Travelogue

About a year after I met Lila, my mom noted that I my cheeks had a glow—like "someone in love," she said. Well, sure, I was in love with Lila, but when I mentioned my mom's comment, Lila laughed. "I think it's just because I'm such a great girlfriend," she chortled. "But I see the glow, too; I'm pretty sure it's my milk." At that point, I'd say roughly a quarter of my daily calories came from Lila's body. It's a very intimate feeling, knowing that. The fact that she was feeding me so substantially only made us feel closer.

Another thing: I had not been sick for a single day since I first started feeding from Lila, and she says her milk is responsible for that, too. "So, my milk is full of my antibodies," she explained to me, "and the thing is, women's immune systems are way better than men's. Sorry, it's true, that's why we live so much longer. That's why I've got two grandmas and four great-grandmas and only one grandpa. Anyway, you have my milk every day, so it's like I'm putting my immune system into you. That's why you stopped getting sick. It's almost like super-powers." Well, it's true that I used to get colds all the time, and after she started feeding me they stopped, so maybe she was right.

Time passed and some things changed. I found a home in the journalism department at Shiloh, and took a turn as editor for a semester. Lila was in the pre-nursing program there (and by this point I was teasing her about that—"pre"?!). Joshua and Shirley got older and stopped breastfeeding altogether; they were the first two that Lila had ever nursed, so that was kind of hard for her to handle.

But then new babies came: Judith had a daughter Eva, and Esther had a son she named Michael. I had no idea who the father of Esther's baby was, and I'm not sure she actually did either—one of her boyfriends, for sure, but which of the four or five of them? In a town full of old-fashioned, conservative social customs, she somehow got away with doing anything she wanted. The pastor even baptized her baby in the church. Meanwhile, Lila stepped up to help; she stayed the night at Judith's sometimes in the first few weeks and breastfed little Eva so that Judith could sleep through the night. When Lila was at home, she would nurse baby Michael for Esther. Mornings and afternoons, cousin Sarah and her friend Molly would be over at the ranch to help feed both babies, too. (Molly's milk had apparently come in after only a few months, and she became enthusiastic about breastfeeding. Her breasts had grown noticeably larger, which I presumed she was delighted about). Esther's son Zack had become a rambunctious and very hungry toddler; it seemed he was always at someone's breast, whether Sarah's or Molly's or Lila's or his own mother's.

Life in Watley seemed very normal to me at this point. I didn't try to explain all aspects to my old friends on Skype (Internet finally arrived!)—certainly not the issues of body hair and wet nursing—but they told me I seemed surprisingly happy. I was. And then, more change happened.

—

EPILOGUE TO A TRAVELOGUE

It's early morning in Spain, and I just woke up next to my wife, still snoozing.

I sneak out to the bathroom without waking her, brush my teeth (because I'm paranoid), then quietly slip back under the covers and slide down between her legs. My tongue pilots through a forest of pubic hair to find her thick vulva, and I begin making love to her.

Some mornings, very lucky mornings, Lila doesn't really wake up until her first orgasm has started, which is, as she says, a delightful way to arrive at consciousness. This particular morning, though, I can tell she's already awakened, because her legs have lifted and spread for me, and I can hear a soft purr from above the covers. She comes soon enough, then twice more before she grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me up to kiss me. She smells and tastes good, always; I don't know what kind of magic this girl is made of. After we kiss for a bit, I'm presented with a large breast and its moist, knotty nipple, erect; I open and pull it into my mouth, and before I can even get milk to flow, my hand has slid back down between her legs. She has more orgasms while she nurses me. Between her bouts of rapturous shivers and jerks, we snuggle; our bodies press tightly together, her long, soft hair eventually spilling across my head, and I am overwhelmed by the sweet scent of her chest as I take in her milk.

After a few minutes, she's had enough, and I feel satisfied, and so she insists on burrowing down under the covers to put my cock in her mouth. I come in about a minute, and she lets out a hum of delight and pleasure as she swallows.

I laid back, drowsy again, my penis wilting. Lila wanders into the bathroom and as I drift off as I hear the shower starting.

