LACHLAN

I took us back through the portal straight away.  It was too much for Heather at first.  She can be so still, so serene with the others... but with me she is often quite a bit different.  More a silly, whimsical girl who is as unafraid to stand up to me as she is to lean on me when she needs my strength to help her stand against life's storms.  She needed me then and it felt damn good to be her man.  To be the one she turned to.

The second pass through the portal was a little easier.  I knew what to expect this time and I simply held her to me as we passed within.  She was breathless and shaky when we reemerged in PW.  Early summer had once again turned to late fall.  The icy wind cut straight through us where we'd been sun-warmed not moments before.  The newer farmhouses had returned below and the cell towers had reappeared on the distant horizon.  Though her eyes were bright, Heather was pale and her hands were on stomach.  I covered them with mine.  "You gonna be sick, love?"  She shook her head at me and I moved us a short distance away before we settled into the grass.   

I pulled her into my arms and held her tight.  The experience had had a different effect on me.  The rush was almost like flying.  Somewhere between exhilaration and arousal.  In my heart of hearts, I'd wanted to stay, but even though I do tend to fly by the seat of my pants most of the time, I'm also a practical man.  We needed to get ourselves sorted first.  We'd had no clothes with us, no transportation back to town, no money.  I couldn't very well plunk down a modern US bill in the 1940's in Canada, now could I?  Not bloody likely, mate.  And Heather needed a little time to gather herself.  Still, I wanted to go back.  Soon.   

It would take a little planning because the simple truth is this was more than just a sexual adventure for us.  We'd been talking about it for ages.  We wanted out of the Game....well, not OUT out.  Not forever.  Both of us love the others too much to remain inside permanently, but we were selfish.  We wanted some time alone together.  I'd been granted a month of compassionate leave.  I had twenty-seven days left and depending on exactly how much faster time ran there, I reckoned that'd buy us nearly three months.  Three months in which the only intimacy we shared would be with each other.  A time to learn about each other without the pressures of the Game intruding.  A time to strengthen our relationship and cement our bond in the most elemental way possible. 

I'm a selfish bastard, I know, but that's what I wanted.  Chalk it up to my old-fashioned sensibilities, her romantic nature and the things we both wanted for our future.  I'd done all my homework.  Talked to Nash.  Talked to a couple of my Brothers who'd already crossed.  Poured over the diaries of the Sisters who'd written about their adventures there.  I am not a foolish man.  I am aware of the pressures it can exert upon us, especially the Brothers, sucking them back into their old life and their old ways and I have taken what measures I can to be certain that doesn't happen in this case.

I decided to return to a stretch of time not long after Johnny and I had first arrived.  It was before my classes had become tasking and also before my relationship with Lil had become intimate.  I have no wish for our lives to touch again and my reasons for that are my own.  I will not share them now.  As for the rest, as close as I can recall, there was time, perhaps not quite a week, where I had light classes and no contact with Lil.  It is my plan to have a go at trying to return to that time. 

I realize I will have to retrace my steps and Heather flatly refused to return with me unless I agreed to change as little as possible.  She is worried that even changing something small could have a ripple effect through time, like dropping a pebble into a still pond.  I agree with her.  That is the other reason for choosing that particular stretch of time.  It is our plan to take a room at a hotel in town and for me to return there in the evenings.

To counteract the effects of the portal, we've decided to come out every few days, take a small breather and then return to the beginning of that stretch of time once more.  A bit like that movie, Groundhog's Day, only on a larger scale and without the beaver-like critter.  Well.....  I reckon there'll be a beaver or two.  Dunno about it casting any shadows though... unless we decide to take a blanket to some private place on the prairie...  Ha.     

All irreverence aside, I am humbled by the awesome power of the portal and what gifts we might take from this singularly unique chance we have to share of ourselves.  I hope and pray it is everything we dreamed it would be. 

