Wolf Cree

Ada was standing at the door of the school house, watching the children filing out and trying her best not to burst into tears. Watching the children file out. The children.

Returning to her life in Slater, Missouri, had been easy enough. All thanks to Aunt Martha. Her aunt hadn't been nearly as judgmental about Ada's fling with Charles Raven at the World's Fair as Ada thought she'd be. Her lips, indeed, had been pursued and her arms folded tightly across her chest when Ada arrived at her home. But there was a twinkle in her eye as well and she melted to Ada's florid description of the fair and of nearly everything that had happened there. Nearly everything. But Martha was no dummy. She had discerned much of what Ada hadn't said—at least where it concerned Charles Raven. There was a glow about Ada that could only have one explanation.

Martha had been young once herself—and hadn't held back herself a time or two. Ada's hurried departure from Slater had provided Martha the opportunity to explain away her absence by saying that Ada's father in Natoma, Kansas, had taken ill suddenly and the dutiful daughter had flown directly to his side until the crisis had, thank the Lord, passed. The explanation was so simple and so much in keeping of the disposition Ada showed to the world that even the hopeful emporium proprietor William Hagen had believed the story, completing understanding now why Ada had just disappeared from this store that day along with his old friend Charles Raven. Ada had, of course, received the news about her father that very day, while William was briefly in the storeroom, and she had rushed out to run to his side. And Charles had gone with her to smooth her journey.

Life had gone back to normal for Ada—or almost to normal. She had a job she enjoyed, an aunt who she could trust and confide in far more than she had ever assumed she would be able to do, and an ardent—well, steady and persistent—and highly eligible suitor in William Hagen. And the ache to experience the greater world wasn't even as pronounced now that she had experienced it. She, of course, wanted to experience it again, but now it had definition and was no longer the frustration it once had been. And the visit to the "greater world" had also encouraged her to take up a talent that had been discovered in her but had been disparaged and hindered by her strict minister father. Ada was a born artist, and all of the wonders she had seen in St. Louis had prompted her to take up her paints and canvasses again. It didn't matter that her subject matter was the relatively mundane landscapes around Slater. The ornateness she had seen at the World's Fair had given Ada a good eye for the simple strength of the landscape around her and, more important, the ability to reveal that simplicity and strength in art.

But Ada's world was destined to challenge and surprise her and deny her any promise of stability. Just as she was beginning to adjust to this world and a future with William Hagen, her world had collapsed inside her.

She let out a little, involuntary sob as the last of the children filed out of the schoolhouse. She busied herself briefly inside, setting up for the lessons of the next day, and then, with a sigh of resignation, a sigh that had a little catch of a sob in it, she closed the schoolhouse door and walked down the path to the street, easel and paints in hand, bound for an escape into the world of her art.

"Howdy, Miss Ada," Horace the postman sang out as he came up the road on his bicycle.

"Howdy back at you, Mr. Trap," Ada called to him.

He tipped his hat. "Mighty fine day, Miss. Ada, but it will turn cold soon enough. You off to Hagen's to be the first to snag one of those newfangled electric heaters that man from the fair over in St. Louis is pushing?"

That man from the fair? Ada stopped dead in her tracks. Her heart was racing. "What man, Mr. Trap? What heaters?"

"Don't you know? That fancy sales guy is back from the fair with all those new things they were introducing over there. He's at Hagen's now, settin' them up. Seems we're real privileged that he and Bill Hagen are close friends. We're about the first to get to buy those things that big Vaughn's Department Store in Chicago is merchandising from the fair."

Ada couldn't run fast enough. Luckily Mr. Trap had kept on down the road away from her on his bicycle or he would have been shocked to see her just drop her books, paints, and easel she was holding in her arms, tear her bonnet off, and run toward town, toward Hagen's Emporium, toward Charles.

Charles. Charles was here. Everything was all right now. Everything would work out.

She arrived at the doorway into Hagen's breathless and flushed. She couldn't have been more enticing to Charles Raven, who was alone in the display room, arranging the samples of wares he had brought for Hagen to sell.

There were no words. He looked up and he and Ada exchanged knowing looks, looks of flashing desire that stripped each of them naked to the other. They flew into each other's arms, and Charles just scooped Ada up in his arms and glided to the back of the store, through a door, and into the dimly lit storeroom. He set her down on her tiny feet, pushing her up against and wall, closely pinning her to the wall with his body, and they devoured each other's lips. He pulled away but just to kiss her eyelids and her cheeks and kissing the hollow of her neck. He was unbuttoning her dress and pushing her bodice down and then his lips were devouring her breasts, suckling her nipples. One hand was buried in her hair, now cascading down her back after he had undone her hair ribbon. The other hand was pressed into the small of her back, holding her to him.

Ada was moaning for him. Here at last. He had come back for her. Had come back to her. She pulled the front of her dress up to her waist, and undid, first, her own undergarments and then unbuttoned his fly. And she was stroking him, making him grow, pulling him to her.

Charles withdrew his hand from her hair and was fumbling around in his pocket.

