1975
Adrien
Janey dances in the surf.
Earth, Wind, and Fire plays on the transistor radio I’d rigged up, but she’s lost in her own rhythm. Her lithe body is covered only by a white bikini that makes me want to haul my tired bones off the lounger and race toward her. To touch her skin that is wet and salty with the water of Kompong Som Bay, and kiss her. Her hair is tied back while we work in the tents—me in the emergency medical unit of the refugee camp, her in the communications center. Only at night, it’s down for me to tangle my hands in as she comes undone beneath me. But we have two whole vacation days—mandatory, as Dr. Kouchner insisted we take time off—and now Janey lets it free. The long gold strands catch the sun that is intense in a way I haven’t quite gotten used to.
“Come join me,” she says, kicking at the blue-green water.
“I can’t,” I say. “I haven’t lain down during the day in six months, and now I can’t move.”
“You moved well enough last night,” Janey says with a sly grin.
I once told her she reminded me of white beaches, blue water and a hot sun. California, maybe. Or Tahiti.
I never imagined Cambodia.
I glance over the white sands of the beach. It’s crescent-shaped, with green grasses thickening into forest behind us. The last vestiges of an American military installation is a good kilometer and a half down; the dark green of their Jeeps haul supplies from a small port. Their ships—one warship and the other cargo, sit on the still water, like toys from this distance.
Janey and I are alone. Or as alone as we can be with MSF’s base two kilometers up the road. Other personnel, also on leave, cavort in the surf too, but there seems to be an unspoken agreement to pretend that the other doesn’t exist.
I watch Janey, and as I do, no one else does exist. The Cambodian refugee crisis we’ve been working to help feels far away in that moment. I see only Janey and the heat drugs my exhausted mind, and drags it back to how we got here.
My father’s painting “Khmer” sold for one million francs. I used the money to find a home for him that was clean, professional and where he could be given the proper care and supervision he needed. The hospital has an art therapy program, and I’m hopeful that he’ll find and put back together the pieces of himself the war shattered in him.
My mother visits my father now. Every week. She writes me that it’s hard, and her guilt for abandoning him when he came back broken haunts her. I imagine her sitting with him while he paints or talks or does nothing at all, and though it might not seem as if she’s getting through to him, I know it matters.
Sophie, after persuading our mother, attends the Sorbonne now, studying political science. She doesn’t yet know what she wants to do, but she knows she can and will do something important, and that’s good enough for her.
Back in ‘70, Paris Central won that final match I’d been banned from, and tied for third place at 48 points. Turns out, my season goal average gave them the edge and they advanced to Ligue 2. They’ve maintained their position there for years, but Robert has written they are in the promotion zone. On their way to Ligue 1.
A part of me aches at the news, like touching an old bruise. I could be with them, on a pitch with thousands of spectators who watch with their hearts and souls on the edge of their seat as they cheer for their team. Instead, I finished med school and joined Médecins Sans Frontières with Janey before the ink was dry on my diploma.
We’d been stationed in Cambodia for six months, tending to the sick and wounded Cambodians as they flee the Khmer Rouge. Saigon has fallen and three million people have fled, seeking asylum in China or Thailand. We are stationed to aid them on their journey. To see that they make it somewhere safe. Many won’t, but we won’t abandon them as they try.
But this day, only one of two days we were willing to take away from our duties, there is just Janey and this beach and me.
She beckons again and this time I haul myself off the ‘lounge chair’ I’d made from a broken military stretcher. I step out from under the dried palm frond umbrella and the sun beats down on the bare skin of my back.
Janey laughs at my grimace. “The water isn’t any cooler.”
“That’s because you’re in it,” I say, sloshing through the shallows to wrap my arms around her waist.
“Are you trying to lay a line on me?” she laughs again, reaching up to ring her arms around my neck.
“I’m trying to say you’re hot,” I say.
“Yeah, I get that but if you have to explain it…”
I tickle her to make her laugh, then haul her close. “I’m tired.”
Her smile softens and she trails her fingers over my scruff of my beard. “I know you are. You work so hard.”
“So do you.”
Janey works tirelessly, writing articles and taking photos of the crisis, and seeing they get published in the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek; as well as French and British publications. In between, she translates bulletins and memos for MSF.
She’s had bylines and photographs in some of the most prestigious publications in the world but hasn’t eaten a meal in a restaurant in three months.
But today, she’s mine, and if she regrets any of the work we do, it doesn’t show on her beautiful face.
