enough rope to reach me!”

“There wasn’t, at first,” Jason admitted, “but after you went under I ran and untied the rope from the tree back there and got it to snag on something closer so I could get to you.”

“You got it… to snag on something… closer…” Angela stammered in hesitating gasps she spat the last of the muck out of her mouth, not understanding the significance of his choice of words. “You mean… on that?” she asked as she glanced over Jason’s shoulder and beyond the edge of the mudflat.

Jason twisted his head and torso around to see what Angela was looking at, remembering that up till now he also didn’t know what it was that had saved them both. His eyes followed the rope out of the mire and across the dirt to a point about five feet from the edge, and there, snagged in a tight “v” between a pair of rocks embedded in the earth and jutting a couple of inches above the ground, lay the knotted end of the rope. It had hung up on the last thing that it could have possibly caught before joining Jason and Angela in the quicksand, but that improbability wasn’t what seized his attention. Just beyond the rocks, with one knee on the ground, knelt the Kid, again looking like his nineteen-year-old self, a mischievous smile on his lips. Jason’s eyes met his, and as the Kid stood up he winked and nodded toward Jason before turning and walking a few feet away from the rocks where the rope had snagged.

Nooooooo, Jason protested silently, staring in disbelief. He… couldn’t have made the rope snag like that. It seemed impossible. The Kid was just a projection of his own memories of himself, a reflection of his own psyche, a figment—

“Of your own imagination; yeah, I know,” the Kid replied, finishing Jason’s thought for him. “I remember what you wrote back at the beginning of Part 2,” he continued, folding his arms across his chest as an impish grin played over his face. “And yet… here we are. Besides, if you’d gone under with her, it would have been the end of you, and it would have been the end of me. And worst of all, it would have been the end of me,” he added, winking again as he channeled his inner Mr. Krabbs.

Jason’s eyes wandered as he ignored the cultural reference and slowly turned back toward Angela, trying to make sense of what he had just seen. He must have taken longer than he had realized as her voice suddenly interrupted his ponderings. “Hey,” she asked softly, “are you okay?”

“Hmm?” he mumbled, his thoughts returning to the muddy reality that he shared with her.

“You spaced out for a moment, like you’d seen something that wasn’t there,” she said.

Boy, if you only knew, Jason thought, a weak smile crossing his face. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he replied, “I just think this has taken a lot out of me, to say nothing of what you’ve been through.”

“Huh,” she muttered as she looked around at the surface of the mire that still encompassed her body from her neck down, “tell me about it.”

“Come on,” Jason said to her with a gentle smile on his face, reaching around with his left hand to take hold of the rope, “let’s get you out of here.”

Jason held his right arm around Angela’s chest as she effortfully pulled her arms free from the mire, one at a time, pausing a few times to catch her breath, before placing her hands on his shoulders for support. He then extracted his own arm from the ooze and slowly turned his body around in the quicksand so that he was facing toward the edge of the mudflat, while Angela put her right arm over his right shoulder and her left arm under his left armpit, clasping her hands together against his chest as he began working to pull the two of them out of the muck, holding the rope tightly with both his hands. “Kick your legs to keep them loose in the mud, Angela,” he said, kicking his own legs as well for the same reason. Boy, that rope sure better stay snagged, he thought, not sure what he would do or how Angela would react if it were to come loose now that they were so close to safety while still in the deep part of the pit. Too bad the Kid can’t actually give us a hand now, he chuckled quietly to himself as he continued inching closer to freedom, straining the muscles of his arms and upper body with his efforts. I’m gonna be sore for days after all this, he thought as he worked mightily against the mire’s grip on both their bodies. After several rounds of hand-over-hand pulling on the rope while Angela held tightly to him Jason came up against the submerged drop-off that he had slipped over earlier the first time that he had tried to reach her, and he turned to his left and held a length of rope back toward her.

“Here,” he offered as he caught his breath, “hold on to this while I pull myself onto the ledge.”

“All right,” Angela replied as she released her hold from around his chest and took the rope in her left hand, and then quickly pulled her right arm from around him and did the same with that hand, hanging on to the rope with a death grip. No way was she going under again! Jason placed his hands on the ledge a few inches in from its edge and leaned forward, pushing against the muddy support as he kicked his legs beneath the surface to help propel himself upward. Even though the ledge was solid, it was beneath about a foot or so of soft, gooey mud, and he struggled to maintain his handhold so as not to slip and fall face first into the muck as he slowly freed himself from the mire’s grip. Bracing his left elbow on the ledge while grasping the rope in his right hand, he leaned to his left as he heaved his right thigh and knee through the mud onto the solid surface, and then, leaning forward and using the strength of his right leg as he pulled on the rope, he rolled himself completely onto the submerged ledge.

