Carnifex

31/9/466 AC, Isla Real, Quarters #2

I think the thing I like about this, thought Lourdes, on her knees with her head bobbing and her tongue working, is the control it gives me, not just over the sex, but over Patricio. But then, she thought as her husband pulled her head off, stood her up and pressed her back to the wall, but then he doesn't always let me keep control.

Despite having borne two children, a boy and a girl, Lourdes' body was unmarked, well shaped and still very firm. Tall, almost as tall as her husband, she was quite slender except in those places a woman should be more full. If anything, her breasts had improved from her pregnancies.

Cupping one of those, Carrera bent his head to tease the nipple of the other with his tongue. Lourdes loved that, he knew.

She let him continue in that for a long while, moans of sheer desire occasionally escaping her lips. When she couldn't stand it anymore she pulled his head up to kiss more intimately.

Balancing her back on the wall, Lourdes arched her hips forward and reached down to guide. A small gasp escaped her lips as Carrera thrust up and forward. The gasp became a long moan as he filled her fully.

And, for a while, she didn't think of much of anything.

* * *

"Do you really have to go so soon?" she asked Carrera, later as they lay in bed. "You only come home about five or sometimes six weeks a year. Are you so anxious to leave me."

Carrera sighed, then answered, "I take more leave than the troops get."

"Yes," she conceded, "but they only spend one year away for ever three years they spend here."

"That's only now," he countered. "Most of the leaders have been gone half the time since the war began."

"And you've been gone eighty percent of it."

To that Carrera had no really good answer. He went silent, thinking, They don't carry the curse I do, the obligation to destroy those who murdered Linda and the children.

After a short time he offered, "You were with me there until you came up pregnant with the second child. Besides, the war won't last forever."

"It will last too long; long enough for me to become a dried up old prune."

"Never happen," he answered, adding, "You're one of those women who will keep her looks into old age. I can tell."

Lourdes shook her head, doubtfully. "I'll age, the same as anyone. And you'll grow tired of me."

"Never happen," he repeated, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her head onto his shoulder. "For one thing, you're a lot younger than I am. By the time you're a wrinkled up old lady, I'll be using a walker, too old to get tired of anything except pissing myself."

She giggled at the image. "Now that," she said, "will never happen."

"Yes it will." Unless I'm lucky enough to be killed before it does.

"Speaking of the future, what's on for tomorrow?" Lourdes asked.

"Mass review of the Corps of Cadets at Puerto Lindo, then rechristening of the old HAMS Venganza. Want to come watch? The boys are bussing in from all over."

"No . . . no. I'm not comfortable with turning fourteen-year-old boys into soldiers."

"I love you for that, too," Carrera whispered, "for that among many other reasons."

Lourdes never asked if her husband loved her more than he had his first wife, Linda. She was much, much too afraid of the answer.