Much, much easier for her to let down her guard and express a very natural and enthusiastic interest in his voluntary work than to respond to him or acknowledge her sexual awareness of him. Much easier for her to be herself, to show herself and all the charming complexities of her delicately drawn personality through the questions he then asked her in return than if he had only been able to communicate with her through the guarded protective response she might have made to merely sexual overtures—which was not to say that there was no mental or verbal communication between them; there was, very much so. It surrounded them almost visibly and physically, crating so powerful an aura that the girl bringing them their second and then their third cups of coffee sighed enviously as she went back to the kitchen to tell the girls there about the pair of besotted lovers sitting at one of their tables.
They talked for so long that they missed Peter’s meeting completely.
‘I don’t want to let you go,’ Hugo told Dee as they left the coffee shop and stood together on the busy street outside. ‘There’s so much I want to tell you...so much I want you to tell me. I want to know everything there is to know about you, right from the day you were born.’
Dee laughed, flushed, and then laughed again, before protesting, ‘Oh, but that would take all night.’ And then she flushed again, but it wasn’t embarrassment that was making her skin glow so warmly. It was the way she was feeling inside, just thinking about what it would be like to spend the night with Hugo.
She saw that Hugo was smiling, a male glittery smile that made her heart flip over. It made him look so dangerous, so attractive...so...so...sexy...
‘So...?’ he whispered.
‘I...’ Dee felt herself floundering, flustered and incoherent as she fought for some semblance of adult sophistication, some slick answer that would defuse the exciting tension building up between them.
But where another and more experienced girl might have teased, tongue-in-cheek—‘so...persuade me’—all Dee could manage was a stammered, ‘I can’t... I don’t...’ She stopped and shook her head, and then told him with honest simplicity, ‘I don’t do things like that.’ She saw his eyes widen before he gave her a swift, comprehensive look that rested on her mouth, her breasts, and then lower, before returning to her eyes.
‘What...not ever?’ he asked her gruffly.
From somewhere Dee found the courage to meet his eyes and hold his steady look.
‘Not ever,’ she confirmed.
‘The tribe I was working with last summer have a tradition that whilst a girl has to marry a man chosen by her family she has the right to choose for herself the man who will be her first lover. It’s considered the greatest honour a woman can bestow on a man, to choose him and to choose him out of love, to bestow on him her love and herself, and I happen to agree.’
Dee could feel herself starting to tremble, while her body had become taut with responsive desire.
‘Of course, some of the men get a little bit impatient waiting to be chosen, and then they snatch away the girl of their choice in case she chooses someone else. They seduce her with gifts and kisses.’
His voice was dropping as he spoke to her, becoming lower and raw. Dee made a little husky sound of protest, and as her lips parted Hugo warned her thickly, ‘Don’t do that. Otherwise I shall be the one stealing you away. Have dinner with me tonight,’ he begged her abruptly, and then, when she hesitated, he told her, ‘You needn’t worry. I’m not suggesting... It will be somewhere safely public,’ he told her gravely, ‘for both our sakes. The way I feel about you...’ He stopped and shook his head.
‘In Africa a man considers himself to be very much a man, and his woman very much his woman, very, very responsive to him, and their love a sacred thing if she conceives his child the first time they make love. Here, in our so-called civilisation, things are different.
‘Once you were in my arms I know that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from responding to man’s most basic instinctive urge, to bury myself as deep inside you as I could, to give my seed, give our child the very best chance it could have of being conceived. And I know, too, that that would be the very worst thing that could happen to it and us right now... I’ve seen students struggling with domesticity and a baby. It doesn’t work,’ he told her flatly.
Dee was too shaken by his earlier comments to say anything. Deep down inside her body she could feel her own very basic response to him, and she knew that what he’d said had touched a deep cord within her.
Of course she didn’t want to get pregnant. Of course she didn’t. But of course she did—oh, how she did. But she couldn’t...wouldn’t...
‘Do you understand what I’m trying to say to you?’ Hugo was asking her tenderly. ‘Dinner is all that I can let myself give you tonight, Dee, even though it’s very far from all I want to give you. Very, very far. So will you, please, please have dinner with me?’
‘Yes,’ Dee responded simply.
After she left him she made a detour on her way back home to call at her doctor’s surgery and ask for an appointment to discuss birth control. She knew she was blushing as she made her request, but the receptionist was completely matter-of-fact about the whole thing.
Dee knew that most of her fellow students were using one form of birth control or another.
‘You can’t leave it up to the men,’ one of her house-sharers had commented bluntly as she had hunted in the bathroom for the small white pill she had lost as it popped out of the packet. ‘After all, they are our bodies, and we’re the ones who have the right to decide.’
‘The righ
t and the responsibility,’ another girl had chimed in, a little bitterly. ‘The two go hand in hand.’
* * *
Hand in hand... Dee looked down at where her hand was linked with Hugo’s.
To her relief none of the others had been there when he had come to collect her.
‘Nice place,’ he commented as Dee closed the front door behind them. ‘Must be quite pricey to rent, though, even sharing...’