Night Angels Ch. 3

* * * Thursday morning we arrived at the airport together. I’d packed my things, dropped Mr Thelonious off at the boarding cattery, and arrived at the airport gate in a bit of a rush. There she was, in her normal clothes again – beige pants, dark cashmere sweater, camel hair coat, notebook computer in shoulder bag, smart Samsonite suitcase. No hot come-on, no tease. Just her normal, warm, friendly self. Lucy the dependable colleague. No clue for any outsider that there was anything between us.

And precious few clues for me, too. For a few minutes I thought she was going cold on me. But then there would be these tiny, almost undetectable signals. Her ankle, barely touching mine under the table as we waited in a coffee shop. Her coat, brushing my jacket for a moment in the departure lounge. The fleeting touch of her hand as we boarded the plane. Just faint enough to make me wonder whether I was imagining it, just there enough for me to feel it as a pulse of warmth between us.

It was unbearable. Was she withdrawing? Or was she just being careful? Was she friendly? Or was I just dreaming it? I had certainly not dreamed that kiss in the loo. But why this will o’ the whisp attitude? Was she playing with me? What was I doing here? It struck me that aside from our tantalising encounters and our professional exchanges, we’d never talked. What did I know about her? Who’d dropped her at the airport? What had I got myself into?

Fortunately I had plenty to occupy my mind. Once we in our client’s mammoth steely-blue post-modern skyscraper, things were a whirl of activity. We had to keep our wits about us. We were hobbits in the ogre’s castle, and the ogre wanted to do business. The hobbits needed to look sharp. And we did. Between me, Andrew, Peter and Lucy, were a dream team. We were smart and slick, we knew our facts, we knew our bottom line, and we covered for each other. It was good. But it was hard. And it kept on and on. Meetings with the IT folks, meetings with the legal department, meetings with the non-executive board members. Morning meeting, late morning meeting, power tea, power lunch, power dinner.

We did it, though. We were in top form. Somewhere during the course of the day, I heard a little voice in my head, saying it. John, you’re in top form. But somewhere beyond it, further still, there was another voice, bleaker and quieter, saying, - she hasn’t looked at me once for the last five minutes, she is sitting three seats away from me, she’s not smiling at me, her smile is a bit wan and reserved….was that her hand touching mine as she passed me the file?

We had supper at some utterly boring haute cuisine restaurant that had made its name in the 1970s and lost the plot since. I had run out of small talk for the suits, and I was utterly exhausted. I stared at my dinner – a consommé of something in a coulisse of something else – and thought, Mr Thelonious, please forgive me. I am catching the red-eye home and we’ll go to bed together…

But the day was not over yet. Our party was supposed to be whisked off to some waterfront spot for yet further confabulation (was there such a thing as power nightcaps?). I was not up for it and begged to be dropped off at our hotel on the way. In the taxi, Lucy and I were silent. I still was unable to gauge her mood. Was she just tired? Was she having second thoughts? I looked at her carefully and I could not fool myself. Her eyes were downcast, her mood oddly reserved – if I had not known her better, I would have said she’d been overcome with shyness. And yet, her calf was just perceptibly grazing my leg, and as I left the taxi her fingers touched mine. What was going on? If she was withdrawing from me, why these touches? And if she was still interested, what was it with the sudden hesitancy? What had happened to the brash girl of earlier in the week? What had happened to the tall, dark temptress?

I realised that without thinking about it I had assumed we would spend the night together. The Friday evening I would go back home, while Lucy and Charles would stay on for further meetings (power weekends!) and the signing on Monday. After that, Charles was going off to some lawyer’s conference or other and Lucy was expected to accompany him. Tonight was my last chance. I would only see her in ten days’ time. And now this certainty seemed to be disappearing.

I went into hiding in my room. I wanted to sink into oblivion. I wanted to stop caring. I wanted to find an old Kurosawa movie and forget that I had feelings. I did find one – it was The Seven Samurai – but it all seemed to be about me. The young swordsman, inept with his feelings, not knowing how to get the girl, too clumsy to know how to react to her desire. Except that in the movie, he gets her in the end. I wasn’t the young swordsman, I wasn’t even the ultra cool steel-eyed archer, at best I was the grizzled old campaigner, too old for love, tired of chopping off heads, missing his cat, alone in a hotel room in a foreign city late at night.

