by Sacchi Green
(06/12/02)

The fog began to lift as our carrier rounded the Marin Headlands. Slowly, seductively, the Golden Gate emerged; San Francisco Bay spread her golden thighs to let us in.

Point Bonita thrust out, a rocky clit, but my awareness was fixed on a spot around the curve of Point Diablo. "I'll wait there all afternoon," Romy had written, "and the next day too. Please come, Sage."

Romy had never said please to me. Well, maybe in erotic extremity; some of our games were pretty inventive for neophytes. But I was the one who begged, fourteen years ago; and she had gone ahead and married my cousin Damian anyway, obsessed by some damned Earth-Mother-fertility-goddess fantasy. I hadn't seen her since.

I knew she was running a craft gallery in Oregon now. I send birthday presents to her daughter Phoebe every year and get nice notes back; she's about as close to posterity as I'm likely to have, and I don't regret her existence at all, but dammit, there were other ways! I'd heard through the family grapevine when Romy and Damian split up, and hoped for a while that she might get in touch. Nothing for years. I'd be damned if I'd beg her for anything ever again.

Sometimes, when I woke from a dream too soon, with the taste of her in my mouth and the feel of her small tight breasts against mine, I knew I was damned anyway.

But now she begged me to come.

Everyone else lucky enough to be off duty was on the city side of the aircraft carrier. I looked toward Marin, searching with binoculars for the glint of other lenses searching for me. We used to imagine we were being watched through telescopes from the Presidio or passing ships; maybe we were. We put on a damned fine show.

But it was too early for her to be there. And when we did meet, we'd probably be strangers. Did her memory have the psychedelic intensity of mine? Not just of our trysts in that secret refuge on the headlands, though my body gave my mind a hard time getting past those. We had been just eighteen, in waitressing hell in Sausalito, our first adventure away from a Mendocino commune. But we'd been together since birth, Sage and Rosemary, toddlers waving at the TV cameras in the Haight-Ashbury, poster babies for the Summer of Love. What had driven us so far apart?

Our ship passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and I forced myself not to look back. San Francisco emerged from the lifting fog and caught the sun like a hoard of gold and crystals spilling down the hillsides and heaping on the flats. I scarcely noticed.

I was shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cool morning breeze. A Chief Petty Officer can't shake; a CPO can't press against the rail and let memory and anticipation get her wet between the thighs. I got a grip by mentally reviewing the Bay's underwater topography all the way to the Alameda Naval Air Station, not just the familiar patterns from the sonar screen but the rocks and silt and sand that were as real to me as any landscape. The station was being closed down at the end of the month as the Peacetime Navy retrenched, and this was the last time a carrier would pass this way; I tried to focus all my nostalgia on that, without success. The closing was probably what had impelled Romy to make contact at last.

Once on shore, it was hell pushing through the throng of families. I couldn't just bull through with my head down and my mind closed as I usually did; Romy might have changed her mind, might have come to meet me.

She hadn't. It was past noon before I picked up a rental car and was zipping across the Bay Bridge. I stopped in the Marina district to pick up wine and fruit, as though planning a seduction, and wondered how I would bear it if she weren't planning the same thing.

It was past one-thirty when I reached the Marin side of the Golden Gate. Joggers and tourists were thick along the walkways; any bird watcher training binoculars on the right spot would be able to see Romy -- if she were there. In a while they might be able to see a whole lot more. Being visible and out of reach had always turned us on, not that we needed anything but each other for that.

I parked at the trailhead to Kirby Cove. One of the three cars there had to be hers; I hoped the owners of the others were well out of the way, maybe getting off on the old WWII gun emplacements uphill.

Half a mile down the trail I realized that scuba diving and jogging on deck don't prepare the legs for steep slopes. The weather was unusually warm, and I was sweating from both exertion and anticipation. I wondered whether I could still manage the tortuous off-trail route when I came to it, or even find it after all these years.

I found it all too easily. Others had climbed here over the last few years; I couldn't tell whether anyone had passed today.

My heart -- along with various other pulse points -- was pounding when I approached the thicket of stunted black oak. A single ancient bay tree, no more than shrub size in this harsh location, leaned out into space. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder whether it would still be there. I gripped a familiar branch, felt for the old footholds where the hill dropped away, and swung myself over to the hidden ledge.

