Juvenile Crimes - Chapter 11

Achieving My Destiny (Part 3 of 3)

When Tami came back to Dickinson for Christmas break, we worked out a plan to spend Christmas with each other’s families, at least as much as was allowed by hers and time available for mine.

My mother’s family had a Christmas Eve tradition of everybody getting together to celebrate at the old farm they grew up on (and was still owned by one of the younger sons). Part of the tradition was to have someone they knew come to the house dressed as Santa Claus and hand out gifts to all the little kids, and then the big kids. It was a packed house each year and usually pretty fun. Tami came and met most of my aunts, uncles and cousins that were still in North Dakota, and they loved her. They took to her – she was another “Days” fan – and she liked and got along with all of them, so it was a good time. The only problem is that Tami’s mother expected her to be home that night so she would be home on Christmas morning. That required us to leave early for the 100-mile drive back to Dickinson. It also meant that I couldn’t sneak in that night since her brothers and sisters were home, too. We had to settle for stopping and parking along the countryside for a quicky. Twice. 

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Along the way, Tami briefed me about what to expect and how to act. Her parents weren’t thrilled about having me over for such a big holiday – usually it was required to officially be a fiancé. Tami’s brothers and sisters were more relaxed, she claimed, and she thought it would be good to start playing board games or some game of cards with them (but NOT Bridge – that was her mom’s game with her girlfriends). That way we’d be occupied away from her folks, mostly, and it would give us all a chance to get to know each other.

“Oh, and when we’re opening gifts, do not tear the wrapping paper or my mom will freak out!” Tami said, feisty but serious.

“Say what? That’s what it’s for, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Not in our house, it isn’t,” Tami went on. “We have always, and I mean since before I was born, used scissors to gently cut the tape on the wrapping paper so we could save it to use again next year.”

“You gotta be shitting me,” I said dramatically in an effort to joke.

“I’m dead serious. We’ve had the same old wrapping paper ever since I can remember. I think I’ve seen her buy one new role in my whole life.”

I was stunned. “That’s some seriously uptight shit right there,” I said with Marine Corps swagger. “What gives with that? Wrapping paper is cheap.”

“It’s just the way it is with them. They’re very conservative and don’t like wasting things,” Tami explained. “Their ways are set in stone. Don’t rock the boat and everything will be just fine.”

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I had never used scissors to open a present before. It was awkward because it felt like I was being watched. I made a few extra unintentional cuts here and there - they were small and tapeable so no fuss. Fucking weird. Everyone was pleasant and seemed happy, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was on a 1950’s sitcom set. Each person had their specific role to play, and they worked diligently at playing them.

I started to see the idea of “plastic people” from a very different perspective. I started having some internal questions…some things just didn’t add up. They had a pool table room with a full and very wet bar with many different types of full or partial bottles of booze, but the family didn’t touch any it. All of them drank a glass of wine or had a beer or two, all very casual, with no one drinking enough to get tipsy. They were all conservative-stiff, yet the wallpaper in the room was 1970’s hipster, with jokes like: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I am schizophrenic, and so am I.” Definitely not what I thought that grumpy old badger of a mother would allow in her house, on her walls. They still had protective plastic on two of the recliners in their living room, for fuck’s sake! And on the sofa!

It was a very different world than I was accustomed to, or even realized still existed.

Tami’s brothers and sisters generally viewed me as a likeable oddity. We had nice conversations, nothing too deep beyond my Air Force Academy goals. One of her brothers took a slight interest, the rest didn’t go far beyond being polite. I looked very young to them but that was nothing new to me. We played a few games and had casual unserious conversations.

After the new year and school started back up, the former routine largely continued. The only change was that I had a little bit more free time to party with my friends on the weekends I stayed in Dickinson. Party we did. The main drag in Dickinson was the perfect place to go cruising on Friday and Saturday nights to look for parties. It went from the east end of town to the edge of the west part of town, with a convenience store anchoring the east and a Hardee’s on the west, both great turnaround and quick gathering spots to make plans. I had taken on some partying up until then whenever I could. Now, with less pressure, I had time to make some of those special memories the school administration was so concerned about.

My two best guy friends, Jim and Jack, had become good friends with each other by then. The three of us had been to our first rock concert together and been through many high school antics. They were like brothers to me. As time went on and our circle of friends and party buddies grew, we always remained close. We had each other’s backs and covered for each other as needed. All of the guys in our circle were horny teenagers on the loose looking to score. Even so, I remained faithful and loyal to Tami.

