The Kid (Part 7): Generations

[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 6, it's at viewtopic.php?p=125962#p125941.)

Having gently and respectfully calmed Angela's arousal and desire for him after saving her life while holding his own desire for her at bay, Jason is confronted with Angela's unexpected confession of her fetish for deep mud and quicksand, forcing him to do his best to keep his own similar fetish under wraps, although he remains uncertain as to how successfully he has done so. Exhausted by their efforts to free themselves from the clinging mire, Jason and Angela fall asleep in each other's arms in the shallow mud at the edge of the pit... only to be awakened by yet another something that Jason never saw coming.

Standard disclaimer: As before, 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 7): Generations


Jason woke with a headache. A sharp one, on the right side of his head. That’s strange, he thought, I don’t usually get headaches like this. Normally his headaches were of the dull, throbbing kind, centered just behind his eyes, and usually coming only when his sinuses were acting up, but this one was very sharp, and very definitely on the right side, just above his ear. Ow! There it was again, almost as if it were coming from outside his skull. It hurt so badly that he jerked his head to his left... or had his head been knocked toward the left? Is this a migraine? Jason wondered. No, I don’t get migraines. What’s going on?

Now he heard a voice. No, two voices, female, arguing heatedly with each other. Jason then remembered where he was. He had fallen asleep, asleep in the… mud? Oh, yeah, next to Angela, he recalled, after I saved her from the quicksand. How long had they been lying there? His senses were still fuzzy; they must have been asleep for much longer than he’d expected due to weariness from their efforts to free themselves from the mire. Were the voices the lingering traces of a dream? No, they were coming from outside himself, and they were still arguing. Jason labored to open his eyes against the fog of sleep to try to make sense of what was happening when the sharp pain hit him once more on the right side of his head. Now he knew that it too was coming from outside. Who the hell is hitting me? he wondered as he struggled back to lucidity.

Suddenly one of the voices broke through his mind’s haze with unmistakable clarity. It was an older woman’s voice, and it didn’t sound happy. “I said,” the voice shouted, “get your filthy hands off my daughter, you damned pervert!”

“Stop hitting him, Mom!” the second voice protested to the first.

Suddenly Jason was wide awake. Daughter? Mom?! Ohhhh, boy…

He opened his eyes to a view of Angela’s torso above him, her muddy breasts dangling pendulously over his face; a not unpleasant sight, he thought, but certainly unexpected. The heel of her right hand was pressing into his sternum as she supported herself above him, her left arm extended outward in a not completely successful attempt to block whatever it was that the other woman (“Mom,” apparently) was using to bludgeon him, and as Angela pressed down on his chest Jason realized that her weight was pushing him deeper into the mud in which he was reclining.

Now the pressure on his chest eased as Angela rose first to her knees in the mud over him and then to her feet, defending him with both her arms from attack as she grasped at the blunt object that “Mom” had been swinging at him. Probably her purse, all eighty pounds of it, Jason pondered dizzily, the pain on the side of his head making coherent thought still somewhat difficult as the two women’s irate words assaulted his ears.

“What the hell were you doing sleeping naked in the mud next to this jackass?!” Angela’s mother demanded angrily of her. “Answer me, young lady!”

“Mom, it’s not what you think!” Angela replied defensively as she stepped out of the mud onto dry ground, still grappling with her mother over the swim bag that she had been using as a weapon against Jason.

Since they were clearly arguing over him, Jason felt that it was only fair that he should also contribute his own two cents’ worth to the discussion and started to rise, figuring that his words would probably carry more gravitas if he weren’t lying flat on his back in the mud when he said them. Unfortunately, the time that he had spent lying still next to Angela while they had been asleep, coupled with her having pressed down on his chest as she had risen to her feet, had left him quite stuck on his back, unable to break the suction of the foot-deep mud in which he lay. “Um…” he started to say, his voice drowned out by the volume of Angela’s and her mother’s altercation.

“All I know,” the older woman continued irritably, “is that your sister and I came rowing over here in the canoe to look for you after you didn’t come back from swimming in the river, and when we got here we found your bikini on the riverbank and you sleeping naked in the mud next to this… this pervert, draped over him like a blanket! Angela, you know better than that! You’re better than that!” she groused sharply. “Here, put this towel around you before anyone else sees you!” she added with impatience as she thrust a beach towel that she had been carrying over her shoulder toward her muddy, naked daughter.

