Our Private Eden: A Memphis Miracle

Except to establish historical context, this is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any active character or situation to any actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

This is the second installment in the "Private Eden" series..

All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

Our Private Eden: The Memphis Miracle

By Royce F. Houton

Working hard never bothered me. The early mornings. The whole day spent in the blistering sun. Soaking myself through with sweat before lunch. I was used to it. A hot shower after quitting time, a couple of cold Budweisers and a good night's sleep, maybe a day off and a night to blow it out on the weekends and I was ready to go after it again.

I had nothing better to compete for my time until that night I walked into Conway's bar in Van Buren, Missouri, met Holly and fell crazy in love with her faster than I ever thought was possible, having remained decidedly single until now when I was on the north side of 35.

I had given up my room at the Big Spring Motel a few weeks ago at Holly's behest and shared her mountainside lodge for most of the past month. I was leery at first, worried that I had committed myself to the sex and not the woman. But that wasn't so. I found myself content just to sit on the veranda and talk with her, to blast down the backroads of southern Missouri on a summer afternoon with the top to my 1977 Mustang down, to hold hands at a movie, to doze off fully clothed in each other's arms.

It was a Tuesday in mid-July. After two nearly three weeks without rain, we were almost 10 days ahead of schedule on the highway - something I had never seen before. So when a thunderstorm rolled in just after lunch and halted work for the day, I was ready for it. I parked my car in the gravel driveway behind Holly's hillside lodge and surprised her just as she finished her shower.

"Your turn, stud. Water's still warm. Rinse the sweat and dust off and let's fuck each other silly on your afternoon off," she said.

I did. And then we did. She grabbed me by my already semi-erect cock, led me to the veranda, seated me on the swing without even the opportunity to towel off and straddled me in the cool, overcast midafternoon. She rode me to two orgasms of her own before I finally came deep inside her. We rinsed each other off again in the shower and retired to the sofa to relax.

"So, do you ever not work? This afternoon makes me want to spend more time with you, to get away from here for a while, to be with you on weekday mornings and afternoons and not when you're dog tired from a day out on the job," Holly said as her hand traced the contours of my face.

"I have vacation time and some personal days built up. Quite a few, tell the truth. We got a few more weeks of pretty intense roadbed work and then things will lighten up, at least for my crew. That's when the earthmoving work slows down and the finishing work - pouring pilings and pillars for bridges and finishing the grade for paving - begins," I said.

"So by the start of fall - first week or two of September - I'll be looking to take some time off. And nothing against Van Buren, but I was hoping to get away from here for a while," I said, pausing "... and I hope you'll get away with me?"

She said not a word but answered with a kiss that could have smothered me and made me glad to die that way. "Mmmmm," was the only sound from her as she slowly pushed me onto my back on the sofa and opened the front of my bathrobe as she crawled on top of me.

Before I knew it, I was harder than the hope diamond again, and Holly had nuzzled the head of my dick just inside her sticky pussy and clamped her thighs together, trapping it there. Her legs inserted themselves between mine, creating a different twist on the missionary position with her on top, her ass pumping furiously between my thighs splayed wide, working my cock in and out of her tight twat. The alignment created a new, powerful sensation that registered quickly on us both, but particularly her as her vaginal walls, her labia and her clit found a new level of simultaneous compression.

Within moments she was moaning and whimpering, on the cusp of another orgasm, pounding me like a porn star when I growled, thrust hard upward and emptied what little semen my drained nuts could muster on short notice deep into her cunt. The feel of my hot jizz jetting into her flipped her switch and her long, shuddering orgasm commenced. She flattened herself hard onto my chest, heaving and gasping, her mound pressed tight onto my pubic bone, her bloated nipples digging into my chest and her face flushed from exertion against my neck.

Long minutes later, as my boner shrank with her and our mingled juices pooled on the inside of my bathrobe, Holly raised herself up so that her face was just above mine, exhibiting an exhausted but triumphant leer.

"So, that's a yes, you'll go on vacation with me?" I said.

