Project Passion (2 page)

That was nothing compared to this.
There was that fear again when she went back on the internet late
at night, and started, possibly kidding herself as to its
seriousness, but looking for men.

At first, she searched sites which
were clearly in other towns. She scrolled through a few of them, as
she did sometimes for porn, and saw the odd guy that might have
been interesting. Most of the pictures were garbage, a lot of
penises, mouths full of semen didn’t shock her, but this was a
fantasy and not just a meat-market kind of thing for
Heather.

She eventually checked out a site in
her area of the state, almost frightened of what or who she might
find. If she ever saw a familiar face, she wondered what she might
think of them, or herself, again. The nun who looks at porn. I saw
you on there. Your IP address has been logged…

A terrible thought it was,
too.

They were all mostly the wrong type of
guys. She was looking for something very specific. It wasn’t an
openly normal lifestyle she was looking for. There was no way she
could ever handle that.

This was pure fantasy, and if she was
going to do it, then she was going to do it right and have it just
exactly the way she had always imagined it. She would be willing to
pay for it, if it was done properly. It was a terrible risk. It was
to be lust for its own sake. She would suffer in Hell for eternity
and that was that. But it was a price she had come to accommodate
herself to…however all that came about.

In the final analysis, it was better
than just being lonely, and slowly growing old, and quietly and
fearfully masturbating once a week, if she was lucky, for the rest
of her life. Raw sex of almost any kind, with almost anyone, might
make up for being alone a lot of the time.

It was better than not knowing. She
had nothing to lose.

#

When the chat box popped open and
Braden appeared, Heather sort of took it amiss at first.

Her initial thoughts were not good,
and she’d never answered any of the alleged women that did that on
girlie websites where she went looking for male bodies to fantasize
about. Some of the other sisters had strangely intimate
relationships. No one really talked about it. She wondered what
they would think of her now!

But as her pulse rose and her heart
pounded, Heather’s thoughts raced and she thought, why
not?

Why not? She clicked on the chat
box.

If nothing else, she could at least
ask a few questions. That was what had always killed this project
in the past, many times in fact.

She didn’t know how to go about
picking up a man. Very few men had the nerve to make passes at a
nun. Of the few that did, it was rare to have it happen at a
convenient time and more especially, the right sort of place. Those
men were usually repulsive at first glance.

#

There were days when it was hard to
believe she was thirty-eight years old and still cared what people
thought.

When she arrived in the parking lot at
the dock on Lake Bonsett and didn’t see Braden’s vehicle, she
wondered how long she could wait around. She only had so many days
leave. She had reservations in the park and she was an occasional
canoeist anyway. Their charity dragon-boat team was always a hit,
and known to be competitive. She’d half expected the guy not to
show. She struggled herself; the last few miles, even breaking off
once and driving five miles back the other way. The trouble was,
she’d made it this far, so she turned around, barely able to
breathe, and kept going. The car was rented for a week. It was all
paid for. It was her Uncle Daniel’s canoe. It had to be accounted
for. Seven days alone in the bush, meditating on the nature of
Christ. That’s what she told them and so that’s what she had to
do…

She could go into the woods and kill
herself. She could go into the woods and cry for a week. She could
go into the woods and God might talk to her…she had a few foul
words of her own.

Braden had mentioned that he wasn’t
much of an outdoorsman. Heather had wondered which of them was most
likely to chicken out and for what reasons. Not everyone was into
the outdoors, but it was part of her vision. It was for safety and
privacy. She would have thought she would have been the first to
back down, obviously that was the most likely. Braden had fooled
her by not being there.

Feeling slightly relieved about the
whole thing, Heather loaded the canoe after a half-hour or so, and
set off up the lake in search of a viable campsite, determined,
come what may, to enjoy a few days of vacation in the wilderness.
That was the sensible thing to do. She still had the end of a
broken shovel, hastily sawed off at about fourteen inches. She
found it in the garden shed while she was doing spring cleaning and
smuggled it up to her room under a folded rain-coat. It was in the
bottom of her pack. A flutter went through her abdomen at the
thought of it.

It was an escape from reality. Of
course, that isn’t really possible, is it?

#

Her heart faltered. She contemplated
the unthinkable. In the soft evening air came the unmistakable pop
and rattle of a small outboard motor. The place was deserted this
time of the season.

She could do nothing, for the odds
were it was nothing, probably just a fisherman or more likely two
of them, out for an evening troll. They would go up one side and
then go back down the other side of the lake.

The word troll stuck in her mind. Yes,
an apt word. She could troll for cocks…there was nothing stopping
her.

With a quiver in her midriff, Heather
turned and bolted up to the tent. In the unlikely event that it was
Braden, and that in spite of finding Heather not there and just
giving up, he was coming after all, there were a couple of things
she’d been putting off. If it wasn’t Braden, there was small
likelihood of them coming ashore anyway. She could always get a
little kinky later on and masturbation in the wilderness could be
very good. It had enough temptation of its own. That was an idea
she was more comfortable with…

Aware of the pun, she was too
terrified to smile. Braden was coming ashore. It had to be him.
Please God, let it be him. She raced to get ready.

Heather was quickly on a gravel beach,
on the far side of a small headland, thirty yards from the
campsite, as the sound of the motor built and built.

The logical conclusion was that it was
coming straight towards her site. The lake narrowed at this point,
widened out into a basin, and then there was a landing a mile and a
half away on the other side of a small curving bay. A long range of
low hills receded off to the southwest.