Then Tami made me go out with another girl…

The mini honeymoons went mostly as they had gone before through both January and February. In March, everything changed…forever.

Sometime after my February trip to Grand Forks, in one of our phone calls Tami said that she believed, “like everybody else,” that I didn’t have enough “dating experience” to really be know what I wanted, and that I should date other girls “just to know for sure.”

I was shocked. Why in the hell would my fiancé-to-be, the love of my life, my “one and only,” want me to go out on dates with other girls? “Where in the fuck is this coming from?” I pressed (my language was already farmer-bad, now it was taking on Marine Corps-bad, with many varieties and uses for the “F” word).

“Oh, come on, I’m the only girlfriend you’ve ever had, and everybody thinks you need to date a few times just to know, you know…that I’m the One,” she claimed innocently.

“First off, I already know you’re the One. How many times have I said as much to you? And second, you haven’t had any other serious boyfriends, so why is it any different for you?” I asked. As the words came out of my mouth, I realized the answer. “That’s it, isn’t it? YOU want to date other guys, right?” I started to get angry fast. “Who the fuck is scamming on you?”

She immediately took on a tone like she was offended that I would even suggest such a thing. “Of course not! That’s not it at all,” she claimed. “Everybody just thinks you’re just too young…”

I cut her off. “And just who in the fuck is this ‘everybody’ bullshit, anyway?” I said with some heat. “Your family? Your friends? I thought we were through with all that fucking crap.”

The argument went on for some time as she either downplayed the significance of what she had said, or she got angrily defensive at the implication of her wanting to date someone else. I was extremely skeptical and did not fully believe her story or motives for broaching the idea. We argued intensely.

“Just what the fuck is the purpose of going out with someone else if I’m ‘with’ you?” I pressed. “You do know that the purpose of dating is to find a mate, right? That means finding the person you want to fuck, possibly for the rest of your life!”

“It does not! That’s not what I was talking about!”

“Oh, really? What is dating all about, then? It’s about BEING with somebody; somebody you want to FUCK!” I started yelling. “And I sure as fucking hell do NOT want you going on a date, holding hands with, making out with, or FUCKING any other guys! Is that what you want me to do?”

“No, of course not, don’t be ridiculous! You can go on a casual date and not have any physical contact at all!” she yelled back at me.

“Yeah, and for what purpose? For how long? You’re describing people who are friends, not people who are dating. People who on a date are looking FOR A MATE, someone to have a relationship with AND FUCK! Or at the very least, someone to mate with for the night and FUCK RIGHT NOW!”

We continued to fight and did not reach any resolution on anything to do with the topic. Earlier in the year, after she had first started college, she made a ‘guy’ friend who I was extremely cautious about. She also met several other weirdo guy friends who I could tell were no competition for me. But this one guy – I’ll call him Lars because he was from a Scandinavian country - could have been. We had gotten into our first big fight about it and the general idea that men and women (I meant straight men and women), especially if they are single, cannot be friends without sex being an issue at some point. We both got heated in our arguments over it. The one thing that helped ease my concerns was that Lars had a fiancé of his own and they had their own long-distance relationship to deal with. Still, I watched that situation with microscopic scrutiny to be sure they weren’t filling each other’s lonely times by cheating on their significant others.

After the call ended, the tension remained for the next several weeks. For whatever reason, she continued to say I should go on a date with another girl. I told her with absolute conviction that I did not want her dating anyone else, and she maintained that she had no interest in doing so.

Then I met a woman worth dating…

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I was on another long weekend school-related trip to Bismarck and heard that there was a girl my age from a town near to Dickinson who was interested in me. I think the actual words were “crushing on you.” She had been watching me from afar and had built up a bit of an infatuation with me. I didn’t have a clue who she even was up until then, but I was flattered by the news. The girl in question was beautiful – she was taller and with a completely different look than Tami – and smart. I liked that. For all her qualities, Tami was not an intellectual (Tami was intelligent, for sure, but not very interested in academic pursuits.) I sent word around to her that I was interested, too.

We met in the hot tub at the Holiday Inn. It was a perfect neutral place to meet as we both had several other high school classmates around, going in and out of the tub, providing a casual environment to start talking. Charlotte (I’ll call her) and I had a wide array of mutual interests that led to many hours of conversation. We bonded quickly. It helped that I downplayed my relationship with Tami to the extreme and tried leaving our status as opaque to Charlotte as I could. Charlotte was easy to convince as it was clear that she was into me.

