Although Jennlynn had spent many hours nude in bed with various men, now she was wearing a floor-length flannel nightie. She’d brought it because the ranch house didn’t have central heating, and cozy as the cabin was, it didn’t have it either, so the nightie was welcome as she lay cuddled in the cozy feather bed close to Will. That the nightie was mostly up in her armpits didn’t matter much; if anything, it made it more special. She’d had sex with a lot of men in the seventeen months since she’d last been together with Will, but tonight was for making love, and it wasn’t the same thing at all. Though she’d had sex with literally thousands of men, he was still the only one she’d made love with. It made a hell of a difference – and especially since he was thoroughly aware of the difference, as few other men could have been.

It was late. The fire in the fireplace had burned down to coals; the kerosene lantern had been blown out hours before. Through the glass of the front window of the cabin, she could see the moon low in the darkness of the western sky, casting its light into the room, illuminating the two lovers as they cuddled and caressed and talked in low tones. "Will," she whispered, "I can’t believe how good you are to me, and how good you are for me. For all the men I’ve been with, it’s always so much better with you." She let out a sigh. "I mean, I know all about your family, known it as long as I’ve known you, but I guess I’m still just conventional enough to wonder if it makes you a little jealous."

"No, it doesn’t," he whispered back. "Not a drop, Miz Swift. I’ve always know’d about your furious sex drive, and that you have to scratch the itch."

"It’s different," she said flatly. "Look, just for a second, let’s assume that there isn’t that wall of money you were talking about, and some of the other walls. Let’s assume we’re married, living out on the ranch, trying to make ends meet, and I have to go off and work in a house just to put food on the table, just like your momma and gramma."

"I understand," he said. "Like you’ve always known, I grew up with that reality."

She smiled to herself, "I can just visualize driving back home in a dirty, beat-up pickup truck, walking in the house and telling you that I’ve been fucked half silly for the whole shift, now, I need some real loving to recover."

"Again, I understand," he smiled. "I remember both Momma and Gramma talking about it and saying about the same thing. I mean, this was after I got older and understood what was going on, and after Momma had quit, just stories of the old days. Dad, and I guess Granddad understood that perfectly. I never met Granddad, of course, he died before I was born, but I guess he was really somethin’."

"He’d had to have been."

"Point is, Miz Swift, they understood the difference between fuckin’ and lovin’, just like I do, and just like you do. We may have some walls between us, but that ain’t one of ’em."

"In spite of all the walls, as you put it, that may be the reason I love you so much," she whispered. "I can’t think of another man I’ve ever met who would feel that way. There’s always that one word that comes between me and them, in bed or out."

"Prostitute?"

"Yeah," she sighed. "Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the way I was brought up, and I can’t quite shake it off, but no matter what, there’s always some little part of me that feels ashamed about it, except when I’m with you."

"I guess that’s the way society looks at it," he sighed. "And really, with good reason. There ain’t a lot of street whores running around in the Persian Gulf, but there were some at Dover, and they’re all over the place at Okinawa. Pretty much, they’re trash, and that’s how most people see ’em. But you’re not trash, Jennlynn, you’ve proved it time and time again. You’re a true class lady, and there’s a whole hell of a lot of difference. Again, I’ve been around it enough to know."

"You ever try any of them?" she asked, feeling uncomfortable with the introspection and wanting to draw away from it a little.

"Hell, no," he snorted. "I get to have the best once in a while; why should I throw my money away on incompetents?"

"Not ever?" she asked. "Not even down at the Redlite?"

"Well, down there a few times, but it was all before we did the Colorado River that time," he said. "I’ve been down there several times since, but it’s just to visit Gramma. In fact, I’ve only picked one girl out of a lineup since then, and that was special."

"Special?"

"It was Sara, just before she retired and got married," he laughed. "I did it just to tease her; I wanted to see if she would walk me."

"Did she?" she laughed.

"Oh yeah, we never even got as far back as her room, but she was real flustered. I ain’t real sure what I would’ve done if she’d quoted me a decent price."

"Nothing since?"

"Nope, no one but you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a question of loyalty. If I had your burning sex drive it would be different. I enjoy it, but I don’t have to have it like you do, except when I’m with you. I appreciate the quality, and that’s something you taught me. Like I said, I get to have the best once in a while, why would I want to deal with less?"

"I often wish I could feel that way," she told him. "Thank God, I get the best when I’m with you, but I need regular doses of less until I can have the best again."

