A Trip to the Desert

Unlike previous stories I have posted here, this one is not entirely factual. The events unfolded as described here up until a certain point, but did not go quite as far as the story takes them. Wish they, had, tough. Names, of course, have been changed to protect myself. Note: This story includes male and female homosexuality/bisexuality, so if that isn't your bag, please move on.

* * *

Things were different then.

We were all younger, and more energetic, and more willing to explore and experiment. We had grown out of the stage where we were all intimidated by the new and the unknown, and hadn't yet grown into the stage where we knew precisely what we liked, and don't vary from it much.

A bunch of us -- pretty good friends -- all hung out with each other. Every Saturday night, we played games. Board games, card games, role-playing games, and we had found that the games were (mostly) an excuse for us to hang out together. Of course, the RPG's were the majority of our gaming -- they allowed us almost unlimited creativity, and made us use parts of our minds that we didn't get much excuse to play with in real life. And we meshed pretty well as a group.

There were six of us in the group -- our 'leader' (less because we had elected him than his just being a natural leader and a complete game fanatic) was Andy, who was openly gay, but not blatant. He could have fit in with any military force I'd ever been in (several during my tours), and the only way anyone knew he was gay was by watching him and his boyfriend, or by asking. He was almost 6 feet tall, with sandy blonde hair and grey eyes and a ready smile.

Spence and Patsie were a married couple. Spence was smart but quiet, and Patsie was vivacious and energetic, and if Andy was the brain of the group, Patsie was its heart. She figured out things she wanted to do, and Spence made them work. He worked out the practical aspects of the things we had to do -- making sure there was enough food and drink for everyone, mostly, but also looking after paper and pens and rule books and that kind of thing. He was about 5'9", with dark hair and eyes, and had some sort of office job. She got us into gaming conventions. She planned cookouts. She was about 5'7" with red hair (whose shade changed constantly) and green eyes. She and I had intense chemistry, but because she was married we were fighting it ... though we still flirted outrageously. And he put up with it because he wanted to keep her around.

Chrissy was the other female in the group. She was Hollywood starlet beautiful, raven haired and dark eyed, and very self-conscious about it. She was about 5'4" with a curvy but firm shape, and legs that went on for days. She'd made it clear from the start that she was in the group for the company and the mental stimulation, and was not even vaguely interested in dating anyone there.

Danny was Andy's polar opposite. He was the only one in the group who was not in decent or better shape, and he was blatantly, flagrantly gay. He was a little over six feet tall, but about 25 pounds overweight, and often scruffy, with dark stubble. His RPG characters were always bizarre or extreme in one way or another and he loved to flaunt how he broke the rules, but deep down he was always a coward -- he wanted to look bold, but never took the steps needed to really step outside of the box.

And I was the newcomer. I'd been with the group for only a year and a bit. I'd learned RPG's in the service (several different definitions of them), and once I got out, I looked around to find a group I could continue play with, and found these people. I was, at that time, 5'10", on the thin side, with shoulder length black hair (my reaction to getting out of the navy after 10 years) and hazel eyes.

So one weekend, Patsie said she had a friend who had a cabin up in the desert near Palm Springs, and she'd asked him if we could use the cabin for a weekend. Get out of our rut. Do something different. She also mentioned barbecuing and running around naked, and the only one of the group that even flinched at that was Danny, but he laughed it off as a joke.

So the second Saturday afternoon after that, we all met up at Danny's place, as it was our gaming central, and piled into two cars to caravan up to the desert. It was a drive of about two and a half hours, and we used Danny's car and Spence's, as they owned the cars that ran the best, and we reached the cabin at about six PM. As promised, it had a barbecue grill, a kitchen (with very little in the fridge) and one bedroom, but it also had a large, open-plan living room with a fireplace. While Danny and Chrissy and Andy tidied the place up and opened the windows to let in a breeze to cool it down (one thing it did not have was air conditioning), the rest of us drove into town and visited a grocery store to get food and drinks and ice and that sort of thing. We'd all brought beach towels and swim suits and sun block and a change of clothes, but not food, which would have cooked in the trunk of the cars anyway.

By the time we got back to the cabin, it was cool enough that we all changed into swimsuits. The grill had been fired up, so we cooked some burgers and chicken and made salads and stuck some ice cream into the freezer in the kitchen, and when we were done with the food we sat at the picnic table in the back yard and watched the sun set and marveled at the stars, which were almost invisible back in the city.

