Chapter 36: Gardening
Kaitlyn came over to my house again the next night, Friday. We were eager to make it a nice late night, without the pressure to get up for work the next day.
I met her out on my front porch where I’d mounted a bench swing. I waved her to the seat beside me, stopped my rocking long enough for her to sit, and then started it back up again. We held hands and watched the sunset over the bluffs across the Kane Creek Boulevard, a few hundred feet down the hill from the house.
As the last of the cerulean and orange tints were fading from the sky, I got up and led her into the living room. After we’d gotten settled, Kaitlyn began, “Well, I saw The Goat in the office again today.”
“Angry little Ranger Eddie?” I asked.
“Yeah. He laid right into me, snarling about how I’d gotten off lightly again somehow and how he wasn’t going to stand for it. I guess he didn’t buy the story about remote overnight assignments being a punishment.”
“I’m sorry, babe. I wonder if we’re going to have to do something about him. Letting him have his over-the-top revenge didn’t work. I wonder if he’s a bit unhinged?” I speculated.
“Yeah, maybe. I think he’s obsessed with me,” Kaitlyn said, “and now that I’m off the market, he’s losing his grip.”
“Well, nostril zits.” I shook my head, then sat and thought about that, no answers coming to me.
“Nostril zits‽” she exclaimed incredulously.
“I’m trying out a new curse. Can you think of anything more annoying and unwanted than nostril zits?”
“No, now that you mention it…”
Then I said to her, “C’mere, I want to show you something I worked up last night.” We walked over to the computer desk I keep in a nook off of the front room. I call it my ‘office’ even though it isn’t really a separate room. I suppose I could wall it in, but I didn’t see the point. With her over my shoulder, I showed her the Jupyter model I’d gotten to a barely functional state last night, pushing its sliders around to show the sorts of things it was predicting.
“Hang on, didn’t that thing just say that my magic power would go infinite?” she asked, startled.
“Yes, but only if we push the cell phone inside your body. Here, see the proximity from center of mass? Two and a half centimeters.” She gave the ridiculous result the laugh it deserved. “That’s computers for you,” I went on, “poor data in, poor answers out. So, I’m going to have to keep working on this, which means we’ll have to keep collecting data. I expect this to be a slow process.”
“I know another kind of slow process I’d like to explore with you,” she said with a purr.
“I know just the thing, and I know just where to get it done.”
We discarded our clothes piece by piece as we walked out the door into my natural back yard, the cool post-sunset air washing over our naked bodies.
The man crept up to the house in the fresh darkness. No one was visible, so he kept moving forward along the edge of the road, screened momentarily by the junipers randomly scattered over the hilltop, giving little peeks of the house as he moved.
Soon enough, the man was looking through a side window into a half-lit room in the house. The side table light by the couch was on, and there was a computer screen on the other side of the room, casting light back past the two figures in front of it, one standing, one sitting. It edge-lit them in a blue glow, contrasting with the warm yellow light of the side table lamp. He couldn’t hear what they were saying through the window.
Then they turned towards him and grasped hands! He ducked down quickly and pulled back from the window into the shadows, only his eyes peeking over the window sill. They were undressing as they walked. Oh, my god, Kaitlyn! How I’ve wanted to see your body again!
The man watched the clenching of her buttocks beneath the loose white cotton panties hungrily, their motion creating and smoothing a vertical fold between them with the rhythm of her swaying walk. The fingers of one hand were up behind her back unclasping her white bra as she turned the corner into the next room. Oh, Kaitlyn!
We managed to get down to our skivvies as we were going out the kitchen door to the back yard, leaving a trail of clothes back into the living room. We slipped the last pieces of our clothing down our legs and tossed them onto the chaise longue on the back deck, then walked naked hand in hand into the darkened back yard, junipers surrounding the cleared area, the next section of the hill rising in front of us, the quarter moon shining down on us from around one side.
We lay down in a sandy patch and began to kiss, long and slow. We had as much time as we wanted. All night, if that’s what it took to sate our desire. There was no rush.
The man crept around the house, knowing he had to go quietly, there being no more walls to screen his approach from sound and sight.
A few painful minutes later, he saw them, slowly tumbling in the back yard, naked, their hands on each other, dusted cocoa skin on milk chocolate. Damn that…what was his name…? David? Damn him anyway, putting his hands on my Kaitlyn!
As he watched, his jaw slackened, and drool began trickling down from one corner.
His hand went down to his pants and began fiddling with the fly.
We rolled slowly, trading time on top, controlling and being controlled. It was a perfect mutual exchange. I said the first word in minutes, “Merge.”
The action stilled for a while as we both slipped into a trance and merged with Gaia, then with each other. As our hands and hips resumed their action, I pushed another thought across the link to Kaitlyn: spread out.
The part behind my house that you’d call my back yard isn’t very big, being bounded by a hill on one side and my house on the other. It drops off into gullies and hillocks on the other two sides. On paper, I own a few acres, but only a smallish section of it is flat land. The rest is all ups and downs, providing some privacy from those driving down the road and scenery for myself, but it’s not “two acres” as a farmer would understand it. I loved it; it was perfect for me, which is why I bought it.
And I was sharing it all with Kaitlyn. Perfect squared.
I slid inside her. Perfect cubed.
