by Radclyffe
“Let’s loosen this a little.” Madame slid a finger beneath the bodice’s neckline and slowly worked her way along.
Eloise heard a sound and knew she had whimpered. Mortified, she averted her eyes.
Madame’s hand stilled at her nape. “Would you like me to kiss you?” she asked, her breath damp on Eloise’s cheek.
Eloise could only nod, aware of a hot, flooding sensation between her legs and a clamoring need to act on all she was feeling. She moved closer, bringing their bodies into contact. Madame’s lips brushed hers with unbearable delicacy. It was not enough.
Eloise kissed her in return but more firmly, communicating what she wanted. Madame’s fingers moved from her nape through her hair, cradling her head. Their next kiss was completely different. Madame parted Eloise’s mouth with her own and deliciously explored her, sending goose bumps marauding over the hidden parts of her body. Her breasts, her thighs, her spine. Madame’s tongue teased its way deeper, and her hands finally delivered the caresses Eloise craved. A shock of desire made her freeze for a split second when Madame found a nipple and slowly teased it through the fabric of her dress.
Somewhere in the recesses of her mind it occurred to Eloise that she should not be doing this with a woman, but she cut the thought loose. Almost immediately another took its place, and this time she broke contact, just barely.
“What about your husband?” she whispered against Madame’s lips.
“Henry and I have in common…separate interests.” The hands did not pause in their work for a moment, one of them sliding beneath Eloise’s bodice as the other fully unbuttoned her. “Our marriage is a convenience, for both of us.”
Eloise’s teeth chattered as her dress was drawn from her shoulders, and Madame’s lips abandoned hers to heat the skin she was baring. Helplessly sagging against the back of her seat, Eloise surrendered to sensations she had never known. Madame’s touch was the complete opposite of the nervous grabbing and aggressive intrusion she had experienced while dating in college. With every stroke and bite and kiss her flesh blossomed, and the moist ache at her core became a throb, as though a tiny separate heart beat there.
“Madame,” she gasped, as her brassiere was discarded. She felt dizzy and overwhelmed.
Dark, glittering eyes lifted to hers. “You want me to stop?”
“No.” She caught a handful of Madame’s shirt.
“My name is Sylvia,” Madame said, pulling Eloise to her feet. “Let’s make the most of what Spartan comfort British Rail affords us.”
She tugged at a lever and the narrow couchette folded out to a fully made-up bed. Eloise thought her face was probably scarlet at the sight of the pale sheets and the feel of her dress sliding past her hips as Madame helped her out of it. She felt exposed and self-conscious, excruciatingly aware of her imperfections. The freckles on her chest, her small breasts and thin hips. Madame must have felt her stiffen, for she reached past her to the lamp cord, dimming the lights. Then she took Eloise in her arms.
Tenderly kissing her cheek, she said, “You are enchanting and I want to make love to you.”
“I don’t know…much,” Eloise mumbled. “I mean, I haven’t—”
“There’s nothing to worry about. You’re perfect.” Madame drew back the bedding and lowered her onto the cool sheets. “We can stop anytime. Do you understand?”
Eloise stared up at her and had the strangest feeling that she had been waiting all her life for this moment, for this woman. “I don’t want to stop.”
She watched with dry-mouthed longing as Madame dropped her suspenders and unbuttoned her shirt. When she unfastened her pants, Eloise shamelessly reached out for her, begging, “Hurry. Please.”
Laughing, Madame said, “An impatient virgin. How very tempting.”
Divested of her clothing a few seconds later, she seemed to Eloise to be the perfect woman, an Aphrodite—high breasts, gentle curves, strong but feminine. Leaning down, her breasts grazing Eloise’s, she tucked one finger into the elastic of her bloomers and said, “You won’t be needing these.”
Once naked, Eloise shyly moved over to make room in the narrow bed, and Madame joined her. For a moment, they lay on their sides, facing one another; then Madame slipped an arm beneath Eloise’s shoulders and drew her so close they seemed to glide against each other with every breath.
