Chapter 22: Sexperiments
Late morning light stabbing down through the trees woke us.
We must have slept through all of the motor sounds that run through a campground in the morning: generators starting, ATVs tearing off for the trails, campers pulling out for the next step in their journey. I wondered if the woodsmen of a hundred years ago would even recognize this place as a campground or would instead assign it some strange kind of ritual significance?
Kaitlyn was in my arms, my upper thigh between hers, my morning wood nestled between two soft pillows. I ran my hand up over Kaitlyn’s wonderful chest, caressing her perfect-handful breasts to wake her up. I felt her hips grind back into my crotch in reply. After we’d gently lifted each other out of our sleepy states over several minutes, she lifted her upper thigh and said, “Do me again, Davie.”
We rarely had sex in spoon position, mostly just slept that way, but I didn’t argue, just slipped myself between her warm lady lips and began slowly pumping, not wanting to make a lot of noise. Tent fabric doesn’t block sound to any useful degree, and this was a public campground!
I didn’t use any magic other than the normal magic between experienced couples, knowing just how to send her to a shuddering morning O. She in turn milked me expertly with her pelvic floor muscles, so that we came simultaneously, quietly, gently.
I left my cock in her, my will causing its slow return to flaccidity to coincide with our fading afterglow.
When I finally slipped limply out of her, she spoke with a certain amount of resolve. “We’ve got a long hike to the next site. I think we should pack up the camp site today and just hit the next several sites on the road, rather than keep coming back here.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “I’m not happy about becoming homeless for the rest of the week, but this out-and-back stuff is a lot of extra work. Let me think about this for a bit.” I then lay on my back staring up at the glowing tent fabric, running traveling salesman problems in my head.
About halfway through my work, I lost my internal battle to resist slipping into professor mode. “You know, what you’re asking me to do is one of the most fundamentally difficult problems in computer science, and I’m having to do it in my head.”
She look confused, then said, “What’s the big deal? We’ve only got four more sites in biking distance, so how many possible paths are there?”
“It turns out to be n-factorial, or four times three times two times one paths to search, only one of which is the optimal path.” I crunched the numbers quickly, continuing, “Or 24 possible paths among the 4 mine sites in this case. Then you have to add in the ‘weighting’ of the edges, which in this case means the length, difficulty, and speed of the roads. But what really makes the problem hairy is how quickly the complexity escapes toward infinity. Add a fifth city, and now it’s five factorial, which is the prior value times five, or 120 possible paths. Six factorial and now you’re talking…” I paused longer this time, “…720 paths. The function takes off so fast that most calculators will only give you up to 38 factorial before running up against their limits. See?”
“Yeah. Wow.”
I went on, “It’s so famous a problem it’s got an initialism, TSP.”
“Initialism?” she queried.
“Colloquially, an acronym, but there’s a distinction. Never mind. The TSP is more interesting than English grammar pedantry.” I paused to re-collect my thoughts, then continued, “The TSP is a deep problem in mathematics and computer science, not only for its obvious practical value in routing people and things among physical locations, but also for its diverse applications in other areas. For example, study of the TSP has had benefits in the manufacture of microchips and in DNA sequencing!”
She looked surprised at this.
“The TSP is at the root of a longstanding debate in mathematics about whether some problems can be solved quickly or not. At a fundamental level, mathematicians have been able to prove that if we ever learn to solve one problem in this class quickly, we could solve them all quickly, but we cannot say whether such a one-size-fits-all solution does in fact exist. My personal belief if that there is no such solution, but fortunately, the TSP has several incomplete yet useful solutions, which are the sort of solutions we use in practical systems.”
“All right, big-brain, gimme a partial solution for the TSP for 4 mines, then!” she challenged.
“Actually, I can give you a complete solution, since there are few enough possibilities for just 4 points that we can use brute force.”
“You’re going to…hit…the problem!? Smack it around?” she asked, confused.
I chuckled, then said, “No, it means we can just run all of the possibilities and compare them. I was halfway through the possibilities when I started this discussion, so just give me a sec to finish my thinking.”
She arched an eyebrow, but stayed silent.
About half a minute later, I finished my mental calculations and lined out my plan.
Kaitlyn said, “That seems sensible. Now for your next challenge,” she said. I looked smugly back at her, and then she popped my bubble: “Your turn.”
Confused, I said, “My turn to what?”
