Rope and Veil Pt. 02

This is a sequel to Rope and Veil. As with that story, any mistakes or misunderstanding of the issues facing PWD communities are mine and mine alone; and I hope I don't cause offence.

A key element of the story was inspired by Pascale Honore, a woman with paraplegia. Use your favourite search engine.

--ooo OOO ooo --

"Alex, take me down to the sand, be my legs today."

We're staying in a small town in the far north of the state, where Amelia's grand-parents built their summer retreat before she was born. By the ocean, this is the town where Amelia first found her love of water and learned to swim like a fish. When her mother returned to her family for southern Christmases, Amelia was a gleeful child, a dolphin skimming down the waves. She was dark and small and ran like a sprite.

She parked her wheelchair at the top of the dunes, where the grass ended and the soft sands began. The chair placed so conspicuously declared her presence.

"The town gossips might as well know I'm the woman in the wheelchair, right from the start. They'll get used to me quicker that way."

The existence of the sand gave Amelia the shits the first day when the wheels bogged, but she was kind to me by taking her own weight on her arms around my neck, and I carried her lightly onto the beach, rewarded with a kiss.

"Alex, slather me with sun cream, this sun is glorious on my skin, so warm. Thanks, my darling man."

She wore a black bikini, high cut on her hips and a lovely curve over her ass, the top cupping her perfect breasts. Amelia goes a darkness in the sun, her skin colouring with some ancestral trace, and our bodies quickly become a contrast. Her darkness and my lighter tan, my hair turning blond in the sun and salt; her coloured hair, flame red at the moment but that will change next month. She's never constant, but she's always Amelia. Summer by the ocean, there is no better time. Amelia by the sea, there is no better woman. Amelia anywhere, really. She doesn't need a place.

Amelia lay on her front, and I rubbed the cream onto her long legs and up over her slender, muscled back, lingering over her shoulders. I wished she was lying on her back, her breasts a delight for my eyes.

"You're horny, aren't you? I can always tell, your fingers slow on my skin."

"Who wouldn't be horny, looking at you, Amelia? God, look at you, lying there all tanned and gorgeous in a black bikini, barely there."

"Oh go on, fuck off and collect some shells or something. I'm just getting to a good bit in this book, you can wait..."

She paused, two beats and a promise.

"Besides, it's a public beach and there's too much sand."

The problem with Amelia is that she's right. It's a public beach, and of course there's sand. It's a beach.

I wandered off to the edge of the water, scattering sprays with my feet and kicking the water into flickering patterns.

At this end of the beach, fishermen back between the wars cleared rocks from the shallow reef, making a wide landing place for their boats. Now, the place was a small lagoon, and when the tide was low, safe for children, the sandy bottom slowly sloping away to about six feet deep. Some two hundred yards out from the shore, a low reef broke the surf, and kids bobbed on their boards. Out there, I saw snorkels, and remembered Amelia telling me about fish on the reef.

I looked back up the beach to Amelia, but she was engrossed in her book and didn't see my wave. I did as I was told, and bent to collect some shells. She'll want to see them when I go back to her, to wonder at their colours and shiny surfaces. She'll turn them over in her long fingers and trace the corrugations on the shells, all tactile and sensual. I'll watch her fingers, fascinated, and I'll want them tracing along the shaft of my cock. Amelia's touch is always worth waiting for. Her fingers have no weight, they float across the surface of my skin, bringing shivers to my spine.

My fingers on her skin are less successful, sadly. She can see my caress, and know its intent is true; but sometimes I wish she could feel my love for her on every inch of her body.

Her gaze was strong and direct as she watched me return to our wide towel on the beach. I knelt by her side, and dropped a small pile of shells in front of her. It's a little offering.

"Did you read more of the chapter?" She'd sent me away, and I wanted to know it was worth it.

"No. I didn't read another word. I wanted to watch you walk along the beach, bend down, stand up, kick the water, bring me shells."

Sometimes I can't keep up with Amelia. I thought she wanted me gone so she could finish her chapter. No, she wanted me gone so she could see me come back to her.

"I love watching you, Alex. You're a fucking Adonis, you know that? All tall and golden and blond. I watch the women looking at you, and I see their eyes narrow and glint. They want you so bad. I see them look across at me, here on the sand. Sometimes their astonishment shows, before they can hide it."

