*****
There'll be a few things happening in this chapter, though all of them are at least during the same couple of weeks and I present them here in order, so that ought to be a bit of a relief to some.
U-161 is on its way to its prime mission objective while Ullmann quietly fights off his desire to murder Wilhelm just out of wanting to rid the world in general and his crew specifically of one particular idiot.
There are a few surprises for a pair of sleepy little island harbours as well.
0_o
*****
1942, nearly midnight, Florida
Eden was in her bed. Well, it wasn't HER bed specifically. It was just a bed in a building designated to house American service people on "TDY" or temporary duty, the sort who passed through where she was on their way to somewhere else. It was clean, though it looked pretty antiseptic from her point of view.
She wouldn't be here long anyway, she thought, from her vantage point in the bed. She'd be picked up in the morning and taken to where she was to go so that she could present herself and begin the process of taking a ship which she didn't want and deliver it to where they both had to go.
That was the simplest way that she'd found to think about it. She tried not to think of how it could be sunk in a storm or a collision with another blacked-out ship in the dead of night as they both travelled to different places during the war. The truth be told, Eden was far more concerned over something like that occurring during her watch, because she wanted no part of being here.
She looked around in the darkness lit only by the base streetlights coming in through the plain, bland curtains. By luck, she was the sole occupant of the all-female building.
Her hands began to move over her body under the blanket and she sighed softly.
She didn't want to think about the blasted boat that Robert had gotten which would probably be a poor choice for what was really needed. She'd already been bothered over the stupid thing for days to this point, so right here, alone in her bed far from her home it wasn't worth another thought.
She licked her fingers and began to tease her labia a little, her fingertips swirling only once in a little circular motion just barely touching her clitoris every time. Her other hand found its way to her breast to caress it before she got down to business.
She wasn't thinking much of anything at the moment, though a stray thought did come to her of Hans-Joachim out of the darkness. She found that she hadn't thought of him in a long time and wondered where the thought had come from.
It didn't matter, she told herself. She wasn't in the mood to go over that old set of memories at the moment – though she did have the thought to see if she could find someone to replace those memories with – or at least keep them down in her mind. She hadn't seen the man in years and she knew that she'd never see him again, so why hang onto the thoughts?
She thought about a few of the men that she'd see now and then around the island on her rides taking messages here and there and she began from there to think of a trio of men who were making a go of resurrecting an old and abandoned farm which was way out near the coast.
She'd gotten a little confused one day because she'd missed a turn on one particular route that she very seldom rode. She realised it very shortly afterward and was retracing her steps after getting turned around when she'd seen them working from the road.
As she was on her way past, one of them walked to the fence and waved. Eden glanced at her watch and saw that she was still miles ahead of her schedule, so she stopped opposite him and they chatted over the fence for a little while. As they talked, the other two drifted over and Eden had been surprised.
The three of them were very unusual to her – and all three of them were a little magnificent to look at, working as they were with no shirts and covered in a slick sheen of sweat. One of them was a black man; with skin so dark that Eden thought that it surely matched Cora-leen's exactly, because that was what struck her just in that instant. The second was quite obviously Chinese in his origins and the third was Indian and both of those two had hair longer than she'd ever seen on a man in her life, even if they both kept theirs in pony tails.
It didn't matter to Eden very much, but as they all talked after one of them came up to the fence with a cup and an immense earthenware jug of cool water and a cup, the strangeness of their tale came forth.
They'd met in jail.
They'd been there for three different reasons and were all serving a bit of time, but they'd all known that they needed to do something different and change their lives somehow; since petty theft and other assorted ways to make a dishonest living sure hadn't been working out for any of them.
What they were doing now was bitch-hard work and it was lonely out where they were, but it was already keeping them fed at least and they were working for themselves. It had been a pleasant half-hour as they chatted and they were obviously happy to meet her, though they wondered about her uniform and what it was about, since they'd seen her riding past a few times before.
As Eden rode off that day, she couldn't help thinking about how good those three looked to her. She'd told Cora-leen about it that evening and shown her on her map.
And Cora-leen had ridden by the next day and met the trio as well.
That night in Eden's bed, they'd had a lot of fun wondering as they'd lain together. A lot of people just naturally seemed to gravitate to others of their own kind, but the three seemed a little different and Cora-leen had the beginnings of an answer.
"They were like that too, but I found out that each of them were in with a bad bunch. If they hadn't met each other and compared things between them, they'd never have had the idea that they'd come to – to try making a different life to get away from where they all knew they'd end up," she said.
Then Cora-leen had told Eden of a fantasy that had come to her as she'd ridden on that afternoon. She'd had to get hold of herself, she told Eden. "I almost rode straight off the edge of the road to the next post, the one with the road hanging out over the sea."
What she'd thought of was getting something started out at that old farm and both of them doubted that it would be very difficult to do, after all. "If I can make it happen," she'd grinned, "then I'd want alla them."
Eden had chuckled when she'd heard it, "You should stop being so shy about things with men," she'd laughed. "You want to be the girlfriend of three men. How would you do that? Which one is to be your first conquest? Have you decided?"
"You don't think that I can do it?" Cora-leen asked.
"I'm not asking IF you can do it," Eden had laughed, "I'm asking in what order."