Noises outside. My colleagues returning. Voices in the corridor. I tensed up. The room next doors to mine had been assigned to Andrew - Lucy’s room was upstairs – but if he was back, so should she. I tortured myself, telling me she was going to show up any moment, she was dropping her things, changing into something sexy, and then there would be a scratching at my door… I heard a toilet flush next door, the TV flick on and off, and then silence. Andrew getting his beauty sleep. Then nothing.

Half an hour passed.

It was after twelve. Exactly a week ago I had been at the club… I remembered my mood of heady resolve. My image in the mirror, looking back out at me, saying here goes nothing.

What was going on? You been around a bit, Mr Old Campaigner. Can you tell the young swordsman what to do?

I sat back in my armchair and summoned up before me the image of Lucy as she appeared to me throughout today. Not reserved, not cut-off. Those small sidelong glances, the tiny touches – those had been real.

What was it then? Could it be shyness? The idea seemed ridiculous. Lucy, the person who had overwhelmed me with her boldness? I was the shy one, the reserved older man swept away in her torrent of confident passion!

And yet, and yet… I tried to imagine her as she was right now. She was sitting in her hotel room, maybe sitting in the bed. Not soundly asleep. Not forgetting me. Waiting. Waiting for a knock on the door.

I remembered what Selma had said. “Claudia might end up outwitting Claudia. Lucy could end up tricking Lucy.” Lucy had enjoyed playing games. The careful charade of the first few months. The teasing. Breaking the rules in the club, where she was still Claudia and I was just some nameless man who would disappear before morning. Even this week: no more kid stuff, she had said on Monday, but she had still tried to turn it into a game.

But now it was past midnight. The ball was over. The princess, pretty as she was, was feeling like an ordinary girl again. And she was suddenly unsure of herself. Would I still like her when she was out of her party gear? When the fancy dress was stowed away?

What do we do when the games stop, Lucy?

Let me show you.

I was out of my door, night-gown wrapped around me, before I was even conscious of having made a decision. The hotel corridor stretched away in both directions, with that bland, timeless, placeless, artificial feel that you get in hotel corridors everywhere. Maybe they have consultants for that, I thought. People who specialise in making sure that every major hotel chain has its own unique distinctive feel of limbo, so that no matter where you were – Paris, New York, Seattle, Rio – you would actually feel you were somewhere else, somewhere more familiar, a parallel universe, that of your hotel chain of choice.

In this particular one – Universe Hyatt – the lifts in the elevator had walls in plush velvet and quiet, tasteful, smoked silver mirrors. The numbers on the touch pad gleamed amber and the door’s tone as it opened and closed was very soft and muted.

Bing.

The door opened again, and there, waiting mutely in a hotel-badged bath-gown, was my princess, in the corridor in her bedroom slippers. She just stood there with her eyes downcast, looking shy and confused and more than a little vulnerable.

For a long instant we just stood gazing at each other.

Once in a while, you suddenly have a chance to see anew someone you thought you knew well – to see them afresh, not through the lens built up from expectations and past knowledge.

I saw a tall, slender, beautiful girl, someone who had just come into the full power of her womanliness.

Full power? Maybe not.

She was beautiful all right, and womanly. But the old campaigner saw something else.

Some girls are pretty for a season. For a while they are cute little teens, and then they turn into stunning beauties. For a year or two or five of ten, they are graceful, beautiful, bewitching. And then something – stress, children, husbands, jobs – steals it away again. It has nothing to do with weight or wrinkles. It is something else. A quality of spirit, that disappears.

And in some women, that early beauty is just the early signs of what is to come. They are beautiful at eighteen – but the princess can not be compared to the queen. Forget everything you have been told about skin tone and hair colour. That is not what matters. Ask the old campaigner. What matters is sureness and confidence in lovemaking, confidence and strength in society - and a different beauty. A beauty that lives in a depth and clarity and warmth in the eyes, a grace and poise of figure and motion. A womanly power. You may have seen it in the movies. Katherine Hepburn had it. Susan Sarandon has it. Angela Basset is getting it. A man who has such a woman at his side is lucky.

