It turned out we were both staying in the club dormitory upstairs. We went up two flights together; then I opened the door on the third floor landing. Cleo’s room was on the fourth floor. I paused, and she said, without too much subtlety, “One step at a time, Kay, one step at a time!” Then she bolted upward, her long legs taking the stairs two, sometimes three, steps at a time.
Night brought, instead of a return to common sense, a series of dreams wilder than anything my imagination or clinical knowledge of anatomy had ever provided before. When I met Cleo for breakfast it was hard to look at her without envisioning her dark, springy hair brushing my thighs, while her mouth… but all my dreams had dissolved in frustration, and I had woken tangled in hot, damp sheets with my hand clamped between my legs.
Cleo didn’t look all that rested, either, but for all I knew she was always like that before her second cup of coffee. When food and caffeine began to take effect, I got a map of bus routes from the porter and we planned our day.
London Bridge, Westminster Abbey, Harrods department store; whether I knew how to do it right or not, every moment was a dance of sorts. Cleo got considerable amusement out of my not-so-subtle attempts at seduction. She even egged me on to try on filmy things in Harrod’s that I could never afford, or have occasion to wear (what on earth, we speculated, did Harrod’s stock when it wasn’t wartime?) and let me see how much she enjoyed the view. I didn’t think she was just humouring me.
In the afternoon, after lunch at a quaint tearoom, we went to the British Museum and admired the cool marble flesh of nymphs and goddesses. Cleo circled a few statues, observing that the Greeks sure had a fine hand when it came to posteriors; I managed to press oh-so-casually back against her, and she didn’t miss the chance to demonstrate her own fine hand, or seem to mind that my posterior was not quite classical.
Then we decided life was too short to waste on Egyptian mummies and wandered a bit until, in a corner of an upper floor, we found a little gallery where paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite movement and other Victorian artists were displayed. There was no one else there but an elderly female guard whose stern face softened just a trace at Cleo’s smile.
Idealized women gazed out of mythological worlds aglow with colour. The grim reality of war retreated under the spell of flowing robes, rippling clouds of hair, impossibly perfect skin.
Cleo stood in the centre of the room, slowly rotating. “Sure had a thing for redheads, didn’t they?” she said. “You’d have fit right in, Kay.”
I could only hope she herself had a thing for redheads. Standing there, feeling drab in my khaki uniform, I watched Cleo appreciating the paintings of beautiful women. When she moved closer to the sleeping figure of “Flaming June” by Lord Leighton, I gazed with her at the seductive flesh gleaming through transparent orange draperies and allowed myself, experimentally, to imagine stroking the curve of thigh and hip, the round, tender breasts.
“I don’t know how this rates as art,” Cleo said, “but oh, my!”
A hot flush rose across my skin: desire, yes, but also fierce jealousy. I wanted to be in that bright, serene world, inside that pampered, carefree body, with smooth arms and hands not roughened by scrubbing with hospital soap. I wanted to be the one seducing Cleo’s eyes. “She could have a million freckles under that gown,” I blurted out childishly. “The colour would filter them out!”
A tiny grin quirked the corner of Cleo’s mouth. As always, I wanted to feel that movement of her lips. “Freckles are just fine,” she said, “so long as I get to count them.” She turned and leaned close, as shivers of anticipation rippled through me. “With my tongue,” she added, and very gently laid a trail of tiny wet dots across the bridge of my nose. I forgot entirely where we were.
Then she bent her dark head to my throat, and undid my top buttons, and gently cupped my breasts through my tunic as her warm tongue probed down into the valley between. I couldn’t bear to stop her, even when I remembered the guard. My breasts felt heavy, my nipples swollen, but not nearly as heavy and swollen as I needed them to be.
Cleo’s grey eyes had darkened when she raised her head. “Where,” she murmured huskily, “is a bomb shelter when you need one?”
But we knew that even now, with the Luftwaffe so busy in Hitler’s Russian campaign that there hadn’t been a really major attack on London in over a year, every bomb shelter had its fiercely protective attendants.
The guard’s voice, harsh but muted, startled us. “There’s a service lift just down the corridor. It’s slow. But not necessarily slow enough.”
She gazed impersonally into space, her weathered face expressionless, until, as we passed, she glanced down at Cleo’s silver wings. “Good work,” she said curtly. “I drove an ambulance in France in the last war. But for God’s sake be careful!”
In the elevator Cleo pressed me against a wood-panelled wall and kissed me so hard it hurt. I slid my fingers through her thick dark hair and held her back just enough for my lips to explore the shape of her lips and my tongue to invite hers to come inside.
By the time we jolted to a stop on the ground floor my crotch felt wetter than my mouth, and even more in need of her probing tongue.
There was no one waiting when the gate slid open. Cleo pulled me along until we found a deserted ladies’ room, but once inside, she braced her shoulders against the tiled wall and didn’t touch me. “You do realize,” she said grimly, “what you’re risking?”
“Never mind what I’m risking,” I said. “One nurse blotting her copy book isn’t going to bring everything since Florence Nightingale crashing down. But you…” I remembered Frank’s bitter voice asking, “What kind of woman?” Tears stung my eyes, but it had to be said. “You’re holding history in your hands, Cleo.” I reached out to clasp her fingers. “Right where I want to be.”
“Are you sure you know what you want?”
“I may not know exactly what,” I admitted, drawing her hands to my hips, “but I sure as hell know I want it!” I reached down and yanked my skirt up as far as I could. Cleo stroked my inner thigh, and I caught my breath; then she slid cool fingers inside my cotton underpants and gently cupped my hot, wet flesh. I moaned and thrust against her touch and tried to kiss her, but her mouth moved under mine into a wide grin.
“Pretty convincing,” she murmured against my lips.
I whimpered as she withdrew her hand, but she just smoothed down my skirt and gave me a pat on my butt. “Not here,” she said, and propelled me out the door.
On the long series of bus rides back to Charles Street we tried not to look at each other, but I felt Cleo’s dark gaze on me from time to time. I kept my eyes downcast, the better to glance sidelong at her as she alternated between folding her arms across her chest and clenching and unclenching her hands on her blue wool slacks.
Dinner was being served at the Red Cross club, probably the best meal for the price in England. Cleo muttered that she wasn’t hungry, not for dinner, anyway, but I had my own motive for insisting. The band would be setting up in half an hour or so, and with the window open, you could hear the music from my room. Well enough for dancing.
So we ate, although I couldn’t say what, and Cleo teased me by running her tongue sensuously around the lip of a coke bottle and into its narrow throat. Her mercurial shifts from intensity to playfulness fascinated me, but the time came when intensity was all I craved.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to dance, would you?” I repeated last night’s invitation in a barely steady voice. “If I tried my best to do it right?” I stood abruptly and started for the stairs. Behind me Cleo’s chair fell over with a clatter as she jumped up to follow.