“Mom, you weren’t even here! You don’t even know what happened!” Angela responded indignantly as she took the towel from her mother and threw it to the ground.

“Um… ladies…?” Jason said a little louder this time, still unable to free himself from his miry mattress.

“I don’t have to have been here to know full well what happened, young lady, because all men are alike! You know that, Angela!” her mother responded to her derisively. “I can see it now: You meet this jerk by the river, you talk awhile, he acts like he’s all kind and caring, it’s a hot day, maybe you go swimming together, then he sweet talks you out of your bikini and takes advantage of you!”

“Mom, sometimes you are just so… so…” Angela stammered in frustration.

“Ladies!” Jason interjected, shouting as he held his right arm up out of the mud. “A little help, please…?”

His request was met with another blow from the older woman’s oversized swim bag (all eighty pounds of it, it felt like) against the side of his head. “Mom!” Angela shouted, finally wresting the bag away from her mother by its strap and throwing it toward the middle of the dirt path, “Stop it!” She then turned back toward Jason, reaching over and taking his hand in hers. “I’m so sorry, Jason, it’s just… oooh, my mother.” Much to his surprise, Angela quickly pulled him free from his reclining position in the mud in one smooth, seemingly effortless motion, and as he suddenly found himself sitting upright he reflected that, as physically fit as Angela obviously was, he hadn’t yet considered how strong she might be as well. Her unexpected display of prowess had interrupted the flow of her and her mother’s argument, and Jason decided that he would use the momentary lull to try to deescalate matters as he struggled to his feet.

“If we could all please just… calm down, all of us,” he said as non-confrontationally as he could, pulling his mud-soaked shorts back up to their normal position at his hips as he stood up and began stepping out of the mud onto solid ground while keeping an eye out for any other weapon that the older woman might have at her disposal. “I think there’s been a big misunderstanding between Angela, here, and you, Mrs… um…” For the first time since waking up Jason looked directly at the belligerent woman’s face as he remembered that, of all the things that Angela had told him about herself earlier, her last name hadn’t been one of them. “Mrs…” he said again, a bit more hesitantly this time as he continued gazing at the woman. He had hoped that his obvious vocal prompt would have led at least one of them to provide their last name, and for all he knew one or both of them did indeed say it, but if they did, he never heard it as he suddenly found his attention riveted completely on the face and figure of Angela’s mother.

She stood the same height as her daughter and looked to be about Jason’s age, and even though her face was still red with anger, her emotional extreme couldn’t hide the clear family resemblance between the two women. Her clothing befitted the warmth of the summer afternoon; she had worn a white tee shirt over her bikini top, a pair of denim shorts, and red flip-flops for her canoe trip to search for her daughter. Her figure, which she held more proudly than modestly, was a bit fuller than Angela’s and understandably so, given both her years and her having borne at least two children in her life, but it was evident that she worked out, the force with which she had pummeled his head making that painfully clear. Her hair was a slightly lighter shade of auburn than was Angela’s, he observed, but it still bore the natural reddish coloring that must surely have fully graced her head in her younger years, and her piercing green eyes perfectly matched those of her daughter. Of course they do, Jason realized with a wry chuckle of recognition as he at last understood why the sweet young woman whom he had rescued from the quicksand had so very much reminded him of his puppy crush of decades before.

“What are you looking at, asshole?” the older woman challenged him.

“Your name is also Angela,” Jason replied matter-of-factly.

Both women stared back at him, a look of complete surprise on their faces. “How the hell do you know my name?” the mother demanded of him.

“Um, yeah, how do you know it?” her daughter chimed in with equal confusion. “I never told you that my mom and I have the same first name. Oh my gosh, do you two know each other?” she asked incredulously.

“I’ve never seen this bastard before in my life!” her mother retorted indignantly.

