Amnesia

The ward was dark. It must be night, I thought. The bandages that had made it perpetually dark were off now. There was a glow through the window across and down the ward. The moon providing more light outside than existed inside what must once have been a ballroom. A screen had been pulled out between my bed and the next one down. Mine was the last bed down the long room from the door. How did I know it was a hospital ward? Was it just because everything around me was white and it was oh so silent, except for the grunting and snuffling noise? And why in blazes could I remember this afternoon and not earlier than that—and that tomorrow I’d remember the night, but not this afternoon? And four hours later the here, the now, would be gone. Did I want the here and now gone? Why was that even a question?

His name was Stanley—the orderly’s name—I’d heard that this afternoon. I wouldn’t remember it tomorrow unless I saw him again then and he told me his name. But would he do that, considering what he was doing now? He was big and heavy. He had to be fifteen stone, redheaded and florid, wheezing now. How did I know as dark as it was that he was redheaded? I just knew. I have no idea how long I would know that, however.

Just do it. Finish it and get off me. Why wasn’t I shocked by the very act of it?

I tried moving my arms to push him away from me, but they were restrained with surgical gauze to the brass rail overhead of the bedframe. I wanted to scream, but there was gauze wrapped around my mouth too. My head was covered with gauze but, for some reason, that was as should be. It wasn’t wrapped around my eyes anymore—if it ever had been. I couldn’t remember.

That had become my mantra: I can’t remember.

This, though. This wasn’t what should be. Even I knew that, even with my head perpetually swimming in a daze and memories coming in and out. It wasn’t as it should be that Stanley was on the bed, on his knees, between my knees, pushing my hospital gown up to above my belly, running hands up underneath and squeezing my pecs, thrumming and pinching my nipples. A hand grasping my shaft, squeezing it and stroking it. Me moaning behind the gauze gag, not reacting as I should, rising to his touch, digging my heels into the mattress and thrusting my pelvis up into his hand.

He gave a low, guttural laugh and fingers went to my entrance, penetrating me, moving in and out. Groaning, I pushed my pelvis up more, rocking on the fingers. I wanted him inside me.

“Like that, dontcha?” It was murmured. I almost didn’t hear it. Another ten minutes and I wouldn’t remember I’d heard it.

A moment of clarity, but not the here and now. A trench, mud everywhere, bursts of noise all around us. A field in France.

“Come on lads. Over the top with us. It’s our time to shine.” I was younger than most of them. How was it that I was the one giving the orders? Suddenly the trench and the mud and muck weren’t what I wanted to escape. I wanted to sink down into the hole, into the muck, and stay there forever. Safe. But not safe. A shell burst in the trench just down around a corner, and I was calling the advance again. Up onto the rim of the trench, running in a crouch. Lads to the left of me and to the right. A shell burst and those to the left were gone. Just a bit farther and then another, deafening explosion. Bright lights. Searing pain.

This afternoon, Doctor . . . Doctor . . . I couldn’t remember his name now. The doctor had told me when they found me, all they could see above the muck was one hand held up and my face. He said no one knew who I was. I couldn’t remember his name now. Just this flash of memory of France—and of my boys going over the top because I had told them to.

But I remembered the orderly Stanley now, his belly pressing down on me. Dead weight. Fifteen stones of Stanley. And I remember the look he gave me this afternoon. I remember him asking something. I don’t remember my answer. But I know the here and now.

I arched my back and cried out through the gauze of the gag as he entered me with his shaft. I wanted it. I wanted the shaft inside me. I felt myself spreading, stretching to its need and insistence. He was thick, as thick as . . . I couldn’t remember. But I did know this isn’t all that alien—that I felt completed when a man’s shaft was inside me. He was hovering over me, his hands clutching and squeezing my bare butt cheeks, pulling me up to him. Deep inside me—me stretching to take him. Opening to him.

“Hot damn,” I heard him murmur. “You want it.” And he was right, I did. I didn’t know why I did, but I did want it inside me. I couldn’t wait for it to begin working me.

