“Captain Ramsey will be right with you.” The unit’s cute little secretary surveyed Maureen with open curiosity. “Help yourselves to coffee.”
“Thanks, Wilma.” I was already at the hot-plate in the corner. “What do you take, Maureen?”
“Black is fine.” She accepted a cup. “What was all that about regulations?”
“Just a holdover from the fifties.” If Wilma wanted to listen, she might as well get her money’s worth. She always got a kick out of bringing out the worst in me. “Now and then the military gets a bee up its butt about women soldiers being models of femininity. In the States some officers get tight-assed about it, but nobody enforces it in war zones.”
“Sergeant Hodge!” The one voice that could make me jump sounded right behind me. I spun around so fast that hot coffee sloshed onto my shirt.
“I think it’s time to make an exception in your case.” Captain Ramsey’s tone had taken on a don’t-you-challenge-me edge. “I expect to see you wearing lipstick within the next week. Consider that an order.”
Wilma snickered. The captain turned calmly to Maureen, who had just handed me a napkin. “Miss O’Malley, I hope Marjoe has been taking good care of you.”
“Oh, yes,” Maureen replied demurely, watching me dab at the wet splotch on my left breast. “Very helpful.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Your congressman has asked that we give you every possible aid and protection.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Maureen said sincerely. “Just while I get my bearings.”
“This next week could be difficult,” Captain Ramsey said. “The Tet holiday is coming around again. Our intelligence indicates stepped-up activity, though not on the scale of last year. While you’re here, under our protection, I’m going to have to insist that you go nowhere beyond the base perimeters without Sergeant Hodge. She’ll be your designated driver.” She looked at me with an entire lecture condensed into one stern glance.
“But Captain, I’ll be too busy…I thought I’d assign…”
“I’m delighted to hear that you’ve been thinking, Marjoe,” she said drily, “but no one else has sharpshooter rating on both .45s and M16s. It’s a matter of security.”
“Women don’t get sharpshooter ratings,” I protested. “We’re not even technically allowed to carry weapons.”
Wilma had kept quiet about as long as she could manage. “Just the same, it’s in your 201 file,” she said. “From Basic at Fort Benning, but you’ll never see a badge for it.”
“So that’s settled,” the captain said with finality. “Wilma will handle any further details. Show our guest around, Marjoe, take her over to the mess hall, and then finish whatever motor pool maintenance is scheduled. Wilma can be my driver for the next week.”
She held out her hand to Maureen. “It’s been nice meeting you, Miss O’Malley. Don’t hesitate to let me know of any problems. I suggest you have Marjoe drive you into Saigon tomorrow for some orientation.”
“A sharpshooter?” Maureen asked with interest when the captain was gone. “How did you pick up that skill?”
Wilma was miming putting on lipstick, pursing her lips and working them together with gusto. I grabbed at Maureen’s diversion. “Where I come from, in northern Wisconsin, the better you shoot, the better you eat. It’s a family tradition.”
“So what brought you all the way to Vietnam?”
I could sense that mental tape recorder flickering behind her green eyes. “Getting as far away from family tradition as possible,” I said. “So, Wilma, where do I dump Miss O’Malley’s gear?”
In her room, temporarily vacated by a lieutenant on leave, Maureen slumped onto the narrow cot. I retreated to the doorway. “Jet lag hitting hard?” I asked. Her short skirt was hitched so high that I could tell what color panties she wore. Pale pink. “How about you get some rest, and I’ll save a sandwich for you.”
She yawned and stretched. Both skirt and undies inched higher. For an instant I could also tell, no surprise, that she was a real brunette. Then she sat up.
“No, they say the best way to reset your internal clock is to eat meals on the local schedule. Just let me change into something that hasn’t been sweated in for twenty-four hours, okay?” In one sudden motion she pulled her blouse off over her head. Her pale pink bra was very nicely filled indeed. She bent to rummage in her suitcase, breasts nearly spilling over, and I edged farther away.
