He grinned with knowing pride and male arrogance as he sat her on the bed and turned her on to all fours.
He stroked her ass, smoothing up her back as he dropped soft kisses up her spine to her neck. The mattress shifted under his weight as the power of his erection pushed between her legs. He grasped her shoulders. He was hard against her, pressing to meet her need. His hips rocked. His cock slid though her wetness. Dea cried out as he thrust. She was tighter than she’d expected and Lucien filled her, stretched her, and possessed her. Driving with grunts and animal need, pressing into her soul with his male heat. Pumping her, taking her, possessing her, giving all a man could. He was Primal Man, potent and firm. She was Goddess, power and life. They melded in one life rhythm that took them both higher and harder through his grunts and her cries until, with a relentless thrust, he drove deep as she screamed aloud her triumph and he poured his jism into her heat.
She collapsed, his weight pressing her into the mattress, his cock embedded in her cunt, her mind drunk with joy and life, and her heart racing at one with the storm outside.
Through a haze of grogginess, Dea felt his weight ease off her. Lucien shifted her so her head rested on the pillow. Lips pressed on her forehead, arms held her close and she passed from frenzy to satiated rest.
She woke to electric light blazing overhead. Damn! The power outage. She’d left the lights on. Padding across the room to flick out the switch, she realized she was naked. Her night clothes lay in a crumpled heap in front of the last dying embers and she was wet halfway down her thighs.
She had just fucked a total stranger!
So what? It had been stupendous and her body still vibrated with the memory of Lucien’s tongue on her skin and his cock planted deep.
But fucking a completely unknown man! She made herself stop. No longer was she thinking like Rob Sullivant’s wife. She was Dea. Goddess. She curled up between sheets that smelled of sex and life.
Bright morning sunshine woke her later. Time to be on her way. She may have to face Lucien over coffee, but so what? He’d fucked a total stranger too. Her shoes waited, cleaned and polished outside her door, and breakfast was set at a lone table by a window.
As Dea sat down, Madame appeared with croissants and fresh bread, and a slab of firm cheese and little curls of butter. “Did you sleep well?”
Was she being facetious? A look at the woman’s face and Dea decided it was a routine enquiry asked of any guest. “Yes, very well. Apart from the storm.” No need to specify which storm.
Madame nodded. Fierce storms were to be expected. It was the time of year, the point vernal.
The vernal equinox: the season of wild tides and gales that marked the beginning of spring. A time of new life and renewal. Of course. Dea was alive, well satisfied, and drinking aromatic coffee several thousand miles from her humiliation. She cut off a corner of cheese, chewed it slowly and decided to stop and pay homage to the Goddess in the parking lot, on her way forward.
To Remember You By by Sacchi Green
“A movie!” she exulted from three thousand miles away. “They’re making a movie of our book!”
“Our book” was Healing Their Wings, a bittersweet, sometimes funny novel about American nurses in England during World War II. My grandson’s wife had based it on oral histories recorded from several of us who had kept in contact over the past half-century.
I rejoiced with her at the news, but then came a warning she was clearly embarrassed to have to make. “The screenwriters are bound to change some things, though. There’s a good chance they’ll want it to be quite a bit, well, racier.”
“Racier?” I said. “Honey, all you had to do was ask the right questions!” How had she missed the passionate undertones to my story? When I spoke, all too briefly, of Cleo, had she thought the catch in my voice was old age taking its toll at last? The young assume that they alone have explored the wilder shores of sex; or, if not, that the flesh must inevitably forget.
I had to admit that I was being unfair. Knowing what she did of my long, happy life with Jack, how could she even have guessed the right questions to ask? But it hardly matters now. The time is right. I’m going to share those memories, whether the movie people are ready for the truth or not. Because my flesh has never forgotten – will never forget – Cleo Remington.
In the summer of 1943, the air was sometimes so thick with sex you could have spread it like butter, and it would have melted, even on cold English toast.
The intensity of youth, the urgency of wartime, drove us. Nurses, WACs and young men hurled into the deadly air war against Germany gathered between one crisis and another in improvised dance halls. Anything from barns to airfield hangars to tents rigged from parachute silk would do. To the syncopated jive of trumpets and clarinets, to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Ac-cen-tuate the Positive”, we swayed and jitterbugged and twitched our butts defiantly at past and future. To the muted throb of drums and the yearning moan of saxophones, to “As Time Goes By” and “I’ll Be Seeing You”, our bodies clung and throbbed and yearned together.
I danced with men facing their mortality, and with brash young kids in denial. Either way, life pounded through their veins and bulged in their trousers, and sometimes my body responded with such force I felt as though my own skirt should have bulged with it.
But I wasn’t careless. And I wasn’t in love. As a nurse, I’d tried to mend too many broken boys, known too many who never made it back at all, to let my mind be clouded by love. Sometimes, though, in dark hallways or tangles of shrubbery or the shadow of a bomber’s wings, I would comfort some nice young flier with my body and drive him on until his hot release geysered over my hand. Practical Application of Anatomical Theory, we nurses called it, “PAT” for short. Humour is a frail defence against the chaos of war, but you take what you can get.
Superstition was the other universal defence. Mine, I suppose, was a sort of vestal virgin complex, an unexamined conviction that opening my flesh to men would destroy my ability to heal theirs.
These very defences – and repressions – might have opened me to Cleo. Would my senses have snapped so suddenly to attention in peacetime? They say war brings out things you didn’t know were in you. But I think back to my first sight of her – the intense grey eyes, the thick, dark hair too short and straight for fashion, the forthright movements of her lean body – and a shiver of delight ripples through me, even now. No matter where or when we met, she would have stirred me.
The uniform sure didn’t hurt, though, dark blue, tailored, with slacks instead of skirt. I couldn’t identify the service, but “USA” stood out clearly on each shoulder, so it made sense for her to be at the Red Cross club on Charles Street in London, set up by the United States Ambassador’s wife for American servicewomen.
There was a real dance floor, and a good band was playing that night, but Cleo lingered near the entrance as though undecided whether to continue down the wide, curving staircase. I don’t know how long I stared at her. When I looked up from puzzling over the silver pin on her breast she was watching me quizzically. My date, a former patient whose half-healed wounds made sitting out the dances advisable, gripped my shoulder to get my attention.
“A friend of yours?” he asked. He’d been getting a bit maudlin as they played “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To”, and I’d already decided he wasn’t going to get the kind of comfort he’d been angling for. I shook off his hand.