The Other Side of Paradise

Crowds were gathering, which was understandable because, in Manhattan, you don't often see a perfectly preserved 1925 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost sitting there, engine running. I gave the faceless chauffer the directions, and we purred off, headed toward the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey.

Since I considered my permanent parting from the 21st Century a historic event - at least as far as I was concerned. I wanted to off-myself at a place with historic significance. It would also be nice if it was lovely and secluded. So, nobody would interrupt.

I had a place in mind. It was beneath the Hudson Palisades where the fatal duel was fought between Alexander Hamilton - you know... the guy on the ten dollar bill... and the guy who was Vice President of the United States at the time - Arron Burr... you think present politics are acrimonious.

I stopped at True Value to pick up a garden hose and some duct tape. Now, all I had to do was wait. It was sunset as we pulled into an isolated parking spot in a condo development beneath the Weehawken dueling grounds. There was nobody to notice an ancient Rolls with its engine running. I thought of all the happy times I'd had with Julia as I watched ship traffic pass on the Hudson.

***** I startled awake. The City was still lit up in front of me, but it was a different kind of light. The skyline of Midtown was totally different, and the Intrepid, which had been moored across the river just a moment ago, wasn't there. In fact, it would even be launched for another sixteen years.

I had no idea what date it was, but the time on my Rolex said it was six in the morning. I bought a Times from a kid who was selling early editions in front of the train station. I held it in my trembling hands as I scanned the masthead for the date - July 31st, 1927!! I'd returned on the same night I'd left. It was obvious that time compression happened when I was in the other century. I mean, only a day and a half had passed in the 21st for all the time that I was back in the 20th.

I eased into our house through the rear entrance. If I handled this right, Julia would never notice that I'd disappeared - back to the future - and she would never experience the heartbreak that followed. I slipped into bed next to her - naked.

I normally slept in the pajamas like the ones I had on when I had my little brush with the NYC criminal justice system. But I had lost those at the Plaza and my 21st Century clothes were just too strange. Julia stirred, opened her eyes, and gave me a loving glance. It was all worth it. Every last agonizing, scary moment of it.

I said flirtatiously, "Good morning, sleepy-head." Julia covered her mouth and said hastily, "Give me a second to brush my teeth." Then she bolted into the bathroom. She returned a few minutes later wearing nothing but a loving smile.

Her body was a feminine paradox: soft but hard, fruitful but athletic, trim but voluptuous. She ran toward me in the hippy way female architecture dictates and then pounced on me like a cat. I said, "Oooff," and then rolled her directly on her back.

Julia had no idea of the emotional firestorm I was dealing with I mean... I'd nearly lost her. She didn't know that. But I did. And I needed to reaffirm our connection - reestablish the psychic bond that I had with her in the most physical way possible.

It wasn't lust - although there was a lot of that as well. It was the need to merge us back into the single organism that the joining of two people creates... it would be the essential means of cementing our future together in this world.

Julia has particularly beautiful nipples and they are extremely sensitive. I tweaked one, and that absolutely freaked her out. Her head rocked back, her mouth opened in a silent scream and suddenly, I was lying on top of a wild woman.

Julia always knows what she wants, and she knows exactly where to put it. She reached between us and jammed me into her boiling, highly lubricated inner self. I slid right to the top. She gasped loudly and her mouth dropped open... eyes rolling slowly up into her head.

She held me there at the very top, not moving, making a constant high-pitched whine of mindless physical sensation. Then she began to undulate. I started out with long slow strokes until Julia increased the pace, all-the-while emitting short shrieks of mounting arousal.

The feeling of heat, the squishing sounds and the hormonal smells were getting both of us to the end of the line faster than I wanted. So, I slowed a bit. She opened her eyes questioningly. Then the first orgasm hit her like the proverbial railroad train. Julia's body bent into a bow, every muscle rock hard with strain, and she began a series of rhythmic moans of increasing intensity, finishing with a frantic scream. I could feel the contractions as she writhed out of control.

I moved to turn her over when she stopped writhing. She looked puzzled for a second. Julia normally got the job done in the missionary position. I wasn't in a mood to discuss it so I grabbed her tight muscular flanks and impatiently flipped her face down on the pillow, her perfect round ass elevated high in the air. She made a loud, surprised grunt, threw her head back so vigorously that her thick sheaf of auburn hair first flipped outward in a dense cloud, and then back over her shoulders. Her hips elevated even higher.