Again, a kiss was her only answer.

●●●

The 'L' word had yet to cross her lips or mine. But it was there, present every moment we were together, and in my thoughts when I was away from her. It didn't need to be said but the time was coming when it was important for one of us to take the first step and say it.

It was a lazy, rainy Saturday morning in early August. We were in the swing on the veranda of the Raymer lodge overlooking the late summer gloom as chilly, misty gusts whipped across the valley below, making the Current River below barely discernible and fully obscuring the Ozark promontory - to small to qualify as a mountain but way too large to be a hill - rising from the other side of the river.

The three-day rain had stalled the last days of earthmoving work on the highway project. Three or four days of sunny weather next week would allow us to finish the last details of preparing the grade, loading the gargantuan earth-scrapers onto low-boy trailers and get them on the road to new job sites, one in Mississippi and one in Oklahoma. That's when the total focus would turn to precision grading and preparing the road bed for paving work. Other than supervise a few crews doing drainage work and cleaning up the earth borrow pits where we had gouged hundreds of thousands of tons of soil from the flatlands to build the elevated roadbed, my work here in southern Missouri was about done. And that presented a decision to be made for Holly and me.

But first things first. I had some time off that I needed to take before making any decision on the next assignment I might take. And that time away with Holly would play an enormous - perhaps dispositive - role in the decision.

I had a felt-tipped yellow highlighter that I would use to outline on a road atlas of the United States and Canada the route we would take to wherever we agreed to go. A mountain getaway was pretty much out: we lived in one of those. So that pretty much left the big city or the beach.

"I'm leaning toward the beach," Holly said as she snuggled close in to see the atlas before us.

"OK. Which one do you like best? There's the Atlantic, with places as different as Hilton Head, Miami and Cape Cod. We can do somewhere on the Gulf Coast, but it's pretty much the same from Tampa all the way around to Galveston, and since September's still hurricane season, that's a little bit of a crapshoot, but it would be lovely that time of year - still warm but not blistering hot, and since school would be back in session, it wouldn't be crowded with a bunch of kids," I said.

"If you're really feeling adventurous, there's always the Pacific Coast - places like Malibu in California. Or Hawaii, even."

"Why don't we keep it simple. I don't feel like driving all the way to the East or West coasts. But I've been to Panama City - we went when I was little - and I remember it being like one big, tacky carnival. I'd like someplace less crowded," Holly said.

"I think I know just the place. Let me make a call," I said. "OK to dial long-distance? It's weekend rates." She responded with a thumbs-up.

Ten minutes later, I came rejoined Holly on the veranda.

"Gulf Shores, Alabama," I said.

"Never heard of it," she said.

"That's why it's ideal. Hardly anybody there. Best kept secret on the Gulf. You go east across Mobile Bay at Mobile and turn south for about 15 miles and it's right there where the road meets the Gulf."

I pointed to it on the atlas, a tiny spec on the heel of Alabama right against the blue of the sea.

One of my college buddies, Elmer "Hoss" House, got a job in Montgomery after we graduated and bought two-bedroom house on Orange Beach just outside Gulf Shores several years ago. He rents it out most weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day, but it sits mostly idle the rest of the time except for Thanksgiving and whenever his family wants a getaway.

"I called him and he said I could use it for free any time after the first week in September, that it's booked til then. I went down there with him once a couple of years ago. You can walk a quarter of a mile in either direction without seeing another beach house and usually not another person. It's got this big, covered porch with a hammock just 30 yards from the water at high tide."

"Mmmmmm," Holly purred. "When can we go?"

"Why don't we leave on September 15, which is a Thursday. Take our time - I've got two whole weeks if you can swing it. That would put us back here on the 29th."

I took the highlighter and traced a yellow route from Van Buren down to Poplar Bluff, from there to Kennett, and then hit Interstate 55 at Hayti and take it into Memphis.

"My mom grew up through High School in Memphis, so I know the town a little. There's this hotel called the Rivermont that sits on top of the highest point of the bluff that overlooks the Mississippi River and we can stay there the first night," I said, narrating the route I was tracing with the yellow highlighter.

