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The drapes were white and gossamer thin, and they undulated softly in the warm breeze, their caress on her almost-naked body a lover’s promise. She has lived with Lana in this beautiful flat for several years now, but when they make love she still feels like she’s been abducted to some other-worldly palace. Magical. The high terraced windows that overlook the bay with its bobbing yachts and their strings of coloured lights. The almost overpowering scents from the distant lavender fields on summer nights, the soft moth-wing touches of the billowing nets like a third person stroking her nakedness. She shudders to Lana’s kisses and waits impatiently for her lover to ease her pants down and put her tongue into her wet and willing cunt.

And yet…

And yet she still remembers another time, another room, another life, far, far away.

*

It was her first flat. Well, it wasn’t really a flat, strictly speaking, just a big attic room at the top of the house with a dormer window where she could see all the streets of the town stretching out like her Dad’s old motoring road maps. Tiny metallic-coloured vehicles buzzing about like die-cast toy cars, the river with its mostly derelict docks flowing by like a silver ribbon. There was a kitchen in the basement, but she never used it, getting by with the tiny wash hand basin in her room and a toaster and electric kettle. She had meant to buy a microwave when she moved in, but had never got round to it, surviving on buttered toast and sachets of dehydrated soup mix made up in cups, fruit when she remembered to buy it and biscuits at night when she treated herself to hot chocolate.

The bathroom was downstairs and she shared it with the girl who lived on the floor below, who she hadn’t met yet, though she’d inhaled her floral scent and seen her footprints in the spilled talc on the worn linoleum floor. The whole room was a bit of a relic, actually, with a big iron bathtub, faded fish-patterned wallpaper and a funny single bar electric heater on the wall that was attached to a meter that literally ate pound coins and did nothing to keep the room warm, the whole place filling up with steam and the walls running with condensation every time she took a bath.

And she was just emerging from the selfsame room that fateful night—she still remembers the time to this day, twenty minutes past seven on a wet Thursday at the start of term—one very frayed towel around her body, another mismatched one turban-style on her head, when a door opened across the hall and the girl appeared. Beautiful. Voluptuous. Curvy with close-cropped chestnut hair. Her feet bare, a luxuriant red silk kimono wrapped carelessly around her—obviously naked—body, her nipples clearly visible to Emylia’s hungry eyes. A scent like the vast flower fields of Southern France preceding her as she crossed the threadbare carpet of the passageway.

“You smell like summer,” Emylia said—thought aloud?—as she stood to one side to let the other girl into the warm steam of the bathroom.

The girl laughed. “It’s only cheap old lady perfume. My Gran buys it for me every Christmas. Soap, talc, body spray all in a set. English Lavender. From Yardley. Not exactly designer fragrance…”

“It smells lovely on you…”

The girl grins. “Flatterer,” she says, giving a little laugh that sounds a bit like a squeal, walking into the room and turning the bath taps on, letting her kimono fall unselfconsciously at her feet. Her skin a light buttery colour, breasts full and heavy, low slung, the aureolas big and round, like old half crowns, nipples erect from the cold of the unheated hallway. “Come in and close the door, would you, you’re letting all the heat out.”

Emylia feels she should leave and give the girl her privacy but instead she obeys like someone in a dream. She’s an only child and has never seen another girl naked this close before, never played hockey or lacrosse, never used a communal shower. She’s sure that she’s blushing. Robotically, she lowers the lid on the toilet seat and sits, its strange hand-knitted cover damp under her bum, its texture bumpy even through the threadbare towel.

“Are you at the university?” she asks for want of something to say, trying not to look and failing as Lana climbs into the tub, her back a softly undulating snowbound landscape, her plump backside round and soft, a pillow to lose yourself in. The crack a crevice to burry an inquisitive tongue. Fuck, where was all this coming from?

“No, I’m not a student, I work in the Philosophy department office. Nothing important. Just a dogsbody for the teaching staff.”

“Oh, I thought you were studying…”