An Account for a Bullet

"I think it does me fine service, Miss Ada. You're sure I am not putting you out of your own bed?"

"No, this was Father's room before he left to join the War." I opened the windows to let the June breeze in while he arranged his leg on the bed. "Rest here through the afternoon. I will come with dinner tonight, and cards, if you will have a game with me." I took a pillow from one of the chairs and placed it under his calf to cushion his thigh. "Remember, if the minister finds I have been playing at cards, then you must swear on your life that you seduced me to it by cunning Yankee trickery."

"On my life? Why not swear on my eye, Ada? Or my heart?" He caught my hand like a busy bird in his, a surprise.

"I did not save your eye or your heart, you owe them not. But your life," I jibed, "that is mine to ask, friend." I turned to leave him be, but he kept a firm grip on my wrist and a peculiar look on his face.

"Ada, will you yet do me another favor?"

"Certainly."

"Will you take your hair down for me?"

It was an earnest entreaty, a plain need on his face I did not fully understand. Since he had been well enough, we had been playing at a game of social visitors. We played cards in the evenings and I read to him. We spoke stories from our childhoods but never of deprivation, never of the War. I had not spoken to a man about more than the price of a bolt of cloth or the rain's effects on our crops in more than two years; his voice was a sound I did not know my ears had missed. How much more it must have been for him! To have no woman's company nor taste of domestic comforts, restricted though they were. I could not deny my friend such a simple pleasure as seeing a woman's hair loose upon her shoulders. I unpinned the snood from the crown of my head and combed my hair loose with my fingers, the dark red waves falling down to the bottom of my small bosom. He said nothing, but looked at me with half-lidded eyes and released my hand.

I left the room, heat flushing through my chest and growing hotter when I put consideration to the expression in his eyes. On a whim, I fetched the shaving mirror, brush, and razor we kept for guests, as his beard was coming in thick, rejoining the Union with his side-whiskers, as it were. I approached the cracked bedroom door carefully, lifting the skirts of my work dress to make no rustling if he was already asleep.

When I peered in, I saw that his longjohns were open and he had his penis in his hand, longer and thicker than I had ever dared make it while washing him. He pinched at the swollen glans, rubbing the foreskin in circles with his thumb before pulling the whole hood back to reveal the tip beneath, the color and shape of a young plum. The only thing that stopped me from rushing in to begin immediate medical treatment was his deep groan of pleasure. He stroked his hand fully from his pubic hair, along the shaft, to halfway up the head, perhaps a dozen times. Then he stopped his hand midway and squeezed and released the shaft, just as I had done when bathing him. This brought another moan of pleasure and I felt a prickling heat between my own legs. He went back to rubbing the full length at a faster pace, the rattle of his quickened, thinned breath matching my own. His thighs stiffened and a glistening pale liquid erupted from inside his fist, spilling over his fingers. He sighed and lay still for a moment before wiping it up with a handkerchief and putting his longjohns back to their previous state. I went down to the spring house to cool off for the rest of the afternoon.

The next night, after dinner and reading, I sat on the edge of the bed and set a large wooden tray between us to play cards. We played a simple game of betting tricks and winning them with trumps that my sister and I had learned by creeping into the men's parlor after dinner and not being turned to more spiritually productive practices by Father. My soldier was a quick study, and we modified the game to hold adult interest with small wagers of truthful answers to questions posed. I won the first hand.

"I owe you a truth, then, Miss Ada."

"I will save it," I smiled, "against some useful future inquiry." He gathered the cards back together and shuffled them for the next hand.

"How do you know I will honor such a marker?" His smile lit him, a lamp in his fog of a face left too long unshaved.

"Ah, because if you do not," I leaned across the tray and squeezed his thigh above his knee, upon the uninjured leg, of course, "I shall be forced to eat you."

"You dare not," he snorted, set the cards upon the tray between us, and covered my hand with his. "I am far too tough. You would have to cook me a fortnight." I tilted my head up at him and arched an eyebrow.

