Stranger in the Night

The sky seemed more blue, the sun brighter and the air fresher than it had felt in a long time, or at least it seemed that way that early morning, as I stood alone outside the entrance to my quarters.

I'd hit the sheets early that night, or at least earlier than usual, still bottling in that sense of futility that comes with tragedy, the tragedy of an Armageddon for which there was no cure, no fix, no future and no understanding.  Where had this all come from?  We were alone and so few of us that it didn’t take a clairvoyant to prophecy the final outcome.  Within a couple of generations at best, assuming we weren’t discovered and destroyed ourselves, the world would be inhabited by morons, the products of severe inbreeding, or at its worst the inability to reproduce resulting in a dead planet, humanly speaking at least.

But, something had been different last night, something like that phone you hear ringing, just before you wake up to an alarm clock.  It hadn't been a sound however, it was more a feeling of an ominous presence, as if something were about to reach out and grab me.  Yet the moment that I actually awoke, was not sudden, but a slow transition, so much so that I began to reach out to touch that something that I was now sure inhabited my bed.  It dawned on me that we did have solid doors at our entrances and that an animal could very easily have crawled onto my bed only if I had for some stupid reason left that door open.  It was possible.  It had happened before.  I'd awoken in the morning to see the door wide open.  Anything could've crawled in during the night and I wouldn’t have known a thing. 

In my half sleeping mode, my imagination held sway.  Would it have fur?  What if it was rabid?  Perhaps it was a skunk.  We'd seen those around.  If it perfumed the cave, I'd lose everything.  We'd even seen wild dogs.  It occurred to me that whatever this creature was, it was giving off a lot of heat, more than I had felt under the covers in months.  Under the covers?  What animal would crawl under the covers?  At any rate, it was no small animal.  I reached out a tentative hand, then a single finger and touched...flesh, warm, soft flesh, flesh that responded to my touch by moving closer.  The skin was bare from head to toe, although I didn’t actually check for socks. 

Although a relief to know I was not about to become dinner, this was more than I could handle.  There was only one real possibility.  But surely it was not Lise.  We had gone through this discussion before.  She was far too young for me.  Hadn’t she just turned 18 yesterday? 

She spoke, removing any remaining doubt.  Since the invasion and discovery of the loss of her family and friends, Lise had begun to cling to me as...I thought, as a father.  After all, I was certainly old enough to be her father or maybe her grandfather.  I had been her teacher, she my student.  There were no such relationships between teachers and students, especially with students so young.  I had to maintain my separateness, my principles.  I had to do what was right.  What would the others think of me?   At least that was what my brain was telling me, most of the time anyway. 

All the while, my heart was arguing another story.  The situation in which we found ourselves was not at all ordinary or customary.  Sometimes, my thoughts drifted to my own losses, my wife, whom I assumed had been reduced to a small sphere and my children who lived out of the country and had no way to contact me, and that was assuming they too, were survivors. Perhaps the rules had changed.  “No,” I thought, “Rules in a civilized world never change.  They are based on sound principles.” 

Finally, I broke the silence.  “Lise, I told you two years ago that this wouldn't work.  We can’t be together.  I’m much too old for you, and besides, I’m your teacher,” I had argued.

“Why are you talking like the world is the same as it was ten years ago?  You can see that we’re all there is.  There IS no society.  Who’s going to care?  I certainly don’t.   And for that matter, you’re not my teacher.  In case you haven’t noticed, school’s out!  For good!”

“Do you think it just matters what a few people think?” I responded.  “This is about doing what is right, no matter who’s watching.” 

“You mean like stealing something when no one is watching?  Mr. W, I love you.  I have liked you for a long time, and I don’t think inappropriately, but my feelings for you have changed in the last little while.  Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we have no one else.  Please don’t write me off.  Do you care for me at all?”

Until that moment, I'd felt some semblance of control of my feelings.  However, when I thought about what Lise was telling me, how she felt, I too began to take stock of the way I really felt.  I had to admit, I was drawn to her.  She was right.  I had no one and neither did she.  I was concerned about what the others in our camp would think, but heh.

“I want to know how you feel about me.  I'm pretty sure you like me, because you've always treated me kindly and never turned me away, other than like this.  I want to know if your feelings for me go beyond that.  I need to know.  If you care for me, I don’t care what others do, or say, or think.  I’ll be with you.”

