Jen's Legacy.

Her granddaughter needed to ‘unload’, having seen no one else to talk to for days, to share all of these strange and wonderful feelings with.

She prompted. “So, you fell in love.” She stroked Claire’s face. “I’m so pleased for you.”

“Yes, Gran, I fell in love. I’ll tell you all about it later. It’s very complicated.” It usually was. “Some of it I’m not sure I believe for myself, but I have to believe it, as it happened to 'me'.”

“This intimacy that you shared...?” No point in Claire denying it with the evidence of it all over the bed and her. “When did that start?”

“Soon. It began almost immediately after he pulled me out of the river and undressed me. That was the beginning of it, though nothing happened other than what we saw of each other, and became conscious of.”

Seeing a man that way for the first time would be both shocking and eye-opening for her. She wouldn’t have known what the hell to expect.

“When my things were dry, he dressed me again. We grew less tense… I did… by later the next morning when I realized that he was no threat to me but only wanted to help. Except there was something else there that he couldn’t hide for me, and I’m not talking about his body, though I noticed that too. It was the way he looked at me. I think I was falling in love with him even then. We were falling in love with each other.”

They were interesting memories to revisit. “The actual intimacy between us started the second night. I knew what I wanted to happen, and I didn’t give him a choice. I asked him to make love to me.”

Her grandmother stopped breathing for a moment. Claire had driven it, and taken the initiative? Wow! She had fallen; hard.

“But we didn’t make love properly until the Thursday morning after I’d had a really strange dream. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

She clasped her hands in her lap, reliving those memories. “So many things happened that my head is still spinning.” She sighed and a tear escaped. “Oh, Gran. Does love always hurt so much as I feel right now, now that he’s not here?”

“Sometimes it can, my love.”

“He was kind and gentle, Gran, and wonderful in every way. He saw me fall out of that raft from the rim, hundreds of feet up and he risked his life to get down to the river and me, and then leapt out into it on the end of his rope to save me. I wasn’t aware of any of it at the time. I was almost ready to give up. I was as good as dead, and he saved me.

“I didn’t realize what risks he’d taken until we had to climb up from the river the following morning when we decided that we couldn’t stay there. It took hours to climb out, yet he’d got down to me so quickly. Minutes. I couldn’t believe it.”

Elinor had said something similar when she’d first spoken to Mrs. Prescott to tell her of the accident. She hadn’t believed what she’d seen either, of the way that man had been throwing himself down those slopes. Seeing that, had given her a whiff of hope that help was already on its way.

“You can tell me the rest of it… as much as you can, and as much as you want to when we get chance to speak alone, Claire. Your parents are waiting for us and are probably impatient to see you.” She remembered something else.

“I looked around, but I don’t see your swimsuit anywhere.”

Clair shook her head. “It’s at the bottom of his pack. He had to cut it around the middle that first night, to save me having to take everything off when I needed to … go, without struggling.... (she remembered having to ‘go’ that time when he had helped her after that cougar had scared her) and she suddenly and reflexively clenched her legs, feeling as though he had just touched her there again as he had then, being mischievous. Maybe he was thinking of her now in that way; had even touched her there in his mind, and she had detected it and responded subconsciously.

“I couldn’t wear it. It gave me a dreadful heat rash on that second day” (another wonderful memory, despite that damned rash)—and had been the reason he’d had to see to her that second night; undressing her completely, applying that lotion all over her body, her breasts and between her legs; always coming back to being between her legs and why they had come so close to making love that night. They had got used to nakedness then, and she had got used to him always wanting to touch her; then, she had touched him—as she had done—and they had progressed to lying naked in that pool together the next morning, touching each other and playing, giggling, suddenly ticklish, before trying to make love again.

Not ‘close to making love’, or ‘trying to make love’, but actually ‘making love’. The feelings had been there, and all of the motions, and the kissing, the touching the excitement, the intimacy, and even that final feverish end-point for him, even if he hadn’t got into her all of the way. Everything else had been there, just not him getting all the way into her as she’d wanted.