It was just starting to get light as Mark packed his camping equipment into his rucksack and started up the steep trail. Today would be his last day on the John Muir Trail. He didn’t have enough vacation to do the whole trail in one year and so he was coming out over Bishop Pass at roughly the halfway point. The second half of the trail would have to wait until the following summer. Today he would have to hike nearly twenty miles over the 12,000’ pass.

It was cold even though it was still only September. Once the sun was high in the sky it would get hot, but when the sun went down the nights were freezing.

He was moving fast since the trail across Dusy basin was nearly level and after a week of backpacking he was really fit. Ahead in the distance he saw another person, the first he’d seen since he left the John Muir Trail proper the previous afternoon. He, or maybe it was she, seemed to be moving slowly, almost shuffling and it only took another twenty minutes for him to catch up.

It was a woman, about his height. She was wearing mirrored sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. Her dirty hair, unwashed for a week like everyone on the trail, pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a pair of shapeless khaki pants. The thick fleece she wore for warmth made her upper body rotund.

It was odd how anonymous the trail made you. You would meet someone, often you only knew their first name. Or they had a trail name so you didn’t even know that. You talked about the trail, and photography and the mountains. It was always a surprise if someone volunteered information about their normal life, that they were a secretary, or a tire salesman, or a graphic designer.

“Are you OK?” Mark asked the woman, who he could now see was making such slow progress because she was limping.

“Yes and no,” she replied.

“What happened?”

“Things were fine until four days ago coming down from Muir Pass. Then I caught my foot on a rock and twisted my ankle. I was planning to do the whole trail but now I’m forced to come out here at Bishop. I won’t even make it out tomorrow, I’ll have to camp one more night. I can only go about six miles a day.”

“Don’t you have any hiking poles?”

“No, normally I don’t use them. But once I hurt my ankle I wished I’d brought some.”

“Take mine.” Mark held them out to her.

“But don’t you need them yourself?”

“This is my last day, my pack is light. You need them much more than me.”

“How will I get them back to you?”

“I’ll write down my address and you can mail them back to me once you are out.”

The girl took the poles.

“Do you know the trailhead here? I’m not sure how I’m going to get from there to my car at Whitney Portal.”

“Well, it is too far from Bishop to walk. I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a guy picking me up this evening who runs a shuttle service between the trailheads. I’ll get him to come back for you in two days time if you want. It’ll cost you about fifty bucks. Can you afford that?”

“That would be great.”

“I’d walk out with you if I didn’t have to get out today. There’s the shuttle, plus I have a flight back to the east coast tomorrow.”

“I’ll be fine. I’m just slow.”

“Are you OK for food?”

“Not really, I’ve been on this section of the trail longer than I planned, obviously.”

Mark lowered his rucksack and got out his bear barrel. He unlocked it with a coin.

“Here.” He passed her a dehydrated meal. “I’m afraid I’ve only got the least interesting flavors left. The ones I’d look at and then choose something else. Here, ‘pasta marinara’. And here’s the last of my granola, I’ve just had my final breakfast.”

“Do you want any money for them?”

“No, of course not. You’d give me your spare food if it were the other way round, I’m sure. Well, I’m going to have to get going, I’ve got a long way to go.”

Mark reached into the side pocket of his rucksack and got out a ziploc bag containing a small pen and paper. He wrote down his name and address.

“Just send the poles back to me when you get back to civilization. I won’t be hiking again for weeks so there’s no rush.”

She looked down at the paper and read his name.

“Thank you, Mark, I’m really very grateful. I’m Tee by the way.”

Mark lifted up his rucksack and soon was striding up the trail. In ten minutes when he looked back he could no longer see Tee. He hoped she was trustworthy, his hiking poles had not been cheap and, besides, they had been on a lot of hikes with him and so had sentimental value too.

Mark crossed the pass and started the long descent. The sun was low in the sky as Mark arrived at the car park. He had less than an hour to wait until the shuttle would arrive.

Mark climbed into the truck and the old man drove him back to Yosemite where he had started. Mark asked him to return t`o pick up Tee but he insisted on being paid in advance or he wouldn’t do it. Mark gave him the fifty dollars, wondering if he would ever see it again.

