GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY by harry

Author:harry [harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Trite. What was fair? Was anything fair? This whole thing was a cliche. He wasn't answering her at all.

Inside, she wept. It had all been a stupid idea. Septemius had tried to tell her. Kostia had known.

Tonia had known. Her own ten-year-old self would have known. What was it Stavia herself had said about Myra's infatuation for Barten? "She doesn't have any sense at all."

"No," Morgot had yawned. "None of them do. Neither did I, when I was that age."

"I refuse to be that age!" Stavia had asserted.

"I wish you luck," Morgot had replied.

Meaning, we all do it, daughter. All of us. We know what's sensible and right, and we do foolishness instead.

And here she was. Actor Stavia, trying to make the best of it. While inside the silly, sentimental, loving part of her howled for her own lost childhood.

And then he smiled, like the sun rising, suddenly, without warning. She saw it on his face: capitulation, a decision not to be angry. What she saw was not an emotional need to reconcile himself to her but a conscious decision that anger would do nothing for him. She could not see to the reasons behind that decision; she saw the mind at work, however. "You're right, Stavia. I behaved like . . . like one of those ancient peoples in Beneda's book. Like a barbarian. Let's start over." And smiled again.

She perceived the cold-bloodedness of it, the chill manipulation of it, but decided to ignore it. They were new to one another after all. She let everything within her melt and flow and reform again in a new and softened shape.

Actor Stavia was waved off into the wings.

"Oh, Chernon," she said, opening her arms.

STAVIA HAD NEVER had a lover before, so she had no one to compare their lovemaking with. She did compare him with other men she knew, however. With Joshua. With Corrig. With her surgical instructor in Abbyville.

Chernon seemed anxious, rather than eager, to give her pleasure and sometimes succeeded, though it happened more often by accident than it did through Chernon's understanding of what he was doing. He was so engrossed in his own feelings that he wasn't able to pay much attention to her. She was soon adept at pleasing him, which was not very complicated. He needed little arousal and did not tolerate long delays.

He reminded her a little of the ram lambs she had seen in the meadows around the camp, suddenly hungry, butting at their mothers' udders with fierce determination, only to become as suddenly satiated.

Everything was now. Nothing was later. She remembered what Beneda had said about him, years ago:

"When he comes home, he eats all the time, everything, just gulps it down and doesn't even bother to taste it. . . ."

Which, she reminded herself, her studies had informed her was a frequent state of sexual affairs among very young men. Chernon was twenty-four, but that was still very young in garrison country, where a man counted for little until they had been tested in battle, even though he might have fathered sons before then.

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