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‘So it’s open season on him,’ one girl had declared gleefully. ‘And don’t forget, whoever gets him, we all want a full report...’
Dee had left at that point. She wasn’t a prude but... But what? But the images the others’ comments had conjured up in her brain were far too private to be acknowledged, never mind shared. Not that Hugo was likely to ask her out. She suspected that she simply wouldn’t be his type. He was so popular, so sought after, that no doubt when he did date a girl he would choose one who...who what? Who would make no bones about the fact that she was quite happy to jump into bed with him and have sex with him simply for sex’s sake? Whilst she, Dee... No, they would have nothing in common.
Three days later, as though fate had overheard her and decided to teach her a lesson, she found out just how wrong her judgement had been.
There she was, riding her hired bicycle across the cobbles, struggling to control it, when Hugo came racing round the side of the building, the full weight of his body hitting her sideways on.
Neither she nor the cycle had stood any chance. He was six feet three and a sportsman, she was five feet nine and slim, the cycle was nearly twenty years old and rheumaticky; the result was inevitable. Regrettably the cycle, venerably ancient though it was, was left to fend for itself whilst Hugo went to Dee’s rescue.
She was picked up, carefully dusted off, and even more carefully inspected for damage, and all the time Hugo was apologising to her in his deep rough voice that made her feel rather as if a cat was licking her skin with its rough tongue. But his hands as he touched her were anything but rough; he was so careful and tender with her. Her shirt, a neatly buttoned-up affair, had a rip in it and her jeans had dirt stains down one side. The combs had fallen out of her hair and there was a nasty patch of grazing on her index and middle fingers, where they had come into contact with the gravel, but otherwise she was all right—as Dee gravely assured Hugo.
‘Thank goodness for that,’ he said in relief. ‘For a moment I thought I might really have hurt you.’
‘It was an accident,’ Dee felt bound to point out. It was very chivalrous of him to shoulder all the blame, especially when both of them knew that she shouldn’t really have been cycling where she had.
‘Look, I was on my way to a meeting, but would you let me buy you a coffee? You never know,’ he told her gravely, ‘you could be suffering from shock.’
There was no ‘could be’ about it, Dee admitted inwardly, though her shock wasn’t caused by her fall but by the fact that he had actually offered to buy her a coffee, which must mean...
‘You have hurt yourself,’ she heard Hugo saying tersely as he suddenly caught sight of her fingers.
‘Oh, my hand—that’s nothing,’ Dee denied, trying to tuck her grazed fingers out of sight behind her back just in case he decided that their gravel-pitted state meant that she wasn’t fit to be seen in a coffee shop.
‘Nothing...let me see.’
Before she could stop him he had taken hold of her hand and was gravely inspecting it. Dee wasn’t small, and her hands were elegantly long and fine-boned, although when compared with Hugo’s they suddenly looked almost deliciously frail and feminine.
Her heart tripping excitedly against her ribs, Dee watched as he carefully brushed away the bits of gravel adhering to her skin.
‘This should really be cleaned,’ he told her gravely. ‘I’ve got rid of all the gravel, but...’
‘It’s fine,’ Dee started to say, and then stopped, unable to speak, unable to draw breath, unable to do anything as Hugo lifted her fingers to his mouth and slowly and carefully started to suck on them.
Dee felt as though she was going to faint. The sensation was just so unbelievable, the warmth, the wetness, the slow, rhythmic sucking movement of his mouth.
She tried to protest, and managed to make a sound that came out like a small whimper, the merest breath, more easily recognisable as one of intense appreciation than one of protest.
Much later Hugo told her that he hadn’t initially meant his action to be sexual. He had simply been genuinely concerned about the state of her hand and had reacted promptly and very much in the fashion of his own practical, prosaic country-bred mother, who had, when he was a small child, often ‘cured’ small childhood cut fingers and bruises with a cleansing maternal lick.
‘All mother animals do it,’ he told Dee simply.
?
??Yes,’ she agreed, doe-eyed, ‘but you weren’t...you aren’t my mother.’
‘No,’ he conceded, ‘I’m not your mother.’ And then he gently continued with what he had been doing, which was peeling her pretty lace bra away from the fullness of her breasts so that he could expose the dark pink crests to his ardent gaze and even more ardent mouth...
Although the area of the campus they were in when the accident happened was normally a busy one, today, for some unaccountable reason, no one else seemed to be around and they were, to all intents and purposes, alone, so that there was no one else to hear the small anguished sound of shocked virginal pleasure that Dee made, nor the totally male, all-male, all-possessive look that Hugo gave her in response. His gesture might not have begun nor been intended as sexually erotic, but by the time he slowly relinquished her fingers neither of them was in any doubt as to what it was or how it was affecting them—nor what it portended. Peter’s meeting—their shared destination—was forgotten.
Dee walked at Hugo’s side in a daze as he guided her, guarded her almost, keeping her body protectively and possessively close to his own, towards the café. Her bike he had disposed of, propped up against a wall. She would, no doubt, have to pay a hefty fine to the firm she had rented it from for the damage caused, inflicted on its ancient frame, but Dee didn’t care. Quite simply she wasn’t capable of caring about anything or anyone right now, and nor was Hugo.
The café Hugo chose was small and dark, smelling richly of fresh ground beans and thick with cigarette smoke. He guided her downstairs to its dimly lit cellar and to a small table tucked away in a natural alcove, his body shielding her from anyone’s curious or predatory gaze.
He ordered for them both, a cappuccino for her and a coffee, plain, black and strong, for himself.
‘I got used to drinking it like this last summer, when I was doing volunteer work in Africa,’ he told her when their coffee arrived.
A simple enough statement, and yet it proved to be both the cornerstone and the basic foundation on which they went on to build their relationship, promoting between them a sense of shared purpose, an intimacy which Dee, with her upbringing, might have found very difficult to reach out for had they taken the route of learning about one another simply through their sexual desire for one another.