**

Mark was in his apartment when unexpectedly the bell rang. He opened the door to find a UPS guy. He held out a long shipping tube, the type used to hold rolled-up blueprints. Presumably it was his hiking poles. He looked at the return address, wondering where Tee lived, but it was a company in Los Angeles.

He took the tube into his room and emptied the contents onto his bed. There was just a small envelope. He wondered why it had been put into a tube large enough to hold his hiking poles. Perhaps she’d forgotten to put them in. In the envelope were a $50 bill and a ticket. He was surprised that there wasn’t any thank-you note from Tee, it seemed a bit ungrateful not to thank your good Samaritan. He turned over the ticket. Madison Square Garden in a couple of week’s time to see Tiffany.

Tiffany was the most famous singer of the time, maybe the most famous woman in the world. Disney had taken her as a teenager and made her a star. As she got older her act had got more and more sexy. And every red-blooded male fantasized about fucking her, and probably lots of women too. Her catchy music and sexually charged stage act meant that every show sold out immediately the tickets went on sale and it seemed to be almost impossible to get a ticket apart from paying a ridiculous price to some tout on Ebay. It was hard to listen to the radio for long without hearing her, it seemed like she had been the background music to life for the last several years.

Presumably Tee would meet him at the show and be sitting in the next seat. She must have had the tickets from long before she went hiking, he realized. For a moment he wondered who she’d originally planned to go with. Still that guy’s loss was his own gain.

**

Mark arrived at Madison Square Garden. He wasn’t sure where he was sitting, the section numbering was hard to decode. Each usher he asked pointed further forward. Eventually Mark found his seat. He was in the center of the front row, just a few feet from the stage. He was at the end of a row with an aisle next to him. The seat on his other side was empty. He expected Tee to arrive at any moment and was surprised that the seat was still empty when the house lights went down.

Tiffany took to the stage and Mark got captivated by the spectacle of the show and forgot that Tee didn’t seem to be going to join him. He’d never been so close to the stage before. The back of the nose-bleed section was where he’d normally seen concerts. Tiffany left the stage for one of her costume changes as the band laid into the long introduction to the song ‘Pole Dance’. Tiffany danced back onto the stage to hit the cue where the vocals started. Mark’s jaw dropped. In her hands were Mark’s hiking poles.

He was completely thrown, wondering how Tiffany could have got his hiking poles from Tee. What a coincidence that they even knew each other.

Then, in a flash he realized how. Tee was Tiffany. It wasn’t Tee, it was T. T for Tiffany. He’d never really seen her face, concealed by sunglasses and a sun-hat. Her hiking clothes had hid her attractive dancer’s body.

She artfully incorporated the poles into her routine until, as the song came to a close, she danced to the front of the stage. Everyone in the audience saw her bow and hand the poles to a lucky guy sitting in the front row. Mark was stunned. He suddenly found himself literally in the spotlight looking down Tiffany’s cleavage as she bent down to hand him his poles. He took them from her in a daze.

Soon the show was over, Tiffany sang an encore and then left the stage. Everyone started clapping hoping for a second encore. A large black guy, a bouncer type, came over to Mark and indicated he should follow. Mark was taken along the front of the stage and then through a door that presumably led backstage. They went down a rough concrete corridor and through another door and then they were outside at the back of the hall. There was a long white stretch limo waiting there. The bouncer opened the door for Mark and he stepped in. Tiffany was sitting on the seat still in the costume from her encore, see-through harem pants over a miniscule thong, and a revealing bikini top. The audience was still clapping and whistling as the limo moved off. Mark realized he was living the dream of every man, to be alone with a half-naked Tiffany. She was breathing hard, still somewhat out of breath from singing and dancing the final song.

“Thank you for lending me your poles. And thank you for paying for the shuttle with no certainty that you’d get repaid. Those were the first genuinely generous things anyone has done for me for a long time.”

“How do you mean?”