When I wake up this time, I can hear Lila speaking in rapid Catalan on the phone. I pick out some clothes, listening, trying to make out what she's saying: something about an appointment for the afternoon, I think, but there are a lot of details I miss, words and phrases that I don't understand.

My knowledge of the Catalan language is OK. We've been here almost a year now, enough for me to pick it up and learn to make myself understood. I can understand others, more or less. But alas, when I speak, I still sound like a child.

Lila doesn't. She sounds effortless and natural; even her accent is pretty good. I know this because some of the local friends we've made have told me (kindly) how impressive she is, and I can also tell because when she's in conversation, they talk to her quickly and fluidly. When they talk to me, they slow down and speak in shorter phrases, always with this facial expression that says "do you understand?"

I don't know why she's so good and I'm not; I guess it's a female thing (this is what one of our friends, Laura, tried to get across to me once). I just know that one week Lila and I were both just trying to learn the basics of the language, and a couple weeks later she was using long, complicated phrases that I couldn't grasp. I guess this is just another thing that she naturally excels at; it's just kind of ironic, because I'd thought I was supposed to be the wordsmith in the family.

So Lila does most of the talking. We speak English to each other at home, naturally, unless she's really sleepy and forgets herself and starts telling me something absent-mindedly—I'll go along up to the point where I can't follow what's she's saying, and I'll have to stop her and point out that she's speaking Catalan. She'll laugh and apologize and turn a little red, and then go back to English.

What we're doing here: well, Lila and I dated happily for a couple of years at home in Watley. Then, my parents suddenly announced that they were moving to Scottsdale (!)—and there was no way in hell I was leaving Lila at that point. Problem was, her parents weren't going to just let me move in (they are far too traditional), so I had nowhere to stay. Lila and I seriously considered moving out to the forest lake like we'd always fantasized about, but we both knew we really didn't want to do that (full-time anyway).

Marriage became the obvious choice; it was actually my dad's idea. I was far, far too young to be getting married, he told me, but this was a special case, because he said he would kill me if I ever married anyone other than Lila (my parents adore her; in fact, that's an understatement). Plus, my parents thought of her as so mature that it would make up for our extreme youth. Lila told me privately that she thinks I'm quite mature, and I didn't try to argue that, although I did inform her that it was probably due to her influence. Girls mature faster and all that, but maybe it can rub off.

The wedding took place outside, although we conceded and let the pastor do the ceremony. It wasn't so bad. Lila looked beautiful in white, and I was actually OK with a country-style tuxedo. Earl, the guy who did the fireworks every July, did a little fireworks show in our honor at the reception. My parents went out to Bakerton and checked into a hotel that same evening so Lila and I could have a proper wedding night in my bedroom. And then after that, the two of us moved into her bedroom at Summerall Ranch—yes, kind of a tight squeeze, but we really kind of enjoyed being that close. Truthfully the only problem is that we either had to be very quiet during sex (difficult for Lila), or find somewhere else to do it. And while Lila could breastfeed babies and children in the ranch house without a special need for privacy, nursing her boyfriend/now-husband was something that absolutely had to be done behind closed doors. (Fortunately, Lila's bedroom, which had become our marital bedroom, had a lock.)

A few months after my parents moved, my dad sent me an email (which I read at Lila's cousin Magdalen's house, since she had an Internet connection): would I be interested in applying for a gig as a writer in Europe? Temporary thing, a few months, probably; they wanted a "world-class" young writer to do an American-in-Europe sort of blog-style travelogue. The pay was not going to be much, but it was a chance to live somewhere in Europe! I dashed off a blog-post/essay sort of thing, written as if I already had the job and was preparing for the move. Lila was naturally included in the piece. About a month later, Mrs. Summerall handed me the phone, and suddenly I was speaking to an enthusiastic magazine editor: they loved what I wrote, so would I still be interested in the job? When I cautiously explained that I was newly married, he told me that while the accommodations would not be extravagant, there was probably room enough for two. My parents told me they'd pay for Lila's plane ticket.

I actually had a choice: the United Kingdom, or Spain. I forced Lila to choose, knowing for sure what it would be. And, Spain it was. We're here for 18 months, although there's been some talk from my editor about possibly extending our time here.

