Lady Behind The Wall

"And Amanda?" I asked gently.

"I had a boyfriend. I was a junior, he was a senior and a football player. We knew it couldn't last. He had enlisted in the Marines, their delayed-entry program after graduation. It was more teen lust than true love anyway.

"The night before he left for boot camp, we made love and the condom broke. I stole a girlfriend's birth control pills and took four of them the way the health class book said to if you had an accident with a condom, but it didn't work. Either I took the placebos they put in the dispenser for your period by mistake or the dose wasn't high enough to do the job. Doesn't matter what went wrong; but there I was, knocked up again.

"Same shit, different day. More abuse from Grandmother, even worse this time. I was packed off to Aunt Cloud's again, with more home schooling and hiding the shameful fact of my pregnancy.

"Things were tense between her and the jackass she'd married. My being there and looking like I'd just stepped out of the pages of a men's magazine didn't help the situation one bit. He liked to fool around, especially if he'd had a couple. He took a run at me one night and wouldn't take no for an answer. I kicked him in the balls and screamed for help, and Aunt Cloud chased him out of the house with a shotgun. She filed for divorce the next day.

"This time I got to give birth in a hospital, away from the reservation. We'd already made the arrangements for Aunt Cloud to adopt the baby when it was born, and she'd put it about she was going to adopt a child, so when Amanda came home from the hospital it was no surprise to the community. I stayed with Aunt Cloud and finished my senior year in her district, the odd girl out for my last three months of high school. I wasn't even in the yearbook because the senior photo pages had been sent off before I went back to school. It was like I was The Girl Who Never Was. Funny how that still bothers me, even now."

At last she relaxed and leaned against me in the fading sunlight. We stood together and watched the sun sink below the horizon. Finally she said, "I don't know what set me off today, John. Not like that. You know that I'm your woman. I am yours to be taken any time you feel the urge. I am always ready and willing for you to have me, no questions asked. It was like I was outside myself, watching but unable to interfere with what my body was doing. I don't understand what happened."

"Tell me one thing, Deirdre. Was the residence at which you stopped the domicile of the snake in human form that masquerades as matriarch of your sept?"

"Yes. I know Grandmother was home. The hood of her car was warm. She just got back from somewhere. She had to be there, but she wouldn't even talk to me, like I'm nothing and nobody."

The pieces fitted. "That's what triggered your break, darling. Reopening the wounds of the rejection your grandmother inflicted on you, on top of interacting with your progeny but with the awareness they don't know you as their mother, plus proximity to the site where your innocence was taken from you, was too much to bear. You needed a reason to feel as badly as you did at that moment. Reenacting your biggest sexual trauma provided it. The human mind is a mysterious thing. We can't always be certain why it does what it does, but I think I'm right in this instance."

She turned in my arms and kissed me gently, laying her head on my shoulder. "The difference is that this time, the man using me the way I was used before is the man who loves me. Part of me could sense you trying to be as gentle as possible even as I begged you to humiliate me. That part of me knew you would not hurt me the way they did. I knew I was safe with you even as I used you to recreate my being gang-raped. I think I'm past that now. I do love you so."

I stroked her hair and caressed her skin. "And what of your offspring?"

She straightened up, looking me in the eye. "They can never know. They must never know. I may have birthed them, but Aunt Cloud is their mother, not me. Promise me, John."

"They'll never hear it from me," I promised. "It wouldn't be fair to your Aunt Cloud, to them– or to you. We can help them unobtrusively if and when they need it; there are ways. Okay?"

"Okay." She relaxed against me again and I allowed my hands to wander down her back to stroke her buttocks. She smiled and rubbed against me appreciatively, feeling the erection proximity to her always evoked. She took me by the hand and led me back to the car.

"My turn to drive. Let's find a motel or something, have dinner and get some sleep. We can make up the time with an early start tomorrow."

That night we shared a shower before making slow, gentle love. Well satisfied and sated, Deirdre laid her head on my chest and we slept, secure in each other's arms, sure that it was no ordinary bond we shared.