“Of course people do things for me all the time, but they do it because I’m Tiffany not because they would do it for anyone else in the same situation. But I’m so famous at the moment that I live in a bubble, isolated from the real world. I rarely talk to someone who isn’t employed by me. I can ask anyone for anything and I know they’ll do it because I’m Tiffany. But I can’t be myself. I went and did the John Muir Trail on my own to get away from all that. My management staff hated the idea, they figured I’d fall over a cliff and kill myself, or get recognized and raped by some mountain man. They insisted someone went with me. But I refused. Nobody recognized me. Nobody did anything, good or bad, just because I was Tiffany. I was having a fantastic time until I wrecked my ankle.

“I hurt my ankle once before, dancing,” she continued. “I was rushed to a helicopter and whisked off to the best hospital in Las Vegas where top bone specialists treated me for what was basically a trivial injury. This time I had to rely on myself for the first time in ages. My ankle hurt like hell, but in a way I was glad since it made the experience even more of a change from Tiffany than I’d planned.”

“I had no idea who you were,” said Mark. “There’s a sort of code on the trail that you don’t ask people what they do in the real world. In the mountains everyone is equal, and in a very real sense. Tiffany, or T, is as likely to twist her ankle as anyone else.”

“I nearly sent your hiking poles back to you without revealing who I was. It would sort of complete the circle. But then on the spur of the moment I took them out of the box and threw in a ticket for you tonight instead. I already had a song called ‘pole dance’, even though not about that type of pole. I decided to give them back to you on stage. I wanted to meet you again.”

“Well, here I am,” Mark replied. “What can I tell you? I’m a marketing guy. I’m single. I love hiking and pretty much anything in the outdoors.”

“Girlfriend?”

Mark was surprised at the question. “Not at present. But I read somewhere about your boyfriend. Aren’t you going out with that actor guy?”

“Don’t believe everything you read. If I have dinner with someone then the magazines are all full of stories about how we are in love, or secretly married or that I’m pregnant. Everyone wants to fuck me because I’m Tiffany, which isn’t a good enough reason for me to do it. So I’ve not had sex in nearly two years. I can only really meet people in the business and they are so narcissistic it’s a real turn-off. I rarely come into contact with people like you who are not in the industry, what show-business people call civilians.”

The limo arrived at the rear of the hotel. Mark and Tiffany went in through a back entrance and went up to the top floor of the hotel in the service elevator, away from the crowd of fans at the front entrance. The two of them walked into Tiffany’s enormous suite, so large that there was even a grand piano in the main room.

“Pour yourself a drink,” Tiffany said. “I must go and change.”

“Before you go can I take a photo of you?”

“Sure.” Tiffany went over to the piano and leant against it. She flicked a switch and the piano began to play itself. Tiffany started to dance slowly along with the music while Mark took a few photos.

Tiffany left the room to what Mark presumed was her bedroom. He poured himself a large scotch and sat looking at the view of Manhattan through the floor length windows. He presumed Tiffany was having a shower and was surprised when she returned so quickly. Tiffany came into the room. She was wearing her hiking pants, the thick fleece and her sun hat. Of course she hadn’t been on the trail for over a week, the clothes were clean, her hair was done. But the ordinariness of the clothes only made her sexier than when she was in her stage outfit, somehow it made her more approachable.

“Good evening T,” Mark said.

“Call me Tuffy. Tiffany really is my name but my friends shorten it to Tuffy.”

She walked up to Mark and before he realized what was happening she kissed him.

“You are one of my friends,” she said.

She put her arms around him and pulled him against her. Their tongues found each other. Tuffy took one of Mark’s hands and put it on the zipper of her fleece. He pulled it down and the fleece jacket fell open. She wore nothing underneath. Her breasts were large but firm, crowned with large rose colored nipples. Mark rubbed a nipple with the palm of his hand. It was already hard. Tuffy moaned as he caressed her breast. She started to unbutton his shirt.

Tuffy pushed the fleece off her shoulders. She spun away from Mark and started to dance again, dressed in just the hiking pants and the hat. She picked up Mark’s poles where he had leant them against the wall and danced with them as she had done on stage earlier. She stood facing Mark, holding the hiking poles in both hands above her head like a trapeze bar, her breasts thrust out proudly, bouncing as she danced. She unbuttoned her pants. Then she turned so she was facing away from him and wiggled her hips. Her hiking pants slid down her legs and her ass came into view. Her pants puddled at her ankles and she stepped out of them, totally naked except for her floppy hat.

