The Girl (Part 6): Angela's Preservation
Posted: Mon May 06, 2019 6:59 am
THE GIRL (or, Angela’s Story: A Side-quel to “The Kid”)
by Jason Sample
December 2018–May 2019
After being driven to the limits of human endurance and very nearly beyond, Angela recovers from her terrifying ordeal in the quicksand, grateful to Jason for rescuing her from a suffocating end while coming to terms with her conflicting feelings regarding her hero's behavior and actions before she had gone under... and afterward.
(Author's note: If you have not yet read "The Kid," you may ignore the rest of this paragraph and enjoy the latest installment of "The Girl." However, if you have read my earlier story, you will quickly notice that the narrative sequence in the remaining three chapters of this story parallels that of chapters five, six, and seven of the previous one. Jason's and Angela's conversation and interactions with each other after he rescues her from the quicksand are necessarily identical in both stories, as are their interactions with other characters who eventually arrive on the scene, but whereas "The Kid" told its story from Jason's viewpoint, "The Girl" presents the same sequence of events from Angela's perspective... the result being an entirely new story.)
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The Girl (Part 6): Angela’s Preservation
Angela’s eyes fell closed and her head collapsed upon Jason’s shoulder as she continued gulping air into her lungs to satisfy her body’s overdue demands for oxygen, her naked form heaving against his body with her every breath, her mind a jumble of emotions and impressions, some stark and vivid, some blurry and uncertain, all of them culminating in an overwhelming sense of gratitude toward her rescuer. Oh, god, she murmured weakly between gasping inhalations, thank you, Jason… thank you… As she slowly recovered from her fearful ordeal in the quicksand, she felt his fingers softly stroking her hair through its thick coating of muck as she lay against him in the middle of the mudflat under the warmth of the sun, his right arm clasping her tightly to himself. This was the most intimate embrace that she had ever shared with a man, the thought occurred to her, her bare breasts squeezed against his chest beneath the surface, her lower body pressed against his, and their legs somewhat intertwined with each other’s in the miry depths, but she sensed no prurient intent on his part. For the next minute or so she did little other than to breathe, her various bodily systems reviving as her bloodstream delivered fresh oxygen to the boundaries of her being, the sensation of feeling gradually returning to her extremities, while her hero did nothing more than to hold her close. In her relief and exhaustion she would have gladly remained this way indefinitely, comfortable and safe in her protector’s arms… until she suddenly remembered where she was… and what had just happened to her.
“But… but…” she objected in a new panic as she abruptly raised her head and looked around herself in resurrected terror at the muddy surface just below her chin, noting with alarm that Jason was also sunk in the mire almost as deeply as was she, “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,” he admitted gently, “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, oblivious to the significance of his choice of words. “You mean… on that?” she asked as she glanced over Jason’s shoulder beyond the edge of the mudflat.
In response to her question Jason twisted his head and torso around to see what Angela was looking at behind him. As he did so, she noticed several loops of rope coiled around his left shoulder, from which the rope snaked away from their position in the middle of the mire toward where the mud met the dry ground and then beyond, traveling across the dirt to a point about five feet out from the edge, where, 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. That’s how he was able to reach me and pull me back to the surface without going under himself, Angela considered silently, the knot in the rocks a mute rebuttal of all the horrible things that her creature had accused Jason of being and doing while she had been trapped beneath the surface of the quicksand.
Her creature! The memory of her terrifying torment at the hands of that… thing… in her head came racing back at her as Angela looked at the knotted end of the rope. She no longer sensed her fetish-thing’s active presence in her consciousness, but she knew better than to think that it had simply left her; having reclaimed herself from its consuming lust while she had still been submerged within the sucking mire and now safe in Jason’s embrace from her creature’s smothering intent for her, she suspected that it had retreated to the depths of her subconscious, where it would bide its time, licking its wounds while lying in wait for its next opportunity to overpower her through her fetish-level desires. There really was a dark part of herself, she realized sickly, that was more than willing to destroy her if given the chance… if she were, say, to decide on the spur of the moment to indulge her quicksand fetish fantasy in a mud pit of unknown depth without taking any precautions to ensure her safety. I almost died today for the sake of a momentary thrill, she said shakily to herself as she and Jason continued gazing at the rope snagged in the rocks, and would it have been worth it? Given what her creature had been willing to do to her and to put her through after she had gone under earlier, she reflected with a shudder, she knew what its answer would be. La petite mort, indeed, she said grimly to herself.
But there was another recollection accompanying that of her agony in the quicksand; vague, uncertain, as if subsisting only in the fragments of a dream; faint, fleeting impressions of an endless emptiness, darkness giving way to light, love and hope intermingled with fear and loss, and an elusive, benevolent… presence… watching over her in the moment of her greatest need. The memory seemed to slip away from her every attempt to reclaim it, yet she knew that it was there, much as certain faint stars in the night sky could be glimpsed only when she would avert her eyes and not look directly at them. Perhaps it had been only a dream, she reflected, the last, fevered firings of her dying neurons flickering weakly in the hypoxia of her fading consciousness… a reassuring dream to which she knew that she would long to return every night when she lay down to sleep.
Angela’s reflective reverie was interrupted as Jason turned back toward her, a faraway look in his eyes, and she realized that for the past several seconds he had been as silent as she while they had both been pondering the rope snagged on the rocks. “Hey,” she asked softly, “are you okay?”