The muscles of my passage walls gripped his shaft, shimmering, and rippling over the hard, throbbing rod. I wrapped my legs around the small of his back briefly, holding him inside me as he engorged and I opened to him. This wasn’t alien to me. Why wasn’t this alien to me?

Inside me, stretching, filling me, working me. And me working with him. Moving my pelvis, establishing the rhythm of the fuck—with him. Him grunting and snuffling, hard at work—on me, in me.

It was all so comforting in its own way. Soothing, if having a thick shaft throbbing inside you wielded by a heavy grunter and snuffler can be soothed. I knew how to do this. I sighed behind my bandaged mouth as the shaft started to stroke inside me—in and out, in and out. He was in and it had begun. Set into this rhythm, I was calmed, anxious for the ending. I dug in my heels in the bed, my hips in motion, thrusting up as he thrust down. The low, guttural laugh again. Stanley released my cheeks long enough to grasp my legs and raise them, setting my ankles on his shoulders and then palming my buttocks again, pulling my hips up to him, putting my weight on my shoulder blades.

“If you gonna take this so good, let’s do it proper,” he murmured.

It was a proper missionary fuck. Picking up vigor, intensity. Fucking me hard and deep.

Another flash of clarity. In the trench in France again. The lieutenant’s side bunker off the main trench. My back against the muddy wall. My knees hooked on Howard’s hips. That was his name. Howard. Yorkshire. Completely improper, of course, Howard, as an officer, fraternizing with a soldier like this—in this way, certainly. But we hadn’t just found each other, realizing both having a preference we shared and an arousal for each other, in the trenches. We’d come to war together. We were here together. We were together in an established unity, our bodies joined, close to coming together. Rigid everywhere but at the hips. Rocking. Rocking together. Thrust, thrust, thrust. Quick before we’re discovered. No chance to savor it in the trenches. Just tension-releasing animal lust.

“I’m going to come!” I don’t know who called that out. It could have been both of us. Suddenly blood all over the place. All over Howard. All over me. And Howard slowly slipping out and away, clawing down my legs to the muck at the base of the wall.

Thrust, thrust, thrust. “I’m going to breed you. You’re a right good fuck you are,” delivered in a husky whisper as fists buried on either side of my chest and red, florid, chubby face staring down into my eyes, Stanley—it had to be Stanley who muttered this; I could not—pulled back, thrust forward deep, and then again, and again, and, with a shudder, released inside me.

No condom. I’d been breeded.

We lay there, Stanley still on top of me, Stanley still inside me, both of us breathing heavily.

“Knew you wanted it,” he muttered in my ear. He reached up and extracted the metal clip at each of my wrists holding the gauze in place. He unwound the gauze and my hands were free. I didn’t know where to put them—put my fists against his chest and push him away? Try belatedly to sock him in the face? Or what? What I’d wanted from him—what I’d let him take without resistance—made that laughable. He was still wearing his medical tunic. He could be up and looking innocent before I could get anyone else here. I was here as a mental case. It dawned on me that I’d probably given what he took to others before him. I couldn’t escape my androgynous looks and yielding manner.

It was “or what.” I pressed my hands into his shoulder blades and lowered my legs to hook my knees on his hips. My now-freed hands went to clutching his buttocks, holding him inside me. He laughed, pulled his tunic over his head, briefly dislodging my grip on his buttocks, but only briefly, and pulled my gown over my head. We were both naked now, his chest deep, muscular despite the beer belly, and covered in what I knew, despite the darkness in the ward, would be reddish blond swirls of curls. We were going to fuck again now. A beer belly, but a man’s cock.

“You want it again, don’t you?” he muttered in my ear.

Giving him no answer was the answer he wanted to hear.

How did I know he was hirsute before his tunic came off? Had we done this before?

He pulled the gauze from my mouth, and, leaning down, exchanged the gag for his lips and his tongue, darting in, taking possession. I took the thick tongue inside me hungrily, just as I took the thick cock inside me hungrily. I clutched him with my claws and pulled my mouth away. “Again, now. Deep, hard. Fuck me again, Howard,” I whimpered.

