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  “This is turning out to be quite the lucky day,” I agreed, forgetting about her unhappiness, her husband gone off to war.

  And, it seemed, she had too, at least for the moment. “It is, isn’t it?”

  She reached for my hand, and I juggled the bag and her suitcase in one arm so I could clasp it for the short walk around the corner and down toward the beach. I saw our lights on—we were allowed to show them on this side of the house—and knew my mother was home, probably worried and wondering where I’d been. She, too, was in for a surprise,

  —

  I stretched out on the sofa with a groan as Naomi settled in front of the radio, tuning the station. We didn’t get the best reception and often listened through static about news of the war.

  “I’m stuffed!” I announced happily, rubbing the pouch of my belly. An entire steak, a whole potato—with butter!—and even carrots from the summer garden, stored for the winter in the larder. They were a little rubbery raw, but cooked they were quite tasty.

  “Want to dance?” Naomi teased, settling the radio on some big band music.

  I groaned. “Not on your life. Quick, someone push me back into the water!”

  The sound of her laughter, coupled with my mother’s as she joined us in the sitting room, was enough to make me giddy, if the food hadn’t already done its job.

  We all sat quietly for a while, although I admit I was watching Naomi through half closed eyes. Dinner had been a delight, both women talking animatedly, getting to know one another. I could pretend, and did, that the beautiful woman beside me was mine, and not married to a man headed halfway across the world to face certain death—if not his own, than someone else’s. It was a lovely fantasy, although I knew it was just that. I had no designs or intentions of making it anything else. Instead, I just enjoyed basking in the company of two beautiful women who couldn’t help but be their feminine selves. It fed me more than the huge meal ever could have.

  That’s when the news came on the radio. Every time, we hoped it would be the end of the war, and every time, it wasn’t. This was no different—FDR making another statement about the atrocities happening overseas. We all listened, the jaunty edge immediately taken off our evening, the wind in our sails stilled by reality.

  “The United Nations are fighting to make a world in which tyranny and aggression cannot exist; a world based upon freedom, equality, and justice; a world in which all persons regardless of race, color, or creed may live in peace, honor, and dignity.”

  Naomi sighed, and I watched her as we listened to FDR speak, her eyes cast down, her mouth set in a small rosebud. The speech wasn’t long—just long enough to put a damper on the mood. Then the news came on, and they were talking about the Recy Taylor case—a young Negro woman, a wife and mother, forced into a car by four white men and “ravished.” That’s what they called it on the radio. We couldn’t say the word “rape” in 1944.

  “That poor, poor girl.” My mother sighed, turning a page in her book. She’d always been progressive in her views—much more than my father ever had. “We’re fighting for equality overseas, and we don’t even have it in our own backyard.”

  “My cousins are in Poland,” Naomi spoke softly, her hair still falling in her face. “They’re in hiding—at least, I hope they still are. They got a letter out to us early in the war, saying they were safe, for now. But the world just isn’t a safe place anymore, is it?”

  “No,” my mother agreed, marking her place and looking at Naomi. “But I’m not sure that it ever really was.”

  “I need some air.” And with that, Naomi was gone in a flash, her coat plucked from the rack as she headed out the front door.

  “Patrick,” my mother started, but I was already up.

  “I’m going.” We weren’t supposed to go out after dark. There were wardens who patrolled up and down the beach, and you could actually get arrested for being out after curfew.

  “Naomi!” I saw her walking, shoulders hunched against the February cold. “Wait up!”

  It was snowing hard now, which was always disconcerting, to be walking in sand while it snowed, but I knew if I let her get too far, I’d lose her. Breaking into a run, I caught up, breathless, and found myself holding a sobbing woman in my arms for the second time that day.

  She railed against me, although I knew it was more than me, as she struggled and hit my chest and screamed and swore. I’d never heard words like that coming from a woman’s mouth—it was both sobering and heartbreaking. And then she collapsed, spent, and I couldn’t hold her as we sank down to the cold sand. I rocked her, the way my mother used to rock me after bad dreams, for a long time.

