It was finally Friday afternoon, and I impatiently left the flight line for the barracks to shower up and exchange uniform for “civvies”. I had a date and was in a hurry to see the gate of Homestead AFB in the rear view mirror. As I drove out, it occurred to me that the warzone mentality had begun dimming fast and being back in the “world” was becoming normal and accepted, as if I were entitled once again to be an American in America. “… strange thing to feel” I thought to myself, even though I knew this is a common mental transition for GI’s returning stateside. Anyway, “enough of that,” I mused as I pointed my Olds north toward Cutler Ridge.
We had already dated a few times, more reluctant each time to part company and go our own ways in our own routine lives, and then ever more anxious to rejoin each other’s company. For me the prospect of being with her was becoming constantly more exciting and essential but, warm and friendly as she was toward me, her reserved nature was difficult to read, and I was not so sure my growing feelings were matched. I felt tentative, thinly cloaking my desire for this beautiful, exotic woman who had allowed me such enjoyable time over the last few weeks. Or was it days? Time had flown until I could not tell by my own instincts how long or short this new relationship actually had been so far.
The balmy south Florida July evening had passed too quickly, and we hesitated at her apartment door, unwilling to allow it to be finished. I kissed her, dreading the finality of this good-night gesture, when she drew back slightly and looked up at me. I saw an openness, almost a trust, in her face. “Would you like to come in for a while?” I don’t even recall the door unlocking and our stepping into her home. We were just suddenly next to each other, half facing on her couch, visiting. I don’t know how much time had passed when I realized quiet had fallen upon us and there was no more talk, just a silent gaze as if we had been taken to a different place and given a different way to speak, to connect without words.
I uncertainly reached for her, and she let me. Then, taking her into my arms, I softly found her lips and felt the warm return of her kiss. A new passion was rising as we embraced and tasted each other like we hadn’t before. Kisses grew deeper and longer, and we consumed every second of new discovery. Her arms encircled me and her hand caressed my neck as we shifted to hold each other closer. Her body seemed to invite my hand, slowly exploring her side and then discovering the rise of her breast under the fabric of her blouse. She moved slightly away, not evading my advance, but loosening our embrace to whisper, “Not here. Come with me.” Her face seemed to show an intention, a decision. Holding my hand in hers, she led me across the apartment, through a doorway, into her bedroom. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might actually be visible under my shirt. I was disarmed, surprised, apprehensive. I wanted this woman, and had wanted her from the first time I had laid eyes upon her, but what if I turned out to be less than what she expected, whatever that might be? My mind was racing. “How can I be polite and respectful, yet take her body to mine? How do I please her? This is it – the moment I desired, yet the moment I feared. “ I so want to be her lover!” Then I saw that my own apprehension didn’t matter. I could see it in her face; the decision had been made already, calmly and deliberately, by this dark, beautiful, mysterious woman. I didn’t deserve her, but nothing could have dragged me from that room in that moment.
The curtains were drawn back from the bedroom’s glass wall, its terrace washed by the full moon. We could see the world, but it could not see us, two lovers in the midst of a secret, intimate place of our own. Standing next to her bed, she gently circled her arms around me and raised her face to meet my kiss, a long delicious open-mouthed joining of lips and tongues. Her taste and voluptuousness captured me and I wanted to bring her body to me. We kissed again, hard and long, and my hands gathered the hem of her blouse, a sailor style jumper that I began to draw up over her head. She allowed the blouse to slide off her body and reveal her lace brassiere. My hand found her breast under the bra, and she stepped back. I was afraid I had gone too far too eagerly, but then her hands began to slowly unbutton my shirt while she drew me to the bed. Her face confirmed she had made me her choice, her decision, and while I sat on its edge she stepped back and seductively glided her slacks over her hips, letting them fall to the floor. She stood between me and the glass wall, the grey-blue moonlight silhouetting her sexual feminine outline as she moved to her dresser, and I could make out her tender breasts being freed from the bra. She pulled a sheer hip-length negligee from the drawer, donning it, and turning back to me. I had undressed but didn’t even remember doing it, shyly waiting, disrobed, in the semi-darkness. Her arms were around me again as we drank each other’s lips in a deep wet kiss. I banished the nightie from her body and tenderly held her as we both moved onto the bed, my fingers curling into the top of her lace panties and gliding them down the course of her long smooth legs and off her feet.