“Hmm?” he mumbled as his attention returned to the muddy reality that they shared.
“You spaced out for a moment, like you’d seen something that wasn’t there,” she said.
A weak smile crossed his face as he looked back at her. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he replied chucklingly as he inhaled deeply. “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.” She knew that he had no idea what she had endured between the time when she had sunk beneath the surface and when he had finally pulled her free, for however long that had been, what horrors she had suffered at the hands of her fetish-creature, and what… other things she had experienced… and his not knowing about them, she decided, was probably just as well.
“Come on,” Jason said to her with an encouraging 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 began to pull her arms free from the mire, one at a time, pausing a few times to catch her breath as she struggled to bring them to the surface, before finally placing her hands on his shoulders for support. Despite her overall physical health and fitness, even this simple exertion seemed to exhaust her completely, and she wondered how long it would be before she fully recovered from what her earlier battles against the clinging muck had exacted from her body. She watched as Jason then extracted his own arm from the ooze and slowly turned himself around in the quicksand so that he was facing toward the edge of the mudflat, while she 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 quicksand, holding the rope tightly with both his hands. “Kick your legs to keep them loose in the mud, Angela,” he said as he began kicking his own legs as well.
I’ll try, Angela replied silently, kicking weakly against the deep grip of the mire as she held her arms tightly around Jason, the muscles of her legs still responding sluggishly to her brain’s commands to move, and she hoped that her seeming feebleness was merely the effects of extreme fatigue and not symptomatic of the oxygen deprivation that she had endured while she had been submerged in the quicksand. She still had no idea how long she had been sunk in the mire, how long it had taken Jason to reach her and to pull her back to the surface, or how long it had been before she had taken the first breath of the rest of her life. All that she knew for certain was that she was safe, and all that she could do for now was to maintain her grip around Jason’s chest as she lay her head upon the nape of his neck and closed her eyes, more than content to let him shoulder the burden as he slowly and effortfully pulled them both toward freedom.
After several rounds of hand-over-hand pulling on the rope while Angela held tightly to him, Jason finally came up against the hidden drop-off that he had slipped over earlier the first time that he had tried to reach her, and as he turned to his left he 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 am I going under again! she vowed insistently to herself. She watched as Jason placed his hands on the submerged ledge and leaned forward, pushing against the muddy support while kicking 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 she wished that she could somehow assist him as he struggled to maintain his handhold while slowly freeing himself from the mire’s grip. Leaning to his left while grasping the rope in his right hand, he heaved himself higher onto the solid surface, and then, leaning forward as he pulled on the rope, he eventually 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, loops of rope falling from around his left shoulder and arm as he extended 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,” Angela replied, grasping his forearm with her right hand and planting her left on the ledge as she began the arduous process of extricating herself from the deeper part of the pit while he held her arm securely. She took a deep breath — Oh, to breathe again! she gasped in grateful relief — and pushed down on the ledge, the muscles of her arm trembling with the exertion. She was still shoulder-deep in the ooze, and it took a while for her to make progress against the continuing grip of the mire on her body and the wearying effects of her earlier struggles against it. You can do this, girl, she silently encouraged herself as with time and Jason’s patient assistance she gradually began to ascend from the quicksand, her naked form slowly rising from the miry surface as she laboriously pulled herself onto the submerged support. More than once she hesitated, her aching muscles objecting sorely to the demands that she was placing upon them against the incessant grasp of the gooey mud, until she finally dragged herself over the edge of the drop-off. Once safely there she paused momentarily, resting on her knees and her left arm while she caught her breath, her other arm still clasping Jason’s, globs of muck and ooze flowing and falling from her body in thick, wet clumps and splatting to the surface beneath her as she panted heavily. Wow… I could sleep for days after all this, she reflected wearily as she recovered from her efforts to free herself from the clinging mire. When she at last felt ready to try to stand up, still not certain how well her legs would obey her brain after her suffocating ordeal, she looked toward Jason for support, only to find that he now seemed to be deliberately looking elsewhere, anywhere, other than at her.
“We should, um… we should… ah, be okay now… um, Angela,” Jason said hesitatingly, averting his eyes from her as he looked toward the place where the loose mud met terra firma. “It’s not that far to the… um… ah, to the edge.” He struggled to his feet, still holding her right hand in his left as she began to stand up as well.
At least my legs seem to be working okay now, Angela said to herself with a sigh of relief as she rose to her feet, her legs’ earlier weakness apparently having been due to muscle fatigue after all and not something more worrisome, but why is he looking away from me? Jason certainly seemed to be willfully keeping his eyes from her as he started moving toward the solid ground several feet in front of him, and as she continued to grip his hand in hers she suddenly understood his odd behavior. Oh, my gosh, she realized with a widening smile, I’ll bet he’s embarrassed to see me naked, just like before, when he first saw me! That’s so sweet! Charmed by his seeming reticence to ogle her nude, muddy form when he had had the chance to do so, Angela suddenly jerked his arm back behind him, giggling softly as she did so. Jason turned his head slightly toward her, apparently still unwilling to look upon her mud-covered, 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?” Even with his face turned from her, she could see that the skin on his neck was quickly turning red.