Surprise, surprise, Jason thought in response. You didn’t notice me in college, and you don’t remember or recognize me now. “Lucky guess,” he replied cryptically, playing his cards close to his chest. Given the potential volatility of the situation, he decided that, just as earlier it had seemed the better part of discretion, to say nothing of valor, not to admit out loud to the daughter that a very real and noisily insistent part of himself had wanted to see her sink beneath the surface of the mire, it was probably just as prudent now not to mention that the same noisy part of himself had fantasized about seeing the same thing happen to the mother three-and-a-half decades before when she and he had been in college together, especially since she was clearly not opposed to using violence to punctuate her arguments, he thought, rubbing the sore spot on the side of his head.

“As I said before,” Jason offered as non-anxiously as he could, seeking to mollify matters now that both women had quite clearly forgotten their earlier argument with each other, “there’s been a big misunderstanding that I think your daughter, here,” he said, gesturing toward the younger woman, “can easily clear up, ma’am, if you will let her.”

“Um… yeah, Mom,” Angela said hesitantly, remembering her mother’s earlier refusal to listen to her explanation, “it really isn’t what you think it is.”

“Oh, really?” her mother replied sarcastically, “Then why don’t you tell me just ‘what it is’?”

“Okay, I will,” Angela answered her nervously, looking back at Jason as he nodded his head toward her. “All right. First, Mother,” she said, gesturing in his direction, “Jason isn’t a pervert, he’s not a jackass, he’s not a jerk, and he’s not a bastard or an asshole. He’s a perfect gentleman, and he’s the sweetest man I’ve ever met. He saved my life!”

Jason smiled over the extreme differences of opinion that the two women held of him even as he reflected that, while the younger woman’s words were quite complimentary toward him, it could easily be argued that at various times in his youth and adulthood he had been any one of the less complimentary things that her mother had accused him of being, and sometimes more than one of them at the same time. But not today… not with Angela.

“Really?” her mother replied disbelievingly to her. “And you know that he ‘saved your life’ because… he told you he did! Let me guess: You got a cramp while swimming, he helped you back to shore, then he told you that you would’ve died if not for him, and then he convinced you to show him your ‘appreciation’!”

“Ooooooh!” Angela turned away and clenched her fists, groaning at her mother’s obstinance. It was bad enough that her mother wouldn’t even listen to Angela’s attempts to explain what had and hadn’t happened, Jason thought as he observed their angry exchange, but it was even worse that she had immediately leaped to the worst possible conclusions regarding both her own daughter and someone who had risked his life for her. He shook his head with a twinge of pity, suspecting that this wasn’t the first time that Angela had become exasperated with her mom; after all, he had certainly managed to exasperate his own kids from time to time while he and his wife were raising them.

Jason turned his head to avoid eye contact with the older woman and for the first time noticed the younger sister whom Angela had mentioned to him earlier and whom the mother had said had rowed over with her in the canoe a little while before, standing a short distance away from him and the two other women. She was barefoot and clad in a bright pink bikini, and aside from her brown hair and eyes she looked very much like her twenty-year-old sister, no more than a year younger at most, he considered, and she appeared to be fully engrossed with her phone as she seemed to ignore the ongoing row between Angela and her mother. She’s standing there all cool and aloof, Jason said to himself as he gazed in her direction, but I’ll bet she’s posting every word of this on her social media, along with photos and video as well. Wait a minute… photos and video? Of me covered with mud and Angela all…? Ohhhh, boy…

Angela’s sister glanced up from her phone in his direction as Jason quickly averted his eyes, pretending to have been looking anywhere and everywhere except at her and hoping that she hadn’t seen him gazing her way. She probably did, he thought with a sigh, and that’ll be one more shot of muddy me on her Instagram. Joy…

“Listen to me, Mom! Look out there in the middle of the mudflat!” Angela demanded of her mother, pointing toward the deep mud as Jason turned his attention back toward the two other women. “Here at the edge it’s only a foot or so deep, but out there it’s bottomless quicksand!”

“Quicksand?” her younger sister suddenly piped up as she pulled her nose away from her phone, her interest piqued by the unexpected word from her older sister’s lips. “That stuff’s not even real, is it?”