And I looked at the young Lucy who was looking all bedraggled and lost, and saw the woman she would become, and wondered to myself – who will that be?

I suddenly wanted to be the man who would be around when her hair too was starting to be tinged with grey. She would still be tall and slender, with a long straight back. There would be beautiful laughter lines around her eyes. Most men hunting for someone to bed would look right past her – never knowing what they were missing. A lioness, a tigress, a graceful and sensual woman. A queen.

The elevator binged again and started closing. We both moved forward at the same time and ended up embracing clumsily in the hallway, the door gently chiming as it butted at my back. I pulled her back inside and we went to my room. I led her by the hand, and she followed quietly, almost passively. Once inside, she allowed herself to be held, allowed me to kiss her on her forehead, her eyes, and then, chastely, on her mouth. I held her for a moment, and then released her. She gazed at me wordlessly. My temptress, this beautiful young woman who thought nothing of dancing naked in front of strangers, who volunteered to allow herself to be raffled off at a strange, probably illegal nightclub, who had brazenly entered the men’s room at the office and all but invited me to enjoy her body there, seemed all of a sudden a little bashful, hesitant.

I tugged open her bathrobe and let it fall to the ground. Underneath she wore a slight little slip of a nightdress – pink, with pink with buttons halfway down the front that parted easily at my touch. This too, I tugged off her shapely body. She stood in front of me naked, vulnerable.

I took her hand again and led her to the bed, where we sat down side by side.

She did not look up at me, but sat with her hands folded demurely in her lap. I put my arm around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder.

We sat wordlessly for a while, looking at her slippers. They were pink, and fluffy and very old. Ages ago they had been designed to resemble bunny rabbits. But now three of the ears and one of the eyes had come off. I imagined her getting them from her dad at age fourteen or fifteen.

I knelt down on the floor and gently eased them off. Her feet were slender and delicately arched. She wriggled her perfect toes in my hand.

“Well, Cinderella,” I said, “care for a drink?”

Her eyes met mine shyly and she nodded. I went to the bar fridge. She drew her legs up and sat on the bed, her knees against her breasts and her hands across her ankles. She looked unbearably beautiful and unprotected. I suddenly felt awkward and strange, being a clothed man in the presence of a naked young woman and slipped out of my own night clothes.

I made it double whiskeys all round. We sipped them cross-legged on the floor, our knees touching. We did not speak. Speech was unnecessary.

After a while, she smiled, dipped her finger into my whiskey, and painted her nipples with the liquid as she had done when we had first met. And it was sweet to be able to lean over and kiss it away, and then to kiss her mouth in earnest, leisurely and slowly. It was sweet to enjoy her body when there as no-one around but us and the silence of the sleeping hotel.

My cock, sleeping on my thigh, stirred and woke.

She curled up and laid her cheek on my thigh, dreamily touching it, touching my balls, watching my loins awaken. She played experimentally with my foreskin. Softly she took me still half-erect in her mouth and gently sucked until I was stiff and hard, pleasure flowing from her mouth into me.

Then we kissed again. I tasted the whiskey in her mouth as well as the acrid taste of my own arousal.

My hand found its way between her thighs. There was already a hint of moisture between the lips of her sex, a slickness around the sweet little button of her clit. I stroked and tickled her lips and watched her face become a soft mask of pleasure.

We played like that for a while, my fingers at her slit and hers at my cock till both of us were slick with juice.

Then she lay back on the bed, her hips on the edge of the mattress and her feet on the floor, her thighs splayed wide to receive the pleasure of my touch. Her shyness was rapidly ebbing away. She was dissolving, relaxing, losing herself in bliss. Her engorged pussy lips opened like the petals of a flower as I gently tongued and sucked them, taking them into my mouth, running my tongue up and down. I gently teased her clit with the bottom of my tongue, and then plunged it deep into the slightly bitter-tasting outer passages of her cunt. She was making soft, throaty, noises of enjoyment. And for me it was pure pleasure as well, sending this beautiful, bold and gentle girl skilfully and surely down the river of pleasure. Nudging the raft ever deeper into the stream…

Her thighs were clenching and trembling slightly. She was tugging at my hair, pulling my face away. She wanted my cock now, wanted it inside her.

