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She takes the paper from his hand, impatient, and is confronted with a grainy photo of a woman soldier holding what looks like a six-shooter straight out of a cowboy movie.
“Oh. That.” She reads quickly through the accompanying text. It’s the story of a small action, just a minor vignette in the war really, but one that stars Rio Richlin. “Gosh, I hope my folks haven’t seen this.”
“It went out on the wires and may have been picked up by the Gedwell Falls Democrat-Press, I don’t know. A buddy saw this in the New York Herald Tribune when he was home on leave. I talk about you a lot, so . . . I guess he recognized the name. There aren’t a lot of girls named Rio, let alone one who can handle a six-shooter.”
Rio sags back onto the bed and lets it bounce her back up to a seated position. “I’m . . . sorry.”
“Sorry?” He is genuinely puzzled. “Sorry for what? Sounds like you single-handedly wiped out a Kraut mortar team.”
Rio snorts. “Single-handed? Any time you read ‘single-handedly’ it’s bullsh—it’s an exaggeration. I was just the one that climbed down the rope. And the gun wasn’t even mine, I borrowed it off the reporter who . . .” She realizes that makes no difference to the story, but she is mortified to have the story out in the wider world, and annoyed to have Strand showing it to her.
They drink some more Champagne. Conversation rises and falls, with each silence more awkward and pregnant with meaning than the preceding one. Rio is looking more and more frequently at his lips, which are, according to that great expert Jenou, eminently kissable. And in doing so the memories of every kiss they have shared comes welling up, bringing a wave of feeling, a wave of . . .
She leans forward just as he leans forward and their lips meet. It’s an awkward stance, both leaning, so Rio takes his quite wonderful bicep and draws him to sit beside her on the bed. They kiss some more, quite a bit more, and Rio’s heart is pounding, but Strand does not press for anything more intimate. Rio is certain—almost certain, nearly certain, kind of certain—that she would rebuff him if he did.
After a while they move to a more comfortable position, side by side on the bed with their backs against thin pillows that barely soften the brass tubes of the headboard. Rio unlaces her relatively mud-free but far-from-clean boots and kicks them off. When they land they sound like they weigh ten pounds each. Strand leans down and carefully unlaces his polished shoes and places them next to each other on the floor.
“Tell me about flying, Strand. Bombers, right?”
“Turns out I couldn’t take the G-force for a fighter. You get into a dogfight, take those tight turns, and it presses all the blood down out of your head. They say it’s worse in big guys, tall guys like me. Fighter pilots tend to be more compact.” He sounds abashed and seems almost to be gritting his teeth. It’s a story he’s had to tell before, Rio guesses. Everyone wants to fly fighters—the Battle of Britain and the romance of the Spitfire pilots have settled that.
“I like you less compact,” she says, and kisses him again. It is a tender kiss, a gentle kiss, one with less animal need and more affection. Love? Maybe. She isn’t sure how she’ll know if it’s love.
Maybe when you stop thinking about Jack Stafford.
She kisses him again, this time putting more heat into it, as if trying to push the thought of Jack out of her thoughts. But Strand has cooled now. In fact he seems distracted.
“Tell me about it,” Rio says again, feeling like a hypocrite since she herself dislikes being asked about her actions.
He shrugs. “Mostly we sit around the bar—the officers’ club—or else lounge in the briefing room being lectured by captains and majors and such. There’s a lot of big maps on the wall and all sorts of exceedingly dull talk of course adjustments and radio direction finding.”
He’s striving for nonchalance and failing.
“Don’t you ever fly?”
“Occasionally.” His tone is transparently false. “Sure, there are missions. Sometimes, though, we don’t even find the target and have to dump our loads in the water.”
“And other times?” she presses.
He rolls away from her then, ostensibly to fetch the half-empty bottle and refill their glasses. But he does not return to his place beside her. Instead, he paces the ten linear feet available to him.
“Sometimes we reach the target and deliver the package.” He smiles and adds, “Bombs away!” He has a hand motion to go with it, wiggling fingers emulating the bombs as they fall from the bomb bay.
“Is it rough?”
He shrugs. “The flak isn’t so bad, but we do run into the occasional 109 or Focke-Wulf.”
She sees something in his eyes, though he looks away. “Have you lost anyone?”
Strand shoves his fingers back through his hair and paces to the window. “I, uh . . . my tail gunner. This Indian kid, Sioux from North Dakota, we called him Poke, on account of calling him Pocahontas at first when he was still green, and then that got to be Poke.”
“What happened?”
“A 109. Nobody spotted him, Kraut just dropped down out of the sun. Ground crew says we only took one round. We’ve come in all shot up, two hundred holes, and everyone safe, and then one lousy round . . .” Then, after a stretched and painful silence, he adds, “Just last Thursday. So it’s . . . um . . . kind of raw, I guess.” He smiles as if it’s something he should apologize for.
There’s nothing to say, so Rio nods.
“I haven’t lost anyone before. Buddies, sure, you remember Bandito? You met him on the Queen? Well, his crate went down, we saw some chutes, so maybe he’s sitting in a POW camp, but see, it’s different when it’s your own crew.”
