by Blake, Laila
Contents
Copyright
Driftwood Deeds
Now
Then
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
Now
About the author
More from A Hotter State
LAILA BLAKE
DRIFTWOOD DEEDS
An erotic novella
Copyright © Laila Blake 2013
Cover picture © Depositphotos / Stefano Tinti
Published by A Hotter State
ISBN 978-988-12898-0-3
All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorised duplication is prohibited.
Warning: This title contains graphic language and is suitable for adults only.
www.ahotterstate.com
www.lailablake.com
DRIFTWOOD DEEDS
An erotic novella
Laila Blake
NOW
The teacup jangles against the saucer with each passing train. They rush through the tiny station without stopping here, where nobody ever seems to arrive and nobody ever leaves. When I filed down the steep three steps with my small suitcase yesterday, I was the only one on the platform. Today, an old man is sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper fluttering in the wind.
I check my watch, stretch and rub my face. The train that will take me back into civilization isn’t due for another half hour, and I am cold and bored. I don’t want to think about Paul, but I’ve run out of energy upholding a forceful internal monologue about work, an in-depth critique of the movie I saw last week and a description of the station.
I cross my legs again and find my teacup empty, the biscuit eaten. My stomach rumbles, and I pick up the menu again; I can’t seem to wring up any enthusiasm for sandwiches or a piece of the wilted pie in the cake display though. Unbidden, a memory of Paul’s pancakes enters my mind; the peach sauce he bottled last summer in jars with handwritten labels still makes my mouth water. My taste buds tingle and before I know how to stop it, there is another flavor-memory intricately linked: cum and cheese. Cum and bread. Cum finally washed down by heated sips of wine from his lips and then its absence.
I can feel my eyes sting, but establishing itself quite comfortably is a counterpoint: the ache deep in my cunt. I straighten my back, bearing down upon my clit, pressing it against the wooden chair. The relief it offers is hardly more than marginal.
I leave a fiver on the table and walk outside. Even here I can smell the sea, hear the caw-caw of the seagulls. The air is fresh and the town deserted. I am told that it livens up in summer, that the boarded up restaurants open for a short, warm seaside season where holiday makers enjoy old-fashioned ice-cream sundaes and tip-toe into the always tepid North Atlantic Ocean.
It is barely even spring, the air fragrant but cold, and the streets are reminiscent of ghost towns steeped in urban legend. I check my watch again: twenty minutes. The closer I get to leaving, the less I want to go.
Picking through my bag, I find my camera. I sit down on a bench and navigate through the pictures saved on the memory card. My friend Carole over last week’s Tikka Masala at our favorite curry place back in London, a blurry crow on my windowsill, five pictures of the sky, trying to frame a strange cloud formation that looks like a turtle. Paul’s house by the sea. My own face, flushed crimson, eyes dilated and lips open, greedy for more.
My jaw tenses and quickly, I exit the preview menu. The display shows my knees, knobbly as they stick out from under my coat and skirt, naked because I ruined my tights yesterday. I click the release, the lens whirs as it adjusts and then snaps a picture of pasty, goose-fleshy thighs under a blurry, flapping skirt. They could be thinner. As if in rebellion against that thought, I take another picture. This time I zoom in so close that I can see every pimply-pointed gooseflesh erection like a hill in a colorless landscape.
I look at both images for a while, then delete them and angle the camera towards the little station café I sat in for over an hour. It was a long walk from Paul’s house to the next bus station, and a longer wait for the next one to appear in the cool March morning light. Rickety and stopping at every second corner, instead of passengers, it picked up gusts of cold wind that shot up under my skirt. The café had provided warmth and a modicum of comfort.
When I arrived yesterday, there was something romantic and quaint about the peeling paint and the lonely streets. Staring at the camera display now, I can’t see it. I click and snap a picture anyway. The next is the red motion blur of a passing train that blows my hair about. The next an empty parking lot. When I check the picture though, it isn’t empty at all and I despair of ever capturing a completely focused image with this thing. A blurry pick-up truck is turning into the parking lot like a smudge on my idea of a lonely, pointless place.
I let the camera sink from my field of vision, mildly interested in what new arrival snuck into my picture. I have seen trucks like this before, I’m sure, but I’m not a car person and can’t place it. It’s a countryside car, not one you’d find in the city; it’s too cumbersome, too large to fit into regular parking spaces. On the back, sticking up over the sides are pieces of driftwood and old fisherman’s rope, baskets and a camera tripod. I am taking it in almost without seeing but then, like taking off a blindfold, recognition dawns and the driver-side door swings open.
Paul. He’s unmistakable even from so far away, still wearing his morning slippers and pajama pants under his coat. His hair, the little of it that is sticking out from under a woolen hat, flutters around his jaw. For a long heartbeat we stare at each other across the parking lot and I can’t breathe. Paul.
Just as my vision starts to blur, he raises his hand and waves.
THEN
I
Having paid the taxi driver, I stood on the cracked and pot-holed pavement of a narrow seaside road. In my hand, I held a five pound note and some small change, the driver’s card with his telephone number and, scribbled on the back, the number of a younger colleague who worked past eleven p.m., as well as the name of the Bed and Breakfast his son-in-law ran, and where I’d receive a discount if I mentioned his name. I was ill-accustomed to small town cheer and the desperation of its inhabitants to keep it on life support.
