Relationships sometimes start with what I call the slow burn. Like the one I had with a girl from work. We’d known each other and liked each other for a long time but it wasn’t until we were travelling together that anything happened. I’d never been sure if she was gay or what; I only knew she was single and never talked about anyone special in her life. She was Josephine Larkin and I’d fancied her for ages. We had often talked over coffee and I thought maybe, just maybe, she was interested. Bitter experience of rejection not to say outright offence had stopped me taking any initiative.

We checked into an hotel and went to our rooms to shower and change after a long journey before meeting up for a drink and a meal.

“You’re gay too, aren’t you?” she had asked over a sharing plate of delicious Chinese morsels. I was just using chopsticks to shove a prawn in my mouth and it fell, smearing my chin with chilli dipping sauce.

“Christ, you pick your moments! Yes, I am but I had no idea you are too.” My gaydar was never properly functional.

“You’ve been flirting with me for about six months!” She was smiling so I guessed she wasn’t too upset about that but the truth was that I hadn’t been deliberately, or perhaps I mean knowingly, flirting with her. “And the way you’re dressed now suggests you wanted to make an impression, which I have to tell you, you have.” She picked up her napkin and wiped my chin. “Good job this didn’t get on your lovely, sexy dress.”

I nearly did the, ‘what, this old thing’ thing but the truth was that I had made an effort. The black dress was short, not too revealing but not too concealing either. Jo Larkin took me to her bed. She’d started at the dining table, taking my hand in hers, her long fingers stroking. Her knee touched mine under the table.

“I’ve been dying to ask you out.”

“I didn’t dare hope you would.”

“Well, here we are and why should we wait?”

Since I couldn’t think of a good reason she stood, still holding my hand and led me to her room. Our first kiss was tentative and in the lift. The second, by my guess around half way to her floor, was firmer, her tongue pressing against my lips and they parted obediently to let her in. When her room door closed behind me she took my hand and kissed me again, while her hands undid the zip down my back and she pulled my dress forward and down to expose my breasts which she kissed hungrily. I don’t remember the dress or anything else coming off, nor can I recall her clothes coming off either but they must have because soon we were on the bed and she was in me, fingers in my cunt, tongue in my mouth. I spread my legs and wrapped them around her so that our cunts were kissing and I don’t know where her fingers had gone but we rubbed together, tits mashed, mouths pressed together until with a muscle stretching arch of my back I came and probably disturbed the rest of the hotel guests. Jo came a few moments later and that was because I’d got between her legs and fingered her and tongued her until it happened. We lay together after, then did it again, slower and more gently and, with light shining between the curtains in the morning I woke her up with my tongue and we tried again to see if it was as good as it had been the night before; which it was.

But this is not the point of my story.

While some relationships take time to develop others seem to just be.

Karen Miller was a beautiful Irish woman about three years younger than I. It was the explosion that did it. No, no, I mean a real explosion.

People will tell you different things about their experience of an explosion and I guess it depends where they are in relation to it and a load of other factors that govern their experience. Mine was like this. I was sitting in the lobby of one of the big banks’ head offices, suited and booted for an interview. The weather outside was crisp and sunny and I had chosen a gunmetal pencil skirt, white blouse and dark blue jacket along with the usual underpinnings and was reading a newspaper while I waited for what seemed ages. I don’t remember hearing anything until I was conscious of far distant wailing sirens, a few very muffled screams and a wet sensation on my face. I tried to move but a hand restrained me and I felt a sudden searing pain in my left arm. I tried to move it but it didn’t work.

A face, the face of an angel moved hazily in front of me and I saw glossy red lips move but couldn’t hear what, if anything, was said. I passed out. When I next came to the face was still there, smiling at me reassuringly and I asked her who she was but she must have been foreign because she didn’t answer. I saw the sheen of her almost black hair and the sparkle in her eyes. I was suddenly tired, desperately tired and darkness fell again.

“Well, you’ve been in the wars.” The voice was from my left and not very distinct but I turned my face towards it to see a nurse in pale blue scrubs adjusting a drip on a stand beside me. “Don’t worry love, you’re going to be fine.”

That, I thought, was one of the great lies of the world. My mouth was as dry as a pilgrim’s sandal and my head felt as if the entire British Fleet was firing at the enemy inside it. I tried to move but nothing seemed to work. Oblivion, I thought, was what I needed and kind Gods delivered it to me.

They told me it was three days after the gas main exploded that I was properly conscious and for me, that was about a year too early. A nurse, maybe the same as before but maybe not, was taking my temperature with a device stuck in my ear. She smiled benignly and left to be replaced by a middle-aged woman in a white coat, salt and pepper hair tied severely back.

She shone a torch in my eye as she asked me if I knew who I was. Of course, I knew who I was. I was, er, well, okay maybe I wasn’t exactly certain but then it came to me and I said “Libby.”

“How old are you, Libby?”

“Thirty-six.”

“Does anything hurt?” Well, thanks for asking, every fucking thing hurts but I didn’t say that. I simply nodded because talking was getting tiring.

The doctor sat in a chair beside me. “You were in an explosion. You’re going to be fine but you lost a lot of blood. You took some glass in your face and you were concussed. Your hearing is going to come back but may be slightly impaired. Understand?” I nodded again. She took my hand. “A piece of glass went through your arm and severed an artery but someone tied a tourniquet around it and saved your arm and probably your life. You’ve had surgery and it’s under control. Your face isn’t damaged, a few little scars most of which will disappear.”

