by LSF Publications
by Jessica Kosciuszko
It was raining when Lola opened her eyes, and beyond the window the coast and sky were not their eponymous azure but a navy-tinted grey. The sheets felt different under her skin. His absence was tangible, emphasized by the scent that clung to the pillow beside hers. Lola waited for some sentiment to wash over her - relief, celebration, regret - and felt only a happy languor.
The door from the sitting room, with its view of the ancient cathedral, opened quietly into the bedroom, and Ron filled the doorway, a tray of breakfast in his hands. Lola smiled, and at the sight a lingering solemnity fled his face, the corners of his green eyes crinkling slightly.
"Good morning," he said in that voice she still found almost incongruously low. As he sat on the bed, handing Lola a bowl of chocolate and adding milk to his own bowl of coffee, the towel around his waist slid, and he didn't stop its fall. Lola let her eyes roam, from the droplets of water from the shower still clinging to the scruff on his face, which he always let grow on leave, and downwards. She'd been naked, or very nearly so, around him before, but always he'd stayed mostly dressed, a safeguard for his own self-control, since Lola so thoroughly abandoned hers.
Gazing at him, his wiry muscles under tanned skin and sandy hair, she absently sipped the chocolate, only to be reminded that morning chocolate in France was not the same as hot chocolate in Canada. So her first words to Ron, on that momentous morning, were "Ugh, where's the sugar?"
"You don't need it."
"They haven't sweetened this enough, it's hardly chocolate," she protested. He put his coffee down on the bedside table and moved toward her, and her body reflexively arched against him, but he didn't touch her, reaching for her bowl instead.
"It is perfectly chocolate, chere Lola. Children and monkeys and dogs will eat anything that's sweetened enough, even poison. But the real pleasure comes when you move into other dimensions." Ron took her finger and dipped it into the chocolate, brought it to his mouth. "If you taste everything" - he bit her fingertip, almost hard enough to hurt - "and feel everything" - he ran his tongue around her, licking off the chocolate, sucking gently - "it's a completely different experience."
She pulled her finger back and replaced it with her mouth, tasting the rich, bitter chocolate from her bowl that graced his lips.
"It's not good in spite of the bitterness," he whispered. "It's good because of the bitterness." And they both knew that, even though the night before he had become her first lover, tonight would be an even more profound first time.
My name is not Lola, of course, except when he is with me. My mother wanted all her daughters to have names with gravitas. "Could you imagine: this is Justice Sherri Landau?" she sniffed, when I asked why I couldn't have been one of the endless Jennis or Candis or Tammis whose made-to-be-dotted-with-flowers names I coveted.
He calls me that because he met me when I was two weeks shy of 16. It was in Paris, which is in part why that first time, almost four years later, was also in France. My grandfather was a diplomat posted there, and I was visiting over spring break, and accompanied my grandparents to a formal dinner. Ron had served with the American military liaison at the event, but was not in uniform that night. Talking on a balcony on the second floor of the embassy after dinner, I let slip a reference to high school. It wasn't that I had lied about my age earlier, exactly, but I knew, in the chic Parisian sheath dress my grandmother had bought me, and the heels I wasn't really supposed to own, I looked like a 20 year old, not a child too young to drive.
"Jesus," he said, looking equally amused and appalled. "I've found my very own Lolita."
"I am not 12, thank you," I said tartly, genuinely offended, which made him laugh. He told me later he'd never thought to meet someone so young who'd read the book; thank heaven for my parents' uncensored bookshelves, and my own prurient determination to read every book that ought to have been forbidden.
Perhaps Lolita was too on the nose even for Ron, who cares less for the opinions of people around him than anyone I've ever known. But I became from then on, in private, Lola. In the letters we wrote, before ubiquitous email, he addressed the envelope using my full name - the one with gravitas - but the letters within always began with "chere Lola," and it was the letters, not the envelopes, that were really meant to reach me.
What do I call him? To the few friends with whom I discuss him, he's the Soldier, occasionally My Soldier. Even his name I keep private. I have no pet name for him. Ronald suits him, as does its diminutive; it's old fashioned and solid and somewhat unusual, Scottish for 'regal' and Hebrew for 'song.' When we speak in French, as we did a bit that evening, as we sometimes do still, he's the only person to whom I say 'tu' - thou, the French second person singular that denotes intimacy, familiarity - rather than the formal 'vous.' In some company, it's seen as excessively formal - unfriendly, even - to use 'vous' among peers, but I can't bring myself to speak to, or think of, anyone else as 'tu,' as 'thou.'