The laugh was low, guttural, husky. “Who the fuck is Howard?” I didn’t answer—I couldn’t answer—but I don’t think he really expected one. I was just one of the loony bin ones in the ward—the cute piece that took cock.

He was coming alive again. I moved my hands back to his bulbous buttocks, holding him close to me there, as he regained my lips and his thrusts began again. The cock moved with less friction now, being well lubricated with his previously deposited cum. I moved my hips, knowing just what to do, having no idea at the moment why and how I knew what to do. But I did. We were fucking again. He wasn’t just fucking me. We were fucking each other.

He pulled his mouth off mine, arching his head up, putting everything he had behind the deep thrusts, huffing his declaration of victory. He brought nearly all to the surface, gave me a cruel little smile, and then thrust it deep. Again and again. Groaning, I arched my head back, looking wildly at the ceiling tiles high overhead in the nearly total darkness of the old ballroom turned into a ward, and took it and took it, my fingernails digging into his buttocks with each deep thrust.

“I knew it. I knew you wanted it. I knew how you looked at me when I gave you the glad eye that this was what you wanted. This was what you needed.”

Thrust, thrust, thrust. RELEASE—this time mutual.

* * * *

“It went quite well, I think. All of the shrapnel is out, I’m quite sure. The pressure on the brain is off. You should start regaining memories, slowly at first. At least we hope you will. We might know who you are when you’ve recovered more of your memory. The Army is working on that, although those wheels move slowly, I’m afraid. It will help if you are able to tell us what you remember soon. In the meantime, some time outside—in the garden, will do you wonders.”

“Thank you, Doctor . . . doctor . . .” I couldn’t remember his name. He had such a fine head of wavy chestnut-brown hair, graying at the temples. I thought I knew his name. But I couldn’t come up with it.

“Baker. Ian Baker,” the man hovering over me said, patting me on the arm as I lay in the bed, in the last bed down the long wardroom, formerly the ballroom at the stately old Caversham Park in Berkshire, near Reading—or so I’d been told. Did I denote a slight dimming in his eyes? A twitch at the side of his mouth as he looked up to the nurse standing behind him? Was I supposed to know who he was? Of course I was if he’d been the surgeon who had just taken shrapnel out of my skull at . . . at . . . wherever this was.

The nurse was a woman. I expected to see a man—a burly young redheaded man standing behind the doctor, a male orderly rather than a female nurse. I don’t know why I expected that, though. It was just a passing snatch of memory that there had been a redheaded man there the last time that Doctor . . . that the doctor had visited my bedside.

The nurse disappeared from behind the doctor and he turned his head as if watching her move further down the line of beds in the ward. When he turned back and smiled down at me, I felt his hand go under the hem of my hospital gown to rest on my inner thigh, high up. Just how well did I know this doctor? How much of me did he know? Why was I so frequently thinking of men touching men? Who was I in life? What had I done? What was I willing to do with another man?

“I’m glad the surgery went so well,” he said. “You are a beautiful, yielding young man. Thank you. You are a gift. I thank you for that.”

For what? Why does a doctor care whether I’m a beautiful young man—and yielding—or not?

“You must get your strength. I suggest walks, a bit longer each time,” he continued. “We can set my house on the edge of Caversham, on Kidmore End Road, near the Reading Golf Club, as a goal, if you’d like—if you’d like to visit me where we can chat . . . and be alone. Here, I’ve written out the address and given walking directions.” He smiled at me and slipped the paper into the top drawer of the nightstand beside my bed.

Long after he was gone I wondered what the hell he meant by that—the part about me being beautiful and yielding—a gift. But I also remembered that, when he placed his well-manicured hand on my thigh, I had no desire that he take it away.

The flash of an image surged across my mind: An examination room, a padded table. Stirrups. My feet in the stirrups, legs raised and spread. Arousing pleasure, my hands cupping a head lodged between my thighs, my fingers running through wavy chestnut-brown hair, the fingers pressing through the gray at the temples. Wetness. His tongue inside me. The pleasure lifting me up into the clouds, using the leverage of my feet in the stirrups to raise and push my pelvis into the licking tongue and the nipping teeth.

