The knock came after curfew. A hard rat-a-tat. Maya blew out the candle and cursed as she hid her book beneath the mattress. Possibly the soldiers had seen the dim light from outside. Some were kind-hearted, or too lazy to do their jobs properly. If they saw the light had gone out then they’d move on.
Rat-a-tat .
It was softer this time – not soldiers after all. More like an appeal. She remembered opening the door to shy men with bright bunches of flowers … a steady string of them in the years after Mario was taken. She frowned. They never stayed shy for long. Soon their greasy hands would expect to grope her, grabbing her wrists and pushing her against the wall.
Under her sheet Maya was naked. She cupped a large, full breast, a habit of hers when she was thinking. And then her head snapped into action and began to think clearly. Only soldiers came out after curfew. If they really wanted someone to open the door they shouted guttural orders, or smashed the wood with the butts of their rifles. Whoever was knocking wasn’t a soldier. They needed her.
Then came shrill whistles, and the rough bark of a dog. They were far off still, but she knew at once what had happened: a young man, defiantly fighting back – daubing slogans against the government like Mario used to in the dead of night. The young man had been spotted, and now they were chasing him down. She pictured him running up the hill, arms spinning wildly as he battled with the cobbles and narrow turns.
She slipped out of her sheet, her smooth, lithe legs plunging into boots as she pulled Mario’s old greatcoat over her breasts, its soft lining brushing and teasing her nipples. The youth would be sweating, exhausted with fear – eyes terrified, skin taut. Mario would have helped him.
She almost tripped over him on the threshold, where he was curled tight. She placed her finger over his soft, fleshy lips, and whispered, lest he cry out in his panic, ‘Don’t question me. I will save you.’ He nodded, and she wiped his sweat-drenched hair from his brow. ‘Now take off your shirt.’
A precious second passed. She glanced up the street. It gathered all the little alleys of the town like stray ribbons, leading them all to the top of the hill. The soldiers would come this way. And what if a neighbour was watching?
‘Now,’ she said tugging his arm. ‘Quickly.’
He hesitated, then ripped opened his shirt, and Maya saw in the starlight his smooth chest and the hollow where a girl’s head would lie, safe and content after sex and before sleep.
‘Go up to my attic. Beneath the broken chairs a rug hides a trap door. Drink the fresh water sparingly, and do not leave until I come, however long.’
She breathed him in with the chill night air, held his scent in her lungs as if she could keep it from the dogs. But now she could hear them barking and yelping – they had found the boy’s scent too.
He flung his shirt into her hands then crushed her to him. He was taller than she had thought, narrow but strong. His hands grasped her buttocks hard, spreading the delicate folds of flesh between her legs and releasing a desire in her that ached as much as it delighted. Her fingers, unthinking, reached out and felt the heat of his back and the sinewy toughness of his muscles.
‘I love you,’ he said simply.
‘I love you too,’ she whispered to the closing door, and she knew she’d done the right thing because such youth, such beauty must live.
And then she ran, dragging the sweat-drenched shirt behind her. She must lure the dogs away. They would pause at her door, of course, and then follow; the youth’s scent was strong, she could smell it herself.
She began a game, zigzagged, as he would have done, searching for a place of refuge. At old Herta’s blue- painted door, she stopped. It was tempting to toss it in the other woman’s woodshed. Ha! Let Herta explain that to the soldiers – Herta who sneered at her short skirts and red lipstick, though it was half a decade since Mario had been “disappeared”.
‘You expect me to be a nun?’ Maya had asked.
Herta had shrugged. ‘There are two things you can be in this town. Do you enjoy playing the whore?’
Maya vowed she’d find her own way, neither saint nor sinner. But the men who came left when they found she wouldn’t be possessed. She refused their crude advances, pushed away their thick fingers that poked at her breasts through her blouse and rubbed her private parts through her skirts, as if that were enough to get her to spread her legs. She sent them away, though they’d had a taste of her and at night they dreamed of licking her dark-nipples and stroking her backside which sat as high and proud in her forties as it had in her youth, and yearned to pin her down over her polished kitchen table and sink their frustrated cocks in to her sweet wet cunt.
She smiled and ran on. She chose a rocky path that would leave no prints, despite her thick boots. She approached the church now – behind it began the thin line of trees that led the way to the dense woods that crept up the mountain from the other side of the hill. The dogs would chase into there, and the soldiers would pause, scared of the ghosts of the men who had died there, refusing to be defeated.