“Promise me something,” she said.
“Anything.” Eloise planted a small kiss in the hollow at the base of her throat.
“Afterwards. Later. Always remember this exactly as it truly was.”
“What do you mean?”
Madame caressed her cheek. “Don’t allow anyone to make it ugly.”
“That would be impossible,” Eloise said, wallowing in her fragrance and the sensual dialogue of their bodies. She felt Madame sigh.
“You know very little of the world.”
Angling her head so she could look into her eyes, Eloise said, “The only world I want to be in is this one. Right here, with you.”
“Then kiss me,” came the reply.
And in the silken haven of Madame’s flesh, Eloise discovered herself.
The next morning, Madame handed her a folded slip of paper and a heavy key. “If you wish to see me again, come to this address a year from now. Let yourself in through the gate in the wall, and wait for me in the garden.”
“A year? Why can we not see each other sooner?”
“Because the world is about to change, and we cannot make plans. The best we can do is try to keep a promise.”
“I’ll come on my birthday,” Eloise said, imagining how special and perfect that would make the day. She looked down at the address: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Across the top of the card, a name was printed in plain black letters: Lady Sylvia Devon.
“It’s a villa I have in the mountains,” Madame explained as Eloise confounded herself, trying to accept that she had not only been relieved of her virginity on a floating train by a woman wearing men’s clothing, but that the woman was also a British aristocrat. Such thrilling misadventure was the type of thing that could only happen abroad.
“Of course you are welcome to visit any other time,” Madame continued, “but I may not be there. I shall see to it that the servants know who you are.” A film of tears spiked her lashes and made her eyes even more eloquent in their beauty.
“What’s wrong?” Eloise asked.
“I believe I’m afraid. Most unlike me.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Honestly?” Madame seemed momentarily bemused. “That I’ll never see you again.”
“Oh, but you will. I promise. I’ll be there on the first of September next year.” Eloise hoped her sincerity showed in her eyes, but she sensed a quiet, inexplicable sorrow in her companion.
They held one another, and Madame placed her lips to Eloise’s forehead. “Whatever happens, be careful, my beautiful girl. Go back to America soon.”
The last time Eloise saw her, she was striding through a sea of people, across the cavernous, arched hall of the Gard du Nord, followed by a stringy little man dragging her luggage on a cart. She looked back once, blew Eloise a kiss, and walked out of her life.
In the five years that followed, the world indeed changed, and so did Eloise. When the Nazis marched into Paris, Aunt Constance rushed back to Chicago. Eloise was supposed to go with her, but instead she fled to the Auvergne to find Madame’s villa. She wrote to her parents telling them not to worry; Germany was not at war with America. Predictably, they sent money. Lots of it. Each time urging her to come home.
In the end, she left her departure too late. Pearl Harbor was bombed, and it was no longer safe to live in the little cottage she’d been renting, so she went to Sylvia’s villa on the outskirts of the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and Monsieur and Madame Raynaud, the couple who maintained the villa, took her in.
There, in the relative tranquility of the mountains, Eloise put to good use the money she’d saved from her parents, doing what she’d been doing si
nce 1940—forging documents for the Résistance, delivering packages, and escorting rescued British and American pilots from one safe house in the area to another, she and her Allied charge riding their bicycles past groups of German soldiers like any rural couple.
Her Résistance connections gave her the identity papers of a dead girl from Marseille who was killed on a mission, and even now, she carried Bernadette Touchet’s documents out of habit.
Paris had been liberated, Allied tanks were rolling through the Auvergne, and it seemed everyone had a special bottle of wine saved for the celebrations. Eloise wanted to get drunk and have food with salt on it, but instead she saw some men drag a collaborator from his home and hang him, and she could not stop crying. She’d pedaled back to the villa as fast as she could that day and had remained there ever since, too numb to think.