I kiss her softly, then harder. Her breasts, clad only in a bikini top, press against my bare chest and suddenly I’m not tired any more. My body wakes up to her nearness, her warm, wet skin, and the softness of her pressed tight to me.
“Adrien,” she breathes, breaking our kiss. Her eyes are heavy and she lightly grinds her hips against me, feeling my erection straining against my bathing suit. Then her hand slips down to stroke me. She moans softly. “God, I want you but…here?”
“Here, Janey,” I say, almost a groan. “I have to have you right now.”
Her glance darts to the other people further down the shore; distant figures that aren’t paying us the slightest bit of attention, and then back to me.
She nods. “Yes. Yes, me too. So much…”
Without another word, I lift Janey up and she wraps her legs around my waist. I trudge back up the beach to our little base, her long, damp hair like soft seaweed draping my arms as I hold her.
I lay her on the lounge chair that had once been a stretcher, and reach up to pull the palm umbrella between us and the people down the shore. But as soon as my body lays over hers, the rest of the world vanishes.
Janey reaches for me, kisses me hard and spreads her legs so that I fit between them perfectly. We fall into each other immediately; kissing that is almost biting, her nails raking down my back… I’m so hard, and it’s maddening that we’re separated by thin scraps of nylon. Janey lifts her hips to meet my mindless grinding.
“Adrien,” she breathes. “Now… Please. I need…”
Her words break off as I slip my hand between us, cupping her. Her eyes fall shut under the golden sun, droplets of the sea and sweat beading over her skin like diamonds as she arches her back into my touch.
My fingers slip beneath her suit, and into her wet heat. My head drops to the crook of her neck to feel her like this.
“Ah, God, Janey…” I grind out as she undulates beneath me, already in the throes of ecstasy. I want more, but force myself to wait, to curl my fingers inside her, to bring her to a crashing orgasm first.
She arches off the stretcher, cries out, her hands making painful fists in my hair, and then she shudders beneath me.
“How…?” she breathes, her eyes hooded. “Every time. So good, Adrien. God, you make me feel so good.”
Even as she’s talking, she’s slipping out of her bikini bottom entirely, while I push my suit down just far enough. In seconds, I’m where my fingers had been and a groan slips out of me to feel her body take me inside her, tight and wet and perfect.
“Yes,” she hisses in English, slipping into her native tongue as she so often does when I have her like this, beneath me.
I thrust quickly, hard, over and over; experience telling me it’s the best way to build another orgasm off of her first. Re-stoking the fires that had already been lit.
The stretcher creaks and I wonder vaguely if it can withstand us.
I don’t care; I take her harder.
Janey wraps her legs around my waist and cinches tight. The heat of sun blazes over my back, and the heat of her beneath me envelopes and consumes. I’m delirious, feverish with her. Janey is everything I want, in mind, body and soul, and I realize in these moments—in these frantic moments of need and want, of give and take—that there can only be her. Now and forever.
The crescendo hits, like a wave crashing over us, and we come within seconds of each other; my guttural moan following on the heels of her crying out my name. I slump over her, and for a little while, we’re a tangled mess of sweat-slicked arms and legs; our breaths coming hard and fast. Eventually, I lift off of her and from inside her, and we lay side by side, our foreheads touching.
“Janey…”
She smiles at me, a peaceful smile that is my oasis in all the blood and war we have seen, and I’m so overwhelmed with her I can hardly think but to blurt out the truth.
“I’m happy,” I say. “I’ve never felt so damn happy in my life, despite everything.”
“Me too,” she says, her fingers toying with my beard.
“Are you happy?” I ask. “It seems impossible some days, but in the quiet times, like now, it comes to the surface, how happy I am. With you.”
Her smile is brilliant and soft. “I am happy, Adrien. I promise you, I’ve never been more happy.”
I kiss her gently, then harder, and when we break apart, the words fall out. “Marry me. Marry me, Janey. I have nothing to give you. No ring, no fancy proposal…I have nothing. But…”
Her fingertips touch my lips silent.
“I told you a long time ago,” she says, her lips trembling and her eyes shining. My girl was tough, but for me, she gave everything. “What I want from you can’t be bought.” She leans close to kiss me. “Just you, Adrien.”
“Just you, Janey,” I say. “Will you?”
“Oui,” she says in my language and again in hers. “Yes, Adrien. I’m yours. Always.”
I kiss her then, and her lips are salty with the sea, or her tears, or maybe my own, and it is the taste of perfect happiness.