Jennifer Stevenson

WARNING: STORY CONTAINS SEXUAL CONTENT

Jennifer Stevenson "I Remember You"

“I feel that,” Rose breathed. Her hips shifted. “I do!”

“They’ll hear.” Stelle rolled Rose onto her side so she could reach the back of her neck with one hand. Rose moaned. Stelle’s heart filled with heat. “Talk to me.”

“Oh God,” Rose whispered.

It took longer now, but she could still get Rose panting. Stelle worked her fingers down Rose’s back, her mouth busy at Rose’s breast, pushing fear to the back of her mind, drawing in the sounds of Rose’s litany of arousal. Don’t think. Listen.

“Yes, do that. Oh, Stelle. Now with your fingers on my nipple. Mmm.” Rose twisted against Stelle and Stelle’s heart kicked up, racing with gladness, hammering with anxiety.

“They’ll hear,” she said, over the noise of her pulse in her ears.

“Fuck ‘em,” Rose said, and Stelle chuckled.

“Now?” She moved her hand around Rose’s hip, squeezing inch by inch (“Yes”) as she headed for the hot spot. Her fingertips, softened after years of retirement, teased the hairless doorway to Rose. Rose made a please noise. One finger.

“Now both fingers.” After a few breathless moments Rose whispered, “I remember you.”

Fiery relief flooded Stelle’s chest. Her hand paused. I remember you, too. Always.

“Hey,” Rose said.

Oops. “Hey yourself.” Years ago, Stelle had resented this addition to Rose’s litany, talking all the time, but now she was grateful for it. It told her when Rose was there. Rose always knew what Stelle needed. And Rose needed to hear Stelle talk, too, so they made love like this, one at a time. It gave Stelle an opportunity to love Rose harder, with more of herself.

Fingers moving, lips moving, Stelle pressed her ear against Rose’s arm and listened for the blood moving inside. Rose moaned and Stelle laughed. “My God, how you turn me on.”

Rose murmured, “Oh, baby.”

Talking sex used to bring Rose back when she wandered. Just a little verbal touch between them to reassure Stelle that Rose wasn’t off in her head somewhere, wasn’t thinking of her abusive father.

Then the day came when Stelle lifted her head to find that the girl whose thigh was under her cheek was a girl indeed, mentally sixteen, wondering aloud, Who’s this old lady eating me?

That’s when Rose said she would try the new gene therapy.

Stelle was terrified.

She stopped moving again, and Rose said, “Don’t be afraid.” Rose was always the brave one. “Think of it as a short trip. Just a couple of days. Just a tiny gene or two.”

Can it really work? Stelle thought.

Rose, the brave, said as if she had heard, “It’ll work.”

Don’t go, don’t go. “It might not,” Stelle blurted.

Rose said in a strong voice, “Love me. I remember you today. Help me stay with you the whole way.” The whole way to the end.

They had both been thinking about the end for some time now. Stelle thought about it the most these days, what with Rose waking up thirty in her head, or fifteen, or fifty. The End was the enemy threatening to part them. There was always an enemy. They had loved each other their whole lives, always under threat from someone, something. For the past twenty years it had been death they’d faced, and they’d loved and laughed in death’s face. Now it was dementia.

Stelle turned from her thoughts to the fragile skin of Rose’s throat, tried to live only in the smell of Rose’s arousal, mingled these days with the smells of baby-powder and hospital moisturizers. She whispered under Rose’s ear, “For you, here it comes, let me do you, oh baby, hold still.” Every time they touched, it was a privilege. Dumb luck, a gift from fate.

Rose interrupted this time.

“Will you want me if I become young and beautiful again?” This again, even in their eighties, her fear of losing Stelle over her looks. Vain creature. Beloved. Even her vanity made Stelle love her harder these days.

Stelle countered, “Will you remember me when you’re young and beautiful?”

“I might not,” Rose said. “You’ll have to do that thing with your fingers down my back. One more time?” she wheedled.

She’s right. This is no time for fretting. “I’ll always do that.” Stelle did it, her left hand busy inside and her right tracing Rose’s back while she arched and sighed. As long as I can.Stelle had been losing sensation, but not in her feet, like Rose. She could still feel Rose’s fingers on her nipple. I remember you. “Nuh-uh, my turn.” There was fire in her throat.

“You’ll do it next,” Rose said with authority. “The gene therapy. Don’t make me be twenty again without you.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” She twisted her wrist to make Rose groan.

“You’re worth it,” Rose panted. “We talked about this.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Yes, you are. Come on. We got past breast cancer. We got past the Who-wants-to-die-first thing. This is our chance to beat another motherfucker trying to come between us.”

“Yes,” Stelle whispered.

“So hush up and do me.”

