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.
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 h
er 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.
Thirty-three years later, in 1977, when women were at last being admitted into the Air Force, the WASPs were retroactively given military status. It was then, through a reunion group, that I found out what had become of Cleo Remington; she had found a sky high and wide enough to hold her fierce spirit, and freedom as a bush pilot in Alaska.
And she was, as I discovered, even more breathtaking at sixty than she’d been at twenty-six.
But that’s another chapter of the story.
Death on Denial
O’Neil De Noux
The Mississippi. The Father of Waters.
The Nile of North America.
And I found it.
–Hernando de Soto, 1541
The oily smell of diesel fumes wafts through the open window, filling the small room above the Algiers Wharf. Gordon Urquhart, sitting in the only chair in the room, a grey metal folding chair, takes a long drag on his cigarette and looks out the window at a listless tugboat chugging up the dark Mississippi. The river water, like a huge black snake, glitters with the reflection of the New Orleans skyline on the far bank.
Gordon’s cigarette provides the room’s only illumination. It’s so dark he can barely see his hand. He likes it, sitting in the quiet, waiting for the room’s occupant to show up. Not quite six feet tall, Gordon is a rock-solid 200 pounds. His hair turning silver, Gordon still sees himself as the good-looking heartbreaker he was in his twenties.
He wasn’t born Gordon Urquhart those 40 years ago. When he saw the name in a movie, he liked it so much he became Gordon Urquhart. He made a good Gordon Urquhart. Since the name change, he’d gone up in life.
He yawns, then takes off his leather gloves and places them on his leg. He wipes his sweaty hands on his other pants leg.
The room, a ten-by-ten-foot hole-in-the-wall, has a single bed against one wall, a small chest of drawers on the other wall, and a sink in the far corner. Gordon sits facing the only door.
He closes his eyes and daydreams of Stella Dauphine. He’d caught a glimpse of her last night on Bourbon Street. She walked past in that short red dress without even noticing him. As she moved away, bouncing on those spiked high heels, he saw a flash of her white panties when her dress rose in the breeze. He wanted to follow, but had business to take care of.
Sitting in the rancid room, Gordon daydreams of Stella, of those full lips and long brown hair. She’s in the same red dress, only she’s climbing stairs. He moves below and watches her fine ass as she moves up the stairs. Her white panties are sheer enough for him to see the crack of her round ass.
They’re on his ship from his tour in the US Navy. Indian Ocean. Stella stops above him and spreads her legs slightly. He can see her dark pubic hair through her panties. She looks down and asks him directions.
Gordon goes up and shows her to a ladder, which she goes up, her ass swaying above him as he goes up after her, his face inches from her silky panties. Arriving at the landing above, she waits for him atop the ladder. He reaches up and pulls her panties down to her knees, runs his fingers back up her thighs to her bush and works them inside her wet pussy. She gasps in pleasure.
A sound brings Gordon back to the present. He hears footsteps coming up the narrow stairs up to the hall and moving to the doorway. Gordon pulls on his gloves and lifts the 22-calibre Bersa semiautomatic pistol from his lap. He grips the nylon stock, slips his finger into the trigger guard, and flips off the safety as the door opens. He points the gun at the midsection of the heavyset figure standing in the doorway.
Faintly illuminated by the dull, yellowed hall light, Lex Smutt reaches for the light switch. Gordon closes one e
ye. The light flashes on and Smutt freezes, his wide-set hazel eyes staring at the Bersa.
“Don’t move, fat boy!” Gordon opens his other eye and points his chin at the bed. “Take a seat.”
Smutt moves slowly to his bed and sits. At five-seven and nearly 300 pounds, Smutt knows better than to think of himself as anything but a toad. He runs his hands across his bald head and bites his lower lip. Wearing a tired, powder-blue seersucker suit, white shirt, and mud-brown tie, loosened around his thick neck, Smutt is as rumpled as a crushed paper bag.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.” Gordon rises, his knees creaking, and closes the door. In his black suit, Gordon wears a black shirt and charcoal-grey tie.
Yawning again, Gordon says, “Long time, no see.”
Smutt lets out a nervous laugh.
Gordon’s mouth curls into a cold grin. “Lex Smutt. That’s your real name, ain’t it? It’s a stupid name. You stupid?”
Smutt shakes his head slowly, his gaze fixed on the Bersa.
“You know why I’m here.”
Smutt’s eyes widen as if he hasn’t a clue.
“Give me the 15,000. Or die.”
A shaky smile comes to Smutt’s thin lips. “I don’t have it.”
“Then die.” Gordon cocks the hammer – for effect – and points the Bersa between Smutt’s eyes.
Raising his hands, Smutt stammers, “Come on, now. Gimme a minute.”
“You’ll have the money in a minute?” Gordon’s hand remains steady as he closes his left eye and aims careful at the small, dark mole between Smutt’s eyebrows. The loud blast of a ship’s horn causes Smutt to jump. Gordon is unmoved.
As long seconds tick by, Gordon takes the slack up in the trigger and starts to pull it slowly. Staring eye-to-eye, Smutt blinks.
“I got six grand,” Smutt says.
Gordon’s trigger finger stops moving, but his hand remains steady. He blinks and nods.
“Where?”
“On me.”
“Where?”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3 Page 35