The combined light of the moonlit sky above and the city below faintly entered the bedroom, casting a dim patina over the dusky curves of her body. Relaxed and vulnerable, she unabashedly gifted me with the visual beauty of her slender form, nothing obstructing the space between our exposed nakedness. Modest inviting breasts rose and fell with her breath, nipples firmly swelling from russet coronas. Her sensuous body was half hidden in the shadows of the night, but I could make out her shape, bronze in the darkness, down to her angular pelvic jut framing a tousled black triangle at the summit of her converging thighs. She was breathtaking, absolutely beautiful, unashamedly feeding my eyes and senses as she lay on her back in the faint silvery light, arms comfortably askew across the smooth bedcovers, legs slightly apart. I came to her on the bed, and my heartbeat quickened even more as I brought my body over hers. My hand lightly explored her, finding the soft fleshy rise of her breasts and fondling their rigid dark nipples, closing my fingers around one, then the other. My other hand combed through her long black hair spread out on the sheets. Our lips brushed briefly and I buried my face in the sensual refuge of her neck and shoulder, pressing my body intimately along hers. She shifted to meet me as I pressed forward, and I felt her body awaken to the discovery of my invading presence, emotionally rising under me as if transforming from a person alone to a person joined. We explored with intimate harmony, a deep gentle enveloping dance, savoring the erogenous fusion of our bodies. She grasped me tightly, fingers kneading into my back and shoulders as I nested my face in her throat, kissing and delicately biting her neck. Strokes became thrusts and breathing became gasping as the excitement of our singular conjoined body rose to a driving, back-arching, crescendo.
In each other’s arms, we drifted into deep sleep, the tropical breeze entering the open glass door and caressing our spent, uncovered bodies; but then we awoke and made love again, and then again, and then again, all night. We were two insatiable lovers, immersed in pleasure never to depart our memory, never to leave our consciousness, an inaugurating signpost of a special indelible bond.
In the early morning light I gazed upon the bare, curving back and hip of the sleeping beauty at my side, and I pondered. There had been romantic encounters in my life, some regrettable in their random impermanence; one or two that had tender meaning. Maybe her story was similar. The thought caused me to suddenly realize that two people who had yet to know each other had taken the deepest of plunges. I didn’t know what it all was to mean, but something had happened this night that extinguished all the holds of the past.
I don’t think either of us had expected more than an interlude, a joining for a moment of two people who liked each other very much. These were strange times marked by painful changes in life and society, combined with a bloody war that abandoned its heroes and tore at the nation’s soul; and it seemed reasonable not to wait on the gifts of pleasure or solace or refuge, reasonable to ban our loneliness in the fear of a tomorrow too far. Maybe this was one of those times. Maybe this woman and I would get up from here and move on, leaving our night behind. But, deep down, I knew a corner had been turned in my life that was yet to be fully comprehended. I knew that this night would never leave my soul. This would never surrender its niche in my memory.
In the early morning light, I gaze upon the sleeping woman in my bed, and I understand, these many years later, the story she and I hurried to begin that night. Since that first erotic dance we have loved wildly and passionately, quietly and reticently, in joy and in sorrow. Our relationship sometimes stretched thin, but came back each time stronger, tempered by good times and bad. We have grown in experience and satisfaction, learning more each time what giving means. We are today no less passionate, much more mature, more satisfying lovers; but there is only one first time, and the tender arousal and excitement of our youth that Florida night is etched indelibly in our interwoven soul, the beginning of a forever love sought by many, captured by few; the beginning of a story worth telling.
I graze her lightly with my fingertips. She awakens, and we love.
(Screen) Name: Jack Dominic
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