A Ride to Remember
and Other Erotic Tales
Sacchi Green
Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords
Copyright ©2011 Sacchi Green.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally; and any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by: Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Ave, Maple Shade, NJ 08052.
lethepressbooks.com lethepress@aol.com
Book design by Toby Johnson
cover image: © FotoliaI - Fotolia.com
ISBN 978-1-59021-320-9 / 1-59021-320-3
“To Remember You By” was originally published in Shameless: Women’s Intimate Erotica (Seal Press, ed. Hanne Blank, 2002) / “The Outside Edge” was originally published in Girl Crazy: Coming Out Erotica (Cleis Press, ed. Sacchi Green, 2009) / “A Dance of Queens” was originally published in Best Transgender Erotica (Circlet Press, eds. Hanne Blank and Raven Kaldera, 2002) / “Dietrich Wears Army Boots” was originally published in Wicked: Sexy Tales of Legendary Lovers (Cleis Press, ed. Mitzi Szereto, 2005) / “Of Light and Dark” was originally published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2001 (Cleis Press, ed. Tristan Taormino, 2000) / “White Tigress, Scarlet Stripes” was originally published in Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z (Pretty Things Press, ed. Rachel Kramer Bussel, 2004) / “Sunset, Sunrise” was originally published in Hot Lesbian Erotica (Cleis Press, ed. Tristan Taormino, 2005) / “Feeling Blue” was originally published in Wild Flesh (e-book, Eggplant Literary Productions, 2002) / “Petroglyphs” was originally published in Rode Hard, Put Away Wet (Suspect Thoughts Press, eds. Sacchi Green and Rakelle Valencia, 2005) / “Bright Angel” was originally published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2007 (Cleis Press, ed. Tristan Taormino, 2006) / “Alternate Lives” was originally published in Best Women’s Erotica 2004 (Cleis Press, ed. Marcy Sheiner, 2003) / “A Ride to Remember” and “Long Meg” are original to this volume.
Table of Contents
Title Page: A Ride to Remember
White Tigress, Scarlet Stripes
To Remember You By
“A movie!” she crowed from three thousand miles away. “They’re making a movie of our book!”
“Our book” was Healing Their Wings, a bittersweet, often funny novel about American nurses in England during World War II. My grandson’s wife had based it on oral histories she’d 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 merely 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 to her. 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, WAC’s, 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 “Accentuate 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 up to 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. Humor is a frail enough defense against the chaos of war, but you take what you can get.
Superstition was the other universal defense. Mine, I suppose, was a sort of vestal virgin complex, an unexamined belief that opening my flesh to men would destroy my ability to heal theirs.
My very defenses (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 gray 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, 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 most of 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.
“No,” I said, “I was just trying to place the uniform. Are those really wings on her tunic?” I felt a thrill of something between envy and admiration. The high, compact breasts under the tunic had caught my attention, too, but that wasn’t something I was ready to admit to myself. I watched her movements with more than casual interest as she descended the stairs and took a table in a dim corner.
“Yeah,” he said with some bitterness, “can you believe it? They brought in women for the Air Transport Auxiliary. They get to ferry everything, even the newest Spitfires, from factories or wherever the hell else they happen to be to wherever they’re needed.”
His tone annoyed me, even though I knew he was anxious about whether he’d ever fly again himself. But then he pushed it too far. “I hear women are ferrying planes back in the States now, too. Thousands of ‘em. Next thing you know there won’t be any jobs left for men after the war. I ask you, what kind of woman would want to fly warplanes, anyway?” His smoldering glance toward the corner table told me just what kind of woman he had in mind. “Give me a cozy red-headed armful with her feet on the ground any day,” he said, with a look of insistent intimacy.
“With her back on the ground, too, I suppose,” I snapped, and stood up. “I’m sorry, Frank, I really do wish you the best, but I don’t think there’s anything more I can do for you. Maybe you should catch the early train back to the base.” I evaded his grasp and retreated to the powder room; and, when I came out at last, he had gone.
The corner table, however, was still occupied.
“Mind if I sit here?” I asked. “I’m Kay Barnes.”
“Cleo Remington,” she said, offering a firm handshake. “It’s fine by me. Afraid the boyfriend will try again?”
So she’d noticed our little drama. “Not boyfriend,” I said, “just a patient who’s had all the nursing he’s going to get.” I signaled a waitress. “Can I get you a drink to apologize for staring when you came in? I’d never seen wings on a woman before, and...well, to be honest, I had a flash of insane jealousy. I’ve always wanted to fly, but things just never worked out that way.”
“Well,” Cleo said, “I can’t say I’ve ever been jealous of a nurse’s life, but I’m sure glad you’re on the job.”
“Tell me what being a pilot is like,” I said, “so I can at least fantasize.”
So she told me, over a cup of the best (and possibly only) coffee in London, about persuading her rancher father that air surveillance was the best way to keep track of cattle spread out over a large chunk of Montana. When her brother was old enough to take over the flying cowboy duty, she’d moved on to courier service out of Billings, and then to a job as instructor at a Civilian Pilot Training Program in Colorado, where everyone knew that her young male students were potential military pilots, but that Cleo, in spite of all her flight hours, wasn’t.
Then came all-out war, and the chance to come to England. Women aviators were being welcomed to ferry aircraft for the decimated RAF. I watched her expressive face and hands and beautifully shaped mouth as she talked of Hurricanes and Spitfires and distant glimpses of German Messerschmidts.