I wasn’t used to being pursued so this was exciting. My ego loved the notion that I would be appreciated and showed off instead of having to duck down and not be seen. Before the weekend was over, I had asked her Charlotte out for a date. We arranged to go out to dinner and a movie on the first Friday of UND’s spring break. For her part, Tami said she approved. Then Tami asked me to come over to her house after the date. Our usual time to sneak me in was around 11:00 as that guaranteed her parents would be asleep, ensuring our privacy. I told her it would be very late, but she insisted I come over anyway. She missed me.

The date went very well. Charlotte was clearly into me and not afraid to show her admiration of me. I liked her despite her similar family characteristics as Tami – she was the youngest child of a large traditional Catholic farm family. Luckily, that was about the only similarity they shared. I was becoming more interested as the night went on and I learned more about her. Charlotte was very smart, a fellow high achiever with lofty goals. Our talks were interesting and often thought provoking. We fast solidified our friendship.

She was also cute. As a horny teenage male, I noticed her attributes were just fine. This could go somewhere…

Our mutual interest in each other kept the date going long after the movie. We drove around for a while, then I decided to take her to my house for a bit before I drove the 15 miles to her home. We hadn’t had any physical contact yet, but the attraction was getting stronger. At about midnight, Charlotte was sitting on my bed and I was standing across from her, just talking, when in marches a red-faced Tami, fuming with rage! She immediately looked at Charlotte, then back at me.

“You motherfucker!” Tami screamed at me. “You god-damn son-of-a-bitch!” she continued as she turned and started back out of my bedroom, stomping to the stairs.

I couldn’t believe Tami would just storm into my house like that. I was temporarily dumbfounded, not having been prepared to handle any of this kind of mess. I ran after Tami and called to her, “Wait! Tami, stop!” I pleaded.

Tami stopped at the top of the stairs ever so briefly to sneer down to me, “Nobody stands me up, you fucker,” and she left, slamming the door behind her.

I was again caught in a temporary daze before returning to my room. Charlotte was still sitting on my bed. “I take it that was your sort-of girlfriend?” Charlotte said with a slight grin.

“No, my very ex-girlfriend,” I tried to joke. My head was still swimming. “Unbelievable, really. I never thought she’d just barge into my house like that.”

“Yeah, a bit bold, I’d say,” Charlotte agreed. “I don’t want you to take this wrong, but I should probably be getting home soon.”

We kept talking and growing closer over the drive home. Charlotte wasn’t too freaked out about what happened because she also had a guy who was in her life but not an official “boyfriend.” He had already asked her to their school’s prom and she said yes, and she didn’t want to hurt him, so she kept the date – with my blessing because it took pressure off of the Tami situation. By the time we got to her family farm, physical contact had been broken, by her, when she grabbed my hand and started pouring her heart out even more about how much she liked me. I returned the heart-felt interest in her. We spent a couple hours making out on a couch in the foyer.

I quickly found out that she, like Tami before her, was a “good Catholic girl” who was saving her virginity for marriage. Although not surprising at all, it was NOT information I wanted to hear – and I really did not want to have to go through the “good Catholic” virgin games all over again. I had to make a quick decision on how to handle my past with Tami. This could really be a serious relationship, I thought. She’s going to want it to be ‘special,’ just like Tami had. If she knew about my sexual history with Tami, I might not be so great a pick to her, or worse, she’ll always have the comparison between Tami and her in the back of her head. And I really don’t want to hurt her unnecessarily, especially if this becomes a long-term relationship…

That’s how I justified lying to Charlotte about it and my relationship with Tami. I claimed we never went that far, and that I was still a virgin, too. I bought into a new relationship built upon (at least partially) a lie. No matter how well-intentioned, that is a disastrous way to begin.

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The next day, Tami came over - in a rage again – wanting her things back from me, such as her senior photograph portfolio and alarm clock. If there was anyone else home when she arrived, they quickly left because it got heated, fast. Tami went into a full-on raging fit on me in the basement of our house after taking back her alarm clock (she had given it to me so I would think of her the first thing when I woke up every day).

“Nobody stands me up, motherfucker!” she screamed again.