“Lise, what's this about?  What are you asking of me?  This is your birthday.  Am I just a birthday present, one you'll throw away tomorrow after you sneak away?

“You are a birthday present all right.  But you have the wrong idea.  I’ve never heard of a birthday present that you use one day and then throw away the next.  You’re like getting a house.  It’s forever.  But you haven’t answered my question.  Do you care for me?”

I hesitated, so Lise began to put things together and started to slip out from under the sheets.  I could feel her at the edge, trying to find what I assumed were her slippers, then, there was that springing of the mattress that revealed that she had indeed left me.

“Is it because I'm not beautiful enough?” she questioned.  It was true that she was not stunningly beautiful, but this attribute was hardly noticeable due to her wonderful character and personality. She could light up a room with her presence.

I couldn’t lie to her.  When it came to what men usually thought of as beauty, Lise didn't have a lot of.  Were her eyes the exact distance apart or her nose set just right?  Were her ears the right size?  And her cheek bones were they high enough?  But who cared, for perhaps God, if there was one, had given me a little of his insight, for I saw in Lise a truly beautiful person.  “Lise!  Beauty, as man sees it, is only skin deep.  You truly are beautiful, but God chose to put more of your beauty inside you.  If he had put it on your outside, it would have made the rest of the world look ugly by comparison.  You’re probably the most beautiful person that I’ve ever known.”  Lest I give the impression that Lise was ugly, misshapen, or plain, that was hardly the truth.  It was just that according to scientific experiments with what men worldwide considered beautiful, she did not quite match up.  But what others had ignored, now became a blessing to me.

 My comment hadn't stopped her retreat from the room.  The realization that the greatest gift anyone had ever offered me, other than my own first wife, was about to simply walk away, brought my senses to high alert.  I sat up with a start.  There'd been times of regret in my life that I'd remained silent when I should've spoken up, had failed to take an action and later regretted it. 

Heart and mind were in a combat to the death, a struggle for control of my life or what was left of it.  How did an older man, her former teacher, tell an eighteen year old that he loved her?  Even as I rehearsed the words over in my mind, they didn't resonate as sensible.  Yet, I suddenly realized that Lise was right.  What society thinks of something isn't necessarily about right or wrong.  Other societies on the planet, both present and past, had marriages such as this and thought nothing of it.  Many mores of society were simply constructs of that society.   Had earth’s people set up a committee to decide who could marry whom and when?  To some extent that'd been true.  Court cases had taken place where prosecutors had convinced judges that certain older men should be punished for having the gall to have consensual sex with a minor.  While I certainly don't think that minors should be having sex, upon what sound basis did the judge make his ruling other than that he thought that the majority of the country frowned upon what the couple had decided to do.   Now, there was no country.  Now, there were no judges.  Now, there were no prosecutors.  All the body of law created by the decisions of judges over several hundred years, right or wrong, was now null and void.  We were starting from scratch.

I made my resolve, a resolve based upon a losing battle between those two competing organs, the one of conscious, rational thought and decision making and the other of feelings, and emotions, emotions that I had unsuccessfully tried to bury since the loss of my wife and family.  I could hear her at the entryway.  “Lise, don’t go,” came the words from deep within me.  She was still in the room.  “I do care...very much.”  I had nothing to lose.  “Please stay.”  Could I repeat the words that would compel her to stay?  “Lise, I love you.”  The struggle was over.  As I was speaking, I hadn't heard her soft feet run swiftly to my bed.  “I don’t know how I could live without you,” I went on speaking to no one at the entrance, as she jumped in beside me once again and wrapped herself around me.   “Lise, although I want to be with you, and I agree with most of what you've said, there's a little issue I'd like to clear up before we take this relationship any further tonight.”

“What’s that?” she asked, sitting up beside me.  I could hear disappointment in her voice as if she sensed that I was about to send her away again.

“If I ask you some questions, will you answer honestly?”

“I’m always honest.”