And then we went inside to get our game back on track. On regular weekends we generally met at around sunset and played until midnight, and I'd begun running an adventure two weeks before, so I'd brought my laptop computer along with my rule books, character sheets, dice, M&M's and all the rest. We set up our map board on the coffee table in the living room, topped off our drinks and bowls of munchies and resumed play where we'd left off the week before, shipwrecked on a haunted coast.

It didn't take long before we were doing battle with a variety of coastal monsters (giant crabs - Patsie commented that they probably went well with giant butter, and it was too bad we'd only grilled burgers), and apparently I was doing a fair job of keeping it active and exciting, because a half hour into play, Patsie looked across the room at me, dressed only in cutoffs and sandals, with my computer on my lap, and declared "Look at [me]! He looks like he's naked!"

Well, to be honest, all of us were lightly attired -- though cooler than it had been before, it was still in the mid 90's -- we were all wearing shorts, and the girls and Danny were wearing t-shirts, and I have to admit I had been taking advantage of that to picture the girls nude, but I hadn't imagined that anyone else had been doing the same thing to me. But everyone commented on my apparent nudity with laughs and cat-calls, and Danny said "Ooh, baby! I can see everything!"

Well, I was more than a bit warmed up by then anyway, so I reached down and slid my cutoffs off while keeping my laptop on my lap, and tossed the shorts across the room to Patsie.

"Here you go!" I said, and she cheered and squealed and waved them like a captured battle flag, scattering the contents of my pockets to the four winds.

The others laughed and cheered, except of course, for Danny, who felt I'd stepped over the line, and demanded that Patsie give me back my shorts. He grew very red in the face and very loud and did his best to kill the buzz, but we were having none of it.

"This is wrong!" he kept shouting. "We shouldn't be doing this!"

But Andy shut him down cold. "If you don't like it, you don't have to be here. But the rest of us are having fun, Patsie has been talking about running naked in the desert for the past two weeks, and the rest of us just don't have a problem with that."

Danny just sputtered and flailed around, and the rest of us laughed at him (including, I was happy to see, Patsie), and when we didn't knuckle under to him, grabbed his overnight bag and keys and stomped to his car and drove away.

"Well, that's better" said Andy.

"Can we kill his character off?" asked Patsie.

"I can do better than that" I answered. "I can have him captured by Ogres or something ... but none of your characters would let hat happen. That's the down side of not allowing evil characters in the game."

"Then what can we do? He is the only cleric in the game, and we need his healing skills."

"We can play some other game" volunteered Spence.

Everyone looked at Andy, as he was the real Game Master in the group, but he just shrugged. "I didn't bring anything else -- I thought we'd be headed up the coast, and didn't want to bring a heavy bag."

"I have a deck of cards in my bag" I said. "We could do something with those."

"We could," cooed Patsie. "Why don't you go over there and get them?"

She was obviously trying to get me to put my laptop away, but I wasn't quite ready for that yet. Though I have some very strong exhibitionist tendencies, I didn't want to be the only one in the group without clothes. I'd been taken advantage of before, and played for a fool, so I just looked around the room at the others, who were still mostly grinning. I turned off my computer, but kept it on my lap.

"All righty, then -- cards are out. What other games can we play?"

"Twenty questions?" suggested Patsie.

"Trivia?" suggested Spence.

"Truth or Dare!" suggested Andy, which got an almost universal "oooooooh!" in response.

"Strip Truth or Dare!" announced Patsie, to universal laughter and applause. The mood of the room had set since Danny left, and the party was determined to end up going where we had not even imagined before.

"Then please give me my shorts so I have something to bet with!" I laughed, and Patsie tossed them close enough to me that I could snag them, though not without leaning far enough to the side that all could see that I was still wearing my skivvies.

"Cheater!" she yelled, but I just smiled back.

"How do we start?" asked Patsie.

"It's usually done with spin-the-bottle or something, isn't it?" asked Spence, and then he looked around the room and saw that each of us was drinking from a can, none of which were empty yet.

"We could just roll a d20" suggested Andy. "Low number goes first, and then clockwise or counterclockwise around the room by who gets the next lowest."

