That Summer with Kate

My summer with Kate didn't get off to a very good start. In fact it could have ended before it even began.

Ever since I was a little kid I had spent my summer holidays on the family farm with my uncles, aunts and assorted cousins. This one was going to be different, for a start it was longer than normal, given that I had graduated high school and was heading for Uni, and this started a month or so later than school. And this was the first time that I had brought a girl with me.

Stephanie and I had been going together for the past six months since she joined our church youth group. There had been a scramble amongst the boys to see who she would go with, and it came as a shock to me that I was the chosen one. It could have been that I had expended little effort to attract her because, given my track record with the opposite sex, I held out little hope of success, I don't know. For whatever reason, I was chosen, not that I was about to complain. Our friendship had progressed steadily, given the constraints placed on it by the church, and our schooling. We spent time together studying and kissing, but that was as far as it got, because our eagle-eyed parents seemed to have this radar that told them if we made any attempt to progress beyond that. I had high hopes that away from these constraints things would progress, so I invited her to spend some of the holidays with me on the farm. I was over the moon when she accepted, on our making an undertaking when discussing this with our parents, that we would not do anything silly, like make love.

From the very beginning the rellies seemed to make a concerted effort to make her stay comfortable, stopping short of letting us sleep together. She shared a room with my cousin Lynn, while I slept in the sleep-out on the back veranda. There was no chance of us doing anything. Even our walks in the bush (a State Forest) surrounding the farm on three sides, offered little to no opportunity, as we were always accompanied by at least one cousin who acted as a 'guide'. The guide was more of a wet blanket, never allowing us to wander off on our own.

After a week things began to go downhill between us. It began when I tried to take her for a walk up to the waterfall. This was a spectacular bit of scenery, a creek cascading some hundred feet over a cliff from the high plateau into the gully below. On the north side of this steep gully was a temperate rain forest, because the sun never really reached the bottom of the gully, while the southern side that got a lot of sun, was a temperate eucalypt forest.

We followed the creek up from the farm, and about halfway up we had to leave the creek and strike up the slope to the base of the cliffs that lined that side of the gully. All was going reasonably well until Stephanie let out this almighty scream. "Get this thing off me!" She screamed, pointing to the leach that was sucking her blood out of her like it was going out of style.

"If you leave it there it will drop off when it has had enough." Cousin Geoff told her with a smile on his face.

"I don't want it on me for a second longer, just get it off!"

I grabbed it and pulled it from her. "It'll bleed for a while. You see these things use an anti-coagulant to help the flow of blood. You aren't going to tell me that you're afraid of the sight of blood, are you?"

"Take me back, now!" She looked daggers at me. What else could I do? I took her back.

It didn't get any better from that time on, and the whole thing came to a head when I was asked to walk over to a neighbour's property and pick up the mail. The neighbour, Greg Brown worked in town, and drove past the local Post Office on his way home. As there was no mail delivery out to the farm, he would collect the family mail as well, and someone would go over and collect it from him. The walk was a couple of kilometres each way across the paddocks, twice that by road, and Stephanie decided that she didn't want to walk that far. Not that I blamed her, because there were at least half a dozen barbed wire fences to negotiate, and her efforts with these had not gone well. When I eventually returned, she did not take kindly to the fact that it had taken a lot longer than expected.

I offered no explanation as to why it had taken so long, hoping that she would not complain, but she did. It wasn't until dinner time that my silence jumped up and bit me. "Did you bump into Kate while you were over there, we heard she was back for the holidays before heading off to Uni." Uncle Trev asked.

"Kate? Who is this Kate that you're talking about?" Stephanie asked.

"Kate Brown, she and Adam here had something of a fling last Christmas." Cousin Lynn said.

The daggers that emerged from her eyes pierced me and had me pinned to the wall. "Oh you did, did you?" There were icicles in her voice.

"I wouldn't call it a fling as such, just being friendly." (I was scrambling to save my skin here.)