“I didn’t stand you up, I was just late,” I retorted,

“Bullshit, you fucking asshole, you stood me up! And what the fuck was that girl doing in your room, sitting on your bed? That’s my place to be, not hers!” Tami yelled as she threw the alarm/radio to the ground, shattering its white plastic frame.

“You were the one who wanted me to date other girls!”

“I said date, not take some bitch to your bedroom while standing me up!”

“We weren’t doing anything.”

“Fuck you! I don’t care, you stood me up!” she screamed again.

“I told you you wouldn’t like it if I dated someone else. I fuckin’ knew it!”

“And I told you that you can go out on a date with someone and just be friends.”

“Yeah, that’s not dating, that’s called just being ‘friends’” I quipped sarcastically.

“You were on an actual date!” she hissed.

“Ah, I knew it! You’re finally admitting that men and women going on a date is a courtship, looking for your mate, LOOKING FOR A SEX PARTNER!” I yelled back at her.

“I am not! You don’t know anything! And fuck you, you motherfucking asshole!” she yelled. Her vocabulary had radically and noticeably changed fast.

We fought for about ten or fifteen minutes before she stormed off, officially breaking up with me - the first time. She had been screaming at me so loudly that I learned later that our neighbors across the street could hear her (some of me, too).

That argument was the basis of virtually all the fights to follow, or at least, what those fights would boil into, without fail. Tami pushing me to date with her not liking the consequences and me standing her up were two sticking points for years. The real fight was about whether men and women could “date” and not have sex become an issue, or whether men and women could truly be platonic friends without sex ever becoming a problem or issue between them.

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Charlotte and I dated each other for several weeks. While I hadn’t been struck by the Thunderbolt, there were sparks in the air. We had a few intense make-out sessions, but her Catholic virtue held strong. I didn’t push, thinking things would probably evolve as they had with Tami, and the sex part would come along in due time. In the end, I broke her heart like a cad. Happily, I was but a speed bump on the way to her destiny, however, as she later married and had a family with the man who went to prom with her.

As graduation neared, my free time opened up and I went on the party prowl. The last week of the school year was called “senior skip week” because that’s what happened for the seniors – no class and no finals. We were free to roam wild, and we did. I was angry about the breakup with Tami and acted out accordingly. I took it upon myself to see if I could uphold my father’s legacy and “date” as many girls as I could. I was hot shit and knew it, so I tried. Although I got personal and physical with several young ladies that week, I didn’t conquer any of them.  

When my father came back for graduation, it was with a heavy heart and more bad news. His second wife, Margaret, had thrown my brother and my father out of their house. She was going to file for a divorce, too. My brother Greg and Margaret had never been friendly with each other – to the contrary, the friction had always been present and there had been fights every yearly visit. He wasn’t alone in that regard as I had a few bouts with Margaret, too. This time, however, Greg had gone too far. He had done some bad shit that pushed her over the limit (the substance of “what?” doesn’t matter – this is my story, not his), and my father apparently hadn’t been handling it as she needed. Margaret made the choice to rid herself of both of them at once.

Having lost his career and his second wife in less than a year brought him low. Very low. I could see I on his face and how he handled himself with a lack of his regular vigor and energy. He had one hope that he was reaching for, and that was becoming a correctional officer for the State of California. It was a longshot and a tough road if he got it. At 40-years-old, he was almost double the average age of police academy trainees. He would have to go through eight weeks of police academy boot camp before going on the job, which meant he needed to get into shape, fast.

I could see he was drinking pretty hard, too, but since I had been in a near-constant state of partying the last week, I wasn’t in a position to preach. I was supportive of him, though. And gently confrontational about a few things that needed to be said.

At our first dinner together after he arrived in Dickinson, after catching up with each other and getting a couple drinks into him, he asked me if I would give him back his old 12-gauge shotgun. The gun was an unusual Mossberg bolt-action shotgun with a long full-choke barrel. He used to use it for goose hunting. I had borrowed it some years before for pheasant hunting as he hadn’t been hunting for anything in decades.

“Sure, it’s yours…but I gotta ask why you want it?” I gently pressed. “I mean, California’s not exactly known for goose hunting… A lot of guys who’ve been through half of what you’ve lived this last year might think about hurting themselves. I sure as hell hope that’s not you.”

“It’s not, son,” Gary replied. I think I surprised him with my bluntness.

