They could hardly have been more different physically, these two girls sitting opposite me at Gate 10 at Luton airport, waiting for the fight to Edinburgh. Sophie was tall and slim, her immensely long legs shown off in no uncertain terms by the fact she was wearing loose sports shorts of the kind that might have been used by female hockey teams, if they don't still wear miniskirts in these joyless, wary days. She had long blonde hair and a ready laugh in which she threw back her head.
Tara, on the other hand, was a little shorter, less lithe, and less confident in her body. She had small breasts and was fuller in the beam around her hips and legs, which were shrouded in a sensible brown skirt. She did, though, have beautiful shoulders and arms finished with pale, creamy, smooth skin. Her face was that of a bookworm, a studious type, with a little button nose and rosy cheeks. Her mousy hair was pulled back with a scrunchy. She looked as if someone was keeping an eye on her development and making sure her arrival at womanhood was not accompanied by any suggestion of sexual interest.
Tara had avoided my gaze at first, and I had reined it in accordingly, but my eyes were constantly drawn back to her face, her creamy arms and shoulders, her flat chest, and that discreet brown skirt and all it contained. Gradually, she gained confidence and her eyes flicked across mine, meeting with a tiny flash that brought a suggestion of acknowledgement to her face. She didn't know how to handle this, being given "that look" by a man who was older than her and disturbed by the boys who came skittering into her orbit ever few minutes, mainly to flirt with awkward grins at Sophie.
I couldn't work out what kind of group they were. They were a little too old for school but too immature for university students on a field trip. Immature, that is, all except Tara, who was an old soul in a young body. I could see her getting railroaded into a relationship with some young fogey and ending up as frustrated at thirty as a middle aged woman, working as a teacher and being dowdy, pleasant Mrs Respectable, with 2.4 children and 0.75 of a husband, the missing 25% being the part that could stir her blood.
I wanted to save her from that fate, not by marrying her myself but by giving her some naughtiness to look back on and maybe to replicate from time to time. I wanted to show her how to give in to her desires and how to impose them on men.
I was wondering how to literally cross the divide so I could sit next to them when one of the Sophie fans hurtled in and plonked himself down on the other end of the bench of four seats I was on, jerking it up like a seesaw because the legs weren't equal or the floor wasn't level.
"Oh, Justin!" Tara exclaimed. "You've spilt the man's coffee." Justin muttered apologies and dashed off again.
Sophie dragged her giraffe legs up and straightened her back.
"You'd better come and sit over here," she said, "or you're going to get that all day." As if to demonstrate the point, an elderly man shuffled into the picture and sat down where Justin had been, causing the same kind of jolt. There was something sexy about being jerked upwards in front of these girls and we all laughed nervously. Tara stood up and moved to the next seat so i could sit between them.
So there I was, happily placed between Miss Sexy and Miss Fascinating. Without intending to, I slapped a hand down briefly on Tara's left knee and Sophie's right.
"That's much better, I said. "Thank you, ladies." Neither of them had flinched at my hands, although I fancied I felt Tara tense a little. We fell into conversation. They were a youth orchestra on an exchange trip, their last concert before most of them went off to uni. Sophie was a cellist and I could well imagine her with those wonderful lower limbs cradling her instrument, just as she was destined to cradle a succession of men as their eager penises sought out her long, mysterious tunnel. She reminded me of Tilda Swinton's character in the film with Ewan McGregor where she plays the lusty, frustrated wife of a bargeman who gives the younger McGregor character a lift and when inevitably she and he fuck, outside on the canal bank in broad daylight, her left leg reaches for the sky.
Sophie would have such encounters, I had no doubt. My lovely Tara, though, would never put herself in such a position, and I felt it was my duty as her official admirer to make sure she had some excitement too. I found myself talking to her rather than both of them, and Sophie eventually stood up and wandered off.
Tara was a pianist but was being groomed as a conductor. We both tittered uncomfortably at the word: grooming is one of those terms that have acquired a new and unwelcome meaning that makes it awkward to use in its original context.
"You're being groomed?" I mused. "In a good way."
"Yes," she said with a barely suppressed snigger, well aware of the fact that it could sound like an accusation to a man like me. "Nothing could be more respectable and innocent than being groomed to become the conductor of an orchestra."
"You look pretty respectable to me," I said.
"Not innocent?" she said, almost choking on her own flirtatiousness.
"One never knows," I replied. "Do I look innocent?"
"You look respectable too," she said. "That's a decent basis to start from."
And indeed, it was a good basis for Tara and me. In those few sentences, we had become conspirators, answering unspoken questions so that we had leapt ahead in the getting-to-know-you stakes. We were going to be lovers, I could feel it. And more importantly, so could she. Tara had dipped a toe in the water of a love affair and she liked it.
We talked about music and then somehow got on to tennis but kept away from man-woman matters. I was invited to their concert - at lunchtime in a park - and she accepted my offer of a meal afterwards. By the time Sophie came back with three cornettos, Tara and I were an undisclosed but undoubted item in our own minds. I even managed to shrug off the thought of getting my head up her skirt and ventured into the fantasy of a personal relationship. Of course I had beautiful thoughts about sucking the girl juice out of her, about thrusting my hips between her thighs and plunging my cock into her, but I also thought about talking by the river with her, hand in hand.
The concert was okay if you like that sort of thing - a bit like going to watch a school play which you would never consider unless there was someone you knew in it and it would make them feel good. I like a few classical pieces, but not many.
The musicians were dressed in casual clothes: a deliberate move to make them more relatable to the young people in the audience. Tara had explained this to me at the airport, how they were determined to dispel the myth that classical music was for posh people. Even she had made an effort. Rather than the dull brown skirt she had traveled in, Tara was wearing a short denim skirt, although below it, black tights and big, heavy-soled black boots seemed to have been chosen deliberately to bring down the sexual temperature.
She was very impressive with a baton in her hand and seemed to command the respect of the orchestra. Even Sophie kept her eye on the conductor while involuntarily (I think) reinventing the cello as a sex toy, her miles of beautiful female leg flexing and relaxing as the music demanded. She seemed to be wrapped in a tight PVC outfit, neckline plunging of course and the skirt slashed to the crotch. Every man in the audience - and many of the women too, -must have wanted to take her behind the bandstand and devour her before plonking her back on her chair so they and she could get on with the music. Maybe female cellists have always had this effect on people, I don't know. But as sexy as she was, I kept being drawn back to the less obvious charms of Tara and by the time it was over I was salivating at the thought of what was to come.