Enough, my body said and I nodded off again.

I dreamt I saw the angel again. This time I could see her more clearly and her eyes were brighter, her hair darker, her lips more clearly defined.

“I’m Karen Miller,” the angel said. Not a terribly angelic name, I thought. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

She was sitting where the doctor had sat and I turned my head to face her properly and realised that I wasn’t dreaming, she was real.

A voice from the end of the bed startled me and I looked, wishing I had turned my head more slowly, to see the doctor. “Karen tied a scarf around your arm. That’s why you’re here.”

“Ruined my fecking scarf,” said the soft Irish voice. The doctor left us. It transpired Karen had been on her way to the foyer when the explosion happened and she’d been unhurt. Seeing me bleeding profusely her first-aid training kicked in and she saved my life. That was not what she said but it was what had occurred. She held my hand and pushed my hair gently away from my eyes.

“I’m sorry about your scarf.” It wasn’t until later that I realised I had forgotten the pain.

“You can apologise properly when you’re out of here. I’ll buy you a drink.”

She left a card on my bedside table and left. I watched as her slender body and firm arse moved liquidly to the door and I fell asleep and, this time, it was a dream about her that came to me.

I wasn’t going to call her until my arm was out of its sling and I could stay awake for a full day and evening. I called her. We met in a wine bar close to where she had worked since the explosion. She arrived and I realised I’d been holding my breath. A white cotton blouse was tucked into high-waisted and pleated beige trousers that were tucked into knee boots that were deep, lustrous brown. Her dark hair shone in the early evening sun and those eyes, my God those eyes. She had a dark brown leather coat over one arm, a matching handbag swinging below it. She put them on a chair and kissed me, full on the mouth and took her time and I didn’t give a fuck who saw. She was still kissing me when she sat beside me and I had to break the kiss because a waitress was standing beside us to take our order.

“A bottle of the Pinot and two glasses,” Karen said.

I fumbled in my bag and pulled out a paper bag and placed it in front of her. She opened it and drew out the deep red silk scarf that I had bought her. “I thought this one wouldn’t show the blood.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Good thinking but I hope you’re not planning any more blood?”

“No. How can I thank you?”

“Oh, Libby, you know perfectly well how you’re going to thank me.”

She rolled the scarf a couple of times and tied it loosely around her neck. It looked fabulous.

We talked.

“What is your favourite word?” she asked.

I thought for a moment. “Ridiculous.”

She looked a tiny bit annoyed. “My question?”

“No, the word ‘ridiculous.’”

She smiled. “Why?”

“Because it is, itself, ridiculous.”

Her hand frequently held mine, stroked my leg under the table, caressed me. We took a cab to her flat. What, I asked myself, are you doing? You don’t know her but the truth was I did know her. I had always known her. In the cab, she kissed me and I thought at one point her hand was going to go under my skirt and I knew I wouldn’t stop her but it didn’t and I felt slightly disappointed. But then it did. Her finger stroked me through the thin, moist fabric of my knickers and I had to kiss her harder so the cabby couldn’t hear me groaning.

Once inside her flat, she kissed me again. As the kiss endured she undid my blouse and opened it, her hand covering my breast and tracing it with her nails which made me gasp into her and she liked that because she did the same to the other one. She tried to pull my blouse off but I tried to stop her because of the unsightly scar on my arm. She stepped back and took my hands and put them, firmly but gently, at my sides. She peeled the blouse off and lent to kiss the scarred skin, her fingernails gently tracing the scar’s outline.

“It’s ours, not yours.” She untied the scarf from her neck and tied it around my eyes and, still standing in her sitting room she undressed me until I was bare, then led me, blind and willing to her bedroom. She guided me, her hand holding my good arm, and led me to her bed. The sheet was cold against my naked back but I soon forgot that when her mouth covered my cunt, her tongue opened me and her fingers ran along my legs. She was in me then, her finger deep, curling, stroking and her mouth was on mine again, her breasts touching me as she bent over me.

Her finger left my cunt and suddenly it was in my mouth and I sucked it, tasting myself. Then she left me, lying there and I felt the bed shift as she moved. Gentle hands rolled me over and the bed dipped again as she knelt behind me, lifting my arse high. Her tongue licked down between my buttocks and she wet me there, then licked lower until she was probing my cunt with her tongue. My mind was in a whirl, the blindness heightening every other sense.

Something hard entered me and I could feel her hips rocking behind me as she fucked me, slowly at first, then pushing me down onto the bed and all her weight on me as she pounded into me.

“Cum for me, cum with me.”

I cannot say if it was the strapon or her words but cum I did, lifting her bodily as my body spasmed and the breath roared out between my lips in a huge bellow of ecstasy and my cry was mixed with hers as she came, quieter than I, like a whimper.

We lay, side by side and she stroked me, my belly, my breasts, my face. She had removed the scarf and placed it beside us on the bed. As she ran her fingers over my arm, it seemed she wanted to remember the scar, the thing that had brought us together.

“I want to fuck you again. Do you mind?”

I told her not to be, well, you know the word I used.