Her canoe lay on the beach, visible
for several kilometres at least.

Heather stood, letting the Nair on
legs, lower back and tummy do its work. She had never done this
before, and after careful reading of the instructions, again with
the terror at work on her system, was hoping she still had enough
time. Her thoughts were all mixed up, in some ways she was hoping
whoever it was would go right on past.

What if they stopped and it wasn’t
Braden?

What if they stopped and
it
was
Braden?

Could she really do it?

What if they stopped, and it wasn’t
Braden, and what if she was all dressed up in the skimpy shorts
she’d cut off from stolen jeans, and what if she had her lips done
in that nice hot pink gloss she’d picked up that day? What if she
wasn’t wearing any top and three teenage boys stepped out of a boat
and decided this was too good a chance to miss?

What if a couple of horny and very
hairy fishermen wanted her? Big arms and bristly whiskers. What
about that, eh? It’s not like anyone around here knew her, or that
anyone here was anything but a tourist from somewhere far, far
away…she wondered how much of that actually went on. What if they
laughed and called her a slut or a whore, and beat her up and left
her for dead…of course she was just scared. She knew that. She was
a big girl, she could probably take care of herself. It made for an
interesting mental picture, though, runaway nun beats off
attackers, but even so…even so. If it was a pair of lesbians in a
boat, she would try and get them interested…she might be
interested.

She’d heard of sexual tourism, but
this was different. This was her and didn’t she have the right to
try and act out a fantasy too? She wasn’t prepared to take a lot of
abuse from anybody. Not if she didn’t have to…she could always dive
in the tent. She would run off into the woods and not come back
until they left.

These were all very good notions. She
abruptly waded into the shallows and began rubbing the drying dirty
foam off of her skin. Real women, normal women…surely she was a
normal woman at some level, but they did this all the time. The
impression was all new to her. Unlike shaving there was no need to
go back and do it again. She popped up out of the water and
staggered back up to the beach. The bottom there was all sharp
rocks and she wanted a razor to do her bush and armpits
again.

The motor noise sounded all too
close.

With a stab in the heart, a stab of
hope and a gush of anticipation, something that made her gasp for
breath and wave her hands around in confusion, the boat was coming
right towards her. It sounded like they were right there, as she
brushed her teeth, applied the gloss, and threw on what little
costume she’d had the nerve to arrange. Once or twice she had taken
a bath with bath beads and lots of foamy, blue-coloured water. It
always made her horny. It was a shame she couldn’t do that now. She
could be waiting for him in a foamy blue bath. She loved how her
body looked in the foam. Every part of her vision had its dark
side. What if Braden had been lying about a few things? And what if
he didn’t come, either? Now that all of her hopes and terrors,
fears and desires were up. What if he brought a friend or two and
they gang-raped her? Her face lightened at the thought. Heather was
hyperventilating and moaning quietly, mouthing curses in her state.
God, yes, rape me…but be gentle and do it slowly. One at a time
please, boys. No! She could suck a cock at the same time. A big
one. She could have slapped herself in her sudden rage, but
controlled the impulse.

The motor was so loud that Heather
couldn’t even think straight anymore.

She had wine in a cooler. Get the man
drunk. Get them both drunk. That was a plan…men were easier to
handle when they were drunk. She’d read that somewhere. Especially
if all you wanted was sex. She’d laughed at the time, but that was
what it said.

All dried off, in a pair of cut-off
jeans, with rings on her toes and a silver ankle bracelet, her
mom’s charm bracelet, clip-on ear rings, a black ribbon with a bow
on it around her neck, with her lips done and her skin all smooth
and satiny from the hair removal, Heather took a couple of deep
breaths and headed back to her camp and the place where her orange
canoe lay on the rocks like a beacon to any passing stranger.
Topless was too terrifying. She ran to her pack and grabbed a black
undershirt, the sleeveless kind, one she’d cut off just below the
nipples, nervous that the thing would fall out of her packsack or
something somewhere in the real world and everyone would know who
she was and laugh. She put it on, grateful for its slight warmth as
the evening was coming on and she was shivering and shaking like a
leaf, taking the binoculars with her.

She had never felt less horny in her
life.

#

Screened by shadows and a thin clump
of cedars, Heather studied the figure in the boat. In this light it
was hard to tell, but she was pretty sure a white face would have
shown up.

It had to be Braden. Her heart began
to thump deep in her chest. She ran up the hill and put the
binoculars in the tent. Then she went back down to the shore to
wait.

The man in the boat, God he looked
big, gave a big white smile, waved and then half turned to do
something with the motor.

It sputtered to a stop and the
aluminum fishing boat, bows piled high with colourful nylon bags of
camping gear, drifted maddeningly slowly towards the beach as
Heather stood petrified.

Wrong shoes!

She still had on her neoprene surf
slippers…too late now.

The smell of perfume, underarm
deodorant and the taste of a dry red in her mouth was all she had
to comfort her as she waited.

“
Hi, Heather!”

“
Hi.” Heather managed to
get it out, barely.

She was so scared. The guy wasn’t fat
or anything, and he seemed to be about the right age.

He had a shirt on, and shorts, and a
set of aviator sunglasses. He was barefoot. His hair was short and
he wasn’t dressed like a hip-hop artist or anything like
that.

Heather waded out into the sandy
shallows, guiding the boat in and steadying it as Braden got
out.

“
You look very
nice.”

“
Huh? Oh.” Heather didn’t
know what to think just yet, but it was a start.