| No Better Time by Gregg Dean She had smiled at him across the counter. At first, Peter hadn't seen it, concentrating on lighting a damp woodbine. He dropped the fourth spent match on the floor, looked at the cigarette as if his gaze alone would rectify it, but the paper had started to split and the cheap tobacco stuck out in tuffs. He shrugged and placed the woodbine in his pocket and moved up to the counter. The girl was in her early twenties, olive-skinned, hair drawn back and caught in a polka dot head scarf. Peter returned the smile shyly, removed his tin helmet and placed a scrap of paper on the counter. Using broken French he attempted to enlarge on the requirements of the meagre list, when the girl placed her small hand over his. "I know a little English," she smiled proudly, "you say me in English." Even if Peter's French was word perfect, near-native and without accent, he would have allowed this young girl her chance. In rural France, few Englishmen, if any, would ever come this way again - certainly not once the war was over - and Peter afforded her a rich opportunity to draw on her fund of English words. "You are home soon, I think?" The girl asked, and Peter shook his head. "No, lass. Over the top, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after." He realised as he said it that his voice, by timbre and tone was heavy with a fatalistic air. He knew he would most likely die. At best escape simply maimed. By some miracle he may escape with a wounding from small arms or shrapnel. Now the girl shook her head and jutted her lower lip in misery. The nuance, subtle though it was, hadn't escaped her. "What you eat Tommy?" she asked. "Bully beef, hard potatoes, carrots." Along with fear, carnage, the rats and desperation. "You are nice man, Tommy . . ." ". . . Peter." He corrected but it didn't matter - they were all know as Tommy. "I can give you dejeuner - dinner - perhaps tonight." With difficulty he had managed to leave the trench, bribing, cajoling, threatening where necessary, and now in the glow of the small oil lamp, he saw her dark features jump with the capricious light from a guttering wick. He knew from the glances across the table that they would end in bed - that his long held virginity, protected by a legacy of virtue and doctrine would expire in this previously unheard of part of France, at the hands of a virtual stranger. "I am virgin." He said simply and was surprised how he didn't blush. How easily he admitted it. "Me as well." But it seemed natural, automatic and intensely sweet. She allowed his to take control of - of what? The fumbling as she spread her legs and had to take his hardness, guiding it inside her. Her hands guiding his mouth to her nipples where they hardened, teased by his mouth. At first she had been shy of her nakedness, and him of his erection. To cover their mutual embarrassment she moved up close to him, stroking his erect penis in her hands. Now, she arched her back as he entered her, raising her moist womanhood to meet him. It was instinctive, natural, time-honoured in its simplicity. Their mouths locked and to his surprise her tongue entered his mouth. The fire already burning in his loins became suffused with energy and fuel. She rocked in sympathy with his urgency and longing. In keeping with the same dictates which had kept him a virgin, he had never experienced orgasm and felt the urgency peak in an undefined way. His body was searching for something and he couldn't articulate it. It was there, it was imminent. It was as certain as the death he was facing and with that memory the urgency rose, their strokes became harder and they filled each other with longing and desire and the need to give and to take. She was aware of his peaking ecstasy and despite the terrible risk of pregnancy and stigma found herself moving to meet his need, searching with him until the moment arrived and she clawed his back. He felt the semen rise in him and gasped with passion and the culmination of his pleasure. "Oh God." He moaned as he jerked several times, filling her. He found himself pushing deep in her and she had wrapped her legs around him to pull him there. "Oh God." He repeated again and now she cried out for his pleasure and now for her own. He now stood in the dawn light. The woodbine, now dry, trailed laces of grey smoke to the ceiling. Almost dressed, he had watched the dawn as it clambered reluctantly into the morning sky. There was small doubt that the conditions were right. If not early tomorrow then the next day, they would be going for the "big push". Such a grand term, noble in purpose, was a recognisable veneer for horror, pain and fear. The girl awoke. Remembered. Smiled and stretched her young clean limbs. "All right lass?" Peter asked. "Oui. And you? You sleep well?" He nodded. "And now you are doing what?" "Going back, lass. There's nowhere else." Naked, she sprang from the bed, held onto Peter's arm. "You can stay here. You will not die here, I think." "They'll come. They'll find me. Desertion they call it. I'll be shot." "And you die if you go now." He nodded, drew on the woodbine. The irony hadn't escaped him, now and the thousand times he had thought it through before. "They'll find me, lass. Someone round here knows someone who knows someone else who saw me in your shop yesterday. They'll come." "Not in the woods. We can hide you. Please. Please." She clung to him and there was an urgency in the face of his death that he had seen on her face over his impending climax. An urgency of impending fulfilment, kismet, the consummation of his young life under enemy fire. "I'm nineteen in a week's time," he whispered, "I'll be eighteen when I die." "No. Here," she placed his hands over her breasts, her hand stroking his crotch, "you can stay, We will love again and again." And for one dizzy moment his head spun with the notion of her yielding flesh and his mounting excitement, a woodland hideaway. He cleared the smoke from his head, breathed deeply and the image was replaced with the charge of AWOL becoming desertion. His family's shame. His own. "I've got mates. They'll fall. I won't. It's just the way it goes." He picked up his jacket. "No." she cried again, trying to take his jacket off him. "Only eighteen - is too young for a hero, too young to die. Who says this. Who says you must?" He bent over and kissed her and again she parted her lips, penetrated his mouth with her tongue. "At least. . ." he wanted to make it deep and meaning full but the words sounded tawdry before he spoke them. "Eighteen perhaps. But now a man, eh?" He smiled, patted her naked bottom and stubbing the woodbine out on the floor he opened the small bedroom door. "And I can think of no better time to die." She listened as his footsteps descended the wooden staircase like staccato gun shot, and the sharp report of the front door slammed behind him. Copyright Gregg Dean 2002