Julia widened her stance and grabbed the rails of our brass bed for leverage. Then she began to actively push back, while rotating her hips to feel the new sensation. Her two big buns were perfect, round and so firm that they didn't ripple when I slammed into her. As the tempo increased her moans got even more agitated.

Finally, I reached around to give her a finger to suck on. She was frantically sucking on the finger when the next orgasm hit, and I almost lost the tip. Her legs crumpled as her incredible apple shaped ass began to writhe in an ecstasy of erotic sensation. I'd reached the limit myself and I collapsed on top of her, cumming like the Midnight Express. Then there was a short period where neither of us were rational.

As soon as I calmed down, I realized that I was crushing her. So, I rolled to one side. Julia was still on her front. She lay on her stomach quivering and moaning, still clutching the brass bars of the headboard. I was lying on my back on our trashed sheets, gasping and sweating.

There was a moment's hesitation. Then she popped her head up and said, "What motivated that? And can I look forward to it every morning?"

I didn't want to recount the unbelievable story about a man from another century, who fell in love with a beautiful princess - and who then had to die in order to ensure that they would live a long and happy life together. That would be stretching Julia's imagination a bit too far. Instead I said, "I'm a word person. So, I ought to be able to communicate my feelings to you. But unfortunately, I can't express how much I love you in any other way. I hope you'll be able to live with that."

Julia's beautiful face got the most intense look of love as she said, "Always and forever." And I knew to the tips of my toes that that was the way it was going to be. I mean, we both had to die individually in order to be able to die in each other's arms. Nothing would separate us now.

Epilog It was pure dumb luck that had gotten Billy Wentworth into the stock market. He was running a fishing boat out of Greenport on the north fork of Long Island when he discovered two dozen cases of premium scotch bobbing around in Gardiner's Bay. The Sag Harbor area was a hotbed of rum running from offshore ships. So, that was no surprise - the former owners must have had a spat with somebody bigger than them.

Unlike most of his peers, who would have just guzzled the lot, Billy took the small fortune he got from selling his find and rolled it into the stock market - where he got filthy rich buying on the margin. By 1927, Billy had acquired generational wealth, a pile of money so high it would be passed into the future forever, and the Wentworth name would be right up there with Morgan, Chase, and Mellon.

Then on one fateful day... the stock tickers at Wenworth's firm lit up with extreme selling activity on his entire portfolio. Share prices plummeted in conjunction with huge blocks being dumped and the sell-off continued throughout the day. The falling stock value finally triggered the margin calls and since Billy was highly leveraged across the board he couldn't cover. The forced sale of his holdings in order to bring him back to minimum value liquidated most of his portfolio.

That was when the shadowy entity that had caused the devaluation in the first place stepped in and bought Billy's holdings at fire sale prices. Hence, generations of Wentworths would never see the wealth Billy had once accumulated. They would probably be fishermen, like he was. Oh well... easy come easy go and Billy had never trusted his good fortune, anyhow.

The sinister fellow who had devoted the capital to driving down the price of Billy's holdings got a lot richer in the liquidation. But the thing that pleased him the most was knowing that he'd engineered the downfall of the Wentworth family. Sometimes you have to wait a while to get what's coming to you.

Author's Note:

A lot of this is historical fact, not fiction, and I used a number of real people. Some are my personal heroes, like Dorothy Parker, and some I am speculating about given their writing and what I know about their life. Julia Richmond In particular was a semi-successful author of what were known as "women's stories" in the '30s. Frank Sullivan was a fringe member of the Round Table and an equally successful minor author during that era. I have no idea whether he or Julia knew each other or even what they looked like. But this is just a story and it was fun poking around in that era. Maybe I'll come back to it someday.

I also want to acknowledge my buddy, Bruce1971. He gave me a lot of good advice about the setting since he's a hip Manhattan dude who works in the publishing trade right down where this thing is set.

Finally... I have started signing all of my work because a scumbag who will remain nameless was happily selling twelve of my stories on Amazon at $3.60 a pop, and it's easier to have a story taken down if your name is on it. Hence, Daniel Tiberius Iverson, Ann Arbor, Michigan