Farewell My Innocent

Chapter Two-1

Chapter Two

Our honeymoon of lust and s****l awakening was over in four days. Preston had only a week before he would report to his company and soon be shipped overseas. It was decided that I would stay in the Wilkes’ family home, although no one consulted me about this decision. Had they, I would certainly have recommended that I go home to mama as stay with strangers in a place that was as foreign to me as the forbidding North.

Preston took me to the family home, an enormous clapboard mansion by the sea. A look of shock must have filled my face seeing the estate for the first time. I stood in my tracks unable to move for several minutes, gazing about in wonderment. The scope of his family wealth had oddly eluded me during our brief time together.

“This belongs to you?”

He laughed. “Hardly, but perhaps someday I’ll own the quarter of it over there.” He gestured to left wing of the house and its long stretch of gabled windows, shuttered in black. “I’ll share it with my sister and my brothers,” he explained. He was the youngest of four. “There’s a reception here tonight.”

“For us?”

“Of course, for us. Mother was incensed that we eloped. So you can expect this will be one hell of a party.”

“We didn’t elope,” I was quick to remind him.

“I’m afraid that’s how she sees it.”

“But, Preston, I don’t know a soul!” I declared unhappily.

He tousled my hair as he would a kid’s. “That’s the point, darling. You’ll meet them all tonight, the family and friends, then you won’t have to be bothered later. Just plaster on that becoming smile and nod your head politely. You won’t have to bother speaking, they’ll be enough chatterboxes to keep the conversation going to well past midnight.” He pulled me to the house, a reluctant child of poor parents required to understand in minutes what would take years of training to properly access. I walked up the steps, through the foyer and into the front room so overwhelmed by the finery of two hundred years of Wilkes’ heritage that my mouth was completely agape and my eyes bugged out like a scared animal.

“Mother, father, this is Stacia Beaureguard,” he half-bowed in a gentlemanly way as he introduced me to his parents. “And, of course, Sam,” he added his brother, making a half turn to show me off to his older sibling. Mother and father were classically wealthy Northerners, mother dressed off the rack of New York boutiques, at the moment in a black sheath that accentuated a svelte and graceful figure. Her brassy red hair was coifed into a neat French twist, while her eyebrows were arched over emerald eyes, and her lashes trimmed in black. Chic, sexy and still maternal; to cut such a perfectly imposing figure she must own half the world. The other half I’d have given to her husband, a solemn, straightforward man, who said very little during this meeting—forecasting a tight-lipped manner that pushed him to the background of family politics. In other musing moments, I imagined that his law ruled his kingdom, unemotionally but without argument.

My first innocent impression of my in-laws was one of tongue-tied awe. I could hardly get my, “How do you do?” out of my mouth, as I awkwardly extended my hand. I realized then how very little I knew about my new husband. Our courtship and marriage had been steeped in sexuality, with little time or energy for the mundane essentials of our lives to be discussed. The two worlds of Preston Wilkes seemed grossly at odds, and in those initial moments inside my husband’s more respectable public domain, I shrunk back, as afraid of this one as I was of the s****l one I was more accustomed to.

“I would have thought you’d have married a more vivacious woman,” his mother peered at me critically. Then she smiled, “But she’s very pretty.” She gave her son a warm hug and me a perfunctory one before rattling on, “You know you gave me little time, Preston, to get a proper wedding reception planned. I feel as though I’m spinning out of control. We’re off to Mexico as soon as it’s over. I can’t stand this constant talk of war. Clifford was sent to some god-awful island in the South China Sea. I doubt we’ll ever see him alive.” She turned to light a cigarette. “Want one?”

“No,” I replied softly shaking my head, a bit baffled that she spoke as easily of Clifford’s certain demise as she did the party.

“You two will just have to bang around here by yourselves. Sam’s off to Greece, is it?” she didn’t wait for him to reply, “of course Lettie is always here.”

“Mother, I’m shipping out next week,” Preston reminded her.

“Oh?” her face looked a little drawn. “Where to?”

“England.”

She took a long draw on her cigarette and blew the smoke my way, “At least they’re civilized,” she turned toward me, “it will be just Lettie and Stacia here.”

“I could go back home while Preston’s away,” I chimed in timidly.

“Oh, heavens no child,” mother Wilkes immediately defeated my idea, while Preston jumped on my offer looking peeved himself.

“You’re staying here,” he announced emphatically.

“Yes, that would be fine too,” I agreed for the sake of harmony. Something about these people alarmed me, as if any minute a domestic war of words would ruin the glossy and cultured façade. What remained unspoken, that disquiet rumbling beneath the painted exteriors, made me queasy.

“So, about the party…” the woman ventured on to outline the details of her plans for our lavish wedding reception. Already there were workmen scurrying about, putting up an outside arbor, tent and a podium for the orchestra—she could only get a dozen musicians on short notice, “so many have left to fight, leaving us no reprieve from this catastrophe.” She shook her head, while slumping to the sofa and squashing her cigarette in a near-by ashtray. She plucked another cigarette from a gold case, and waved it about unlit for several minutes while her diatribe continued.

Somewhere during Libby Wilkes’ blithe monologue about the party, Samuel Wilkes senior slipped off—he was the only smart one in the group. Mother’s boys paid homage until mother was finished with them.