“Shh,” Stelle said, but it was too late. The sounds of footsteps came down the hall, and the squeak of gurney wheels, voices. The nurses. Trapped on the high hospital bed with Rose and her own bad hip, half out of her polyester pantsuit and under the covers, scandalous, Stelle held still. Her pulse beat in her throat with panic. Not yet. They can’t take this from me.Sweaty with rebellion, she tapped with her buried fingers, Remember me, remember me.

The nurses didn’t say a thing. Gently they lifted the blankets and sheets away, helped Stelle out of the bed, stripped off Rose’s sweaty gown and laid her on the gurney. Rose chattered to the nurses, asking questions, commenting on their touch as if taking charge. That’s my Rose.

Rose’s face was still pink. She met Stelle’s look with sparkling eyes as if to say, You did this, I love you, wait for me.

The doctors came in with papers. Another paper to sign, one last chance to back out. Stelle didn’t expect Rose to back out. She didn’t.

The doctors repeated the warning. “This will deal with your physical symptoms, but we don’t know how the dementia will respond.” They told her again how slow the gene repair process was, how it might take a few tries, how she’d feel some discomfort while the toxins of a lifetime’s ageing left her tissues.

Rose lifted her chin. “Bring it.”

Stelle could barely breathe. Her nerves sang with lust. Good grief, how inappropriate is that.

Reading her mind again, Rose met her eyes and grinned wickedly. “Hold that thought. I’ll be gone just a few days.”

Stelle shaped the words, You bitch, with her lips.

Rose put out her tongue.

But by the time she was clean and prepped, Rose had begun to drift. Stelle forced herself to stay in the room as the gurney rolled out.

Rose was saying querulously, “Where are you taking me? Is Stelle here?”

Stelle crawled between the still-warm sheets and pulled the pillow over her head.

o0o

Three and a half hours passed. The doctors came to say that the first round of the procedure was complete. Rose was resting well. She couldn’t have visitors for days yet.

Stelle refused a tranquilizer. She wanted to feel it all, because if she couldn’t survive disaster here in the hospital, she knew she would go straight home and kill herself in some ugly, quick way. And she’d promised Rose she wouldn’t.

Isn’t it time for me to be selfish yet?

No. She couldn’t. Because what if the procedure worked on everything except the dementia? She’d have her own last few years to watch over a physically younger but mentally fading Rose. Or, if she found she had the guts, Stelle could undertake the procedure herself, so she could spend forty years, not three or four, hoping hour by hour to coincide with the Rose-who-remembered.

Making people younger had been easy. Snip, snip, get the genes to tell a few good-for-you lies about growth hormone, about adrenaline, denying the body the right to slow down.

Memory was harder. They had determined that memory resided not just in the brain but in the body, stored not in aging tissues and scars but in patterns of energy left by those scars. Dementia wasn’t a brain thing but a failure to hold onto those patterns. Losing them in the sofa cushions, as it were. Rose was, literally, sometimes rummaging among millions of memories, looking for a pattern and forgetting which one she sought. The gene that managed this was the gene for attention.

Stelle felt excruciatingly aware of every memory. Every single one. It was as if her own attention had decided to recall it all, in case Rose lost it all.

If there were something I could do. Donate a kidney.

And:

Swear to God, nothing in this world ages you like waiting.

She thought all these things, in exactly the same order, many times over the next three days.

After three days, they told Stelle that the therapy was taking, that Rose seemed present and alert.

“Can’t I see her?” I never whined when she had the blood clot.

“Another day or two. She’s expelling toxins right now and she’s a little uncomfortable.” The doctor smiled.

Stelle was rubble inside. She laughed shakily. “’Nuf said.” Rose in discomfort was a braying donkey, an emergency siren, a big, bad, colicky baby. “I love her, but I don’t envy the nurses right now,” she lied.

o0o

Eight days.

Stelle accepted a pill one time, just once, and when she came out of the fog she felt positively grateful for the tearing pain and uncertainty of waiting.

She drank a lot of decaf. She looked blindly at a lot of television.

When she couldn’t stand feeling sorry for herself any more, she thought about Rose, about her courage. What does it take to lie down on that table feeling okay, well, crappy and eighty-two but no worse than usual, lie down there and say, Go ahead, I’m willing to wake up feeling worse. Or even, I’m willing to wake up and not be myself. It was all very well for the doctors to say, but how could they know which gene they had hold of?

Rose must want to remember very, very badly to take this chance.

Stelle felt stronger.

She wants to remember me. I’ve been worth that, to somebody like Rose.

Stelle warmed, gasped, broke a sob, and warmed hotter, hot as a hot flash, boy, hadn’t had one of those for twenty-five years.