Surely Madame had to come now. The war was over, at least in France. If she didn’t come, it could only mean one thing, and Eloise would go home. She couldn’t stay here forever. The Raynauds had contacted Lord Devon, and he said Her Ladyship had left for a trip to Switzerland one day and had not returned. That was in 1943. He thought she may be dead.
Eloise refused to believe it. She faced her wristwatch to the moon. The hands pointed north. Midnight. With a ragged little sigh, she opened her knapsack and took from it the bottle of Pernod Fils she’d been saving since she first came to the garden in 1940. On each of her birthdays she’d brought it with her and left with it unopened. But not tonight.
She walked through the garden to the mausoleum beyond the apple trees. On a marble slab that confined several of Madame’s ancestors, she set down the bottle, two glasses, precious sugar, and a pitcher. Into this she poured some water from the hip flask she always carried.
Draped in the dark sheet of night, her table seemed to belong in a dream and she in a ghost world. She wondered where the girl on the Night Ferry had gone. Sometimes she mourned her, for it seemed Eloise had died, and in her stead, evicting every trace of her softness and naiveté, was Bernadette, who did her thinking in French and did not trust a soul, her own included. She had witnessed too much.
Where could she take refuge within the occupied territory of her mind? Where was peace to be found but in memory? Eloise closed her eyes and conjured the feeling of a narrow bed, a low ceiling, the rock and sway of the boat train, the magic of Madame’s hands on her bare skin, the taste of her mouth, the heat of their passion.
With a certainty she’d too long scorned in herself, she whispered, “I met the love of my life, and there will never be another.”
Eloise could not explain why she was convinced of that. She supposed some of life’s most important events masqueraded as chance and were only later proven to have been destiny. Meeting Madame had changed everything, and the truth was, even if she could go back in time and make different choices, she wouldn’t. She regretted nothing. Only the loss of what might have been.
Tears rolled down her face as she placed a single sugar cube on the silver spoon over one glass and two cubes on the other. She lifted the pitcher high and slowly released a shimmering trickle of water into each glass.
“Goodbye, Madame,” she said, and felt the air stir behind her as if her words had summoned a ghost.
Shivering at the thought, she looked over her shoulder to the wall of granite and the statues of angels that decorated the mausoleum. Deep in shadow, still and silent, the angels stared back at her, and for a split second she thought one of them moved.
Laughing at herself for this fancy, she wiped away her tears and loudly declared, “I hope no German soldier is stupid enough to think he can hide from the Americans, here in this garden.” On the off chance, she added, “Deutsche? Lassen Sie Ihre Waffe fallen! Kommen Sie hier.”
She didn’t even bother to reach for the gun she always carried with her. Most of the German soldiers still hiding in the country-side were not trying to return to their units. They simply wanted to surrender to the Americans so they could sit out the rest of the war in a prison camp instead of fighting the Russians.
As she’d expected, there was no answer to her command about dropping weapons. Instead, a soft click made her breath freeze in her chest. A tiny flame pierced the darkness and spread a halo just far enough to illuminate part of a face. A cigar tip glowed as its owner took a puff.
“You had me terrified there for a minute,” said a husky voice.
Eloise lurched to her feet. She tried to walk, but her legs were shaking so violently she had to clutch the marble coffin so she would not fall.
“You’re here?” she gasped, and Madame stepped out from behind a statue, set her cigar down on the pedestal, and closed the distance between them.
It had to be a dream. But the hands that caught hold of hers were warm, and the body she felt was flesh and blood. The lips that trailed across her face were those she had longed for night and day. Frantically, she slid her fingers into Sylvia’s hair and kissed her so hard and so long, they both had to stop and catch their breath. Their faces were wet. Eloise had no idea whose tears were smeared over her cheeks.
“I thought you were dead,” she croaked.
“I know.” Sylvia cradled her close. “I’m so sorry, my darling girl.”
“I can’t believe it.” Eloise ran a hand over Sylvia’s face, allowing her fingertips to verify the planes and hollows imprinted so long ago. The bones were more prominent now, and a thin track of flesh was knotted from her right temple to her jaw. Horrified, she said, “You’ve been hurt.”