Moaning. “Yes, yes, yes. Do it. Put it in.” Hands running up my inner thighs. The white medical coat pressing into my chest. The snap of the condom being rolled on. The pleasure-pain of the penetration, and the stroking inside me of the hard cock. Panting, spreading open. All sensation centering on the throbbing, searching, sinking shaft. Remembering not required, the muscles of my passage grabbing and rippling over the cock, pulling it deeper. “Yes, yes, like that. Deeper, harder. Stroke me.” Down, down into the soft, spongy, shimmering, hungry core. Explosion.

“Oh, doctor!”

A man’s cock inside me. Oh, how I wanted a man’s cock inside me.

The nurse—or a nurse—I couldn’t remember if it was the same nurse who had visited me with Doctor . . . Doctor Baker—accompanied me out to the garden behind a stately old manor house. I had little idea why we were here. She’d said it was Caversham Park, but that meant little to me. I didn’t know whether she was with me to help me find my way back . . . to wherever, or to ensure I didn’t wander off. I’d been told that this place . . . Caversham Park, which had been given over to the Army as a hospital and rehabilitation center for soldiers, had extensive gardens undulating down toward the banks of the Thames River.

I was a little scared. The memories were coming and going. But increasingly they were coming, which was hopeful, I thought.

I sat on the bench, listening to Nurse Doris—yes, that was her name; she’d told me that some time ago—reading to me from a book of poetry, when I saw him come out of the house and onto the terrace above the lower one where Nurse . . . the nurse and I were sitting, and walk across the back of the house toward the service wing. He was a big man, a little pudgy. Florid, with flaming red hair. He was a hirsute man, curly chest hairs. Although, how I knew that, I certainly didn’t know. He had on a medical tunic now. He was a big-cocked man. Not much older than I was.

I was touching myself and Nurse Doris brushed my hand away, with the comment, “We’ll have none of that, young man.” She put the poetry book away she was reading from and had told me she’d been given by Doctor Baker when she’d wanted something to read to me in the garden and picked up another book. “I suppose Richard Barnfield isn’t the best of poets to be reading to you young men,” she murmured, turning to a book of sonnets by Shakespeare.

The redhaired young orderly—Stanley—looked out in our direction, make an abrupt about-face, and went back into the building. It was a fine-looking building, a central section with columns set into the walls, with lower-roofed extensions on either side. I wondered what building it was.

Later, in the darkness of the night, men settled in their beds in the ward, fewer beds occupied now than before, there being a lull in the war making in France, I was told by my good friend in the next bed, Brian . . . whatever, I heard the scraping of the legs of the screen by the bed as it was being drawn between my bed, in the back corner of the ward, and the whathisname’s bed beside me. The scraping sound registered with me, and I automatically pulled the sheet off me, turned onto my back, and spread and bent my legs, putting my feet flat on the surface of the bed and pressing my arms flat beside me. I started to pant a little. It was even darker now than before. I heard the heavy breathing, though, and pulled my gown over my head and lay, naked, on my back on top of the sheets.

He was on top of me, naked, substantial, heavy. I raised my legs, pressing my heels into bare thighs. and, as he pushed his knees between my thighs and under my buttocks, I sighed, “Yes, yes, do it.” He pressed a big, beefy palm over my mouth and I raised my arms over my head, grabbing the brass rail of the bedframe to hold myself in place and arched my back, as he entered, entered, entered me and my passage fought to stretch to take him in.

I gasped when he took his hand away, pulled his hips back and then thrust them forward—and again and again. I wrapped my legs tightly around his waist and lowered my arms, grasping and squeezing his undulating buttocks, holding him close to and inside me as we rocked together in the fuck. He possessed my lips with his, invading my mouth cavity with his tongue, which I sucked on as we moved together. His curly chest hairs rubbed against my chest—his red hairs, I knew was the case despite the darkness that enveloped us, as we moved together in perfect harmony, me sheathing him, him buried deep in my core, kissing my passage walls as he stroked inside me.

He took his mouth away, his chest rising up from me, his body straining in the last few thrusts before ejaculation.

