up against him, pushing and trying to guide him with her hands, greedy now. Her eyes were closed, turned inwards into her head. Her breasts fell aside, no longer elastic, and revealed the tender knobs of her breastbone.
Gordon held himself over her for an instant, enjoying this moment of dominance. He splayed his hands over her belly, and then crooked his arm under her hips so he could lift her. He took off her pants and knelt with his knees beneath her buttocks. She had a sparse lick of sandy hair, and a surprisingly tight, flat stomach like a boy’s. Her hip bones jutted prominently on either side. Vicky’s belly was rounded and generous, like the pillows on her bed, even between her pregnancies.
He bent his head over Nina, kneading her skin with the heels of his hands.
‘Not a single stretch mark,’ he marvelled, meaning only to convey his admiration. Vicky’s skin between her navel and the points of her hips was marked with two fans of fine, silvery lines.
‘Not a single pregnancy either.’
‘I’m sorry. That was clumsy of me.’
‘It’s all right. We were happy as we were.’
He did not want to think of her husband at this minute, or of Nina’s past life that he had no knowledge of, nor did he want to remember Vicky and everything else he knew too well. He lowered Nina’s hips and slid away, over the side of the bed, to kneel in front of her. He put his tongue to the wet gingery hair and parted the lips and worked at her until he heard her sigh.
Gordon lifted his head. Her hair was wound across her face like a veil. He moved again to lean over her, big and dark, and she opened her eyes to contemplate his face.
‘I want to fuck you now,’ Gordon said.
Richard had not used words like ‘fuck’ in bed.
‘Yes,’ Nina said.
He pushed her legs wider, excited and made rough by her apparent submission, but she put her hands in the way to stop him.
‘Shouldn’t you use something?’
‘I’ve got some in my jacket pocket.’
After his lunch with Andrew and the retailers he had made an excuse before going back to the office and had hurried into the big Boots in the precinct. He made sure he didn’t know the girl at the checkout, and he had bundled his purchase through with some toothpaste and dental floss. In spite of his forethought, now that the time had come he didn’t want to use one of the things.
‘But I had a medical check-up a month ago, for insurance. A full blood test, everything negative.’
Her eyes were very close to his. The proximity made her appear cross-eyed, greedy.
‘I trust you, then. And I haven’t been with anyone since Richard died. I was always faithful to him before that.’
He didn’t want to hear about this fidelity, a tribute paid to love that was locked and sealed away from him. For answer he moved her hand out of the way and spread her open with his fingers. As he came into her she asked,
‘Are you faithful to Vicky?’
He made the first thrust. ‘Not as of this minute.’
She was hot, and pleasingly tight around him. His entering her seemed to have released some catch. Her face changed and softened. She wound her legs around him and as he found his rhythm her fingers raked over his back and worked his buttocks, pulling him into her. They rolled over, and over again, with their mouths covering each other’s eyes and cheeks and throats.
She was good, Gordon thought. She was responsive and he liked that and he liked the whistle of her breath and the way she came on top of him and worked up and down so her bumpy little breasts hung over his chest with a sheen of sweat gleaming between them. They fitted together, hand in glove.
‘Turn over,’ he whispered. ‘I want to see your backside.’ He saw the concupiscent thickening of her eyelids again. Perhaps her husband hadn’t talked to her in bed.
She did as she was told, turning her head to one side with her mouth open so that a wet patch of saliva formed on the pillow.
He came into her from behind and she stretched out her arms over the coiled sheets, clenching and opening her fists in alternating submission and aggression. Gordon licked her shoulders and rubbed them until the white skin flushed a dull pink, and then they rolled again and she twisted her legs around his waist, trapping him.
‘Now you are mine,’ she said fiercely. She held his wrists too.
‘Is that what you want?’ he whispered. Her hair had fallen back and he could see her face. The skin was loosening over her cheekbones and under her eyes and the recognition of her imperfections, and of his own, filled him with sympathy and compassion for them both.
‘I do now,’ Nina said.
‘I am here now.’
Her mouth looked sore. She bit her lower lip and he kissed it where the teeth marks showed for an instant in the chafed skin. He freed his hands and stroked her face as she tilted her hips upwards, to reach for him. Carnality seemed interleaved with tenderness and he knew that she felt this too because her face had changed again. It had become clear and he could see directly into it, as if the cross-hatched skin had become transparent.
She said ‘Oh,’ seemingly surprised.
He knew she would come soon and he worked at her, both of them panting. When she did come it was with a series of small inhuman yelps that made him think of a nocturnal animal caught in the undergrowth. Her fingers dug into the thick muscles of his back, and her head fell blindly back to offer him the taut white cords of her throat.
Afterwards she was breathless and she laughed, as if still surprised, and held herself against him, rocking them both.
After a while she said, ‘You now. Do you know what I would like?’
‘What would you like?’
She had grown more confident, he noticed, made secure by their success so far and by her own satisfaction. Her eyes were bright and her tongue showed between her teeth.
‘I’d like to drink you.’
Gordon’s breath caught. It had been his first thought when she knelt in front of him, and the suggestion offered so coolly made him stiffen as he had done at the very beginning.
‘Do, then.’
She knelt between his legs and tucked her hair behind her ears with a prim gesture before lowering her mouth to him.
‘Vicky doesn’t like it. She says it makes her feel she is going to choke,’ he betrayed her.
Nina lifted her head for a second. ‘Braggart.’ Her coolness struck him with a jolt of lust.
He came quickly, feeling her mouth hard and soft, with a spasm that seemed to wring his heart.
She moved to lie beside him, her lips shiny, and he tasted the juice of himself when he kissed her.
‘Thank