“Here, Angela,” Jason panted, turning back toward her as he struggled to his knees in the shallow mud, letting loops of rope fall from around his left shoulder and arm before extending his left hand in her direction while holding with his right the length of rope that was snagged tightly between the rocks, “take my hand and I’ll help you pull yourself up. It’s only a foot or so deep here.”

“Okay,” she replied, grasping his forearm with her right hand and planting her left on the ledge as she began the slow process of extricating herself from the deeper part of the pit while he held her arm securely. She was still shoulder-deep in the ooze, and it took a while for her to make progress due to the continuing hold of the mire on her body and the wearying effects of her earlier struggles against it. As he watched Angela gradually ascend from the quicksand with his help, Jason remembered that she had been standing naked in the mud when he had seen her earlier that day before she had fallen into trouble, and with a twinge of embarrassment he realized that she was still just as naked as she at last pulled herself onto the ledge and paused for a moment, resting on her knees while she caught her breath, globs of muck and ooze flowing and falling from her body in thick, wet clumps and splatting to the surface beneath her. Jason turned his gaze away from her so as not to ogle her mud-covered form in her vulnerability, suspecting that the Kid would feel no such compunction about doing so.

“We should, um… we should… ah, be okay now… um, Angela,” he said hesitatingly, still looking away from her as he sought to focus his attention on getting them both safely out of the mire and not on the alluring appearance of the nude young woman on her knees in the mud behind him. “It’s not that far to the… um… ah, to the edge.” Jason struggled to his feet, still holding Angela’s right hand in his left as she began to stand up as well. He kept his eyes from her as he started moving toward the solid ground several feet away, only to feel his forward motion interrupted as she suddenly pulled his arm back behind his body, giggling softly as she did so. He turned his head slightly toward her, still unwilling to look upon her muddy, unclothed figure.

“Jason,” Angela said his name laughingly as she stood on the ledge in the shallow mud, her hand still grasping his, rivulets of ooze dripping from her body in the bright sunlight, “are you embarrassed to see me naked?”

“Um, uh, no, of course not… um… Angela,” Jason stammered in obvious embarrassment, his eyes still averted from her shapely form, “um… no, it’s just that… um… that… uh…” Now the middle-aged father of five felt like a teenager himself, both wanting to look at the nubile form of the muddy young woman standing behind him and feeling too nervous and shy to do so. “It’s just that… um… I really don’t feel… right… ah… looking at you like… um… like this… without having been properly… um… invited… to do so,” he finally finished, a nervous laugh escaping his lips.

“Jason,” she responded, smiling as she laughed again, “you saved my life.” She tugged on his hand as she held her other arm out at her side in a welcoming gesture. “You’re invited.”

“Um… okay, Angela,” he answered, a hesitant chuckle accompanying his response, “if you say so.” Desiring both to take in her beauty and to respect her humanity, Jason slowly turned his face toward Angela as they stood together in the shallow part of the pit. She was indeed gorgeous, he thought, an involuntary sigh escaping his lips as the ooze dripping from her body and merging with the surface of the mire below her knees made her appear to be one with the mud and it one with her. Her shoulder-length hair, its auburn color obscured beneath a thick, muddy coating, appeared to be sculpted around her youthful face, which glowed brightly in the sun through the thin layers of ooze still clinging to it, while her shining green eyes and sweet smile reflected an innocent joy, ecstatic simply to be alive. She held her fit, toned body — Jason inhaled deeply and blushed to behold her nude, well-proportioned figure on full display, coated in a sheen of flowing ooze that reflected the sunlight like liquid gold as it slowly rolled downward as gravity required and the contours of her form allowed — modestly and proudly at the same time, and as he contemplated the totality of her loveliness it occurred to him that while she might not be “his” Angela from his long-ago college years, she certainly appeared to be just as much an angel — indeed, an earth angel — standing before him now as the puppy-crush of his past once had.

“Wow, um… Angela…” Jason spoke haltingly, searching for words to do justice to the vision of muddy comeliness that stood smiling before him as he became aware of an undeniable fullness that was quickly developing inside his shorts, “you really… um… gosh, I mean… I can’t quite… um…” In his nervousness he took another deep breath and started to shift his weight on his feet, but the stickiness of the mud in which he was standing prevented him from compensating for the subtle change in his center of gravity, and he felt himself beginning to topple over backward despite himself. “Whoa-whoa-whoa!” he cried out as he began to fall, his right arm pinwheeling crazily in a useless attempt to maintain his balance while Angela gripped his left to try to hold him upright. Despite their efforts, gravity had the last word as Jason’s two-hundred-fifteen pounds fell backward toward the edge of the pit into the shallow mud with an unceremonious plop, pulling Angela forward and downward on top of him. The muck broke their fall as she landed against his body with a heavy “oof,” her head ending up against his shoulder as it had been when he first pulled her up from the quicksand.