“Yes, Amy, it most certainly is,” Angela answered her sister defensively, “and not only is it real, but I fell into it, and I couldn’t get out! If you two are wondering why I’m covered with mud from head to toe, it’s because I actually went under! I almost died! Then Jason here…” She paused and looked back toward him, her voice catching momentarily as she remembered her terror at sinking beneath the surface and the risk that he had taken to save her, “Jason… jumped in and pulled me out,” she continued, her voice still a little shaky, “even though he could’ve died, too. He saved my life. He’s… he’s my hero.”

“He saved you from quicksand?!” Amy asked, staring at her older sister in amazement. “Cooool!” she then exclaimed, turning her attention back to her phone. Ohhhh, boy, Jason muttered to himself as her fingers fluttered over the device’s screen.

“How very ‘Tarzan’ of him!” her mother replied, rolling her eyes dismissively. “He saved the ‘damsel in distress’ from ‘quicksand!’” she went on disbelievingly as she turned her ire back toward her older daughter. “Let’s say that’s all true, Angela. Let’s say your ‘hero’ here did in fact ‘save your life,’ as you put it. Well, having so ‘heroically’ rescued you, he probably figured it was only fair for you to put on a little show for him in return, to give him a little strip-tease while you pulled off your bikini, and to let him fuck you right here in the mud!” she shouted, jabbing the index finger of her left hand downward for emphasis.

Jason listened to the older woman’s tirade toward her daughter with uneasy wonder. She was certainly no longer the modest, demure, “spiritual” girl whom he remembered from his religious group meetings in college; that younger Angela had gone out of her way to avoid saying even the most innocuous of “bad” words, while this older Angela sounded like she could give a barroom bruiser a run for his money in a swearing contest. Jason shook his head as he imagined the kinds of negative experiences that she must have endured in her adult life to leave her so bitter toward men in general and himself in particular, and he wished that he could chalk up her anger to overprotectiveness of her daughters while realizing that there was probably much more to her story than that.

“That’s not what happened!” her older daughter exploded in frustration. “For your information, Mother dear, after Jason saved my life, I wanted to fuck him!”

The directness of Angela’s admission seemed to have taken her mother by surprise, and for once the older woman had nothing to say in response. Even Amy appeared to have momentarily forgotten all about her phone as she stared and listened, spellbound, to her sister’s frank admission of her sexual desire.

“Yes, Mom,” Angela continued, her voice a little softer now, “I wanted to make passionate love to Jason right here in the mud after he pulled me out of the quicksand, and I would have, too, except that he said ‘no’!”

“He said ‘no’?” her mother repeated disbelievingly as she turned her attention to Jason, sizing up his barefoot, shirtless, mud-covered frame from head to toe with a disdainful smirk on her face. “What’s the matter, you dumb prick?” she challenged him. “My little girl not good enough for you?”

Jason stared back at her in amazement. First the older woman had been livid at the idea that he had taken advantage of her daughter, and now she was berating him for his not having made the attempt. In that moment he realized that this older Angela was far more concerned with coming out on top in an argument than she was with understanding what had actually happened before she had arrived. There would be no real reasoning with her, Jason decided, concluding regretfully that the sweet young woman whom he remembered from his college years had clearly long since ceased to exist.

The older woman continued regarding him derisively as she stood with her elbows out to her sides and her fists on her hips, shaking her head dismissively. “Doesn’t matter anyway, I suppose,” she said mockingly. “Ol’ ‘grandpa’ here probably couldn’t even get it up in the first place.”

Jason crossed his arms over his chest and lowered his head slightly, glaring over the frames of his bifocals at the older woman and scrunching his forehead into the best “Spock raised eyebrow” expression that he could summon while Angela burst out laughing next to him. “What’s so funny?” her mother demanded of her daughter as she went down on one knee, overcome with hilarity at her mother’s cluelessness.

“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Angela chortled to Jason between heaving breaths, “She thinks you… ‘couldn’t’… ha-ha-ha-ha!” He smiled and joined in with her laughter, and even Amy started giggling lightly — twittering? Jason wondered — as it became clear to everyone there — well, perhaps clear to everyone except for Angela’s mother — that whatever moral high ground that the older woman had hoped to stake out over her daughter and especially over Jason had been forever lost.