“Haven’t we all?”
“Where have you been?”
“We’ll have plenty of time to talk about that.” Sylvia drew back a little and put her arm around Eloise’s waist. “I have something to show you.”
She walked Eloise to the granite wall, collected her cigar, and moved a small urn at the angel’s feet. The door to the mausoleum opened, and they entered the lamp-lit interior. In the center of the room a stairway led down. Eloise stared in astonishment as they followed it through a crypt to a concealed storage bunker packed with supplies, and then along a narrow corridor lined with stretcher beds.
“What is this?” she asked.
“A safe place.”
Stunned, Eloise sank down on one of the beds. “You were here all along?”
“No.” Sylvia sat down next to her. “I was away almost all the time, collecting the people I brought here.”
Hurt consumed Eloise. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It would have been dangerous for you to know.”
“I don’t understand. If you were here, why didn’t you meet me? I came every year.”
“I know. I wanted to. So very badly.” Sylvia gazed at Eloise as if devouring her. “At first, I thought if I didn’t come, you would go back to America and you’d be safe. I wanted that. Later, I just had to protect you as best I could.”
“But I knew what was happening in the village,” Eloise protested. “Every time the Vichy patrols came through, I knew all the Jews hid in the forests.”
“And many hid down here,” Sylvia said, “including the ones we took across the border to Switzerland. I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t. The Vichy did not suspect me or the Raynauds, but if you’d been caught on any of your Résistance missions—”
“You think I’d have told the Gestapo under torture?”
“Anyone would.”
Eloise didn’t know whether to be angry or touched, but she understood Sylvia’s choices. She lowered her gaze to the hands holding hers and realized several of Sylvia’s fingers were missing. Everywhere she looked, there were scars. Along the forearms exposed by her rolled-up khaki sleeves. At the base of her throat. Even her beautiful mouth was slightly twisted in one corner.
“I’m not as I was,” Sylvia conceded dryly. A pained uncertainty entered her expression. “If you find me unattractive—”
“Stop.” Eloise placed two fingers across her lips. “You could not be more perfect. I fell in love with
you the moment I first saw you, and nothing has changed.”
“Then I am Fortune’s pet.” A smile of pure joy lifted Sylvia’s face, erasing the pain so evident. “I think I fell in love with you the moment you took that first sip of absinthe. I felt like I had corrupted the most innocent creature alive. From that moment on, all I could think about was completing your education.”
Before Eloise could reply, she was in Sylvia’s arms, where she needed to be. And Sylvia’s kiss told her everything she needed to know. The world had gone mad, and yet there was hope.
Love could survive anything. For them it had.
IN YOUR POCKET
Evan Mora
Every day I love her.
Every day I wake up beside her and know I am where I am meant to be.
She’s always asleep when I wake up (definitely not a morning person), so I have a chance to see her in this quiet, vulnerable space—to see the dark fan of her lashes against her cheeks, to hear the gentle even fall of her breathing, to see her snuggled into the warmth and softness of the countless blankets she’s piled atop us in the night. When she heads out the door in the morning, she’s a force to be reckoned with—on top of her game and hard as nails, making the world a better place. But in these moments, she is mine alone, and I am happy.
Every day I love her, but today I fell in love with her again.
With a burst of early spring cleaning energy (hey—it’s March, I can dream) I tackled the closets, intent on purging all the out-of-style, wrong size, tattered, and old relics I could find. She’s a notorious hoarder, and her end of the closet is filled with an abundance of “nostalgia” that I was determined would grace the Goodwill donation box by end of day. I’d nearly finished—had worked my way to the very end—when I came across her old leather jacket. I mean, really old. It had looked beaten and weathered the day I met her, way back when...and now? Now it couldn’t even charitably be called vintage. But I had to admit that even I had a soft spot for it, remembering how sexy she’d looked in it standing on my doorstep the night of our first date.