“Um, uh, no, of course not… um… Angela,” Jason stammered in obvious embarrassment, his face clearly flushed, his eyes still averted from her shapely form, “um… no, it’s just that… um… that… uh…” For the first time since he had come to her rescue he seemed not to know what to say or to do. “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 as he slowly turned back toward her while they stood together in the shallow part of the pit. “If you say so.”
Angela stood smiling before Jason as she held her fit, toned body at her full height, muck and ooze dripping from her nubile form and merging with the muddy surface below her knees. She heard him inhale deeply as he beheld her nude, well-proportioned figure on full display, coated with a sheen of flowing ooze that brightly reflected the sunlight as it slowly rolled downward as gravity required and the contours of her body allowed. You’re the only guy who’s ever seen me naked like this, Jason, she said to him silently with a chuckle as he continued gazing at her, to say nothing of seeing me naked and covered with mud. She had felt the lustful stares of other boys and men before, even when she was fully clothed, their eyes undressing her as they imagined the degrading, lecherous things that they would do to her if given the chance. But as she watched Jason take in the totality of her appearance, she saw in his eyes not lust, not lewd desire, but what looked almost like… admiration, bordering on awe. She sensed that, even though they barely knew each other, he truly appreciated her for who she was, not merely as an object of desire but even more so as a beautiful, worthwhile person who deserved to be treated with honor and respect… who deserved the second chance at life that he had given to her.
“Wow, um… Angela…” Jason spoke haltingly in the presence of the vision of muddy comeliness that stood smiling before him, “you really… um… gosh, I mean… I can’t quite… um…” She found his halting attempts to compliment her delightfully endearing, and she chuckled to see an obvious, undeniable fullness quickly beginning to develop inside the front of his shorts. Jason 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 Angela suddenly realized that he was beginning to topple over backward in the mud. “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 she gripped his left to try to hold him upright. Despite their efforts, gravity had the last word as Jason 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 and 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 gazed into his eyes, an astonished grin playing across her face. Look at you, Jason… look at me… I haven’t been this muddy since my sister and I played in the mud as children… 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. After a moment’s hesitation 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 lay mere feet away from them.
Even though she knew that the older man on top of whom she was lying naked and laughing in the mud was little more than a stranger to her, Angela felt utterly safe in his embrace. Yes, she had noticed that he was becoming aroused in her muddy presence just moments before, but she sensed that his sexual desire was tempered by an even greater desire to treat her with decency and dignity. Now that he had kept his promise to save her life, she suddenly felt that she could trust him with anything… and with this newfound willingness to open herself to him came an abrupt, unquenchable outpouring of emotion as the pent-up burden of the ordeal that she had just endured in the quicksand erupted from her heart in convulsive moans of sobbing and crying. After a moment of uncertainty following the sudden change in demeanor that had come over her, Jason responded to her distress by quickly working his way back into a sitting position in the mud, holding her as she wept against his chest.
“I was so scared!” she cried, her tears flowing copiously, 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.”
Angela continued sobbing in his tender embrace, the memories of her terror in the clutches of the quicksand and of her merciless torment at the hands of her creature still vivid in her mind… as well as all the horrible things of which her fetish-thing had accused Jason while she had been trapped in the miry depths before he had finally rescued her… accusations that reflected emotions and feelings that Angela recognized as having been her own.
“And the last thing I remembered,” she went on as 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 as she recalled his odd, distracted behavior earlier while she had been sunk to her chin in the quicksand, his almost-but-not-quite-enough efforts to reach her, and his unfathomable tossing away of his shirt just before she had gone under. She couldn’t begin to guess how he might respond to the torrent of incrimination that she had abruptly flung at him, especially since he had just gone to the trouble of saving her life, but even as she remembered that she had forgiven him for his failures as one of her last acts of lucidity when she had been facing what she was certain would be her imminent end in the choking mire, she also knew that she needed to be completely honest with him about everything that she was feeling so as to exorcise any remaining bitterness from her heart lest it eventually overwhelm and consume her just as surely as the quicksand had nearly done.
For a long moment each gazed into the other’s eyes, and in Jason’s Angela perceived an expression of sorrow and regret over the horrors that she had experienced and from which he had been unable to spare her. But rather than trying to explain his actions or to justify or excuse his earlier failure to save her from sinking beneath the surface, much less accusing her of having put herself in danger in the first place, even though she knew full well that that was what in fact had happened, he seemed willing instead simply to take her anguished accusations upon himself, to bear in his own heart the burden of the suffering that she had endured in the quicksand, without objection or complaint.
“That’s what I thought would be the end of my life,” Angela then continued, laying her head on his chest again as she went on weeping, “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.” She sat up on Jason’s lap and again looked at his face, her tears tracing watery paths through the thin layers of 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, recalling with a shudder how the ooze had penetrated her lips after the breath had been knocked out of her. “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, a mystified tone in his voice. “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, his face a mask of confusion over Angela’s words and the emotions behind them. He seemed at a loss for what to say in response to her, and she could only imagine the swirl of conflicting feelings that he must surely have regarding the torment that she had undergone in the depths of her miry purgatory and her words of reproach toward him.