"If you thought he took a long time this evening, it used to take him hours last time." Auntie Sybil said. "We were beginning to think that he was going to move in with them." (Shit, you can really rely on relatives to drop you into it, can't you? Why are they doing this?)

I tried to heal the rift between us later that evening, but it was soon obvious that I had failed. "Would it be possible for someone to drive me into the train station, I need to go home." Stephanie dropped this particular bombshell as we sat around having a light supper before going to bed.

"But I thought that you were staying here for another week."

"I have things to do before starting as a Student Nurse." She told them. (How come she never mentioned this before?)

"How come you never mentioned this before?" I asked her.

"I thought that I would enjoy this holiday, I can see that I was wrong." The icicles told me.

"Then why have you not said anything before this?"

"Because you neglected to tell me about your friend Kate before this."

"Kate is just a friend, you are my girlfriend, and you mean more to me than she does." (Even before I had finished this statement I realised that she wasn't about to buy it.)

"I don't think so. If I am your girlfriend you would have come straight back instead of talking to her for so long."

"I wasn't only talking to her. Her parents were there as well." (I knew that it was the wrong thing to say to her, but I had to say something.)

"Whatever. It would seem that Kate and her family are more important to you than I am. I want to go home tomorrow, and that's final."

"I'll come with you." (I was hoping that time on the train would give me the opportunity to salvage my relationship with her.)

"Don't bother, I can get home on my own. I would prefer to get home on my own. I never want to see you again."

I tried to heal the rift between us the next morning, but she would have none of that. I carried her bag onto the platform and stood silently by her side until the train arrived. I attempted to kiss her good-bye, but that failed. She grabbed her bag from me and headed straight for the carriage door, not once looking back at me. I tried to get a last glimpse of her as the train left the station, but she was seated on the far side of the carriage, looking intently at the glorious scenery of the station buildings on that side of the tracks.

Word travels fast in small country communities. I realised that when I was asked to collect the mail again. As I headed across the paddocks I came to the conclusion that this wasn't such a bad thing. And it got better when I was met at Brown's door by Kate. "They tell me that your girlfriend has left you."

"I wouldn't say that. She had to go home to get ready for when she starts work."

"A little bird told me that things didn't go well last evening, and it looked like a final split with no hope of reconciliation."

"That little bird should mind her own business."

"Changing the subject, what are you going to be doing at Uni?"

"She, your little bird, must be slipping if you have to ask that. If you must know, I'm doing Engineering."

"Amazing coincidence time, so am I. With a bit of luck we'll run into each other from time to time."

"It appears as if luck has little to do with this. The rellies knew months ago that I would get the marks I needed to get into Engineering, and it doesn't take a mental giant to know that they would have told your parents."

"Oh, so the only reason that I'm doing Engineering is so that I can bump into you. Is that what you think?"

"No, that's not it, but the feigned surprise is. You must have known ages ago that that's what I'd be doing."

"Okay, you got me there, I did know, but it's no coincidence that I'm doing Engineering, and it's part of my long term plan."

"And what might that be?" (I had a feeling that what she was about to tell me was not going to be a surprise, we had talked about clever ways to finance our studies, and allow the government to pay for them, so as not to burden our families.)

"I have signed up to go to the Defence Force Academy at Duntroon. I have joined the RAAF and enrolled to study Aeronautical Engineering."

"Gee, isn't that a coincidence, I too have joined the RAAF, and I too have been accepted into Duntroon."

"Then I guess we are destined to see much more of each other in the future."

"Will we see more of each other over the next few weeks?" I asked hopefully.

"Talk about fickle, your girlfriend isn't even home yet, soon to be sobbing in her mother's arms and telling her what a thorough bastard you turned out to be, and here you are hitting on me."

"I hadn't noticed you telling me to piss off and leave you alone."

"Did I give you the impression that I was unhappy with this turn of events?"

"Now that you mention it, no. How would you like to come back with me? I'm sure that there'll be enough food to go round." I looked at her slim body. "You don't look as if you eat much."

"You're going to have to drive me home, if you think that I'm going to stumble around in the dark bumping into barbed wire fences getting home, you've got another think coming."

