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Gingham. That’s what she remembered.
Lavender in the master suite, yellow and pale green in the two downstairs bedrooms, and red and blue throughout the kitchen and living areas.
For six summers straight her family had vacationed in the same cabin, tucked in the foothills of the Argos mountain range five hours north of Caprica City. The first summer Laura picked the bright yellow bedroom for herself, relegating her younger sisters to the darker bedroom in the back.
At fourteen, she’d been the odd one out that summer, too young to have any real interest in her parents’ conversations but too old to want to satisfy the playful whims of her five and seven year old sisters.
Too studious to indulge during the school year, she had brought along a stack of the teenage romance novels that her friends had been pushing her to read. She found the plots ridiculous and the allusions to blossoming womanhood and awakening desires to be insulting. She could not even bring herself to finish the first one. She perused the stocked bookshelves in the living room, taking the book with the most creases in it’s spine, assuming the well worn cover was an indication of quality, an anonymous recommendation from years worth of vacationers.
It was dark, smart, funny and sexy in a way that would have made her friends giggle and blush but that made Laura’s mind and body tingle with a myriad of unknown possibilities She stayed up all night spread out across the yellow gingham reading and rereading passages that made her mind and heart race. She imagined herself in the story. She was the one being shot at, the one racing through Caprica City Streets, the one being caressed by the hands of a man who loved with incredible passion and urgency.
She found herself growing restless, wanting something, though she didn’t know what. A walk maybe? A shower? She felt alive in a way that she couldn’t explain. It was adrenaline and endorphins and she reveled in the pleasurable sensations they sent racing through her limbs, thrilled at those that settled between her thighs. She turned over on the bed, laying on her stomach and kicked her legs as she read.
She finished the book sometime in the early morning hours. She immediately wanted to go get another, but was afraid the noise would wake her parents and they would somehow know what she had been reading. She slipped the book under a pillow and herself under the yellow checked bed spread, the sheets warm from her own body, and slept until noon the next day.
Looking at Bill Adama in the New Caprican sunlight, she suddenly remembered that first book, the detective with the rough, calloused hands, piercing blue eyes and wavy brown hair. She wouldn’t say he was what she had imagined, more like after thirty five years she had found a man that reminded her of the man she’d envisioned herself with over and over again..
Of course she knew now that what she had felt that summer reading those books had been desire - for new experiences, new places, new sensations. Even now when she read a good mystery her body would tingle like it did back when she was fourteen years old. As it turns out being looked at the way Bill was looking at her now had pretty much the same effect, her breasts felt heavy, her heart raced, and her clit pulsed as his eyes lingered on her body.
A sexy smile crossed her face and she pulled her red wrap top a little further closed, not out of modesty, but to encourage him to have to look a little harder. Suddenly her mind flashed to an image of them together in that room, the sun bright as he laid her back onto the bed spread, onto the same yellow gingham that she remembered staring at while trying to make sense of the first stirrings of sexual desire that had gathered in her young body, struggling the impulse to touch herself to see if she was wet like the women she had read about in her books..
She had often imagined her first time taking place on that bed. She would have met someone, a man, like him, like the detective - like Bill - and while her family was away they would have fallen onto the bed together.
Her mind strung together a series of scenes from her novels and in her fantasy he took her through each one of them: his dark hands sliding down her arms, up her long legs, and then spanning her stomach and sliding up to capture her breasts, his parted lips moving to capture hers, his cheeks hollowing as he suckled at her breast, big hands working delicate buttons, his clothed body moving over her, his naked body moving inside of her.
Then she began imagining things that had not been in the books. She felt the tickle of his moustache against her skin, felt the little pinpricks of it as he kissed and sucked on the slick flesh between her thighs, felt the way he soothed her with the moist heat of lips and tongue, felt the impossibly soft skin of his cock in her hand, against her cheek. She had learned so many ways that a man could touch and take a woman that summer and she suddenly wanted to experience all of them with the man beside her.
Their eyes met for a moment. It was an incredibly erotic moment. She could see the desire in his eyes, could feel it rolling off of him and knew that her own body was answering the call of his, or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, he could have her tonight, or any night from now on she’d decided, she no longer had a reason to deny herself this, to deny them this any longer.
Bill Adama was the best parts of those worn paperback books. He was adrenaline and excitement, humour and heartache, passion and simmering sexuality. She spent many nights over those summers laying on that bed wondering what it would be like to respond to his touch - to the touch of lover she could only imagine.
If tonight it was the lover who was real, she’d happily imagine that yellow gingham.
She looked away but reached out to touch his arm. “It’s good to see you too, Bill.”