"The next day, we can hop back on I-55, take it to Jackson, and from there, take U.S. 49 down to Gulfport and Biloxi. That's where we pick up I-10 to Mobile, cross the bay and then there we are. We can make it there from Memphis in one day if we start early enough."

"One whole week with the house, the beach and each other to ourselves. Sound OK?

Holly smiled broadly. She leaned over and rested her head on my shoulder. "Sounds like heaven, baby."

I kissed her forehead, told her to give me a half hour or so and I'd call Hoss back and reserve the beach house and make reservations in Memphis, where I paid extra to secure the penthouse honeymoon suite. I gave the clerk my American Express card number and wrote down the confirmation number in my appointment book.

When I returned to the veranda, Holly had draped herself in a green-and-blue cashmere Afghan her grandmother had once knitted against the unseasonable chill in the air. She was gazing into the mist, her mind far away and so lost in thought that she seemed not to notice that I had returned until I sat down again beside her, wrapped her in my arms and pulled her backward against me.

"What's on your mind, precious?" I said.

"Oh... just trying to sort things out," she said. "I mean, two months ago, you were about to walk into Conway's and we were about to meet for the first time. That's not a long period of time. I had spent years alone, fending off one guy after another - either horn-dogs or gold-diggers. Was not in a man mood at all, and I'll be damned if I know why I struck up a conversation with you that night, why I asked you to take me home, why we made love..."

She was quiet for a moment.

"It just felt, you know,... OK. Like a voice was telling me it would be OK to give you a chance. Even after you almost blew it with that clumsy come-on line, I still felt something pushing me your way."

She sat up and repositioned herself in the swing to face me, the Afghan around her shoulders like a shawl, her legs crossed in front of her.

"Corey, I'm not that way. I've never been the kind of girl who lets her heart lead the way. I always put my head in charge, and it's kept me out of trouble. But I have not done that with you, even though my head keeps raising holy hell about it, telling me I am taking a huge risk, asking me if I'm sure that I you're right for me and that I'm right for you," she said, her eyes focused on mine.

This felt like treacherous terrain. Where was this going? Had I moved too fast with the vacation together? Had I presumed too much? Had I spooked her?

"Am I Corey? Am I right for you? And are you? Are we right for each other? Hearts don't think, they don't explain. They just want. How do we know? It feels like we're on the verge of something big. And like that drive you just traced on the map, I think we need to know whether we're in that something for the long haul or if this is just a beautiful summer romance," she said as tears began clouding her eyes.

I kept my eyes as deeply focused on hers as hers were on mine. This wasn't a challenge, though it had felt like one. But it was the acknowledgement that we had reached a pivotal moment in our relationship. I had no rehearsed answer for this. So I just spoke the truth that had reverberated through my mind and soul hundreds - maybe thousands - of times in the past two months.

"There's every reason to be skeptical of a summer relationship that blows up like a late afternoon thunderstorm, all wild and a little scary; full of wind and lightning and rain and thunder, and then the next morning it's gone and there are a bunch of trees down. I've had one of those," I said.

"During our first days together, I wondered if that was where this was headed, though even then it felt - still feels - new and different. In those first days, our passion was so intense that I had to wonder what else there was. And in the weeks since, I've seen what that was."

"Making love to you is incomparable. It hasn't diminished a bit. In fact, it's only gotten better. But something more important has emerged: I can't get you off my mind. I don't want to get you off my mind. And no, it's not just one of those things where I can't wait to get home and get in bed with you. My mind flashes to what's happening in your life and how I might make it better. I find myself fretting about every time you sneeze if you're getting a cold - do I need to run to the drugstore. I find myself in the grocery store looking for the kind of shampoo and skin lotion you like. When I see the railing to the steps get loose or a door not shutting right at the lodge, I want to head to the hardware store and come home and fix it.

"When I see marigolds in bloom, my eyes go to them because they're your favorites and you've cultivated them everywhere here. Before I met you, I couldn't have told you the difference between a marigold and a sunflower."