As she talked, I did, in fact, fantasize like crazy. But visions of moonlight over a foaming sea of clouds kept resolving into lamplight on naked skin, and the roar of engines and rush of wind gave way to pounding blood and low, urgent cries. Her shifting expressions fascinated me; her rare, flashing smile was so beautiful I wanted to feel its movement under my own lips.
I didn’t know what had come over me. Or, rather, I knew just enough to sense what I wanted, without having the least idea how to tell whether she could possibly want it too. I’d admired women before, but only aesthetically, I’d rationalized, or with mild envy; and, after all, I liked men just fine. But this flush of heightened sensitivity, this feeling of rushing toward some cataclysm that might tear me apart…that I wanted to tear me apart…. This was unexplored territory.
“So,” Cleo said at last, looking a bit embarrassed, “that’s more about me than anybody should have to sit through. What about you? How did you end up here?”
“I’m not sure I can even remember who I was before the war,” I said, scarcely knowing who I’d been just half an hour ago. “It seems as though nothing interesting or exciting ever happened to me back then. Not that ‘interesting’ will be a fair description of life now until I’m at a safe distance from it.”
She nodded. We were silent for a while, sharing the unspoken question of whether the world would ever know such a thing as safety again. Then I told her a little about growing up in New Hampshire, and climbing mountains, only to feel that even there the sky wasn’t high and wide enough to hold me. “That’s when I dreamed about flying.”
“Yes!” she said. “I get that feeling here, once in a while, even in the air. Somehow this European sky seems smaller, and the land below is so crowded with cities, sometimes the only way to tell where you are is by the pattern of the railroads. The Iron Compass, we call it. I guess that’s one reason I’m transferring back to the States instead of renewing my contract here.
“The main reason, though, is that I’ve heard women in the WASPs at home are getting to test-pilot huge Flying Fortresses and Marauders. And that’s only the beginning. Pretty soon they’ll be commissioned in the regular Army Air Force. In Russia women are even flying combat missions; “Night Witches” the Germans call them. If the war goes on long enough...” She stopped short of saying, “If enough of our men are killed I’ll get to fight,” and I was grateful. “History is being made,” she went on, “and I’ve got to be in on it!”
In her excitement she had stretched out her legs under the table until they brushed against mine. I wanted so badly to rub against the wool of her slacks that I could scarcely pay attention to what she was saying, but I caught one vital point.
“Transferring?” I leaned far forward, and felt, as well as saw, her glance drop to my breasts. The starchy wartime diet in England had added some flesh, but at that moment I didn’t care, because all of it was tingling. “When do you go?”
“In two weeks,” she said. “I’m taking a week in London to get a look at some of the sights I haven’t had time for in the whole eighteen months I’ve been over here. Then there’ll be one more week of ferrying out of Hamble on the south coast.”
Two weeks. One, really. “I’ve got a few days here, too,” I said. “Maybe we could see the sights together.” I tried to look meaningfully into her eyes, but she stared down at her own hands on the table and then out at the dance floor where a few couples, some of them pairs of girls, were dancing.
“Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.” Her casual tone seemed a bit forced.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to dance, would you?” I asked, with a sort of manic desperation. “Girls do it all the time here when there aren’t enough men. Nobody thinks anything of it.”
“Somebody sure as hell would,” Cleo said bluntly, “if they were doing it right.” She met my eyes, and in the hot gray glow of her defiant gaze I learned all I needed to know.
Then she looked away. “Not,” she said carefully, “that any of Flight Captain Jackie Cochran’s hand-picked, cream-of-American-womanhood pilots would know anything about that.”
“Of course not,” I agreed. “Or any girl-next-door nurses, either.” I could feel a flush rising from my neck to my face, but I plowed ahead. “Some of us might be interested in learning, though.”
She looked at me with a quizzical lift to one eyebrow, then pushed back her chair and stood up. Before my heart could do more than lurch into my throat, she said lightly, “How about breakfast here tomorrow, and then we’ll see what the big deal is about London.”
It turned out we were both staying in the club dormitory upstairs. We went up two flights together; then I opened the door on the third floor landing. Cleo’s room was on the fourth floor. I paused, and she said, without too much subtlety, “One step at a time, Kay, one step at a time!” Then she bolted upward, her long legs taking the stairs two, sometimes three, steps at a time.
Night brought, instead of a return to common sense, a series of dreams wilder than anything my imagination or clinical knowledge of anatomy had ever managed before. When I met Cleo for breakfast it was hard to look at her without envisioning her dark, springy hair brushing my thighs, while her mouth.... But all my dreams had dissolved in frustration, and I woke up tangled in hot, damp sheets with my hand clamped between my legs.
Cleo didn’t look all that rested, either, but for all I knew she was always like that before her second cup of coffee. When food and caffeine began to take effect, I got a map of bus routes from the porter and we planned our day.
London Bridge, Westminster, Harrod’s department store; whether I knew how to do it right or not, every moment was a dance of sorts. Cleo got considerable amusement out of my not-so-subtle attempts at seduction. She even egged me on to try on filmy things in Harrod’s that I could never afford, or have occasion to wear—what on earth, we speculated, did Harrod’s stock when it wasn’t wartime?—and let me see how much she enjoyed the view. I didn’t think she was just humoring me.
In the afternoon, after lunch at a quaint tearoom, we went to the British Museum and admired the cool marble flesh of nymphs and goddesses. Cleo circled a few statues, observing that the Greeks sure had a fine hand when it came to posteriors; I managed to press oh-so-casually back against her, and she didn’t miss the chance to demonstrate her own fine hand, or seem to mind that my posterior was not quite classical.
