She’d hidden herself in the furthest recesses of my bed, the bed about which someone once asked of me why I needed one quite to big. It’s an occasional double, I’d told them and they’d chortled with recognition. Yet Elsie, in a terrible surge of frightened anticipation had managed, at one and the same time, to make both herself appear much smaller and the bed twice the size. She’d squeezed herself into a corner and huddled, her arms wrapped around her tightly drawn up legs staring at me wide eyed, as if I was the first completely naked woman she’d ever seen.

Maybe I was.

“Elsie!” I whispered “Of course its me”

I rearranged some pillows as soon as I got up there, while she crept, like some small pale orange coloured animal, on her hands and knees towards me.

“The light is alright” she replied when I asked her. “I want to see you…...”

So I lay in my usual place, mattress and pillows recognising me and, after a merest moment’s hesitation, she manoeuvred herself alongside me.

Her body felt different this time, different because now no garments came between us, different because she was naked and I was naked with her. Different because we lay and were relaxed. Different in the size and shape and feel of us against each other, skin to skin, and in the knowledge of what we were doing and the anticipation of it. Different though she did still tremble slightly.

I asked if she was cold but she shook her head. I don’t feel the cold much, she told me.

“We have plenty of time Elsie” I whispered. “All the time we need without having to rush anything”

Yet still she trembled against me.

~~~~~~~~

I am of the opinion that two women, no matter how dissimilar in size and shape, will find their bodies fit closer and more comfortably together than those of a woman and a man. Breasts after all prefer other breasts to squash against. Similarly, slim smooth legs better match others like them, rather than those that are muscular, hairy or rough.

We slipped closer, half covered by the duvet, half uncovered for each others eyes. A shadow, a curve, a patch of darkness loosely outlined. Movement and stillness devoid of design.

She muttered some words I could not discern, her voice coming as if from a long way away.

Was it ‘I love you Vicky’ she whispered? It may have been. Or it may have been a prayer of some kind, for the sound rang familiar, or would have had I been able to make out any words. The tone of it rose and fell in cadence and rhyme but the language itself was somehow foreign and obscure, a sing-song of syllables I did not know, so that she might have been saying I love chocolate, for all I could tell.

So I looked for, and found, that gentle place, that curve of ribcage between somnolent breasts, found and was instantly rewarded with the exquisite taste of her skin.

She lay with her arms by her sides as if sleeping, making no attempt to return my favours. Nor did she resist when, crouching I moved myself downwards. Only when, as my lips explored her navel did she rest one hand lightly on my head.

Moving gently I paid homage to the woman, as was only right and proper, an act unknown to even the most sensitive of men. She made the tiniest of noises when my lips brushed the skin of her belly, a shuddering sigh when my tongue touched and tickled the outermost fringes of her hair.

Special spices sighed softly in the bower, peppery, perfect as I moved through curls of springy softness, mmming breathily then crying out sharply when at last my tongue tip traced the curve of her crease.

Shall I go on, Sweethearts? Shall I continue? How sweet these trials are to bear and how magical! Shall I move you, disillusion you, bore you yet again with my description, as all the while it seemed, I was boring her, for, unmoving and barely responsive she resembled a statue, a grey marble corpse yet warm to my touch.

Until at last my fingers slipped and smoothed and made stiff her nipples and my nose and my mouth sampled the secret seeping secretions of her sex.

Then, in the instant I found her, she began quietly to murmur, a single word over and over again. My own name: Vicky! Vicky! Vicky……!

Shivering she surrendered her secrets to me, her torso trembling, her treasures revealed. Her taste was nondescript at first, stale with sweat and supposition’s secretions, but ere long she writhed and moaned and put more weight upon my head with her hand, her shape softening, as her sweet juices released.

She sighed then, her body relaxing, her demeanour changing from defensive to compliant, her skin suffusing before my very eyes as she abandoned her body to me.

Was it lust or love that enflamed her. And if love then that in essence must remain a personal thing.

My heart beat for her as did hers for me. I know ‘twas so for Sweethearts, I felt it strongly, but was it love or merely lust’s bold efforts that fired the roaring blood in our veins? And if lust not love then ‘tis all a dream, a journey of mind and memory, frightening in its intensity, the earliest instance surely, of a primeval urge. What might one woman feel for another to make them act this way? Hush child Darkness! Have you never experienced it? In truth now! Speak! Have you never thought of it, never dared?

Then wait, but wait not too long, for love - oh love is fleeting and what one woman might feel, a wholeness and oneness, a completeness and a contentment with another, no poetry could describe, no, nor any song one line of it sing.

~~~~~~~~~

We lay partly apart and loosely together for a long while after that, me, relaxed and contented and she bursting with the fresh sensations and excitements she had experienced. Her thoughts were as loud as her heartbeat had earlier been, her wishes, her hopes, as shrill as her moans which still echoed in my ears.

Casually, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do, which of course it is, she turned her head and put her tongue in my ear.