“Mom, you really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” Angela gasped through her laughter, “but I love you anyway!” She rose as she recovered herself, then walked over to her mother and, still chuckling, gave her a big hug that left the front of the older woman’s shirt and pants smeared with mud. “For your information,” Angela continued laughingly as her mother looked down at herself and gasped in dismay as she started trying to wipe the mud from her clothes, “Jason said ‘no’ not because ‘I’m not good enough for him’ or ‘he couldn’t get it up’; he said ‘no’ because he’s a kind, sweet, decent gentleman… and he knows what it means to treat a woman with respect.”

“Oh, really?” her mother responded with as much dignity as she could muster after the others’ amusement at her expense while she continued wiping futilely at her muddy clothing with her hands. “Well, if he’s so ‘respectful’ of you, how did he manage to get you out of your damned bikini? Or did it conveniently ‘fall off’ while he was ‘rescuing’ you?”

“Jason had nothing to do with it, Mom,” Angela replied testily, her feelings of exasperation beginning to return. “If you must know, I was already naked in the mud before he even showed… um, before he even… showed up.” She stumbled over her words as both her mother and sister stared at her in astonishment, and with a sinking feeling Angela realized that in her desire to exonerate Jason in her mother’s eyes she had inadvertently raised more questions than she had answered.

“You were already naked…?” her mother said in a low, disbelieving voice.

“Why were you already… naked in the mud?” her sister asked uncomfortably, not sure what to make of her older sister’s unexpected admission.

Angela stood motionless, inhaling slowly as she wondered how she was possibly going to explain to her mother and sister that she had a “thing” for deep mud and quicksand, when Jason came to her rescue once again. “She said she wanted to take a natural mud bath,” he spoke up quickly, “like at a spa, only out in the open, since no one else was around. The beauty of nature and all,” he said, gesturing at their surroundings. “That’s what she told me after I pulled her out of the quicksand.”

“Y-yeah,” Angela said, glancing at him as she followed his lead. “It was… such a warm day, and the mud looked so cool and inviting, so I took off my bikini and settled in for what I thought would be a relaxing mud bath,” she offered in explanation to her mother and sister. “I just didn’t realize when I stepped into it that it was bottomless quicksand. Jason heard my cries and came to help, but I went under before he could pull me out. You do understand that, don’t you, Mom?” she asked as she looked pleadingly at her mother. “I almost died in the quicksand. And if Jason hadn’t come along when he did and saved me, neither you nor Amy would’ve ever known what had happened to me.”

Something in the tone of Angela’s voice seemed to get through to her mother as the older woman appeared at last to be paying less attention to the fact that her daughter was standing muddy and naked next to a stranger and more to the fact that she had been in mortal danger.

“Then after I went under,” Angela continued tearfully, a lump forming in her throat as she remembered how frightened she had been, “Jason jumped in and pulled me out, and then he gave me mouth-to-mouth because I wasn’t breathing. Then after he revived me it took so much time and energy to get out of the quicksand that when we finally made it to the shallow part we fell asleep from exhaustion. And I promise you, Mom, that’s why I was sleeping naked next to Jason in the mud when you and Amy got here.”

The older woman gazed at her nude, muddy daughter, the expression in her eyes softening as she began to consider just how close she had come to losing her oldest child. “Is that what really happened… um, Jason, is it?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, it is,” he replied calmly. For the most part, he added silently.

“And there was nothing weird or kinky going on between the two of you… in the mud?” she inquired, gesturing toward both him and Angela with one hand and toward the mudflat with the other.

“No, ma’am, there wasn’t,” he answered.

“Well, if that’s so, then what’s with that rope hanging off your ass like a rat’s tail?” she persisted, pointing to the ground behind him. “You two weren’t playing a game of ‘tie me up,’ were you?”

“No, Mom, we weren’t,” Angela answered, rolling her eyes as she intercepted her mother’s accusation with more than a hint of annoyance in her voice. “The rope is how Jason saved me. You see those two rocks?” she asked, pointing to the knotted end of the rope on the ground and the jutting rocks between which it had snagged. “Jason tied the rope to his belt and hooked the other end of it on those rocks so that he would have his arms free to pull me out of the quicksand after he jumped in to rescue me.”

