Saturday was bright, cold, and sunny. I awoke just before sunrise with a magnificently stiff erection. Given my recent sexual experiences, it seemed a waste of a perfectly good erection.

I thought about my most recent experiences as I slowly stroked my cock. But what I really missed was Catie's touch and her love. It had been nearly a month since she died. At times it felt like it was "yesterday." At other times it seemed like it was months ago. I imagined what her body would have begun to look like with twins were growing inside her with her just begin to show, her atop me riding my cock now purely for fun because she was already pregnant, and then cumming inside her. This was to be our weekend together had she not died in the crash.

In these days after Catie's death, I found my feelings were going back and forth between sadness and grief of Catie's death and the escape that sex and lust brought, if only for a short time. And though I was probably more aware than I was willing to admit at the time, each of these encounters that were or had become sexual were all with people that Catie knew. These were all people that I would likely not have known if it wasn't through their connection with Catie. With that knowledge came a sense of guilt that I was taking advantage of this connection just to have sex with these people. In the end I rationalized it as this: we were all hurting in our own ways and we were all trying to find some comfort for ourselves (and maybe to give to others) through the temporary escape via sex, sometimes very "deviant" sex. Looking back, I realize that my depth of connection varied based upon what I thought I knew of the level of friendship that they had with Catie.

My fling with Carol was essentially a one-off. Catie and Carol played together, worked together, had fun together. If it was something more than that, Catie didn't share that with me or through the words in her journals. Carol would appear from time-to-time in Catie's journals. For both of Carol and I, it was more curiosity about the other through our interaction with Catie. On the other hand, Jody and Catie were best of friends. From the words in Catie's journals, I gained a broader understanding of that relationship between the two of them. If I could summarize, Jody was the person that Catie hadn't become (yet) and there was a special bond between the two of them. It was more than Jody being "a guide" for Catie's sexual exploration (though she clearly was that). There was a comfort level between the two of them that was evident from when we first met. If anything, I think the fact that Catie and I "leaped" beyond what Jody could share as an experience was unexpected to both of them and "now" Catie had experiences that Jody hadn't tried yet, at least until a couple of days ago.

I thought about what it would have been like for Catie and I to be with Mark and Jody as the four of us explored both swapping and threesomes. Those were pleasant thoughts and brought me to pleasing orgasm that emptied my balls. As the ecstasy of cumming subsided I was faced with the reality that I had a puddle of cum in my navel and on my belly, that I was alone in bed, and the slopes were waiting. I wiped the cum off my stomach, got dressed and went downstairs to get breakfast. The dull ache of Catie's loss returned.

After breakfast, I finished getting into my skiwear, grabbed my skis, recovered my rental car and was off to Breckenridge. Traffic wasn't bad on I-70 with only one slowdown near Idaho Springs. I got there before 10 AM, got my skis off the roof rack, got my lift ticket and started explore the three peaks that comprised the Breckenridge ski area. I had a taste of the much wider slopes during the previous afternoon at Keystone. There was so much terrain to choose from. I started the morning at Peak 8 and finished the after noon by moving over to Peak 9. Almost completely separate ski areas. The snow as great in the bright sunshine of the morning and midday. But as the shadows lengthened in the afternoon and the light got flatter, it was more challenging for tired muscles.

I dropped off my skis to be waxed before I left Breckenridge and the ski tech said "you must not be from around here because these are the sharpest skis I've seen in two years here." I walked about the village, got something to eat, and bought some sunglasses to help with the flat lighting and other light conditions. I still have those glasses after all these years.

The drive back to Denver wasn't bad and I returned to the hotel at a reasonable time. But of the nights I spent alone after Catie's death, this one stood out as the hardest one. No longer in shock, no longer running on adrenaline, no longer with Catie's friends and family. And maybe what made it more challenging is that I had brought a couple of Catie's journals with me to read the words from the woman I loved and to write a few in my own journal.

I had been reading some of her journals over the past couple of weeks and learned things about the years before she and I met. I learned that she loved her family and the perspective of being the oldest child growing up in a house with two brothers and her young sister. She adored her dad and loved her her mom and the way she was a strong woman in a great partnership with her dad. It was clear to me that she wanted something like that for herself and maybe, just maybe, she had found that with me. Her mom was right, at least from what I read; the two of us finding each other like we did just energized her.

I learned about her first sexual experiences as a geeky girl/young woman growing up in Portland, Oregon. She wrote about her first experiences with males and with females. It was pretty funny reading about her first times with males from her perspective and that there had to be something more to all the hype. She was smart (I knew that) but she wasn't one of the "hot girls" in high school. Even though the times were different (and more maybe more dangerous in being outed), she found a certain "safety" in the friendship and close intimacy with some of her female friends and she felt deeply connected to them. Catie, like me, had physically changed (became more physically attractive) after high school. Reading about how those changes were perceived during her 10th high school reunion was actually amusing. A few years later, I would experience something similar when I went to my 20th high school reunion. And if I felt any anger from the words I read, it was reading about the relationship she had before me with a guy who lived in Glenview. Catie had gotten out of that relationship on her own. If there was anything I read into her words, it was how different I was in the freedom I allowed Catie to experience with me. She knew, almost immediately, that I wasn't about controlling her.