Then we decided life was too short to waste on Egyptian mummies, and wandered a bit until, in a corner of an upper floor, we found a little gallery where paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite movement and other Victorian artists were displayed. There was no one else there but an elderly woman guard whose stern face softened just a trace at Cleo’s smile.
Idealized women gazed out of mythological worlds aglow with color. The grim reality of war retreated under the spell of flowing robes, rippling clouds of hair, impossibly perfect skin.
Cleo stood in the center of the room, slowly rotating. “Sure had a thing for redheads, didn’t they,” she said. “You’d have fit right in, Kay.”
I could only hope she herself had a thing for redheads. Standing there, feeling drab in my khaki uniform, I watched Cleo appreciating the paintings of beautiful women. When she moved closer to the sleeping figure of “Flaming June” by Lord Leighton, I gazed with her at the seductive flesh gleaming through transparent orange draperies and allowed myself, experimentally, to imagine stroking the curve of thigh and hip, the round, tender breasts.
“I don’t know how this rates as art,” Cleo said, “but oh, my!”
A hot flush rose across my skin, of desire, yes, but even more of fierce jealousy. I wanted to be in that bright, serene world, inside that pampered, carefree body, with smooth arms and hands not roughened by scrubbing with hospital soap. I wanted to be the one seducing Cleo’s eyes.
“She could have a million freckles under that gown,” I blurted out childishly. “The color would filter them out!”
A tiny grin quirked the corner of Cleo’s mouth. As always, I wanted to feel the movement of her lips. “Freckles are just fine,” she said, “so long as I get to count them.” She turned, and leaned close, and shivers of anticipation rippled through me. “With my tongue,” she added, and very gently laid a trail of tiny wet dots across the bridge of my nose. I forgot entirely where we were.
Then she bent her dark head to my throat, and undid my top buttons, and gently cupped my breasts through my tunic as her warm tongue probed down into the valley between. I couldn’t bear to stop her, even when I remembered the guard. My breasts felt heavy, my nipples swollen, but not nearly as heavy and swollen as I needed them to be.
Cleo’s gray eyes were darker when she raised her head. “Where,” she murmured huskily, “is a bomb shelter when you need one?”
But we knew that even now, when Hitler’s Russian campaign had distracted the Luftwaffe enough that there hadn’t been a really major attack on London in over a year, every bomb shelter had its fiercely protective attendants.
The guard’s voice, harsh but muted, startled us. “There’s a service lift just down the corridor. It’s slow. Though not necessarily slow enough.”
She gazed impersonally into space, her weathered face expressionless, until, as we passed, she glanced down at Cleo’s silver wings. “Good work,” she said curtly. “I drove an ambulance in France in the last war. But for God’s sake be careful!”
In the elevator Cleo pressed me against a wood-paneled wall and kissed me so hard it hurt. I slid my fingers through her thick dark hair and held her back just enough for my lips to explore the shape of her lips and my tongue to invite hers to come inside.
By the time we jolted to a stop on the ground floor my crotch felt wetter than my mouth, and even more in need of her probing tongue.
There was no one waiting when the gate slid open. Cleo pulled me along until we found a deserted ladies’ room, but once inside, she braced her shoulders against the tiled wall and didn’t touch me. “You do realize,” she said grimly, “what you’re risking.”
“Never mind what I’m risking,” I said. “One nurse blotting her copy book isn’t going to bring everything since Florence Nightingale crashing down. But you...” I remembered Frank’s bitter voice asking, “What kind of woman?” Tears stung my eyes, but it had to be said. “You’re holding history in your hands, Cleo.” I reached out to clasp her fingers. “Right where I want to be.”
“Are you sure you know what you want?”
“I may not know exactly what,” I admitted, drawing her hands to my hips, “but I sure as hell know I want it!” I reached down and yanked my skirt up as far as I could. Cleo stroked my inner thigh, and I caught my breath; then she slid cool fingers inside my cotton underpants and gently cupped my hot, wet flesh. I moaned and thrust against her touch, and tried to kiss her, and her mouth moved under mine into a wide grin.
“Pretty convincing,” she murmured against my lips.
I whimpered as she withdrew her hand, but she just smoothed down my skirt and gave me a pat on my butt. “Not here,” she said, and propelled me out the door.
On the long series of bus rides back to Charles Street we tried not to look at each other, but I felt Cleo’s dark gaze on me from time to time. I kept my eyes downcast, the better to glance sidelong at her as she alternated between folding her arms across her chest and clenching and unclenching her hands on her blue wool slacks.
Dinner was being served at the Red Cross club, probably the best meal for the price in England. Cleo muttered that she wasn’t hungry, not for dinner, anyway, but I had my own motive for insisting. The band would be setting up in half an hour or so, and with the window opened, you could hear the music from my room. Well enough for dancing.
So we ate, although I couldn’t say what, and Cleo teased me by running her tongue sensuously around the lip of a coke bottle and into its narrow throat. Her mercurial shifts from intensity to playfulness fascinated me, but the time came when intensity was all I craved.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to dance, would you?” I repeated last night’s invitation with a barely steady voice. “If I tried my best to do it right?” I stood abruptly and started for the stairs. Behind me Cleo’s chair fell over with a clatter as she jumped up to follow me.
I reached my tiny room ahead of her—nursing builds strong legs. I crossed to the window to heave it open, and then the door slammed shut and she was behind me, pressing her crotch against my ass, wrapping her arms around me to undo my buttons and cradle my breasts through my sensible cotton slip. I longed to be wearing sheer flame-colored silk for her.
