Back to the Garden (13 page)

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, touched 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.

I didn’t say anything as she led me down the hall to her bedroom. I didn’t say a word when she unzipped me and pressed me to the bed, kneeling between my thighs on the floor. But I couldn’t help my moans and cries of pleasure when her mouth engulfed the already-slick head of my cock and she began to suck.

Something in me was torn as I watched her head bob up and down between my legs—I couldn’t believe we were doing this, that I was in my mother’s bedroom, and she was…she was… oh god, what was she doing?

Her tongue moved in circles around the head, her hand stroking the thick length of my shaft as she watched my reaction. My toes curled, my belly clenched, and I moaned out loud when I saw her other hand reach between her legs to rub herself.

“Mother, please,” I whispered as she crawled up onto the bed over me, pushing my shirt up as she went, flicking my nipples—holy Christ!—with her tongue as she divested me of the last bit of my clothes.

“Oh, yes, say it again,” she begged, reaching back and grabbing onto my cock, squeezing, rubbing her thumb over the tip.

“Mother,” I gasped as she slipped the head between her legs, up and down her slit. “Oh god, Mother, please!”

“I’ve wanted this for so long,” she whispered, and I felt that sweet, velvet sleeve beginning to descend over my aching erection. “I want you so much.”

“Me, too,” I groaned as she slid all the way down, and I didn’t want to think about what we were doing, if it was wrong or right or indifferent. I just wanted to feel—the delicious sensation of her flesh against mine, the sweet words she whispered in my ear, the love I’d felt and always had for the woman in my arms.

She rocked on me that way for a moment, offering me the spill of her breasts, which I eagerly took in both hands and mouth, making her moan louder when I squeezed and sucked and licked them at my leisure. But it didn’t last long. Then she was climbing off me, on her hands and knees, her bottom up in the air as she pressed her cheek against the bed.

“Take me,” she whispered, her eyes on mine as I rolled to look at her like that, some obscenely sexy offering, all for me. She shouldn’t have been, she wasn’t mine, but I found myself wanting yet another woman who didn’t belong to me, and the feeling was profanely delicious. “Fuck me, baby. Fuck me good.”

Oh. God.

I knelt up behind her, unsure, but she used a hand to guide me where I wanted to go—just where she wanted me, deep inside, buried to the hilt and seeking even more heat. She began to rock, encouraging me, and I started to take the lead, grabbing onto the fullness of her hips, looking down to watch my cock moving in and out of her flesh. The sight was incredible, the wet shaft of my cock burying itself into her flesh like the nose of a pet insisting on attention, please pet me, love me, again, again, more! I couldn’t get enough of her.

“That’s it!” She moaned and bucked back against me. I felt her fingers underneath, between us, rubbing herself, my sac slamming into her every time thrust. I couldn’t get enough of her flesh, I couldn’t bury myself deep enough, hard enough, and although I worried for a moment about hurting her, the words she uttered soon had me pounding so hard it rattled us both.

“Fuck me harder!” she begged, hips making circles, forcing my cock to explore every delicious inch of her insides. “Oh yes, baby, fuck me hard, hard, hard!”

Those words, those naughty, nasty words, coming out of my mother’s mouth as my cock impaled her onto the bed, forcing her from her knees, down flat, and she grunted and moaned and took my weight, asking me for more, more, more.

“Oh baby, yes, make Mummy come, make me come, make me come!”

Her words were more than enough to push me over the precipice—although I had fallen, really, long ago. I growled and shoved in deep, longing to bury the hot jets of my seed as deeply as I could, and she took it all, gasping and squirming beneath me, calling my name out loud in her pleasure.

When I rolled off and collapsed beside her, my arm thrown over my eyes, I felt her sigh and then move to find me, snuggling up and tucking her head under my chin, resting her cheek against my chest. It seemed the most strangely natural thing in the world to my put arm around her shoulder, to kiss her hair, to murmur, “I love you.”

For the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the impossibility of having the woman I’d been with the night before, the one I thought I could love. For the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the war, or my father, or the whys and wherefores of my not following in his veteran footsteps. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, my mind a delightful blank, and it was the best feeling in the world.

“Do you regret it?”