She had a perfect ass, Mark thought. She moved her legs apart. He could clearly see her inner labia silhouetted between her thighs. She turned around slowly. She was hairless, waxed smooth. Mark raised his camera. He saw her tense and he hesitated. But she said nothing and so he took the photograph of her naked.

She reached behind and positioned one of his hiking poles between her legs, so that the handle stuck out like a black plastic cock. She made small thrusts with her hips, rubbing his hiking pole along her slit. He could see it was glistening with her juices. His pole would certainly have even more sentimental value now.

She dropped the poles and came back over to him. She knelt down and started to undo his pants. His cock leapt free as she simultaneously slid his jeans down to his ankles and slid his cock into her mouth. He finished unbuttoning his shirt and pushed it off, and kicked his jeans away.

Mark looked down at the sexy sight of Tuffy, still wearing the old hiking hat, holding his cock in one fist while she licked his cockhead as if she was eating an ice-cream cone. She moved her other hand up and started to caress his balls. She took his cock out of her mouth for a moment so that she could lick one of her fingers. She went back to stroking his balls again, but this time sliding the wet finger further back and lightly touching his asshole. She took him in deeper, pushing his knob right to the back of her mouth. As she started to fuck him slowly with her mouth she worked a finger into his tight ass. Mark knew he wouldn’t be able to last long, he could already feel his balls tightening. She started to move her head faster now, sliding her tongue the length of his cock as she forced him into her throat. At the same time she fucked his asshole, sliding her finger completely into him. Mark felt his orgasm building. Tuffy sensed it too. She pulled off him and opened her mouth wide as she pumped his cock with one hand and fucked his ass with the other. Then he was coming, warm jets of come shooting into Tuffy’s open mouth. She wrapped her mouth back around his cock and licked him clean as she knelt submissively in front of him.

Tuffy let her body fall backwards over her heels. She lay on her back and spread her legs wide, exhibiting her cunt to him. She put one hand behind each knee and, with her flexible dancer’s body, she pulled her legs up so that she was bent double, offering her pussy to him.

It was beautiful. Mark couldn’t help thinking that it was just the sort of pussy a Disney princess would have. Completely symmetrical, lips that were not too big and not too small, a perfect pink color.

Mark bent down and ran the tip of his tongue over Tuffy’s outer lips, first one side and then the other. On each stroke of his tongue he moved infinitesimally closer to her inner lips, until, eventually he was running his tongue up the crevices between her inner and outer lips, first on the left, then on the right. Tuffy was trying to move under him so that his tongue touched her clit, but he teased her by moving away just enough that he avoided contact, just ran his tongue to either side. Mark held each of Tuffy’s inner lips between finger and thumb of each hand and gently pulled her open. He pushed his tongue into her opening. He started to rhythmically move his tongue in and out of her cunt, feeling her start to rock her hips in time as he tongue-fucked her. Her nectar tasted sweet.

Mark opened Tuffy up more, exposing her hard clit. He felt her tense at the anticipation that his tongue would finally touch her clit. He could sense that she was close to cumming. He paused for a moment as she lay there with her eyes closed, lost in the intensity of the pleasure. Finally, he moved his tongue to her clit and started to lick it hard and fast, at the same time pushing two fingers into her cunt. He could feel that her clit was hard like a ball-bearing. She cried out as her orgasm hit her almost immediately. He continued to lick her clit, more softly now, as her orgasm continued. He could feel the spasms of her cunt clenching around his fingers.

Mark continued to gently kiss Tuffy’s lips as she came down from her high. He touched her clit with the tip of his tongue and started to make small circles on it. He had to be careful because he could tell that it was hyper-sensitive. He started to slide his fingers in and out of her wet cunt, stroking her g-spot. Tuffy was already close to a second orgasm. Mark continued to circle her clit, barely touching her. He could feel her body tensing up, close to climax again. He started to circle a finger on her asshole, wet where her juices had run down between her ass cheeks. Just as she was on the point of cumming, he pushed his finger into her tight rear hole. With his tongue on her clit, fingers in her cunt and now a finger up her ass, her body could not resist and another orgasm burst over Tuffy.