A man yelled an order, another replied. She tore the shirt, left a piece on a bare branch and another behind a white gravestone. Let them be confused, she thought, before they followed her into the woods.
Amid the trees, dark branches whipped her face. At the stream she left the last piece of shirt, kissing it before running on. The soldiers would follow the running water now, laughing at the cocky lad for thinking he could trick them and get away. She prayed that her own musky perfume would stay hidden beneath Mario’s greatcoat, which smelt of the earth and the land and the air of the town. She believed Mario’s ghost was there in those woods. He would be proud of her, though worried too, about what the soldiers might do if they caught her. The thought of their hands on her body had driven him crazy with anger. She felt for the knife tucked into her boot and promised to be brave and never let them.
Footsteps. A patrol of five – two older men she recognised and three from another district. The two dogs were strangely silent. She didn’t move, but blended into the trunk of a tree and let them pass. She thought of the boy in the hiding place. Perhaps he was even asleep, the sweet slumber of the innocent. She moved around the mountain, keeping away from the paths and the stream, ready to cut back through the alleyways to the back door of her home before the town began to wake.
At the edge of the town was a spring. She rested and drank from it, cupping the cold water to her mouth. She remembered how the boy had lifted her to him, pulling at her buttocks and how it had separated her flesh between her legs. She pictured what that would have looked like, a burst of ripe fruit to be sucked and licked and tasted, and the thought aroused her. She licked her finger that had touched his fleshy lips and immediately she imagined those lips running over her arse and up her back to her neck, which prickled with delight. She smiled that even in fear she could feel such desire.
Maya made it to her kitchen as the sun rose. She prepared coffee and a breakfast of spicy sausage. She took her coffee to her bed knowing that the youth was there, in her attic, above her head in that tiny space, the rough wood digging splinters into his young flesh as the tried to find comfort. He would smell the coffee, and know that she was safe, but it was too soon for him to come out. He must wait.
She pulled her knees up and stroked her shins. Mario’s greatcoat was back on its peg, as if guarding her door, and she slipped on a thin cotton chemise. She thought she could smell Mario on her body, as she’d loved to in the past, his scent protecting her – marking her as his. In a box under the bed was a present he’d given her once: a varnished piece of wood, smooth on one side but on the other chiselled with rough ridges. She took it out and began to stroke her thighs. The excitement of the chase hadn’t left her. She longed for something – not being caught, that wasn’t it. Death didn’t frighten her, though the soldiers wouldn’t have let her die, not at first. Still, she required an ending.
With her other hand she unlaced her chemise, lay her head back on the pillow and let her deft fingers so lightly rub over and over her nipples. Then she licked them and rounded the dark circles, picturing a tongue lapping and sucking there as she closed her eyes. At first it was Mario she imagined, and then it was the youth – and then she thought of no man, only the desire that needed quenching.
She used the wooden paddle to rub at her clitoris through the thin sheet and then, as the pleasure grew, she threw it across the room and pulled the sheet away, substituting her fingers to probe inside her and rub the wetness over her, round and round until the climax shook her – a great sob erupting that made her smile and laugh with its exquisite pleasure.
For two days and two nights she left the youth alone. Soldiers came and went. Perhaps no one had seen … perhaps the stomach for judging and killing had ended in her small town. Each night she made herself come, each time taking longer to touch and caress her body, lying on her front, a pillow under her stomach to reach beneath and stroke, and then on her back, splayed and open, thinking only of being full. Full of Mario, full of the youth – and then, when she thought of them both, one on each side of her, deep orgasms shook her inside leaving her satiated for only moments.
On the third night, she climbed the thin wooden ladder. She carried a large jug of warm water and soap and food. The water sloshed on her arm. She hummed lightly, so he would know not to be frightened. He sat up stiffly and she helped him out. The sweat that had dried didn’t smell too bad, and he had been able to piss in the china basin left for the purpose.
He started to speak, a thin croak, but she put her fingers on his dry lips. ‘I will wash you. Then you will eat.’ She had him lie face down on a towel, and she dipped a cloth in the water and wiped him over before adding soap to her bare hands. As she stroked him, over his shoulder blades and down his arms, he began to cry, reaching out and gripping her knee. He had a mole, just above the crease of his buttocks, and she bent and kissed it. Then, down his thighs and his calves, narrow but sturdy, a good sportsman’s body that had saved his life and given purpose to hers.
‘Turn over.’