“I’m so sorry, Angela,” he finally offered, seemingly to sense that even his sincerest words of apology would be insufficient even to begin to compensate for what she had endured. “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 leniently, 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 then 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, the blurry moment of her rebirth from the miry womb of the earth flitting at the periphery of her consciousness. That’s why it felt like I’d just been kissed, she recalled as she brought her fingers to her lips, but was I really under for only a couple of minutes?! She honestly felt as if she had been dragged all the way to hell and back, especially as she recalled her endless, merciless abuse at the hands of her fetish-creature and the mire’s obscene violation of her lips and mouth while she had still been trapped within its clutching depths, before her memory became uncertain… even though she was sure that something else had happened before she had escaped the smothering darkness. He would’ve had to reach deep inside my mouth, deep inside my body, to scoop out all that muck before he could revive me, she reflected uncomfortably while she continued gazing at Jason, but he didn’t say anything about doing that; he didn’t want me to feel violated a second time. But her momentary disquiet over what she knew that he must have done to save her life after he had pulled her back into the sunlight quickly faded before the far more important fact that he had saved her life and that she again had a future to which she could look forward.
“You brought me back to life,” Angela finally said to Jason, an expression of gratitude spreading over her face, “just like in a fairy tale. My hero, rescuing me and reviving me with a kiss.” Her smile broadened as she recalled the childhood stories of fair damsels and brave knights that had so enamored her in her youth, as she considered the roles that she and Jason seemed to be playing at this moment in a very similar kind of story, and as she sensed the return of the bulging hardness that she had noticed earlier at the front of Jason’s shorts before they had taken their tumble in the mud as she now sat upon his lap… but she said nothing about that particular detail so as not to embarrass him. “The most romantic moment of my life,” she continued, chuckling to herself as she looked deeply into his eyes, “and of course I was passed out the whole time and missed it.”
Angela laughed lightly again, the moment of erotic tension between them easing with her self-deprecation, and Jason smiled and chuckled as well. She straightened up on her knees, noting how his eyes remained on her face and not on her muddy, ample bosom that was now directly before him, and looked over his shoulder, tracing the rope’s path out of the pit to the two jutting rocks between which the knotted end was still caught. He knew just what to do, she considered as she gazed at the rope, and how to do it to make sure he could save me. “You said you snagged the rope on something,” she said to him, 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 turned his head and glanced at the end of the rope, staring at it silently for several seconds before turning back toward Angela, seemingly preoccupied with something. She brought her gaze from the rocks back to her hero as she noticed an uncertain expression come over his face, as though he were trying to make up his mind about how to respond to her words of praise for his resourcefulness. “Um… about that, Angela,” he replied hesitantly, “that… wasn’t really planned.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, a note of confusion in her voice as she again settled down onto his lap.
“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 as she considered his unexpected admission. “You hoped it would catch on something…” she murmured uncertainly, turning his words over in her mind for a few seconds. You hoped it would catch… Suddenly her eyes 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 lips.
“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 dubious 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, utter disbelief etched on her face. “That’s… got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” she exclaimed incredulously as she stared at him. “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 Angela’s eyes for a few moments and smiled gently before answering. “Because I promised,” he finally replied, self-assurance and confidence returning to both his expression and his voice. “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 which she now knew 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; if what he was saying was true, she considered, then he was even more so her hero than she had imagined. “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 all that had happened to her and what Jason had told her. He promised, she repeated in her mind, and then he risked his life to keep his promise… even after I went under… even though it could have cost him everything. Of all the men whom she had ever known in her life, she realized, before today there had been only one man whom she had genuinely felt that she could trust in every way, only one man who had always kept his word with her… yet now she found herself sitting in the mud at the edge of a pit of quicksand, of all places, with a second such man.
She sensed his gaze upon her mud-smeared face against the backdrop of the forest of vegetation that stretched back toward the river, and after several seconds she felt a solitary tear trickling down her cheek. Jason 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,” Angela replied, looking away from him again. “Nothing. Everything. Take your pick.” She took a deep breath and sighed heavily, more tears following the first. After all the jerks I’ve known in my life, is he really the kind of man he seems to be? she asked herself, the insinuations and accusations that her creature had made against him while she was trapped in the quicksand surfacing again in her consciousness, before 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, sympathy in his voice. “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 even as she noticed that Jason was struggling mightily to keep his eyes on her face, “well… you know… you’ve seen my body…” Jason nodded uncomfortably even as Angela sensed that the hardness between his legs was increasing. All those other guys would’ve already been staring at my tits for so long, she thought disparagingly, they wouldn’t even remember what I looked like… but you’re actually paying attention to me…
“Well,” Angela continued, recognizing and accepting as normal and natural Jason’s physiological response to their being in such close physical contact with each other, “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.” In her awareness of Jason’s own arousal in her immediate proximity, however, she perceived no similar such vulgar intent. Instead, he seemed to be trying to tamp down his libido as he shifted his legs slightly under her weight, apparently to try to create space in the mud between her body and his while she sat on his lap.
“Angela,” Jason said quietly, still adjusting his position beneath her, “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 he had nearly met their end; it still seemed incredible to her that only minutes before she had been completely and helplessly encased within the smothering muck, at the mercy of her fetish-creature as it had sought to own her and end her… and that the very stranger on whose lap she was now sitting in the mud had risked his life to save her from it.