Like he had to worry -- he was one of those guys who could roll -- legitimately -- any number he wanted. It made him great at D&D, but I wondered how he'd be at craps. Would casinos block him?

Anyway, we all rolled a die on the table, and I rolled a 3. Chrissy, to my left, rolled a 5. Andy rolled a 20, of course.

"Who asks?" I inquired of Andy.

"Me, me, me!!" squealed Patsie.

Andy looked at me and I shrugged. It was going to get down to this sooner or later anyway. "OK" I said, "but ... who determines if a ... what's the word? If a default is called? Who says when you lose an item of clothing? And do shoes count?"

"Shoes count, jewelry doesn't" said Patsie. "Otherwise it'd be over too fast."

I looked around and it looked like everyone was wearing (nominally) 4 or 5 things, unless the girls were wearing bras. And Chrissy definitely wasn't.

"Hit me with your best shot" I said, looking Patsie directly in the eyes.

"Truth or dare?"

"Truth."

"Why don't you have a girlfriend?" she asked.

OK. Starting out with a softball. "I haven't found the right girl yet" I replied, with just a hint of emphasis on 'yet' and a look right into her eyes.

Everyone nodded, accepting my answer, and Andy looked at Patsie. "Truth or dare?"

"Truth."

"Why do you always play Halflings?"

Everyone in the room groaned except Patsie, who laughed. "I like something that challenges me. Halflings are so limited that you have to be at your best to survive as one."

It had been a pretty lame (but very Andy) question, but the answer had been revealing.

Then it was my turn, and Spence was my subject.

"Truth or dare?"

"Truth."

"How old were you when you lost your virginity?"

"Fifteen."

I'd known Spence in high school (one of the things that got me into the group), and he'd been dating a chunky southern belle then. I raised an eyebrow and gestured, and he nodded, blushing, but I took it no further.

"Truth or dare?" asked Patsie.

"Dare" said Patsie.

Patsie was taken aback -- this was pretty early for dares, but... what the hey. "Roll a d6, and kiss the person that many spaces away for a minute" was the dare. Patsie rolled and laughed out loud when she rolled a 4, and then turned and kissed Spence long and deep, with more than a bit of moaning and groping. I was once again very glad I had my laptop in place.

"Time!" shouted Andy after a good minute had passed, and the broke up the kiss to much laughter, even if some of it was nervously aroused.

Then Spence, after he caught his breath, and looked at Andy, who simply said "Truth."

"Have you ever been with a woman?" asked Spence.

"No."

"Have you ever wanted to?"

"One question per round" laughed Andy.

Then Patsie looked me deep in the eye, and we both cracked up. The silliness in the room was almost up to the level of sexual tension, and we had to break that.

"Dare." I said, and she gave me the same dare Patsie had given her.

I rolled the die, and rolled a five. Everyone looked at each other in surprise, and I went with the silliness of the situation, and put my arms around myself and extravagantly and noisily kissed the inside of my elbow, moaning and groaning as Spence and Patsie had not a minute earlier, but while it got a lot of laughs, it also got called by everyone in the room.

"Default! Default!"

I laughed with them, and took the cutoffs that I'd kept sitting on top of my laptop and tossed them onto the coffee table in the middle of the room.

Andy looked at Chrissie, who said "Truth."

"When did you lose your virginity?" he asked, trying to maintain the spirit of the night.

"When I was 12" she said, "but it wasn't voluntary."

All of us stopped laughing at that one.

"Well that explains a lot" said Spence.

"Aww, honey!" said Patsie.

I felt helpless, so I just nudged the bowl of M&M's closer to her.

Fortunately, Spence was more understanding of how to break tension that we deserved, and he said "Dare" when I looked at him.

"You're a slab of bacon in a frying pan" I said. "Show us what it's like."

The others looked at me like I was nuts, but Spence and I had done this before, in an improv class in high school. Another guy did the frying bacon bit, but it was a guaranteed crack-up, and by the time Spence was done, we were all laughing, and laughing hard, including Patsie.

"Truth or dare?" she asked Patsie.

"Truth?" Patsie sounded almost afraid, remembering how Patsie's question had turned out.

"Have you ever been with a woman?"

You know, I'd never seen Patsie blush before, but now she blushed right up to her hairline. But she brazened it out.