I cannot wait to return to her.  We have been inside nearly three weeks now and I still cannot get enough of her.  She consumes me.  This is the sixth repetition of my stretch of easy days and I could bloody do the calculations they've assigned in my sleep by now.  Hell, I nearly could before.  Now it's a bloody cakewalk.  Let me tell you, mate, that experience has gotten old fast.  I'm not a patient man and I don't care for repetition.  The classes were terminally boring, having sat through the same lectures multiple times now, but the payoff was more than worth it.  Our plan was working perfectly.  Went off without a hitch, actually. 

Well, maybe not quite without a hitch.  Heather about fell over backwards when she got her first good look at me inside the portal.  I'd lost the years I'd gained in PW and was again the younger, slimmer man I'd been in that time.  Hair a bit shorter than she was familiar with.  Not as heavy as I'd been before.  Bit more of a swagger in my step.  I felt different too.  More....I dunno... just....more. 

I was young and virile and strong, living back in a time when I understood my world and my place in it.  I was her man and she was my girl and it felt so bloody good to be that man for her.  Confident.  A bit cocky.  Irreverent, for certain.  Not so prone to being thrown by some of the oddities of the modern world, a happenstance that still puts me off, especially when it happens in front of her.  I've been a lot of places in my life and seen a hell of a lot of things, but some of the stuff I run across in the modern world just leaves me gobsmacked.     

For all the horrors of war and the realities of life that came with living during that period, it was a simpler, more innocent time.  It wasn't like it was now.  You couldn't just turn on the telly and get two hundred channels chronicling gossip and news in every last corner of the globe.  Radio was paramount.  People talked more and tuned-out less.  The average man made a little over two thousand dollars a year.  Bread was nine cents a loaf.  Milk was sixty cents a gallon.  Petrol was nineteen.  Contrast that with modern prices.  One pair of Jimmy Choo's - upwards of five hundred dollars.  It was a whole different world with a whole different mindset.

Inside my portal, I had to be away in classes several hours every day but Heather enjoyed her time alone, and in truth, I enjoyed the time with my old mates.  I shot the shit and fucked about, practiced bombing the Officer's Mess and made crude jokes about poncy Nigel and good ol' Scotty.  Heather kept busy too.  She wrote some and wandered a bit through the town but mostly she painted.  It got to be habit for me to come back and see what moment she'd captured while I'd been away.  Sometimes it was something she'd done from some sketch of me but mostly it was studies of life here.  She wanted something to take back with her, I guess.  Like photographs... only better, not for the images themselves but because of the moods they evoked.   

She had stacks of them, little flickers of time caught with her brush.  The old man who ran the corner grocery.  The pinched widow who ran the hotel.  Airmen sharing a pint outside the pub.  Pilots escorting their girls.  Women with babies.  Children playing in the street with a stray dog.  A life in pictures.  Snapshots from my old world infused with new life because they were seen through new eyes.                   

She had a much easier time adjusting here than I did, to tell the truth.  Like my Brothers before me, I struggled with the pull of my portal, but stepping outside it every few days helped immensely.  And in between those moments of clarity where we reconnected with the outside world, it was like we found a time apart; like we found the quiet heart of our lives, of who we are to each other in our most personal, private moments and in our everyday moments as well.  Sharing a meal together.  Sharing a bath.  Sharing our thoughts.  Talking late into the night.  Making love into the sunrise. 

The lovemaking here... the lovemaking and the fucking (we did our share of both) well, let's just say that those who've already crossed have the right of it.  It is simply....beyond.  Beyond all thought and reason and logic and words.  It's this incredible, elemental joining of man and woman and I've never felt its like in all the days that I've walked this earth. 

That thought is uppermost in my mind as I return to her this afternoon.  I hardly notice the passing scenery as I leave the base behind and make my way into town.  I have seen it all before, too many time to count, and all I can think about is getting back to her.  How will I find her today?  In deep concentration at her easel?  Reading?  Or will I find her gone, having chosen to spend the afternoon wandering the small shops?  Watching the world from our window, perhaps?  Will she be napping in our bed, flushed softly with sleep?  A thousand possibilities cross my mind as I leg up the flight of stairs to our room. 