"Now, Miz Swift, you’re pulling my leg."

"No, I’m not," she smiled. "I’ll say that I’ve had a few who have been better than you in one thing or another, but no one puts the package together the way you do."

"You’ve just trained me to your taste," he laughed. "It ain’t the only thing I’ve picked up from you."

"Dare I ask?" she giggled.

"Miz Swift, you gotta understand I’m coming at it from a different direction. I’m just trying to get ready to be a Nevada cowboy again. But I was unconscious when you taught me just how useful a small plane can be around a ranch."

"You mean, when your gramma and I found you out there on the dry lake?"

"Yeah," he said. "I learnt that lesson real well. One of the things the Air Force has is flying clubs, at least at most places, not in the Gulf, though. I got my private pilot’s license back at Dover, and I’ve been working on my commercial on Okinawa."

"You’re kidding!"

"No, I ain’t," he smiled. "Don’t know as I’ll ever want to use the commercial ticket, and I don’t have any designs on flying your Learjet, but I figure the skills will be useful. I’m thinking someday I’ll have me something like a Super Cub with big fat tires so’s I can land anyplace that’s halfway flat for a couple hundred yards. There’s a hell of a lot of work that can be done around here with a plane like that. But for now, it’s something else I can do cheap in the Air Force."

"Well, darn," she laughed. "I thought you sounded a little bit like a pilot this afternoon when we were coming here. Now I guess I know why." She shook her head, and in a small voice continued, "God, Will, I wish I could look into the future the way you do."

"It ain’t exactly lookin’ into the future. It’s plannin’ ahead, they’s a difference," he said. "I don’t got a lot of options to do what I want to do. I have to have things pretty well thought out."

"That’s what I mean," she told him. "I worked for so long and so hard to get where I wanted to go, and I got there years ago. Now, I just sort of do what comes next without thinking about it too much. I mean, I figure I’ll be doing what I’m doing at Lambdatron for the next twenty or thirty or even forty years, because it’s what I want to do. I just hope I don’t get stale at it, and there have been some times in the last couple years when that seemed like a possibility."

"I figured they’d have to carry you out of there heels first."

"Might be," she sighed. "We had some bad patches, mostly a couple years ago, when I was considering my options a little, but we got lucky and blew through them. As far as being a prostitute goes, I never set out to be one, but it happened, and it’s been very good to me. But it’s not as much fun in some ways as it used to be, some of the time. I keep thinking I’ve got to be near the peak of my talents and my appearance. It’s going to start sliding downhill sooner or later, and then what happens?"

"Didn’t bother Gramma much," he shrugged.

"Yeah, and that’s what keeps me going, sometimes," she nodded. "I mean, she’s seventy-one, for Pete’s sakes, and still holds a card. She doesn’t use it much, only with an old friend or a special situation. The bartender down at the Redlite is a temporary, he’s putting in time till he can get a divorce. Great bartender, a really nice guy, but the woman he was married to had him so tied up in knots sexually he was almost impotent. Your grandmother kind of grabbed him by the collar, and a couple times a week they go over to his room at the Sagebrush so she can untie a couple more. No money involved, he’s broke and in debt up to his ass. Just out of the goodness of her heart, and hell, he’s less than half her age."

"Sounds like Gramma," he laughed. "Wouldn’t be the first time and probably won’t be the last."

"Yeah, sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind just telling Lambdatron to go to hell, selling all the planes and buying something like the little 150 I used to have just to buzz around with. Then I’d go over, make a good offer on Bettye’s and try to re-create what we used to have there. Those may have been the best days of my life before I met you."

"Wouldn’t be the same," he said. "You’ve changed, and things have changed."

"Yeah, but I miss how we used to be personally friendly with the customers," she told him. "George and Shirley tried to re-create that at the Redlite, but it’s gotten too big, too commercial. You know what would be really neat? It would be to have some little place out in the middle of nowhere, just a handful of girls, no more than four or five. Everything done by appointment, and on a day rate, not a piece rate. Not even be able to drive to the place, get something like an Islander or Twin Otter and fly the customers in."

"Fantasy Island with hookers," he laughed.

"Yeah, that describes it pretty well," she laughed. "We could cater to people’s fantasies, set things up ahead of time, bring in special help if needed. Nothing cheap, of course."

"Learjet Jenn’s Fantasy Ranch," he smiled. "That would be different, all right."