When she slid her hands under the fabric and over my skin, though, I found I didn’t want to be wearing anything at all. “So soft,” she whispered, “so tender...” and then, as my nipples jerked taut under her strokes, “and getting so hard...”
A melody drifted from below; “Something To Remember You By.” I turned in her arms. “Teach me to dance,” I whispered.
We swayed gently together, feet scarcely moving in the cramped space, thighs pressing into each other’s heat. Cleo kneaded my ass, while I held her so tightly against my breast that her silver wings dented my flesh.
“Please,” I murmured against her cheek, “closer...” I fumbled at the buttons of her tunic. When she tensed, I drew back. “I’m sorry...I don’t know the rules...”
“The only rule,” Cleo said, after a long pause, “is that you get what you need.”
“I need to feel you,” I said.
She drew her hands over my hips and up my sides until she held my breasts again; then she stepped back and began to shed her clothes. Mine, with a head start, came off even faster.
The heady musk of arousal rose around us. A clarinet crooned, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” I cupped my full breasts and raised them so that my nipples could flick against Cleo’s high, tightening peaks, over and over. The sensation was exquisite, tantalizing—I gave a little whimper, needing more, and she bent to take me into her mouth.
I thought I would burst with wanting. My swollen nipples felt as big as her demanding tongue. Then she worked her hand between my legs, and spread the juices from my cunt up over my straining clit, and my whimpers turned to full-throated moans.
Cleo raised her head. Her kiss muted my cries as she reached past me to shut the window. “Hope nobody’s home next door,” she muttered, and suddenly we were dancing horizontally on the narrow bed. I arched my hips, rubbing against her thigh, until her mouth moved down over throat and breasts and belly, slowly, too slowly; I wanted to savor each moment but my need was too desperate. I wriggled, and thrashed, and her head sank at last between my thighs, just as in my dreams. Her mobile lips drove me into a frenzy of pleading, incoherent cries, until, with her tongue thrusting deeply, rhythmically into my cunt, my ache exploded into glorious release.
In the first faint light of morning I woke to feel Cleo’s fingers ruffling my tousled hair. “If I were an artist I’d paint you like this,” she whispered. “You look like a marmalade cat full of cream.”
I stretched, and then gasped as her fingers roused last night’s ache into full, throbbing resurgence. “Sure enough,” she said with a wicked grin, “plenty of cream. Let’s see if I can make you yowl again.”
This time I found out what her long, strong fingers could do deep inside me, one at first, then two; by the end of the week I could clutch at her whole, pumping hand.
Sometimes I think I remember every moment of those days; sometimes everything blurs except the feel of Cleo’s hands and mouth and body against mine, and the way her eyes would shift suddenly from laughing silver to the dark gray of storm clouds.
We did more sightseeing; the Tower of London, Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral scarred by German bombs. We took boat trips up the Thames to Richmond Park, where we dared to kiss in secluded bits of woodland, and down river where we held hands across the Greenwich Meridian. One night, in anonymous clothes bought at a flea-market barrow, we even managed to get into a club Cleo had heard of where women did dance openly with women. We couldn’t risk staying long, but a dark intoxication followed us back to her room, where I entirely suppressed the nurse in me and demanded things of Cleo that left both of us sore, drained, and without regrets.
On our last night in London we went anonymously again into shabby backstreets near the docks. I brought disinfectants, and we chose what seemed the cleanest of a sorry lot of tattoo parlors. There, welcoming the pain of the needle as distraction from deeper pain, we had tiny pairs of wings etched over our left breasts.
We parted with promises to meet one more time before Cleo’s last flight. I mortgaged a week of sleep to get my nursing shifts covered, and at Hamble Air Field, by moonlight, she introduced me to the planes she loved.
“This is the last Spitfire I’ll ever fly,” she said, stroking the sleek fuselage. “Seafire III, Merlin 55 engine, 24,000 foot ceiling, although I won’t go up that high just on a hop to Scotland.”
From Scotland she’d catch an empty cargo plane back to the States. I had just got my orders to report to Hawaii for assignment somewhere in the South Pacific. War is hell, and so are good-byes.
“Could I look into the cockpit?” I asked, wanting to be able to envision her there, high in the sky.
“Sure. You can even sit in it and play pilot, if you like.” She helped me climb onto the wing, with more pressing of my ass than was absolutely necessary, and showed me how to lower myself into the narrow space. Standing on the wing, she leaned in and kissed me, hard at first, then with aching tenderness, then hard again.
“Pull up your skirt,” she ordered, and I did it without question. She already knew I wasn’t wearing underpants. “Let’s see how wet you can get the seat,” she said, “So I can breathe you all the way to Scotland.” She unbuttoned my shirt and played with my breasts until I begged her to lean in far enough to suck my aching nipples; then, with her lips and tongue and teeth driving me so crazy that my breath came in a storm of desperate gasps, she reached down into my slippery heat and made me arch and buck so hard that the plane’s dials and levers were in danger. I needed more than I could get sitting in the cramped cockpit.
We clung together finally in the grass under the sheltering wing. I got my hands into Cleo’s trousers, and made her groan, but she wouldn’t relax into sobbing release until she had her whole hand at last inside me and I was riding it on pounding waves of pleasure as keen as pain.
I thought, when I could think anything again, that she had fallen asleep, she was so still. Gently, gently I touched my lips to the nearly-healed tattoo above her breast. Tiny wings matching mine. Something to remember her by.
