Jennifer Greene - Conquer the Memories

Craig’s eyes darkened. The tightening in his loins was familiar. A certain loneliness ached inside him for the intimate touch of her, yet an unfathomable bleakness etched sudden tension on his features. Thankfully, neither his wife nor his mother-in-law noticed.

“Have we got it all?” June asked. “Sonia, you sweetheart, you didn’t have to bring a pie.” She gave her daughter an impish grin. “And now we’ll have to hide it. If your father catches even a whiff of lemon meringue, you know there won’t be a bite left by dinnertime.”

“I almost made two.” Sonia let out a delighted burst of laughter as two small children came barreling toward her from the long slope of the yard. Rapidly she filled her mother’s hands, freeing her own just in time to catch two curly towheads, neither much bigger than knee-high.

“Sonie, go swim! Sonie, go swim!”

“They’ve been driving Arlene nuts, waiting for you two to get here,” June said dryly.

“Do my sister good,” Sonia announced. “Where’s Uncle Craig?” she asked the youngsters. “Are we going to give him a good dunking in the water?”

Her niece and nephew launched themselves at Craig then, and he carried one child under each of his arms toward the house, both giggling and menacing him with dire threats as soon as they got him in the pool. He threatened them right back, which only made them giggle harder.

They took care of the food, changed into their bathing suits and greeted the other guests. Arlene fussed for a minute over whether the little ones should be forced to take naps and was hooted down. In the melee of noise and confusion, Sonia found her father. Stephen Rawlings was standing on the front porch with a group of ranchers, holding a glass of lemonade, his weathered face squinting in the sun. He was tall, and his hair was gray these days; a paunch was developing around his middle. And Sonia probably loved him more than life. She collected a kiss and quick squeeze before her husband yelled for her.

“What are we going to do with these urchins now?” he demanded ominously, referring to the one towhead draped over his shoulders and the other hanging upside down in his arms.

For an instant, she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do with the children, but knew precisely what she wanted to do to her husband of the bare brown chest and frayed swimming trunks. Stop that, Sonia. “First, we’re going to throw them in the pool,” she announced, and grabbed one warm, wiggling body away from him. The upside-down one. “And then, you little troublemakers…”

The July sun beat down in increasingly sultry waves; a horse neighed somewhere in the distance; the smells from the barbecue wafted toward them; the pool waters felt like slinky, cool silk on overheated flesh. It was just that kind of day when all the senses were alive and bursting; Sonia started smiling and didn’t stop. First little Johnny swam between her parted legs, then Susie. Sonia’s father dropped pennies into the pool bottom for the children to claim. The children bullied Craig into doing a somersault underwater, and then they played keep-away with a beach ball. Sonia, laughing, loved the feel of the warm, wriggling bodies and quickly snatched hugs from her niece and nephew. She adored them. The little devils both knew it.

When at last Arlene showed up at the side of the pool, Sonia was gasping, shaking her head free of water as she handed over her niece and nephew. “Nap,” she mouthed to her older sister.

“I actually think they will, now,” Arlene whispered back.

“Not them, you fool. Me,” Sonia complained feelingly.

“Want Sonie , ” Susie told her mother belligerently, the sound muffled as a towel buried her head. “Want Uncle Craig.”

“You only want them because they spoil you to absolute bits,” her mother informed her and, with an affectionate grin for Sonia, carried off the two protesting youngsters.

Craig surged up from the water behind her, his arms sliding around her waist as he pulled her back against him. Water suddenly trembled on her skin in the sunlight. She leaned back, eyes closed. Sensuality seemed to be stalking her like a thief in the night. The hardness of his thighs against the backs of hers; the cool, bare skin of his chest rubbing against her spine; the feel of his hands on her flat stomach, barely covered by the simple red maillot…His cheek nuzzled against hers. “I think you want one of those,” he mentioned idly.

She glanced up at the children before they disappeared into the house with her sister. “I do,” she agreed. They hadn’t talked about babies before, not seriously. She had wanted Craig to herself the first years, and then they’d been busy, gallivanting across the country, building their house…She still wanted Craig to herself, but the urge for babies was growing, the need for their own personal exhausting little Hamiltons to worry over and fret about the way Arlene did about her kids.

Sonia turned in Craig’s arms, her eyes level with the column of his throat. Water droplets curled in the damp mat of hair on his chest like diamonds in the sun; his skin was cool and wet, his hair slicked back. The urge to touch him, to rub her breasts against him until they ached and tightened…No one would see, she told herself. And knew darn well that everyone would see.

“Sonia?”

He had beautiful eyes. Sexy eyes, deep and tender and sweet. His finger curled under her chin, lifting it; she could feel the sudden tautness in his body, a kind of waiting silence as his head bent lower, blocking the sun, coming closer…

A neighbor suddenly pitched a ball into the pool, splashing both of them. “Hey, you two! How about a game of volleyball?”

Dinner was absolute chaos, with adults running helter-skelter, kids dropping their plates on the grass, dogs cavorting in search of scraps. Sunburned faces grinned while butter dripped down chins from the roasted sweet corn.

After dinner, the children did their usual vanishing act, undoubtedly to prevent their parents from whisking them home before they’d finished playing. The grownups changed into grown-up clothes and settled on the chaise longues around the pool with glasses of June’s lethal punch. Sonia was stretched out between her mother and sister, holding her second glass of punch, her other hand shielding her eyes against that last brightness of daylight. Craig was standing with a group of ranchers that included her dad.

The sky was filled with puffy clouds, slowly moving across the horizon. Listening absently to her sister’s gossip, Sonia kept seeing whimsical pictures in puffs. One looked like the trunk of an elephant, another distinctly like the face of a man. Another, if she observed it just so, looked exactly like a man and a woman in an embrace…

“Where’d you get your skirt, Sonie?”

Sonia glanced at her sister, then down to her white cotton ankle-length skirt with its hem of embroidered orange flowers. The orange matched her camisole, both whimsical purchases for a summer evening a long time ago. “Marina’s, I think,” she said. “You haven’t said how Matt’s doing.”

“Terrific. I thought at first we’d never get used to living in town, but it’s nice. Having neighbors and stores so close…I miss my morning rides, though.”

Sonia loved her older sister; she really did. Both her mother and sister filled a very special niche in her life. Craig had become her world with their marriage; her priorities had changed, but there was still occasionally the urge to indulge in simple gossip and chitchat, and her sister was an expert at both. At the moment, though, Sonia couldn’t seem to concentrate. She found herself staring at the tiny cubes of ice in her punch glass. Ordinary ice cubes. Two clung together and they looked remarkably like an upturned bottom, naked and smooth.