Golden Glow
Flicka von Hannover
We had a year together.
When Flicka looked back over her twenty-three years, she still viewed that year in London with Dieter with a kind of golden glow, even though every moment hurt to look at after it was over.
They had two months of gentle English summer before their classes started again, and they picnicked in the countryside outside of London, away from snipers seeking notoriety or kidnappers with seven-figures of ransom dancing in their feral eyes. They made love on blankets far from prying eyes and booked small B&Bs in Scotland for weekends of lazing in bed.
When their classes started, Flicka had a heavy course load and was preparing to compete in the first rounds of The Leeds competition during the spring of the following year. The first round was in April, which meant Flicka had seven months to prepare to be one of the top sixty young pianists in the world. She thought she might have a chance if she workedhard.If she made it past the first rounds, the final rounds would be later that year in the fall, after she’d graduated.
Dieter had been accepted to study for a Master’s degree in business administration, having completed his Bachelor’s degree the previous spring.
So they were busy, each working hard on their respective academic careers. Dieter escorted Flicka to the Royal Academy of Music in the mornings. Wulfram had agreed that she was safe within the building, so Dieter went on to his classes at the London Business School, fifteen minutes away on the other side of Hyde Park.
In the late afternoons, they reversed the trek.
They negotiated tea, studies, and supper, sometimes out or in their apartment, until some subtle signal—an overwhelming, frustrated passion that had been building all day—brought them together.
As Flicka practiced in the study rooms at the college, as she took notes in composition classes, as she met with her tutors, her skin flushed with heat. Her lips blossomed every time she thought about Dieter, like he was already kissing her. Those odd moments of random, giddy lust when she should have been taking notes were, she suspected, moments when he was thinking about running his thumb down the back of her neck or his tongue over her collarbone.
For Dieter, it was his hands that distracted him. While he was pressing open business policy textbooks and taking notes, he was aware that, the previous evening, his palms had been wrapped around Flicka’s silken hips as he pushed himself into her, her hot moans muffled by a pillow. His fingers had stroked her breasts until they were full and pink, and then he massaged her clit until she cried out his name.
In October, the two of them celebrated Oktoberfest, first with Flicka and her friends in the beer gardens, with Dieter standing dispassionately nearby. When he got her home, he teased her ass for the first time while he ate her out, sucking mouthfuls of her tender skin against his tongue, and she came so hard that she passed out.
After that, it was a slow, gentle preparation, over weeks, as he readied her, slowing using his fingers as he took her and then larger toys, making her want it. In November, he pressed himself past the hard ring of muscle and into her tight asshole, stroking slowly until he shot himself into her bowels and the world went white with silence and bliss.
In December, Wulfram came to London for Christmas. They were the very souls of decorum while he was there, exchanging their usual gag gifts, because what does one buy for the extravagantly wealthy Prince and Princess of Hannover? The only thing they could not purchase was their extinct kingdom, and neither of them wanted it, never mind that Dieter would have gladly led the conquest for either of them.
Flicka gave Dieter a water pistol because that was the only type of gun that he didn’t seem to have. He gave her a coffee mug from the Royal Academy of Music.
Later, after Wulfram had gone back to Chicago and his university post, Flicka gave Dieter a set of old books from the library atSchloss Marienburg,the Hannover castle in Germany. The three slim volumes were a first edition of the seminal masterwork on the philosophy of war,Vom Kriegeby Carl von Clausewitz. Even she knew what those were and what they meant.
Dieter gave Flicka a piece of jewelry, a pin, which had been fashioned out of a tiny military ribbon about an inch long. The ribbon had yellow ends and a black field in the center, upon which crossed mountaineering tools overlaid a minuscule gold wreath. It had been meant to be worn as an honor on the dress uniform, but it had been altered to make it beautiful for her.
The jewelry around it was stunning. The cloud of spun gold was made of tiny strands too delicate to be called wires, and they turned the military honor into a work of art. Diamonds glittered around it.
She held the pin carefully in her palm, the wrapping forgotten on the floor. “This is your alpine mountaineering ribbon.”
Dieter nodded, his neck muscles flexing where they connected to his strong shoulders.
“I was at your ceremony where they awarded it to you. I was, what, eleven? Twelve?”
“Around then, yes.”
She searched his gray eyes, looking for reticence. “But don’t you need it for when you wear your dress uniform?”
“I never wear my dress uniform anymore, not since I mustered out. I suppose I could order a replacement if I needed one, but this is the one they pinned on me when I completed my training in alpine warfare and rescue. It’s the real one.”
“This is too much,” she said. “This is too important to you.”
He took her hands and closed her fingers gently over the pin. “When I joined the Swiss army, I left everything that I was behind and became someone else, someone better. When I completed the alpine mountaineering course, I felt whole for the first time. I was a Swiss man, a guardian of the Alps, sprung from alpine culture, not the boy I was before.” He looked up at her, his snowstorm-cloud eyes absolutely serious. Sunlight glinted on his eyelashes, dark around his eyes. “I felt like I was born again up there, in the snow. Everything that I had done wrong in my life was washed away in alpine ice.”
Flicka turned her hand over and held his large, warm fingers. “Did you need to be reborn?”
He nodded. “You wouldn’t have liked me as I was before. I didn’t like me.”
“But you were eighteen years old when you joined the army. You were a child.”