“Yes, yes, give me your cum, Stanley,” I murmured. I had spoken his name.

The response was electric. He reared up, pulling out of me, but ejaculating as he did, his cum spurting into my pubic hairs, as he rose, rolled off me . . .

. . . and was gone.

Stanley didn’t come back on subsequent nights. When I asked the nurses about him, they said he had abruptly gone to London to work in hospitals there. I was disappointed. I would not have said anything negative about his services. But, in time, I knew I would forget him entirely.

* * * *

The afternoon I decided to see how far I could walk toward the doctor’s house, I walked out onto Peppard Road, using the directions the doctor had given me. I made it as far as the intersection with Kidmore End Road, the road the doctor said he lived on, before I began to tire. I hadn’t been on a walk like this outdoors for I don’t know how long. There was a pub at the intersection, the Black Horse, and I stopped in there for a rest and a pint.

It was late afternoon, and others were there, working men and men just in from the fields, but not too many of them. Two were working the bar, a middle-aged man and a saucy young woman, who was chatting up the men bellied up to the bar. She immediately turned to me and gave me the eye as I walked in, taking my order and informing me that her name was Gertie and that I was the best thing she’d seen walk into the pub that month.

The young guy who had been flirting with her took umbrage. “And what am I, lass? Chopped liver? Have I been wasting my time and money on you now?”

“There’s time for all with money, Charlie, and maybe for some without, if they’re good looking and have been off giving their all for country. Is that where you’ve been, Laddie?” she asked, giving me a smile and a wink and setting my pint in front of me. “You’ve got your head bandaged, Sweetie. Did you get that in protecting me from the Huns? Are you out rambling from the hospital over at the manor and are in need of some appreciation?”

“Yes, I’m back from France and recuperating up at Caversham Park,” I answered, saluting her with the pint and taking a swig. “I was told to start trying to walk at distance.”

“And you made it this far,” she said. “Shows you’re getting your strength back. Maybe we can help you get back into the saddle on other important parts of life.”

The other barman, in his forties and burly, interjected, “The first pint back from France is on the house, soldier. And anything else that might fancy you as well.” He gave me a wink and wafted off to serve another customer.

“We were about to take the air,” Charlie said, his hand on Gertie’s arm.

“So we were, Luv,” she said. “You want to come out in the back in about ten, good looking?” Gertie said. “As Fergis said, the first one is on the house for you boys being brought back from the front.” She gave me a wink and went out the back of the pub, Charlie following her, his hand on her bum.

I thought about what I wanted. She was a bit skinny, but she was a good-looking young woman. She was a little hard looking, but what was it I wanted? I searched my mind, my brain still pretty scrambled and floating in and out on memory. What had I been interested in before whatever happened in France? She came on to me like she liked me and I could have what I wanted. Was I attractive to women? Were women—and pub girls like Gertie—attractive to me? Did I fuck them when I had a chance? Was I up for a casual lay—of a woman? All I conjured up in my mind were men, and encounters with them were hazy in my memory. What is it I wanted? Did I perhaps want both?

There was one way right here for me to find out—or to begin exploring again and perhaps jog my memory back to wellness. I was getting fed up with this fog that drifted in and out in my mind, spending more time there than not. It was getting better, but it wasn’t getting better fast enough.

I pushed off from the bar, my pint finished, and walked to the back of the pub and into the service yard. This was where the necessaries were, and I could always retreat to having come out to use that before pressing on with my walk.

Charlie was fucking Gertie up against the wall of a garden shed. She was facing the shed, her cheek and the palms of her hands pressed against the wooden wall. Her buttocks jutted out from the wall, her breasts were released from her bodice and bobbing free, and her legs were set wide. The back of her skirt was bunched up around her waist. If she had been wearing undergarments, she wasn’t wearing them now. Charlie was in a crouch behind her, his hands cupping and squeezing her ample breasts, and his cock fucking her cunt. She was egging him on with a vocabulary she’d no doubt learned in the pub on busy, raucous nights.