"I've a very large pot in the dooryard for just that." He lifted my hand from his leg to his lips and brushed my knuckles with a kiss. I felt most the overgrown hair of the beard I'd aimed to help him shave the day before, but the manly scratch of it framing his lips sent my blood coursing backwards to meet my drumming pulse. "Besides, I already got out the bullet that would have cracked my tooth."

"How could I forget that I know you to be a cannibal?" I pulled his raised hand back across the tray to my mouth and nipped at his thumb as a puppy might before I let it go. I was flushed with boldness and hoped it would bear me through my plans.

"I believe you are stalling the next hand, for you know that one's lost as well, Yank." He smiled again, and dealt our cards.

"Surely I would not be so sore distracted were it not your constant aim to eat me, Savage Miss Ada."

I won the next hand and stayed my owed truth yet again. He won the hand after.

"Miss Ada, what pet animal have you held dearest to your heart?" In my flush, I almost told him it was he, himself, but I could not get the words right behind my lips. I struck upon something safer.

"When I was a girl, my sister and I had a goat, Little Bill, that would dance."

"Dance?"

"Yes. Not as a learned trick, either. If we went into the yard, on Mama did, he would face up to the front of our skirts and give a little hop, like he was asking for the reel."

"He never."

"It's as true as north. If you moved right to get around him, he would move with you. Left was the same. Little Bill would sway like a dance partner matching steps at a ball unless you got 'round him."

"Did he only dance with women?"

"Yes, I think it was something to do with the skirts."

"Any man ever try?" I could not stop myself from laughing, the memory of a sunny afternoon boiling out of my closed off places like a spring.

"My brother Charles, though he was only a little boy, then. He went out to the yard when Old Bill came by and swept him a right gentlemanly bow," I could scarce finish the story for laughing. "Bill took one look at him and butted him flat into the dirt!" We both laughed, the wild way we could only do in this little life we had, free from social formalities and tucked away from blood and black powder.

"What of you?" I asked, when we both got our voices back. "What pet was dearest to you?"

"I will weigh that answer against the two truths you won." I made an indelicate sound.

"I let you ask a half-dozen questions about my goat and never once told you it counted against your winnings."

"Ah, but I'm not as good as you at playing cards. You need to concede me this to account for all the distraction you cause that ruins my head for the game."

"Are you complaining again of your fear that I will eat you?"

"That you consume me in other ways, perhaps. The distraction is your lips, Ada, not your teeth." I lifted the tray with the cards off the bed and set it to the side, avoiding his raised eyebrows and pointed look.

"Speaking of savage beasts, you are in dire need of a shave." I retrieved the shaving kit from the dry sink where I had placed it earlier in the day. I poured warm water from the earthen pitcher into the basin on the sink and wetted the bristles of the shaving brush. "I will give you but one of my wins, but tell me a good story about your pet."

"We had a squirrel. I raised him from a baby."

"A squirrel?" I circled the bristles of the shaving brush in the solid soap to stir the lather. "Inside the house?"

"We could barely get him to leave the house. That was where he kept all his favored places to perch, where boys always had pockets full of acorns and walnuts for him. I scarce think he knew such things were generally found upon the ground."

"But how did you come by a baby squirrel?" I sat next to him on the bed, coating his cheeks in clouds of lather. Perhaps he could do this himself, now. When I had first given him a razor to shave, his hands shook so badly he lost near as much blood as he had in the summer kitchen, but that had been weeks back. My hands had always been steady with the razor, but seemed made of wood that particular night.

"My brothers and I were clearing trees to extend the back graze land. I was twelve years, the youngest. We didn't see the squirrel nest 'til a springy oak came down. Never did see Mama Squirrel, she must have lit off when we started in with the saw the day before." I was careful with my swipes, cleaning from the edges of his side whiskers first and smiling to myself at how well my own actions matched his story of clearing wild growth for clean pasture. "When we opened the nest, we saw three pups in there. Smaller than my little finger and hairless, eyes closed. If I hadn't seen the nest, I would have taken them for pink rats." I placed my finger against his lips to stop his story and complete his shave.

"How did you get them home?" I asked after navigating the shallow channel of his chin with my silver blade.

"Tucked all three of them snug into my shirt next to my skin and kept cutting brush. By dinner, two of them were still and cold, but one was hungry."