“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 at 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 encouragingly. “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 momentarily lowered her gaze from his face. “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 7: “Angela’s Proposition.”
by Jason Sample
December 2018–May 2019
After being driven to the limits of human endurance and very nearly beyond, Angela recovers from her terrifying ordeal in the quicksand, grateful to Jason for rescuing her from a suffocating end while coming to terms with her conflicting feelings regarding her hero's behavior and actions before she had gone under... and afterward.
(Author's note: If you have not yet read "The Kid," you may ignore the rest of this paragraph and enjoy the latest installment of "The Girl." However, if you have read my earlier story, you will quickly notice that the narrative sequence in the remaining three chapters of this story parallels that of chapters five, six, and seven of the previous one. Jason's and Angela's conversation and interactions with each other after he rescues her from the quicksand are necessarily identical in both stories, as are their interactions with other characters who eventually arrive on the scene, but whereas "The Kid" told its story from Jason's viewpoint, "The Girl" presents the same sequence of events from Angela's perspective... the result being an entirely new story.)
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The Girl (Part 6): Angela’s Preservation
Angela’s eyes fell closed and her head collapsed upon Jason’s shoulder as she continued gulping air into her lungs to satisfy her body’s overdue demands for oxygen, her naked form heaving against his body with her every breath, her mind a jumble of emotions and impressions, some stark and vivid, some blurry and uncertain, all of them culminating in an overwhelming sense of gratitude toward her rescuer. Oh, god, she murmured weakly between gasping inhalations, thank you, Jason… thank you… As she slowly recovered from her fearful ordeal in the quicksand, she felt his fingers softly stroking her hair through its thick coating of muck as she lay against him in the middle of the mudflat under the warmth of the sun, his right arm clasping her tightly to himself. This was the most intimate embrace that she had ever shared with a man, the thought occurred to her, her bare breasts squeezed against his chest beneath the surface, her lower body pressed against his, and their legs somewhat intertwined with each other’s in the miry depths, but she sensed no prurient intent on his part. For the next minute or so she did little other than to breathe, her various bodily systems reviving as her bloodstream delivered fresh oxygen to the boundaries of her being, the sensation of feeling gradually returning to her extremities, while her hero did nothing more than to hold her close. In her relief and exhaustion she would have gladly remained this way indefinitely, comfortable and safe in her protector’s arms… until she suddenly remembered where she was… and what had just happened to her.
“But… but…” she objected in a new panic as she abruptly raised her head and looked around herself in resurrected terror at the muddy surface just below her chin, noting with alarm that Jason was also sunk in the mire almost as deeply as was she, “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,” he admitted gently, “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, oblivious to the significance of his choice of words. “You mean… on that?” she asked as she glanced over Jason’s shoulder beyond the edge of the mudflat.
In response to her question Jason twisted his head and torso around to see what Angela was looking at behind him. As he did so, she noticed several loops of rope coiled around his left shoulder, from which the rope snaked away from their position in the middle of the mire toward where the mud met the dry ground and then beyond, traveling across the dirt to a point about five feet out from the edge, where, 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. That’s how he was able to reach me and pull me back to the surface without going under himself, Angela considered silently, the knot in the rocks a mute rebuttal of all the horrible things that her creature had accused Jason of being and doing while she had been trapped beneath the surface of the quicksand.
Her creature! The memory of her terrifying torment at the hands of that… thing… in her head came racing back at her as Angela looked at the knotted end of the rope. She no longer sensed her fetish-thing’s active presence in her consciousness, but she knew better than to think that it had simply left her; having reclaimed herself from its consuming lust while she had still been submerged within the sucking mire and now safe in Jason’s embrace from her creature’s smothering intent for her, she suspected that it had retreated to the depths of her subconscious, where it would bide its time, licking its wounds while lying in wait for its next opportunity to overpower her through her fetish-level desires. There really was a dark part of herself, she realized sickly, that was more than willing to destroy her if given the chance… if she were, say, to decide on the spur of the moment to indulge her quicksand fetish fantasy in a mud pit of unknown depth without taking any precautions to ensure her safety. I almost died today for the sake of a momentary thrill, she said shakily to herself as she and Jason continued gazing at the rope snagged in the rocks, and would it have been worth it? Given what her creature had been willing to do to her and to put her through after she had gone under earlier, she reflected with a shudder, she knew what its answer would be. La petite mort, indeed, she said grimly to herself.
But there was another recollection accompanying that of her agony in the quicksand; vague, uncertain, as if subsisting only in the fragments of a dream; faint, fleeting impressions of an endless emptiness, darkness giving way to light, love and hope intermingled with fear and loss, and an elusive, benevolent… presence… watching over her in the moment of her greatest need. The memory seemed to slip away from her every attempt to reclaim it, yet she knew that it was there, much as certain faint stars in the night sky could be glimpsed only when she would avert her eyes and not look directly at them. Perhaps it had been only a dream, she reflected, the last, fevered firings of her dying neurons flickering weakly in the hypoxia of her fading consciousness… a reassuring dream to which she knew that she would long to return every night when she lay down to sleep.
Angela’s reflective reverie was interrupted as Jason turned back toward her, a faraway look in his eyes, and she realized that for the past several seconds he had been as silent as she while they had both been pondering the rope snagged on the rocks. “Hey,” she asked softly, “are you okay?”