I stood and watched for several minutes. The scene, albeit the two of them were having a good time, did nothing for me. After a while I moved on to the necessary, relieved myself, and walked around the side of the pub and onto Kidmore End Road, moving away from Caversham.

What Gertie had to offer had no appeal to me. I don’t know if that comforted or disturbed me. I tried not to think about it, and not being able to focus long on any one topic helped that.

Doctor Baker’s house was a neat Tudor cottage in a small, well-kept garden just off Kidmore End Road. He opened the door to me and smiled broadly.

“So, you have found me, have you? And you managed to walk all the way from the manor?”

“I had to break my walk at the pub—the Black Horse. I was surprised I had gotten so weak. Although, who knows, maybe I never had much strength. There’s still so much I don’t know about myself.”

“Come in, come in,” he said, leading me through an entry hall and into a parlor that was smartly appointed. A lot of care had gone into the furnishing and decoration of the room. I was surprised that a doctor as busy as he was up at Caversham Park with the patient load he surely had was this particular with the decoration of his house. Of course, the garden had been groomed as well. “Sit and I’ll get us a brew. You had one at the pub, I assume. But not more than two, I hope.”

“Just the one,” I said as I settled myself on a settee facing the fireplace. A fire was laid, and it was quite cozy in the wood-paneled room.

“And was the barmaid, Gertie, there?” he said when he came back with mugs. “I assume the pint was on the house, it being your first visit to the Black Horse—and that Gertie was on the house as well. How long a rest did you take at the Black Horse?”

I blushed, and he could see that I had. He added, “She’s very patriotic—and very loose, that one. The barkeep is free with her time as well. You are quite the looker, so I assume she would have come on to you.”

“Yes, yes, she did,” I answered.

“And you fucked her?”

I paused, shocked that he was that direct.

“I’m your doctor, and you can’t remember much—not even your name. If we have to shock you into remembering who you are, what you do in life, what you prefer and want, we’ll have to do so.”

“What I prefer?”

“You’ll want to know all that you are in life. You deserve that. Those who care for you—and there must be such—deserve to know that as well.”

“No, she invited me to be with her, but I didn’t stay around.”

“You didn’t stay around because she revolted you? Gertie doesn’t have trouble finding men interested in her—and interested in her again and again.”

“No, she didn’t revolt me,” I answered. “She invited me out back where another man was mounted on her, and I watched for a few minutes. It didn’t disgust me, but it didn’t arouse me, I’m afraid. Maybe that part of my mind just hasn’t engaged yet.”

“Or perhaps you prefer men. If you believe you might, don’t fight it—or be shy of talking to me about it. I’m your doctor, not your confessor or father.”

And we know what you like to do with me, I thought. And then I was shocked that the thought had surfaced in my mind. Images of an examination table, my feet in stirrups, and the doctor—this doctor—crouched over me, inside me, fucking me, flooded into my mind. A memory recaptured. I was surprised that that didn’t revolt me. But it didn’t. The doctor had fucked me, and realizing that hadn’t revolted me. He was watching me carefully, as if he could read my mind.

And it appeared he could read my mind. Giving me a piercing look, he said, “We are just trying to help you recover what is real—what and who you really are. I’m not making any judgments here. And I haven’t done anything that you didn’t show you wanted. I’m just trying to help you find who you are and what you want. It just happened to fall into my preferences as well. You are a beautiful young man.”

So, he didn’t rape me; I had somehow begged him for it. Had I done the same with the orderly, Stanley? I certainly hadn’t tried to fight Stanley off.

I took a long draw on the mug of beer, wanting to discuss something less intimate. The man was getting a rise out of me—not as a doctor but as a man. “This is a very nice house and very well decorated,” I said, fishing now, trying to grasp what the situation was. For the first time, I felt self-conscious about being in the room alone with Doctor Baker. Were we alone in the house? “Your wife must be a very talented decorator.”

