When Naomi Hatara graduated from high school, she wanted to attend the University of Maryland at College Park, but her parents were urgent about getting her to discontinue the relationship with her high-school boyfriend. It may be that they felt the hulking Robert Hairston represented too great a threat to her virginity and her marriage prospects to a good Japanese boy.
Her parents, if so, did not realize that her chances on the latter were not great -- and they probably never guessed that she had already given Robert the former. She was sent to San Francisco State and to live with her grandmother. Who, as it turned out, was more willing to indulge the girl in such matters than her parents were. All the old woman required was that she date decent and smart men, and she gave them a hard but unbiased screening for that.
But the pressure of studies at college and the strictness of the supervision still meant that Naomi Hatara barely dated during her first year at college. And any more physical activity was reduced to nothing.
The studying came easier, or with more assurance, in her sophomore year, and the regulation of her behavior was also somewhat relaxed. Between those two factors, she dated several fellow students, and early in the year she went all the way with one of them on a dark grassy hill at night. That was on the third date with him, and on the fourth she learned that she really did not know him as well as she thought.
But in the next year she met Lewis Bicking. He was a year or so older than her, but much more mature than the competition in most ways than the couple of years would indicate. She fell for him in a big way, and he was very good for her as well as good in bed.
The problem was, he was also very good in his specialty of ichthyology. He was offered a place at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute for his senior year and the summer before it. The only way they could avoid being parted was for her to marry him, and for several reasons that was not practical. There was no way she could maintain her class schedule while commuting to a college in that area, her parents would not pay for the transfer anyway, and if she dropped out there was no way to guarantee work near Woods Hole and he could not support her.
He suggested marriage to her anyway, while they stayed a continent apart, but Naomi was too timid and not sure that she was ready for that. She was concerned that her appetites would give her too much temptation while he was away -- though she was not certain that she would find anyone else quite as tempting. Still, on their last day together she tried to store up a supply of Lewis to last a while.
So they bid farewell to each other for at least fifteen months -- which then became a full twenty-four when he was given a graduate project. The letters tapered off.
During that time, Naomi dated others, and she made full love to two of them. Yet it seemed to her that no one satisfied her emotionally or even sexually nearly as well. And despite the lack of promises to Lew, she did not feel comfortable about it.
Then a matter of a week or so after her graduation, she came back from a job interview to find a note that Lew was going to be back in San Francisco soon. That and a phone conversation that night reignited all her old emotions and maybe her passions, though that she was not sure of yet. She never asked Lew if he had any women during those two years. (It seemed quite possible he did not; Woods Hole did not have many, and he tended to get intense when he worked.).
He moved back soon after, to an apartment that his brother had found for him. Lew called Naomi on the day that he arrived back in town. He told her that he would like to meet her on the next Saturday, and she agreed.
So on that Saturday, Naomi Hatara put on black chinos, a white blouse, a denim jacket, loafers, and a pair of goggles over her round glasses, and rode her bicycle across town to 1278 Strauss Street.
As she rode, she thought about the warm weekend afternoons they had spent together swimming in the pool at the college and how graceful his body had looked slipping through the water. She thought also about other afternoons and evenings they had spent together and how his graceful body felt in her arms, slipping into her. And she thought most of all about whether they could recapture that, or whether the years had brought too many changes in either or both of them for things ever to be the same. Or was it just a fleeting romance which would now have been long over regardless?
One thing she was sure of as she felt the rhythmic pumping of the bicycle between her legs, over these hills, and that was that the rhythmic pumping of Lewis Bicking between those legs was a thing she missed very greatly. And that she liked the places that he took her a lot more.
Lew Bicking saw her slowly coasting down the street and scanning for house numbers, and he was at the front door of his apartment house as she struggled her bike across the sidewalk. He took the weight from her and led the way up the narrow staircase and into his place. As he did, he thought of the times he had held her weight in his arms, either lifting her for a kiss or lowering her onto his upright penis.
He leaned the bicycle against the wall in one corner and gave Naomi the extended tour, which took only two minutes. He had not had any furniture to move in, and the little he had now was picked up in three days at Goodwill and Salvation Army stores before the apartment was ready for him. This was a kitchen table, four non-matching chairs (good ones, though), two worn sofas, a dresser, a large bed, and an end-table in the bedroom. Also bookshelves and a lot of books, mostly still boxed. The pictures on the walls were brought from his parents' home, where they had been for the last year.
On the other hand, the large living room was covered in a deep off-white carpet, installed and abandoned by the previous tenant. Lew had used a vacuum-cleaner on it, but it badly needed to be thoroughly, maybe professionally, cleaned. It made Lew feel guilty to think about that, so he tried not to.
Naomi, on the other hand, thought it was great even as it was. She took off the goggles (though the glasses she wore were not much smaller) and as she hung them over the handlebars of the bike, she bent to run one hand through the pile. As he watched her, he recalled how it felt to move his fingers through the hair on her head -- and, more gently, through another patch of her hair.
They sat at the kitchen table (in the living room) drinking coffee and nibbling on cheese and cookies, glancing out the window at times, for over an hour. Their eyes were otherwise downcast as they talked, giving each other edited or at least abridged versions of what they had done for the last year. Neither wanted to spend much time looking at the face of the other, because that would make the doubts and indecisions about their old relationship become too sharp. Lew knew only too well what a good look into those solid black eyes could do to him.
But neither felt right talking to the other while staring out the window, and focusing on the center of the table -- well, any motion on the other's part drew attention, and that drew the focus to the other's body, and that just brought up the doubts and indecisions (and sweet memories) by a different path.
Lew Bicking was thinking of how sweet Naomi's smile was, and remembering another satisfied smile she sometimes had -- no, always had -- as she lay in his arms and his bed in the afterglow of coitus. He thought of how her voice sounded last Sunday when he spoke to her and invited her to his new apartment. And thinking of her smile and her voice made him glance at her mouth, and think therefore of how she kissed him when they met today, and how her kisses had been years ago -- much better, because those kisses were not in public on the street, and often led to better things. He thought also of how Naomi used her mouth in another way and on another part of him than his lips, and how that part of him fit so very well into her, and how it felt there and what it did to her, and what that did to him... And he wondered how she felt about him now.