"Does that mean...?"

I never did get to finish the question. Kate had grabbed my hand and was heading for the door. "Mum, Adam has invited me to have dinner with him. See you later."

The family knew, even before we got back, that Kate was having dinner with us, thanks to something called the telephone. While they were somewhat cool towards Stephanie, the same could not be said for Kate. "It's about time Adam brought you over for dinner, we were getting a little sick of her uppity ways. You should have heard the fuss that she made about finding a leach on her, you'd think that it was going to drain all of her blood out, and she's going to be a nurse. I wish her luck with that." Auntie Sybil told her.

"What were you doing, dragging her about the scrub? That's no place for a city girl." Kate asked me.

"I wanted to show her the waterfall, I thought that she'd appreciate the scenery."

"And I suppose that you had thoughts of getting her into that cave beside the falls and doing the dirty with her, would I be right?"

"How could you think that I'd do something like that? The thought never crossed my mind. . . ."

"For more than a second." Kate finished the statement for me.

"I might have wanted to, but I wouldn't have had the chance, what with Geoff acting as a chaperone. There was a conspiracy from the start to keep me from getting to the next base with her."

"We were looking after your interests Kate." Lynn said.

"As if I'd be interested in him, whoever gave you that idea?"

"You did. Every time we'd see you, you're asking after him, checking to see what he was doing, or who he was doing." Lynn turned to me. "You should have seen the reaction when she found out that you had a girlfriend, you'd have thought that the end of the world had arrived."

"Bullshit!" Kate said. "I couldn't have cared less about him, or her."

"Is that why you insisted that we made sure that he would be sent over to collect the mail? You wanted a chance to work your charms on him, and split them up."

"I just wanted to catch up, that's all. I never even thought about it being anything other than friends being friends."

"So you had no plans to get together over the holidays?"

"I wouldn't quite go that far. I would not be unhappy if we got together from time to time."

"Like tomorrow for instance?"

"Now that you mention it, tomorrow would be nice." Kate had this conspiratorial look on her face as it this was all a part of some master plan.

"So why don't you stay the night here, that way you can make an early start. If you ask me nicely I'll sleep in the sleep out, and you two can do what you feel like." Lynn had her own conspiratorial look on her face, as if she had been part of the plan all along. "You are going for a walk in the bush tomorrow, aren't you?"

"Well, I haven't been up to the waterfall for a while, and seeing as how Adam didn't quite make it with his late lamented girlfriend, I thought that he might like to come with me." It seems as if the cave was going to be put to good use after all, at least I was beginning to hope so.

"There are so many Freudian suggestions in that statement." I said, smiling at her to let her know that I wasn't averse to the suggestion. Her return smile significantly raised my hopes. The rellies either didn't get it, or didn't care enough to comment, or were in on it, probably the latter.

Kate rang her parents to break the news that she wouldn't be home until the next day, and that it could be late in the day. "I'm hoping to convince Adam to have dinner with us tomorrow night, if that's okay with you." She told her mother. The smile on her face told me that it was okay.

We did get some sleep, eventually, but our lack of sleep wasn't caused by any carnal activity, we did nothing more than talk, and hold each other, luxuriating in the feel of our naked bodies pressing against each other. I have to admit that it took a great deal of will power on both our parts to resist the temptation to go further.

After a hearty breakfast, and with a packed lunch, Kate and I set off down the farm track to the boundary fence and the State Forest. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and warm on our faces as we slipped through the fence and onto the track that led to the old timber trail up the gully.

The trail was the only remaining evidence that there had been significant logging activities over the past hundred years or so, the deep rut in the centre of the track was caused by the bullock teams dragging the logs out of the bush to where they could be loaded onto jinkers (an adjustable wooden frame with wheels at each corner on which the logs were placed.) for the long haul to the river and on to the markets.

As we crossed the creek where the track petered out and we would have to follow the creek, I noticed a large yabbie (fresh water crayfish) in the shallows, "Wait." I told Kate as I waded in and grabbed it behind the nippers. "How would you like yabbie for lunch?" I asked her, holding my trophy high.