Without opening her eyes she said, in a lost, small voice, “What are we going to do, Kay?”
I knew what she was going to do. “You’re going to claim the sky, to make history. And anyway,” I said, falling back on dark humor since I had no comfort to offer, “a cozy menage in Paris seems out of the question with the Nazis in control.”
Then, because I knew if I touched her again we would both cry, and hate ourselves for it, I stood, put my clothes in as much order as I could, and walked away.
I looked back once, from the edge of the field. Cleo leaned, head bowed, against the plane. Some trick of the moonlight transmuted her dark hair into silver; I had a vision of how breathtaking she would be in thirty or forty years. The pain of knowing I couldn’t share those years made me stumble, and nearly fall. But I kept on walking.
And she let me go.
On June 24, 1944, against all justice and reason, the bill to make the Women Airforce Service Pilots officially part of the Army Air Force was defeated in Congress by nineteen votes. In December, the WASP were disbanded. By then, though, after going through hell in the Pacific theater of war, I had met Jack, who truly loved and needed me, whose son was growing below my heart. His kisses tasted of home, and peace, and more unborn children demanding their chance at life.
Thirty-three years later, in 1977, when women were at last being admitted into the Air Force, the WASP were retroactively given military status. It was then, through a reunion group, that I found out what had become of Cleo Remington; she had found a sky that was high and wide enough to hold her fierce spirit, and freedom as a bush pilot in Alaska.
And she was, as I discovered, even more breathtaking at sixty than she’d been at twenty-six. But that’s another chapter of the story.
The Outside Edge
Suli was fire and wine, gold and scarlet, lighting up the dim passageway where we waited.
I leaned closer to adjust her Spanish tortoiseshell comb. A cascade of dark curls brushed my face, shooting sparks all the way down to my toes, but even a swift, tender kiss on her neck would be too risky. I might not be able to resist pressing hard enough to leave a dramatic visual effect the TV cameras couldn’t miss.
Tenderness wasn’t what she needed right now, and neither was passion. An edgy outlet for nervous energy would be more like it. “Skate a clean program,” I murmured in her ear, “and maybe I’ll let you get dirty tonight.” My arm across her shoulders might have looked locker-room casual, but the look she shot me had nothing to do with team spirit.
“Maybe, Jude? You think maybe you’ll let me?” She tossed her head. Smoldering eyes, made even brighter and larger by theatrical makeup, told me that I’d need to eat my words later before my mouth could move on to anything more appealing.
The other pairs were already warming up. Suli followed Tim into the arena, her short scarlet skirt flipping up oh-so-accidentally to reveal her firm, sweet ass. She wriggled, daring me to give it an encouraging slap, knowing all too well what the rear view of a scantily clad girl does for me.
I followed into the stadium and watched the action from just outside the barrier. As Suli and Tim moved onto the ice, the general uproar intensified. Their groupies had staked a claim near one end, and a small cadre of my own fans were camped out nearby, having figured out over the competition season that something was up between us. Either they’d done some discreet stalking, or relied on the same gaydar that had told them so much about me even before I’d fully understood it myself. Probably both.
Being gay wasn’t, in itself, a career-buster these days. Sure, the rumormongers were eternally speculating about the men in their sequined outfits, but the skating community was united in a compact never to tell, and the media agreed tacitly never to ask. A rumor of girl-on-girl sex would probably do nothing more than inspire some fan fiction in certain blogging communities. That didn’t mean there weren’t still lines you couldn’t cross in public, especially in performance—lines I was determined, with increasing urgency, to cross once and for all.
But I didn’t want to bring Suli down if I fell. That discussion was something we kept avoiding, and whenever I tried to edge toward it she’d distract me in ways I couldn’t resist.
Suli’s the best, I thought now in the stadium, watching her practice faultless jumps with Tim. You’d never guess what she’d been doing last night with me, while the other skaters were preparing for the performance of their lives with more restful rituals. She’d already set records in pairs skating, and next year, at my urging, she was going to go solo. It was a good thing I wouldn’t be competing against her.
I won’t be competing against anybody, I thought, my mind wandering as the warm-up period dragged on.
It had taken me long enough to work it out, focusing on my skating for so many years, but the more I appreciated the female curves inside those scanty, seductive costumes, the less comfortable I was wearing them. Cute girls in skimpy outfits were just fine with me—bodies arched in laybacks, or racing backward, glutes tensed and pumping, filmy fabric fluttering in the breeze like flower petals waving to the hungry bees—but I’d rather see than be one.
I’d have quit mainstream competition if they hadn’t changed the rules to allow long-legged “unitards” instead of dresses. That concession wasn’t enough to make me feel really comfortable, though, and I knew my coach was right that some judges would hold it against me if I didn’t wear a skirt at least once in a while. This year I’d alternated animal-striped unitards with a Scottish outfit just long enough to preserve the mystery of what a Scotsman wears under his kilt, assuming that he isn’t doing much in the way of spins or jumps or spirals. I knew this for certain, having experimented in solitary practice with my own sturdy six inches of silicon pride.
So why not just switch to the Gay Games? Or follow Rudy Galindo and Surya Bonaly to guest appearances on SkateOut’s Cabaret on Ice?
If you have a shot at the Olympics, the Olympics are where you go, that’s why. Or so I’d thought. But I was only in fifth place after the short program—maybe one or two of the judges weren’t that keen on bagpipe music—and a medal was too long a shot now.
