Chapter 19: If Only Us... Chapter 19

We awoke to the muted sounds of traffic filtering through the curtains.  It was eight in the morning of a beautiful blue day outside.  Virginia woke slowly, stretching languorously, and turned to me as she did.  Her breasts poked me in the chest.  She flinched a little.

“A little sore this morning, Honey?”

“Yeah.  Just the nipples though.  The rest is just super sensitive to the touch.”

“Oh, you poor thing.  Let me kiss and make feel better.”

I bent forward and gently kissed each pink tipped breast.

“Now, all better?”

She slapped me on the shoulder in response.  Then she discovered my morning woody.  This seemed to interest her even more.

“Joanie told me that guys get this way almost every morning.  Is there a reason?”

“You tell me.  I’ve been spooning a very warm, sexy girl for eight hours, something like that?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, it happens a lot of mornings - for me anyway.  I started doing this around the time I went through puberty.  At first I couldn’t figure out why it happened until I asked my dad.  He was evasive, and all he would tell me was it had something to do with when I got older.  It was another year before he actually told me why guys got hard.  He was pretty embarrassed about it too.”

“My mom was the same way.  I asked her why guys kept pushing and pulling at their pants during a date.  The answer was that guys get something called an erection and it made them get bigger and harder than normal.  I was supposed to not encourage any guy when he got that way.  Until you came along, I didn’t either.  When I dropped my hand that time on the train and felt how hard you were I knew the time had come to find out for sure.”

“Really?  I thought I’d embarrassed you because of the flush under your chin.”

“I flushed when I thought about how I was going to encourage you even more.  Turned out, I didn’t need to try did I?”

“Well, no.  But I sure was nervous that night.”

“Me too.  You have no idea.”

She kissed me deeply, rose up on her elbow, and slid off the bed.  Grabbing up her nightgown, she went into the bathroom and closed the door.  I heard water running into the tub.

I got up and tapped on the door to remind her of our meeting with Harry and Janice at ten this morning.  It was now eight forty-five.  She rushed through her morning routines and allowed me to enter the steamy bathroom.  The delicate scent of vanilla drifted around me as I brushed teeth, shaved, and applied after shave.

Soon we were both ready to go.  We stopped briefly in the lobby for a cup of coffee and some wonderful pastry and then went outside into a cool day to wait for the Rathford’s.

The barge trip was very enjoyable.  The Rathford’s had chartered a tourist barge with a covered afterdeck that used to be the aft hold.  The covers had been removed and the hold fitted with bench seats and a table.  The table was loaded with all kinds of snacks and several wine bottles sat in a rack attached to the port side.  Virginia stayed away from the wine and got a nodded approval from Janice.

After our first encounter in the lounge car of the train, Janice began to warm up to us – to Virginia more than me, I think.  The two of them sat off to one side and talked quietly while Harry and I stood on the deck and took pictures.  It was from a different perspective to see people waving from the bridges we passed under.

We slowly motored up one canal and down another while snacking on the food.  I had several glasses of wine, and made Virginia a small sandwich filled with ham slices and cheese.  She pronounced it delicious.  I fixed myself one and used a very potent smelling hot mustard that very nearly brought tears to my eyes.  As it was, my sinus’s cleared right out.

In time, the late afternoon overtook us and we pulled back to the pier we had originally departed from.  Janice and Virginia reluctantly parted with a heartfelt hug; Harry and I shook hands.  Janice pressed a paper into Virginia’s hands telling her it was their address in Surrey and to please write when she found time.  She turned to me.

“Take care of your young wife Tom.  She is most delightful.  Harry and I have been married for over forty years now and perhaps we have become a bit stodgy.  Having you two near us spiffed up what might have become just another vacation for us.  By all means, send us pictures of the young one.”

“I will, milady, I shall probably overwhelm everyone with pictures if given my head.”

She laughed and waved goodbye as they got into their taxi.  Virginia and I hailed another one to take us back to the hotel.

