People disparage Winnipeg as a matter of course. It's too cold, they will say. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's too windy. It's the capital of nothingness. There's nothing to do. Even in the airport, upon seeing my boarding pass, the TSA agent remarked: "Oh, you’re going to Winterpeg."
I was en route to Winnipeg to spend a summer lecturing at the University thereof. In those two months, I grew rather enamored of the city. I found the people to be friendly, as per the tagline on the Manitoba license plate. Their demeanor was a refreshing change from the contrived ennui of downtown Montreal and Toronto, and the feral rage of people from the westernmost prairies. More unexpectedly, I admit, I found that Winnipeg pulsed with intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. And I met Stepanida.
Stepanida was a graduate student in the English department. She invited me, innocently enough, to a screening of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. The film blended aesthetic sophistication with dotty humor and, oddly enough, hockey history, and it all worked. That was precisely its beauty, Stepanida explained afterward over coffee. We agreed to see more films.
In the weeks that followed, Stepanida showed me Winnipeg. Fridays and Saturdays we'd saunter around Corydon Avenue and the Exchange District, all in an arid heat that seemed contrary to everything I'd been told. We would arrive back at her apartment and make love as the night cooled toward sunset. Hers was a very small bed in a very small room, and she was very delicate beneath me. The lovemaking was slow and not especially remarkable, but it was always a pleasant denouement to our strolls throughout the city.
The summer session ended and so too did my course. Stepanida wanted to show me more, not just of Winnipeg, but of the province, too. She insisted I stay into September, through the Labour Day weekend. I had nowhere else to be, to I took her up on it. We packed a tent in her station wagon and she drove me out of the city, prairie giving way to pine as we made our way deeper north and into the Manitoba wilds.
“I’m going to show you some very lovely solitude,” she said periodically as we drove. “We’re going to be completely alone.”
With each hour we drove, the road grew narrower, the blacktop thinner. The trees thickened on either side of the road, ragged pine receiving the waning sun in its fingers. At last, Stepanida turned onto a gravel road. The gravel road led to another turn. This was hardly a road we were on now, but footpaths in parallel. A stretch of grass bisected two matching bare grooves. The ground was not dirt but rather coarse yellow sand. Limbs of pine hung over the road and grazed the body of the car.
The trail ended in a clearing that framed a stretch of lake, the surface purplish in the twilight.
“Lovely,” I said.
Stepanida smiled over at me. “Didn’t I tell you—”
Her words faltered when she saw the campers overlooking the shore. Campfires danced at chest level. Sun-burnt, slab-thighed couples sauntered between campsites. They eyed us impassively as we drove through.
“All the sites look taken,” Stepanida said, crestfallen.
As it turned out, there was one site left, but far away from the water. We parked there and claimed it as ours. Our relief was cut short when, upon stepping out of the car, black flies the size of bullets converged upon us. They stayed in our orbit as Stepanida and I pitched a pup tent. We had to shoo all the flies out before we could bed down.
I had just drifted off when I was slapped across the forehead.
“What is it?” I chuffed, waking with a start.
“A fly,” Stepanida said. “We’re never going to get rid of them.”
We moved into the car that night. That’s where we slept the entire weekend. By day we went on abbreviated hikes and beach walks. We’d go until we saw some other camper. They were always chatty. By night we listened to their chatter, their chorus of laughter, the crackling of their fires. One night, once it finally got quiet, we made tentative love in the elongated back of the wagon. It proved abortive.
On Monday morning, I woke to the sound of the other campers disassembling their tents. Without thinking, I followed suit, starting to uproot the pup tent’s pegs.
“No,” Stepanida said, standing by the car in her loose sweatshirt, jean shorts, and sneakers, arms crossed below her breasts. “Leave it.”
“What?”
She wore the same pensive look she’s worn all weekend. “Let’s stay another day.”
“Don’t you have class tomorrow?”
She shrugged. “Nothing happens on the first day, and it’s okay. But if nothing happens on the last weekend of summer, what’s it all worth?”
I left the tent up. By the early afternoon, all the other campers had pulled away. Stepanida and I were alone. We built a fire and talked about literature. We sang songs, then went to sleep in the tent.
I awoke to Stepanida kneeling over me at sunrise, urging me out of my sleeping bag. She unzipped the tent and crawled out, wearing nothing. I pulled on my jeans and t-shirt and followed her out.
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She ran ahead of me along the waterline, and then veered into the lake. Splashing and shouting, she beckoned me after her. I lowered my pants, pulled off my shirt. She eyed me curiously as I stepped in. The water was preternaturally warm. We met thigh-deep in the lake. She pulled me into a kiss, placed my hand on the curvature of her hip. I hadn’t known her to kiss so fiercely. Beads of water clung to her body. The droplets seemed bigger, fuller on her milky breast-flesh.
Stepanida took my cock in her palm and hefted it. She repositioned her hand atop it, gripping it in her fist. Her gaze was inquisitive, a wisp of smile on her mouth. My cock grew heavier in her hand. Not letting go, she sluiced onward through the water, leading me back onto the shore. She lowered herself, walking on her knees to dry sand. She turned to face my erection, eyed it sympathetically, and then brought her mouth onto it.
