Farewell My Innocent

Chapter One The summer of my nineteenth year, I smoldered in the heat. Expectation, anticipation dripped from my pores as the humidity soared. I rocked on the porch of the little house, fanning my face with a pink, pleated, Oriental fan my friend Daisy brought me from San Francisco the summer before. Fresh as a new magnolia blossom at ten o’clock, I was wilted and dripping with perspiration by two, vapid and restless. All that was feminine in me threatened to vent like a steaming teapot. I’d dampened my lips with my tongue, remembering the last time they were kissed, then feel my n*****s throb against my sticky cotton slip and my thighs ooze against the sheer fabric of my sundress, as I dreamed up s****l fantasies no proper young lady should dwell on. I met a man at the USO. We danced. Preston Wilkes, a Yankee, made my senses overload, and this smoldering body flame with some outrageous fire I could not suppress. When I got home, I shed my clothes the minute I closed my bedroom door. Facing the mirror, my hands went for the sensation like a hungry animal seeking food. I lunched on the interiors of my cleft, wishing for satiation I could never give myself. This body cawed like an angry crow, while desire swooped in and landed on that little bud between the petals of my s*x and gnawed there. I saw how my eyes could seduce as the languid lids draped the lusty devils. Why was I behaving this way, especially when it was a man I wanted, not my own hands? And still, I couldn’t stop. I pressed my naked breasts together, seeing two pink n*****s grow erect, looking a little deformed in their rigid state of arousal. Bending my head, I kissed the flesh leaving red lipstick marks on my skin as I coquettishly watched the s****l performance. Oh! How mama and papa would revile me if they could see me now. Even as I’d let the sensations flower, their disapproving eyes would peer over my shoulder and attack me from inside the mirror, haunting specters of discontent and condemnation, taking out their frustrations on me. I have always been too feral to make them wholly pleased. My guilt-ridden conscience argued with my baser, animal instinct. But the animal in me won—as it always has. Lost to my body, I fell back on my bed, unable to look at my hands between my legs, doing gross things there. Pinching my rosy bud, prodding the depths of my inner spaces, pitched between the horror of my depravity and the desperation of denial, I groveled unhappily. But I never stopped of my own accord. Only some untimely interruption, the ringing of the telephone or the call of my mother’s voice would bring me out of my s****l revelry. That, or the completion of my episode. Once the hot, painful spasm ripped through my belly and my hands swam in the pungent liquid my v****a offered up, I could finally set aside my wickedness. The summer of my nineteenth year, I was lost in the paradox of being a good girl and chasing my pleasure. I might have succeeded with my virtuous pursuits, if hadn’t been for my Yankee wolf, Preston Wilkes. He was my savior and my demise, all wrapped up in the prettiest picture of manliness that I’d seen in many months. When he combed his wavy black hair with his hand, I thought of that hand running through my hair as it did the night we danced—how I wished I hadn’t cut my hair into a short bob just the month before. When Preston bared his pure, white teeth in a big, broad smile there was a glint of mischief in his eye, something nefarious and distinctly underhanded. I knew he was a scallywag, up to no good, able to sweet talk virgins out of virtue; and yet he stung my heart as much as he manipulated my wet and wanting crotch. He was hardly a man I could sink my hopes into, but at nineteen, what woman cares? Especially when a miserable war was taking all our fine, young men away to distant battles and we were destined to spend our muggy summers languishing in heat reading poignant correspondence from abroad, tossing in our beds at night fretful and unfulfilled. “Miss Stacia Beaureguard,” he tipped his soldier’s hat at me, while sauntering by my front porch one afternoon as I fanned my face like a courteous lady. I blushed in an instant, recognizing my dance partner from two nights before. The red flush of embarrassment crept up my neck until my cheeks were hot. “How do you do?” I asked politely. “You mentioned that I could call on you?” he reminded me of the easy promise I made in a moment of careless passion. Dancing is such euphoria, and so s****l. “Indeed,” I answered, squeamishly smiling. “May I invite you for a walk?” “You may invite me to do anything you like, Preston Wilkes, but that does not mean I’ll accept.” “Then I’d be disappointed.” His rash grin wore me down in a second, but I had to play hard to get. I was not an easy woman, just a woman confused and filled with unrequited s****l desire. “Yankee wolves should mind their manners around Southern ladies,” I declared with a touch of indignation, fanning my face a little faster to keep him from seeing my true expression. “I heartily agree, especially since Southern ladies are such delightful treats.” “I am a ‘treat’, sir? To devour?” “No, ma’am. A treat is perhaps a bad choice of words. A ‘treasure’ would be stating my case better.” He raised his eyebrows, wondering if, perhaps, I was more taken with this adjective. “You are a treasure, a confection to savor.” “Are you trying to charm me with compliments?” “If that is possible. If I could charm you with poetry, I would. But I’m not a poet, just a lonely soldier, who has discovered the most beautiful flower in the bouquet.” I giggled. He was funny. And the way he moved from the sidewalk to my front porch, slithering his way closer like a snake in the grass. I was moved. Smitten. My poor, aroused body kept screaming to be defiled; of course, that was just my private passion. No good girl would reveal herself so easily to any man—even her husband would have to wait some