After breakfast they drove west, down the narrow walled road that led from the hilltop village to the autoroute that paralleled the Mediterranean. Ron had chosen a seafood restaurant in Arles for lunch, and then they watched the wild silver Camargue horses run through the saltwater marshes, where Lola realized finally what had changed in her: it wasn't like gaining an extra sense, but simply a heightening, a higher definition, to her existing senses. They spent the afternoon exploring the ruins of Aigues-Mortes, the cathedrals and citadel walls, all the while catching up on the changes in their lives since their last meeting, a year and a half in the past.
And throughout, he would kiss her, touch her, just enough to arouse, never to gratify. It was utterly unlike the night before, which had been undiluted pleasure, with him giving her everything while she revelled in it, and it was destabilizing and titillating at once. He continued the pattern on the drive back to the hotel in Cagnes, resting his right hand, when not shifting, at the top of her thigh, the pulling away if she tried to manoeuvre it higher by squirming against him.
When they reached their room, well after dark, Lola felt her knees were unsteady from longing and desire.
"Late dinner?" Ron suggested, and she shook her head helplessly.
"I can't. Let's eat after." When she saw him smile, she thought for a second he'd insist on going out to dinner right then, just to keep up the streak of faint cruelty that had held her in a state of lust all afternoon. She couldn't handle it, Lola knew; almost queasy from arousal and anticipation, she'd never keep a bite down. Last night she'd trusted Ron not to hurt her, and tonight she was trusting him to hurt her perfectly, a far greater leap of faith. If the attraction between them consummated the night before had begun with a kiss the night they'd met, then what they were about to do had been imminent almost as long, and she couldn't bear another minute of delay.
"Please," she said, her voice almost a whimper, and saw Ron reach his breaking point. She knew what his desire looked like, by then, and the sound of her begging him brought that look to his eyes.
"You're sure?" he asked, just as he had the night before.
"Please," she begged again. "I can't wait any more; I need to know what it's like."
When he turned to chain the door, she knew the wait was over.
Ron's letters have always been surprisingly clean. It's no surprise they started out this way, given the consequences that could result if my parents had intercepted anything explicit. But now, almost two decades later, he's the same. He exposes parts of himself, when he writes, that astonish me and humble me, telling me the thoughts he can share with few others, none of whom are deployed with him, and I've learned a great deal about who he is, how he became the man he is today, and who he wants to become, from his letters. But ultimately, almost nothing he writes would be out of line in a conversation at a restaurant. What we do in private, he references only obliquely, if at all. The spanking we talk about only in person. I asked him about this, once.
"You're so confused by what you want that there is no point writing about it," he told me. "You'll write what you think you ought to say, or what you think I want to hear, not the truth. I learn more from the look on your face, or the way your breathing changes, than I ever will from your words."
He's not wrong.
He brought it up, briefly, years earlier, when a chance reaction had betrayed this preoccupation of mine, when he'd guessed we were kindred in this way, too. I was sitting on his lap, my head leaning back on him.
"Tell me, Lola," he asked, in the middle of a conversation about the places he'd traveled and I hoped to see, "how long have you known that spanking turns you on?"
I looked away, feeling terrified and offended at once. "That's sick," I blurted. "Who would want somebody to hurt them on purpose?" I meant every word, not that it answered his question.
"It doesn't have to make sense to be what you want," he said. "And there is nothing wrong with being aroused by it. Or not. No wrong answers, here."
I stayed silent, grateful he couldn't look me in the eye. Then I realized Ron could see me in the mirror across the room, and almost closed my eyes to avoid his gaze, to avoid this conversation. I hate to lie and am a terrible liar; to this day I don't know if either fact caused the other, but I rarely try to deceive anybody. And I've never once tried to lie to Ron, in part because I learned that night he can read me even when I don't say a word.
"Have you ever been spanked?" he asked. I shook my head slightly, glancing away from his reflection.
"Do you imagine it?" I didn't answer. In retrospect, my mouth went dry at the question and I swallowed, my face flushing even more, so it said nothing about his skill at interrogation that he knew it was true, but at the time I felt stripped naked, even with all my clothes on.
"Every night?" I did close my eyes then, and couldn't stop from physically squirming, the question made me so jumpy, because yes, almost every night I found my thoughts drifting toward images of me over a knee, being spanked, or bent over a perfectly positioned chair, a hand or a ruler or a hairbrush smacking into me.
"For how long?" I shook my head then; I couldn't bear to answer, and kept my eyes closed, almost wishing myself somewhere else, so uncomfortable was I with the conversation. But the stillness dragged on and on.
"For as long as I can remember," I admitted at last, so softly I could hardly hear myself.
"Of course," he murmured.
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