We talked about the things that were weighing on him. It was a heavy mix of career and family disappointment to the point of failure. He admitted he was depressed but denied being suicidal. I made him promise that he would NOT use that shotgun or anything else to try to harm himself, and he made the promise. I was pleasantly surprised by his new openness with me. This was the most personal of any conversation I had ever had with my father, so I decided it was time – I decided to finally ask him about what his older brother Otto had done to him when he was a child.

“Oh, he tried putting his hands in my knickers a few times,” he downplayed to the extreme. “You know I took care of that right? He tried that shit again right after he got kicked out of the military. I was 13 years old, and do you know what happened? I broke three of his ribs and slammed his head through a plaster wall. Fucker’s lucky I missed any two-by-fours.”

I didn’t press him on the details of the assault upon his younger self because I intuited he wouldn’t give any. “Why didn’t your parents stop that piece of shit?” I asked.

“They’re old Germans with the old country attitude. And superstitious Catholics. They just don’t talk about such things,” he pondered.

 “Doesn’t it, or didn’t it, make you mad at them?” I pressed on.

“Oh, hell yes. I hated them for years…it took a long time to forgive them. But I’ve made my peace with it,” he said in a way suggesting he wanted to change the topic.

“What about your sisters? Did they know?”

“Yep, the older ones did. They’d get a whippin’ if they said anything against Otto.”

“Damn, it makes me mad as hell at them for it. I’m surprised you can forgive them at all,” I said.

“Holding on to all that anger just gives you ulcers. No, I put that to rest a while ago, and that’s how I like it. No sense kicking a dead horse,” he wrapped up with.

I took the hint and let it go. Our conversation moved on and managed to get more upbeat and positive.

Graduation was the typical cap and gown, pomp and circumstances affair. There was no special recognition of my achievement beyond being another Honors student tassel-wearing graduate to separate us from the underachievers. I looked as best I could to see if Tami was in the audience, but I never found her.  Her absence and my father’s sad situation weighed on me, dampening my ability to fully celebrate my accomplishment. My dad was in a great mood, however, proudly coming up front to the stage to get a snapshot of me going through the diploma-granting line. We said “goodbye” and he left after the ceremony to stay with his sister and family in another town, so I was free to go to the unofficial graduation party.

It was known as “Green River” because it was by an old highway rest stop along a little stream bearing that name. The party, as always in this location, was a huge outdoor bonfire with a stereo system set up to blast the popular hard rock and heavy metal of the day. No country music amongst our party crowd – rockers only! And there were a lot of us, probably 300 people or more at its peak, with cars parked in arranged lines in the prairie grass field as guided by lot attendants when entering. Everybody brought their own booze, and the trunks of the cars were frequently filled with ever-shrinking coolers of beer (I know mine was).

Everybody who liked to party was there, and even some folks who didn’t. Bonfire parties like these were common in the summer months, but graduation was by far the biggest turnout. Drinking to get intoxicated was the purpose. Copious amounts of beer was swilled. I was feeling fine and having fun. Then I saw her.

Tami’s eyes locked with mine from about ten feet away. Neither of us were talking to anyone at the moment, so she walked closer to me, wine cooler in hand, and said, “Hey you,” with a sweet smile.

“Hi,” I said pleasantly back to her. “Didn’t see you at graduation,” I said loudly over the music.

“I didn’t go,” she replied. We tried to make small talk, but it was difficult with the loud rock n’ roll blasting. After a moment, she leaned over and asked me, “You want to go talk for a bit?” she asked. “So we can hear each other?”

“Sure,” I said.

The night sky was pitch black. Away from the light coming from the fire, it was almost completely dark. We walked around a big tree at the edge of the crowd. On the other side was the start of an embankment toward the creek where an occasional dude would stroll by to look for a place to pee. Otherwise, we were alone with enough ambient light to see each other’s face.

“How are you?” I asked sincerely.

“I miss my friend,” she said just as sincerely.

I looked deep into her eyes…those eyes…and she stared back into mine. “I miss you, too,” I said.

We talked. We drank. And we talked some more. And drank some more, getting ourselves thoroughly impaired, taking occasional time outs to pee and get refills. At one point, during one of her heavily animated expressions, she twisted her foot and fell down the embankment. I went after her and tended to her injury. Her foot had swelled and hurt to walk upon, so I had to help her. Now that the ice was completely broken and physical contact made, all the old feelings rushed back to full force. I apologized profusely for the incident with Charlotte and expressed my undying love for Tami once again. She expressed her loneliness without me and longing to be with me again.