"What did you name him?"

"Tecumseh."

"Tecumseh?" My laughter sputtered like a candle in a stiff draft. "Tecumseh the Squirrel?" He nodded, soft cheeks and softer smile making him a boy again before my eyes.

"Tecumseh was the noble savage hero of all our boys' games. It seemed a natural fit, since he came to us from Nature herself."

"Tecumseh. " I repeated, only believing half of him. "And what nursemaid did you find for such a warrior?"

"I fed him myself, cow's milk and a little sugar, warmed and soaked into the corner of a cotton cloth. It's no wonder he thought the house was all the forest he needed."

I rinsed the shave brush and dried the razor before putting them back into their case. Into a second basin I poured the remaining water and soaked a dry cloth for his bath. Without a word, he pulled his broad arms from the ill-fitting sleeves of his longjohns. Though we both knew any man who could dress and undress himself had no need of my aid to bathe, neither of us was yet willing to give up my gentle sweeps against his skin. I set to my task by getting stray soap off his throat.

"I will call upon another truth you owe me now." I could not look at his questioning eyes and so stared intently at his shoulder beneath the washcloth. I felt as if my head were a cork floating above my sinking body.

"Ask what you wish. I'll answer."

"Are...have you ever been married?" His chest rose and fell in a heavy sigh under my scrubbing hand.

"Yes, I have been married. Her name was-"

"I do not wish to know." The hardness and resolve of my voice surprised me. He stopped my hand under his.

"Her name was Elizabeth," he said quietly, insistently. "She passed before the War." It was a cresting wave of relief to me, marred by the pulling anchor of the way he said her name, a man invoking a saint.

"Did you love her?"

"Yes," he answered immediately, then thoughtful added, "in the way that you love someone who shares your life. I wanted things for her. For both of us. A prosperous farm, a table full of children. We never got much past the wanting."

"Is that why you joined the Infantry? Because she died?" He looked at me as if I had spoken to him in French and he was puzzling out my meaning.

"You want to know if I volunteered for the Army out of my grief." I nodded, feeling childish at hearing a concept that was a staple of the novels I read breathed into life by a mouth that had screamed at Hell itself. He placed both his hands on my waist and pulled me to the edge of the bed, to a hand's breadth of his chest. "I suppose I did, but not in the way you think. She died two years before the first shots of the War. I planted seeds those years, I harvested. I went to church on Sundays. I lived a life a man might live, but I was all hollow and echoing on the inside. I was not well." He rested the side of his head against my burning breast. "A brave man who lost his love would have volunteered as soon as his mourning was over. I wish I could be that man for you, but I must be honest and tell you I am not." I combed into his black hair with my fingers and tilted his face up to mine, our mouths close enough to share a breath.

"I could love an honest man."

I cannot tell which of us closed the gap between our lips, or if we thought to do it at all. It seemed to me then that the earth raised him up to meet me as it raises a tree and that it pulled me against him as smoothly as a falling stone. I had kissed boys before, and they had kissed me, but that had been a game - most of the thrill of the thing had been in escaping the chaperone. To kiss a man! To feel the heat of his bare chest pressed against the cotton of my house dress instead of my formal satin, lace, and whalebone armor against the importuning of love was not to dance the same measure as a stolen touching of lips while Auntie retrieves her fan from the front parlor.

I reclined on the bed beside him, an imitation of the position I assumed so many times those first days in the summer kitchen when I was listening for his heart's thready beat. I could not keep my lips from him, or close them against his darting tongue. His hands, released from some draconic rule, could not fill fast enough with my hair and skin, clutching at my neck and the slight slope of my bodice only a moment before moving and filling again. They did not stop until I laid my hand along the smooth curve of his branch, hot and hard as an iron pipe under the thin concealment of his longjohns.