I knew, deep down, what the problem was. Johanna, the coach we shared, had urged me to study Suli’s style in hopes that some notion of elegance and grace might sink into my thick head. Suli had generously agreed to try to give me at least a trace of an artistic clue. But the closer we became, the more I’d rebelled against faking a feminine grace and elegance that were so naturally hers, and so unnatural for me.
This would be my last competition, no matter what. Maybe I’d get a pro gig with a major ice show, maybe I wouldn’t. If I did, it would be on my own terms. “As God is my witness, I’ll never be girlie again!” I’d proclaimed melodramatically to Suli last night.
“Works just fine for me,” she’d said, kneeling with serene poise to take my experimental six inches between her glossy, carmined lips and deep into her velvet throat.
Ten minutes later, serenity long gone, I stood braced against the edge of the bed and bore her weight while she clamped her thighs around my hips and her cunt around my pride, locked her hands behind my neck, and rode me with fierce, pounding joy. I dug my fingers into her asscheeks to steady her, and to add to the driving force of her lunges. Small naked breasts slapped against mine on each forward stroke. When I could catch one succulent nipple in my mouth her cries would rise to a shriller pitch, but then she’d jerk roughly away to get more leverage for each thrust.
My body ached with strain and arousal and the friction of the harness. My mind was a blur of fantasies. We’re whirling in the arena, my skates carving spirals into the ice, her dark hair lifting in the wind…
“Spin me!” Suli suddenly arched her upper body into a layback position, arms no longer gripping me but raised into a pleading curve. Adrenaline, muscles, willpower; none of it was enough now. Only speed could keep us balanced. I stepped back from the bed and spun in place, swinging her in one wide circle, then another, tension hammering through my clit hard enough to counter the burn of the leather gouging my flesh.
Suli’s voice whipped around us, streaming as free as her hair. I held on, battling gravity, riding the waves of her cries, until, as they crested, the grip of her legs around me began to slip. In two lurching steps I had her above the bed again, and in another second she was on the sheets. I pressed on until her breathing began to slow, then covered her tender breasts and mouth with a storm of kisses close to bites until I had to arch back and pump and grind my way to a noisy release of my own.
When we’d sprawled together in delirious exhaustion long enough for our panting to ease, I raised up to gaze at her. The world-famous princess of poise and grace lay tangled in her own wild hair, lips swollen, skin streaked with sweat, and most likely bruised in places where the TV cameras had better not reach.
“And you lectured me about never jumping without knowing exactly where I was going to land!” I said. “How did you know I wouldn’t drop you?”
“Aren’t you always bugging me to let you try lifts?” she countered drowsily. “You’ve spun me before, on the ice; you’re tall and strong enough.” She rolled over on top of me and murmured into the hollow of my throat, “Anyway, I did know where I was going to land. And I knew that you’d get me there. You always do.” Then her head slumped onto my shoulder and her body slid down to nestle in the protective curve of mine. In seconds she was asleep.
I always will, I mouthed silently, but couldn’t say it aloud. Giving way to tenderness, to emotions deeper than the pyrotechnics of sex, was more risk than I could handle. Wherever I was going to land, she belonged somewhere better. How am I going to bear it? How can we still be together?
I shook my head to clear it. Suli and Tim were gliding with the rest of the competitors toward the edge of the ice and I realized suddenly that it was time to take my seat in the stands. The final grouping of the pairs long program was about to get underway.
Suli and Tim skated third, to music from Bizet’s Carmen. Somebody always skates to Carmen, but no one ever played the part better than Suli. The dramatic theme of love and betrayal was a perfect setting for her, and today the passionate beat of the “Habanera” was a perfect match for my jealous mood.
Watching Tim with Suli on the ice always drove me crazy. When his hand slid from the small of her back to her hip I wanted to lunge and chew it off at the wrist. His boyfriend Thor, a speed skater with massively muscled thighs, would have been highly displeased by that, so it was just as well that I resisted the impulse.
It wasn’t really the way Tim touched Suli that burned me. Well, okay, maybe it was, with every nuance of the traditional lifts and holds pulsing with erotic innuendo. Still, my hands knew her needs far better than he ever could, or cared to. But he was allowed to do it publicly, artistically, acting out scenarios of fiery love—and I wasn’t. Knowing that the delectable asscheeks filling the taut scarlet seat of her costume bore bruises in the shapes of my fingers was only small comfort.
His other hand rested lightly on her waist as they whirled across the ice. Any second—in six more beats—she would jump, and with simultaneous precision he would lift, and throw… Now! For all the times I’d seen it, my breath still caught. Suli twisted impossibly high into the air, and far out…out…across the ice…
Yes! Throw triple axel! A perfect one-footed landing flowing into a smooth, graceful follow-through, then up into a double loop side by side with Tim in clockwork synchronicity.
It was the best. The audience knew it, the judges knew it. I knew it, and admiration nearly won out over envy when Tim lifted Suli high overhead, her legs spread wide, in the ultimate hand-in-crotch position known as The Helicopter. Envy surged back. Her crotch would be damp with sweat and excitement, not the kind I could draw from her, but still! Then she dropped abruptly past his face, thighs briefly scissoring his neck, pussy nudging his chin. I shook, nearly whimpering, as Suli slid sensuously down along Tim’s body. As soon as her blades touched down she leaned back, back, impossibly far back, until her hair brushed the ice in a death spiral. I tensed as though my hand, not Tim’s, gripped hers to brace her just this side of disaster.
A few judges always took points off for “suggestive” material. What did they think pairs skating was all about, if not sex? But it was a technically clean and ambitious program, beautifully executed. Suli and Tim won the gold medals they deserved.
