‘Dad, Hugo won’t be leaving me,’ she told her father quietly.
‘Not leaving you? You mean he’s changed his mind...seen sense?’ her father demanded.
‘No. Hugo hasn’t changed his mind,’ Dee answered him steadily. ‘He still plans to go, but...’ She paused, and then looked lovingly at her father. ‘I’m going to go with him, Dad...’
‘You’re what?’
She had known he wouldn’t be pleased, of course. Although no firm plans had been made she knew that he had hoped she would move back home after university, and until she had met Hugo she too had assumed that that was what she would eventually do.
Her father had never tried to hold her back, nor to impose his views on her. He had been the one to encourage her to leave home and go to university, but...but he wasn’t really ready, deep down in his heart, to let her go completely yet.
‘This is what Hugo wants. What do you want, Dee?’
I want you and Hugo to like each other. I want to be happy. I want Hugo, she could have said, but she knew that in his present frame of mind her father’s heart was closed to the needs of her own. ‘This is something I want to do for myself,’ she told him quietly. ‘I have to go, Dad. I love him!’
‘Well, you’re over-age, and I can’t stop you,’ he responded curtly.
Hugo loved her, too, she knew that, but he was fiercely, passionately determined to carry out the plans he had discussed with her. If she didn’t go with him Dee knew he would go on his own. That didn’t mean he would stop loving her—she knew he wouldn’t—but it would mean that there would be a large slice of his life which she could not share.
Hugo was a crusader, a man who needed to live life on a grand scale, a young man full of the passionate intensity of his youth, and if Dee felt in her heart that her own inclinations lay closer to those of her father, if she felt that she could do just as much good working to help those in need at home as she could helping those who lived in such tragically difficult circumstances, if her dreams were smaller and gentler than those of the man she loved, then she felt that they were perhaps best kept to herself.
Hugo’s family had already thrown enough cold water on his dream. Hugo needed her support and her love, and she needed to be with him.
In years to come the time they would spend together would be something they would remember, a memory that would help to bond them together, something to tell their children.
A small smile curled Dee’s mouth.
Hugo might be all crusading male eagerness where his own life was concerned, but she knew instinctively that when it came to his children, to their children, he would want to protect them just as fiercely as her father did her.
In many ways they were so alike, so alike and so fiercely jealous of one another. Sometimes she felt like a bone they were both determined to possess.
In another few weeks she would sit her finals. Hugo had already completed his work, and their plan was that just as soon as they could they would leave together. Hugo had already approached one of the main aid agencies, and both of them had been provisionally accepted onto a scheme they were operating in Ethiopia.
Dee had suggested that before they left they should both spend time with their respective families, but Hugo was impatient to leave just as soon as possible.
Although officially they still had separate homes, Dee now spent most of her time at Hugo’s and she had her own key. Her father might logically guess that she and Hugo were lovers, but Dee was sensitive enough to know that he would not want to have such suspicions confirmed. He came from a generation when a couple’s sexual life was something strictly private, and really only acceptable inside the respectable confines of a marriage. Dee knew that it was different for her and Hugo, of course. The thought of how it would feel not to have the freedom to reach out into the night and touch Hugo’s naked body, not to know the special pleasure of knowing that body so well that it was almost as though, in some way, it had become hers, was simply unbearable, and not just because of the sexual frustration she would suffer. She loved Hugo so much that she wanted to be close to him in every way there was.
Emotionally, mentally, physically and of course sexually, they had no secrets from one another, no prohibited areas. Dee loved lying in bed and watching as Hugo padded around the bedroom, his naked body as splendidly magnificent as that of a male cheetah in his prime. Everything about him sang with energy and health, from the silky, sleek gleam of his skin to the thick, shiny glossiness of his hair.
It still amused—and amazed—her to see the way he could respond physically to her just because she was looking at him.
‘You’re the one who’s caused it,’ he would tease her as his busy perambulations about the flat became halted by the demanding urgency of his arousal. ‘So now it’s up to you to do something about it.’
‘Such as what?’ she would ask, mock innocently, all the while her fingers delicately caressing him.
‘Mmm...well, that will do for a start,’ he would murmur to her as he covered her mouth with his own, his weight pushing her back against the pillows.
They had been together for over two years, but the intensity of their physical desire for one another still had the power to awe and excite Dee. She only had to run her fingers teasingly along the length of Hugo’s erection, or just merely circle its head and caress it playfully, for him to immediately be so responsive to her that her own body flowered into delirious resp
onse. Sometimes, in the middle of a serious discussion, she would reach across and touch him temptingly, laughing as he tried to hold on to the thread of his argument, her eyes betraying the wonderment and awe she still felt that he should love and want her so much.
They had their quarrels, of course. Both of them were strong-willed and passionate, both of them felt things very deeply, and both of them were very vocal in stating those beliefs, but the only real issue of contention which existed between them was that of Dee’s father. She had introduced them to one another with loving pride—and anxiety—and soon discovered that she had been right to be anxious.
The evening had ended with her father and Hugo arguing passionately about the morality of the government in power; her father had been pro-government and Hugo anti. Torn between both of them, she had tried to placate her father, knowing how it would hurt his pride to have to acknowledge the strength of Hugo’s arguments. But then later, when they had returned to Hugo’s flat, Hugo had claimed that she had supported her father against him, and not just that but, even worse, she had denied her own beliefs as well.
‘You know as well as I do that I was right,’ Hugo had told her fiercely, for once refusing to respond to the loving little kisses she’d been pressing placatingly along his jaw. ‘You’ve agreed with me that—’
‘Dad’s old-fashioned and set in his ways,’ she had told Hugo. ‘I didn’t want to hurt him...’