*****

As we continued our eastward journey, we talked to pass the miles. As if yesterday's session of rough sex had been a trigger, most of our conversation was about our pasts. She asked me what it had been like growing up with Asperger's.

"In ten words or less, the other kids didn't know what to make of the freak. They tended to avoid me whenever possible, lest they be tarred with the weirdo brush and become as socially outcast as I was. A few of them didn't mind me; they figured it was just the way I was and I couldn't help it. Looking back on it, the ones who accepted me all were country kids."

"I thought you lived out in the sticks."

"Well, there's living in a small town, and then there's living out in the country on the family farm raising cattle, pigs, chickens, soybeans, running a dairy, or whatever kind of farming your family does. Farm kids learn all about how the world works sooner than city kids do. It imposes an objective reality on their thinking at the cost of their imagination.

"After I got my first .22, the fact that I could shoot better than they could, could move through the woods like Dan'l Boone and was happy to help them deal with their varmint problems earned me acceptance by their folks, even if I did talk like Mister Spock. Back then Asperger's was unknown outside of a few research institutes, much less the mainstream. The assumption was that the kids who talked like they were in college already were geniuses – which many of us really are – so ones like me were tracked into the gifted program and exposed to all kinds of learning that most students get much later, if at all."

"Like what?"

"Oh, like an experimental program where all our subjects were taught in French two afternoons a week and we had one period each day where we'd learn French history, grammar, songs and that kind of thing as if we were Frenchetudiantsinstead of American school kids. We 'eggheads' got that from first grade to twelfth. I kind of enjoyed it. What the heck, it got me out of having to study a language in high school and I learned enough to CLEP out of the foreign language requirement when I went to college. It didn't hurt that my parents were well off."

"How do you mean?"

"Father was in construction. He did well as a general contractor building houses and apartment buildings for other people and then got into land development, kind of like that family in the TV show Arrested Development except he was honest. He bought a foreclosed poultry farm near Charlotte, tore down the buildings and put up a couple of houses on spec; then more, all on at least an acre of land as people bought up the property.

"He flipped the profits and repeated the process on acreage close to large towns and small cities, making a bundle each time. Then he moved farther out and created one of the first estatelet developments in the United States, every one to be a big custom house on five acres or more. It was an idea ahead of its time in the 1960s, but Father had faith in his vision. Fortunately, he also had sufficient money that having a chunk of his capital tied up in land out in the boonies didn't cramp his style. It took a long time before he showed a profit on his estatelet development, but when the people of his generation up north started to retire in the 1980s he found he had a ready market for mini country estates. He was clever that way.

"Out in the country was where he built his own dream house in 1961, the one we're going to. When I was in high school, he and Mother had the company renovate and redecorate it to be a model home aimed at comfortably well off retirees. He showed what could be done for not a huge pile of money. He made a fortune off Golden Acres and invested it wisely, some in stocks and bonds, some in more land, some back into the company. My siblings and I inherited enough wealth to pursue our own dreams without having to worry about money.

"I still own a third of his shares in the construction and development company he founded, but I don't meddle with how its president and CEO run it any more than I interfere with my own grandiosely titled executive vice president who runs JM on a day to day basis. All I'm interested in is getting dividends from Father's outfit, just like my brother and sister. My involvement with Father's company is to show up for board meetings and nod sagely as appropriate.

"I've enough business knowledge to tell if matters are going well, that was what I took my Bachelors in. But I much prefer getting my hands dirty to sitting behind a desk in a suit. I understand machinery, not people. A machine will never hurt you unless you do something dumb but people will hurt you for reasons of their own, no reason at all, or just for the fun of it.

"I could have had a worse childhood, I suppose. Mine wasn't a patch on yours. The only thing I resent about it in the here and now was that the gifted kids never treated me like I was one of them. I took classes with them, but I wasn'tofthem, if you see my distinction here. It's hard when the group you presume would accept you rejects you instead. Didn't you get a lot of that, traveling around the world the way Army brats do?"

