After the Last Dance by Manning Sarra Page B

with his teeth, unbuttoned and unzipped. He took her limp hand and put on his cock, closed his fingers around hers as she jacked him off. Then the condom was on and he was so hard that he hurt from it, could feel the ache deep in his balls, and sliding deep into her was the only thing able to save him.
    She was tight. Even tighter when she gripped him, wrapped her legs around him. Leo hadn’t even taken his jeans off and she deserved someone who’d do it sweet and slow, make love to her. But he couldn’t be that guy.
    So he pulled out then slammed back in and she shut her eyes and gripped him even tighter though he hadn’t thought that was possible.
    Then her eyes opened. ‘Oh, darling, is fucking me into the mattress another one of those things you’re really good at?’ she purred with a cat-like smile. ‘Go on, then. Show me what you’ve got.’

5
    Â 
October 1943
    Rose thought about going back to Durham many, many times. When she had telephoned home on that first uncertain grey London morning a month ago, everyone had been out except Shirley, who’d screamed at Rose for borrowing her dresses. She’d said that if Rose did come back, she was going to be confined to her bedroom knitting balaclavas until they could ship her off to the Land Girls, if Father didn’t have her arrested first.
    Rose hadn’t called home since. She was managing perfectly fine on her own. She’d found a job in a café in Soho, owned and run by a Mr and Mrs Fisher. She did everything from waiting tables to battling with the cantankerous hot water urn to make tea, peeling vegetables and washing up. By lunchtime her feet ached and her hands were now red raw and split in places from scrubbing at pots and pans.
    Every day Rose enquired about vacancies at the Lyons Corner House on Tottenham Court Road. She’d much rather be a Nippy in a neat black dress instead of wearing a stained pinny over an old summer frock and cardigan. She was paid two pounds a week plus tips, which were so scarce as to be non-existent, and rented a shared room with half board in a house just off the Edgware Road for one pound and ten shillings a week, which didn’t leave much for her to live on.
    Her landlady Mrs Cannon was thin and mean-looking and had commandeered Rose’s ration book. She had to be at the café for seven every morning and Mrs Cannon left her out one measly slice of bread with a scraping of margarine for breakfast. When she got home from work at five, there’d be a bowl of stew with a lot of cabbage floating in it and a few pieces of something grey and both gelatinous and gristly. Rose was never sure if it was meat or fish.
    But she got a decent lunch every day and the girl she shared her room with, Olive, volunteered as a roof spotter. The two of them would set the alarm for eight o’clock in the evening and go straight to bed, after their bowl of tasteless, indeterminate stew, for a nap.
    At eight-thirty Olive would jump on the trolleybus to the City for her shift and Rose would head back into town. After two weeks, she’d stopped trying to get into Rainbow Corner. It was impossible without finding a GI willing to sign you in and those sharp-looking girls thronging the spider’s web of streets around Piccadilly Circus didn’t take kindly to newcomers trying to queer their pitch.
    Those girls all had flashlights they shone on their ankles every time a man in uniform passed. They did things in doorways with soldiers too. Even though the doorways were in shadow, the noises from the couples, a hint of a bare leg braced, made Rose hurry past, eyes averted, and on the evening she saw two girls fall to the ground kicking, spitting and hair-pulling as they fought over the attentions of a skinny GI with a huge nose and buck teeth, she’d wondered if maybe one glorious night in Rainbow Corner was all she was ever meant to have.
    Rose had even gone all the way back to