“You can share mine.”
Did she say share? he thought, quickly agreeing. “But what about you?”
“I was in the Girl Guides,” she replied, turning her back, scrunching her flowing hair into a swimming cap that appeared from nowhere, and stripping off to reveal a slinky black costume that took on a silky sheen in the bright moonlight.
Bliss stood rock still, stunned almost to tears by the beauty of her body, entranced by her strong, almost masculine shoulders, her smoothly curvaceous waist and her firm boyish bottom. Then she turned and the swell of her full breasts took his breath away.
“Ready?” she asked, and he fought off the rest of his clothes in an instant. “Stay close,” she added, taking his hand, her eyes fixed firmly ahead on the dark horizon. “And stop staring – I’m sure you’ve seen a swimsuit before.”
He hesitated apprehensively at the water’s edge and Samantha egged him on with a tug, “C’mon, it’s quite warm.”
But it wasn’t the water holding him back – the nightmarish fleet of death ships still floated in the back of his mind and he half expected to see them, and their grisly immortal cargoes, sailing in from the shadowy distance. But the horizon was clear, the sea had stilled and the ghosts of the dead servicemen had returned to their watery graves for another year. It was D-day plus 3, in the timelessness of the hereafter, and the grim reaper had moved on to gather lost souls from the beaches and fields of Normandy.
“D-Day plus 3,” Bliss mused to himself, his thoughts miles and years away – on the other side of the Channel with a pretty young Englishwoman, brazening her way across no-man’s land on a liberated bicycle, to deliver a baby into the reaper’s hands.
“Dave ...” called Samantha with alarm, breaking him out of his catalepsy. “You are in a bad way, aren’t you?”
“Sorry,” he said, clearing his mind and walking forward until the coldness of the water squeezed the air out of his lungs. Samantha sensed the contraction in his hand. “Just relax, Dave – breathe normally, you’ll get used to it in a moment.”
“Are you sure?” he squeaked, wondering if his testicles would ever recover.
Once fully in the water, the anonymity of darkness and the reassurance of her firm grasp dissolved his inhibitions and he bared his soul. It only took a few minutes: Maggie Thatcher’s botched bank job; Mandy and her unborn baby; the killer’s threats in court; the letters, phone calls and bomb; the blue Volvo; the funny little man delving through the hotel register and the final, spine-tingling message on the computer.
She said little, listened well, hummed knowingly at appropriate intervals, and clearly believed every word. “Oh, Dave ... you should’ve told me before,” she said without censure, then queried, “Do you think that man we chased last night was him as well?”
“I thought so at first, that’s why I told you to stay in the car – not that you listened. Afterwards I realised he was probably just a local car thief sussing out the car park for a worthy motor.”
He questioned himself later, asking why he had confided in someone who may have mocked his apparent timidity or blabbed to his colleagues. And yet, instinctively, he’d known she would do neither. Anyway, he rationalised, had he not cornered himself by his actions. Wouldn’t it be somewhat disingenuous to swim stark naked with someone late at night on an isolated beach and later claim that you wouldn’t have trusted them to share a Mars bar let alone a personal secret?
As they stepped from the water Bliss hesitated and turned to give her an appreciative kiss, but she dodged his advance and ran up the beach to grab a towel.
“Lay down,” she said, spreading the towel over the blanket.
“Well ... ”
“Stop arguing, Dave, you’re in need of serious help.”
He lay, face down, and felt himself sinking into the soft blanket as he listened to the hypnotic rhythm of wavelets fizzling into the sand. Then she laid her sea-softened fingers on his shoulders and firmly massaged his rigid muscles until the tension dissolved and her fingers felt like warm tendrils playing deep inside him.
“That’s wonderful,” he sighed, as her hands inched down his spine, one vertebrae at a time, working their way into the small of his back. And his pulse raced with pleasure as she pushed even lower.
“Turn over,” she whispered when she reached his feet.
“Do I have to?”
“Don’t worry – I won’t bite.”
“That isn’t what I was worried about exactly.”
“Oh – I see ... Well, I won’t look. Honestly.”
He turned, eyes closed and felt her fingers dancing on his chest, then slipping sensuously over his stomach and down his thighs. This isn’t happening, he cautioned himself. You’ll wake in a minute and discover the psychiatrist was right – it’s all a delusion.
The hands stopped moments before his mind would have burst in ecstasy and he felt her hair brushing his face as she leant over him, her fingers tracing his eyebrows – then the warmth of her lips on his mouth, and the tip of her tongue running along the length of his teeth.
“Oh Samantha,” he breathed, and tried to raise his arms to embrace her, but found them pinioned to the sand by a pair of strong hands. Then she nuzzled her wet lips to his ear, “That’s better, Dave – you can get dressed now.”
With his arms freed he reached out to clasp her but she twisted away and sat looking out over the sea. “Don’t be impatient, Dave,” she said over her shoulder. “You haven’t even bought me dinner yet.”
“You’re gorgeous, Samantha. I’d really like to make love with you.”
“But you already have,” she replied, leaving him questioning his memory.
“Did I miss something?”
“Close your eyes again,” she commanded, squirming back across the sand to gently stroke his forehead, and he felt the warmth of her breath on his face as her soft sing-song voice played in his ears. “Love is what happens in here, Dave – in your mind,” she whispered. “Surely you saw me slide out of my bathing suit: you must’ve seen my boobs when they slipped free – wasn’t that your tongue ...?”
“Mmmm – You were very good, Dave,” she continued after a pause, her deep breathing soothing him hypnotically. “And wasn’t that your hand between my thighs,” she went on, sighing breathlessly in his ear. “And your finger playing a tune on my violin ... I could feel it ... gentle but firm; soft yet hard ... And couldn’t you feel yourself inside me – throbbing and pulsing ... It was wonderful, Dave ... Oh, so big; so strong; so ... Mmmm ... Didn’t you hear the angels singing and the trumpets sounding?” He smiled at the sensual imagery and she kissed him lusciously. “You see, we did make love,” she breathed softly into his mouth. “And the nicest thing is we could do it all over again the next time.”
Opening his eyes, half afraid she was an illusion, he found himself staring straight into hers. “Do you mean that – a next time?” he asked. “Do you mean – for real?”
“I don’t think you’ve been listening,” she said, looking him closely in the eye and gently tapping his temple. “What’s real is what’s in here, Dave – what you believe – what your mind tells you is the truth.”
“But what about you?”
“It was good for me too,” she laughed.
“Are you teasing me, Ms. Holingsworth?”
“Maybe,” she laughed. “Or maybe you’re teasing yourself.”
“How did you do that?” he asked as