"Not yet" she purred, and wiggled her eyebrows in what might have been an invitation or a very bad Groucho Marx impersonation while giggling madly.

Then Spence looked to Andy, who just said "Truth."

"What's it like, being with a man?"

Andy took a breath, paused, and stopped. "I don't have the words" he finally said. It's something you have to do to fully understand. You'd probably say the same if I asked you what it's like to be with a woman."

Everybody nodded. Everybody agreed. Everybody called "Default!"

Andy nodded, and removed his flip-flops and tossed them on the table.

I looked at Patsie, and said "Truth."

"What's the kinkiest thing you've ever done?" she asked.

"Well, depending on your definition of kinky ... I guess sex on a bar in front of an audience would count?"

Her eyebrows went up to her hairline.

"Hey -- it was in the Philippines, back in the navy. It's part of why I don't drink" I said, and I could see the others trying to picture it, or not. "I tell you what -- you spend a few months out at sea with only guys aboard when you're 25, and let's see if you don't get a little bit ... silly when you have a chance."

Andy raised his eyebrow a bit, obviously liking what he was imagining, and then turned to Chrissie.

"Truth or dare?"

"Truth."

"If you had a super-power, which one would you want to have?"

We often switched to a game of Challengers when our DM's were building D&D adventures, so we'd all given this some consideration, but even I was surprised when she said "I think I'd want to be a shape-changer."

"That could be fun, I guess" I said. "Being able to be anyone you wanted could be a lot of fun ... especially if you wanted to be a spy or something."

And then everyone pitched in with their own ideas of what they'd want to do. Patsie chose invisibility, Andy super-strength and Spence chose flying. I wavered between transmutation and super-intelligence.

And then Spence chose dare. So I gave him the same dare I'd gotten, and he rolled a 2.

The look on his face was enough to get us all laughing outrageously.

"Hey, man -- If I can do it, you can do it!" I said, and while that might have unfairly highlighted the simmering competition between us over his wife, it was also a relatively safe dare, having been used before, and having gotten him the advantage of a good minute of making out not long before.

But he chickened out, and just gave Andy a peck on the lips before retreating to his side of the couch to cries of "Default! Default!"

Blushing, he took off his sandals and tossed them on the table. So far, all of the males had lost once. It was time to step up the game. And remember -- we were all serious gamers. Very competitive and determined to win, whatever the game.

I chose truth on my turn, and Patsie asked "Have you ever been in love?"

I started to quibble, asking her to define what she meant, but I could tell that nobody was buying my bullshit.

"I don't know" I ended up saying. "There was a girl in high school and right after -- we though we were serious -- we'd decided where we'd live and what to name our kids, but she 'dear John'd' me when I was in "A" school. Since then I haven't been around enough eligible women to start a relationship. There are women I like a lot, but ... maybe some day?" I said the last words looking her right in the eyes.

And then when Chrissie also said "Truth", Andy asked her the same question.

"I'll willingly default on that one" she said, and looking around at each of us, she pulled her T-shirt off, She was an easy "C" cup, with firm, pink nipples that stood high and proud in the warm night air, without any sign of a tan line. Every jaw dropped to the floor, and I had to reach twice to get my soda from the table between us. She sat proudly, head up, and didn't even pretend not to be showing off. Even Andy was in awe of her perfect shape.

The game was well, if not a foot, at least eight inches by now and I was very glad I still had my computer on my lap. So glad that Andy had to nudge me enough to remember that I had to ask the question of Spence.

"Truth" he said.

"Do you feel safe with everyone here?" I asked.

"I'd better!" he said. "I wouldn't go even this far with people I didn't trust."

I noted the qualifier, and wondered how much planning had actually gone into this weekend. Had they actually intended this from the start?

Patsie chose "Truth" again, and Chrissie asked what was the kinkiest thing she had ever done. And when she started to object, we all said turnabout was fair play.

"But ... I haven't done much!" she objected. "I've thought about it a lot sometimes, but ... " she trailed off, looked around the room, and pulled off her T-shirt.

Where Chrissie's body was astounding, Patsie's was ... inviting. Her breasts we not as rounded, but stood up higher. A "B" cup and maybe a bit more, but with very firm and pronounced nipples that were very hard and slightly darker, and just begged for a tongue. My mouth was watering again, so I grabbed my soda, and found it almost empty. Sooner or later I'd have to stand up.