Her mother glanced at the rope, one end of it caught between the two rocks, its length snaking back into the mudflat, surfacing here and there in the ooze before finally emerging and making its way to the back of Jason’s belt. She frowned as she reflected on her daughter’s and Jason’s explanations of what had happened and why they had been sleeping next to each other in the mud, acknowledging to herself that their story made perfect sense… perhaps too perfect. “You two are sure that… nothing… happened between the two of you before I go here?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” Jason replied. At least nothing that you’re imagining, he thought.

“You promise?” Angela’s mother asked emphatically.

“Yes,” Jason replied, looking her in the eye, “I promise.”

The older woman looked back and forth between Jason and her oldest daughter, still not certain if she should believe their words as the two of them gazed back at her. “Mom,” Angela finally spoke up, “I can assure you from very recent experience that when Jason makes a promise, he means it.”

Her mother’s countenance at last lightened at Angela’s words and in the face of her united front with Jason. “Well, I still don’t like the idea of you sleeping naked in the mud next to a stranger,” the older woman insisted to her, “but since he still has his pants on, and you both promise that nothing happened, I suppose I owe you both an apology for jumping to conclusions,” she relented, adding, “and a ‘thank you’ to you, Jason, for saving my daughter’s life.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied respectfully as he considered that perhaps he too had jumped too quickly to certain conclusions regarding the older woman who had once been his long-ago college crush.

“Yeah,” Amy piped up from behind Jason and Angela, “thanks for saving my big sister. From quicksand! Wow, my followers are gonna love this!” she exclaimed as she again buried her nose in her phone. Ohhhh, boy, Jason groaned quietly as he rolled his eyes at the prospect of his and Angela’s “trending” among Amy’s social media contacts.

“Yes,” Angela said softly as she turned and took his hand in hers, “thank you, Jason, for saving me.” She stepped toward him, a smile of gratitude on her face as she extended her arms around his neck to give him a hug. Jason placed his arms around her muddy waist, hesitantly at first but then more certainly, to hug her in return, and for several seconds the two enjoyed a chaste embrace together until Angela suddenly turned her face toward his and planted a long, wet, sloppy kiss directly on his lips as she pressed her naked body tightly against his frame. His eyebrows arched as his eyes popped wide open at her unexpected passionate display, and he worried for a moment that she had forgotten everything that they had discussed earlier before realizing that with her mother and sister present, nothing more could or would come of their lips meeting now than the kiss itself. Given all that they had gone through that day and the deadly danger that they had survived together, Jason relaxed and kissed Angela gently in return.

“Well, I never…” her mother muttered disapprovingly while the camera of Amy’s phone snapped shot after shot of her sister and the older man in their muddy embrace.

“Maybe you should sometime, Mom!” Angela exclaimed laughingly as she released Jason’s lips from hers and gazed into his eyes, much as she had done earlier when the two of them had been alone in the mud. Several seconds went by before she spoke again. “Thank you,” she at last whispered softly to him, “for everything you did… and didn’t do.”

“You’re welcome, Angela,” he said tenderly in return as they both squeezed each other in a final hug before separating, which was made momentarily difficult by the sticky mud coating their bodies. They both laughed at the sucking sound their bellies made as they pulled apart from one another, while Amy giggled nearby. “Now trending on Twitter!” she joked as she continued snapping photos, and for the first time since waking from his muddy nap Jason felt so lighthearted and happy that he no longer cared how many pictures the girl took or how many people saw them.

“If you two are finished making out, Angela,” her mother said sarcastically as she retrieved her towel and swim bag from the dirt path, “we still have enough time to get back to the house for you to get cleaned up before the cookout tonight, but just barely, considering what a muddy mess you are.”

“Oh, the cookout!” Angela’s eyes brightened at her mother’s reminder of her family’s evening plans with their neighbors. “Could Jason come too?”

“Absolutely not!” the older woman objected before her daughter even finished asking the question. The stranger may have saved her daughter’s life, she grumbled to herself, but that didn’t mean that she had to welcome his presence in her home or among her friends. Despite Angela’s and Jason’s assurances to her, she still wasn’t quite convinced that “nothing” had happened between the two of them earlier in the mud.

“Actually,” Jason said quietly to Angela, “I really need to get back home myself. I should have been home hours ago, but I got… distracted,” he added, giving her a knowing smile.