"No need for that, my love," Ada whispered to him in a breathy voice. "No need for that now. Just love me. Make love to me."

But Charles already had the condom out and was sheathing himself.

When Ada felt the helmet of his cock at her entrance, she climbed his hips with her legs and threw her head back and gurgled in pleasure and at being possessed as he pushed his way, strongly and steadily, up into her. And then he was fucking her hard and wildly against the wall. And she entwined his neck with her arms and lost herself in the stroking, sliding her body up and down on his cock as she was pinned between his heaving breast and the storeroom wall, completely wanton and lost in the pleasure of the taking and the giving.

So lost were Ada and Charles in the eroticism of the moment that they didn't notice that William Hagen had returned to the emporium and was standing in the doorway between the sales floor and the semidark storeroom, paralyzed, watching on his shock and dismay, his whole world shattered.

They were alone once again when Charles had finished and had obligingly kept stroking into Ada until she too lurched in orgasmic satisfaction and relaxed in a sighing heap against the man she loved, the man who had come back to Slater to save her and take her back into the greater world. Everything would be fine now.

"I guess this means you are glad to see me," Charles murmured. He gave her that big beautiful smile and kissed her tenderly on the lips. But he continued holding her there against the wall, letting her feel him soften inside her."

"The French letter wasn't necessary, Charlie," she was whispering. "You came back to me. I knew you would. You wouldn't leave me like this. Not now."

"What do you mean it was unnecessary?" Charles asked, but not completely focused on what she was saying, what she was trying to tell him, once more stroking her hair and nibbling on an earlobe.

"I mean that I'm pregnant, Charlie. We're going to have a baby. I've been to the doctor, and he's confirmed it."

Charles was focused now. And then he laughed. "That old codger. Still has it in him. Who would have known."

Ada looked at him blankly. She had no idea what he meant and why he was saying this under the circumstances. Was he called the doctor an old codger? The doctor wasn't particularly old. In fact, Ada had been terrified and deeply embarrassed when he started telling her what was wrong with her, why she was feeling so poorly of mornings.

"The baby can't be mine, Ada," Charles said. And then that little laugh again, a bit more nervously now. "That's what these French letters are all about. I didn't get you with child. It had to be someone else."

"But you're the one I went to St. Louis with," Ada said. She was shocked and confused. "I assumed . . . and others will assume too . . ."

Yes, Charles thought, others might assume. His mind was racing. And Charles was nothing if not a quick thinker. He had the solution worked out in a flash. If it was Mrs. Raven Ada wanted to be, it would Mrs. Raven that she'd be. And, problem solved in his mind, his awareness returned to the now. In the now, he had a beautiful woman against a wall, sheathing his cock. His cock got the message and started to come to life again. He wanted her again now. And thinking that there was a life growing in that womb that his cock had been reaching for enflamed his ardor.

"Oh, Charles. What are we going to do?" Ada whispered.

"Don't worry, Ada. I'll take care of you. But right now what we're going to do is fuck again. And without a French letter. As you said, that's beyond being necessary now."

He withdrew from her and rolled the condom off his cock. Then he turned her, belly to the wall, and she pressed her palms and cheek against the rough surface of the wall, and Charles thrust his throbbing tool back up into her from the rear, alternating plowing her in her two entrances, enjoying immensely the skin on skin rubbing and stroking with no worries of the consequences while Ada moaned and groaned in ecstasy, being taken again by the well-endowed, masterful worldly man of her dreams.

Hours later, William Hagen, the man who had loved and, in his temerity lost, the love of his life, Ada, found the used condom on the floor of his storeroom and doubled over onto the floor in a sobbing fetal position as if a knife had been thrust into his belly. Within two weeks, much to the surprise of the entire town of Slater, including the unwitting Ada, Hagen had put his store and lumber yard on the market and was preparing to move west. He said he had his eye on a pristine valley running down from Wyoming into Colorado, where he planned to harvest the lumber that would help build the settling of the settling of Colorado that had recently taken off like a wild fire. It was a new life he wanted in an a virgin territory, he was saying. And although everyone he told this to thought they understood what he meant, they no inkling of the true depth of his meaning and motivation.

For her part, Ada had little time to contemplate either Hagen's abrupt change in the direction of his life—even less his motivations for the change. Ada was busy preparing to become Mrs. Raven.

On a cold, windy, rainy Saturday autumn morning in 1904, in an ironic twist of Ada's infatuation with the greater world, Ada Albin arrived at a small chapel in the appropriately named Warsaw, Indiana, to join in wedlock with a flabbergasted and busting with pride and gratitude Mr. Raven—Mr. John Raven. Charles's brother John.

Of all involved only the world-weary perceptive realist Aunt Martha seemed to fully realize and understand the ramifications of what had happened in Ada's world. And Aunt Martha could only purse her lips and fold her arms tightly across her chest. Ever the optimist as well, however, she also was determined just to bide her time and do what she could where she could. She loved her niece as deeply as she had her own sister. And she was determined that Ada would not be lost to mediocrity and life as her sister had suffered with the Reverend Albin.