time before he’d see such a blatant display. “Preston Wilkes, you are a scamp.” “But I am very sincere, Miss Beaureguard.” “Humm,” my thoughts were rife with schemes, “then maybe we can walk to the park.” He bowed graciously, as I pulled myself from the creaky wicker rocker. “Mama, I’m going for a walk,” I called into the black emptiness beyond the screen door, and left with Preston Wilkes before I could hear my mama’s reply. One thing led to another… led to a stroll about the park… to a stroll through the woods where I got kissed … to a ravishing in the hayloft of the barn at the back of mama’s property. He came to see me every day with a little more interest, more desire, and more explicit determination to press his cause. Mama’s old barn was the evitable conclusion to our dance with lust. I got kissed some more, his hands running over the exterior of my blue print dress, over my breasts and down my thighs. I was in tears with shivers of ecstatic pleasure extending from the top of my head down through my shoulders, though my breasts, into my groin where they churned up all that simmering fire. I grappled awkwardly with his clothes, while he with effortless ease undressed me down to my embroidered underwear, then laid me out along the bed of straw. “Raise your arms above your head,” he told me in a breathless, but insistent tone. My fingers were itchy, wanting, yet afraid of touching him—a man—anywhere private, or even anywhere at all. But now, he prevented me that choice, the privilege of getting beyond my apprehensions and living out the pictures that nightly played like motion pictures in my head. He bared my breasts, kissing them with such fervency that he left hickeys on the undersides. He suckled hard, so I was shrieking in my muted voice, almost orgasmic without his laying a hand on my privates down below. Moving back to my lips, he nibbled his way to my navel and spent some time lapping that tiny fissure. My nether regions replied involuntarily, seducing him lower, rising and falling, undulating, begging. Compelled by forces I’d never felt before, I reached down to push his head lower, knowing nothing about oral s*x, knowing only that I wanted his tongue deep between my thighs. “No, Tacy,” he pushed my offending hand back, scolding, “if you don’t behave, I’ll have to tie them up.” Ooo, my entire body jiggled nervously, happily, hearing him speak with such resolve. I gladly obeyed even though the urgent need in me was mushrooming like summer thunderclouds, and my lover, Preston Wilkes, was deliberately denying my body its climactic end. “Please,” I begged him, as he hovered over my torso and teased my seeking pubis below with brutally soft caresses. “Beg more, luscious one,” he snickered as he played me, and dove back in to kiss each n****e and draw it out until it popped from between his teeth. I breathed in feeling sensation roll through me to the ends of my fingers. I grabbed for a railing above my head as my body began to thrash from side to side. Preston held me down, and finally submerged himself between my open thighs. My underwear torn away, his face went for the mound, parting the silky brown hair and opening the lips to my pulsating organ of pleasure. The tickle of his tongue made my spasms begin. My back arched as I held on to the rail feeling bound there, jerking, flailing my belly on air, Preston working the little crevice into such a state of frenzy that I hardly felt him rise up above me, expose his erection and plunge it with force into the virgin territory. I drowned my shriek of surprise with another rapid explosion, and then got f****d hard by a c**k that hit my cervix and broadened my insides for what lay ahead—days, weeks, months into my future. Did I love him? I vowed I had to since we’d just had s*x, real s*x, no fantasy. I would love him forever. He lay next to me exhausted, panting and sweaty, as was I. “You make a man work for it, Tacy Beaureguard,” he sighed big. “How’s that?” I wondered. He shook his head, but was unwilling to tell me more. “Seems you make me work for it, and I can’t even touch you,” I complained. “There are reasons for that,” he answered. “Desire feeds on anticipation and frustration. Your body already wants more,” he teasingly noted, as he ran a warm smooth hand along my naked belly and watched me shiver. I blushed, embarrassed again by forces I could not control. “I think I’ll bind you next time.” “Oh, you think there will be a next time?” I was quietly piqued. “Little lady, there will be many more times. Forever doesn’t begin to describe what we’ll have together.” “Ooo, Preston Wilkes, I’d say you’re making rash statements, and that could get you in trouble.” “Aren’t I supposed to honor your virtue by marrying you?” Of course, he was. But I wasn’t certain if that’s what I wanted. I liked the thought of being in love and having s*x whenever it suited me. But this romance was developing all too quickly. And what didn’t please me at all… he’d be running off to war in a few weeks, and I didn’t like being the girl left behind. We were married two weeks after our first night in the hayloft, in a small ceremony at the front of papa’s great big church. I wore white, despite the fact that I was no longer a virgin. No one knew but Preston and me. Wartime weddings were filled with melancholy. I shed my tears, but watched my groom’s great comforting smile and listened to his whispers. “It won’t be long, we’ll have years of hayloft trysts.” I giggled, my spirits lifted, while my family sobbed waving goodbye when we boarded the train. They were flustered but resigned, even happy that their Southern belle had found a husband to love her, hopeful that he was the cure for my slightly wanton, ever-troubling temperament. He would never be forgiven for whisking me away from my Southern roots and kin, transported miles north into the hostile cold of enemy territory. But such feelings had to be put aside now. Married women belonged with their men.