“Hmm?” he mumbled as his attention returned to the muddy reality that they shared.
“You spaced out for a moment, like you’d seen something that wasn’t there,” she said.
A weak smile crossed his face as he looked back at her. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he replied chucklingly as he inhaled deeply. “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.” She knew that he had no idea what she had endured between the time when she had sunk beneath the surface and when he had finally pulled her free, for however long that had been, what horrors she had suffered at the hands of her fetish-creature, and what… other things she had experienced… and his not knowing about them, she decided, was probably just as well.
“Come on,” Jason said to her with an encouraging 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 began to pull her arms free from the mire, one at a time, pausing a few times to catch her breath as she struggled to bring them to the surface, before finally placing her hands on his shoulders for support. Despite her overall physical health and fitness, even this simple exertion seemed to exhaust her completely, and she wondered how long it would be before she fully recovered from what her earlier battles against the clinging muck had exacted from her body. She watched as Jason then extracted his own arm from the ooze and slowly turned himself around in the quicksand so that he was facing toward the edge of the mudflat, while she 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 quicksand, holding the rope tightly with both his hands. “Kick your legs to keep them loose in the mud, Angela,” he said as he began kicking his own legs as well.
I’ll try, Angela replied silently, kicking weakly against the deep grip of the mire as she held her arms tightly around Jason, the muscles of her legs still responding sluggishly to her brain’s commands to move, and she hoped that her seeming feebleness was merely the effects of extreme fatigue and not symptomatic of the oxygen deprivation that she had endured while she had been submerged in the quicksand. She still had no idea how long she had been sunk in the mire, how long it had taken Jason to reach her and to pull her back to the surface, or how long it had been before she had taken the first breath of the rest of her life. All that she knew for certain was that she was safe, and all that she could do for now was to maintain her grip around Jason’s chest as she lay her head upon the nape of his neck and closed her eyes, more than content to let him shoulder the burden as he slowly and effortfully pulled them both toward freedom.
After several rounds of hand-over-hand pulling on the rope while Angela held tightly to him, Jason finally came up against the hidden drop-off that he had slipped over earlier the first time that he had tried to reach her, and as he turned to his left he 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 am I going under again! she vowed insistently to herself. She watched as Jason placed his hands on the submerged ledge and leaned forward, pushing against the muddy support while kicking 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 she wished that she could somehow assist him as he struggled to maintain his handhold while slowly freeing himself from the mire’s grip. Leaning to his left while grasping the rope in his right hand, he heaved himself higher onto the solid surface, and then, leaning forward as he pulled on the rope, he eventually 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, loops of rope falling from around his left shoulder and arm as he extended 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,” Angela replied, grasping his forearm with her right hand and planting her left on the ledge as she began the arduous process of extricating herself from the deeper part of the pit while he held her arm securely. She took a deep breath — Oh, to breathe again! she gasped in grateful relief — and pushed down on the ledge, the muscles of her arm trembling with the exertion. She was still shoulder-deep in the ooze, and it took a while for her to make progress against the continuing grip of the mire on her body and the wearying effects of her earlier struggles against it. You can do this, girl, she silently encouraged herself as with time and Jason’s patient assistance she gradually began to ascend from the quicksand, her naked form slowly rising from the miry surface as she laboriously pulled herself onto the submerged support. More than once she hesitated, her aching muscles objecting sorely to the demands that she was placing upon them against the incessant grasp of the gooey mud, until she finally dragged herself over the edge of the drop-off. Once safely there she paused momentarily, resting on her knees and her left arm while she caught her breath, her other arm still clasping Jason’s, globs of muck and ooze flowing and falling from her body in thick, wet clumps and splatting to the surface beneath her as she panted heavily. Wow… I could sleep for days after all this, she reflected wearily as she recovered from her efforts to free herself from the clinging mire. When she at last felt ready to try to stand up, still not certain how well her legs would obey her brain after her suffocating ordeal, she looked toward Jason for support, only to find that he now seemed to be deliberately looking elsewhere, anywhere, other than at her.
“We should, um… we should… ah, be okay now… um, Angela,” Jason said hesitatingly, averting his eyes from her as he looked toward the place where the loose mud met terra firma. “It’s not that far to the… um… ah, to the edge.” He struggled to his feet, still holding her right hand in his left as she began to stand up as well.
At least my legs seem to be working okay now, Angela said to herself with a sigh of relief as she rose to her feet, her legs’ earlier weakness apparently having been due to muscle fatigue after all and not something more worrisome, but why is he looking away from me? Jason certainly seemed to be willfully keeping his eyes from her as he started moving toward the solid ground several feet in front of him, and as she continued to grip his hand in hers she suddenly understood his odd behavior. Oh, my gosh, she realized with a widening smile, I’ll bet he’s embarrassed to see me naked, just like before, when he first saw me! That’s so sweet! Charmed by his seeming reticence to ogle her nude, muddy form when he had had the chance to do so, Angela suddenly jerked his arm back behind him, giggling softly as she did so. Jason turned his head slightly toward her, apparently still unwilling to look upon her mud-covered, 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?” Even with his face turned from her, she could see that the skin on his neck was quickly turning red.