On cue, the waiting room door opened and the doctor came in. “She’s out of detox.”

o0o

Who was this beautiful creature, not even as young as fifty yet, no, but in the past few days, how much plumper, pinker, more bright-eyed, the hollows in her cheeks and collarbone ever so slightly fuller, even a few blotches on her face from passing zits. Toxins departing, nothing to worry about, the doctor had said. She wore a tee shirt and jeans, not so loose as usual.

And she looked anxious. When Rose touched the fading zit on her chin, Stelle burst out laughing.

Rose claimed to know her.

They talked about how Rose felt, what she remembered. Even if the dementia had responded to gene therapy, it could take days for all the connections to reinvoke. Stelle had a list, prepared in advance by her and Rose and the doctors, specifically to test this, and she read it to Rose, wishing she had the nerve to kick the doctors out. The doctors watched while Stelle went down the list, her heart in her throat.

“Where were you born?”

“Milwaukee.”

“Who was your first college roommate?”

“Mooey Williams.”

“Who’s the president of the United States?”

“Carson Quarngesser.”

“What did you have for breakfast?”

“Garbage. I want one of your omelets, Stelle,” Rose said, and Stelle almost broke down.

“If you could answer the question,” a doctor said.

Stelle feared Rose’s impatience. Impatience was a bad sign, a sign of the dementia patient forgetting and covering up. Rose had promised never to try to cover up, but of course in the midst of a bad spell she wouldn’t remember that.

“Breakfast?” Stelle said. Don’t push. She hates being pushed.

“I slept for days and days. I’ve been dreaming almost continuously,” Rose said. “It’s a little freaky.” She sounded scared. “Hold me?” She held her hands out.

Stelle could no longer wait. She looked at the doctors. “Scram. Or I’m gonna perv out right in front of you.”

They left the room, smiling, and shut the door.

o0o

“You look good,” Stelle said, thinking, Is it really you?

“You look like crap. I’m afraid I’ll break you.” Rose sounded stronger, as if even her blood was richer. She said, “C’mere.”

Stelle took her in her arms with trembling hands.

Rose buried her face in Stelle’s neck. “Talk to me.”

Warmth flooded Stelle. She took a deep sucking sigh, then another. “Oh, love,” she said. She felt like she’d nearly missed being flattened by a train. Horny.

They sat on the sofa in the doctor’s office, side by side. “I’ve missed you,” Rose said.

Stelle kissed her neck. Rose squirmed against her. Stelle kissed harder, smelling a smell more Rose-of-the-past than Rose-now.

Only this was Rose, now and yet young.

“I’ve known you all my life,” she said over the thunder in her ears. Maybe I’m getting dementia too. It might be better to forget, to be twenty in your head. We were together already at twenty. I’ll probably always remember that much of her.

“Talk to me,” Rose said more urgently.

“Sorry. Woolgathering.” Do you remember me?

Rose grunted. “Oh, for pity’s sake.” She turned in Stelle’s arms and pinned her against the sofa arm with a long slow kiss. Longing more painful than lust rose up in Stelle. She gasped for air. “Oh, no,” Rose said, and kissed her again. Her hands squeezed Stelle around the ribcage. Rose made a “Mmm” noise. Here came the lust again, oh boy.

Stelle remembered Rose on the gurney grinning across a sea of nurses’ and doctors’ heads and broke for air again, indignant. “You got me hot and then you left. Eight days.”

Rose stuck two fingers into her ribs, tickling. Stelle tickled back. They tussled like puppies, too eager, dueling over who would pleasure whom first, and Stelle won when Rose stopped in the middle of their ritual and begged, “Please?”

Stelle thought of the test questionnaire. “We should finish going down that list,” she panted.

“Looky,” Rose said in a voice so strong it broke Stelle’s heart. “You can’t know by that. It’s not all like, ‘What day are you in today.’ It’s how much I remember on a continuum. The whole shooting match.” She smiled wickedly. “So?”

The dementia patient covers forgetfulness with impatience. And diversion. And humor, if she’s Rose.

Stelle swallowed. “So sex will tell us that?”

Rose slid closer to her, one arm around her waist all the way to Stelle’s tit, wheedling. “If you do it right. Please?”

Her fingers brushed Stelle’s nipple and Stelle dissolved into the moment.

Then she did everything she could remember, beginning with the first ways she’d learned to give Rose pleasure, then jumping around from decade to decade.

She pushed Rose over on her back on the sofa, talking to keep Rose with her.

“What’s this beautiful thing I see?” she said, looking into Rose’s bright eyes. “How old were you when I said that?”

Rose swallowed, looking back. “Fourteen. Behind the gym.”

“That’s right.” Stelle rewarded her with a light kiss. Rose’s eyes rolled up in her head. Oh, love. “And when,” Stelle said, cupping Rose’s face with both hands and kissing her closed eyelids, “did I first do this?”

“More.”

Stelle kissed her left eyelid, her right eyelid. “When?”

