** Just a reminder that this story is already in the can and each of the chapters has already been posted.
I hope that it's enjoyed. 0_o
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Long after the point at which they'd both turned to prunes, they walked past the cascade again and back to the room with the fire pit. Silke found that after the hot bathwater, the trip through the coolness didn't even affect her. The table now had two place settings and there were stoneware pots waiting for them.
"Our shadowy well-wishers?" she asked as they sat down to eat.
Tatsuya laughed and nodded, "Yes."
"I don't understand," she said.
"I'm not all that sure that I do," he laughed, "I think that our meeting was set up in some way, though I'm not certain of it yet."
He looked at her, "I'm not about to question it too much, but I will find out eventually, now that I have a pair of suspects in mind. I'll tell you what I learn since we seem to want to be stuck together, but so far, this is way out of the ordinary for either of them -- especially my aunt. They told me that they knew that I'd bring you here. That she'd have no problem with that alone bends my brain a little."
She paused and set her chopsticks down for a moment. "If you don't think that it might break the spell," she said with a little smile, "I'd like so much to know who it is that I've made love with today."
"I'm a little bit of a lost child here," he said without a hint of sadness, "Aside from his own heritage in the family, my father was a pilot who was hired for a job because of his skill at getting into and out of small, mountainous landing strips flying small to medium-sized transports. He was recruited in a rather strange way -- even by his standards - by an American. The money was far better than good enough to draw him.
I ought to point out that he wasn't in it for personal gain so much as he was interested in the return to his family. That, and the challenges which that sort of work presented to him every day on every flight. It was work for an airline which he'd heard very little of before. I don't think that he ever put it together, who he was really working for, but I doubt that the knowledge would have stopped him.
My mother was an American who worked for that company. She'd just started working for them in the states and worked her way up from selling tickets at her first posting in Taiwan. It was years before she learned who they really were. She wore a lot of hats there at the company offices, from clerical work to teaching the children of the American families who worked there. The company had large facilities and shared space with the U.S. Air Force on the Udorn base in Thailand.
To hear her tell of it, they fell for each other within about five minutes while she helped him with his paperwork as he was hired on. He began flying the same day, and they were together whenever they could manage it. I'm told that they lived every second of a great love between them. When they managed to work things out for a vacation, my father brought her here. They were married in these mountains and she was the first person outside of my family to be allowed to come to this place.
I was born a year or so afterward. By accident of birth, I'm Thai, and I learned the language from our housekeeper. I was about five when my father was shot down over the Plain of Jars in Laos. My mother quit her job and we came here where she was welcomed by the family that she was now a part of. I guess that she worked through her grief with their help and we moved to the states. Because I was the dependent of a pair of employees of a company set up by an American intelligence agency, I was given citizenship because of my mother's, since everything in Thailand was coming to an end as the airline was dismantled. I spent my childhood shuffling back and forth because she wanted me to know about my heritage and make the most of both cultures."
Tatsuya looked at the flames of the fire for a moment. "I was here the summer that I turned eighteen when I was told that my mother had been killed in a car accident. I flew back with my uncle and he helped me to make sense of everything that I needed to do. I found that with my mother's passing, a lot of my American family didn't really care all that much about me. I sold everything and came back here."
He looked around for a moment before he turned to Silke with a smile, "I stayed right here for almost a year, learning from my uncle. After that, I used some of my money and went to university in the States, working part-time jobs to keep myself alive so that I didn't need to use any more money than I needed to. Whenever I had time, I flew back. Then I went to school here, working at the family businesses on the side. We produce man-machine interfaces, speech recognition firmware and like that."
He smiled at her, "There's a bit more, but it's not important, really. The most important thing is that I'm a bit of an oddball here and in America. But I'm accepted more here, though I can survive easily in either place. I own a martial arts school in Maryland. Sometimes I compete in tournaments, and if I feel like it, I sometimes compete in Mixed Martial Arts competitions as well, though I never take those as seriously. They're more for fun to me. I can also say that you're not the only one who has failed at marriage, either."
They decided in a mutual way to leave their stories for the moment, and neither one of them ever minded the silence which fell between them now and then as long as they touched somewhere.
"Does your name have a literal meaning?" he asked.
"Yes," he heard her soft reply from under his jaw, "It is a form of Cecilia. Does your name mean anything?"
He chuckled, "I guess that it's either presumptuous of just bloody hopeful, but it means 'Dragon To Be.' Are you suitably impressed?"
"Mm-hmm," she sighed as she sucked one of his nipples against her teeth to make him gasp.
After the meal, he led her to his bed and they began it again. Silke wasn't sure just when it happened, but she became absolutely certain that she could love Tatsuya forever in his own right. This was nothing like anything that she'd ever experienced and she wanted to have him against her now more than anything. It seemed to be turning into a need. She couldn't help herself once and said what she felt in the middle of their passion -- breaking what was perhaps the oldest rule in the book.
Silke found that she'd astounded herself by saying it. She was certain that she'd have denied it even if she'd asked herself beforehand. Now that the echoes of her cry were all that was left in her mind, she realized that she did feel that way -- though it made no sense to her.
Then again, she thought, this whole long day was like nothing that she'd ever, ...
She knew it as soon as it was out of her, and he stopped instantly to stare into her eyes for a long moment. Silke once again thought that she'd ruined everything, but she hadn't been able to keep the emotion inside of herself.
Tatsuya slowly smiled and shook his head. "This isn't possible," he said, "No one has ever said something like that to me at a time like this and meant anything more than that they were feeling pretty good at the moment. But I can feel that you only wish for a more powerful way to say it, don't you?"
"But, ... "she felt her features take on a look as though she was a young doe who was caught in the beams of a car's headlights, "but I said it in German."