"Not as much as you'd think, John. One thing we Nomads – 'Army brats' is what the parents called us, 'cause it's what they were called when they were kids and their folks dragged them from post to post – learned quickly was how to make friends wherever we went. It wasn't like your small town childhood, where you had the same bunch of kids in school with you for twelve years. Nomads get a whole new set of schoolmates every couple of years; sometimes a couple of setsina year. That never happened to me, but it happened to friends of mine.

"It was really funny; peculiar-funny, not humorous-funny, I mean. You'd get close to someone really quickly. They'd tell you stories and their deepest, darkest secrets, and you'd tell them yours. They'd be almost as close as family, since you had lots of shared experiences even though you hadn't met before this posting. And then one day they'd come in and tell you their dad had orders to transfer to another unit, and a couple of weeks or months later they'd be gone. Maybe you'd see them again sometime, more likely you wouldn't. Special Forces is a small military community as such things go, like your town, John. Remember you said once that everyone either knew everybody else, or knew someone who knew whoever you were talking about? Same thing. But the Army as a whole is like the whole United States. You could be with people for a couple of years and then never see them ever again.

"It was a little weirder for me than for some of my fellow Nomads. Maman didn't think the schools on the Army bases, especially the ones overseas, were always good. And Papa wanted to expose me to more of the world than you get in what he called 'the parochial Army atmosphere.' So in places we were stationed where it was safe to do so, he put me into schools off the base. Private schools, mostly for the language, you know? That's where I got my Spanish and Tagalog and German, from schools in West Germany and the Philippines. I think I got a much more rounded education that I'd have had if I'd gone only to American schools speaking only English. I made friends there, the way kids do, and I think it helped me understand the native culture better even if they didn't always fully accept me.

"That was what life was like until I was about 12. Move into quarters on a base or 'on the economy' off the base and stay there for a couple of years; then move somewhere else when Papa was transferred. I'd listen to the local kids sometimes and wonder what it was like to have a house that was really and truly yours, not just military quarters or a rental. From the time I was born, I don't think I spent five years in the continental United States. Even though I had loving parents and the Special Forces 'family' is very tight-knit, I felt kind of rootless. A lot of kids who grow up in the military feel that way.

"We were living at Fort Bragg when Papa was sent on temporary duty to Germany, then detached to a second TDY assignment, and then a third. That's SOP when the Army wants to hide someone's tracks if they are enroute to a job they don't want splashed all over the news. One day, an Army car from the Group showed up at my school and took me home. When I got there, there were six or eight official cars in front of the house and I knew even before Maman told me that Papa was dead.

"Papa had served in an A-Team with the Commandant of the Special Warfare School before he got his commission. It was the Colonel who broke the news to Maman and me. And he was the one who presented Papa's Distinguished Service Cross to Maman when the award was approved a year later. I think that was what sent Maman over the edge and made her run away. Coupled with the tensions between her and Grandmother, it was more than she could stand."

She fell silent and gripped my hand tightly. More pieces in the puzzle that was Deirdre fell into place. It was little wonder my darling had turned out the was she had, given the hammer blows of a beloved father's death under mysterious and highly classified circumstances, being torn from a familiar if strange lifestyle, a posthumous DSC presented with (if my guess was right) a citation that was a masterpiece of military obfuscation, impossible tensions within the family unit and her mother cutting and running without a word. I silently vowed to do everything I could to make her happy.

Deirdre sensed my deep thoughts and transferred my hand to her thigh under her skirt, inviting caresses. I smiled and obliged. She sighed and leaned back as I stroked her soft skin, working slowly up to the junction between her legs. Her breathing deepened and she trapped my hand between her thighs, smiling at me.

"How about some lunch?"

"Honey, we're miles from the next exit on this highway where there might be a restaurant."

"Yes, but while you were showering I slipped out and went to the deli down the street from the motel. We can have a picnic at the next rest area. There's one just ahead. What do you think?"

