Arthur Clarke - Cradle

His hands trembled a little as he opened the package. It was a plain white box. Inside was a silver cigarette lighter simple but handsome, with the initials VW engraved on the outside at the bottom. His heart raced. So she does feel it too. Commander Winters felt a powerful burst of lust in his groin. Now he was imagining a scene no more than three or four hours in the future. He was taking Tiffani home and they were kissing at her front door. “Would you like to come in,” she would say…

“I feel pretty… oh so pretty… I feel pretty and witty and gay…” He heard her singing as she came down the hall. She pushed open the door to his dressing room and twirled around. Tiffani’s hair was stacked high on her head showing the lines of her elegant neck. The gold filigree along the top of the comb that the commander had given her blended in perfectly with the rich red and brown of her hair. Her dress was white, low cut, with her shoulders exposed except for tiny straps in the corners.

“Well?” she said with a big and eager smile. She turned around again. “What do you think?”

“You look beautiful, Tiffani,” he replied. He stared at her with such intensity that she blushed.

“Oh, Vernon,” she sighed, now changing her mood, “the combs are wonderful.” She pulled a cigarette from his pack on the dresser table and lit it herself with his new lighter. She took a deep drag, her eyes fixed on his, and put the cigarette down in the ashtray. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she murmured.

She walked over to him and put her hands in his. “It’s already been another wonderful evening.” She put her left hand behind his head and reached up to kiss him. His heart was about to explode within his body. She could feel his arousal as her lips nestled softly against his. She pulled his head down to meet hers and subtly increased the pressure of her kiss. At length he put his arms around her and pressed her body against his.

Commander Winters thought he was going to drown in the pleasure of that kiss. Never had he felt such longing. He was certain he would gladly die in the morning if he could just continue to kiss her all night first. For a moment, as he let himself experience fully the rush of joy and love and lust, all his worries and despair were pushed aside. He wanted to wrap himself around Tiffani, somehow zip her inside his skin, and close out everything else in the universe.

Melvin and Marc had come to the dressing room to find the commander. They had not approached with stealth and were not even being especially quiet, but neither Tiffani nor Commander Winters heard them walk up. The two men could see the pair kissing through the open dressing room door. They looked at each other and reached out instinctively to touch hands for an instant. From their own experience they knew about the difficulty of love affairs outside the accepted norm.

Tiffani and Winters finally broke the kiss and she put her head against his chest. Her back was to the door. Winters opened his eyes and saw Melvin and Marc standing there in front of him. He blanched, but the director made a gesture with his hands that said, “It’s all right. It’s your business, not ours.”

Melvin and Marc considerately waited several seconds so that it would look as if they had not arrived until after the kiss. The commander patted Tiffani on the shoulder and turned her around in a fatherly manner. “Great show, Commander,” Melvin said as he walked into the room. “And another super performance from you too, young lady.” He paused. Marc smiled his compliments and Tiffani unconsciously straightened out her dress. “There’s a Lieutenant Todd waiting outside for you, Commander,” Melvin added. “He says it’s urgent. He asked me to tell you to hurry.”

Winters face was creased with wrinkles. What in the world is he doing here? he thought. It’s after ten o’clock on a Saturday night. “Thanks, Melvin,” he answered. “Tell him I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

The director and his friend turned and left the dressing room. Tiffani reached over for the lit cigarette, whose ash had grown so long it had nearly fallen out of the ashtray. She inhaled and handed it to Winters. “Did they see us kissing?” she asked anxiously.

“No,” lied Winters. But already he was realizing how untenable his fantasy was. Precious Tiffani, he thought. My teenage lover. We were lucky. But we cannot kid ourselves. We will be seen eventually. He looked into her eyes and saw the flame of adolescent passion. Again he felt the surge in his loins. He reached down and pulled her forcefully to him. And if the wrong person sees us, he thought as his lips tingled with her kiss, there is no limit to my risk.

Winters threw his cigarette down on the ground and stomped it out. He shook his head in disbelief. “You are telling me that you have taken those three into custody? And you’re holding them at the base?”

Lieutenant Todd was confused. “But sir, don’t you understand? We have an entire set of photographs. In three of them you can clearly see the missile. And there are other pictures that show the black guy in some kind of underwater structure down there in the ocean. Just as I had guessed. What more could we possibly need? We also caught them, red-handed no less, coming back from a dive with fifty pounds of gold bars in their backpacks. Fifty pounds!”

Commander Winters turned around and went back in the theater. “Go back to the base, Lieutenant,” he said disgustedly. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

It was apparent that Melvin and Marc were just waiting for Tiffani and the commander before they locked up the theater and went to the party. “Can you take her over, Melvin?” he asked. “There’s a big mess out at the base tonight and it looks as if I will have to straighten it out.” The conversation with Todd had been sobering for Winters on at least two levels. First, it had reminded him that there was a real world out there, outside of the theater, a world that would not look kindly on a forty-three-year-old Navy commander having a sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old high school student. Secondly, Todd’s astonishing announcement that he had indeed detained three civilians, one of whom was a well-known reporter, jolted the commander into realizing that his preoccupation with Tiffani had affected his work. I should never have let this thing get so far out of control, he thought. From here on out that lieutenant makes no move that I don’t personally approve.

“I’m sorry, Tiffani,” he said in a fatherly voice. He gave her an ambiguous hug and a light kiss on the top of her head. “I’ll come to the party as soon as I can.”

“Hurry or you’ll miss the champagne,” Tiffani said with a smile. Melvin turned off the lights in the theater. The four of them walked out the door.

Winters had parked down the street almost a block away. He waved to Tiffani as she climbed into Melvin’s car. I wonder if you will ever know, young lady, he thought. Know how close I came tonight to throwing everything away. In his mind’s eye it was twenty-four years before, on a cold night outside of Philadelphia, and he had just gone berserk and virtually raped Joanna Carr. Winters started his Pontiac and eased into the street. It would be so easy, he thought. Just one time to forget the rules and constraints. To dive into the water without looking first. He remembered his pact with God after he had spent the night with Joanna. So You kept Your part of the bargain. I guess And I became an officer and a gentleman. And a killer.

He winced. He turned the car past the swank Miyako Gardens and headed for the base. With great effort he forced himself to stop thinking about Tiffani and Joanna and sex. It’s not enough that I have this trial with Tiffani. At the same time I am assigned a redneck lieutenant who runs roughshod over civilians in his attempt to prove some cockamamie…