“The year we went to Dallas. More, please,” Rose sighed.

Stelle tasted salt. She felt the insides of her chest melting into a hot easy pain, like breathing only bigger. With one hand she clutched Rose’s hair and leaned into her, slowly, so slowly, letting the warmth between their bodies build, licking the edge of Rose’s ear, nibbling Rose’s earlobe, until Rose reached up and pulled her down.

“Impatient. Work with me,” Stelle whispered.

“Talk to me. Talk.”

“Okay. When did we start talking?”

Rose panted, then growled, and Stelle laughed out loud. “Idon’t want to talk,” Rose said. “You talk!”

Can’t she remember? God, that hurt. Sharper pain than the thought of losing her.

Stelle rolled up onto the sofa and laid herself over Rose, biting her lip as her hip twinged. “Maybe I’m getting into it myself. Maybe I like it. C’mon, hussy. When did you teach me to talk during sex?”

It felt so good to lie on Rose like an old blanket. Stelle felt her bones melt slowly against Rose, smelled Rose’s sweat on her bleached tee-shirt.

Rose heaved a sigh that lifted Stelle two inches. “We were fifty. You came back from that retreat thing and you wouldn’t shut up.”

Stelle laughed with delight. “That’s right.”

“And I made you. I explained it all again,” Rose said, aggrieved, “and I said I wouldn’t have sex with you if you wouldn’t talk. It’s my brain.” Rose’s voice trembled. “It doesn’t stop thinking. You have to keep me here.” Her voice rose.

Stelle stroked her head, blind with relief. “That’s right, baby. I know. I’m here. You’re here. I’m gonna do you good, and I’m gonna tell you what I want to do to you.”

Under her, Rose went rigid. Her thighs clamped around Stelle’s leg and squeezed.

Stelle whispered, “It turns me on to tell you. ’Cause I know how you love it.”

The fabric between them heated to scorching. She loves it. Stelle always had to remind herself of that. Sex was easier for Stelle without talking, but Rose had to have it.

“I think first I’ll take off your shirt. Mm, tummy.”

“You said that,” Rose panted, “after our flying lesson in ninety-eight.”

Stelle licked into her bellybutton, smiling. “Let’s push up the shirt and see what you got. No bra? Bad girl. I like sexy underwear. That’s gonna cost you. Think I’ll take it out on your titties.” She twiddled and pinched and flicked and squeezed.

Rose giggled. She arched her back and pushed at Stelle’s hands, and Stelle pushed back, remembering that this was play for Rose. Stelle had always been so cautious, so careful not to take more than was offered. Rose had had to teach her to be greedy. Rose’s thigh came up between hers and bumped, bumped, sending shock waves through Stelle and making her hip ache.

Stelle rolled deliberately onto the sore hip. She grabbed Rose’s butt and pulled her closer.

“But you have to talk to me,” Rose complained.

“We did it with our clothes on,” Stelle panted, “for the first time, when?” She ground her mound against Rose’s jeans-covered thigh, feeling the hip pain recede on a wave of horniness. “When?” she repeated. “When, when?” She forgot what she was asking as the waves built higher, battering against pain, against fear, carrying her over the top.

Rose panted in surprise, “You’re close, you slut!”

Stelle climaxed suddenly and paused, breathed in fire, breathed out pain, gasping “When? When?”

Without warning Rose cried out in her ear. “We! Were! Six! Teen! Oh, Stelle, Stelle!” Rose squeezed her tight.

The air went out of Stelle, even while orgasm thundered around her old bones like a horse trying to jump the fence. Limp, she lay against Rose and listened to their heartbeats. Rose’s tears trickled down the back of her neck.

This could be good, even with Rose in la-la land.

Rose laid her hand between Stelle’s polyester-covered legs. She said quietly, “I remember you.”

Something exploded in Stelle’s head.

And Rose tapped, squeezed. She said, “I love you.”

Stelle forgot everything in the world except this moment. Under Rose’s hand, she soared. “Me, too.”

And Rose said, “You next. You must. I won’t settle for one or two or five more years of you.”

Stelle rode the endorphin wave, high above fear. “What if it doesn’t work on me?” she said dreamily. “What if something happens between us? We’ve made it almost seventy years. What if we can’t get past this change?”

“That’s not how we work and you know it,” Rose said in that tough voice. She sounded so young. Stelle felt a century old, two centuries. “Love isn’t something we stick on a shelf.”

Stelle took a deep breath. “Grow or die.”

“That’s right.” Carefully, like someone handling a baby, Rose ran her hands over Stelle’s shoulders, dipping her thumbs over the sensitive spots at clavicle, nipples, under her breasts, taking charge, and Stelle’s bones turned to water. “I’ve come back for you. Now you must come back for me.”