“Pat was very artistic. But Pat has left me. Pat was beautiful. I have a photograph.” He hadn’t sat down yet, although he’d put his mug of beer on a small table between a wing chair and the fireplace, next to the settee I was sitting on. He went to a door on the opposite wall from the fireplace, opened it, and went into the room beyond. I could see a four-poster bed in there with rich draperies hanging from its canopy. When he came back and turned the photo for me to see, I almost hyperventilated—and it wasn’t just because he brought a framed photograph back. He was naked, his body magnificent for a man his age. And he was in erection.

“I don’t think I’ll be presuming,” he said. “You have taken me before without reluctance. And we are just trying to help you discover who you really are—what you really want.”

“Before? More than once?”

“Oh, my, yes, certainly more than once. And you weren’t a virgin. A doctor knows these things. You had been with men before me. You wanted to be with me; you encourage me to cover you. You have been here for a couple of months. And now you have come to me at my house. I’m sure you know why you came here.”

The photograph was a surprise as well. Pat was a young man, not a woman—not a wife. He didn’t appear to be any older than I was, with much the same features, and was small, slender build as I had.

“Pat went to the front—to France—and didn’t come back. He isn’t coming back,” Doctor Baker said. “In many ways I like to think of you as the one who came back to me in Pat’s stead—from the first day I lowered you onto the examination table and you opened your legs to me. You wanted it. You gave yourself to me willingly. You responded naturally. You had been with men before. I could tell that you had been. You moaned for me. You let me in deep and clutched me to you as we coupled. You sighed when you took my seed. I admit I lost myself. I was thinking of Pat, and there, for a few minutes, as we rocked our bodies against each other and you sheathed me, I believed you were Pat come back to me.”

“Coupled” was an avoiding, trivializing way of saying it, although as he stood there before me, naked, and spoke so intensely, I didn’t feel he was trivializing this. My doctor had fucked me on his examination table when I didn’t have full control of my mind. He said I begged for it, but I only have his word for that. But what could I say? How could I deny him? He obviously wanted me, and I found, memory loss or no memory loss, that I wanted him too.

He fucked me the first time that day on the settee, me on my belly, my arms and head dangling over the arm and the doctor, on top of me, on my back, inside me once I had watched him split the condom packet and crown himself, his arms stretched over mine, gripping my wrists with his fists, his face buried in the hollow of my throat, and his pelvis moving, up, down, up, down, fucking me deep.

After capturing me under him on the sofa and fucking me, he wanted assurances I accepted it. “You. If you are accepting of this, show me. Give yourself to me,” he had said.

“How can I show my surrender more than I have?” I asked.

“You must do it yourself. You must ride my shaft; you must make the effort and commitment yourself.” He rose from me and went into the bedroom and lay down on his back on the four-poster canopy bed. His shaft was in full erection again. He opened his arms to me, coaxing me to saddle myself on his hips and do the riding—which I did, giving it all to him, accepting full responsibility and control for what we were doing. I rode his cock, saddled on his pelvis, facing him, initially, with the palms of my hands pressed to his pectorals and him grasping and stroking my cock. But when I had ejaculated the first time—actually the second time, having come on the settee as well—I turned on him, grasping his knees with my hands, and rising and falling. We came almost together then.

I couldn’t claim that this was him doing something to me. He was under me. I was astride him, riding his cock.

As I arched my back and both released my load and took his, I cried out. Paul! Paul Parker! My name is Paul Parker! I’m from Timberlay, in Yorkshire!

* * * *

Three weeks later, Lord Ramsay arrived in Caversham Park in his chauffeur-driven 1916 Packard Fleetwood Cabriolet to take me back to Timberlay Hall in Yorkshire. I had remembered more bits and pieces of my past, but other than finding I had come from Timberlay, was connected with the country estate of a Lord Ramsay, and had gone to war with the lord’s son, Howard Temple, who had not come back from France, I couldn’t remember anything about my early life. The lord seemed to expect that I would and was very solicitous with me. I soon suspected that I hadn’t just been one of the estate’s servants. I wondered if he knew what I had been to his son, Howard.

They had done all they could for me at Caversham Park, and they needed the bed for newly arriving wounded soldiers. With me beginning to remember my recent past, at least, Doctor Baker pretty much lost interest in bedding me, evidently for the same reason that the orderly Stanley had left. It was too risky what I would remember and possibly say, and there were other good-looking amnesia patients who were susceptible to his attention as long as their memories were impaired.