Preston and I spent the afternoon in his room making love. For the first time since we’d been having s*x—which was only three weeks since the hayloft in mama’s barn—I could touch my husband’s body at will. My hands quaked as they skirted his warm smooth skin and caressed his vibrating muscles with a silly self-consciousness. He was so strong, his flesh tanned, compact, exercised, firm, my respect for him expanded in a way that made all my nerves tingle.

As I raked my fingernails down his back, the act fed the fluttering fire in my belly, fanning the steadily growing warmth between my thighs. My crotch turned liquid, bathing itself in seeping juices. Preston moved over me, his head at my p***y where he lapped my nectar; my face at his c**k, where I tasted the skin with my tongue, and teased him, refusing his erection, but licking his sinewy thighs, waiting for him scold me. When he planted his mouth on my p***y and began to suck the bud in earnest, I started to come, holding back the inevitable scream, pouring all my responses into the furious jacking off of his c**k. The feeling of it inside my fingers inspired my body toward another climax.

“Ah! Preston, put it in me,” I pleaded. My need was imminent.

He obeyed me as easily as I did him. Though falling off me, he turned me over and grabbed for my hips, pulling my ass up to greet his spear. I lewdly circled my buttocks, but he needed no further enticement. Once dipping his c**k inside the velvet warmth of my channel, his thighs slapped against my skin as he achieved a fast-paced rhythmic f*****g. His fingernails ground painfully into my sides and he spanked my ass at regular intervals, making certain I could not escape the element of pain within this battle. He didn’t seem to care what sounds he made while coming, so I didn’t either. I refused to think, forgetting everything but the physical me. Finally, lunging into me for the last time, Preston held me to him as he shot off, while gurgling some nonsense everyone in the house within a hundred yards should have heard. Thank fate the windows were closed.

“I think we were too loud,” I giggled in a whisper as I snuggled into his side. He was being particularly affectionate allowing me to be so close.

“Never.”

“Why would you say that? Aren’t you the least bit embarrassed?”

“They won’t say a word.”

“No?”

“Never. I could start f*****g you in the living room; they’d quietly leave the room and never utter a thing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“My family paints a picture of gentility, while behind their uppity veneer, father’s screwing his mistress, and my mother’s seducing the bellhop, the paperboy, the milkman and my best friends. She hops beds faster than a rabbit in heat.”

“You don’t mean that?”

“I don’t lie, honey. At least not about them. Let them hear us having fun, we’re married and have a right to do anything we want—as loudly as we want to do it.”

“I’ll bet your brother will start snickering. He looks as much the scoundrel as you are.”

He laughed, “Perhaps, wait until you meet Lucy.”

“Lucy?”

“My sister. She’s as much a w***e as you are.”

“Preston, why do call me that?”

“It’s a term of affection, admiration, like slut.”

“It is not!”

“But you do have to watch out for Aunt Lettie.”

“Oh?”

“She’s the one bastion of Puritanical morality in this mass of depravity, a sneaky old broad. Never married. There are stories of vaudeville lover affairs but she pretends to be straight as an arrow now. She’s a religious nut who recites the Bible in her sleep. She’ll practice her piety, while sneaking around the house at night, peeking in rooms, looking for something evil to rail about the next time she sees you. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was listening at our door just now. ”

“And this is the woman I’ll share my life with while waiting for you?”

“Ah! Don’t worry about her. She’s basically harmless. You have to talk back to her a little. Besides, you can turn your attentions to Lucy, who you will love. She’ll feel sorry for you and rescue you if Aunt Lettie gets too mean. I’m sure you’ll be fast friends.”

***

I met Lucy as Preston and I were descending the stairs for the party. She was a little slip of a thing, not more than five feet two with blue black shoulder length hair, big black eyes and a round mouth. Her full lips were painted Chinese red to match her long polished nails. She wore a thin sundress, black, with wild red flowers starting at her big left breast and trailing downward to the hem on the right side.

“And this is Tacy!” she exclaimed, while taking both of my hands in hers, and looking straight in to my eyes. “Whatever you do here, don’t let mother run your life, and don’t let Lettie see your underwear.”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Who are you f*****g today, sis?” Preston asked, while affectionately placing his lips on her cheek.

“Dustin Montgomery.”

“Really?”

“I thought mother might have made him gun-shy to be with another Wilkes woman,” then in an aside to me, “one of mother’s conquests of my prep school friends. Seduced him in the boathouse a couple of years back.”

“Dustin’s back from Europe, came home before the fighting got really bad. Unfortunately, he couldn’t join up because of his leg getting mangled in the car accident last year. But he’s going to sit out the war at the newspaper desk writing about it. I think that’s grand.”

“And all the better for you.”

“Of course,” she c****d her head, her black eyes shining mirthfully.

I loved her. I don’t mean just loved the vivacious, conspicuous woman she was—that was indeed a charming thing to enjoy and I loved that too. But even more, I loved her body, the way she squirmed a little and shook her shoulders when she walked, the way her succulent lips formed words, and her hip jutted when she stood, and emoted s****l intricacies I couldn’t even guess at. I’d never been with a woman who left me breathless with anticipation, who made me want to dive into her body and soul, devour, succumb to, who instantly made me want to eat from the palm of her hand. I’d never had any reaction to any woman like the one I had to Lucy Wilkes. Caught off guard, it embarrassed me. I wanted to take her aside and ask her a zillion questions about who she was, then make love to her all afternoon. While Preston was trading gossip with his sister, I was falling in love—again. Caught. In a daze.