"We can stop," he gasped as I closed my hand tight against his hardness. "To be safe with me in your house you do not have to-" I stole his chivalrous protestations with the hunger of my teeth against his lower lip. I skimmed my hand beneath his cotton underwear and pulled the member I knew well but had never seen this close at full attention into the lamplight. I tried to mimic what I had watched him do with it the day before, but curiosity moved my hand to detours of exploration. I circled the head in my thumb and fingers, marveling that it was the same part of him I washed a dozen times before. The sheath of skin over it was taut and pale against the deeper bruise of his glans. I worked it gently, coaxing skin across skin until he answered with panting and clear ichor dribbled from the slit at the tip. Had I not observed what he was capable of producing the day before, I would have thought that to be his ejaculation in my innocence.

I tugged back lightly on the foreskin, thinking to move it back from the head smoothly and slowly, like rolling a woolen stocking down from my thigh. I was quite surprised when it sprang back like shucked corn and folded into neat pleats below the head. I grasped the center of his shaft and pulsed it in my fist as I had when first exploring his body, but the reaction in my hand and of him moaning against my mouth was better education in pleasing him than I had ever received before.

Emboldened, I stroked my hand along the full length of him, from the black hair at the base of his penis to the slick tip. His moan had lost its voice and retreated into a steady gasp and explosive release of breath. His hands could no longer roam my body because they were clasped and twisted tightly into the bed sheets. His face flushed crimson and he chewed at the air like a fish on land as his rod leapt in my fist and covered my fingers with the thick cream of his pleasure.

* * * *

"Why do you never wear a corset?" My soldier helped me open the buttons on the back of my work dress and placed his hands along my ribs over my chemise before sliding them forward to cover my breasts. His warmth against my back was welcome in the autumn chill that dug into the house even here, in my bedroom.

"How do you reckon I would have done with dragging your heaviness into the kitchen had I been caged in silk and whalebones?" He held tight to me and bent his head to bite at the place between my neck and shoulder. He did this now when he thought I was being too hard, and it surely worked to soften me to his explorer's hands and mouth, if not always his point of view. I surrendered him the full truth. "My old ones no longer fit. They were made before the War, when I was not yet seventeen years old. Time and thrift have changed me, leaned me out. I see no utility in having new ones made."

He stripped my chemise over my head and lifted me onto the high feather mattress. He clambered up between my legs and untied the draw waist of my pantalets, pulling them down over my narrow hips, my white thighs, my strong calves. He rubbed his nose against the tuft of reddish hair over my mons pubis, taking in my scent as he always did before giving me the French Pleasure.

"Miss Ada Frazier, it matters none to me that you are lean or plump, you are the most beautiful woman in the world." He lapped at my protruding secret lips with his tongue flat until I rolled my hips beneath him. He rested the dark whiskers of one side of his face against my thigh and looked into my eyes. "Tonight I am going to have you fully for myself."

"You cannot," I chided gently. This was our familiar tease of the past few weeks. Instead of continuing with his mouth as he had always done before, he moved over me and placed his glans against my sex, the contact of the two kindling fire through the whole of my body. He stopped there, gazing down at my face. I wanted to sate his hunger and to feed my own, to feel them move together like two flames licking at the same log, but I did not want to be, as the log, consumed. I turned my face from him to steel my resolve. "Sir, it is a pleasure reserved only for my husband."

"What husband are you waiting for, Ada?" He asked gently and did not move to take me outright. His glans stretched into my opening, the outer lips of my sex completely enveloping it. "What fiance will you find in this empty place? What man will come back here whole?"

"I suppose we will have to begin holding cotillion in Hell."

He neither moved inside me nor moved away, but kissed the side of my neck. My sex burned. If it could have reached out of its own accord for the thick shaft my hands and mouth knew so well, he would have been full inside me before I could protest. I had strangled and buried many appetites since the War began, borne many hungers. This one I could bear no more.

I pushed my hips to him, letting his glans slowly into the slick channel of my sex. He held his body still, though the effort of it appeared to cost him the full measure of his will. I rocked beneath him, taking less than a finger's breadth at a time of him into my virgin place. When I thought he was inside me completely, he pushed still deeper.

"My name, Ada," he whispered in my ear as he pulsed his hips against me, "call me by my name."

"David!" I gasped as he pulled half out and sunk into me again. "You are my David and I am yours to have."

* * * *

It was May again, and the War had ground itself out.