“To get our clothes out of the bike bags. Just like I did last week.” It was her smiling now.
“Rock paper scissors?” I countered.
“Nope. Your turn,” she repeated, firmly. Then she started laughing at the dismay on my face.
My unease faded quickly, because I realized she’d set me a much simpler task than the one she’d taken on. She’d done it in her parents’ driveway in sight of their neighbor’s farmhouse, potentially in sight of anyone driving down the country lane from the nearby highway that ran up the civilized valley floor through Moab. By contrast, here we’d camped on the edge of the campground way up in the mountains, and we didn’t know any of the other campers. The two tasks weren’t nearly to the same scale; she was letting me off easy.
“And no running or cheating with magic!” she admonished as I started to get up. “Just,” she emphasized, “as I did it.”
She meant that I was to step outside, walk unhurriedly over to the bike bags, rummage through them to find our clean set of cycling togs, and calmly walk them back to hand her set over.
I paused in my squat toward the door, then shrugged, resolving to do it just as she’d done. Which meant leaving the front door to the tent gaping open behind me, just as she’d left the front door of her family’s home open behind her, my nude fiancée now framed by the tent opening! Hah!
I heard a bit of a gasp behind me, then a whispered, “Davie, you ass!” but I walked purposefully away from the tent, reached up for the bike panniers that I’d hoist into the tree last night to prevent any animals from tearing them apart to get at our food, extracted our clean clothes, and turned to walk calmly back to the tent, just as she had done on her “turn” a few weeks back.
…And I immediately saw a young couple standing perhaps 50 feet off, hand in hand, staring at me! After my rational brain un-seized, I realized they must have been hiking through the woods behind our camp site at the time I’d emerged.
I recalled that I had agreed to do this task just as Kaitlyn had done hers, so I smiled and waved at them, then resumed my path slowly back toward the tent, taking the time to amusedly study my lovely lying there like some kind of life painter’s model. I wanted to stop and take pictures, but I decided I had to continue on. I squatted down to hand her clothing to her, then as she was whispering, “Who are you waving at?” I just stood and began getting into my clothes, the couple still standing there watching.
I did not answer, just motioned her to squirm into her own clothing and come out and see.
Kaitlyn rapidly donned her cycling shorts and a sports bra, emerging barefoot to see the other couple. She waved embarrassedly at them, then we turned away from each other, back about our morning tasks.
Kaitlyn silently slipped her clean tee shirt on over the sports bra and stooped to grab the clean set of socks I’d handed her.
As I was watching the other couple whispering together as they walked away, Kaitlyn snarled, “Dammit, Davie!” though without much heat.
“You said ‘just’ as you did it,” I reminded her. “I wonder if the young woman’s last name is Johannsen?” I smirked at her.
“Agggh,” she replied, exasperated at me.
“I don’t think we need to hurry about eating and breaking camp. They did continue on into the forest, rather than go running for a ranger,” I pointed out.
“It’s a BLM campground,” Kaitlyn replied. “There probably isn’t even a full-time camp host on hand, much less a ranger.”
“I wish I lived in a world where what I just did was boring, a normal thing you’d have a fair chance of seeing in a campground in the morning,” I said wistfully.
“I thought I was the exhibitionist,” she returned.
“That’s still true. I wasn’t trying to show myself to them; I was in fact trying to get dressed, and that meant getting outside the tent. Sleeping naked is normal for me, especially in the summer, so why was it necessary to be forced into a sub-optimal choice? My options were to either a) put on my sweaty clothes from yesterday just to fetch clean clothes; b) unpack the next day’s clothes last night, tossing them into the tent ahead of us; or c) take the risk of storing the pannier sets in the tent, with the attendant risk that animals would be attracted and try to claw their way into the tent. The simple and correct option is d) leave the clothes in the panniers, hung up in a tree to keep the camping food away from animals. This bad choice was forced upon me because society says we must avoid any chance that someone may see us briefly naked. Why is nudity so frightening to the body politic that we have to make criminal laws about it?”
“It is pretty silly,” she responded with a ‘preaching to the choir’ tone.
I went on, rather wound up now. “I’m not an absolute nudist or an exhibitionist. I just don’t see why nudity isn’t one of the options for clothing, being the ‘none of the above’ choice, especially in places like this.”
“Preach it, brother!” she said with a sardonic grin.