“Marjoe?” Her voice was muffled by the knit shirt she was pulling on. “How come I’m not bunking with you? For security?” Her eyes emerged, gleaming with mischief. Her skirt slid down to be replaced very, very slowly by a pair of sleek black slacks. Every wriggle was deliberate. She knew exactly what she was doing to me. What I hadn’t figured out was just why she was doing it.
“I sleep with the jeeps. Alone, except for Spike.” And he wouldn’t be any protection for you. I gave thanks as never before for my lean-to hooch built against the side of the motor pool’s Quonset hut. I’d be in desperate need of some alone time tonight—if I could wait until then. She was building enough tension to have me punching holes through plywood if I couldn’t get relief soon.
The WAC division didn’t have its own mess hall, so we ate at the 24th Evac hospital with the nurses and the ambulatory patients. I didn’t try to prepare Maureen for what she’d see, but after one quick clutch at my arm she handled herself like a real trooper. By the time I left she was circulating among nurses and amputees and men trailing IV trolleys like the best of the Red Cross Donut Dollies (a term I use with the greatest respect).
I looked back once and saw her kneeling beside a wheelchair, listening intently to a kid who could barely speak through his bandages. Her hand rested on his arm. I wondered cynically, or maybe jealously, whether it was compassion or journalistic skill that drove her.
She was still at the hospital at six, pale and strained behind her bright lipstick but managing to smile for the boys. I tracked her down in a ward of patients who couldn’t make it to the mess hall. After forcing her to come along for some dinner, I half-carried her back to the barracks. Jet lag and sudden immersion in the realities of war had pretty much knocked her out.
“Get some sleep before you forget how.” I eased her onto the cot and tried to get away. She held tight, her arms around my hips.
“Stay with me, Marjoe. Please.” Her face was pressed against my crotch. She had to know, by my aroma, by my pulse, how much I wanted to stay.
“I can’t.” I pulled away. My butt burned where her fingers had dug in. “Maureen, I have a job to do over here. I need to keep my hands clean.” Hands that shook with the urge to reach out to her, stroke her dark hair, pull her face hard into the ache between my legs…
“Always?” she asked.
“Except for motor grease and mud. And blood,” I added, before I could stop myself. So much for keeping it light.
“You’ve never touched a woman over here?”
“Who’s asking, the reporter?” I said nastily.
Those green eyes really were magnificent in anger. Relenting, I added, “I’m not absolutely sure. There was this head nurse—we both dived into the same bunker one night during a heavy bombing. She asked what I had in my canteen; when I told her it was water, she said, ‘Good, mine’s whiskey, we can mix and share.’ Which we did. I can’t remember clearly just how much mixing and sharing went on.”
“Right,” Maureen said sarcastically. “How much liquor does it take to get you in that state? And where can I buy it?”
“Forget it. The next time I touch a woman, I intend to remember it.”
I stepped forward. She inhaled sharply, lips parting, breasts rising. I yanked the army blanket up to cover her. “Get some rest,” I said. “You’ll need it.”
I shut the door behind me carefully. If those plywood walls hadn’t been too flimsy to filter out even a whisper, Miss Bright-Eyes-and-Heaving-Bosom would’ve had more than jet lag and in-country shock to exhaust her.
Maureen
seemed rested by morning, but I wasn’t. Much more of this, and Spike would go looking for a quieter hooch-mate. He sniffed my crotch with interest before I lit out for the showers extra early. I was reaching for my towel with dripping hands about the time Maureen stepped naked behind the canvas partition. I caught her checking out my ass. Fair enough. One brief glimpse had left her smooth curves printed indelibly on my memory.
The twenty miles to Saigon had their share of tension. I usually traveled with a Colt .45 tucked inconspicuously down beside the driver’s seat, regulations be damned, and this time the captain had wangled an M16 rifle for me. I didn’t ask how. No firepower would deflect a grenade or a mortar, but you did what you could and wore risk like an extra stripe on your uniform.
As we started out, Maureen said demurely, “My mother taught me never to distract the driver, so I’ll try not to bother you.”