After my shower, I wander out into our tiny living room and find her lazing on our love-seat-sized couch. She's wearing a pretty sleeveless sundress that she made herself, patterned after the style that the local girls wear, cream-white with deep reds and other earthy colors. She looks like a model: simple, natural, beautiful.

When we had just arrived, Lila told me she was thinking of starting to shave. I was stunned. She didn't want to stand out, to call attention to herself in a foreign country: "We have to realize that this isn't Shelton County," she'd said (speaking of the region around Watley). And she really wanted to dress in more modern-style clothes, which meant exposed arms and legs. Well, I forbid her from even looking at a razor. By this point I have truly fallen in love with the way she looks (and feels), and that definitely includes her body hair. It's beautiful on her.

It turned out not to matter. Once we got to Rupit, the small touristy town in the region around Barcelona where we now live, we made a pleasant discovery: not all the girls and young women here shave. It's not uncommon to be in the town plaza and see several women with hair under their arms and on their legs, and no one seems to pay any special attention. So the soft, pretty hair in Lila's armpits, plainly visible in her sleeveless dress, is of no consequence. Her leg hair wouldn't matter, either, but you can barely see it on her shins anyway, and she doesn't wear clothes that show her upper thighs.

"Hey," she says to me, casually. "Carlotta called; they want me this afternoon." Lila had picked up part-time on-call nanny jobs—with extra pay when, often enough, the mother asks her to wet nurse the children. ("El mugró és sempre millor", or something along those lines, is what many of the women here would repeat: a real nipple is always preferred.)

I will spend the afternoon working on daily updates for the actual blog and then continue a longer "think-piece" (my editor's term) I was in the middle of. Somehow, they're making money from this, although I'm never sure about what the real interest is. Lila never complains when I have to work, but I think she prefers to stay busy when I'm busy myself.

"Do you have to start work right now?" she asks me, smiling.

"Not yet," I say, sitting next to her, kissing her softly. "I was gonna eat breakfast."

"Well, here, can I add a little to that? Just a little extra." She smiles sweetly again and begins fumbling with a latch on the top strap of her dress.

The advantage of Lila making her own clothes is that she can design her own clothing conveniences. Easy-off latches, making it simple to bare her chest—that's a good example. She pulls open the top of her dress on one side, then pops the clasp at the top of her bra cup and pulls it down. Earlier, I had fed from her right breast; now, she's exposing her left. It looks full and potent, and her nipple is visibly thickening for me. She cups her breast as I lean my head down to approach it. Her areola is slightly shiny; Lila has explained that when she knows she's about to feed me, her areola secretes a natural oily lubricant to moisturize and help me stay latched on. Something about that natural response really turns me on.

I open up, drawing the nipple toward the back of my mouth, and I seal my lips on her. Lila sighs as I begin suckling, and it seems like only moments before I taste the start of her milk flow. She'd only intended this to be a moment of sweet intimacy, but after a few minutes of nursing, she ends up getting so excited that she actually has an orgasm. It's pretty exciting; that doesn't really happen very often. When we finish the session, she goes back into our bedroom to change her panties and clean up.

Sometimes she cries. We have a surprisingly reasonable Internet connection, and my laptop is with us, so we're able to Skype with Lila's family (and mine) on occasion. Lila's mom and sisters and usually a whole horde of the kids will go over to cousin Mag's house for an hour-long visit. It's always bittersweet for Lila, though, even though the Summeralls do seem to recognize that she's living something she dreamed about for years. Lila gets misty when it's time to end the calls. And once in a while she will break down and tell me she misses the kids a lot, misses nursing them, misses playing with them, misses Watley. ("When I see those kids, my boobs just ache inside," she will say.) It's as though she's two people: one who dreamed of traveling far, and one who's just a down-home small-town girl.

Most of the time, the travel bug in her wins out. We've made a fair number of Spanish friends, both here and in Barcelona, largely owing to Lila's prowess with the Catalan language. She's a good conversationalist in English, and this translates to what she's like in Catalan as well. I am able to follow along some of the time—even a lot of the time—but I never really get the jokes she makes (though the natives do laugh, so they're obviously funny). I laugh along, pretending.