“All right, all right. Rant over,” I conceded.
“I’ll go wash yesterday’s clothes in the creek, and you get breakfast started,” she proposed. “Or maybe we should do it the other way around? Maybe you need to go soak your head?” she said teasingly.
I bowed low to her, hands in an Indian pose of supplication, back flat, head up with a grin on my phiz. “I’ll be okay, my love.”
We separated for our tasks, me to make breakfast and she to do the laundry. When she got back, we ate a hearty breakfast of just-add-water camp food.
We had begun packing up when the couple returned from their walk in the forest. They paused on seeing us, then they whispered together and came over.
Kaitlyn spoke first, “I hope you weren’t offended by my fiancé’s display this morning.”
“Oh, no,” the younger woman said, “just surprised. He’s, um, kind of yummy.”
Kaitlyn walked over and put her hand around my waist possessively, and I just smiled at the couple, deciding to let the two women work it out. “Thank you,” Kaitlyn replied graciously.
The young woman was already in her beau’s embrace, so she leaned her head on his shoulder and smiled back, the signals properly conveyed.
Kaitlyn continued the exchange with, “I hope you two went off and did a bit of experimentation with nudity yourselves.” The young woman looked a bit crestfallen, so Kaitlyn said in a mock-stern tone, “All right, turn around. March, you two! Get back out there, and do it right this time!”
The two looked at each other and started laughing. Then they shrugged at each other, turned, and walked back into the forest, each looking back over their shoulders at us and waving. We waved back.
“Like mother, like daughter,” I complimented her, thinking about her mother’s handling of the young couple back at the hotel. Then I kissed her on the hair, and we resumed breaking camp.
It took a couple of hours of hard riding to get out to the third JRE operation, another coal mine. After we’d regained our breath, hidden our bikes, and stripped the sweaty riding clothes off, Kaitlyn said, “I’ve been thinking about your speculations last night. You know, the bit about whether we can do this sort of magic solo?” I just nodded, so she continued, “I want to try it.” I just shrugged, so she got a mulish squint to her eye and said, “I’m our designated scientist, so I bid you, Igor, to go beat your meat.”
I laughed out loud at this. Then as soon as I could get words out, I said, “Yeth, marthter. And your Igor wishes for you to have an epic wank, marthter.”
She grinned, then said, “You were saying it has something to do with love vs. orgasm, so I think we have to separate. I don’t want to even hear you, um, working,” she said euphemistically.
“I think you’re right,” I said, reluctantly. It’d been months since I’d been relegated to masturbation, and I at least wanted to engage in mutual masturbation with her, but I’d have to return to solo work today… “For Science!” I said aloud in a grandiose tone, standing proudly, my semi-erect cock in my hand.
It was her turn to break out in loud laughter. I added a military salute with my other hand, and her laughter redoubled.
We dropped an invisibility bubble around ourselves and began hiking up a low rise that looked down into the mine, this time looking down into the main pit, not staying around the maintenance and administrative edges as we’d done before. We’d walked through all of that area for this mine, but we saw nothing noteworthy, nothing to work on. It seemed that JRE wasn’t a wholly irresponsible operation.
We sat down at the edge of the mining pit and just studied it, when Kaitlyn said, “I think the biggest problem here is just loss of habitat. The BLM requires that mine lease-holders replant an area with native vegetation after they’re done extracting everything they can, but how many decades will it be before they get to that point? Will we lose species in the meantime?”
“Species are hardy things,” I replied, “so that just one mine probably isn’t going to wipe one or more out entirely, but you’re right, there isn’t much greenery around here. Wanna try to fix that?”
“Yeah. It’s high noon. Let’s go pace off to either side of the pit and make a proper showdown of it,” Kaitlyn replied in a challenging tone.
Being invisible now, I couldn’t see her face any more, but I could sense the grin there anyway.
“Genitals at noon it is!” I answered back, taking up the challenge, both metaphorically and physically in one hand. Then I felt her hand cover mine and push it up and down on my engorging shaft, so I reached over and fingered her a bit.
“Ahhh,” she sighed reluctantly, then got up, breaking our mutual contact. Then she observed, “The pit is wider than long, and we’re on the long side. Let’s each go off to the farthest points, me right, you to the left, and we’ll begin. Edge for at least half an hour before you let go, then meet back here afterward.”
