Beth moved her mouth and looked at Miriam – for a lingering moment, her dark eyes flicking up and down the thin frame, over the pretty, perpetually young face. The captain didn't look to be in her mid-thirties at all. Army life had agreed with her. Or maybe it was lez life.
"All right. Captain," she said, her voice tinged with insolence. "Sunday it is. If you can wait that long, so can I."
"Good night, Beth," Miriam said, turning.
Beth didn't respond. She watched thoughtfully as Miriam walked briskly down the hallway toward the door. Then she saw it. The slight pause, the hesitation as she passed by the door to Vera Thomas' room. She smiled slowly to herself, and her mind started to race.
She'd been on. Miriam had the hots for Thomas. The captain was getting tired of her two lieutenants and was looking for some new pussy to cultivate after they were commissioned next summer and left Bronson.
The problem at hand now was to figure out the strategy for breaking Vera Thomas in and presenting a willing girl to the captain in exchange for a cushy assignment. She turned and stalked slowly to the room she shared with Judy at the end of the hall. She'd go it over with Judy. Judy was good at strategy problems. Beth was good at the tactics. Together, they'd get Thomas ready.
They'd make her cry and crawl on her knees to get fucked.
Miriam Garner stopped on the way to her cottage, standing in the warm, night beside a big oak tree. There were redwood benches in a circle about the huge trunk. A tingle of mock orange and oleander bushes made a screening amphitheater for the treeand the benches, a private little area on a campus that was otherwise largely barren.
From where she sat, she could see the upper floor of the girl's dorm in one direction and the bedroom corner of her cottage in the other. She could see a light on through the undraped window and remembered the old envelope of faded snapshots she'd dug out of the bottom of the drawer and spread out on the dining room table.
She tipped her head back and looked at the stars through the leaves of the oak. She drew in a deep lungful of air and let it out slowly. Tears stung the backs of her eyes. She closed them and saw the old pictures again, the ones she'd taken of him so long ago, back when she was a teenager – an age when nothing could possibly ever go wrong.
A choked sound came from her throat, and she gritted her teeth and shook her head and swore softly and gutterally.
What in God's name was she going to do? He was coming tomorrow. Sometime tomorrow, Saturday. Most probably in the evening. That's why she'd had to put Beth off until Sunday. Not because of cards.
But because Paul Thomas was coming to Bronson.
She sighed heavily again. She couldn't avoid him. There was no way she could avoid her duty as officer in charge. She'd found the message in her box at headquarters. She hadn't even talked to him, had the chance to try to pass him off to someone else. He was coming, and she'd been assigned to meet him because Audrey had gotten a pass to leave campus for the weekend.
She wondered if his voice still sounded the same. She knew he couldn't look the same. Not after nearly eighteen years. He would be forty now, not twenty-two. His face would have a few lines, his hair maybe a little gray.
She tried to imagine him with a pot belly, a sagging butt, white, oily skin and flabby arms. An aging, balding, unattractive man, now, instead of the beautiful specimen he'd been back when she was a silly teenager and had been his mistress. His child mistress.
She wept openly in the moonlight, shaking her head with disgust and self pity. Mistress! For two months of maddened, wild, unrestrained fucking. She hadn't been a mistress. She'd been a cunt hole for him to fuck his cock into and fill with gallons of cum. She'd tried to compute it once. It had to be gallons. And one infinitesimal fraction of a drop of all that cum had done it a job, deep in her young, fertile womb.
She hadn't told him about it. There hadn't been any point. He'd quit seeing her. An argument one night, and then she'd run away, far from him, far from home. She'd done it because he'd hurt her. She'd done it to have the baby free of shame. She'd found a childless couple to take her and the baby, and she'd continued to run. She'd found the best hiding place of all, finally, here in the Army the ultimate swamp.
But she hadn't been able to stop herself from keeping track of the son she bore. She'd watched him grow from afar, walking past the schoolyard at recess, taking telephoto shots of him at the circus, always seeing to it somehow that her duty assignments were somewhere nearby.
Now she was too near – much too near. She saw him every day, now. It was wearing her down. Several times, she'd nearly stopped him to tell him that she was his mother, and that was no good. That would just destroy them both.
Now it was all snarling into that tangled ball of string, because his father was coming tomorrow and might see the boy. He would have to know the boy was his, because he was a carbon copy of Paul, even if his name was now Cadet Frank Cobb.
Miriam sighed again, her body shuddering as she drew in the night air and let it out. She'd known there was something terribly familiar about Vera, even from the day of registration, when she'd seen the slim, beautiful girl with the violet eyes standing in line with the others. After receiving the message that her father, Paul Thomas, was coming, the reason she looked familiar was clear.
The odds for its happening were too small to compute, but all the pieces had come together, and it was real. Her son and his daughter, both at the same small, obscure military academy at the same tune, and she, mother and mistress, an officer there.
She stood up and walked slowly along the path to her cottage, wondering how, on top of all the rest of it, she was going to explain to Beth why she hadn't gone into town tomorrow night after all. Not that Beth deserved an explanation for anything – even her true function for Miriam. There was only one purpose for Beth – the same as air the other girls before her… sex. Sex without fear of pregnancy again. No more than that. Her apparent lesbianism was nothing more than the fear of getting knocked up by a man's spurting prick. Once was enough.
She'd thought of getting herself operated on, but never had. In the back of her mind always lay the hope that something would turn out right in her crummy life, that she might meet a man she could fall in love with and want to marry and have children by. The trouble was, after Paul, she hadn't wanted anything to do with another man for years. Now it was a habit, a state of mind. The thought of changing now grew increasingly burdensome, and she was to the point of being resigned to spending the rest of her lifetime having her cunt sucked and finger fucked and dildoed off by an endless parade of faceless women. So, why get cut now.
She was so absorbed with her thoughts she didn't hear the rustle behind her in the bushes, just as she was entering her cottage. Then there was a rush, a dark bag over her head, and strong arms pushing her inside. She heard the door close and knew there were two of them.
She started to scream inside the bag, but a powerful forearm came around her throat and choked her breath off. She tried her best judo move, but he'd been expecting it and blocked it. Then it was too late. The pounding in her head and the purple flashes at the backs of her eyes told her she was blacking out.
"Easy, man – don't choke her dead," one of them said. "No fun to fuck a corpse. I wanna feel her tight lez cunt jiggle and suck around my cock, not just lie there."
"She's all right, Peter, I know what I'm doing. Just make her a little drowsy so we can fix her up." The stink of cheap booze was strong.
The other one laughed. "Who you calling a peter, you peter?"
"That's us, don't forget. No names. This here's a captain we're fucking with."
"A Goddamn lez bitch, you mean." He squeezed her tit roughly. "Damn, that's nice! Hurry up and black her out, man. Remember, we flipped for first fuck, and I won."