Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(32)

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.”

“Nothing you could have done,” Rio says.

This causes Strand to bang the meaty part of his fist against the wall. “I know that,” he snaps. “Doesn’t change anything, because you still have to go over and over it in your head. It sounds crazy, I know, me being the youngest pilot and well, you know me and I’m not . . . But the guys—see, to them I’m the skipper. It’s my fault because who else is there to blame?”

She goes to him as he gazes idly out of the window, stands behind him, and slips her arms around his chest. He puts his hands over hers. She brushes his ear with her lips, and he twists in her grip to face her. He kisses her, soft at first, gentle and almost melancholy. But she opens her mouth and touches his tongue with hers, and it is as if someone has attached them both to electric wires.

They kiss madly, almost violently. Rio pulls his tie off and throws it toward the bed and goes to work on the buttons of his uniform. She is disappointed to find the OD T-shirt beneath, more OD is not what she craves. Having never before formed the thought, she suddenly now knows that she wants very badly to see and touch and taste bare flesh.

What am I doing?

She pushes his shirt down and off impatiently, then forces him to bend forward so she can draw the offending T-shirt from his body.

Whatever I’m doing, I don’t seem to be stopping.

She has always imagined this moment as a type of surrender. That’s certainly been Jenou’s notion: you surrender at long last to the man and he . . . But that is not what is happening right here, right now. She is not surrendering, she is pushing the pace, she is practically forcing herself on him.

One more step and it will be too late . . .

Okay, then: one more step.

Finally Strand begins to undress her, so much more carefully, slowly, uncertainly than she had done to him, and hesitation again and again. He stops, breathing hard, when she is down to her bra.

“I . . . uh . . . how is this thing attached?” His voice is octaves lower than normal.

Rio laughs shakily. “It’s an army bra, so it makes no sense.” She reaches the snaps at the sides, pulls them free, and shrugs the bra to the floor.

For a moment she has forgotten to be self-conscious about her body, which has always been described unhelpfully by Jenou as “boyish.” But all of that, all of that shyness, all of that modesty, all the lessons incessantly drilled into her head by her mother, seem very far away and unimportant now. Because now she’s a teapot coming to full boil, not entirely right in the head, not at that moment, not when he stops breathing, not when he starts again but with a ragged, desperate urgency.

My God, it’s happening. It’s happening right now.

Her mouth is as dry, her heart as fast, her breath as shallow as when she stood blazing away at the Krauts. In fact, some distant part of her observes, she was calmer then. This is like some mad race inside her head, with animal desire and indifference to consequence pushing to overwhelm modesty and chastity and even the vague notion that she is meant to be passive, resisting, saying no.

“Do you . . . ,” she says, but finds her voice breaking. In a lower octave she says, “Do you have a French letter?” using one of a dozen common euphemisms for a condom.

Strand strains to raise his head. His expression is comical, a battle between shocked disapproval and urgent longing. “Are you? Do you? Should we . . . ,” he babbles before ending lamely, “You could get pregnant.”

“That’s why I’m asking about the . . . the thing,” she says, irritated by this conversational delay.

“No, I mean . . . I mean, if you were in a family way they’d send you home.”

It’s like a dash of cold water in her face. Does Strand actually believe she would do that? Use pregnancy to escape the war?

But that dash of cold water is a mere dribble of spit to the fire inside her. “Find it. Put it on,” she says, and watches with bold attention as the job is carried out.

The deed is done with a great deal more wild thrusting than Rio expects. The springs of the bed squeak loudly in telltale rhythm.

There is some pain, but nothing to compare with the punch she took from the Texan’s fist. It takes much longer than it takes a bull, she notes, and it is more fascinating than it is pleasurable.

They lie side by side then, talking for a long time, not about the war or even the army, but about home. Rio talks about her parents, acutely aware that there is something transgressive about discussing parents while naked beside a man to whom she is not even engaged, let alone married.

A line has been drawn in the sand of her life. Before and after. Some part of her mind dreads the inevitable confession to Jenou. If Jenou has become annoying in asking about killing Krauts she will become an absolute Sherlock Holmes in ferreting out every last detail of this first.

I am no longer a virgin.

Am I a woman now?

They make love again, more slowly this time, cautiously, learning about each other’s bodies.

Two hours later, as Rio lies in bed beside a dozing Strand, staring up at a bug on the flaking ceiling and wondering whether she has just done something very stupid, a siren wails.