“Sounds good,” I replied, and we separated slowly, our fingers intertwining from where we’d been holding hands, silently slipping apart as we reached the limit of our arms, and we turned away to take our positions.
I’d been mostly single through my adult life, so I was pretty good at masturbation, reaching a certain level of creativity and mastery of the art, if I do say so myself. I normally used lube for this, but today I’d have to rely on saliva.
Fortunately, I had many recent memories of my Kaitlyn to fuel the session.
And so, I proceeded to my enjoyable but lonely task. I didn’t keep careful track of time, focused as I was on not letting go, on edging to a peak of orgasmic release, raising the level many times before I decided to push myself over the edge.
Unlike with my pre-Kaitlyn masturbation sessions, I purposefully avoided pushing myself purely into the land of imagination, keeping an eye instead on the magical effect of the orgasm, intending to study and control it, pushing the effect into a pancake shape around me, focusing on the topsoil, not wasting effort upward or straight downward.
I came hard and loud, being well back from the pit edge and with all of the workers riding in noisy heavy equipment besides. I’d magically healed myself and regenerated from yesterday’s efforts, so I came voluminously, shooting three ropes of cum upward, seeing it appear in white streams as it left my body, then disappear in places where it landed back on my body, sliding back under my invisibility bubble. The bits that landed on the ground remained visible.
Then I slid my awareness around the area, checking my effect on it, and was sorely disappointed. Compared to last night, this effort was like a large firecracker as to a grenade. I could see a shallow dish of improvement to the land’s health, but I suspected if I came back in a month to see what actual effect it’d had, I might not even be able to tell the difference between this working area and the surrounding area. I’d done smeg all here.
Then I remembered I wasn’t alone in my efforts, so I got up and started running towards the other edge of the pit as my cock softened, hoping to catch the tail end of Kaitlyn’s working before she came towards me. As I passed the midpoint on the long edge of the mine pit I didn’t sense her life presence, so I picked up my pace and ran flat out toward the other edge, hoping to catch her in the act.
As I approached the diametrically opposed point to my own work site, I sensed her presence, so I pulled my magical presence in as tight as I could and slowed to a careful walk, intending to make no sound. I was gambling on Kaitlyn being too distracted in her own pleasures to sense me.
Shortly, I heard her cries and moans. Like me, she was being completely uninhibited, the mine’s rim devoid of workers as it was, all of them too far away down in the pit to hear us, surrounded by noisy equipment besides. I got close enough that I could hear the squishy sounds of her fingers in her vagina, and I stopped right there and got small. I didn’t want her to sense my presence.
I settled down to listen, enjoying my aural voyeurism, but concentrating most of my attention on my nature mage’s life sense. I kept it passive, not stretching out to feel any of it, just watching from my tiny-like-a-mouse position nearby.
Shortly, Kaitlyn’s cries increased in volume and rapidity. “Ah, ah, ahhhh! Yeahhhh! Hah, hah, yeahhhh! Ohhhh yeeahhhh!” Then with a bark of pleasure, she yelled out, “Arraayhahhhhh!”
I thought maybe the warriors of Sto-vo-kor might have just been warned that a sex mage was coming for them. Were they frightened or anticipatory?
‘Pay attention, Davie!’ I scolded myself.
As loud and apparently satisfying as that orgasm was for Kaitlyn, I didn’t sense the same magical pulsation as when we’d been working last night.
Kaitlyn’s gasps and hoarse breaths calmed as I rose from my squat and walked quietly over to her.
“Oh, it’s you, Davie,” she said, only a slight bit of surprise in her tone. I guessed she hadn’t heard me sneak up on her but rather sensed my magical presence nearby as she slid back to rational awareness. “It didn’t work, did it?” she said, glumly.
“I was watching the end, having finished earlier,” I said.
“Just like a man,” she said with faux exasperation.
“Yeah, well,” I went on, “I enjoyed your invisible but wonderfully audible show, and I was paying attention to the magic: it was much smaller than last night. Present, but I think this proves my guess last night right: it is the love, not the orgasm itself. The size of the orgasm plays into it, as it intensifies the feelings, but we can’t just split up and do twice as much work this way.”
“Damn,” she said, quietly.
“Well, I’m kind of happy with the result. It means you’re mine forever now! Muaahaahaa!” I said, cackling in my evil overlord tone.
“I did think that was the point of marriage, yes,” she said drolly.
