Heroes David Hagberg (best motivational books TXT) 📖

she had loved her husband very much. She had been pregnant when he had been killed. She had had a miscarriage.

“I’m sorry about your Katrina in Wolgast.”

“What?” Deland asked, suddenly very frightened. “Has something happened to her? Have you heard?” Marti came a few steps closer. “No,” she said. “I meant I was sorry that you could not be together. You must miss her very much.”

“Christ,” he said, his heart hammering. He went back to the window. The sun was setting. The haze was thickening across the city.

Marti followed him. She touched his shoulder, and he jumped as if he had been shot. He turned.

” …” he sputtered.

She looked up into his eyes. Then she put her arms around him and drew his lips down to hers. He had no resistance left.

Marti was thin, and very bony after Katrina, and yet it was comforting to hold a woman. Boys began with their mothers and ended with their wives. In between were difficult lonely times.

She led him to the bed where she pulled him down. Blindly he had her shirt off, and then her bra, and he was kissing her breasts, taking her nipples in his mouth, her back arching against him.

For just a moment he pulled back, thinking about Katy, thinking about the way it had become for them in Maria’s apartment, thinking about all the hopes and desires he had had for them. For just a moment he thought about how it would be when the war was over and he came back to her. What would it be like, in Wolgast?

What would it be like in Germany then, for an American? He shuddered to think about it.

“Helmut,” Marti breathed. The name was foreign, as was the voice calling it, but God help him, he was lonely, and cold, and frightened.

They parted, and he stood up and took off his clothes, while she pulled off her shoes, then her slacks and her underpants. The tuft of hair at her pubis was very blonde and hardly visible.

When they were in bed together, lying side by side, Marti propped herself up on her elbow and looked into Deland’s eyes.

“I want to say something to you,” she said seriously.

Deland was hard. He wanted her. “What?” he said.

“I don’t want you to forget about your Katrina,” she said. “It may sound strange that I am saying this now, but after the war you must go to her. This between us now, it is just comfort.

Nothing more.”

Tears began to leak from her eyes. He tried to draw her to him, but she pushed him back, and kissed his chest, his stomach, the inside of his thighs, and then took his full length into her mouth.

The sensation was amazing, wonderful, and yet he wanted more. He had her head in his hands, and finally he pushed her away, over on her back, and he rolled over on top of her, entering her with a great feeling of relief.

“Oh … yes,” Marti cried at one point.

He slid his hands under her hips and grasped her buttocks, pulling her up each time he thrust, pushing harder and deeper each time, until he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he could feel himself coming, everything draining from him, Marti shuddering beneath him as she too climaxed.

They held each other for a long time, until Deland began to feel that his position was awkward and that he was probably too much weight on her. He moved aside.

She clung to him, though, not allowing him to move too far.

“It was wonderful, Helmut,” she said. “It was for me. Did you get pleasure?”

“Yes, of course,” Deland said, the beginnings of embarrassment rising within him. He couldn’t believe they had done what they had just done.

Marti sat up and looked at him. “You’re sorry,” she said.

He sat up and pushed away from her, getting to his feet.

“What was I, some sort of a leper?” she asked.

Deland hurriedly got dressed. “I am sorry, Marti,” he mumbled.

He felt like such a fool.

“Sorry?” she shrieked. “Sorry for what? Sorry that we made love? Sorry that there was a little pleasure in the midst of all this death?”

Deland stepped back. His face and ears felt very hot. He kept thinking about Katrina. He was glad that she wasn’t here.

“I’m sorry, Marti, this should never have happened.”

She jumped up and grabbed a small ceramic cat that stood on the floor at the foot of her bed, and she flung it at him.

He easily ducked aside, although it surprised him. The figurine breezed past his head, striking the wall and shattering into a million tiny pieces.

“You bastard!” she screamed.

He backed away.

“You miserable bastard,” she screamed again, and Deland, only half dressed, fumbled his way out of her room.

The early morning was very hot and sticky. Deland, stripped to the waist, sweat dripping from his nose and running down his chest and from his armpits, stood in the upstairs corridor of his apartment building, his radio in hand, as he listened to the air raid sirens wailing across the city.

It was late. After four A.M. This was the third raid this night.

The weather had broken three days ago, and the Allies had been unmercifully pounding the city day and night.

He went to the end of the corridor and looked out the rear window across the bombed-out courtyard and beyond, toward the Kurfurstendamm. Spotlights worked back and forth, their beams stabbing the black night sky.

There were stars up there. Only he could not see them from here. It gave him a sense of claustrophobia. He thought about Wisconsin: the lakes and the woods, fishing and hunting with his father and his uncles, and then later, as a young man, with his high school friends. In college he had been too busy, but there for a while in high school he had really enjoyed himself in the outdoors. He missed it now for some reason.

The first bombs began falling well to the southwest in Charlottenburg, which meant the raid had a