“Um, uh, no, of course not… um… Angela,” Jason stammered in obvious embarrassment, his face clearly flushed, his eyes still averted from her shapely form, “um… no, it’s just that… um… that… uh…” For the first time since he had come to her rescue he seemed not to know what to say or to do. “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 as he slowly turned back toward her while they stood together in the shallow part of the pit. “If you say so.”
Angela stood smiling before Jason as she held her fit, toned body at her full height, muck and ooze dripping from her nubile form and merging with the muddy surface below her knees. She heard him inhale deeply as he beheld her nude, well-proportioned figure on full display, coated with a sheen of flowing ooze that brightly reflected the sunlight as it slowly rolled downward as gravity required and the contours of her body allowed. You’re the only guy who’s ever seen me naked like this, Jason, she said to him silently with a chuckle as he continued gazing at her, to say nothing of seeing me naked and covered with mud. She had felt the lustful stares of other boys and men before, even when she was fully clothed, their eyes undressing her as they imagined the degrading, lecherous things that they would do to her if given the chance. But as she watched Jason take in the totality of her appearance, she saw in his eyes not lust, not lewd desire, but what looked almost like… admiration, bordering on awe. She sensed that, even though they barely knew each other, he truly appreciated her for who she was, not merely as an object of desire but even more so as a beautiful, worthwhile person who deserved to be treated with honor and respect… who deserved the second chance at life that he had given to her.
“Wow, um… Angela…” Jason spoke haltingly in the presence of the vision of muddy comeliness that stood smiling before him, “you really… um… gosh, I mean… I can’t quite… um…” She found his halting attempts to compliment her delightfully endearing, and she chuckled to see an obvious, undeniable fullness quickly beginning to develop inside the front of his shorts. Jason 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 Angela suddenly realized that he was beginning to topple over backward in the mud. “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 she gripped his left to try to hold him upright. Despite their efforts, gravity had the last word as Jason 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 and 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 gazed into his eyes, an astonished grin playing across her face. Look at you, Jason… look at me… I haven’t been this muddy since my sister and I played in the mud as children… 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. After a moment’s hesitation 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 lay mere feet away from them.
Even though she knew that the older man on top of whom she was lying naked and laughing in the mud was little more than a stranger to her, Angela felt utterly safe in his embrace. Yes, she had noticed that he was becoming aroused in her muddy presence just moments before, but she sensed that his sexual desire was tempered by an even greater desire to treat her with decency and dignity. Now that he had kept his promise to save her life, she suddenly felt that she could trust him with anything… and with this newfound willingness to open herself to him came an abrupt, unquenchable outpouring of emotion as the pent-up burden of the ordeal that she had just endured in the quicksand erupted from her heart in convulsive moans of sobbing and crying. After a moment of uncertainty following the sudden change in demeanor that had come over her, Jason responded to her distress by quickly working his way back into a sitting position in the mud, holding her as she wept against his chest.
“I was so scared!” she cried, her tears flowing copiously, 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.”
Angela continued sobbing in his tender embrace, the memories of her terror in the clutches of the quicksand and of her merciless torment at the hands of her creature still vivid in her mind… as well as all the horrible things of which her fetish-thing had accused Jason while she had been trapped in the miry depths before he had finally rescued her… accusations that reflected emotions and feelings that Angela recognized as having been her own.
“And the last thing I remembered,” she went on as 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 as she recalled his odd, distracted behavior earlier while she had been sunk to her chin in the quicksand, his almost-but-not-quite-enough efforts to reach her, and his unfathomable tossing away of his shirt just before she had gone under. She couldn’t begin to guess how he might respond to the torrent of incrimination that she had abruptly flung at him, especially since he had just gone to the trouble of saving her life, but even as she remembered that she had forgiven him for his failures as one of her last acts of lucidity when she had been facing what she was certain would be her imminent end in the choking mire, she also knew that she needed to be completely honest with him about everything that she was feeling so as to exorcise any remaining bitterness from her heart lest it eventually overwhelm and consume her just as surely as the quicksand had nearly done.
For a long moment each gazed into the other’s eyes, and in Jason’s Angela perceived an expression of sorrow and regret over the horrors that she had experienced and from which he had been unable to spare her. But rather than trying to explain his actions or to justify or excuse his earlier failure to save her from sinking beneath the surface, much less accusing her of having put herself in danger in the first place, even though she knew full well that that was what in fact had happened, he seemed willing instead simply to take her anguished accusations upon himself, to bear in his own heart the burden of the suffering that she had endured in the quicksand, without objection or complaint.
“That’s what I thought would be the end of my life,” Angela then continued, laying her head on his chest again as she went on weeping, “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.” She sat up on Jason’s lap and again looked at his face, her tears tracing watery paths through the thin layers of 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, recalling with a shudder how the ooze had penetrated her lips after the breath had been knocked out of her. “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, a mystified tone in his voice. “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, his face a mask of confusion over Angela’s words and the emotions behind them. He seemed at a loss for what to say in response to her, and she could only imagine the swirl of conflicting feelings that he must surely have regarding the torment that she had undergone in the depths of her miry purgatory and her words of reproach toward him.