What I was reading (then) covered the times from the summer of 1985 before we met until the her last entry just before she died. It was interesting reading about myself though her eyes and her words and much of what I've written here is influenced by the story that she told in her journal(s). Most of what I read, I already knew because of how we talked with each other and what we shared. But she expanded on those feelings in her written words. So, after taking a shower to relieve the tired muscles, it was poignant that I was sitting in the hotel room bed reading her words on the weekend that we planned to be together.

What she wrote about our sexual encounters was extremely erotic. I read until just before midnight with multiple masturbations and enemas inspired by the words she wrote about the experiences we shared. After cleaning up for the night, I drifted off to sleep missing Catie and thankful for the times we had together and wishing we had more.

I awoke to another glorious day and another glorious erection. I repeated the morning routine from the previous day and soon I was on the road to Arapahoe Basin (A-Basin). As part of the Keystone Resort I could park there and ride the bus up to A-Basin if I wanted/needed to. A-Basin seemed more challenging to me in the morning. But, by midday, I was navigating further up the mountain. It was relatively warm in the basin and by midday I had shed my jacket. Although I would occasionally ski all the way down to the base, I mostly stayed above the mid level at the Alpine Hut (it's been replaced and is named something different, but was a rustic place). When the Super Bowl started late in the afternoon, the play-by-play was being broadcast over the outdoor speakers at the hut. It was a good skiing day and after the day was done, I went down the road to Keystone to hangout at the base village, drink a Corona and be with other skiers after another great Colorado ski day.

The drive back to Denver had the typical backups on I-70 east as people headed back from a weekend in the mountains. I listened to the game in the car and by the time I returned to the hotel, the game was over and the Chicago Bears had won the Super Bowl. I figured that Mark and Jody were out with their friends. I left both of them messages of congratulations and hoped they were doing well. I ate dinner and returned to my room and watched some of the post game coverage and then returned to reading more of Catie's journals.

Jody called me later that evening after getting my message. She and Mark had been out. She heard the message at Mark's house before she heard the one I left for her at her condo. She asked how I was doing. I told her I was doing okay.

"That's good. Any stomach problems?" she asked.

"Not anymore than usual when going to altitude (referring to being in the mountains above 7,000 feet)," I said. "Why?"

"Because you had your tongue up my ass so much the other night that I hoped you didn't get sick," she said.

"I did, didn't I?" I asked.

"Yeah, you did," she said. "And I really liked it. Mark still doesn't know what to make of it and all the cum you took out of me."

"It's like getting to Carnegie Hall...practice, practice, practice," I said. "How about you? You did your share of ass-to-mouth sucking." I asked.

"I figured if you could suck the cum out of my ass, the least I could do was suck your cock after the load you shot in there," Jody said.

"I haven't done that much, like that, in the past," I told her.

She told me that whenever I felt the need to cum in her ass and then lick the cum out, I was welcome to do that. The conversation was getting pretty hot and raunchy and I was getting hard talking to Jody this way. Catie and I had many conversations like this when we weren't talking about more serious stuff.

I told her that I was reading a couple of Catie's journals that I brought with me. I asked Jody if she wanted me to read some of what Catie wrote about our (Jody, Catie, and I) first time together. I told her that she'd like it.

I picked a passage from Catie's journal where she described what she saw and felt as she held the enema bag up by one hand and the nozzle in my ass with the other. Her written commentary was all about watching my ass move as I was thrusting my cock into Jodie and how much she liked watching me/us do that. And she liked watching Jody's response because she (Catie) knew how good it felt. She went on to write about watching my cock slide in and out of Jody's pussy, the way my balls moved and watching us cum. It was quite a long passage.

She told me that she remembered the particular time that Catie wrote about and although she had tears flowing from my reading the passage to her, she also found herself incredibly wet from me reading it to her.

"Are you sure it's not just Mark's cum?"

"Well, that too," she laughed. "But hearing you read that and thinking about us fucking with you just makes me wet and makes me want you inside me the way Catie wrote about it." There was a long pause before she said "I miss her so much." The conversation went back and forth between missing her and us talking about the fun we had together (some of that was the fun that Catie and Jody had together).

My heart beat a little faster. It turned into phone sex.

At the end I remember asking, jokingly, "was it as good for you as it was for me?"

As we wound down our conversation, we did return to how the skiing was. The thing that was so different was the size of the slopes and just the amount of skiing I could get in on any given day. There was a certain skiers high from being there on the slopes like that. We finally said goodnight and I cleaned off the pool of cum that was on my stomach.

I had considered going skiing on Monday and then coming back in the early afternoon to help setup the meeting room where the workshop was going to be held. Instead, I chose to stay around Denver. That meant I could lay in bed for a few hours, read some more of Catie's journals and enjoy a number of warm enemas and the cum that came with them.