The man’s hand went into his pants, now halfway open and threatening to slide down his legs. The scene in front of him was incredible. Kaitlyn’s glorious nude body, rimmed with moonlight, rolling in the sand and moaning. She was getting fucked right in front of him! But by that other damn guy! Darin? It should be me! Damn him, damn him, damn him!
We slowly spread our consciousnesses out into Gaia, becoming one with my small patch of untouched land, spreading out, wanting to know it as deeply as we were learning to know each other.
But over there… By the side! We weren’t alone!! And it was no mule deer.
We shot to our feet yelling in startlement. The presence squeaked and began running away. I ran in pursuit, my long muscular legs catching up quickly. I knew the land both from experience and through my Gaia bond, and he was falling with his pants tripping him in his flight besides. I tackled the intruder, pinning him to the ground in a judo hold. He wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how much he squealed and thrashed!
“Ed!” shouted Kaitlyn in recognition as she ran up. She put both arms over her breasts and squatted down a bit to shroud her little paradise in shadow.
“Call Poulsen!” I told her. “Tell him we’ve got a trespasser!”
I watched her callipygous butt wiggle away for a sec before I noticed Ed watching, too. I grabbed his hair and turned his face to the ground. “You’ve done enough peeping tonight, Ed!” I was sorely tempted to beat his face into the ground, but I held myself back. Barely.
Waiting for the police to arrive when you need them takes ten times real-time. We waited for hours, me naked atop Ed, him pantsed and face in the dirt, held there by one of my hands in his hair, tighty whities disarrayed. So, about 12 minutes, then.
Poulsen’s squad car crunched rapidly up the dirt and gravel road to the house, lights whirling, but no siren. He got out cautiously, made an assessment of the situation, then crept around the car door, drawing his weapon, holding it at low ready in a strong isosceles grip.
“Over here, Officer,” I called. Kaitlyn, dressed now, started running through the trees before I called after her, “Walk, don’t run! Don’t startle the man with the gun!” She slowed to a walk, met Poulsen, and guided him up to the scene of the citizen’s arrest.
“Why is it that I always arrive to find you naked, Mr. Bhat?” the officer asked.
“Answers later, Poulsen. This man was sneaking around my property, and we caught him peeping on us,” I barked back, still angry.
“They were having sex in public!” the little man cried.
The officer didn’t say anything, only produced a set of handcuffs and restrained Ed, motioning me to get up off of him. “We’re going to go into the living room and sort this thing out, you three,” he finally said. “Mr. Bhat, do get dressed and join us.” He pulled Ed’s pants up by the back belt loop and marched him forward, holding onto the cuffs’ center chain with the other; the officer was nearly throwing Ed into my house. Most satisfying.
“I gathered your stuff and put it on the deck table,” Kaitlyn told me, then left to follow the other two inside.
“So,” the officer began once I’d joined them after re-dressing on the back deck, “you said something about seeing them having sexual intercourse, Mr. Goetz?” I guess Kaitlyn had done the introductions while I’d been occupied.
“Yes, fucking right out there in public!” he cried, clearly perturbed.
“Well, let’s see,” Officer Poulsen said, “it appears to me that they were a few hundred feet away from the road, probably twenty or thirty feet above it, behind a two storey house, behind a bunch of trees, and in the dark of night besides! I don’t know a judge in this county that won’t call that trespass three to five levels deep, Mr. Goetz.”
The Goat began to look scared, but he said nothing.
“Well, nothing more to say? How about you two? Mr. Bhat?”
“It’s true, my girlfriend and I were enjoying each other’s company when this perv snuck up on us, and we caught him sneaking around.” I put in, as calmly as I could manage.
“And we certainly didn’t invite him here!” put in Kaitlyn.
“That’s right. Even if you grant some right to approach the house on a social call, that’s a tough sell this late at night and then sneaking around behind the house, too.”
“Well, I think I’ve got enough to book you, Mr. Goetz. Do you have anything to say in your defense?” offered Poulsen.
The rogue ranger scowled and said, “I want a lawyer.”
“We can certainly arrange that down at the station, Mr. Goetz. Good night, you two. Sorry for the disturbance.”
“Thank you, officer,” we both said over each other.
Officer Poulsen led The Goat off, hands manacled behind his back, reading him his rights and stating the charges.
I followed the pair out at a distance. After Poulsen had put The Goat into the back of his patrol car, he turned and said, “I’m getting off in about two hours. Most of that will go into booking this guy, getting him his lawyer, and trying to get some answers out of him if I can. I’d like to come by afterward if that’s okay.”
Kaitlyn had crept up behind me and answered for me, saying, “If this is to be a social visit, Officer, come in civvies.” It was half invitation, half challenge.
“Well,” he responded, “it’s not quite social, but it’s also not official business, so I will do as you ask and leave the uniform behind.”
“Thank you. You will be most welcome here then, officer,” I responded, implicitly sealing our deal.
I remember thinking as they drove off, “It’s nice to have that weed out of my garden.”
We weren’t really in a mood to resume our activities. My back yard was somehow no longer private, and the delicious vulnerability of two lovers together is spoiled when it becomes two lovers, a voyeur slime-ball, and a police officer with duty weapon drawn. We’d need to gather the tatters of our sense of privacy back up again and sew it back together; that would take time.
So, we stayed dressed and watched a movie. I don’t remember what. Something anodyne and lovely, good balm for our abraded souls.