"Yeah, well, just because you can't walk on the sand, doesn't mean you can't have the hottest man on the beach. Fuck 'em. They can check me out all they like, but only you can have me!"

But I was flattered, of course I was, that the other women on the beach were jealous of Amelia.

She rolled onto her back and propped herself against me, resting her weight on one elbow. She'd undone the string of her bikini top, and as she re-arranged herself the black scraps of cloth slid to the towel. Her breasts were the same dark tan as the rest of her, her nipples darker circles with a small tightness at their centre. Amelia reached for the sun cream and rubbed it onto her arms, breasts and belly.

"Can you rub the cream in on my legs?"

She knows that I love to care for her long, thin legs, and she watched my hands caress the cream into her scarred thighs, the long gouge on her right thigh still pale, never tanning. The lighter, more regular cutting scars were silvering with time, fading memories. I stretched down to rub cream over her lower legs and feet. As I did so, I felt her gentle touch upon my waist sensing the twist of muscle under my skin. Whenever Amelia sees my fingers on her legs, which she cannot feel, she rests her fingers somewhere on my skin, which she can.

"Can you believe that my mother, when she first came here for summer hols, used to rub baby oil on her skin, deliberately, to go brown?"

"You're kidding, you mean she would lie in the sun and just cook? Jesus, that's asking for skin cancer, isn't it?"

I was incredulous. I'd met Amelia's mum, couldn't imagine her cooking herself in the sun.

"You'd think so. Probably just as well mum lives in England most of the time. Mind you, by the time I first came here, proper sun block lotions were being used. I don't remember though, I was only little."

She looked around, down to the water, and back up to the dunes.

"I've just realised something." The tone of her voice changed, and I knew from past experience that I was going to hear some quiet reveal.

"This beach, maybe even right here, this must have been the place my grand-dad died, that first Christmas I was here. I must have been about three. I can't remember a thing.

"Apparently, the whole family had come up to the holiday house for Christmas. Mum's younger brother drove back south the day before we all arrived, so he wasn't here when it happened. Mum, Judy and I flew from England on Boxing Day, and we'd only been here a day when grand-dad died. Mum said he'd taken me for a swim, right there in the lagoon, came out of the water, and bang, collapsed and died right here on the beach. That's not fucking right, is it?"

"God, it's like he waited until he'd seen all his children, and you. Fucking hell, that's cruel, isn't it? Fuck."

Nothing more could be said. Amelia was too young to remember, but I was reminded just how quickly the impossible can happen and change everything. No, that's not fucking right.

After ten or fifteen minutes, our silence together became a stillness, and I felt Amelia's fingers press on my skin. I squeezed her shoulder and kissed her hair, affectionately. I suppose love and death go together, and being with Amelia reminded me all the time about life. Being around her, I'd learned never to take anything for granted.

Her fingers were a slow, unconscious movement, circling softly on my flesh. In the drowsy heat of the sun, the touch of her fingers soothed me into a doze. Then her fingers were slower on my skin.

"Alex, take me into the water."

I looked down at her, and saw that her nipples were tight and taut. She was aroused, and I'm so slow. Maybe not such an unconscious movement, then. Perhaps sex and death go together, as well as love.

I took her up in my arms, and she clung tightly to me like she was drowning, but we're not even in the water yet.

In the water, Amelia wrapped her arms around me until I was waist deep. She slid from my arms and swam in circles around me, her strong arms pulling through the water like her palms turned the wheels of her chair. Her legs trailed behind her like a mermaid's tail, and the water freed her. She dove down between my legs, and when she surfaced, she flung her arms around me, droplets of water a rainbow around her as she flicked her hair.

"Further out, come on, let's go where it's deeper. Where no-one can see."

Her voice was joyous, laughing. She was weightless in the warm water, and her bare breasts had become perfect globes, her hard nipples tighter still. My cock hardened in my swimming briefs. Her hand went down inside them and gripped me, tight. She pushed herself away from me, her feet knocking against my body. Amelia's body curved in the water around me, but she's so quick, she's gone.