“You’ll distract me less once we get you outfitted to blend into the background,” I told her. The tight black slacks and white tank top definitely stood out. The helmet I’d made her wear looked more jaunty than utilitarian. “Rumor says the North Vietnamese have offered twenty-five thousand dollars for an American woman, a ‘round-eye.’ I’ve never heard of anybody collecting, but there’s no point offering one up gift-wrapped.”
“Only twenty-five thousand?” She preened teasingly, hands running over chest and thighs.
“A journalist might bring in more.” I reached out to give one breast a sharp pinch. No point now in letting her get away with much. “Especially one more generously upholstered than the typical Vietnamese girl. At least the NV value us more than the U.S. Army does, with the puny ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy we get.”
I steered the subject into the universal griping-at-bureaucracy routine. Maureen was good company the rest of the way, asking intelligent questions, paying attention to the answers, and keeping teasing to a minimum.
In Saigon we drove down boulevards lined with elegant French Colonial architecture, crowded with trucks and old Renaults and the pedal-driven rickshaws called cyclos. I pointed out the Caravelle Hotel where most war correspondents hung out.
“Writing ‘frontline’ dispatches at the bar behind a line of brandy-and-sodas,” Maureen said dismissively. “Getting all their news from the Pentagon’s ‘five-o’-clock follies.’ No thanks.”
I looked at her with new respect. Maybe she knew this reporter business better than I’d realized.
At the notorious Thieves’ Market you could get anything that had ever passed through an American PX, and many items that never would. We got Maureen outfitted in tan and olive drab shirts and pants and the ubiquitous blue jeans.
“Wait a minute, we forgot something,” Maureen said urgently over lunch at the California Bar and Grille on the liveliest strip of Dong Khoi Street. She waved toward the honey-skinned working girls replenishing their makeup, preparing for a later influx of horny GIs.
“You want one all to yourself,” I asked, “or can we share?”
“Not my type,” she shot back. “I’ll stick with round-eyes. But shouldn’t we pick out some lipstick for you? Captain’s orders?” She made kissy-lips at her compact mirror while freshening her glossy lips. “How about my Burgundy Passion?”
I’d been working on forgetting that little incident. But the captain wouldn’t. “Lila offered to share. Just once will get me off the hook.”
“Cocky, aren’t you,” she said, with a look that made me consider some blacker-than-black-market shopping, but we needed to beat the rush hour, Saigon’s most dangerous time.
Not that danger couldn’t strike at any minute. Fifteen miles out we hit a military roadblock. Smoke billowed from around a curve. I detoured onto a longer, narrower riverside track, making sure my guns were accessible.
Maureen kept quiet for a while, but finally blurted out, “Did you ever shoot anyone?”
“Maybe,” I said shortly. There was firing in the distance, either from the road ahead or the roughly parallel highway we’d left. The driver of a supply truck going the other way motioned us wildly to go back. I slowed, started to turn—and heard the unmistakable whoosh of a rocket launcher somewhere behind us. An explosion rocked the area where the supply truck, now out of sight, might have been.
“Hang on!” I veered off on a rutted cart track toward the river a hundred yards away. A fringe of trees would hide the jeep, I hoped, but just in case I made Maureen scramble out and lie with me farther along, behind a log where I could brace my M16. We waited, watching the road.
Maureen pressed against my side, her body shaking just slightly more than mine. “I don’t know whether I’ve ever killed anybody,” I said conversationally. “In Nha Trang they overwhelmed our perimeter, looking for medical supplies. It was dark, chaotic, but I think…well, I don’t usually miss. And we beat them off.”
I was wound tighter than Jimi Hendrix’s guitar strings. Maureen stroked gently up my spine to the nape of my neck and massaged away some of the tightness, but tension of a different kind radiated from her touch, ripples of heat licking all the way down my body. Even my toes twitched inside my heavy boots. I couldn’t keep my hips from shifting. Maureen slid her hand down my back to my butt.
“We do what we have to,” she said, her breath warm on my ear. Her dark hair tickled my cheek. “You’d be out there leading a platoon if they’d let you.” The pressure of her hand increased, her fingers digging in just slightly.
