Two Women on a Harley 883

"We told you it was a lady's sickle!"

Their laughter was good-natured, though.

On one occasion we stayed away, took a motel room, and made love there. More often we would arrive at the diner, ravenous, in time for an evening meal. We would talk and joke with the regulars there, before going back to Louise's house in the dark, where we would lie on the bed, gently licking each other's love-places until we were both satisfied.

One evening, at the diner, the man to whom Louise had shown the magazine article about me, came over to the table where I was tucking into a meal. He had his hat in his hand, and something else in the other.

"Ma'am," he said [I had tried unsuccessfully to get everyone to call me something else, but although the regulars had taken me to their hearts, this formality of address seemed to stick]. "Ma'am, I'm sorry for interrupting your meal, but I would take it as a real honour if you would sign this for me. I drove all the way up to the book store in Charleston for it, and it would give me a lot of pleasure to have a memento of your stay here!"

It was my book! I asked him if he had read it.

"Yes ma'am," he said. "Leastways, most of it. I'm not sure I understand all of it, but I know it's a great book!"

"Who do I make it to?" I asked.

"Well, my name's Arnold..."

I inscribed the book for him, and I don't think any signing I had done so far in America – from sea to shining sea – pleased me so much. I even put a few Xs below my name. Arnold was as happy as anything!

Later on, outside, Louise pulled me to her, and growled in mock anger but with twinkling eyes, "I saw those kisses! You wouldn't be turning queer on me?"

On our last day's ride – a long day out down swooping roads, through sun and showers, and sometimes through sun and showers together, ending in a beautiful, vermilion sunset – we turned up as usual at the diner. I had especially wanted to be there on that last evening, so that I could take a photo of all the regulars. I got them all lined up, by the counter, but I could tell there was something the matter, because most of them could not hide a conspiratorial grin. As I was getting ready to take the photo, looking at them through the viewfinder, I could hear someone softly count to three, and then...

"TA-DAAA!"

I went "Eek!" and almost dropped the camera.

Each one of them produced, and held aloft, a copy of my book. I found out that Arnold had insisted, and in fact no one had objected. I was almost in tears, and could hardly take the photo. I had hardly got to know them, but they were people about whom Louise cared, the way a good teacher cares about her class, and that means they were had to be dear to me too.

I got up early next morning, and went to sit on Louise's porch swing, to listen to the Mourning Doves, and to get fresh air while it everywhere was cool. Later on the Chevy was due back, and I had to start for North Carolina no later than lunchtime. I must have sat there for an hour or more, becoming more and more melancholy. Suddenly I realised that Louise had come and seated herself next to me. I don't know how long she had been sitting there; when I looked into her face, her eyes were, for the first time, sad. She took my hand, and gently pulled.

"Come inside," she said. "I want to fuck you!"

That word, dirty and, to me, incongruous when said by a woman to a woman, made me catch my breath. There was something desperate in her use of it, something which actually expressed the depth of her longing and desire, the intensity of her emotion, the build-up of sexual tension in her...

I paused. My heart skipped. I took a breath, and answered her.

"Fuck me, then!"

We went back inside, up the stairs to the bedroom where we had spent a precious handful of nights together. I had hardly got into the room, when Louise began to tug my clothes off me – no seduction, no build-up, just a surfacing need in her, manifesting itself. It sucked me in too. I was gripped by this urgency, this great need to get close to her instantly, and I began to tug at her clothes. Later I would realise that it would have been so much easier if we had each taken off our own clothes, but right then neither of us was concerned with things being done the easy way – only that they should be done with haste. We cared nothing for common sense, nothing for comfort, we cared about nothing except that these clothes were coming off. If something got ripped because it wasn't properly undone, so what? If someone got scratched as a garment was pulled off, so what? We needed, more than we could say, to get naked and get next to each other, before the tears overwhelmed us.

When we were naked we rolled and rolled and rolled on that bed. We clung and pressed ourselves to each other, as if we were trying to get inside each other's skin, as if each of us wanted to impress something of the other on our very being. Our mouths and tongues met, then mine explored every square inch of Louise that they could reach, and hers did the same to me. Our hands and fingers did the same, chafing and probing. All this time neither of us made a single vocal sound. Sometimes our breath rasped, other times it came in short, hesitant panting. Only when Louise scissored her legs between mine, and began that grinding rock'n'roll which pushed our two sexes together, did we begin to cry out. She fucked me. She fucked me. Yes, she really, truly fucked me! Maybe not the way you understand it, but that's what she did.

It was what she needed, and it was what I needed too, at that moment.

When, at last, I drove sedately up to Maureen and Gerry's house, and they came out to greet me, I could see the relief in Gerry's eyes. I didn't tell him about the transmission, because somehow I knew it would last longer than the car itself.

"Did you have a good trip?" they asked.

"Yes, it was fine. It was OK."

"I expect you have a lot to tell us," said Gerry, pretending not to be inspecting the Chevy's bodywork as he got my luggage.

"No, not really. It was rather uneventful."

"Did you get lots of pictures with that instant camera of yours."

"Not many. Here's one, though. It's a bunch of people I got to know. In a diner. Somewhere."

"They've all got your book!" exclaimed Maureen.

"My! That waitress is a handsome girl!" said Gerry, teasing his wife of thirty years.

"Now, Gerry!"

Indeed, I told these two good friends of mine very little. Nothing about two women on a Harley 883, and what they shared. Nothing about how, as I drove back to North Carolina, I kept looking in the mirror, hoping to see a motorcycle coming up fast behind. And on the odd occasions when I did, how first my heart leapt, and then sank as I realised it wasn't Louise. I said nothing about lying, naked, holding that fine, strong woman in my arms, while she cried because I was going away. I said nothing about how, at last, she had looked up into my face, and stifled the flow of tears long enough to say something.

"I do love you. You know that."

I said nothing about how my own reservoir of tears seemed to be empty at that moment, but nevertheless how I knew that sometime very soon – maybe later that day, maybe the next day, maybe a month down the line – that reservoir of tears would fill, and overflow. I told them nothing about my answer to Louise's confession of love.

"Yes, I know. I love you too."

I made no mention of the rush of words, the stream of promises, that Louise and I started to make – our plans for her to come and visit me in Scotland, for a road trip around the highlands, for stops at tea shops, and nights in bed-and-breakfast guest-houses. And the promises to write, to email, never to forget each other, to love each other for ever, even though we were so far apart. All those promises, which began to sound impossible as soon as we made them, so impossible to keep.

Because we were the two women on a Harley 883. We belonged together at a particular time, heading down a particular road, coming back to a particular place. There would be no attempt to cram that love into anywhere else, at any other time, because it simply would not be. And could there be any going back? Who said you can never go back? I think that person must have been very wise.

Our promises were made so that the pain and terror of parting would somehow be softened, blunted. They were not made to keep. Not all of them. Not unless you count – for my part – the ones about never forgetting her, about loving her for ever.