“Oh my gosh, Angela, I’m so sorry!” Jason apologized as they both struggled to a sitting position in the mud, with Angela straddling his lap, facing toward him. “I didn’t mean to pull you down on… um… on top of me. Are you okay?” he asked. She lifted her head and looked at him, an astonished grin playing across her face. A brief giggle escaped her lips, followed by another, and then she suddenly burst out laughing… laughing at him, at herself, at their muddy circumstance together, at the entire course of events that had brought the two of them to this point. Unable to resist, Jason began laughing as well, clasping her body against his as they collapsed into the mud in each other’s arms, overcome with hilarity and relief that they were finally free and safe from the mortal threat that had nearly claimed them both.

Their mutual revelry continued unabated for close to half a minute before Jason noticed that Angela’s whoops of laughter in his embrace had given way to convulsive moans of sobbing and crying. For a moment he worried that she might have hurt herself when she had fallen against him, but he quickly dismissed the notion as he again worked himself into a sitting position in the mud as she wept against his chest. He recognized that the young woman whom he held safely in his arms, having barely escaped a horrifying end in the clutching depths of the quicksand, finally felt free to give voice to the swirl of emotions that were still roiling inside her.

“I was so scared!” she cried, her tears flowing freely, her body heaving against his as he held her on his lap with one arm around her while bracing himself with the other. “I couldn’t breathe, or see, or hear! It was pressing in all around me, and everything was just… blackness, and silence, and… I knew if I tried to breathe I would… oh, it felt like I was being dragged down to hell!”

Jason held her tightly against himself, rocking her gently as she wept. “It’s okay,” he whispered reassuringly over her pitiable sobs, “it’s okay… just let it out. Cry it all out.” What swelling sensations of arousal and desire that he had been feeling for her moments earlier while standing in her muddy, naked presence before they had taken their tumble together were quickly dissolving into feelings of compassion and protectiveness as he found himself wanting nothing more than to comfort the weeping, trembling young woman whom he now held like a child on his lap.

“And the last thing I remembered,” she sobbed haltingly, “the last thing I thought I would ever remember, was you standing there in the mud as I went under, and how you had promised to save me.” Jason continued to rock her tenderly, stroking her muddy hair as her emotions spilled out. “I felt like after all your talk and all your promises,” she continued, “you had just given up on me and let me go under anyway, that you would get to go on with your life while I would die in the quicksand, and how unfair it all was, and I hated you for it! I didn’t even know you, but I hated you!” She looked up at him, a pained expression on her face. Her words of betrayal and accusation stung Jason deeply as he held her close, especially in light of the crisis of conscience that he had endured after she had sunk beneath the surface and that had spurred him to risk his own life to save her, but he realized that she was simply venting her feelings after her traumatic experience, and he knew that now was not the time to argue the point. After all, he wasn’t the one who had gone under and nearly drowned in the quicksand.

“That’s what I thought would be the end of my life,” she continued, laying her head on his chest again as she wept, “me, suffocating in the mud, lost, alone, and my last thought, my last feeling, would be that I hated you. That’s why it felt like I was in hell.” Angela sat up on Jason’s lap and again looked at his face, her tears tracing watery paths through the thin layers on mud still masking her features. “Then I felt something heavy hit the mud in front of me.”

“That was when I—” Jason started to say.

“When you jumped in to save me, I know,” she completed his thought for him. “But I was going out of my mind, and when I felt you touch my arm I actually thought you had jumped in to push me deeper. That’s why I started fighting against you.”

“To push you… deeper?” Jason asked, mystified. “I… I don’t understand, Angela; why would…?”

“Why would you do that? Why would I think that?” Angela finished his question. “I don’t know. I was fucking crazed down there. I felt like you wanted to make sure no one would ever know that you had let me go under, to make sure I would never live to tell anyone that you had let me die.” She looked up again into his confused face. “It doesn’t make any sense, I know.”

