They stood
grinning at each other in the sixty watt halflight in Ali’s bare holiday-let
flat – truth be told it wasn’t even hers, she’d ‘borrowed’ it for the week from
a friend who was away up country, so that she, Ali, could have a break from the
ancient caravan she had holed up in for the past three months. The smell of
damp was less here, but it still pervaded the room, slowly turning the wood
soft and the furniture black and musty.
She reached up
to Terry’s head and pulled his mouth down to hers – they’d both drunk until the
pub shut, talking, listening and fixing all those common points in their lives
that proved their compatibility to each other and to themselves – places they’d
been to, bands they’d seen, tastes in food, all the usual trivia and surface
gloss that people pick up and toss about as reference points. They even discovered that they'd been
on the same demo once, about a year and a half ago, a coincidence that they
could only have shared with about two hundred thousand other people but which
seemed to be quite unique to them right now.
Ali’s tongue
flickered over Terry’s lips and he saw her eyes light up with something more
than just normal excitement. He slid his hands across the rough cotton of her
jacket, up to her neck and pushed his fingers through the short hair on the
nape of her neck, she threw back her head, eyes closed and mouth so slightly
parted.
Encouraged, he
pulled her close and kissed her deeply again, her eyes opening and staring at
him so forthrightly that he was in no doubt, even at this point, what was going
to happen. He felt his fragility fall away from him along with the last traces of any
questions and he pushed her gently but with unfamiliar assertiveness up
against the bare magnolia wall, still running his hand through her hair,
holding her submissive head, part protecting, part owning. Ali came out of her
trance and pulled him closer still, their hip bones clashing through the denim.
She reached down for his belt and fumbled with the clasp before pushing the
palm of her hand against front of his jeans, making him gasp. Simultaneously
Terry pulled open her jacket, feeling her body through the thin material that
separated them, just.
Ali drew back,
Terry worried that he’d moved too fast, too soon. But she slipped off her jeans
and presented herself to Terry with a smile exaggerated by her swollen lips and
wide blazing eyes. He pushed her back against the wall, tore down his own jeans and let
her push herself against him until he could no longer think of anything but
wanting to have her.
Looking back
Terry wondered how much of it had been the drink, how much had been pure lust,
and how much of it had been that indefinable-something-else which separated
this from any other experience he’d had up until that point in his life. The
distant wash and rumble of the surf soundtracked the night; the dust from the
beach made the curtainless windows almost opaque, but still they were both
aware that anyone could have glanced up to see them coupled furiously against
the dirty paintwork and neither of them cared, in fact quite the opposite. The
quietness of earlier in the evening left them as they gasped and sucked in
great draughts of air along with the sweetness of each other’s bodies, scent
and sweat. Ali half sobbed, loudly and unrestrainedly as she felt her body
being taken over by the sheer force of what was happening, she pushed and
pulled Terry into her and away again, feeling every single movement with a new
sensitivity. Terry told her everything that he wanted to do with her, for her,
to her and she replied in single syllables between otherwordly not quite words,
making it clear that she wanted him to do them all and that she could still
promise more in return.
Later in the bed
of crumpled sheets and ragged Indian throws they lay across each other in
silence, lit by the three quarters full moon which dragged the tide inwards
whilst they slept. For a brief time all was still, a tableau pieced together
from the poorest of materials with their naked bodies strewn artfully across
the centre of the scene like the exhausted, unwrapped torsos in some
Renaissance vision of the afterlife.
They woke
together frequently and continued their explorations in the way that only the
newly found or long separated lovers will.
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