  “Naomi, listen, we—”

  “No!” Her head came up, and in the moonlight, her eyes flashed darkly. “Not another word. I’m so sick of words.”

  “But—” I had to protest. If we stayed out there much longer… “Shut up!” Her directive was followed with the easiest way to make me, although I was so surprised, she knocked me off balance. Her kiss knocked us both backwards into the sand and snow, and we tumbled there together, oblivious to the cold, our bodies creating enough heat to keep us from feeling it.

  I didn’t want to take advantage, but the softness of her body pressing, her mouth slanting, her tongue—oh god, her tongue slipping into my mouth, so eager and hungry—all made it impossible to resist. She unbuttoned her own coat, and I did mine, her breasts pressing full against my chest as she kissed me again and again.

  My erection was a monumental ache, and as she straddled me and rocked, blocked by far too many clothes, her skirt riding so far up her hips I felt the edge of her stockings on her thighs as I held onto her, I thought I would explode right there. When she reached down to unzip my trousers, the small, soft tug of her hand like heaven’s own, I groaned and began undoing her blouse, lost in the sensation.

  She encouraged me, whispering, “yes, yes,” as I fumbled one-handed with her brassiere, the other filled with the soft globe of her bottom, pressing her hard against my crotch. She grew quickly impatient with me and undid it herself, letting her breasts spill free, and I thought I would die in the midst of those mounds of flesh, my tongue and mouth making wet trails back and forth between them.

  “Wait,” she whispered, and I sighed when she stood, lamenting the loss of the soft press of her body, afraid it was over, that she was going to realize what we were doing and call it off. Instead, she pulled her skirt up high and undid her garters so she could pull her panties down and step out of them. I couldn’t see nearly enough of her in the dark, just a dark triangular patch against the pale white of her skin in the moonlight, but my hand had a mind of its own and cupped her mound as she stood splayed above me.

  “Oh yes,” she whispered, moaning softly as I explored the soft folds of her flesh, the slickness inside, and I nearly let go the moment my finger entered her, the place I wanted to bury myself, forever and ever. Her legs wouldn’t hold her and she lowered herself onto me, straddling my hips again, this time flesh against flesh, no material left to separate us as she kissed me and rocked, the curly mass of her pubic hair parting over my shaft as she looked for the best angle.

  I’d never done this, but I didn’t want to tell her that and she seemed to know just what she was doing, just what she wanted. She sighed happily as she slipped me inside of her, settling down into my lap and wiggling. Me, I nearly died, my fingers gripping her hips so hard I thought I’d bruise her, but I couldn’t help it. Every nerve in my body was as taut as piano wire waiting to be played, and that’s just exactly what she did.

  She played me, rode me, taught me with every circling motion of her hips, and I went along for the ride, panting in her ear as the dark curtain of her hair blocked out the moon. The words she’d used earlier in anger, she now used in love, urging me on, driving me toward dizzying heights. Again, those words from a woman’s mouth, so powerful, so moving.

  “Naomi, oh… god… I’m…”

  She shuddered in my arms,
biting my neck, her face buried there as I drove up into her, the tight channel I was lost in squeezing again and again, drawing me deeper, taking my pulsing seed with every contraction. There was, in that moment, no cold, no dark, no world, no war…there was only Naomi, and me connected to her, through her, to everything, together beating as one heart “I’m cold,” she murmured, snuggling closer. Her coat was open and covering us, mine beneath, but our bodies’ natural cooling mechanism after such exertion had kicked in, and we were slick with sweat “We need to go back,” I gasped, still out of breath, not wanting to even say the words. “We’re not supposed to be out on the beach after dark. We could get arrested.”

  She giggled. Then she laughed, and I did, too—how absurd it all was, how insane, how delightfully, crazily funny. Laughing was better than crying, although we did the latter as well, tears streaming down our cheeks as we howled into the night, fumbling to reassemble our clothes. She couldn’t find her underwear—and I wasn’t about to tell her that I had them tucked into my coat pocket, along with her photo. For some reason, the loss of her panties somewhere in the sand made her laugh even harder as we made our way up the beach toward the house.

