Grass

Grass. He had loved grass. Fields sprouted and spread through his dreams like fire on a lake of gasoline- when he fell asleep on the damp earth, his gray mind fuzzed over with deep green. He ran, not mechanically, nor fearfully, nor arduously, but ran like a man freed from prison, or a man waking out of a coma and coming home -- ran like joy shooting across synapses, ran to make himself part of the freedom of this unreal world. He was breathing, not just to take in oxygen, but to assimilate the scents- wild scents like old wood and green things growing. The air was always that of late summer, at dusk, just warm, igniting the light dust rising from the woven ground into gold. And in the middle of the dream field, in the depths of these infinite grasses, was the girl. Always.

She lay on a quilt spread over a little patch of grass clipped short like moss, unapologetically nude- bare, like everything else, to the warm deepening late-afternoon blue of the sky. She would be one shade of skin, a natural Greek tan; no cloth had ever shaded her, but the sun wouldn't scorch her. Her long body curved in at the waist and out at the hips defiantly, dramatically, as if God meant to convey through her the essence and strength of femininity itself. She would lie back, propped up on her elbows, one knee arched, watching him run towards her from the horizon, calm, patient, smiling. His memory served him this scene during every deep sleep he managed to settle into, but the real world did not.

In the real world, he twitched on the cold dirt. He was close enough to death that it didn't matter. He had given up, and so his subconscious ignored the dark and frigid; it ignored the wet and the cuts and bruises and led him to this bright dying place, half memory and half fantasy.

So he was there, slowing his sprint towards her, stopping, panting as he dropped to his knees on the soft stunted grass in front of her. They shared a smile as she shifted herself forward, crawled towards him, and sat up on her knees a foot away, close enough for him to smell the air she exhaled into the breeze. Her eyes were a few inches below his - eyes that did not move from his face, the stare so complete that it was like she was holding him, physically, with trust, gratitude, love, and desire.

The sound of old metal creaking and banging echoed across the dream field. He opened his eyes and saw a slit of light flash into a blinding rectangle where the cell door had been slammed open. The silhouette of a guard threw a pouch of water to his feet. Then the door closed and the room was black again. He crawled towards where it had fallen, pulling himself with his hands, dragging his legs, eyes glazed over with pain. When he had emptied the pouch, he put his head down on it and passed out.

The sun became a little lower, in the seamless, instantaneous way time passes in dreams. Her skin tightened into ripples of goosebumps. She turned her face away from him, breaking their gaze for the first time in hours, or seconds, he could not remember. Her nipples hardened as the wind combed lazily through the taller grasses around them, ebbing around her naked figure. She sat back on her haunches. He moved on his knees toward her, onto the quilt- a thick blue comforter that changed its hue to match the sky as the sun melted into horizon. It was soft and, somehow, springy and supportive. When she turned back to him, her face was a quarter's length away. He found that he was naked now, too- a gust of wind rushed through the invisible hair on his bare back and between his legs. He could feel her heat near his stomach, his chest. Their noses brushed. Light shone and disappeared between their kneeling figures. The ends of her small, stiff nipples made contact, just, with the skin of his taut stomach, a touch he could barely distinguish from the air. He didn't move but to breathe. And to look- down, from her face, across the round and perfect breasts, to her legs, parted in a tight v, a gradient of gold from the sun reaching through her thighs from behind. In the impossible physics of the dream, the shadow her small swollen labia cast lay directly on his penis. He felt the shadow almost had weight to it, and softness. He grew hard, his heart-beat evident, his penis thumping in the open air. When his eyes met hers again, she grinned.

She was instantly part of the wildness of the place, like the pollen and the dragonflies, joined at the tail, that jumped across the stalks of grass behind her -- the green earth hummed around them as her small lips turned into that provocative grin. Holding the stare as long as she could, she fell gently onto her back, her muscles relaxing, the black in her eyes reflecting the pink and blue streaks in the sky. He followed her to the ground, dropped to his hands and knees over her. Her hands went up to grip his hair and his back, to pull him down onto her, into her, almost. As their lips met and parted, he dreamed she tasted like the sweet air smelled, and felt like the softness of the blanket, wet like the startling slickness of her pussy, his cock playing against her lips, toying, slipping across her clitoris. She clenched a fistful of his hair and sucked against his lower lip, breaking away and biting his neck, letting out a guttural, impassioned mmph, and he slid inside her, reaching deep into her, until she was full and he was buried, completely. She pulled his head to her lips, planted her fingernails in his shoulder blade, and whispered, the only words he would hear the whole dream.

"I love you." Every dream, every time she said it, her voice was so real he almost woke up. And then, softer, less tangible, "I want you to come inside me."

In the dark cell, the sleeping prisoner's body involuntarily bucked on the dirt.

He jerked his head to her lips, he kissed her. Then he fucked her. He pushed into her with fast measured thrusting that became frantic, almost violent. Every thrust pushed her hard against the blanket; sweat formed on his chest as they moved. She kissed and bit him, his chest, his neck, his lips, she thrust her tongue in his ear, she held his hair and dug her nails into his back and his ass as if he were her only anchor to the world. He was unrelenting. She yelled out into the open sky as she came.

He slowed for her to catch herself. When she'd stopped shaking, she inhaled deeply and opened her eyes. He was still moving in and out of her, as slowly as he could. She grinned the same grin. Slipping his cock out of her, she pushed him off of her and rolled onto her stomach. Then she raised her ass a few inches off the blanket, perfecting the arc of her lower back. Resting her head on her forearms, she looked back at him, and her lips formed the words she'd whispered earlier- come inside me. It was unbearable.

He threw himself onto her, found her pussy with his index finger, and forced his cock inside. On the fourth thrust he gripped her thighs and she pushed her ass hard back against him, forcing him as deep into her as she could. He came, surging, completely within her, again and again, until finally his strength ran out and they fell forward onto the blanket, her ass soft against his groin, his hands surrounding hers. Her parted lips held the hint of a smile.

When his breathing slowed, he crossed his arms underneath her and rolled them both up, so she rested on top of him, her back to his stomach, both looking at the sky. The sun was gone. The weight of her body on him, the feeling of her hair falling across his chest, would linger even into his waking reality, mingling with the pain of his hastily treated shrapnel wound like a cruel joke.

And then as he lay there, waking up slowly into the pitch black cell, it wasn't just her weight that remained. He could still smell the grass -- he inhaled, a shot of pain, but the smell was there, as strong as in the dream. Slowly, out of the maddening blackness, specks of light - stars - emerged. A soft sound manifested itself in the cold room, seeming far away, but then not so much- a gentle, airy sound. His chest grew warm where she had lay. Then something brushed his neck. He looked and saw in the darkness the dim outline of her hand. His red eyes saw her hair then, too, and her breasts rising above her chest. He reached his hand up to her face and felt it. Her hand took his tenderly. She inhaled, and he heard her voice.

"This is it. I can feel it. I'm going to... we're going to have a child."

"I love you," he muttered. His throat felt like sand. "So much."

Metal banged together and light shot into the room -- not daylight now, but the softer light from the compound's lamps. The guard walked into the room and kicked him in the side of the abdomen. He barked something in a sharp language.

"Captain talk you now, see what you know," a second man, just outside, repeated in awkward English.

The words were distant, far away. The dirt was grass, the pain had faded to mere pressure where she lay on him. The butt of a rifle struck him in the forehead, and the world shook for a moment, then remained still. The wind picked up and died down, he swatted a mosquito, but his arm didn't move. He closed his eyes, and the she smiled at him from their blanket in the field.