Jason sat silently for several seconds, trying to assimilate Angela’s words and the emotions behind them. His earlier feelings of guilt and self-recrimination over his failure to save her from going under in the first place began to surface again, and he found himself wondering what, if anything, he could or should say to the young woman after her harrowing ordeal. “I’m so sorry, Angela,” he finally offered, sensing that even his sincerest words of apology would be insufficient even to begin to compensate for what she had gone through. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t get to you before you went under. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you from that hell.”

“But you did… eventually,” she responded, the hurt look fading from her eyes. “I wouldn’t be here talking with you now if you hadn’t. Although, to tell the truth,” she added, “I don’t actually remember you pulling me back out.”

“You’d been under for a couple of minutes,” Jason explained gently, “and you were unconscious and not breathing when I finally got your face out, so I gave you mouth-to-mouth until you came to and started breathing again on your own.”

Angela stared intently at Jason’s face for several seconds, to the point that he started feeling uncomfortable with the inherent intimacy of her gaze. “You brought me back to life,” she said finally, an expression of smiling wonder spreading over her face, “just like in a fairy tale. My hero, rescuing me and reviving me with a kiss.” Jason felt a familiar hardness growing inside his shorts again as Angela sat upon his lap in the mud, and he hoped that she hadn’t noticed his increasing arousal against her nether regions. While at twenty years of age she was indeed an adult woman, he reflected, she was still younger than his own daughters, and she wasn’t so far removed from her youth that childhood tales of fair maidens and brave knights had lost their allure. “The most romantic moment of my life,” she continued, chuckling to herself as she looked into his eyes, “and of course I was passed out the whole time and missed it.”

She smiled and laughed lightly again, the tension of the moment easing with her self-deprecation, and Jason smiled and chuckled as well. Angela straightened up on her knees and looked over his shoulder, tracing the rope’s path out of the muddy pit to the two jutting rocks between which the knotted end was still caught. “You said you snagged the rope on something,” she said, gesturing toward the rocks with her left hand. “That was really smart of you to hook the end of the rope on those rocks so you could pull us both out.”

Jason glanced back at the end of the rope between the rocks and recalled his odd interaction with the Kid the first time that he had looked there. He was all but certain that the Kid couldn’t have possibly made the rope catch on the rocks, yet his younger self had acted quite strangely in that moment, and Jason realized that the Kid had been oddly silent in the time since. In fact, Jason wasn’t sure where his mental doppelganger had wandered off to since he had pulled Angela to safety. He turned back to face her, knowing that the seeming resourcefulness for which she had praised him had really been plain dumb luck, and he felt that she deserved to know the truth, especially after what she had been through. “Um… about that, Angela,” he began, uncertain of how he should explain his actions, “that… wasn’t really planned.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, a note of confusion in her voice.

“Well… one end of the rope is still tied to my belt here,” he said, pointing around to his back. “After you went under and I had untied the other end from the tree back there, I didn’t see anything nearer or strong enough that I could tie it to, but I knew I had to get to you before it was too late, so I ran back to the pit with the rope trailing behind me and jumped into the quicksand to try to pull you out and… hoped… that the end of the rope would catch on something before I pulled it in with us,” he confessed.

A puzzled look came over Angela’s face. “You hoped it would catch on something…” she murmured uncertainly, turning his words over in her mind for a few seconds before her eyes suddenly snapped wide open. “You mean you didn’t know if you were going to be able to save me… or even yourself?” Jason shook his head, a weak smile on his face.

“Wait… wait a minute,” she persisted, twisting her torso around and pointing back to the middle of the mudflat where she had sunk beneath the surface earlier, a disbelieving expression on her face. “You deliberately jumped back into the quicksand to save me after I went under, when you knew there was a real possibility you might die with me?”

Jason nodded his head sheepishly. “A real probability, to be honest,” he admitted to her.

“You risked your life for me?!” she reiterated, her voice and face reflecting utter amazement.

“I suppose I did,” he replied quietly.

Angela glanced again toward the middle of the quicksand pit for a moment and then back to the end of the rope between the rocks before returning her gaze to Jason. “That’s… got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” she exclaimed incredulously. “I mean, I’m glad you did it, don’t get me wrong, but you really could’ve died with me if the rope hadn’t caught on those rocks! You would’ve died with me! We both would’ve died!”

“Yes,” Jason replied, nodding his head gently, “I suppose we would have.”

“But… you don’t even know me!” Angela continued, trying to make sense of his actions. “Before today, before all this, you didn’t even know I existed! Why would you risk everything for a total stranger?”