  Mother knew. I saw it in her face as we burst through the door, still laughing, still glowing, our cheeks red from more than just the cold. Naomi apologized for running out, and my mother accepted with a wave of her hand, suggesting that perhaps we all should get some rest, but through it all, I saw the look in my mother’s eyes and I knew she knew. Perhaps she had looked out the window and had seen us in the moonlight. Perhaps it was only a mother’s intuition, a knowing, that she sensed a change in her only son.

  Whatever the reason, she knew. And it changed everything.

  —

  I had to ask her as I stood, waiting to put her back on the bus. Did she regret it? There was no other opportunity, although I don’t know if we would have taken it. Breakfast was just oatmeal, a simple meal compared to last night’s feast, and a quiet one, too, all three of us lost in our own thoughts. I dreamed and fantasized about the night before, stealing glances at the face of the woman sitting at the table. Naomi had her hair pulled back and up for traveling, and I realized she must have let it down just before she got off the bus the day before. She’d let it down for him—and he hadn’t been there to meet her. Instead, it had been me, and somehow I’d known what was going to happen the moment I saw her picture.

  She hugged me tight, whispering, “I could never regret you,” into my ear. Then she kissed me. It was no small peck on the cheek, no little sister’s kiss. This one was just as passionate, maybe more, than the night before, and my body responded instantly to the soft, wet cavern of her mouth, reminding me of the moist, deep recess I wanted to sink into below. We were just another couple in the bus station, like the hundred others I’d watched, and people passed us without a second glance.

  “Write me,” I said, pressing a slip of paper in her hand. She took it, and she looked sad, but she didn’t say no.

  When the bus pulled out of the terminal, that was it, and I knew it. There was no correspondence, no continued affair. It had been one brief, bright moment in the midst of a world of tragedy, something for both of us to cling to. That moment on the beach had changed me, more perhaps than if I’d been storming another beach in Normandy a few months later, that beach where my father would die, in that last epic battle, and leave me finally, truly alone with my mother.

  And my mother…she looked at me differently after that night with Naomi, and would, forever. I was changed, I felt changed, and she felt it too. What I never understood was how my mother knew how to turn it, pivot everything on its end, to give us both what we needed. But she did, and I gave into it, to her, because there was nothing else left to do. No matter how cold it got, we had each other, and the world was nothing but fire after that.

  —

  “Patrick.” It was almost immediate. She heard the door close, and she was calling me. “Did you get the mail? Was there a letter?”

  “Yes… and no,” I called up the stairs, unwrapping my scarf, shaking the snow off my coat. “Would you come wash my hair?” Even her tone was different.

  I found her in the bath, waiting, leaning back against the tub, her arms supporting her on either side. Her hair was piled up on top of her head, and I saw no bubbles in the water at all this time. Her body was completely exposed to me, shamelessly, almost proudly. Just looking at her made me hard.

  “She made it off okay?” My mother inquired about Naomi as she let her hair down, a thick, dark mass unrolling down her back, long enough to begin spreading out into the water behind her like a fan.

  “Fine.” I tried to be casual—about Naomi, about wetting my mother’s hair as she tilted her head back and arched, her nipples pointing skyward—but I was feeling anything but. Whatever had happened the night before had changed me, but somehow…somehow it had changed the way my mother looked at me, too.

  “It’s hard, being away from your lover that way.”

  Lover.

  It even changed the way she spoke to me.

  I swallowed, soaping up her hair, but didn’t respond. She kept talking anyway.

  “You miss their company, of course, but there’s this primal sort of longing that just never goes away.” She shifted in the water, hands behind her, body stretching forward, putting herself on display for me. My gaze was drawn between the swell of her thighs, and instead of wondering what it might feel like, this time I knew—although it didn’t lessen my desire, as I once thought knowing might do. In fact, it seemed to make it worse.

  “Is there?” I used my fingers to scrub her scalp, trying to keep my composure, trying to keep up the pretense we always had, when she gave a soft sigh, a small moan.