“I’m so sorry, Angela,” he finally offered, seemingly to sense that even his sincerest words of apology would be insufficient even to begin to compensate for what she had endured. “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 leniently, 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 then 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, the blurry moment of her rebirth from the miry womb of the earth flitting at the periphery of her consciousness. That’s why it felt like I’d just been kissed, she recalled as she brought her fingers to her lips, but was I really under for only a couple of minutes?! She honestly felt as if she had been dragged all the way to hell and back, especially as she recalled her endless, merciless abuse at the hands of her fetish-creature and the mire’s obscene violation of her lips and mouth while she had still been trapped within its clutching depths, before her memory became uncertain… even though she was sure that something else had happened before she had escaped the smothering darkness. He would’ve had to reach deep inside my mouth, deep inside my body, to scoop out all that muck before he could revive me, she reflected uncomfortably while she continued gazing at Jason, but he didn’t say anything about doing that; he didn’t want me to feel violated a second time. But her momentary disquiet over what she knew that he must have done to save her life after he had pulled her back into the sunlight quickly faded before the far more important fact that he had saved her life and that she again had a future to which she could look forward.
“You brought me back to life,” Angela finally said to Jason, an expression of gratitude spreading over her face, “just like in a fairy tale. My hero, rescuing me and reviving me with a kiss.” Her smile broadened as she recalled the childhood stories of fair damsels and brave knights that had so enamored her in her youth, as she considered the roles that she and Jason seemed to be playing at this moment in a very similar kind of story, and as she sensed the return of the bulging hardness that she had noticed earlier at the front of Jason’s shorts before they had taken their tumble in the mud as she now sat upon his lap… but she said nothing about that particular detail so as not to embarrass him. “The most romantic moment of my life,” she continued, chuckling to herself as she looked deeply into his eyes, “and of course I was passed out the whole time and missed it.”
Angela laughed lightly again, the moment of erotic tension between them easing with her self-deprecation, and Jason smiled and chuckled as well. She straightened up on her knees, noting how his eyes remained on her face and not on her muddy, ample bosom that was now directly before him, and looked over his shoulder, tracing the rope’s path out of the pit to the two jutting rocks between which the knotted end was still caught. He knew just what to do, she considered as she gazed at the rope, and how to do it to make sure he could save me. “You said you snagged the rope on something,” she said to him, 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 turned his head and glanced at the end of the rope, staring at it silently for several seconds before turning back toward Angela, seemingly preoccupied with something. She brought her gaze from the rocks back to her hero as she noticed an uncertain expression come over his face, as though he were trying to make up his mind about how to respond to her words of praise for his resourcefulness. “Um… about that, Angela,” he replied hesitantly, “that… wasn’t really planned.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, a note of confusion in her voice as she again settled down onto his lap.
“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 as she considered his unexpected admission. “You hoped it would catch on something…” she murmured uncertainly, turning his words over in her mind for a few seconds. You hoped it would catch… Suddenly her eyes 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 lips.
“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 dubious 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, utter disbelief etched on her face. “That’s… got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” she exclaimed incredulously as she stared at him. “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 Angela’s eyes for a few moments and smiled gently before answering. “Because I promised,” he finally replied, self-assurance and confidence returning to both his expression and his voice. “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 which she now knew 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; if what he was saying was true, she considered, then he was even more so her hero than she had imagined. “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 all that had happened to her and what Jason had told her. He promised, she repeated in her mind, and then he risked his life to keep his promise… even after I went under… even though it could have cost him everything. Of all the men whom she had ever known in her life, she realized, before today there had been only one man whom she had genuinely felt that she could trust in every way, only one man who had always kept his word with her… yet now she found herself sitting in the mud at the edge of a pit of quicksand, of all places, with a second such man.
She sensed his gaze upon her mud-smeared face against the backdrop of the forest of vegetation that stretched back toward the river, and after several seconds she felt a solitary tear trickling down her cheek. Jason 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,” Angela replied, looking away from him again. “Nothing. Everything. Take your pick.” She took a deep breath and sighed heavily, more tears following the first. After all the jerks I’ve known in my life, is he really the kind of man he seems to be? she asked herself, the insinuations and accusations that her creature had made against him while she was trapped in the quicksand surfacing again in her consciousness, before 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, sympathy in his voice. “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 even as she noticed that Jason was struggling mightily to keep his eyes on her face, “well… you know… you’ve seen my body…” Jason nodded uncomfortably even as Angela sensed that the hardness between his legs was increasing. All those other guys would’ve already been staring at my tits for so long, she thought disparagingly, they wouldn’t even remember what I looked like… but you’re actually paying attention to me…
“Well,” Angela continued, recognizing and accepting as normal and natural Jason’s physiological response to their being in such close physical contact with each other, “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.” In her awareness of Jason’s own arousal in her immediate proximity, however, she perceived no similar such vulgar intent. Instead, he seemed to be trying to tamp down his libido as he shifted his legs slightly under her weight, apparently to try to create space in the mud between her body and his while she sat on his lap.
“Angela,” Jason said quietly, still adjusting his position beneath her, “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 he had nearly met their end; it still seemed incredible to her that only minutes before she had been completely and helplessly encased within the smothering muck, at the mercy of her fetish-creature as it had sought to own her and end her… and that the very stranger on whose lap she was now sitting in the mud had risked his life to save her from it.
“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 at 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 encouragingly. “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 momentarily lowered her gaze from his face. “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 7: “Angela’s Proposition.”