The workshop started on Tuesday morning and we had somewhere around 90 attendees. The thing that distracted the first day of the workshop was the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It was one of those moment in time events that was so shocking to many, that it was distracting to a large number of people and you remember where you were when you learned what happened. The workshop went well, particularly as it was the fist time presentation with an eye towards critique and adjustment to the course after this first full-scale presentation. By Wednesday, several groups were discussing where we might go after the workshop was over. I was eventually lined up with the group wanting to go to Vail and one of the people in the group knew where we could find places to stay at very reasonable rates because it was between two holiday weekends.

I called Jody to give her the information about where some of us were planning to go and to pass the information along to Mark. I needed to know if they were coming out so I could arrange for a condo for us. She told me that they probably wouldn't be flying out to Colorado because Mark needed to be in Canada on Sunday afternoon rather than Monday. I said to her (jokingly) that she could fly out to Denver and we could go model our stretch ski pants on the slopes of Vail over the weekend while he went to Canada.

"I bet your ass looks good in stretch pants," I said.

"You know it does," she exclaimed.

She told me that she just might take me up on that offer. I found my thoughts racing at the thought of spending the weekend with her in Vail. But I also sensed that doing that would create problems. After such a wonderful visit with the two of them, the last thing I wanted to do was create difficulties with them or between them. In the end, she didn't fly out to Denver to be with me and I ended up staying in a large condo with seven other people. Our first day of skiing was Saturday. There were four people who were real novices at skiing and they pretty much skied together all day. There was a couple from the Washington, DC area and another collaborator on the workshop that I skied with. We were all at roughly the same skiing levels and explored the more advanced (meaning intermediate) terrain that Vail had to off. We all met together for lunch at MidVail and planned our evening dinner together while we were at lunch. At the end of the day, the two groups met together at the base of the Lionshead gondola and we took our shuttle bus back to the condo for showers and cleanup for dinner and the rest of the evening. I had a great time skiing and learned a lot about more challenging ski terrain (like skiing deep powder) which would be beneficial later in the ski season.

None of these people knew about Catie or any of the circumstances surrounding her. A couple of the people knew about my separation from my wife and our pending divorce but it wasn't a dominant part of any conversation. And once again, for the day sliding down the slopes, my focus wasn't on the loss of Catie, It was the focus on the joys and pleasures of skiing (with friends)

On Saturday night, after a great day of skiing, I bowed out of the bar scene after dinner and went back to the condo. There were snow showers passing through and the sky would alternate between cloudless above me, to the passing of clouds dropping snow. It was a cool effect as I was sitting in the outdoor hot tub watching the steam rise from the tub and the snowflakes falling around me and looking up to the sky lit by the diamonds of the stars.

After I returned from the hot tub, I decided to give Jody a call to let her/them know what they were missing. I got her answering machine instead. I said something like:

"You guys really missed it! A great day of skiing, a great dinner in the village, and I just got back from the hot tub watching the snowflakes falling while the steam was rising. Wish you were here to finish off a great day. Hope you are having a great weekend."

Sunday was another bright and sunny day. Some of out group headed back to Denver midday. Most of us skied all day. My original plan was to ski all day, drive back to Denver on Sunday night, and fly back to North Carolina on Monday. About noontime I was eating lunch at Eagle's Nest at the top of the gondola lift on the western portion of the mountain and I called back to my answering machine in NC to retrieve any messages. There was one from Jody and she asked me to give her a call if I could.

It called her back and asked her "what's up?

She told me that they heard my message and she told Mark that they should have gone to Denver to be with me. The description of sitting in a hot tub getting steamy and watching the snowflakes fall was very appealing to her. She told me that Mark was being a bit like "a stick in the mud" about it. She told me that he had already left to catch his plane to Edmonton.

She asked me to come back to Chicago, if I could. I told her I could but I needed to fly home by Monday evening. She told me what she had in mind and I told her that I'd see what I could arrange and would call her back. I changed my flight schedule so that I would take a late evening flight to Chicago and then fly out of Chicago the next afternoon. I cancelled my hotel room in Denver and then called Jody back. I told her everything was all set, gave her my flight information and told her that I'd call her later.

I went back to skiing with my friends. I could think about the upcoming evening on the lifts. But when I was on the slopes, I needed to be careful about letting my mind drift to the upcoming fuckfest. Talk about hard skiing (or skiing hard).

With our last runs completed, we left Vail. Some of us would meet in Frisco at one of the hotels that had a great all you can eat buffet. It wasn't too crowded because many of the weekend skiers were already on the way back to Denver. Then there were people like us looking for an inexpensive meal after a day of skiing. We gathered around a large table and talked about work and skiing. We finally prepared to leave, said our goodbyes, and left. I headed directly for the airport, turned in my rental car, changed plane tickets and checked my luggage including my skis. I called Jody and confirmed my flight and that she would be there to pick me up.

As I sat there in the terminal waiting for my flight to be called, I reflected upon the week and mostly about the way the workshop had gone so successfully and the way my skiing experiences had turned out. I also noted that once again, I was flying to Chicago for more sexual fun and attention...this time with Jody. The question "What am I doing?" did pop into my mind and questioning if I should even be doing this with Jody. But I didn't dwell upon it as I waited to board the plane or once I was onboard. She would be waiting for me at the other end and that was all that mattered in the moment.