“Of course you are.  I needn’t have asked.  Just a minute.”  I got up and lit a few candles, for I wanted us to be able to see one another, then again took my place on my bed.  “There are no priests, ministers, judges or anything like that that we know of, so the legal system as we know it is defunct.  We are in uncharted waters here.  Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to have a lasting relationship with me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“That’s the same relationship I want with you.  I could never agree to anything else.”  I was quiet for a few moments.  “Lise, sit here in front of me.”  She squirmed her way to my feet and sat crossed legged, facing me.  Her beautiful ebony flesh gleamed in the candle light.  She was completely naked, having discarded her top and the sight of her bare skin and the parts of her that I had never seen before, coupled with the knowledge that she wanted to spend the night with me was playing havoc with my own formerly inert hormones.   My eyes followed the curves of her body as her flesh flowed gently over her shoulders and down her arms to her elbows.  The candle light created strange shadows on her torso.  Her breasts were not huge, but enough to fill my hands and the nipples appeared hard and erect.  The area behind her crossed legs was immersed in darkness.  Needless to say, I was beginning to feel like a sixteen year old sitting in a classroom full of mixed students and my own body parts were beginning to respond to this vision.  If she’d noticed, she didn’t let on.  I stared at her face, her ivory teeth and the whites of her eyes aglow.   My heart was pounding in my chest.  I was concerned I might have a heart attack, if not now, before the night was through.  Yet, I pressed on.

“Lise, I don’t have a lot to offer you.  I am not rich, handsome, or young.  I don`t have a pretty house for you or fine clothes or jewels.  I can`t promise you a lot of tomorrows for I don’t even know what today will bring.  All I have is this heart of mine that skips beats whenever I hear your voice. A heart that has known for a long time that I loved you.  No more denial!   Lise, sweetheart, will you marry me and end the suffering of this lonely man?”

 “When?”

That was not what I was expecting to hear.  “When?  Lise, the question has a yes or no answer.  And depending on how you answer, I’ll either become a most miserable, depressed old man, or the happiest I’ve been for a long time.  But to answer your question, I mean right now.”

“O Warren, of course I’ll marry you.  But what do you mean by now?  Do you mean to wake up everyone?”

“No Lise, we’ll let them sleep for now.  Remember what I said about uncharted waters?  I don’t think it really matters exactly how we marry.  But what does matter, if we are honest with one another, is that when we make promises to each other we intend to keep those promises.  So, in the quietness of this room, with no one to distract us, are you willing to commit your life to me, to marry me, here and now?”

“Yes.  This will be our official marriage?”

“That’s the idea.”   I took Lise’s hands in mine and spoke, “Lise, I love you.  I am so glad that you've come into my life.  You’ve given me a reason to live.  And I couldn’t be more blessed that I am at this moment.  I promise you that as long as I live, I will provide for you, protect you, be faithful to you, love and respect you, to the best of my ability.  I will never put anyone else before you; I will always be your best friend.”

Lise realizing that I had just made a vow to her had some words of her own.  “Mr. W, err I mean, Warren.”  At this, Lise burst into a brief fit of laughter.  “I too love you with all my heart.  There is no one that I could want more than you, even if there were hundreds of men to pick from.  I promise to be faithful to you, love and respect you, stick by you and support you for as long as I live.  I will never let anyone come between us.  And for the record, Warren, you are handsome.  At least to me.”

I got up and picked up something that I'd found with my wife’s clothing at her school, a small round piece of gold.  This, I slipped on Lise’s finger.  I had also retrieved my own wedding band that I hadn't worn for nearly a year.  This I gave to Lise, who placed it on my finger.  We had set a new protocol and considered ourselves married, if not in the sight of God, (for after the decimation of the human race, we both wondered whether there truly was a god), at least in ours.   We would share our relationship with the others tomorrow.  Now, we were together.

I encouraged Lise to move closer, as near as two bodies sitting cross legged could manage.  I drew the back of my right hand gently down her left cheek until my hand came to a rest under her chin, then lightly stroked her lips with my thumb.  I felt her shudder.  I was fairly certain that Lise had never been with a man before, though it seemed so common in our world for everyone to be sleeping around without benefit of clergy.  I on the other hand had been married before and was quite experienced.  This I saw as an advantage, for though I had not been with a woman for quite some time and knew that this could often lead to a lack of control, my experience offered a degree of self-control that most young men lacked.  I determined therefore, that this night was going to be a time that Lise would remember fondly for the rest of her life.  I would be as patient as humanly possible, for I knew that my own anticipation would eventually be rewarded.