"Sounds good to me." She gave me my hand back and I guided us into the rest stop. She got out the picnic makings from the trunk, including a blanket, and led the way to the spot farthest from the road, under some trees where the bushes secluded us from the remainder of the rest area. Snapping the folded blanket open and letting it flow flat onto the ground, she set the plastic tubs and bottles within easy reach as she settled onto the blanket. When I went to sit opposite her, she shook her head and patted a spot next to her.

"Lie with your head in my lap, John. I've always wanted to play the harem girl feeding the sultan finger foods at the banquet." Her lascivious smile was impossible to resist.

It was far and away the most enjoyable al fresco lunch I'd ever had. Not one bite of food passed my lips that did not come from my beloved's fingers. When we'd finished, I continued to lie there, enjoying the sun and the solitude, feeling Deirdre stroke my head. I started to doze and felt her move my head onto the blanket before she got up and moved away.

My eyes snapped open as warm wetness engulfed my cock. Deirdre's head was bobbing up and down on my dick, expertly sucking me to erection. My pants had been pulled down and now she rose up over my prick, her skirt held out of the way as she impaled herself on me, sighing as she sank down, my cock filling her pussy.

"Oh yes. That's what I need to make this picnic complete. Fuck me, John! Give me your cum! Use me and make me cum! Please, darling! Please fill me up!"

She leaned forward, the blouse pulled up over her breasts leaving her glorious tits exposed. We kissed as my hands found her mams, squeezing and caressing as she rode me like a cowgirl and my tongue lashed hers. I twisted her nipples lightly, hearing her gasp, enjoying the power I had over her, the power she freely gave me to love her and pleasure her. She rose and fell on me, sighing as I sucked on her nipples, loving the moans my tongue and teeth elicited and the feel of them in my mouth as I buried my face in her breasts.

"Yes! Yes! Suck my nips! Bite 'em! So good! Oh darling, hurry! I'm almost there! Almost– almost– almost– AAAHHH!"

I smothered her cries with my mouth as we orgasmed together, her cunt muscles clenching and spasming on my prick as I drove up into her and grabbed her tits hard as my penis shot wads of cum into her waiting twat. As her body relaxed, she fell forward onto me, smiling, her eyes soft.

"Well, Inever!"

An outraged female voice scraped across our ears like nails on a chalkboard. We looked up. A pale, piggy-eyed woman's face with dirty hair was staring at us in outrage. It turned and vanished, muttered imprecations trailing in its wake. Deirdre was off me and after it like a shot. I took a second to yank my pants back up before I followed, afterglow dispelled by anger like a cloud of hydrogen gas before a match. I caught up with the two women just as Deirdre grabbed the intruder's arm and spun her around.

"If you have something to say, honey, don't say it behind my back. Here I am. Have at it!"

"You – you harlot! You common whore! Fucking your john right out in the open where decent folk can see you! Have you no shame?"

"None at all. I'm not ashamed to make love to John anywhere, any time. I love him, and I love having sex with him. As it happens, this time I started it. I wanted him, and he had me, and there's nothing shameful about it.

"And we weren't out in the open," I added, coming to stand beside her and slip an arm protectively around her. "We were completely concealed from prying eyes– unless they come looking, ready to pass moral judgments that aren't theirs to make."

Out would-be inquisitor's eyes widened as this barb sank home. Before she could draw breath to resume her ranting, Deirdre cut her off.

"And as far as being a whore, let me tell you something, honey.

"All women are whores. All men, too. We all sell ourselves for what we value, to whoever will meet our price. In your case, Petunia, you sold yourself for the security ofkinde, kirche und küchefor the sake of those three porkers over there."

She gestured toward a van conversion, the latest incarnation of the 'sin bin' as a comfortable micro-RV for the family on the go. Two boys and a girl, aged from seven to ten, were having a water gun war around it. The pasty trio ranged in type from flabby to obese. Given their hard breathing from ordinary childhood activity, all would have benefited from the PT regimen of Army basic training. None of them could run twice around the van without stopping for breath.

"As for me, I've sold myself for the clean, honest coin the Great Spirit intended: the love and respect of my man. I'm proud to be his, in every way. Canyousay the same?"