“Come on, girls, let’s go… now!” her mother called to both Amy and Angela but mostly to her older daughter, who was still lingering by Jason’s side.

“In a minute, Mom!” Angela called back to her. “I’m still saying goodbye to Jason!”

“Well, hurry it up!” her mother responded, collecting Angela’s bikini halves as she and Amy started dragging their canoe from the shore and situating it in the shallow water at the river’s edge.

Angela turned back toward Jason, hoping for a few seconds of relative privacy with him while her mother and sister readied the little boat. She put her arms around his neck again and whispered conspiratorially into his ear, “Follow my lead.”

“Hmm?” he responded quizzically, uncertain of her intent.

“I don’t even know your last name,” Angela suddenly called out, much louder than necessary for him to hear but sufficiently so, Jason realized, for her mother and sister to hear down by the water. “How will we stay in touch with each other?” She then leaned toward him again. “Say it’s better that we don’t,” she whispered quickly to him.

“Oh,” Jason said out loud, directing his voice just as audibly toward her mother and sister, who were still busy with the canoe, “it’s, um… it’s better that we don’t, Angela. After all, I am married.”

“Good, that’s good,” she whispered, stealing a glance back toward her sister and mother to see that they were still occupied with their preparations. “That ought to keep them from guessing that we really are in touch with each other.”

“But… today is the first time we’ve ever met; you said so yourself.” Jason replied quietly, a note of confusion in his voice. “We’re not in touch with each other.”

Angela looked up at him, her arms still around his neck, an odd little smile on her face.

“We’re… not in touch with each other,” Jason repeated, “are we?”

She continued gazing up at him, still smiling her odd little smile, the same smile, Jason now recalled, that she had given him earlier after she had admitted her quicksand fetish to him when they had been alone together in the mud.

“Okay,” he finally said to her uncertainly, “just… how… are we in touch with each other?”

She chuckled as she tightened her arms around his neck again and brought her face close to his ear. “I’m no more ‘Angela’ on the quicksand forum,” she whispered slyly, “than you’re ‘Jason’ in real life… Mister ‘Sample.’”

She drew back so that she could see his face, giggling at the incredulous look in his eyes. For a moment Jason considered playing dumb and pretending that he had no idea what she was talking about before finally admitting to himself that his own secret fetish, as well as his participation in the online quicksand community, had somehow become just as obvious to her now as his undeniable arousal had been earlier, and that there was no further use in denying it. Well, whaddya know? he concluded as a faint smile stole across his face, Maybe I have chatted with her on the forum; she just doesn’t use her real name... like someone else I know. “What…” he began to ask, “what… gave me away?”

“Silly ‘Jason,’” she whispered laughingly, “no one talks about wanting to make wet, messy, passionate love in the mud without having a thing for mud… and quicksand.” She looked up at him, her face beaming as she smiled. “After you said that to me earlier, coupled with what you knew about staying safe in quicksand and some other things I’ve read on the forum, I just put two and two together.”

Jason gazed back at her as a momentary wish that he were thirty-five years younger and single flashed through his mind. “Touché,” he replied at last, smiling and nodding his head.

“Angela,” her mother called impatiently from the now ready canoe, “come on!”

“Coming, Mom!” Angela turned her head and called back to her mother before returning her gaze to the bemused older man standing before her. She leaned in toward him one more time and hugged his neck tightly again. “See you around the forum, ‘Jason,’” she whispered as she pressed her cheek against his, “and say ‘hi’ to your ‘monster’ for me.”

“My… monster…” he replied slowly, wide-eyed in astonishment as she pulled back again so that she could look at him. “How do you know about…?”

She smiled back at him knowingly as she removed her arms from around his neck. “I told you, I’m on the forum,” she answered, giggling. “I read that ‘damsel-in-distress’ article you posted shortly after you joined. Very respectful toward women, I must say… just as you’ve been with me. I also read your introductory message, Mister ‘Assumed Name.’”

Jason could only stare back at her, his mouth half-open in amazement as he shook his head at the remarkable young woman standing before him, until his expression fell as a dark realization clouded his thoughts. “Um… Angela,” he said uneasily, “since you’ve read those posts, and after what happened here today, I feel I owe it to you to say that I… regret… that a certain… monstrous… part of me… wanted to see you… go under… earlier.”

