The bed was cold and so was I, and I put my arms around Jimmy. His skin was cold too, at first, but he was comfortingly solid. I needed comfort. I think he did, too.
I touched his cheek with my hand. “I’m not mad any more, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “I didn’t think you were. I’m sorry, anyway. I’ve got to take you as you are, even when you say stupid things. You can’t help what you think.”
He kissed me gently. I cooperated with the kiss.
“I’m glad you came for me,” Jimmy said. He moved his hand up the length of my back and across my shoulders. It gave me shivers. “Are you cold?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Did you think I’d come?”
“I hoped, I guess. I’m glad you came. I’m glad it was you, Mia.”
He shifted and then put his hand on my breast. I put my hand over it.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“Why didn’t you ever say that before?” We’d kissed and done some other things, and I’d assumed he liked me, our differences aside, but he’d never said he liked the way I looked. I pressed the hand on my breast and I kissed his cheek and his mouth. I felt safer and warmer and more secure than I had in days. Oh, he was good to hold onto.
I let his hand go free and he let it wander. “I never dared,” he said. “You’d have used it against me. Hey, you know, that’s funny. When I touch this one, I can feel your heart beat and when I touch this one, I can’t.”
“I can feel yours, too,” I said. “Thump, thump, thump, thumps thump.”
I kissed my hand and let it touch his face. Kissed his face.
“You do like the way I look?”
“Of course. You are beautiful. I like the way you look. I like your voice — it doesn’t squeak. I like the way you feel.” He moved his hand. “I like the way you smell.” His face moved in my hair.
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” I said. “I don’t think I’d like this if I didn’t like the way you smell, and I never thought about it before. What do you mean I’d have used it against you?”
He said slowly, “You’d have said something snippy. I just couldn’t take the chance.”
I never realized before that he was that vulnerable, that something I might say could hurt him. “I say things sometimes,” I said, “but never if you told me that.”
He kissed my breast, moved his tongue experimentally over the nipple, and it swelled without my willing it. I thought my heart would become too large and break with the surge it made. We moved tightly into each other’s arms and kissed deeply. I held Jimmy to me and my knees moved apart for him.
Sex in the Ship is for adults. If you are an adult, then it doesn’t matter particularly whom you do sleep with. Nobody checks. But just as anywhere, people tend to be fairly consistent, fairly discriminating about what they do, at least the people I’m likely to be friends with. I don’t think I’d want to know well the sort of person who makes notches on the end of her bed, the sort of person who takes sex wherever he can, the sort of person who takes sex lightly. I can’t do any of those things. I’m much too vulnerable. I enjoy making love, but I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have confidence and trust, liking and respect, beyond the basic fact of physical attraction. I had known Jimmy for nearly two years and been attracted to him for nearly that long, but making love with him was something that I could not have done much sooner than I did.
In a sense, Jimmy and I were intended for each other. Whether we had met or not, whether we had liked each other or not, we still would have had at least one child, and probably more. But that is a mechanical process that has nothing to do with living together and loving. It was nice that knowing each other we could love. The passion of age fourteen is not an ultimate, but age fourteen does not last forever and passions do grow.
Sex in the Ship is for adults. We were not officially adults, but we needed each other then, and I was no longer quite the stickler for rules that I once had been. We needed each other then and it was the proper time. If we didn’t make it back to the Ship, who would ever care? And if we made it back to the Ship, we would be officially adults and the question would be irrelevant.
So we made love there in the dark with the rain falling outside, safe in each other’s arms. Neither of us knew what we were doing, except theoretically, and we were as clumsy as kittens. It was something of a botch, too, in an extremely pleasant way. At the climax there was simply a hint of something we couldn’t reach.
We lay quietly and after a few minutes Jimmy said, “How was that?”
I said, somewhat sleepily, “I think it takes practice.
Just before I fell asleep, I said, “It was comforting, though.”
The next night, we left our horses tied in the trees. We were miles from our camp of the previous night. We had arrived on the hillside in the late afternoon, then crawled through the woods to look over the army complex. Below us, in the gold light, was a town cupped in a bowl between the hills. On our side of the town was an enfenced army base, patrolled like all army bases by regular guards, and on what must have been their parade ground was sitting the scoutship.
“I got curious,” Jimmy said. “It seemed strange to me that they should have a scoutship. I snuck out there to take a look and I got careless and got caught.”
Buildings framed the parade ground on three sides. The enclosed short side was nearest to our vantage point high above. The open short side was at the far end of the parade ground nearest to the town. There were some few trees mixed among the buildings. The fence was linked iron spikes, and it completely circled the camp. It was perhaps a hundred feet from the fence to the nearest building.
Jimmy pointed through the leaves. “See the two-story building just below there? That’s their headquarters. That’s where they took me until the police came from the town. That’s where we ought to look for my gear.”
The building was red brick with a gray slate roof and it dominated the end of the parade ground. Most of the other buildings in the camp were only single story — barracks and stables and the like — and the other two-story buildings were not as large.
We timed the guard on his rounds. It took him twenty minutes to walk from one end of his post to the other in the slow, casual way of guards killing watch hours. Sometimes he reached the end of his post at the same time as the guard from the adjacent post and they stopped and talked.
I said, “We couldn’t count on more than twenty minutes if we hit the guard.”
“No,” Jimmy said. “We’ll do best if we can sneak over without being seen.”
After we had checked everything, we crawled back out of sight on our knees, and then we went back to our horses, where we ate a cold meal. Jimmy’s mistake before had been that he had entered the camp too early, when people were still about and the guards were alert. We were both tired from riding all day and we went to sleep until well after dark. I woke when Jimmy shook me.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s time to go.”
We took our time picking our way down the dark slope, making as little noise as possible. I was glad to be with Jimmy. We did make a team, and with Jimmy along I felt something more of an effective hell on wheels than I did by myself. It was twenty feet from the edge of the brush to the fence, the space cleared. We crouched there in the brush, able to see the fence and barely able to make out the outline of the two-story headquarters building beyond.
“Shh,” Jimmy whispered, holding my arm. “There’s the guard.”
We waited until he had passed and then we ran low to the iron fence. Jimmy gave me a boost and I grasped the spikes, the points sharp under my thumbs. He pushed me up and I got a knee on the top bar between the spikes. I paused there for a brief moment and then I jumped clear on the far side, ripping my pants on one of the spikes. I looked both ways to see if the noise of my landing had alerted anyone, and then I turned back to the fence. I put both hands through the bars and cupped them for Jimmy’s foot. He stepped into my hands and I pushed up. He got his other foot on the top bar and then sprang over. He landed on his feet with a thud that was noisier than mine and then without pausing we ran for the nearest tree, where we stopped for a moment before we ran to the shadow of the headquarters building.