  “Oh, baby, that feels so good,” she murmured, arching more, and my cock jumped in my pants like a snake trying to bite. “Do it harder.”

  Oh, hell.

  Instead, I took the cup I used to rinse her hair and started pouring water, trying to wash it away, the feelings I knew I shouldn’t be having. Her sounds didn’t stop, though…she kept on, arching, moaning, mmmmm-ing until my erection was a steel rod in my pants.

  “Was that the phone?” I asked weakly as she opened her eyes, flushing the excess water from her hair as she stood. I hadn’t heard anything but the sounds of my mother’s pleasure but wanted any excuse now to leave temptation behind, because I knew, somehow, where we were headed, and there was just no going back.

  “Towel?” She held her hand out for it and I gave it to her as she stepped from the tub, her body deliciously sleek and wet. She rubbed her hair for a moment, looking at me, something in her eyes I’d never seen before, and then she handed the towel back.

  “All the hot water’s made me faint,” she murmured. “Will you dry me?”

  It was the worst sort of feminine excuse, and it worked on me the way it had worked on every man through the eons. I took the towel and tried to look away as I rubbed her dry, but it was no use. The material rubbing over her skin made her nipples hard, and I stared at the puckered circles around them, fascinated by this development. Naomi had been one night in the dark, but this woman’s body was mine to gaze upon at my leisure. When I dabbed the towel meekly at the hair between my mother’s legs, she put one foot up on the edge of the high tub and a hand on her hip.

  “You can do better than that,” she assured me.

  I stared—the soft, open pink of her flesh was a siren’s call, and I leaned in closer as if to hear it better. She was right, there was water still beading in the wiry hair, and a wetness inside that glistened in the light. “Do you like what you see?” Her hand moved in my hair, her nails softly raking my scalp, making me shiver. I felt like an obedient dog who would do anything…anything…

  I looked up at her, nodding. “You’re beautiful.”

  It seemed to be the right thing to say. She smiled, her hand moving to under my chin, lifting my face. She’d done this a hundred times, a thousand, t
ouched me this way, but never with that hungry look in her eyes. Something had changed—I had changed, she had changed. We were different, and I knew something different was about to happen.

  “Do you want to kiss it?”

  I gaped at her, everything in me going suddenly silent. I had heard talk of such things, I had even read a little about them, but to be faced with the real possibility, and to have my own mother’s hands in my hair, pressing me ever closer to the sweet call of her core, was almost too much. My cock ached and I pressed a hand there, hoping she didn’t notice. I tried to protest, just for a moment. I knew I shouldn’t, we shouldn’t, but the need rising in me was too incredible to be borne.

  “Mother, I…”

  “Kiss it.” The words were soft, but insistent, and I did as she asked, breathing in the clean, sharp smell of her as I pressed my lips and then my tongue into the softness of her cleft. Her moans encouraged me, her hands guiding me. I wanted to push my tongue inside her, taste her as deeply as I could, but she directed me to a hard nub of flesh at the top of her slit, begging me to lick it, faster, faster, oh god, more. I did as I was told, rubbing my cock through my pants as I knelt at my mother’s altar and offered her everything I could.

  “Oh yes, oh god, that’s such a good boy,” she moaned, rocking her hips into my face, burying me in her flesh until I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t care or want to anyway. “Make Mummy come, sweetheart, oh fuck, oh oh ohhhh!”

  And then she shuddered and bucked, her foot slipping off the edge of the tub as she pressed my face deep into her flesh, giving her climax to me in hot, wet waves, just as Naomi had done on top of me the night before on the beach. When she collapsed and sat on the edge of the tub, drooping slightly, breathing hard, I sat at my mother’s feet and gazed up at her in wonder, my face still wet, and found myself wanting more.

  “Oh, Patrick,” she murmured when she opened her eyes to see me looking up at her that way. “My beautiful boy…my poor, beautiful boy. I think we have to do something about that, don’t you?” She nodded down to my lap, where my hand pressed the outline of my cock.