"And what do you plan to cook it in?" She asked. "Anyway, if you look closely, it's a female, so I think you should put it back." Until she mentioned it, I hadn't noticed the cluster of eggs on the underside of the tail, so I put it back. "Thank you oh great white hunter, I'm impressed that you remembered how to catch it without being nipped." She laughed as she said it.

We continued up the track until we reached the stinging tree that marked where, because of the jumbled rocks and thick overgrowth, we had to turn off, and climb up the steep sides of the gully to the base of the cliff, some three hundred metres downstream from the falls. The waterfall marks the place where the creek drains from the plateau above, through a gap in the mountain range. Its catchment area is quite large, resulting in a constant steady flow of water that becomes a raging torrent during a storm. At the base of the falls is a small pool of water, some ten metres across and a couple of metres deep, that provides a refreshing place to swim on hot summer's days, and only then, because at other times the sun doesn't actually reach the pool until mid afternoon, and then only briefly.

At the side of the gully, near the base of the falls, is the small cave where I spent the worst night of my life. As kids, my cousins and I camped in it one spring night, and froze. This was made worse because the uncles forgot to tell us that the sand on the floor of the cave would be very cold, and that we should gather as much bracken fern as possible to make a mattress to sleep on. Added to that, the dog that had accompanied us, kept us awake all night by barking at the frogs in the creek.

"I've heard the story of your cold night in the cave." Kate said as we stood at its entrance.

"I bet. It was the family joke for years. I would have thought that the cousins would have known better."

"Shall we try it out?"

"I don't want to go through that again." I said.

"Not even with me? I'm disappointed in you." She had begun to gather bracken ferns from the side of the gully. I needed no further encouragement and began to grab armfuls of the fern myself. We soon had a bed of sorts on the floor of the cave and Kate had taken her jacket off and spread it over the fern covered floor. "We'll need more than my jacket. Come on, get your gear off."

"All of it?" I was shocked that she should be so forward. In reply she had taken her shirt off and was undoing her jeans. I just stood there admiring her body. "Come on slowcoach, before I get the impression that you're not interested."

I was interested, and the speed at which I got out of my clothes attested to that interest. Spreading the clothes over the fern, we spread ourselves out and embraced, and kissed. It was at that moment that I realised that I had been looking forward to this moment for years, that I had, without realising it, been in love with Kate since puberty. "What?" She asked me.

"You are even more beautiful than I had hoped, well worth the wait." I kissed her, she kissed me, her lips resting against mine. I felt my cock stirring and, while I didn't actually see it, I felt a smile crossing her face.

"I have waited for this day. I really was jealous when I heard that you had a girlfriend. When I heard that you were bringing her up here for the holidays, I had to work on your cousins to help me to break you two up. It didn't take much to get them to help me, you do realise that your parents weren't overjoyed at your choice of girlfriend, don't you?"

"She wasn't really my choice, I didn't even think I was in there with a chance, so I didn't try, and it was probably because of that that she chose me. Now that I think about it, I doubt whether it would have lasted, deep down I think that I was always in love with you."

"What's with this 'was'? I hope that you mean that you are in love with me."

I demonstrated my love and affection for Kate in the best possible way, pretty much as she demonstrated her love for me. Crawling out of the cave, she stood, and with a smile on her face and my come dribbling from her pussy, headed for the pool, diving in with hardly a splash. "Come on in, it's great." She said as she brushed her wet hair from her face.

I dived in, "Fuck, it's freezing." I gasped as I surfaced.

"You're a softy. I blame your city living lifestyle." She swam to me and hugged me to her. I could feel the warmth of her body against my chest in contrast to the cold water on my back. She kissed me, "I have to tell you, before you start to worry about it, that I am on the pill. I knew that this was going to happen and had to make sure that there would be no chance of any little accidents. How would it look for a first year cadet at Duntroon to be pregnant? My military career would be a very short one."