thrall's latest strip-tease

This is a special gift to those of you who haven't bothered with Virtual Hypnotist, but have stuck by my blog anyway while I've yammered on about it these last few weeks. I can't say I'll never post about VH again, but I do want to make it up to the folks who followed me here because of my EMCSA stories. Yes, I'm back to writing erotic MC again - and still feeling unusually self revelatory, even for me. Thus the title above. ;-)

The story itself will be titled (unless I come up with something better) "Union, Reunion." Below are the opening paragraphs, still very much in rough draft form - which does make displaying them feel very much like stripping, to me. But I owe you something.

So see if you can guess where this story is heading. I've already dropped a couple of Easter eggs into the mix, which would tell you a lot, if only you could spot them. But they're not very obvious...yet. Perhaps, looking back on the finished product afterwards, you might catch on. ;-)

---

Union, Reunion

by thrall

I couldn't stop staring at Dianne. All the way up into the Appalachian Mountains, across the Blue Ridge Parkway, and on through the rugged heights of George Washington National Forest, I kept stealing glance after furtive glance at my favorite college crush. Of course, I hadn't known Dianne was a crush back in college. I'd told myself she was my sorority sister and a dear friend. A particularly attractive friend. Nothing more.

I'd been out of college for ten years before I came out to myself, but once I did, my mind kept circling back and back and back to Dianne. Dianne, who'd been everything I could have wanted in a mate, if only I hadn't been too busy chasing guys to notice.

Not that it would have made any difference, of course. Dianne was happily straight then, and just as hppily straight today. In fact, she was married now. They were all married, or had been, except for me.

Ten more years had passed since my great revelation, and I'd only recently decided that, hell, I really would like to see Dianne again. Google found her for me in a matter of minutes, and she was delighted to get my e-mail. Unfortunately, in her cheerful ignorance, she suggested that we try to round up some more Eta Pi Lambdas for a mini-reunion.

What could I do but play along? Besides, it wasn't like I had any real hope of hooking up with Dianne in the way I most desired. And it would be nice just to see her again; to see if she was still as smart and sexy as I remembered; to see if just possibly...just maybe....

No. I was too much of a realist to believe it could actually happen, even before she e-mailed me a current picture of herself. She was just as gorgeous as ever, and she was blissfully clinging to a man just as gorgeous as she was. I tried not to wonder if she was truly as happy as she appeared, and just to look forward to meeting her as a friend. Her and the other five she'd been able to round up on short notice.

We met in Charlottesville, where we'd gone to college, and where Leslie still kept a home. Leslie owned several houses now, thanks to her fortuitous choice of major in the late '80's. The rest of us had looked at what passed for computers in those days and looked quickly away, wondering what anyone could ever see in those cryptic, buzzing boxes. But Leslie had seen the future. Fortunately for us, that enabled her to play hostess to the rest of us, inviting her ex-sisters up to the mountain retreat she'd purchased four months earlier. She'd only had time to renovate a couple of the two dozen cabins, but two cabins was one more than we needed. We planned to party like college girls and gab all weekend long.

Besides Leslie, Dianne had managed to track down Mary Katherine, a sweet, studious college student who'd grown into a sweet, studious adult - without, as far as I could tell, gaining a single pound. Chelsea and Angie hadn't been so lucky, but then, they'd each had a kid. And Chelsea was divorced now: a revelation that gave me quiet delight. She'd always been such a bitch in college; I was less surprised that her husband had left her than that she'd found anyone willing to marry her in the first place. Sara's divorce, though, was a surprise to me. She and her ex had met my freshman year, and they'd hardly left one another's sight from that point onward. I wondered what had happened between them, but so far, Becca hadn't offered any details.

A stranger peering into the rental van wouldn't have marked me as any different from the other six. I'd gained weight since college, too, but I still looked just as white-bread and ladylike as ever, and the stranger wouldn't necessarily notice my lack of a wedding ring.

The other six had asked me about that, but I'd had long practice with twisting words to suit my needs. I just said I hadn't found the right man to marry yet, and they left it at that. Thank goodness. Part of me wanted to tell them, because part of me always wants to tell. But most of me was just too scared of being rejected. Even after ten years of accepting myself as a lesbian, I still hadn't grown a thick enough skin to resist the jabs of homophobes. And these women, whether or not they were homophobes, were my friends. Or, well, my ex-and-maybe-once-again friends. I just didn't care to risk it.

I looked around the van again, taking in the frosted hair, the manicured nails, the casually expensive jewelry. Only Angie didn't look the part of a former sorority girl, but she'd come from the country to college, then gone right back again. We were a pretty homogeneous group, then and now. The closest Eta Pi Lambda had ever come to diversifying was Mary Katherine. Just a bunch of clones, I thought, and smiled to myself, imagining how little it would take to reduce us to nude, mindwiped drones - just like the kind I so loved to write about. Homogeneous, that was us. And I was the most "homo" of all. I pressed my lips together around a giggle.

The Appalachians in early summer were a maze of cool, green caves and darkly looming rock faces. The trees allowed only glimpses of the panoramas beyond, except in a few select spots that the National Forest Service had studiously marked with road signs. At least one of us (usually Angie and/or Mary Katherine) had to take a picture at every one of them. Dianne and I shot each other many a wry glance or an eye roll at the frequent stops...when the cameras weren't turned on us, anyway.

Somewhere beyond the national forest, in the depths (heights?) of Highland County, we saw the first sign for Beck's Peak. The "C" had dropped off the brown background, and Leslie groaningly explained that the county had promised to have it fixed before she opened for business next year. I remembered what she'd told us via e-mail about this area being lightly populated and little visited, and I wondered if she'd used up her entire stock of business acumen in picking a major. How did she ever expect to draw tourists out here?

I kept on wondering that, right up to the moment we turned that final corner. Suddenly we found ourselves near the bottom of a smooth, green bowl, roughly a mile square and cracked wide at the opposite end, revealing a jaw-dropping range of distant peaks. A lake of perfect midnight blue spread across the bottom of the bowl, and around the lake stood twenty-four cabins: twenty weather-beaten almost to pulp, and two gleamingly restored in what Leslie assured us was the original style. She said she'd found pictures of the old camp in a newspaper article but teasingly refused to say more.

No problem, I thought to myself, remembering a host of frat parties. Once she gets a little alcohol in her, she'll spill her guts like a pro.