She didn't actually remember leaving… or even deciding that she must leave. There was just this sudden and alarming sensation of the whole world canting slowly to one side as her nerveless legs stepped down through the wet cobbles of the street as if they had been made of molasses. It was difficult trying to drag her feet up again through that sticky fluid that sucked so persistently at her heels.
But then suddenly she was free of it, walking lightly, as though she was on a sheet of glass a foot above the sidewalk, with no sensation of her feet touching anything. Stefan was with her… a long way off to one side, holding out his hand to help her as he receded further and further into the distance.
Then she was lying on an old-fashioned feather bed in warm room with a fire burning brightly in a polished grate. The old woman drew across the heavy drapes and walked across to the bed to remove the damp face cloth from her brow. Susan blinked dazedly at her. "But… what are you doing here?" she stammered. "Weren't you in the b-bar?"
"Bar?" the woman echoed blankly. "What bar? You've been to a few bars too many, Fraulein, and that's the truth!"
She sniffed severely and turned to leave the room.
Susan shifted on the bed. The satin covers were cool under her skin. She was lying outside them… and, dear God, she was completely naked! She didn't have a stitch on her!
As she gasped in consternation, a warm hand grasped her suddenly around the ankle. She cried aloud and sat up in terror. It was only Stefan. He sat at the foot of the bed, smiling at her in the firelight as his supple fingers absently massaged the flesh of her leg. And then her mind reeled as she took in the full implications of the scene – she saw that he too was wearing no clothes.
"Stefan!" she cried wildly. "What's going on? Where am I?"
"It's all right," he soothed. "It's all right. Don't panic. You were taken a little faint when we left the bar. Probably you didn't eat enough today and then you got cold. Anyway, I thought you weren't in a fit condition to go home, so I brought you here to rest up a little."
"Where's here? Where are we? What time is it?"
"A little hotel I know not far from the Town Hall. Don't worry, they're very discreet."
"Discreet!" Susan repeated, her voice rising to a squeak. "Discreet about what? Stefan, why have you brought me here?" She tried to look angry but the room started to spin around just as the street had done, and she was forced to drop back once more against the pillows. She must have eaten something that disagreed with her, she thought confusedly. Perhaps those sausages at the biergarten…? Or could it possibly have been…? No, not those nice drinks at the bar! They were so sweet, almost like kids' sodas back home, and besides they had only had three tiny ones. In any case, Stefan would have warned her if they were intoxicating, wouldn't he?
Wouldn't he?
Prey to sudden suspicion, she raised her swimming head slightly and stared towards the foot of the bed. He was still holding her ankle, caressing the slender swell of her calf with his other hand, a slight smile on his lips and his eyes shadowed beneath those jutting brows.
She was all at once conscious of her nakedness, aware of her shamelessly exposed genitals alone with him in the firelit hotel room. Why did they have to bring her into a bedroom? Why had they had to take all her clothes off just because she felt a bit faint? And above all, she thought with a wild twinge of alarm, why was he naked too?
She hesitated to speak to him. He would look up at her when he replied… and before he could meet her eyes, he would have to look past the silky brown curls of pubic hair mantling the most secret parts of her loins, past the ripely swelling curves of her budding young breasts and the tender petaled nipples at their tips. Her virginal body was nakedly defenseless before his gaze!
She started slightly, feeling the warm wet pressure of his lips on the soft flesh at the inside of her knee.
"Susan," he murmured. "My Susan, I've missed you so much. Why have you not been to see me? It seems like a year!"
"I told you," she whispered huskily, staring straight up at the ceiling (it was still swaying slightly). "I'm not allowed to any more. My father…"
"I know, I know," he interrupted. "Your father is a difficult man. He does not like Germans."
"It's not that, Stefan," she began awkwardly. "It's just…"
"But surely you could have found time, somehow, to slip out secretly? Surely you could have stolen a few minutes here or there? You're so beautiful… it's been hell for me, just waiting and wondering."
"I did try, Stefan, really I did. I was going to come to the cafe today, but…" Her voice trailed away as she remembered with a sickening pang the scene she had witnessed from the balcony.
"But what?"
"Nothing… something came up. I couldn't." She shook her head as if to clear it and added: "Goodness, I feel so funny!"
He had placed his lips on the flesh of her inner leg again… only this time he was kissing her just above the knee. The bed creaked slightly as he shifted his weight further up it.
"You must relax," he mumbled into her softly trembling skin. "That's why I brought you here… to relax."
"Is it, Stefan?" she demanded, suddenly alert. "Is it that why you brought me here?"
"You know what I feel about you, darling. Susan…"
"No, Stefan. No. You know we mustn't!"
They had kissed and petted often enough. She had let him stroke her and fondle her sensitively throbbing breasts under her sweater. But they had never gone the whole way.
"And anyway," she said firmly, "I feel much too odd to… to… to do anything. I feel kind of sick, and I think I want to go home."
"But you don't have to do anything!" the blond boy protested. "That's what I keep telling you! Just lie back there and relax, honey."
Susan closed her eyes. If he was going to be sensible, if he was just going to stroke her a little, if she wasn't expected to do anything about it – well, it was really too much trouble to argue. She would lie there a while until the world stopped going around, and then she would get right up and go on home, Stefan or no Stefan!
The smooth caress of his fingers – on the sensitive inside of her upper thigh now – the gentle warm plucking of his lips and the occasion flicker of his tongue against her skin, the firm grasp of his hand that had moved from her ankle to the back of her knee, the crackle of the flames in the fireplace and the drumming of rain on the window pane, all fell into a kind of rhythm… a monotonous, hypnotic cycle of sensation born of the alcohol still singing in her blood and the heat of the room.
After a while the giddy swinging movement inside her head slowed down to a manageable rocking. At the same time she became aware that Stefan had altered his position. His two hands were now locked over the outsides of her thighs not far below her naked hips, and the thumbs, reaching over to the soft inner flesh, were gently rotating the skin as his wetly heated mouth played from side to side of her tightly closed legs.
She opened her eyes. To her astonishment she found that the lamp had been extinguished. The room was illuminated only by the redly flickering firelight, which cast long bobbing shadows up the walls and across the ceiling as the flames rose and sank. Stefan must somehow have reached out and found the switch as he lay beside her. Only now he was kneeling up on the mattress, his eyes closed and a look of utter contentment on his face as he gently kissed her legs with little nibbling motions of his lips and the same soft flexing of his thumbs.
Yet she hadn't felt the bed shift as he moved! Had she perhaps fallen asleep for a moment? She couldn't remember.
She closed her eyes once more. And then suddenly she realized that his caresses, which had started modestly at her ankle and calf, were now perilously near her vagina.