As we drove back to the York area, Lord Ramsay queried me about the last moments of his son, Howard. I remembered now more than I told the father, though, out of kindness to the old man. The man wasn’t all that old, really. He was probably in his fifties, fit, and robust. He was a muscular man, a hands-on manager of his estates. He rarely went into London. He was a widower and preferred the rough-and-tumble male world of the countryside. There was little opportunity for talk as we drove. Although there was a chauffeur, Lord Ramsay preferred to do his own driving in the countryside and drove at high speed, concentrating on the road. I spent much of the time in the backseat, as Lord Ramsay wanted the chauffeur up front with him, doing what ever adjustments needed to be done on the instrument panel as we moved along at a brisk pace. The driving was given over to the chauffeur in the villages and towns.

In the conversations we did have, I learned more about my past in Timberlay than the lord learned of his son’s demise. Howard, of course, had received honors posthumously. He was the son of a lord, and despite serving on the line, he had been permitted to take his own manservant and bed companion with him. The Army had given him a hero’s demise. They had lost me altogether, though. If I had died with him, I doubt that I would have received a medal.

I learned from the father that before becoming Howard’s valet, I had worked in the stables at the estate. I came from humble stock. I had been taken in as an orphan as a child, but I had become a favorite of the master and his son. That I was an orphan made sense. There had been no parents to prevent Howard from fucking me in the loft of the stables before taking me into the house and into his bed. I increasingly remembered how demanding Howard was in bed, and, slowly, I was remembering that he wasn’t the only one on the estate who covered me.

When we stopped at an inn in Leicester overnight, I found just how much of a favorite I had been of the master and was able to remember who else had covered me on the estate other than Howard.

“I’m sorry Milord, we have only the one room of the quality you would want,” the innkeeper at reception had said. “The young man may be satisfied with one of our shared rooms, with a bath at the end of the hall perhaps. Your chauffeur, of course, can be accommodated in the rooms above the stable.”

“Does the room you have for me have more than one bed?” Lord Ramsay asked in a booming, authoritative voice.

“It has a divan in addition to a bed, yes sir.”

“Then the young man and I will take that room.”

We didn’t need the divan, although Lord Ramsay made sure of making it look like it had been used for the maids to find the next morning. I found that I had been a bedded favorite of not only Howard, but also of his father. The lord sat at the foot of the bed, with me kneeling between his thighs, and slapped his long, thick, engorging cock on my cheeks before demanding that I give him suck. After I had brought him to full erection, I was made to kneel on the bed, cheek and chest to the sheets, arms stretched out straight in a cruciform sacrificial position, listening to the snap of the condom being applied, denoting the difference in classes and generations. The Stanleys of the world and the thinking-they-are-invincible young, like Howard, breeded; doctors and lords took care with condoms. Both fucked, and the lord did so now, mounting, penetrating, and fucking me expertly. It was made quite clear that we had done this before.

When, hovering over me close from behind and above and gripping my wrists with his strong hands and beginning to grunt and snort in my ear, as he penetrated, not long but as thick as a beer bottle, and started to move inside me, more memories came flooding back and I remembered all of how I’d gotten here and what I had willingly done to do so. I writhed under him, one of his hands went to cover my mouth to keep our business from entertaining the entire inn, and he once again, as he’d done for years before, showed me why he was the master and why I willingly opened my legs for men.

Lord Ramsay assured me I wouldn’t be sent back to the stables when we reached Timberlay Hall.

“I have need for another, younger valet in my bed chamber,” he said. “You will do nicely.”

As had been the case with the doctor, while Lord Ramsay fucked me, more and more of my earlier life floated back into my memory. I certainly remembered that this was one of the lord’s favorite taking positions—but not the only one—and that, virile and robust, he’d be changing positions with me and fucking me through the night.

I wouldn’t be going back to France as a soldier. Lord Ramsay would make sure of that. He had made enough sacrifices to the war.