Tuffy lay on the floor, her body limp, exhausted from the concert performance and the sexual thrills. Mark stood up. He grabbed one of her hands and pulled her to her feet. He guided her into her bedroom and the two of them got underneath the covers. Soon they were both asleep in each other’s arms.

Mark woke. It was still very dark. For a moment he wondered whether he had dreamt the whole evening. But Tuffy lay beside him sleeping. She moved and pushed her back against him, spooning herself into him. He realized that she was awake as she started to rub her ass against him. He felt his cock hardening. It lay along the crack of her ass. She continued to stroke his cock with her ass-cheeks. When he was rock hard she reached between her legs and moved his cock between her thighs. Now as she rocked her hips she was gently stroking her lips along the length of his cock, moistening it with her own wetness. Mark reached around her body and grasped a breast in each hand, squeezing her tightly against him while she stroked his cock between her thighs. As his cock slid along her lips it only took a slight adjustment of her body and his cock nestled in her entrance. Slowly she worked his cock into her, each movement of her body taking him in a little deeper until her cheeks were pushed hard up against his body.

Mark rolled onto his back, pulling Tuffy with him so that she was now lying on top of him, facing up. She sat up and bent forward, and got her legs underneath her. Her hips rose and fell as she bent over. She turned on a light beside the bed. He now had a wonderful view of her ass, with his cock sliding in and out of her hole, with her big cunt lips wrapped around him. The brown pucker of her asshole winked at him. He reached forward and gently slid a finger into her rear, eliciting a moan of approval. Mark lay there while one of the sexiest women in the world worked to give him as much pleasure as she could.

Tuffy moved off him and lay on her back. He moved over her, his cock dangling between her parted thighs. He kissed her deeply, playing with her tongue as his cock nestled between her lips. He let his cock slip lower into her soft opening and then he thrust himself into her in a single stroke. She cried out in surprise and pleasure. He started to thrust into her vigorously. She rocked her hips up to meet each thrust. She reached between their bodies and started to masturbate her clit. Mark looked down to watch. He loved to watch a woman stimulate herself, so personal and intimate. He could feel that he was getting close.

As if she read his mind and knew what he was about to ask, she said “It’s OK. Cum inside me.”

He could feel his orgasm approaching. He knew he wouldn’t have to work hard to make himself cum so instead he slowed down, moving inside Tuffy the minimum he needed to keep his arousal building up.

“Tell me when you are going to come and I’ll come with you,” Tuffy said.

Mark continued to move in long slow strokes inside Tuffy. He felt her squeeze her cunt muscles around him as his climax neared. She stopped touching herself and started to rub his nipples instead.

“I’m just about to come,” he said, although he realized she already knew that.

Tuffy started to stroke his nipples harder as Mark made a few final thrusts into her. She started to come too. Mark could feel her cunt milking his cock and then he was coming hard, emptying himself deep inside her body. He lay there for a bit, going soft inside her. Then he rolled off. In no time they were both asleep again.

The next time they awoke it was morning.

“So is this just a one night thing or am I allowed to see you again? Or do I have to make do with my photo?” Mark asked.

“You have no idea how much it took for me not to stop you taking a photo of me naked. Think how far the paparazzi would go for a picture like that. You’re about the only person in the world I trust that much, which is odd since I don’t really know you. You have no idea how hard it was not to laugh when you asked if I could afford $50 for the shuttle. You trusted me. So I trust you. Anyway, I don’t want this to be a one-night stand. But I’m only in New York one more night then we perform in Boston. Can you come on tour for a few days with me?”

“On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That next summer you’ll come back to Bishop Pass and walk 100 miles with me to the top of Mount Whitney. So we can both finish the John Muir Trail.”

She smiled. “OK. But I may need to borrow some hiking poles. Do you happen to know anyone who has some?”