This tickled and I giggled, so she drew back and giggled in sympathy.

“Was that really your first time?” I asked her gently.

Almost inaudibly she answered me “Yes!”

“And was that a prayer you were saying before………?”

“Oh No!” she laughed “No indeed, I needed no prayer, you were so very gentle with me. It was so lovely and…….. and I didn’t bleed…….”

“I think you did a little” I corrected “Cos I tasted it!”

She peered at me awkwardly and shivered. “Don’t you care……I mean…… don’t you mind the taste of me?”

She is a silly girl, even now, and sometimes I really feel like smacking her. It was a stupid question too, but how was she supposed to know if she didn’t ask it, the idea being an entirely new one to her.

“If I didn’t like it I wouldn’t do it!” I told her in no uncertain terms.

“But…….. blood” she persisted “Blood from me………”

“Else” I chided “Did you never get the urge to taste your own blood sometimes?”

She looked at me relieved and suitably chastened

“Now and then in the month, you know. I can’t help it sometimes……”

“There you are then!” I agreed “What’s the difference?”

Elsie, Else, as I began to call her then, grinned self effacingly

“None, I s’pose, really”

~~~~~~~~~

Our movements became familiar and instinctive after that, If she moved her arm I shifted my weight to accommodate it until, exactly as I expected it, I began to pick up on her thoughts.

After a while she sighed sadly and said

“They aren’t my real parents you know, the Salversuns”

“No” I replied “I didn’t think they could be. She is too old, I reckon, isn’t she?”

“Mmmm. They just adopted me” she explained “Well stole me really, I think”

She must have seen the look of disbelief on my face because, hurriedly, she went on to explain.

“My real mum and dad were killed you see. Dad was working for one of the Salversun organisation at the time. He…. He used to invent things…….. anyway he was killed and mum was very badly hurt when a ferry they were travelling in crashed. They were on the moon…. Luna that is, when it happened…… Mum was carrying me………”

Her voice quavered but she held back the tears bravely, lifting her face up to be kissed.

“I’ve always likened what happened after that to that story in Shakespeare, you know the one, where someone, I forget who, says:

“….. and his gentle lady, big of this gentleman of our theme, deceased as she was born………”

“Shakespeare!” I said “I have to admit to knowing nothing of him!”

“Oh Vicky!” her eyes dried her tears with her laughter “I’m so glad….so pleased, I did it with you first!”

Suitably chastened I smiled my pleasure.

“Was it really, really your first time?” I asked again.

And again she replied “Oh yes, oh yes!”

~~~~~~~~

So we lay quietly for a while longer, while parsecs perished in the pace of our passing. I listened to her breathing, to her heartbeat and the tiny, comforting noises within her chest.

“That Shakespeare stuff” I asked presently “Where did you get it?”

She laughed lightly

“Vicky, they taught the classics at one of the schools I went to……“the king takes the babe, that’s me, to his protection and calls her Posthumus Leonatus, or in this case Posthumus Leonora Elsie Bee…… he breeds her and makes her of his own bedchamber, puts to her all the learnings of the time……” “Like I said, I got taught the classics!”

She grinned then, pleased by my amusement so we kissed again, lightly and lovingly and were happy.

“So that was what you were muttering earlier was it?”

She grinned

“That was a different bit, where some Duke or other asks “Is this the witness Friar? First let her show her face!” but of course the girl refuses saying “I will not show my face until my husband tells me to!” Then the Duke asks: “What, are you married?” and she says “No my Lord” whereupon he asks: “Well are you a maid?” and she answers “No my Lord” so the Duke asks: “A widow then?” again she answers “No my lord” and in exasperation the Duke says: “Why you are nothing then! Neither maid widow nor wife!”

Cuddling against me she giggled happily. “I was thinking how much that sounded like me at one time” she said “A nothing! Neither maid widow nor wife. Until I met you that is. Now I suppose I am all three!”

“You tell me the strangest things!” I joked cheerily. Nakedness came naturally to her now, with me at least, within the confines of that room, within that bed.

“The strangest oftenest are the truthest……truest, aren’t they?” she said quietly.

“I’ve often thought that” I replied.

We leaned together with our arms around each other, half sitting, half propped by pillows feet and legs covered by a rumpled duvet dragged obscurely across the bed. For a while we were content to observe the passing of time. From experience I knew there were things Else wanted to talk about but for the moment I was content to bide my time, and sure enough, after a while she did.

“Vicky…” she began “I must ask you this……Is it natural to want to……to do it again……so soon?”

“The time has come, the walrus said” I began, quoting one of the few lines of poetry I actually knew “to speak of many things………”

Then, as she laughed, I grew confused and forgot the rest as if I’d never known it

“I know that one!” she said brightly “Cabbages and Kings……”

With those words I suspect one of her few remaining barriers came tumbling down. In all the time I knew her I never saw her lost for words, or wary of asking any question again.

© Aahlu. 1998-2010. From my novel “Arcturus Arises”

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