No flowers today.  I was in too much of a hurry to get back to her.  I am greedy for her, like a starving man craves food.  I want to feed and feed and feed.  I have the sense that I can never get enough no matter how much I gorge myself on her.  My fingers were pulling at my tie before I'd even made it through the door.  I could literally smell her in the room.  Not her perfume, just her.  My eyes swept the room, catching briefly on the easel. 

Today it wasn't a proper painting but studies in shadow and light.  A series of the same dark alcove visible from our window; a place on the street below that was too shadowy to see much detail but that was the beauty of it.  She'd caught a pilot and his girl stealing a quick snog, a bunch of street toughs sharing a bottle, a young mother breastfeeding, that stray little dog napping, an old bum taking a piss.  That one made me laugh out loud even as my clothes were hitting the floor.  It's amazing the things one catches if you only take the time to look.  I reckon this is Heather's version of stopping to smell the flowers.  Nice, but not enough to hold my interest.  Not now.  I wanted her too much.   

I found her in the shower, humming.  Tendrils of her dark hair were escaping where she'd pinned it up.  They were stuck to the moist flesh of her face and her skin had been turned an appealing pink by the hot spray.  Her head was bent forward in the steamy space as the water beat down on her back and trickled between her breasts.  I followed it down her body, watching as it dipped into her navel and sparkled in the dark curls below.  There was a smear of red between her thighs.  She'd come on a few days back.  Didn't put me off.  Never really has.  Men are such dirty buggers.  Not much puts us off, but even as I heard the words in my head, they didn't feel quite right.  There had never seemed anything dirty about it to me, especially not with her. 

She'd been sort of weepy and emotional these last few days.  Reckon it has something to do with the portal.  She's not usually so clingy but I know this place has had an effect on her too.  And I must say, she chucked one hell of a wobbly when she returned from the chemist with what was, apparently, a feminine product she considered woefully substandard.  Good job she's my woman and not the General's.  Reckon she would have fancied whatever archaic measures they took in those days even less than the ones here. 

Have I mentioned how bloody glad I am to be a man?  Some half remembered conversation I had with Betty echoed in my mind.  Some nonsense about how ancient Romans believed a woman was at her most fertile when she bled.  Looking at my woman now, however, it didn't feel as silly as it had then.  Like most men, I guess I'd never given it much thought.  I mean usually we complain when they're on because either we're cut off from getting a bit or because we're tired of getting snapped at by a moody woman or because we don't like seeing our girl hurting, curled up in bed with a hot water bottle.  No bloke likes to feel helpless, but this time... I dunno.  It was just different. 

Now while I'm not one to go after her when she's feeling crook, there was no mistaking the interest in her eyes when she got a good look at me standing there with what had to be one of the most obscenely impressive horns I've ever had the pleasure of sporting.  I felt like I was on fire, like if I didn't touch her I was going to go mad... and the simple truth was that one tiny smear of red was making me wild.  It wasn't its presence that was making me crazy, though.  It was the idea behind it.  Portal's effects again, I reckon, magnifying both her femininity and my reaction to it.  What better proof of it was there?   

I joined her in the shower but only to wash the day's grime from my body.  I wanted her in our bed as soon as bloody possible.  She had other ideas, however, and what I'd intended to be a quick wash became a fusion of wet, needy flesh; became me pushing her up against the tiles and rubbing my cock against her soft belly and between her legs while I mauled her throat, kissing and sucking and touching her all over. 

Hot water beat down on us and I turned her in my arms, coming in close behind her.  She gasped when I pushed her into the wall and the cold tiles met her breasts, but it changed to a groan of pleasure when I kneaded the tight muscles in the small of her back while I spread her legs and rubbed the head of my cock back and forth across the slippery folds of her cunt.  When she slid her hand down her belly and fondled me, manipulating that loose bit of skin back and forth over my sensitive head and used my tip to masturbate with, I nearly came unhinged.