“Maybe,” I said, steeling myself not to react visibly, however damp my khaki briefs were getting.
Maureen’s fingers dug deeper, then moved between my buttcheeks. “Am I distracting the driver too much?”
“Hell no! Good practice for capture and torture.” Danger and lust pumped adrenaline through me, triggering a fight-orfuck response. If I didn’t fire a gun soon, something else was sure going to go off.
Maureen heard the approaching truck a fraction of a second before I did. I lifted my head, tightened my grip on the rifle—and she pulled me back down, cramming her helmet over my hair. “Don’t wave your fucking red flag at them!”
“Thanks.” I peered carefully over the log at an ancient flatbed farm truck. The grim-faced young Vietnamese riding on the back didn’t look like they’d been laboring in the fields.
We didn’t breathe. I could feel Maureen’s heart pounding in time with my own. The truck passed out of sight, and still we lay immobile.
“Will there be more?” Maureen asked at last.
“Maybe. We’d better wait…”
My words were cut off by her mouth covering mine. I’d barely set the guns aside before we were in a rolling clinch, scrabbling to get through each other’s clothes.
Maureen won. Her hands were inside my pants, one on my bare butt and the other working hard between my thighs, before I got through her shirt and clinging tank top. With my fingers finally inside her lacy bra, I hung on, pinching her swelling flesh. The feel of her nipples hardening to rigid engorgement intensified my clit’s response to her demanding thrusts.
She worked me hard and fast, our mouths pressed furiously together with only a few moans and grunts escaping, until I had to get enough air for the noises she forced from me. With one wild glance to be sure the road was empty, I let go and shouted up into the quaking leaves of the trees.
By the time I could breathe, Maureen was naked with her shirt spread under her arching hips. I dove right into her luscious tenderness, feeding her need with tongue and hands until her yells made the leaves quake, too. And then, after a short rest in each other’s arms, we started all over again. Frequent checks of the road for traffic only added a spice of danger to our frenzy.
As sunset approached I had to consider what to do next. We’d finally got dressed, and cleaned up at the edge of the muddy river, when we heard cars approaching slowly: two jeeps, one driven by an MP, one by Wilma.
“Company,” I murmured. Maureen barely managed to brace before a furry, joyful Spike rocketed into us.
&n
bsp; “Easy, boy!” I grabbed his collar and went to meet the captain.
“You’re both all right?” she asked sharply, then saw Maureen emerging from the trees with hair quickly combed and burgundy lipstick freshened. “It’s a good thing we brought the pooch. He alerted us that you were in there.”
“We took cover for a while, Captain.” I looked her straight in the eye. “There were indications of enemy activity ahead and behind.” Whatever she might suspect, I could defend my reasons for leaving the road.
“You were right,” she said. “But the area is secured for now, so let’s get moving.”
By the time I retrieved my jeep the MPs had gone and Wilma was chatting up Maureen. Her prattling ceased, and she began whistling a familiar tune. Everyone looked at my rumpled shirt. I’d scrubbed my face in river water, but…
“Marjoe has lipstick on her collar,” Wilma said gleefully, in case anybody hadn’t recognized the Connie Francis song. “That doesn’t count, though. She’s not off the hook yet, is she?”
Maureen stepped right up to the plate. “Of course it doesn’t count. But this should.” She put her arms around my neck and kissed me hard enough to weaken my knees. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she said, pulling away, “for taking such good care of me.”
The captain’s face was impassive, except for a twitch at the corner of her mouth. She wiped a neatly folded handkerchief across my lips, gazed at the results thoughtfully, and said, simply, “That will do.”
A week later Maureen wangled a ride with a chopper pilot heading toward Pleiku in the highlands. Two months later she sent a clipping of her first published article. Others followed. I kept them deep in my duffle bag, along with several intimate items imbued with her scent, mementos of a few more rushed, intense encounters scraped out of the quagmire of war. I have them still, wrapped in a rumpled, burgundy-stained shirt that will never be washed again.
Best Lesbian Erotica 2009 Page 9