“Ah,” I went on, “but what this means is that we’ll be forced, forced I say, into working on this sort of project together. Oh, so much work ahead we have,” I said in the tone of an overworked slave.
“How ever will you handle it all?” she teased.
“I will just have to buckle down and get to it. One bite,” and here I’d slipped into her arms and gave a little nibble on her shoulder, “at a time.”
We began to kiss and caress each other, then Kaitlyn interrupted, saying, “Let’s be scientific about this,” a bit breathily. I held back a groan, and she continued, “Let’s leave this site undisturbed and move out to a third spot and build a proper comparison site.”
I got up and lifted her to her feet. We were in rapport with Gaia, our minds intertwined by this point, so we mutually agreed without words to head off to the far side of the mine pit from the entrance road, equidistant between our two solo working sites. That direction was a vast expanse of virgin desert, so we hiked out about half a mile into it before settling down.
Then we spread our awareness out into Gaia, reaching as far as we could, wrapping our senses partly around the mining pit and pushing out farther into the desert into a kind of cardioid shape, ourselves at the cusp, and we began making slow love to each other.
Kaitlyn was on top, and my hands were all over her body, slowly caressing as we kissed. I don’t know how long we just kissed, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was longer than we’d each masturbated solo. I’d have been happy to continue, but then Kaitlyn slid down away from my mouth and onto my cock, then raised herself up on it like a missile on a gantry and began to bounce, increasing gradually in speed and volume.
“Davie,” she panted, “I am going,” panting more, “to make you,” pant, pant, “explode!” she promised.
“Take,” pant, “your,” pant, “time,” I challenged.
“I will.”
Those were the last words we exchanged for at least an hour.
She remained on top the whole time, controlling my release through the Gaia bond, thoroughly enjoying the twinned senses of penetrating and being penetrated, as did I inversely.
We’d gotten quite good at this, not pushing each other too close to the edge, just raising each other up and up, maintaining control yet giving plenty of mutual pleasure.
And then we agreed, wordlessly: it’s time!
Kaitlyn began bouncing vigorously on my cock, so hard that she actually slipped off it a few times, yet through the bond was able to stab herself back down on it painlessly without using her hands. I didn’t consciously participate in this, but in retrospect, I must have been so deep in rapport with her that we used my PC muscles and her thighs together to steer the re-connection of our genitals, as smooth as an International Space Station docking.
The first time this happened, I felt Kaitlyn’s surprise and relief at maintaining the contact, then I felt her wish to try it again, so we did, repeating the feat several times, purposely this time, her separation increasing each time, stretching it like the build-up on a trapeze acrobatics act.
And then BAM! our mutual orgasm hit! “Yeeeeeahhhhhhhhhhrrrrggghh!” I yelled, she yelling her joy to the sky, completely lost in the moment, so I took the magic and directed it down into a new thunderclap working. The result would take months to show fruit, but I didn’t mind; for now, I just gathered my Kaitlyn and held her in my arms.
I don’t know how long we lay there in the postcoital froth, but some time later I whispered into her ear, “We could sell tickets to that.” I had my eyes closed against the summer sun shining down on me, Kaitlyn collapsed on my chest, slightly sliding over it from time to time as our sweat repeatedly overcame static friction, forcing her to put a hand down on one side of me or the other to avoid sliding off entirely.
She just laughed joyfully at the mental image of us in an arena surrounded by a cheering crowd, a sports announcer commenting on our plays, the image clearly appearing in my mind through the Gaia bond.
“Oh, shit, Davie, we’re visible!” she exclaimed, pushing herself up off of me, sliding off my sweat-slicked hips, landing with a thud on one hip to my side.
I opened my eyes in a squint against the brightness, looked down and saw that she was right! Quickly I slipped back into an invisibility bubble, followed not far behind by Kaitlyn. “We must have lost concentration with that amazing climax, Kaitlyn!”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “We’ve got to be more careful! Good thing we’re so far from the pit here!”
After our shock passed, Kaitlyn said, “I don’t see much difference here over what we did solo. What does that mean? Hypothesis busted?”
“No,” I reassured her, “you lost control, so I had to grab the magic and redirect it. Trust me, it worked beautifully. Power out the hoo-hah, so to speak. Never mind, we’ll practice and learn to keep better control. Now come on, we’ve got to get moving.”