So, say there's a young woman, she's 19 or 20, and she's in love … and she knows that they can't keep fighting this desire that's drawing them together. Would you have them risk everything – their reputation, their peace of mind – because they simply can't help themselves?
1
She locked the door and covered her face with her hands as she slowly exhaled a long, deep sigh.
This had to stop.
Once, perhaps, could be excused as a mistake; twice was more difficult to explain away - but this was the third time it had happened.
Slipping her jacket off her shoulders, she let it fall to the floor as she crossed the darkened room. Her feet felt unsteady, as though they weren't her own. Her head was spinning, and although it was a typically chill February night, she felt like she could quite possibly self-combust. She opened the window and was met with the smell of the railway line nearby, smog and steel and coal, accentuated by the rain. She took a deep breath, and then another, and then another.
Patsy hadn't planned on kissing Delia tonight. She had had only the best intentions when she had asked Delia to meet her in town for coffee. She had wanted to get things settled; to explain how it would be better for the both of them to keep their distance. It would be safer that way. For both of them. And Delia had nodded her head as she listened, her eyes downcast, her fingers toying with a teaspoon. "Yes," she had murmured in a soulful tone as she glanced out of the window at the drizzly evening. "I suppose it's for the best."
And yet, somehow, Patsy had found herself in Delia's room less than an hour later, her back pressed hard against the door and her arms up in surrender as Delia's hands pinned her there by her wrists. Their kisses were clumsy, roughened by inexperience and the desperation to simply connect.
Leaning out of the window, her weight balanced on her elbows, Patsy could see the dark shadow of the East End skyline; blinking against the rain, her eyes travelled along the horizon, over building shapes, smoking chimneys and glowing streetlamps. The ceaseless rumble of traffic was punctuated every now and then with the familiar ring of an ambulance making its way towards the London Hospital a few streets away, perhaps bringing in a new case for her next shift on the Male Surgical ward tomorrow.
It would be so easy for her to pretend that nothing had happened, to cast it to the back of her mind with all the other things she had decided to ignore in her life. She had a knack for this, except, it seemed, for when it came to Nurse Delia Busby.
She lit a cigarette and held it between shaky fingers. The rain peppered against her hot face as she peered out at the grim night. Here, alone in her room, the memory of Delia's hands tangled in her hair, her lips against her mouth, her cheek, her ear, proved difficult to forget.
It would have been so easy to betray what they had resolved earlier in the café. For a moment, terrifying and glorious, Patsy had felt what it was to be liberated, had realised how simple it could be to love. When Delia's fingertips traced over her jawline, and her mouth graze down her neck, Patsy felt all her inhibitions, every hang-up, every qualm, release in the ragged breath she exhaled towards the ceiling as her head tipped back against the door.
She had been so close to giving in.
Too close.
"No, no, no, no…" Patsy had mumbled a second later when she pushed Delia away. "I have to go," she said, fumbling for the door handle. She didn't give Delia a chance to speak before she was gone, tripping down the corridor as though she were drunk, or demented.
When her cigarette had burned down to her fingers, she flicked the glowing ember into the darkness. She stared out, not really looking at anything as she thought about the look on Delia's face when she left; disappointed, and yet, resigned to the fact that Patsy Mount was running away from her. Again.
"You idiot!" she hissed into the night, and slammed the window closed.