She must have dived deeper, I couldn't see her. I felt a tug on my legs. Amelia was a flurry below the surface, struggling to get my swimming trunks down my legs. My cock bounced free, hard up against my gut, but she wasn't interested in that, she was still wrestling my trunks down my legs. Amelia pushed me, causing me to lose my balance, and as I floundered she finally managed to pull the trunks from my feet.

We both surfaced, gasping for air, and she swam away from me, the black cloth of my trunks held high as a victory flag in her hand.

"Come on, merman, come chase your mermaid. What, can't you catch me?"

Amelia's taunting was a challenge, and I lunged for her, determined to net her.

"Come on, merboy, you wuss."

Fuck, she was fast, her body turning and spiralling, fluid. I lunged, managing to grab her foot. She felt her body slow, and I was upon her, my chest against her full breasts, my arms wrapped behind her back. I caught my balance, spreading both feet on the sand so I could support both of us in the water. I stood on the bottom of the lagoon, and the water was just below my chest. Amelia wrapped her body around mine, my erection hard in one hand, her other hand behind my head. She pulled my mouth down to hers and kissed me deeply, her tongue all salty, her breath still fast from her exertion.

As we kissed, Amelia began a slow back and forth rub around me, pressing her breasts against my torso, arousing herself with the press of her nipples against my body. I stood like a rock on a reef, and she undulated against me like some exotic fish. Her hand held my cock, no movement there, just a light grip from her fingers. She slowed herself around me, focussed on our long kiss.

Amelia loved to linger on my mouth, her tongue darting, her teeth biting my lip, sucking my lips between hers. The salty sea changed the taste of us, and the briny tang was a stronger scent. The usual perfume of our sex was washed away, and out there in the lagoon we became creatures of a watery world, no longer land locked but some floating, connected thing.

Her hand was on my cock, and the feeling in the water was so different. Instead of heat there was a liquid coolness, and instead of hot breath there was a smooth flow. Amelia let go of my mouth and our kiss, took a deep breath and was on me, her mouth sucked to the head of my shaft, her tongue replacing the ebb of the water. She clung to me there for some twenty seconds, the sensation in my shaft all new and liquid soft. Then, with a burst of bubbles, she surfaced.

"That's impossible, I don't have gills," she laughed, her eyes sparkling.

Just as Amelia said it, she surged against my body, driven by a rising wave that passed across the lagoon. She looked out to sea.

"The tide's coming in. It always does that, the sea surges across the reef. In a little while, there'll be surf breaking out there. Take me out further, I want to ride a wave in as far as I can."

She'd forgotten about my cock. She couldn't ride me out here as she could on land, her hand a swooning stroke, her breasts a place to spill my seed upon, her mouth a delight to do it all again. Amelia lived in the moment, and the moment was now, with surf about to break.

I started to swim, a strong breast-stroke, and she wrapped her arms around my neck, riding half on, half off my back. Coupled together in the lagoon, we swam for five minutes and got ourselves another hundred yards out. The water was shallower out there on the reef, and again I got my balance and supported her body. The surface of the sea was choppy and rough, the incoming waves were starting to break.

"Can you do it, Amelia, can you get yourself all the way in?"

"Of course I bloody can. I was body surfing this reef when I was eight. Not having legs that can kick won't stop me. We'll just time it so you can push me on to the right wave, and my arms and the sea will do the rest."

I'd learned when Amelia says of course I bloody can do something, it means she bloody will do it. God help any one who gets in her way.

She grinned at me, her eyes as bright as the sky above our heads.

"Anyway, you'll need to come in with me, or you'll be walking from the water naked."

What? Oh shit, she's wrapped my swimming trunks about her upper arm so as not to lose them.

"OK, I reckon we've got another five minutes before the waves will break just right. We need to pass the time."

On dry land Amelia can rise my cock with her hands and mouth and have me gasping in three minutes or less. Or she can edge me for an hour and then make me explode at her whim. Out there in the surging water, she played with me while she waited for the sea to rise, her hand a slow, idle stroke.

"What's the matter, lover, can't you keep afloat?"

Jesus, I loved being teased by Amelia, even if she's only passing the time while the sea rises. She was distracted, waiting for the surf to rise, idly stroking my shaft. She looked at me with that special gaze I knew so well, her gentle smile creasing the sides of her eyes. My mind flashed back to the first time I was truly distracted by her, that day in her office, the beginning of my long delight in Amelia. Her quizzical eyebrow raised as I lost my concentration. Amelia's eyes, the door to her soul, my light.