"Oh, it’s fun to think about," she admitted. "It’s not a goal, at least right now. But ten years ago right now, my goal was to retire from the business in a few more months and spend my life as an anonymous little design engineer. I was close to it, and I did it. And look what happened! So who knows what happens in the next ten years? I really don’t want to think about it right now. At the moment, I’m mostly concerned about what happens here in our home in the next ten days."

"Our home," he said softly. "Miz Swift, do you have any idea how sweet those words sound coming from your lips?"

"About as sweet as they sound coming from yours," she said, and rolled closer to plant her lips on his.

* * *

The next ten days were in a time warp all its own. It seemed to last forever, and it seemed to pass in a flash, all at the same time.

It would be difficult to enumerate all that happened in that period. Once, Jennlynn made the observation that they could get into Songbird and fly someplace if they really wanted to do something different, but they never had reason to. They made love, of course, sometimes simple and gentle and intimate, sometimes wild and exotic, sometimes exploring areas that Jennlynn never had done at the Redlite, for Will was the only man she trusted enough to do them with. But that was not all they did, or even a majority of it. Several times they took short hikes around the area, up the nearby canyon to the spring where they’d enjoyed themselves so much years before, to a view overlooking the desert, or just around for the sake of being out in the cool winter air, once with the ground lightly covered with snow. Sometimes, they just sat cuddled on the sofa, staring into the fire. They talked a lot, of course, but sometimes they didn’t talk, not because there was nothing to say, but because touching and cuddling and just the sheer joy of being together said everything that needed to be said better than words could ever do.

At the end of the ten days, they’d become closer than they’d ever been before. There were still walls between them, they both knew, and most likely there always would be, or at least for many years to come. But some of the walls didn’t matter, at least as long as they were together in their home, and they knocked holes in some of those walls. Suffice to say that before the end of the period, each would admit to themselves, if yet not to the other, that the possibility of getting married at some point in the indefinite future wasn’t totally out of the question, although it was clear that it would have to be a marriage that left each one of them with an extraordinary amount of space.

And who knew what changes might come in the future? It was something totally new for Jennlynn to contemplate; for years, she’d believed that she was totally unable to maintain a degree of intimacy with someone else so that she might contemplate such a thing as marriage. Now, while it didn’t seem likely, it wasn’t totally impossible, either.

In quiet times, she often reflected on Jon and Tanisha. Individually, and she rarely saw them that way, they were very much loners like she was, incapable of maintaining close friendships. Together, they added up to more than the sum of the individuals, and she couldn’t imagine that happening with anyone but each other. Could the same thing be true with Will and her? Or, was it at least capable of being true at some place in the future? It was unknown ground, a place that she shied away from exploring, if for no more reason than Will was headed back to Okinawa in a few days, and it would most likely be a year or more before she saw him again. He would be headed back to a different world, one she scarcely knew, just as she was headed back to her own, equally foreign to Will. Here, at their home – still an awesome thought – they could leave their worlds behind and have each other.

Perhaps it was just as well that they both knew they were heading back to their own worlds as they hauled their things out to Songbird. It was going to take a while to contemplate all that had happened here, to put it into place.

It was a bit of a struggle to start the Cessna after it had been sitting unused in the cold for ten days, but once it was running and warmed up, Jennlynn taxied it out to the end of the dry lake. "Don’t know when I’m going to be back here again, Will," she said as they turned onto the runway. "It’s probably going to be a while."

"It’s your home, too," he told her. "Come out here if you just want to get away from it all some time, and have some peace and quiet."

"It wouldn’t be the same without you, Will," she protested. "Although, if I do come while you’re gone, I think I’ll be able to feel you here."

"That was the idea, Miz Swift," he grinned. "Let’s try to not let it be quite so long before we’re together here again. I should be back in the states along in the fall, and if it winds up that I’ll stay in the Air Force, I should be in the states for a while. We might be able to get together a lot more often, maybe not for as long."

"I’d like that, Will," she said as she taxied down the improvised runway. "I’ve come to miss you when you’ve been gone, and you’ve been gone too much."

A few minutes later, she turned the 310 down the runway, opened the throttles and began her takeoff. Partway down the dry lake she could feel Songbird getting light, and eased back on the yoke to get the plane in the air. As it broke ground, she glanced out the side, to see their home sitting in the trees well off of the improvised runway. It was only a glance, for she didn’t dare look for long, but it would be a memory she would carry with her until the next time.

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