I reached my tiny room ahead of her – nursing builds strong legs. I crossed to the window to heave it open, and then the door slammed shut and she was behind me, pressing her crotch against my ass, wrapping her arms around me to undo my buttons and cradle my breasts through my sensible cotton slip. I longed to be wearing sheer flame-coloured silk for her.
When she slid her hands under the fabric and over my skin, though, I found I didn’t want to be wearing anything at all. “So soft,” she whispered, “so tender…” and then, as my nipples jerked taut under her strokes, “and getting so hard…”
A melody drifted from below, “Something To Remember You By”. I turned in her arms. “Teach me to dance,” I whispered.
We swayed gently together, feet scarcely moving in the cramped space, thighs pressing into each other’s heat. Cleo kneaded my ass, while I held her so tightly against my breast that her silver wings dented my flesh.
“Please,” I murmured against her cheek, “closer…” I fumbled at the buttons of her tunic. When she tensed, I drew back. “I’m sorry… I don’t know the rules…”
“The only rule,” Cleo said, after a long pause, “is that you get what you need.”
“I need to feel you,” I said.
She drew her hands over my hips and up my sides until she held my breasts again; then she stepped back and began to shed her clothes. Mine, with a head start, came off even faster.
The heady musk of arousal rose around us. A clarinet crooned, “I’ll Get By”. I cupped my full breasts and raised them so that my nipples could flick against Cleo’s high, tightening peaks, over and over. The sensation was exquisite, tantalizing. I gave a little whimper, needing more, and she bent to take me into her mouth.
I thought I would burst with wanting. My swollen nipples felt as big as her demanding tongue. Then she worked her hand between my legs, and spread the juices from my cunt up over my straining clit, and my whimpers turned to full-throated moans.
Cleo raised her head. Her kiss muted my cries as she reached past me to shut the window. “Hope nobody’s home next door,” she muttered, and suddenly we were dancing horizontally on the narrow bed. I arched my hips, rubbing against her thigh, until her mouth moved down over throat and breasts and belly, slowly, too slowly; I wanted to savour each moment, but my need was too desperate. I wriggled, and thrashed, and her head sank at last between my thighs, just as in my dreams. Her mobile lips drove me into a frenzy of pleading, incoherent cries, until, with her tongue thrusting rhythmically into my cunt, my ache exploded into glorious release.
In the first faint light of morning I woke to feel Cleo’s fingers tousling my hair. “If I were an artist I’d paint you just like this,” she whispered. “You look like a marmalade cat chock full of cream.”
I stretched, and then gasped as her fingers roused last night’s ache into full, throbbing resurgence. “Sure enough,” she said with a wicked grin, “plenty of cream. Let’s see if I can make you yowl again.”
This time I found out what her long, strong fingers could do deep inside me, one at first, then two; by the end of the week I could clench spasmodically around her whole pumping hand.
Sometimes I think I remember every moment of those days; sometimes everything blurs except the feel of Cleo’s hands and mouth and body against mine and the way her eyes would shift suddenly from laughing silver to the dark steel of storm clouds.
We did more sightseeing: the Tower of London, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, St Paul’s Cathedral scarred by German bombs. We took boat trips up the Thames to Richmond Park, where we dared to kiss in secluded bits of woodland, and down river where we held hands across the Greenwich Meridian. One night, in anonymous clothes bought at a flea-market barrow, we even managed to get into a club Cleo had heard of where women did dance openly with women. We couldn’t risk staying long, but a dark intoxication followed us back to her room, where I entirely suppressed the nurse in me and demanded things of Cleo that left both of us sore, drained, and without regrets.
On our last night in London we went anonymously again into shabby backstreets near the docks. I brought disinfectant, and we chose what seemed the cleanest of a sorry lot of tattoo parlours. There, welcoming the pain of the needle as distraction from deeper pain, we had tiny pairs of wings etched over our left breasts.
We parted with promises to meet one more time before Cleo’s last flight. I mortgaged a week of sleep to get my nursing shifts covered, and at Hamble Air Field, by moonlight, she introduced me to the planes she loved.
“This is the last Spitfire I’ll ever fly,” she said, stroking the sleek fuselage. “Seafire III, Merlin 55 engine, twenty-four-thousand-foot ceiling, although I won’t go up that far just on a hop to Scotland.”
From Scotland she’d catch an empty cargo plane back to the States. I had just got my orders to report to Hawaii for assignment somewhere in the South Pacific. War is hell, and so are goodbyes.
“Could I look into the cockpit?” I asked, wanting to be able to envision her there, high in the sky.
“Sure. You can even sit in it and play pilot, if you like.” She helped me climb onto the wing, with more pressing of my ass than was absolutely necessary, and showed me how to lower myself into the narrow space. Standing on the wing, she leaned in and kissed me, hard at first, then with aching tenderness, then hard again.
“Pull up your skirt,” she ordered, and I did it without question. She already knew I wasn’t wearing underpants. “Let’s see how wet you can get the seat, so I can breathe you all the way to Scotland.” She unbuttoned my shirt and played with my breasts until I begged her to lean in far enough to suck my aching nipples; then, with her lips and tongue and teeth driving me so crazy that my breath came in a storm of desperate gasps, she reached down into my slippery heat and made me arch and buck so hard the plane’s dials and levers were in danger. I needed more than I could get sitting in the cramped cockpit.
We clung together finally in the grass under the sheltering wing. I got my hands into Cleo’s trousers and made her groan, but she wouldn’t relax into sobbing release until she had her whole hand at last inside me and I was riding it on pounding waves of pleasure as keen as pain.
I thought, when I could think anything again, that she had fallen asleep, she was so still. Gently, gently I touched my lips to the nearly-healed tattoo above her breast. Tiny wings matching mine. Something to remember her by.
Without opening her eyes she said, in a lost, small voice, “What are we going to do, Kay?”
I knew what she was going to do. “You’re going to claim the sky, to make history. And anyway,” I said, falling back on dark humour since I had no comfort to offer, “a cozy menage in Paris seems out of the question with the Nazis in control.”
Then, because I knew if I touched her again we would both cry, and hate ourselves for it, I stood, put my clothes in as much order as I could, and walked away.
I looked back once, from the edge of the field. Cleo leaned, head bowed, against the plane. Some trick of the moonlight transmuted her dark hair into silver; I had a vision of how breathtaking she would be in 30 or 40 years. The pain of knowing I couldn’t share those years made me stumble, and nearly fall. But I kept on walking.
And she let me go.
In June of 1944, against all justice and reason, the bill to make the Women Airforce Service Pilots officially part of the Army Air Forces was defeated in Congress by 19 votes. In December, the WASPs were disbanded. By then, though, after going through hell in the Pacific Theatre, I had met Jack, who truly loved and needed me, whose son was growing below my heart. His kisses tasted of home, and peace, and more unborn children demanding their chance at life.