Her hand left my shaft, and she positioned herself beside me. The waves were building up now, breaking around us.

"When I say go, push me as fast as you can on to the front of the wave. If I get the timing right, these waves will break behind me and take me in a fair way. You catch the next one, and I'll see you close to the shore!"

Amelia was excited by the physical exuberance of it all, the flurry of the surf, the idea of speeding down the front of the wave, the freedom the power of the surging water gave her. Her lost legs became a sea creature's tail.

"Come on Alex, let's do this."

Amelia launched herself onto the top of the next wave, and with a firm push with my hands about her waist she matched the speed of the surging break. Her strong arms did the rest and she was away. I watched the flash of her cropped red hair and the black armband of swimming trunks wrapped around her upper arm. She was sheer speed, gone with the breaking surf. I looked back out to sea to gauge the next wave, and then I too positioned myself, ready to chase my Amelia.

I said that once, to her face, and was met with her quizzical eyebrow.

"Your Amelia, Alex? I don't think so. You're my Alex. Surely you know that by now?"

The smile in her eyes when she said it, her smile said it all. Her Alex. My Amelia. I think we'd both fallen in love, somewhere between the rope and the wheels and the veil. Strange, that we say fallen. For us, it seemed to happen more side by side with a stillness, a circling, an enrapture. Perhaps you only fall if there's a safety net. With Amelia, whose whole life was a plummet, headlong and fearless, was our love only a moment, suspended and timeless before we fell? There was no safety net with Amelia. She was free fall, all the way.

That's what she did to me, Amelia. Thinking tiny moments of mortality and immortality, all mixed together in a split second, on a fulcrum, poised on the top of a wave. Amelia was gone, and without her I was nothing. So I plummeted down that wave, a momentary pause before the rush, chasing Amelia.

The surf surged around me, and I was exhilarated, speeding, my whole body rigid on the front slope of the wave. Ahead, I saw Amelia's red hair flash in the white tumble of her own wave, and the black flash of the arm band as she took another stroke to keep up her speed.

Then, oh shit, I'd misjudged the breaking power of my wave, and I was tumbling, tumbling, tumbling under the water. I instinctively curled myself into a ball to shrink my size in the pummelling surf, to make myself smaller against its power. My shoulder hit the bottom and dragged against the sand. Then I was behind the wave, clawing for the surface in its afterwash. Jesus, that was scary. Almost sobbing for breath, I threw my head high and gasped for air. Fuck.

Was Amelia all right? If the sea did this to me, what was it doing to her slighter body? I swam hard after her in a lull between the waves, and then there was another break behind me and I was pushed forward by the surf, again. Damn. This water's dangerous. I needed to get to Amelia.

Where is she? Thank Christ, there she is in a smoother band of water, her red head acting as a beacon in the white water behind the break. She'd come off the back of her wave, her speed dropping quickly,and I could see her turning, looking for me. She raised her arm in the air as a sign, and I swam to her.

"Fuck, Amelia, I got dumped. That was fucking scary."

"You OK?" She clutched her arms around me, "here, I've got you."

I scrambled my feet for the bottom and managed to stand, but it was my arms around her neck this time, I was the one clinging on.

"God, city boy, I never thought. I'm so used to this sea, I forgot."

She held my head and looked into my eyes, her concern a laser drilling into me.

"Oh Alex, it's alright." She'd seen a fear in my eyes and needed to sooth me. "Here, put these back on, and we'll go back to the beach."

I took my trunks from her, and pulled them back up my legs. As I did so she took my shrunken cock in her hand.

"Wow, you really did get scared, didn't you?"

Her hand was gentle, holding my shrunken cock and balls. I couldn't blame the cold sea, not this time.

I pushed through the water with Amelia holding on behind until it was too shallow. I bent to take her in my arms to carry her back up to our spot on the beach. This time, though, she was the strength for both of us. I was just a pair of legs carrying us both from the water.

"Maybe, Amelia, I should swim here only when the water's low. That was pretty scary."

She looked at me intently for maybe five seconds, then took my hand and squeezed my fingers.

"No. You'll be fine. It's only the first time it's shit. It always gets easier. You'll see."