She was there, sitting at the base of a sheltering outcrop. Sitting on a blanket. The blanket was a good sign; so was the pack with the wine bottle sticking out. So was the fact that she was naked.

She must have heard me coming, although she just kept gazing out over the water. The wind was moderate, and the breakers beating against the rocks far below were about as leisurely as they get.

"Well, I'm here," I said, knowing it sounded too abrupt. I was having trouble saying anything at all. She was so close, and so distant, and so damned beautiful. Her tawny, sunlit hair hung in a long braid down her back, just as I remembered; mine was dark and cropped short, tinged now with silver at the temples.

She turned toward me at last with an odd challenge in her green eyes. "It's nice that you could make it," she said formally, and I knew she remembered the bitterness of our parting. So much distance between us, so many aching dreams....

"Of course I made it." My throat was tight, and the rest of my body tightened as I looked at hers. She was, and wasn't, the vision and curse of my dreams. Motherhood and life had filled out her body, rounded her breasts and hips; I was shaken by how much I liked her that way.

She looked me over slowly, thoroughly. I wondered how much I had changed. "I was envisioning you in uniform," she said at last.

"For that you should have met me at the ship."

"I almost did, but.... 'Don't ask, don't tell.' Isn't that the deal these days?"

"Did you think I'd jump you at the dock?" I tried for cool amusement, but she had zinged a nerve, the one that ached when I stood alone in a melee of clinching couples. I might have jumped her at that, Navy be damned.

"No, I was afraid I'd jump you and screw up your military career."

My career? She made it sound as though I'd left her, instead of the other way around. But she still wanted me, or wanted me again, and right at this moment nothing else mattered.

"Hey, if a uniform is what it takes to turn you on, I could go back for one."

"Maybe later." Her face lit with that tantalizing grin I knew too well. "Those cut-offs will do just fine for now. Damn, Sage, I've been dreaming of those long legs for so many years I thought I must be imagining them, but they're even finer than I remembered."

Those long legs moved me closer without any conscious command. She tilted back her head to look up at me, stroked me from ankle to thigh, and an exquisite pang ran from her touch up into my cunt. My knees started to buckle.

"Wait, Sage, don't sit down, let me...like this...." She rose to her knees, gripped my hips and pushed me against a high boulder. She pressed her mouth into my inner thigh and worked up and down and up again, nuzzling my crotch too briefly and moving on with lips, tongue, a hint of teeth, her full breasts brushing my knees. My breath came so hard and fast that it sounded like a rising storm in my ears, but the sky was clear and far above I could see a hawk lazing a thermal higher and higher, gaining altitude for a final launch out over the straits.

Romy's teasing was pushing me higher and higher, too. I slid my fingers into her thick hair and pulled her head to where I needed it most. She dug her teeth into the thick denim seam at my crotch and tugged and bit, driving me wild, until I was so wet I knew she could taste me through the cloth.

"Come on, girl, come on, you can do better than that, come on...." I let go to fumble with my zipper.

She leaned back, her eyes glinting with laughter. "I always used to be afraid you'd turn into a mermaid someday. You know, back when we were kids in Mendocino and you'd dive into water too cold for any mere human." She slid her hands up my thighs into my tight shorts; she stroked me with her thumbs, sliding them back and forth along my crotch, not quite reaching my aching clit, not quite probing my cunt. The zipper resisted my frantic efforts.

"I was right that the ocean would take you," she went on, "but at least you're still human. Getting between a mermaid's legs could be a challenge."

"I'll bet you'd manage," I muttered. She worked a little farther in; I gave up on the zipper and used my hands to brace against the rock, thrusting my pelvis into the maddening pressure of her fingers.

Then her grip shifted, moving around to the rear, and she cupped my buttocks and murmured against my mound, "Your ass is still mine!"

"So do something with it!" I yanked again at the zipper, and the stitching tore loose and freed me. My shorts and her hands slid down together. I kicked off pants and shoes and pulled off the T-shirt that was my only other clothing.

"I'll do anything you want me to." Her voice was seductive as she rose to stand before me, her full, round breasts nearly touching mine, but I caught a flicker of uncertainty, even apprehension. I moved back a small step, puzzled by the trace of tension in her body. Didn't she want me, after all? Did she somehow feel she owed me? Had I changed too much?