I got no chance to go for the gold of Suli’s warm body that night. When I came up behind her in our room and reached around to cup her breasts, she wriggled her compact butt against me, then turned and shoved me away.
“No,” she decreed, putting a finger across my lips as I tried to speak. I nibbled at it instead. “You have your long program tomorrow, and I know better than you do what you need.”
I tried to object, with no luck.
“Sure,” Suli went on, “fast and furious sex and complete exhaustion were just what I needed, but you’ll do better saving up that energy and channeling the tension into your skating.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said sulkily. “I can’t medal now anyway. I was thinking, in fact, that this might as well be the time…”
She knew what I meant. “No!” Her scowl was at least as alluring as her smiles. “You can still win the bronze, if you want it enough. At least two of those prima donnas ahead of you have never skated a clean long program in their lives. Medal, and you get into the exhibition at the end. That’s the time to make your grand statement to the world.” She saw my hesitation, and gripped my shoulders so hard her nails dug in. “Think of Johanna! You can’t disgrace your coach during actual competition. And think of your fans!” Her expression eased into a smile she couldn’t suppress. Her grip eased. “Okay, your fans would love every minute of it. I’ve seen the signs they flip at you when they’re sure the cameras can’t see. ‘We Want Jude, Preferably in the Nude!’“ She drew her fingers lightly across my chest and downward. “Can’t say that I blame them.”
Suli was so close that her warm scent tantalized me. I thought I was going to get some after all, but the kiss I grabbed was broken off all too soon, leaving me aching for more.
“Please Jude, do it this way.” She stroked my face, brushing back my short dark hair. I wasn’t sure I could bear her gentleness. “Even your planned routine comes close enough to the edge. One way or another, it will be worth it. I promise.”
So I did it her way, and skated the long program I’d rehearsed so many times. Inside, though, I was doing it my way at last, and not much caring if it showed.
I skated to a medley from the Broadway show Cats. My black unitard with white down the front and at the cuffs was supposed to suggest a “tuxedo” cat with white paws. The music swept from mood to mood, poignance to nostalgia to swagger, but no matter what character a song was meant to suggest, in my mind and gut I was never, for a moment, anybody’s sweet pussy. I was every inch a Tom. Tomcat prowling urban roofs and alleys; tomboy tumbling the dairymaid in the hay; top-hatted Tom in the back streets of Victorian London pinching the housemaids’ cheeks, fore and aft.
Suli had been right about storing up tension and then letting it spill out. Like fantasy during sex, imagination sharpened my performance. Each move was linked to its own notes of the music, practiced often enough to be automatic, but tonight my footwork was more precise, my spins faster, my jumps higher and landings smoother. I had two quad jumps planned, something none of my rivals would attempt, and for the first time I went into each of them with utter confidence.
The audience, subdued at first, was with me before the end, clapping, stomping, whistling. I rode their cheers, pumped with adrenaline as though we were all racing toward some simultaneous climax, and in the last minute I turned a planned double-flip, double-toe-loop into a triple-triple, holding my landing on a back outer edge as steadily as though my legs were fresh and rested.
The crowd’s roar surged as the music ended. Fans leaned above the barrier to toss stuffed animals, mostly cats, onto the ice, and one odd flutter caught my eye in time for a detour to scoop up the offering. Sure enough, the fabric around the plush kitten’s neck was no ribbon, but a pair of lavender panties. Still warm. It wasn’t the first time.
Suli waited at the gate. I gave her a cocky grin and thrust the toy into her hands. Her expressive eyebrows arched higher, and then she grinned back and swatted my butt with it.
The scoring seemed to take forever. “Half of them are scrambling to figure out if you’ve broken any actual rules,” Johanna muttered, “and scheming to make up some new ones if you haven’t.” The rest, though, must have given me everything they had. The totals were high enough to get me the bronze medal, even when none of the following skaters quite fell down.
Suli stuck by me every minute except for the actual awards ceremony, and she was right at the front of the crowd then. In the cluster of fans following me out of the arena, a few distinctly catlike “Mrowrr’s!” could be heard, and then good-humored laughter as Suli threw an arm around me and aimed a ferocious “Growrr!” back over her shoulder at them.
Medaling as a long shot had condemned me to a TV interview. The reporter kept her comments to the usual inanities, except for a somewhat suggestive, “That was quite some program!”
“If you liked that, don’t miss the exhibition tomorrow,” I said to her, and to whatever segment of the world watches these things. When I added that I was quitting competition to pursue my own “artistic goals,” she flashed her white teeth and wished me luck, and then, microphone set aside and camera off, leaned close for a moment to lay a hand on my arm. “Nice costume, but I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get it off.”
Suli was right on it, her own sharp teeth flashing and her long nails digging into my sleeve. The reporter snatched her hand back just in time. “Don’t worry,” Suli purred, “I’ve got all that covered.”
Don’t expose yourself like that! Don’t let me drag you down! But I couldn’t say it, and I knew Suli was in no mood to listen.
I was too tired, anyway, wanting nothing more than to strip off the unitard and never squirm into one again, but Suli wouldn’t let me change in the locker room. Once I saw the gleam of metal she flashed in her open shoulder bag—so much for security at the Games!—I followed her out and back to our room with no regret for the parties we were missing.
The instant the door clicked shut behind us she had the knife all the way out of its leather sheath. “Take off that medal,” she growled, doing a knockout job of sounding menacing. “The rest is mine.”