“I know,” she said softly as she leaned in again and kissed him lightly on the cheek, “and thank you for owning up to it. But what matters is that the man you are was willing to risk everything to save me… no matter what.”

“Angela!” the older woman shouted toward her oldest daughter, tired of her delay tactics. “Now!”

“Okay!” Angela called back to her mother, rolling her eyes and head in mock exasperation as she started backing away from Jason, not really wanting to leave but knowing that she must. “Hey, Jason!” she said to him as she turned and began making her way toward the river, “You know what?”

“What?” he asked as she continued walking toward the canoe while still looking back at him.

“You should write down everything that happened today!” she said laughingly, adding in a loud whisper, “It’d make one hell of a story to post on the forum!”

“I just might do that, Angela,” he replied, chuckling.

“Make sure I can recognize myself in it!” she called back to him with a smile on her face.

I will, Angela, Jason answered her silently, I promise. He smiled as he watched the muddy, naked young woman turn and make her way toward the canoe at the edge of the shore where her mother and younger sister were waiting for her. Rather than stepping directly into the little boat, however, Angela instead detoured around it and waded several yards out into the river until she reached a point where it was sufficiently deep for her to submerge herself completely in the water. After a few seconds she reappeared at the surface as she leaned her head back, running her fingers over her face and through her auburn hair to clear away the mud that had been caking it. She then rose up slowly, splashing and stroking handfuls of water over her arms and upper body and then over her belly, lower body, and legs, front and back, to clean the mud from herself, all the while looking back toward Jason, who couldn’t help but to watch, transfixed by her appearance. “Here’s how I look when I’m not all covered with mud, Jason!” she called laughingly to him, striking a flirtatious pose as her mother again insistently held out the beach towel toward her in a vain attempt to get her oldest daughter to cover herself.

Jason shook his head lightly and smiled at Angela’s playful display in the water. She looked just as lovely soaking wet as she had earlier when her body had been coated with flowing ooze after he had helped her to pull herself out of the quicksand, and he again became aware of the beginnings of a growing fullness in his shorts as he watched her climb out of the water and into the canoe. As she took a seat on the narrow center bench facing toward the rear of the vessel she at last acquiesced to her mother’s wishes and took the proffered towel and wrapped it around herself, all the while looking in Jason’s direction as her mother and sister pushed off and began rowing away from the shore.

Angela continued gazing toward him as the tiny boat moved out into the lazy current of the river, a sad smile on her face that hinted at a wistful yearning for what might have been between the two of them. Jason’s eyes followed the canoe as its distance from the shore increased, never looking away from Angela as she and her mother and sister made their way downstream from where he stood. As he watched the small vessel recede from him, Jason marveled at the irony of his having rescued from quicksand the daughter of a woman whom decades before he had fantasized about seeing in the same kind of peril when she had been her daughter’s age; only now, rather than lasciviously watching the damsel in distress sink helplessly to her doom for his own selfish pleasure, he had instead risked everything to save her for her own sake, and gladly so. Because Angela would be able to go on living for herself and her hopes for the future, he mused contentedly, he would be able to live with himself and the desires of his past.

Jason watched the slow-moving craft grow ever smaller as the late-afternoon sun began to kiss a mountain ridge in the southwest while Angela’s mother and sister continued rowing through the current toward their destination. After a couple of minutes the three women came to a bend in the river, and as the canoe began to turn Angela raised her arm and waved to him from across the water. Jason lifted his hand and waved back to her, each of them saying a silent farewell to the other over the distance separating them as the little boat and its occupants gradually rounded the bend before finally passing from view behind the verdant foliage of the trees and vegetation that grew thickly along the far bank of the river.

And then she was gone.



––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

To be continued in Part 8: “Last Temptation.”

[Solrex]

Hold on, is this a real story? Did you actually meet someone on the forums when they were sinking in real life in this story? This can't be real, is it?

[JSample]

Hold on, is this a real story? Did you actually meet someone on the forums when they were sinking in real life in this story? This can't be real, is it?

As the title of the story says, it's 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). Your mileage may vary.