The bed was low off the ground. I quickly put the firm flat pillow from the seat of the armchair on the ground between her feet and knelt down. Just as I had thought: like this, my hips were level with hers, just at the right level for me to enter her. But slowly.

I let the shaft of my cock slide along the outside of her slit, and then butt softly at the little soft space between her lips. No reason to hurry now, no need to force things. She groaned with pleasure and spread her lips wide, grabbing me and easing me into her. I closed my eyes and echoed her groan. No matter how many times I have made love, I am always overwhelmed by that moment of first entry, by the warmth and softness that envelop me when I first slip slowly into that hot, tight, slippery passage. The sense of direct connection. For a long while it was enough simply for her to hold me there, and to watch her as she writhed with pleasure, running her hands across her own body, squeezing her own breasts and touching herself between her legs.

Then we were moving as one, in the groove, in the rhythm, joined at last in a road our bodies knew together. Her eyes never left my face. We let the river sweep us along, felt its gathering force around us.

Then, quite suddenly, she came, closing her eyes and crying out aloud. I was off my knees, I was on top of her, her thighs locked around my hips. I thrust strongly deep inside her, letting her orgasm deepen and break. She came for a long time, gasping and moaning, holding me to her with her strong, slender arms, sucking at my mouth, my tongue, my lips. At last the storm passed. I held her quietly for a while then, letting the tremors subside, knowing she would be unbearably tender for a few minutes.

Then we shifted farther onto the bed, so that I could support my weight on my knees and elbows now, and she let me begin moving again, looking dreamily into my eyes, circling my the base of my cock with her hand, egging me on and on till it was my turn. I came explosively, with a piercing sweetness penetrating my entire body, surrendering entirely to the sensation of my cock emptying itself deep inside her body. She held me again, hand in my hair, crooning softly, pressing my face against my neck as my body shuddered and shuddered

Minutes passed. Slowly we returned to the dimly lit hotel room and the sound of rain outside. I gently moved off and out of her and looked around. Our whiskey glasses were still sitting where we had left them by her slippers on the floor by the foot of the bed. Miraculously we had not kicked them over. I made a warm nest with of the bedcovers and pillows and we watched the rain pearl on the windows for a while, arms around each other, sipping the warming, fragrant liquid.

There were so many pleasures I had forgotten. The pleasure of timelessness. The gentle play that comes after lovemaking, the investigation and discovery of the other’s body. The downiness of the skin below the earlobe. A small mole on the flank beside the breast. Sweat cooling in tousled hair. Lips and mouth tasting of a whole mix of heady liquids. For so many years I had cut myself off, so scared of being burned again that I had not realised I had stopped myself from feeling anything Now I felt scared again. But I could not go back.

“What is it, love? You look so sad…” Lucy asked me gently.

I had no answer that I could put in words, and just held her tightly for a long while. Sweetness of life. It had returned to me. I did not know what would happen to us, but in that moment it was enough just to lie together in the pool of warmth we had created. Lucy looked long into my face and then kissed me on the forehead. She switched off the light and we drifted off to sleep.

Somewhere in the middle of the night we made love again. Or rather, she made love to me. I emerged from deep sleep to find her straddling me, my cock already hard and deep inside her. Her arms were tightly around my neck and her cheek was pressed against mine. I floated in and out of sleep, conscious of nothing but an enveloping warmth and softness and the increasing power and urgency of our movements. It was almost an animal lovemaking, deep and instinctive and empty of thought. I don’t know how long it went on. We came together, that time, crying out and holding on to each other. And then we slid back into sleep.

In the morning, she was gone. The whiskey glasses were neatly lined up on the coffee table. Her slippers were there too. And there was a note. It said,

“Stay here tonight. Love L”

To be continued...