I set the bronze medal on the bedside table, flopped backward onto the bed, and spread my arms and legs wide. “Use it or lose it,” I said, then gasped at the touch of the hilt against my throat.
“Don’t move,” she ordered, crouching over me, her hair brushing my chest. I lay frozen, not a muscle twitching, although my flesh shrank reflexively from the cold blade when she sat back on her haunches and slit the stretchy unitard at the juncture of thigh and crotch.
“Been sweating, haven’t we,” she crooned, slicing away until the fabric gaped like a hungry mouth, showing my skin pale beneath. “But it’s not all sweat, is it?” Her cool hand slid inside to fondle my slippery folds. It certainly wasn’t all sweat.
Her moves were a blend of ritual and raw sex. The steel flat against my inner thigh sent tongues of icy flame stabbing deep into my cunt. The keen edge drawn along my belly and breastbone seemed to split my old body and release a new one, though only a few light pricks drew blood. The rip of the fabric parting under Suli’s knife and hands and, eventually, teeth, was like the rending of bonds that had confined me all my life.
Then Suli’s warm mouth captured my clit. The trancelike ritual vanished abruptly in a fierce, urgent wave of right here, right now, right NOW NOW NO-O-W-W-W-W! Followed, with hardly a pause to recharge, by further waves impelled by her teasing tongue and penetrating fingers until I was completely out of breath and wrung out.
“I thought I was supposed to be storing up energy,” I told her, when I could talk at all.
“Jude, you’re pumping out enough pheromones to melt ice,” Suli said, “and I’m not ice!”
It turned out that I wasn’t all that wrung out, after all, and if I couldn’t talk, it was only because Suli was straddling my face, and my mouth was most gloriously, and busily, full.
The chill kiss of the blade lingered on my skin the next day, along with the heat of Suli’s touch. I passed up the chance to do a run-through of my program, which didn’t cause much comment since it was just the exhibition skate. Johanna, who knew what I was up to, took care of getting my music to the sound technicians with no questions asked.
There were plenty of questioning looks, though, when I went through warm-up muffled in sweats and a lightweight hoodie. Judging from the buzz among my fans, they may have been placing bets. Anybody who’d predicted the close-cropped hair with just enough forelock to push casually back, and the unseen binding beneath my plain white T-shirt, would have won. The tight blue jeans looked genuinely worn and faded, and from any distance the fact that the fabric could stretch enough for acrobatic movement wasn’t obvious.
It was my turn at last. Off came the sweats and hoodie. I took to the ice, rocketing from shadows into brightness, then stopped so abruptly that ice chips erupted around the toes of my skates. There were squeals, and confused murmurs; I was aware of Suli, still in costume from her own performance, watching from the front row.
Then my music took hold.
Six bars of introduction, a sequence of strides and glides—and I was Elvis, “Lookin’ for Trouble,” leaping high in a spread eagle, landing, then twisting into a triple-flip, double-toe-loop. My body felt strong. And free. And true.
Then I was “All Shook Up,” laying a trail of intricate footwork the whole length of the rink, tossing in enough cocky body-work to raise an uproar. Elvis Stojko or Philippe Candeloro couldn’t have projected more studly appeal. When my hips swiveled—with no trace of a feminine sway—my fans went wild.
They subsided as the music slowed to a different beat, slower, menacing. “Mack the Knife” was back in town: challenge, swagger, jumps that ate up altitude, skate blades slicing the ice in sure, rock-steady landings. Then, in a final change of mood, came the aching, soaring passion of “Unchained Melody.” I let heartbreak show through, loneliness, sorrow, desperate longing.
In my fantasy a slender, long-haired figure skated in the shadows just beyond my vision, mirroring my moves with equal passion and unsurpassable grace. Through the haunting strains of music I heard the indrawn breaths of a thousand spectators, and then a vast communal sigh. I was drawing them into my world, making them see what I imagined… I jumped, pushing off with all my new strength, spun a triple out into an almost effortless quad, landed—and saw what they had actually seen.
Suli glided toward me, arms outstretched, eyes wide and bright with challenge. I stopped so suddenly I would have fallen if my hands hadn’t reached out reflexively to grasp hers. She moved backward, pulling me toward her, and then we were skating together as we had so often in our private predawn practice sessions. The music caught us, melded us into a pair. Suli moved away, rotated into an exquisite layback spin, slowed, stretched out her hand, and my hand was there to grasp hers and pull her into a close embrace. Her raised knee pressed up between my legs with a force she would never have exerted on Tim. I wasn’t packing, but my clit lurched with such intensity that I imagined it bursting through my jeans.
Then we moved apart again, aching for the lost warmth, circling, now closer, now farther…the music would end so soon... Suli flashed a quick look of warning, mouthed silently, “Get ready!” and launched herself toward me.
Hands on my shoulders, she pushed off, leapt upward, and hung there for a moment while I gripped her hips and pressed my mouth into her belly. Then she wrapped her legs around my waist and arched back. We spun slowly, yearningly, no bed, this time, to take the weight of our hunger. And then, as the last few bars of music swelled around us, Suli slid sensuously down my body until she knelt in a pool of scarlet silk at my feet. She looked up into my eyes, and finally, gracefully and deliberately, bowed her head and rested it firmly against my crotch as the last notes faded away.
An instant of silence, of stillness, followed, until the crowd erupted in chaos, cheers and applause mingling with confusion and outrage. TV cameras were already converging on our exit. I pulled Suli up so that my mouth was close to her ear; her hair brushing my cheek still made me tingle.