Then I knew, and pulled her close, hard. "What's the matter, Romy? You think you're too much woman now for me to handle?" I stroked my hands down over her back and filled them with her rounded ass. "You think just because you could do a Marilyn impersonation I can't properly appreciate every...single...inch...of gorgeous flesh?" I punctuated my husky words with open-mouthed kisses on her lips, the silky hollow of her neck, the top of a swelling breast. I eased back a little to set her thrusting nipples free, brushed them for long, exquisite moments with my own, then bent in response to her wordless plea and worked her over with a demanding mouth.

Her taste, her scent, was still the same, her feel the same but even more so. Her response was beyond anything in my dreams. I licked and sucked her nipples, gently and then harder and harder as she moaned and thrust and pulled my head closer against her silk-skinned abundance, all the while writhing against my thigh pressed between her legs.

"Sage, please, I can't wait, I meant to do you first but I can't stand it, please, get inside me, please, don't stop, bite me, hard, but dammit get inside me get inside...."

My clit and my cunt were pounding. I wasn't sure which was more urgent, my need to fuck, or to get fucked. But her begging turned me on as much as her touch, and I hadn't got from queer hippie commune kid to Navy CPO without iron self-discipline.

I slid my hand between her thighs. I teased her clit as I sucked and bit one engorged breast and then the other, and I resisted her frantic attempts to push my hand farther into her slippery heat. Finally, as her curses mixed with high-pitched sobs and she tried to squeeze her hand past mine I gave in, gave her two fingers, and then three, deep, deep; and then, as she opened to my probing, I slid down her body until my mouth was devouring her sweet-salt tang and her clenching cunt was devouring my whole pumping hand.

We tumbled onto the blanket. Her cries lanced through me, and as they finally subsided my own need drove me harder and my own voice rose in wordless pleas. Romy scarcely took time to draw a breath before she leaned between my legs, spread me open, and with deep-thrust tongue blew me all the way into the stratosphere. The shock wave should have blown that circling hawk to Monterey.

A full moon was rising over the Golden Gate and the enchanted city by the time we made our way, sore but not yet exhausted, up the steep slope. What had to be said had been said: Dammit, Romy, you didn't have to marry him. Just fuck him a few times, maybe not even that. There are other ways to get pregnant -- Sure, now, maybe even then, but I was just a kid. What did I know? He was my only way to get some of you into my child. And you were going to leave anyway, no matter what you said, the sea was going to take you and the Navy was your best chance -- But what you said -- And what you said....

Then there was the future to consider, if we dared. I had two weeks' leave before I headed back to Honolulu for six months, six more years of service before qualifying for a pension. "I've heard there's good work for sonar operators on fishing boats along the coast," I said tentatively as we climbed hand in hand.

Romy squeezed my hand against her breast. "No need for any drastic decisions just yet. I've been thinking. With enough incentive, I could manage a trip to Hawaii every now and then, maybe even bring Phoebe. You're her idol, you know. Why don't you come stay with us at Cannon Beach for a week or so? I don't think meeting you in the flesh is going to disillusion her in the least, but I have to admit I'm hardly an impartial judge." She stopped to press herself into me, murmuring against my lips, "Not just when it comes to the flesh, but damn! I've missed this!"

We stood at the overlook, reluctant to pull apart long enough to drive our cars back over the bridge. The wine and food, untouched, we'd share at a bed-and-breakfast on Divisadero where anyone with Navy connections who saw us would be unlikely to advertise the fact. Whatever was coming, we'd manage, whatever it took.

There were a dozen cars, moonwatchers, parked at the overlook. I didn't give a damn. I pulled Romy close and kissed her hard and felt a pull as deep as any ocean current. She drew me the way the moon draws the tides. She was my center, the irresistible force that would always bring me safely home.

The object of these lofty thoughts slipped a hand into my zipperless shorts. "Is your ass as bruised as mine?" she whispered. "Maybe it's time for a real bed."

Her touch set me off again, but its promise seemed worth a few minutes apart. I opened her car door and shoved her in, almost forgetting to let go of her before the door slammed shut. She grinned and gunned the motor, and I sprinted for my car and followed her across the moon-bright Golden Gate.

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