I was like a man possessed.  Our room was small.  It took no time to pull her from the shower to the bed.  In one easy motion I jerked off the covers.  I wanted her wet and naked and needy on a field of snowy white linen.  I wanted to lick away the water droplets clinging to her breasts and throat.  I wanted to kiss her mouth until I couldn't tell her taste from my own.  I wanted to feel her come on my fingers and on my cock.  I wanted.  I just....wanted. 

It wasn't brutal or rough or dirty but it was intense and passionate and raw.  A primal joining of man and woman.  I felt like more of a man in this place... for many reasons, but in moments such as these, one reason stood above all others.  Being in this place had restored my masculinity.  It had restored my potency even as it has robbed her of hers.  She was not fertile here but seeing that hint of red made me aware of her fertility too, even if it was not relevant in this place. 

I wanted to be on top, to feel her smaller softer body writhe under mine as she found her pleasure.  She simply held me and responded, gave me all of herself and held nothing back, crying my name against my throat as I took her to her pleasure.  She felt different to me, softer and more open.  I wanted to bury myself in her, to crawl inside her and fuse us into one being.  Our final moments defied description.  I can only say that I gave and she received, man and woman reduced to their most elemental sexual natures.

She held me while I shuddered helplessly inside her, weak and vulnerable as the wheel turned and the giver became the receiver.  I held her after and felt her tears trickle against my neck as they slipped from under her lashes while our hearts beat against each other in an erratic rhythm, slowing as the fire in our blood cooled to the point where we could begin to think about existing as two individual beings once again. 

I pulled the sheet up over us and withdrew slowly, without moving my body from atop hers.  I didn't give a tupenny damn about the linens but her sensibilities are more delicate than mine and I wanted to spare her the sight.  I knew we'd be a bit of a mess.  Blood and seed.  It sounds a bit off, but in that moment it was the most beautiful blend of man and woman I could think of. 

I never took my eyes from her face.  I simply replaced my cock with my hand, cupping it so tenderly around her sex and then kissed her with all the emotion I had flooding me in that moment.  She kissed me back and to my surprise, wrapped her tiny hand around my softening flesh and held me as tenderly as I was holding her.  I could feel the soft warm tickle of the charms on her bracelet and my ring was trapped between us, imprinting a circle into both our breasts.  An unbroken line.  Eternal. 

She whispered her love for me against my lips and I spoke of mine for her.  The words we shared are private and unimportant to everyone but us.  It wasn't the best sex we ever had.  I wouldn't ever give it so cliché a label as that.  It was, however, the first time I'd ever experienced love that so completely transcended flesh and form and thought and reason and a hundred other words that describe things bound to the surly bonds of earth.  We were somewhere above that, lost in a space sanctified by the depth and the breadth of what we felt for each other in that singular moment. 

Did I touch God?  Well, now... I dunno about that.  But I reckon she did.  Several times over. 

That afternoon we spent loving each other on the snowy white sheets stayed with me a long time.  Several weeks later, it was still on my mind and I have to say, it had given me the most extraordinary idea.  Took a bit of doing to arrange it all, but we managed.  You don't even want to know how many rules I broke to make it happen.  It makes even my own irreverent self wince to think of it... but it was bloody well worth every favor I had to collect to get it arranged. 

Love on the wing.  

Now, don't get me wrong, you dirty buggers.  I'm not speaking of fucking on an airfoil.  I'm talking about flying with my girl.  Riding the wind on a yellow biplane.  Bloody best kind of flying there is, bar none.  It is flying as God intended it to be.  Wind in your face.  Free as only you can be, suspended above the earth, feeling both exhilarated and humbled by the sheer grandeur of it all. 

She was a bit scared at first but after a few minutes, I could feel the excitement bleeding from her.  Her long dark hair streaming back behind her.  Her euphoric shouts swallowed by the wind.  Her hands outstretched into the air the way children do when they pretend they can fly.  Talk about your golden moments, mate.  That one was a cracker.  For both of us.   

If you'd told me fifty years ago, or even one year ago... hell, even one month ago, that'd I'd be here, sharing this moment with her, I'd not have believed you.  But you know... that's the thing about life.  You never know where it's going to take you from one moment to the next.