There have been occasions when my lack of prowess in other languages has made me feel hurt and embarrassed. Once, we were in a bar here in Rupit talking to a few people around our age who had come back to visit. Naturally, Lila charmed them and we sat, chatting in Catalan, drinking beer. (Lila allowed herself only one; something about alcohol getting into her breastmilk.) I thought I was following the conversation she was having with Luís, an affable guy, and I mostly listened, adding a remark here and there when I felt like I understood enough to do so. I followed that he was talking about his girlfriend, but without warning, Lila burst into tears. I had no idea what was going on! Luís was speaking quietly, solemnly, but nothing I'd heard seemed to be cause for crying.

She hugged him and told him she was sorry. When I had an opportunity, I shot Lila a quick "what-the-fuck" look, and she gave me a look back that said "I'll tell you later." She did explain later: Luís' ex-girlfriend had just died of cancer. How I missed that whole line is beyond me, but I guess I didn't know the words for a lot of the words crucial to understanding what he was saying. I felt embarrassed and horrible.

So truth be told, I prefer Barcelona. When we actually make it there, we end up speaking a lot of English; everyone there speaks at least some, and they usually beg us to help them practice. In a loud bar, though, sometimes we have to cut back to Catalan or even Spanish to make ourselves understood. They usually think Lila's command of the languages is delightful. Most people in Barcelona actually speak straight-up Spanish as their first language, then English, and most of them know at least a little Catalan, but it's all so similar that they can usually follow along regardless. And Lila is good at all of them.

I don't make a ton of money at this writing gig—although I'm pleased as hell just to be paid to do it. It's nice, though, that Lila is able to bring in her own money as well; not every job involves her breastfeeding the children, but it does happen often, and the rate she gets for that is surprisingly good. This way, we can actually afford to have nice meals at home (Lila borrows recipes from people in town like a madwoman, and she's getting pretty good at shopping for the right ingredients and cooking the dishes). And we can dine out sometimes! Locally, she does the ordering, but I always look forward to being back in Barcelona, partly because it's easier to order for myself, partly because I think the restaurants are better (and more varied).

How long will we stay? Our visas are limited, even with extensions. We'll probably end up back in Watley within a year. It's weird being married and having no real job prospects; I'll likely end up working for Lila's dad, and with some luck, writing at night. My editor and her boss both think I have a future as a writer, although the days when you can make a good living as one are long behind us. On the other hand, my parents say the cost of living in Watley is really cheap, even compared to Scottsdale, so maybe we'll pull it off. Lila still has hopes of becoming a nurse (the professional medical kind), and so maybe our future will be bright enough after all, financially speaking.

The future: I really don't know what it holds for us. We are still very young, and we both realize it. Children by natural means are not a possibility for us, and neither of us really knows what we are going to do about that—perhaps nothing. She loves kids, but she gets enough of a kid-fix just breastfeeding and caring for them. I'm OK with kids, myself, but I'm not sure if we really want our own. Do we want to adopt? Egg donor? Or just be child-free and live without that gigantic responsibility? I suppose time will tell; right now, we just absolutely adore being together, and the idea of another party involved seems anathema. Who knows how our minds will change in the future, though.

Tonight, after Lila comes home and we make dinner (and then eat it), Lila will probably announce that she's going to take a quick shower. If she is at all horny, she will then appear at the doorway of our little bedroom and call my name; I will turn to see that she's still naked.

Soon we'll both be naked, together in bed. She likes a small variety of positions for nursing; sometimes she puts a pillow on her lap and I will lay my head on it facing her chest, sometimes we lay on our sides facing each other, and sometimes she'll throw me on my back, straddle my trunk, and lower a breast to my lips (this has been a favorite of late, although it's certainly more work on her part). We almost always begin sex with Lila giving herself to me like this, letting me take her body into my own. It makes her gentle hum of arousal turn into a roar, especially when we're lucky and the nipple stimulation brings her to orgasm. I cannot express to you how pleasing it is for me when this happens.