She started slowly, building a thick slaver, as if applying a bottom coat. Her curious, tentative manner did not last long, however. Once she’d accustomed herself to my length, her pace grew steady. Her mouth bore a refreshing heat. This was all very novel, as oral sex had to this point been a one-way street in our routine, a perfunctory preliminary I performed on her. Her head was incredible. At the risk of sounding crass, I’ll say she blew like Portage and Main. But she was oh so warm, her tongue a sirocco. At the pace she was going, I assumed she was aiming for a finish, right there on the beach. I staked my feet in the sand, clenched my thighs and buttocks, and let out short, deep breaths.
“No,” Stepanida said, pulling back. “Save it.”
She crawled around me on her hands and knees, and I turned to follow her. Pulling to a stop, she pressed her round, white-ribboned backside up into the air. Her lovely feet were tensed, pale soles upward, her toes curled in anticipation. I sidled up to her, knelt, laid a gentle palm her hip, and eased into her from behind. This, too, was novel, as we’d only ever been atop one another. She felt sublime. I proceeded very gently into her, caressing the goosebumps that the morning breeze had brought up on her tawny thighs, her pale hips.
“No,” Stepanida said, angling her face toward the lake. “Harder.”
I picked up my pace, delving in and out with less and less abandon. Soon enough, with every outward back-thrust, there was a steady effusion that came with it. I went faster. I gripped the narrowness of her waist, squaring her for each thrust. Stepanida let out an affirmative murmur, eyes closed now. We had found our stroke now, and the pace was dizzying.
Nonetheless, that frantic place hadn’t deterred a black-fly that had landed upon Stepanida’s lower back. It stood starkly against the white of her buttocks, tincturing that impeccable flesh. Without breaking stride, I slapped at it. The fly got out of dodge, but I clapped Stepanida squarely on the right buttock.
“Yes!” she cried out. “Spank me!”
I would have shrugged, if I could have. I spanked her again, her goose-fleshed buttocks rippling.
“Again!”
Smack.
“Harder!”
I spanked her again.
“Both hands!”
Steadying myself with my sheathed, delving member, I brought up both hands and smacked them together on Stepanida’s ass. She brayed delightedly, and shuddered as she came.
“Alright,” she said, huffing, half-turning. “Now fuck my ass.”
I used my veritable erection as a runcible spoon, of sorts, transferring some of the excess wetness from her vulva up to the prim, puckered socket atop it. I’d rub my slick glans around her pretty asshole, and then replenish at her vagina, shuttling the juices back upward. Once her butthole was sufficiently slick, I stood and, bowing my legs, eased into her up-pressed ass. Anal takes time, of course, but as soon as my glans found admission into her, Stepanida resumed her demands.
“Faster!”
I went faster.
“Harder!”
I went harder.
“Spank me!”
I spanked her.
“With both hands!”
Her ass-halves had firmly clamped on my member, and her asshole had fully dilated, so I was able to two-hand her even more confidently, my palms slamming toward one another like cymbals. I’d never known Stepanida to be anything but a restrained lover; now she squirmed and chortled. To a hypothetical observer across the lake, it must have been something of a spectacle: A man straining to ass-fuck a buck-wild, beautiful girl on a northern Manitoba beach, his hands crashing together on her hips while she screamed instructions at him.
That image was too much for me. Beyond my control, my abdomen hitched and my jaw fell open in a short, deep, telltale sigh.
“No!” Stepanida screamed. “Don’t finish!”
I strained, trying desperately to fulfill her request. I stapled shut my eyelids, pulled up mounds of flesh on her buttocks to maintain my stroke. Mercifully, Stepanida shuddered again with finality, and I felt the tropic mist from her vulva on my thighs and heard the patter of pussy-juice on the sand.
Huffing, she twisted, drawing away.
“Now you finish,” she said.
She gripped my erection as if it were a branch and used it to lift herself to her knees. She pulled me toward her. Pressing her chest out, she furiously jacked me off. Legs wobbly, knees numb, I could barely stand. It was as if all sensation had been delegated to one part of my body. Gripping on the tiny bulb of Stepanida’s shoulder, I steadied myself. My cock felt like it was going to evaporate, to burst out of being and into pure bliss.
Burst it did, all over Stepanida’s chest, the tiny dollops spanning her tawny clavicle and her milky breasts, mingling with the beads of sweat and lake-water remaining there. When I’d finished finishing, we collapsed together in the sand, embracing one another in a deep kiss. It went on and on, idyllically, until Stepanida sprang up and ran back into the water. In due time, I fought my way back to my feet and joined her.
Later that morning, we packed up camp and started back to Winnipeg. We met no other cars. We did, however, meet a buffalo. It stood on the road, oblivious to us. We had no choice but to stop. As we waited, Stepanida took my hand. I don’t know how long we remained like that. The buffalo, at last, sauntered on. We drove on.
I left Winnipeg a few days later. Stepanida and I met one last time over coffee, at the same place we’d gone to after My Winnipeg. There was no final public embrace, let alone an intimate one. We simply offered our goodbyes and wished each other good luck. It seemed like the most mature finish. There could be no last tango. This would remain unspoken, or so I assumed. But then we strolled back to the lobby of Stepanida’s apartment and she took my hand in hers.
“I’d invite you up,” she said, “but I don’t think it gets any better. Together, we’ve both seen all of Winnipeg—all that Manitoba has to offer.”
Image credit: Exey Panteleev, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. The image has been slightly altered from its original form.