The next two days passed swiftly at times and slowly at others.  The citizens of the city were wonderful to us as we wandered through shops and cobbled streets.  At night, back in the hotel, we would make slow, lazy, love or just hold each other until we fell asleep.  We were so happy together now that we were married.  Before that wonderful event, there was always a looming shadow of urgency to everything we did together.  Now, the urgency had been erased and we had almost adjusted to being together for the rest of our life.  I fervently hoped we would never get fully adjusted.  That would take all the fun and adventure out of it.

In one of the innumerable little squares located through the city, we watched a very good magician ply his trade.  Among other things, he drew a member of the audience out and asked her to tie a blindfold over his eyes.  When she did, he did a little comedic scene in which he stumbled around looking for his box of tricks.  When he fell over it, the audience laughed.  They made even more noise when he reached into the young woman’s backpack and pulled a rabbit out of it.  I tossed a few guilders into the tall hat he’d thoughtfully placed in front of his makeshift stage.

Our final day dawned grey and overcast.  No rain, but the promise of it was in the air.  We bantered with each other a little as we packed and then called down to the desk for a porter.  We followed him down, stopped at the desk, and paid our bill.  It was a little more than I’d planned, but I’d forgotten the city tax.  No matter though as we still had almost a third of what we were given left.  I noticed that it had started to drizzle outside the front entrance.

It began to rain a little harder as the taxi slopped through the puddles on the way to the train station.  Once inside, we went out to the gate of the platform and asked if we could board.  The guard told us we’d have to wait for yet another ten minutes.  We sat on benches and talked until he motioned that we could go through.  I passed him our tickets, which he glanced at, and we walked down the platform to locate our car.

Once aboard – we were the first to board – the porter led us to our compartment.  It was almost the same layout as our first compartment, but there were no flowers and smelled like cigar smoke.  He saw Virginia wrinkle her nose and asked if everything was correct.  I told him that stale smoke made her nauseous.  He professed distress that there were no empty compartments this trip but promised to bring some air freshener to help.  In the meantime, he opened the window and showed us that if we turned on the WC fan we’d create a cross-draft.

I thanked him and asked if we’d be leaving on time.  He assured us we would and departed.  We sat on the seat and looked disconsolately out the window at the grey skies and the falling rain.

“A sad way to end our honeymoon isn’t it?”  Virginia sighed.

“Oh, I don’t know.  We had a wonderful time, made some really steamy sex, got taken out by a Lord and Lady; what more would you want?”

“God!  That’s why I love you so much,” she smiled at me.  “You always look on the bright side of things.”

“You’ve got to stop being a gloomy puss kiddo.  Smile and everyone wonders what you’re up to!”

She face brightened and she laughed.

“You’re right.  Want something to eat?  I squirreled away some of those pastries on the barge.”

“Oh, yum.  Let me at them.  You didn’t happen to store away some coffee did you?”

“Nope, but I did take two of those little bottles of milk.  They’re right here.”  She said, digging at her small bag.

She pulled two pint bottles of milk out and we toasted each other with a clink and gobbled down the pastry.  It was sweet and delicious.

At precisely eleven-seventeen the engineer tooted twice and we clanked into motion to start out the maze of tracks making up the Utrecht yards.  After a seemingly endless sound of crossing points, we hit the last set and entered the main.  There, we picked up speed rapidly.  Our car was quite a ways back from the engine so when we went around a right curve we could look out and see the head engine.  A huge plume of smoke belched out from the stack and lay flat along the ground as we passed.

This trip wouldn’t take near as long as the trip north.  Instead of waiting in yards for a connecting train, we would just stop briefly for sections to be cut out and left for pickup.  Our section would continue onwards towards Germany and, eventually, Switzerland.  The porter arrived and asked us which seating for dinner we would like.  We discussed it and chose the early seating at seven in the evening.  He nodded and left us for a moment then came back with the conductor who verified and punched our tickets.

“Please have a very good trip,” was all he said when he handed us back our tickets.

Virginia took them and folded them into our book of poems for safekeeping.  She was determined to keep everything relating to our honeymoon so she could put them into a scrapbook.  I never really got into scrapbooking, but she’d had several of them lying around in her room.  I supposed they would now end up in ‘our’ room at my house.  That sounded strange – ‘our room’.  It finally, at that moment, really hit me that I was going to be living with Virginia under my dad’s roof in a single bedroom.  What a rush.