"I was in a shop the other day where they were fixing a tire on one of those massive earth scrapers - a tire so big that I can stand inside it, raise my arms and not touch the top. And you know what I thought about? That the tread on your dad's old F-150 pickup truck is way too worn and I had to get new tires on it soon as I could. All of that and more, much more, I want because in my heart, you have earned the best I can get for you, whether it's bringing you hot chocolate on a chilly night on the veranda to making sure you're safe to just holding you while you take a nap."

I took her hands in mine.

"Those are just a few examples. But it's constant and it fulfills me. It's like that Elvis song, 'you are always on my mind.' It's about more things than I can possibly list right, but what they all have in common is that they all involve you, they all affect you - Holly Raymer. And that's when I knew."

"Holly, my grandfather - mom's dad - was a Methodist preacher who was pastor of several churches in the Memphis area when mom was young. Pop-Pop died eight years ago, but he had the best advice for how to live life I ever heard. And it wasn't like church when it was coming from him. It was like wisdom from Pop-Pop."

"I remember when my dad and mom celebrated their silver wedding anniversary a little over a dozen years ago, Pop-Pop said he had no misgivings when performed mom's and dad's wedding ceremony because he knew my dad loved my mom. And this is what he said: 'Love is not a feeling. It's not just passion and it's not just having someone to spend time with, though those are part of the gift that is love. Love is a constant condition of attention to another, making that person your life's priority in all that you do.'"

"In the past two months, I have examined and re-examined my mind and my heart and asked the hard questions. I have trained myself to make note of the times I think of you - the context of it and why you are on my mind, and why that drives my actions, day in and day out. And I can conclude - no, I know - this: I love you, Holly Raymer," I said.

Tears spilled from her eyes as she wrapped her arms around my neck, leaned forward and sobbed. I pulled her fully into my lap and held her there securely as her emotions poured forth. It seemed a dam had burst, that she felt at last free to let go of her wants, her fears, the continuous and unsettling doubts, the collateral damage from the conflict between her heart and her mind.

Now it was over, settled. She dared go with her heart and her heart had won. Now her heart did what it does in victory. I held her as it all poured out, as she wept in relief and celebration, as she parted ways with the life of the strong lady loner that she had assumed was her eternal station in life.

Eventually, the sobs abated. She reclined against my chest the last sniffles and deep, stuttering breaths of concluded her cleansing cry.

"Corey, there have only been two men in my whole life who I knew loved me. One was grandpa and one was daddy. They told me so often, even though they never had to. They showed me - all the time," Holly said. "And I told them the same all the time. Wasn't a day that I saw either one that my last words weren't 'I love you.'"

"Two men. That's all. Until now. You're the third. Corey, I love you."

She raised herself upward and our lips met as we embraced each other - a sweet, easy kiss; unforced and natural, full of meaning and yearning that surpassed physical passion. It lasted a long, comfortable time.

Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled. Around us, the leaves bent in the wind, making the boughs that held them sway gently. A cool breeze tossed strands of Holly's hair softly against my cheek. And still, we kissed.

●●●

I could already feel the first hints of the autumn chill on the wrap-around porch of my childhood home as the sun set in the northern suburbs of Kansas City. September was barely a week old and the clean, crisp air felt like a refreshing shower as I sat beside mom as dad finished cleaning the kitchen and loading the dishwasher after supper.

"So tell me about her," mom said.

I had let on that I had met someone in tiny Van Buren on the other side of the state and that we cared for each other quite a bit.

"Her name is Holly. She's two years older than I am but you'd never guess it," I said, handing mom a snapshot of the two of us as we prepared to shove off on an inflatable raft a few weeks earlier down the Current River. It was something the rafting company did for customers, most of them tourists, to commemorate their visit. Just cost an extra five bucks, but it was a professionally done 5-by-7 shot, big enough for mom to see her red-tinged golden hair, her smile and her flat belly underneath her swim top and the floatation device we were required to wear around our necks and chests.