All Characters In This Story Are 18+ Years Old
Saturday, December 22, 1962
At six a.m., eighteen-year-old Barney Barnes ran naked down the hall from his mother's double bed to his own bedroom to shut off his clanging Westclox Baby Ben alarm clock. At that very moment, next door in her Westport, Connecticut home, thirty-seven-year-old Roberta Maxon stood in her shower with her head tipped back and her eyes closed. She luxuriated as pleasantly warm water sprayed onto her suprasternal notch and sent rushing rivers down her mature 37-26-37 frame. Running in the deep valley between her D-cup breasts, then over her slight matronly pot to her neatly trimmed dense copper bush, they rinsed away the last clumps of cum left there by Barney when he vigorously fucked her eight hours ago.
Once again her relaxed mind sent her back to the eve of her wedding to her first husband, Paul, in February 1944, when she was eighteen, he was nearly twenty, and she gave up her virginity to him a day early. They had partied together with his twin, Phil, who would become her second husband after Paul was killed in the horror at Hoengsong during the Korean War. After playing Chinese Checkers and drinking whiskey, Paul had helped his nearly passed out brother back to their room while she, herself fuzzy-headed, undressed and went to bed. Then, half an hour later, Paul had showed up at her door for a good-night kiss.
Paul had pressed his case as he pressed his body against Roberta's and one thing had led to another. They made love; through the night and well into the morning. Willingly, she joyfully surrendered everything to him, multiple times in multiple ways, and gloriously came, with him inside her, each time. She thought then, as now, "So what if they reversed the normal order of events and had their wedding night before their wedding? As Paul had said, it was 'Wartime, Baby.'"
But last night, after she let Barney out the front door at midnight, and Roberta was warming herself in front of the dying fire in her family room's flagstone hearth, she remembered, in vivid detail, that special Valentine's Day weekend for the first time in eighteen years. Certain resurrected oddities challenged her modern beliefs. Too tired to think, she had shunted the haunts aside and gone to bed. Now, clear-headed and wide awake, she brought them forward for closer review.
Roberta lifted her right hand to her left tit and covered her beating heart. She thought about the imbedded overlooked truth in her words when she had quipped in the Ayer, Massachusetts diner so many years ago, "You're so funny, Phil. You two are so much the same, that if you aren't dressed differently, even I can't tell you apart!"
Re-imagining her deep post-coital satisfaction from her impromptu pre-bridal defloration and the several subsequent energetic fucks with Paul that fateful Friday, Roberta suddenly wondered, "What if it wasn't Paul? What if it was Phil and she simply did not know?" Still holding her breast, she bladed her left fingers through her wet, partly curly light auburn shag hairdo while she focused her thoughts on her actual wedding day: Saturday, February 13th.
Roberta had wakened, alone, in the Excelsior Hotel Room 212 feeling more alive than she ever had in her young years. Paul must have left her sometime during the night, but she had been so fucked out that she could not say when that might have been. The twins had left a note on her door saying they were breakfasting at the diner and would wait for her there. After her morning toilet, all dressed and made-up fresh, she met them and Phil filled everyone in on the timing he had arranged with the Justice of the Peace.
Light-hearted and gay, the trio had happily prowled the streets of Ayer, enjoying what little there was to do during the war years. After the J.P. officially announced Paul and Roberta 'man-and-wife', Phil discreetly excused himself to go bowling or something. Then, back at the hotel, Paul gallantly lifted his new bride, carried her over the threshold and stood her before him while he kicked Room 212's door solidly closed with his heel. They grinned stupidly at each other while both of them wondered what would happen next, and who should make the first move.
Roberta shook her wet hair, then took up her washcloth and soap. As she lazily began rubbing her front, she thought, "That was the first strange thing: Paul seemed so shy; so hesitant. Certainly not the brash confident man he was the night before. Why did I not think that was peculiar?"
While the clock on the dresser ticked like thunder and the tension between the newlyweds built like a Kansas electrical storm, Roberta said to her husband, expectantly, "Well, Paul, here we are, married and alone together at last." Having broken the silence, she turned to the closet, then put her blue wool beret on the hat shelf and hung up her salt-and-pepper tweed winter coat. He stepped up beside her, tossed his olive barracks cap up beside her beret and likewise put his Army greatcoat on a hanger, too.
With those small tasks done, it should have followed easily for them to disrobe. But again, as she looked back on it, Roberta remembered how painstakingly slow they had done it. Almost as if he was embarrassed, Paul plucked at his tunic buttons. His demeanor was catching. Suddenly, she had been in no more a hurry than he to shed her burgundy wool suitcoat and reveal her underlying lingerie, but she recalled, she had then chalked it up as anti-climactic after their rollicking night before.
Eventually, both Paul and Roberta confronted each other in their most basic clothes. He stood straight in his white ribbed cotton tank undershirt and snowy cotton boxers, just as she had seen him previously. She too, stood again in her white rayon slip, with the difference being that today her soft wireless bra, frilly French knickers, ivory garter belt and fifteen-denier/fifty-four gauge nude nylons were still on her person, beneath the slip, rather than draped in plain view on the chairback. His eyes widened noticeably as he looked upon her; she saw that his posture was not the only thing about him that was stiff and erect.
