Chapter 86
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, all the wives got dressed up, and we gathered down at the pier to welcome our husbands home.
While we waited for the liberty boats to arrive, Laura and I sat on the hood of my car, catching up.
She was telling me how she’d devoted the final days of the cruise to going through her apartment; she’d donated a bunch of clothes, organized her spice cabinet, even alphabetized her record collection.
“That sounds awful,” I said.
She didn’t disagree. “I was so bored.”
Of course, I hadn’t been bored. Not for a single minute. But it wouldn’t do me any good to say so.
“You get anything done around the house?” she asked.
I wracked my brain, trying to think of something I could offer her. “I found a flea collar for the cat at that shop that sells all the odds and ends down at the harbor.”
“Big doings,” said Laura.
“I know.”
The first liberty boat to arrive at the pier was full of little boys, who looked bedraggled but happy as they hauled their duffel bags off the boat and threw themselves into their mothers’ arms.
I felt for Laura, watching Mary Lou and Beverly and a bunch of other women gush over their sons.
She wanted to be a mother so badly, and the reunions unfolding in front of us made the whole enterprise seem pretty great.
Well, except for Carla’s kid, Kevin, who had come home with a busted lip and his arm in a sling.
When Carla looked to her husband for answers, he just shook his head and said, “Don’t ask. ”
Paul and Bobby were on the second boat. They’d barely disembarked when Laura gave Bobby a big, exaggerated wave, hopped off the hood of the car, and did a fifty-yard dash into his outstretched arms. The way she was carrying on, you’d have thought he’d been deployed to a battle zone for the better part of a year and not the Med for the better part of a fortnight.
I moved a little slower. When I reached Paul’s side, I gave him a quick peck on the lips, then made a big deal out of pushing my hair, which was whipping around in the wind, out of my eyes. “How was everything?” I asked in a tentative voice I didn’t recognize.
I suppose I felt guilty about running around with Teo behind his back, but I think the bigger issue was we’d been married such a short time that, in ten days, I’d already sort of forgotten the natural ebb and flow of our conversation, the way we fit into each other’s arms, even the taste of his kiss.
Paul apparently had not forgotten anything.
As soon as we were in the Chevelle, he pulled me onto his lap and pushed my mouth open with his tongue. I kissed him back and in no time at all felt him slide a finger inside my underwear.
“Hey,” I said in surprise.
“I am so fucking horny,” he growled. “I want to be inside you right now.”
For the sake of his career and my dignity, I moved off him, slid behind the wheel of the car, and put the key in the ignition. “How about I get us home first?” I whispered, and Paul didn’t say anything, only reached for my hand and rubbed it against the bulge in his pants.
This was all well and good until I had to shift gears. “I need my hand back,” I said as I pulled into traffic, and Paul relinquished it, briefly, then unzipped his pants and released his anatomy from the stranglehold of his briefs.
“I am so hard right now,” he said as he stroked himself.
I glanced over at his lap. He wasn’t wrong. “Tell that to the Carabinieri when they pull us over.”
“No one can see,” said Paul softly as he reached for my hand once more. This time he folded it around the pink shaft of his penis and moved it up and down until I gave up and began to do it for him.
On the drive home, there was a small turnoff, just a dirt road that led up into the hills. “Pull over,” Paul said, and because he was in a compromised position, I did as he asked.
“Am I going to be able to turn around?” I said as I navigated the narrow lane, but Paul didn’t care.
He had begun touching himself again, and as soon as the car was in park, he told me to get on top of him.
I looked behind us at the Via Padule, where the occasional car zipped by. “What if someone comes?”
“No one’s coming,” said Paul.
“Someone could.”
“For the love of God, Eileen. I’m dying.” His voice was practically a whimper. “Take off your shorts and get over here.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex. I did. But I could see this plan’s flaws. For one thing, we had no idea who lived at the end of the road and how often they made use of it. For another, my shorts—once removed—would be impossible to get back into in a hurry.
There was a third, more pressing concern. “My diaphragm’s at home.”
“Just let me put it in for a minute,” he said, and I smiled in spite of myself.
“A minute, huh?”
He got the joke. “Maybe less if you keep teasing me like this.” He reached for my hand, guiding it back to his penis.
“Paul,” I whispered in a treacly sweet voice I barely recognized. “Remember what we talked about?”
He wrapped his own hand around mine and started to move them in tandem. “Remind me.”
“Not getting pregnant?”
“Right,” he said, but his eyes were closed, and he was in another world. “How about just a little pregnant?”
“Not funny.”
“I promise I’ll pull out.”
“You will not,” I said, and he held up three fingers.
“Scout’s honor.”
The whole time we were talking, our hands were moving in a steady rhythm, slowly at first, and then faster, until eventually, I didn’t have to bother making the case for not having intercourse.
Paul let out a sharp gasp and came in his hand, and while he cleaned himself up, I focused extra hard on reversing down the narrow dirt road so I wouldn’t have to think too deeply about how this reunion hadn’t been exactly what I’d had in mind.