Jason looked into her eyes for a few moments and smiled gently before answering. “Because I promised,” he finally replied, regaining something of his self-assurance and confidence as he reflected on his motivation for what he had done. “I promised you that I would save you, and you trusted me. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I’d turned my back on you and walked away, even after you’d gone under. Even if no one else would’ve ever known what had happened, I would’ve known. And even if I’d failed to save you… and myself… after I jumped back in,” he added, gesturing toward the miry pit that had nearly claimed them both, “no one deserves to die alone. Not like that.”

Angela stared at him for several seconds, not sure whether to believe what she was hearing. “You risked your life to save me,” she repeated slowly, more to herself than to him, “you risked everything… simply because you promised.”

She looked aside and cast her eyes downward, lost in thought over everything that had happened and everything that Jason had said to her. He gazed at her face, profiled against the forest of vegetation that stretched back toward the river, and after several seconds he noticed a solitary tear trickling down her cheek. He reached out with his right hand and gently cupped her chin in it, turning her face toward his. “Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” she replied, looking away again. “Nothing. Everything. Take your pick.” She took a deep breath and sighed heavily, more tears following the first. She finally turned to face Jason again. “Just about every man I’ve ever known,” she began haltingly, “whether my father before he left us, or my mom’s later boyfriends, or my own so-called boyfriends… every one of them has either used me, or betrayed me, or treated me like shit. My constant experience with men my entire life has been a steady stream of lies, abuse, and broken promises.” She lowered her head and closed her eyes, a quiet sob escaping her lips.

“I’m so sorry, Angela,” Jason replied, regretting the inadequacy of his words under the weight of her admission. “It must be painful to remember and think about that.”

“Growing up,” she went on, looking up at him again through watery eyes, “I was always told that I was good for nothing. Not by my mom or my sister, but by the men in Mom's life after the divorce and by the boys I knew. Then when I hit puberty and started… developing,” she added, looking down at her ample, mud-covered breasts as Jason struggled mightily to keep his attention on her face, “well… you know… you’ve seen my body…” Jason nodded uncomfortably, wishing that his returning sense of arousal would somehow abate, and the sooner, the better.

“Well,” Angela continued, “once that happened, all those boys and men who’d said I was good for nothing decided there was something I was good for after all.” She gathered up a handful of ooze and turned it over, letting it dribble slowly through her fingers back to the surface. “Fucking,” she finally completed her thought. “I was good for fucking. They either said it out loud or with their eyes.”

“Angela,” Jason said quietly, shifting his legs slightly under her weight to try to create space in the mud between her body and his as she sat on his lap, “you know that’s not true. You know you’re worth so much more than some immature jerk’s lust for your body. You’re worth infinitely more than some loser’s prurient interest in you.”

“Oh, I know it, believe me,” she replied, grunting dismissively as she rolled her eyes. “I never let any of those dumb fucks near me… or my little sister, as far as I could help it. And when I wouldn’t give in to them, they spread lies about me. Called me a slut, said I was sleeping around with anything that had a dick.” She turned her head and looked back toward the mudflat where both she and Jason had nearly met their end; it still seemed incredible to her that only minutes before she had been completely and helplessly enveloped within the smothering muck.

“No, I decided a long time ago that when I was finally ready to be… you know… with… a man, for real,” she went on as she gazed as the miry spot behind her, “it would be with someone who was nothing like they were. Someone who deserved what I had to give, who showed me that he valued me for who I am, who put me first, even before himself.” She turned back toward Jason and sniffled quietly as she continued speaking. “And then once he had demonstrated that to me beyond all doubt, I would fully and freely give myself to him in every way. I would give him everything those jerks thought they could take from me.”

“That’s a very mature and affirming way to think about yourself and your worth in a relationship, Angela, especially after what you went through growing up,” Jason responded, privately scolding himself for thinking earlier that her willingness to pleasure herself in the mud had been indicative of promiscuity on her part. “I hope someday you’ll meet someone who’ll love and treat you the way you deserve.”

“I already have, actually,” she replied, smiling shyly as she lowered her gaze. “Someone who treats me as a worthwhile human being with feelings, and hopes, and fears, who pays attention to me and puts me before everything else,” she added as she looked up at him again.

“That’s great, Angela,” Jason said, returning her smile. “I’m really glad you’ve found—”

“Even before life itself,” she interrupted him, her eyes locking with his as she clasped his hand in hers.



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To be continued in Part 6: “Honor and Fetishes.”

[DJlurker]

Nice work!

[JSample]

Nice work!

Thank you!

[Solrex]

This story is amazing so far, I can't wait to read further! It's already out, I'm wasting my time with a comment, see you at the end!

[JSample]

This story is amazing so far, I can't wait to read further! It's already out, I'm wasting my time with a comment, see you at the end!

Glad you're enjoying it, Solrex!