He watched her intently as she worked. Light from a tiny window flooded behind her and he could see the outline of her breasts, swinging and nudging one another as she leaned over him. He smelled her skin as he washed his face and neck. As she ran the damp cloth over his chest, he grabbed her hand. ‘I saw you. Through the floor. I could see, parts of you, every time you …’
‘I know.’
‘You are beautiful.’
She smiled. ‘Not beautiful, not now. But I am still alive, and I want to live.’
He lay back, and she worked around the centre of him, where his cock protruded high and proud, not long but thick and glistening, from the dark hairs that curled like her own. And then she filled the rag with water and wrung it over him, a fountain, flowing and cleansing. Ravenous, he ate her food and drank down the beer that made him giggle so that she had to tell him, crossly, to be quiet or he’d be back in the hiding place, watching her again with no peace.
At that he was silent. He followed her down the narrow ladder to her bed and she took his hand and placed it around her waist. She rested her head against his chest and they danced a while though there was no music but what was inside them. His desire would be urgent; she could not expect him to last, so she knelt at his feet and stroked the tight balls and ran her tongue along his shaft. He placed his hands on her head, gently holding her hair. She licked up the bead of come, and took him into her mouth, her moisture and warmth a delicious agony to him.
‘Angel,’ he gasped, as she swirled her tongue and squeezed her firm lips tight, drawing him in further then pushing him away until he took up the rhythm, helpless to do otherwise, his hips pushing her backwards against the bed. She let him come into her, for it wasn’t power but pure delight and joy that had pushed him to the edge.
He lay back and sighed, curled up and punched the pillows and then rose and grabbed her, kissing her mouth urgently. His young fingers explored her, pinched and tickled, his tongue dancing from her mouth to her ears and neck and down her back, but never far from her breasts where his head returned again and again, to nuzzle and suckle and caress.
Was he a virgin? She doubted it, but nor was he knowledgeable. His adventures would have been rushed and secretive, but with each new discovery he made on her, he groaned with pleasure. At last, she reclined on the bed and his dark head began to be drawn to where she ached and longed to be released.
At first she let him work it out. Everything delighted her, but she needed to come, and when his fingers parted her folds and his tongue worked over and around her clitoris, she whispered, ‘Yes … yes…’ so he would understand to continue. She came unexpectedly – not as she usually did with a long build-up. It was sharp and deep, but immediately she wanted to come again and she took his fingers, and had him touch her around the nub – not directly, and this time the spasm engulfed her, and to her dismay, he covered her mouth with his palm.
‘You were so loud,’ he smiled. ‘I am frightened – and jealous.’
They drank coffee and before long he was ready again.
‘This time, can I … you know …?’
He blushed as he asked, and she couldn’t resist.
‘You want your cock inside me? You want to be deep inside my cunt?’
The words made him quiver. His cock rose and thickened and she took it into her fingers and pulled him to the bed. She lay back and spread her legs, and he knelt in front of her, wanting this sight but also wanting to smother her and take her and possess her – though he knew she was beyond that.
He fell upon her, kissing her hard, his tongue deep in her mouth. He pulled her hips up and she shuddered, the thick end of his cock probing forwards until it found its way in, opening her wide yet filling her too. And then they were gone. No restraints, just heat and need driving them to insanity. Maya let her head fall back and with each thrust, the building up inside her increased.
‘I am fucking you,’ he said, and his voice thrilled her. ‘I am fucking you, I will never forget.’
She rolled her head to the side. Mario’s greatcoat hung on the door. Her heart hurt. She realised how much she missed him, but the sadness was mixed with the joy of her life. She closed her eyes, the youth and Mario mingled together – she opened herself wider, as far as she could. She was taking them both. She came, noiselessly this time, privately – though the boy felt her spasm and it took him over the brink.
Maya sold pickles in the market on Fridays. She set about preparing a vat by chopping onions and cabbage. When the soldiers came, the perfume of sex had gone; her little home was infused with vinegar and she was dressed and tidy with her sore nipples hidden under a thick blouse and a fresh apron. The men didn’t stay long; they poked about her cupboards, picked up her underclothes and laughed and made coarse jokes amongst themselves. But they were tired themselves, and bored with looking for this youth.
At the door she watched them strut to the next house. Then Herta appeared from the house with the blue door. She scurried by, her thin, crabby legs poking out of her skirts. She paused at Maya’s door and sniffed the air. ‘My mother always said that the smell of pickles hides a slatternly woman,’ she said. She took two steps away, her head in the air. And then she stopped and turned.
‘But I hear my nephew is safe and I thank you.’
And then she set off down the hill to buy her bread.