Yeah, it went all sappy like that. Within an hour or so, we were naked in a very dark field having sex again. Nobody could see us because it was so dark outside, and we were far enough away from the fire.

We were officially back together.

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To help heal the wounds and bring us closer together again, I suggested a trip to Colorado so she could see my other love, the United States Air Force Academy. Tami was all for it. As fortune had it, her newlywed sister had moved with her husband to a small town about a hundred miles from Colorado Springs. Her sister provided a great excuse for Tami to travel with me to Colorado and it was an acceptable place to stay in her parents’ eyes.

On our way to her sister’s, we took a detour to go see the nearby Royal Gorge Bridge. Tami had never seen it before, and it took her breath away. As we stood at the opposite end of the bridge overlooking the Gorge, she started crying intensely. I thought something was wrong and I tried to comfort her and find out what was the matter. “Nothing,” she managed through her tears. “It’s just…I’ve never seen anyplace so beautiful before…Thank you for bringing me here.”

“My pleasure, baby,” I said. “I’m going to show you the world,” I sincerely promised. She responded affectionately and I tasted her tears as we kissed.

Tami understood immediately why I was so impressed with the Academy when we arrived on our chosen day to visit. The setting for the campus is gorgeous, nestled right at the base of the Rocky Mountains. She could finally visualize me going there and what our lives might be like while I was attending. The Academy’s amazingly beautiful A-framed Chapel became our planned wedding location. We even set the tentative wedding date for immediately after I would be graduating from the Academy (June 6, 1992, was the date selected). I even managed to capture a great photograph of my two great loves together when I got a perfect shot of Tami overlooking the Academy campus with the picturesque mountains in the background. It was a near-perfect day.

Our adventurous sex life picked right back up where it had left off when we broke up, too. Almost like we had never been apart from each other. We were frequently fooling around with each other, groping, teasing, building up sexual tension until we could finally take care of the release. Car sex was back in a big way, as in, while on the road! Don’t try this at home, folks. We were lucky to not get in a wreck and get hurt. But I did come close to getting a ticket on our way home…

I was driving 85 MPH on U.S. Highway 85 on a very lonely stretch of road between Buffalo and Ludwig, South Dakota, when the only other car on the road passed me. And turned on his flashing overhead lights. I hadn’t noticed the cop from a distance because I was on the verge of orgasm – Tami was busy going down on me making my driving quite distracted! I was so concentrated on staying in my lane that I didn’t notice my speed or the cop’s lightbar until too late. I stopped as fast as I possible – just as I was coming! - but he was already behind me before I stopped all the way. Tami sat up as I tried to get my shorts back up and zipped. We quickly tried to clean up and look innocent.

The cop was a young man no older than thirty. He approached my car with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on a cop’s face. Why not? He saw one head in the vehicle going one way, then hers popped up, too. He got the drift. Hell, it was probably the highlight of his day.

“Would you please step out of the car, sir,” the sheriff’s deputy asked me with a huge smile that barely contained his laughter. I complied and he directed me to sit in the front left seat of his car. Then he joined me in the front seat and called in my driver’s license. All the while, he was grinning away. After I came back with a clean record, he laid out the situation for me.

“You see that paper taped on the dashboard in front of you?” he asked. “That’s the fine chart for various speeds. Since I got you clocked at 85 in a 55 zone, you’d be looking at almost a four hundred dollar fine. You’re lucky – at 86, it goes up to almost a thousand.”

I didn’t have money for a fine. Definitely not four hundred bucks. I was nervous.

“But I can understand how a guy can lose track of his speed out here on a lonely road like this,” he continued, again barely suppressing laughter as he gestured to the empty highway. “Since you got a clear record and all, I’ll tell you what: if you promise you can be more careful and slow it down to the speed limit, I’ll let you go today with just a verbal warning.”

“Oh, absolutely, no problem, sir. Thank you so much, Deputy,” I said with total sincerity. “I really appreciate it.”

“You just be safe out there, alright? Have a nice day,” he concluded, chuckling slightly as I left his patrol car.

Glad he didn’t catch us an hour before, when Tami was driving and I was getting her off! Yeah, that was dangerous and stupid. Not to be attempted by anyone, ever…not while driving. (Seriously. We could have gotten hurt or hurt someone else.)

We made it home safe and had a mostly great summer. The roller coaster ride of fighting and fucking got started in earnest after we both went back to Grand Forks, and I began college.