Maybe people are smart too, they've just got nowhere to go.
They destroyed the bridge at Mostar. The Croatian Army. I was there. I saw it. They say it's been rebuilt, but I'm never going back. I'm never going to see it again.
They destroyed the ancient bridge. Mortar attack. 9th November 1993. The bridge at Mostar. The ancient bridge. Yet they were the good guys. That's what we were told.
Good guys don't blow up bridges just for the hell of it.
Now isn't that a fucking joke?
*
It happens that night. Me and Stephanie. Gostkowski, the Detective Inspector. We work late. All of us. No one leaves before eleven. A long day. Some stay until two or three in the morning, but in general we're told to leave, go home and get some rest, come in again early the following day. Clear heads.
We meet where I first really talked to her, last August, which already seems a long, long time ago. Like that time, she's already out there, smoking, coming to the end of her cigarette when I walk out.
We nod, not a lot to say. Think I know right there and then. She stubs her cigarette under her foot and says, 'Let me try one of them.'
I light it for her and hand it over. Lighting a cigarette for a woman and then handing it to her is one of those things that's just innately erotic. Don't know why, it just is. You're passing her death on a stick, but it doesn't matter. Still laced with tension.
'It's all right,' she says after a while.
I smile, sort of, but there's not much smiling tonight. This has been too long a day, too shit a day. A really, really shit day.
I'm tired, but I need something else before I go to sleep. I don't want to spend the day buried up to my eyes in this grotesque murder enquiry, be unconscious for six hours, and then get back to it. I need distraction, and it's going to have to be a pretty fucking mental one. No use watching a documentary on BBC4 or eating a fish supper.
This is why people in war zones, all the soldiers and the NGOs and the paper pushers that are sent to places like Baghdad and Kandahar, just fuck, bonk, bang and shag their way through their time out there. The working environment is too stressful, so that when they do get some down time, it needs to be high quality, needs to be an experience. So they shag their way around the compound, or wherever the hell they're living.
I'm about to bluntly suggest that she comes back with me to my house, and I know she'll say yes, and I also know that we likely won't be the only two doing it at the station this evening.
'You want to sleep with me tonight?' I say. I think when I started the sentence I'd intended asking if she wanted to stay over, or some shit like that, but out-and-out honesty just took over.
'Of course,' she says, as if we'd been fucking for years. Or like she was some blunt non-native English speaker. Dutch or German. For sure.
*
We don't speak. I walk into the bathroom and turn on the shower. She follows behind me, and stands unmoving as I undress her. Slip the blouse off her shoulders. Walk round behind her to undo the bra strap. Kiss the middle of her back. Let my hands rest lightly on her shoulders. Even at that she lets out a small gasp, the gentleness of touch, the caressing of the skin. Then I unbutton her skirt and let it fall to the floor.
The naked DI Gostkowski is as I'd imagined. Slim, not skinny. Deliciously proportioned breasts, great butt. I bend down, my hands holding tightly onto her hips, and bite her butt cheeks. Two, three times. Then I start working my way up, kissing and nibbling at her back. Standing behind her, I continue to kiss while I quickly undress, so that by the time I'm kissing her neck, I'm naked. I reach round and take her breasts into my hands and press against her, my erect cock thrusting hard against her buttocks. She gasps again, and now I turn her round so that we're facing each other.
As usual at this point I want to do everything at once. I want to kiss her all over, I want her lips on mine, I want her tongue all over me, I want her breasts in my mouth, I want to sink my cock deep inside her.
I kiss her gently, teasing her, biting at her lips, she seems to gasp with every enticement, and then I press against her, take her into my arms and kiss her fully and passionately and she gives in to it and I love the feel of her hands as they grab my back, and of her breasts pressed against my chest.
I step into the shower and take her with me, and then wonderfully, she takes over. Presses me against the wall, her hand immediately grabbing at my erection, squeezing my balls. Holy fuck, that glorious mixture of pain and pleasure.
She pulls away, grabs the nearest bottle of shower gel and squirts it over my chest, then starts rubbing it in, as the water — just a little bit too hot — cascades over us. She's not really concerned with washing my chest, as she massages the soap over my aching cock and testicles. She looks intoxicating, the water bouncing off her shoulders and her hair, the soap splashing onto her breasts.
Her hands are all over me, massaging my cock and my buttocks, and now she starts biting at my stomach, quickly getting lower. And then she pushes me slightly to the side so that the warm water is landing directly on my cock and she rinses off the soap, and then suddenly grabs the base of my erection, runs her tongue along the length, and then plunges onto it and starts fucking me gloriously with her mouth.
This is what I'm talking about. Who on earth is going to be thinking about work at this moment? I'm standing in the shower, hot water all over me, and a woman on her knees in front of me, gloriously sucking my cock. Holy shit. Start thrusting, and she takes it, takes every thrust of my hips, and now it's hard to know who's in charge, if she's fucking me with her mouth or I'm fucking her mouth with my desperate, inflamed cock.
Thirty minutes later we're dried off and lying in bed. Well, I'm lying in bed, she's on top of me. Stopped myself coming in the shower, because I didn't want it to end there. She didn't stop herself coming, as I pressed her against the wall, my tongue probing inside her, my lips and teeth massaging and nibbling her clitoris. And now she's sitting on top of me, her shoulders straight, almost leaning back, fucking me desperately, crying out with every thrust.
I've got my hands on her hips, watching the movement of her breasts. I love just watching them, but I want to reach up and touch them, hold them, grope them and squeeze them, those fucking glorious breasts, the nipples protruding and desperate for my touch. Finally I give in to it, and as she's moaning and thrusting and driving her cunt onto me, I take her breasts into my hands, and there's nothing tender or romantic, it's all wonderful, desperate sex, and then I lean up and take her right breast into my mouth, biting and sucking, my tongue desperate for her, and at the same time I'm driving my cock into her as hard as I can…
*
There were rights and there were wrongs, and there was very little truth. That was the Balkan war. That's every war. Generally there aren't good guys. There are just a bunch of people doing whatever it is they can to try and win. Maybe the guys who start it are always the bad guys, but then that would depend on why they started it in the first place.
That's why we're still talking about WWII in the UK, that's why it's nearly impossible to turn on the television without finding something on there about it, a documentary or a commemoration or a TV drama. We were the undisputed good guys. The other lot were stomping across Europe, murdering people for not being blond enough. We stood up to them. We were the good guys, so good that in general we can ignore the questionable stuff, like when we slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians in bombing raids. The overall cause was so indisputably right that we're still happy to talk about it. Over and over and over, long after everyone else has moved on.