I closed my hand around the few items lest the cool and salty breeze blew them away and watched the taxi reverse all the way out of the street, until it turned at the next junction. Slipping the money and the card into the pocket of my coat, I ran my hand through my hair in a vain attempt to keep it from flying into my face. I finally allowed myself to take in the house. It was small, ducking against the ground like the tiny, gnarly seaside trees, weathering the constant wind. Crooked and knotted driftwood was arranged in the small yard and under the windows, and a long line of heavy old rope was fixed around the doorframe and running along the wall. I pulled the cheap digital camera from a side pocket of my bag and snapped a quick picture—just in case I wanted to describe it in my article later.
I didn’t know what I’d expected, something a little grander maybe. I paused, then checked the weathered iron house number against the address I’d memorized. No mistake possible. Maybe I overestimated his income—in the writing trade myself, I knew how badly it paid, but Paul Archer was a screenwriter of some note, especially in the independent cinema market. Maybe that should have been my first clue.
I wished then that I had checked into a Bed and Breakfast first and could have stood there feeling less stranded. The train had
been late and I was only just in time, looking very much the young, eager journalist in a pencil skirt, blouse and cardigan under my coat. I had a laptop in a heavy messenger bag, but also a notepad and an old tape recorder that once belonged to my mother when she was the first of her family to go to university at the age of thirty.
I was nervous, of course I was, and I took a deep breath before I opened the grayed and battered gate. My heels clicked all too loudly on the flat stepping stones lining the short path to Paul Archer’s door. There was no bell, just an old-fashioned knocker and I stared at it for a moment, before I lifted it and rapped it against its base in three sharp knocks. It sounded hollow and dull and I exhaled a breath through puckered lips trying to calm the dizzying onset of nerves.
At first, I couldn’t hear a thing from inside. I looked around but just as I’d turned my back on the door, it opened with a loud creak. I spun around. In the entrance, I saw a tall man in his early forties, chin-length hair graying around the temples much like his gate had, but showing no sign of receding. He looked like a giant in the small door, made for fishermen from a different century, and he had to slump a little, fingers hanging off the frame, elbows sticking out in front of him.
“Yeah?” he asked and I had to smile. It took just a single word to betray his American accent, hardly ground down by the years. I felt out of place in my suit and uncomfortable high heels. Paul Archer was wearing slippers and battered, washed-out corduroys under a simple knit sweater: the picture of his recluse reputation.
“Hi, hello,” I greeted, licked my lips and put on my best smile. “I’m Iris Ellis, um, we spoke on the phone?”
“Of course, Miss Ellis, come on in.” He had a disarming kind of smile, a manner of resetting his glasses and tilting his head to the side, and he stepped out of the way while he continued speaking. “I hope you didn’t have too long a journey. I know it’s a pain to get out here.”
And so we met. He led me through the hallway, made narrow by dusty bookcases on both sides, clearly self-made and built to fit from smooth driftwood. We exchanged pleasantries about how little trouble I had on the way, and how much I enjoyed train rides that cleared the head. He put the kettle on in the small kitchen as he extolled the virtue of his old car and expressed his amazement at Europeans like me who could live without one.
Not one piece of his furniture looked bought from any store I’d ever seen, maybe because the dimensions were so unusual, but it gave the place a strange charm as he pottered between the different shelves. There were few straight edges, following the grain and curve of the wood instead, ground to a soft sheen. Books had found their way between stacked cups and plates, piled on the windowsill and at the back of the table.
He smiled a lot and proved to be far more pleasant than his reputation. He served tea, a weakness he admitted he hadn’t picked up until years in the country, and while I took milk and sugar, he just squeezed some lemon into his mug. The fruit groaned under his touch, yielding its juice drop by drop and it smacked suggestively when he loosened his hold. I was transfixed and hid my face behind my cup.
“I was wondering, Miss Ellis, whether you might want to come out for a walk with me,” he said after a while and if he’d noticed my moment of uncertainty, he didn’t show it. I looked at my shoes. He chuckled. “I can lend you something more suitable. But we don’t get much sun this time of year. Would be a shame to miss it.”
He hadn’t mentioned the interview, had not so much as alluded to it. He had taken my bag and left it with my coat in the hall and for the moment, I was not a journalist, but a guest without the trappings of my trade. I wasn’t sure how to respond. I touched the base of my neck where my skin was warm and soft, and then pulled my shoulders up in a slow gesture.
“Of course,” I said, “in fact, I can’t remember the last time I walked by the seaside. I could take a recorder with me if you prefer the open surroundings.”
He waved off my heavy-handed attempt at efficiency with a casual gesture as if the idea was utterly baffling to him.
“Oh no, there’s time for that later. No reason to rush.”
He had to have read the slightly bemused expression on my face all too perfectly, because he smiled his disarming smile and reset his glasses.
“I don’t believe in interviews with strangers, Miss Ellis,” he explained. “That’s why I take time to choose the magazine and the writer before inviting them here.”
“And then you take them for walks on the beach?” I asked and he laughed. It was a pleasant sound.
“Something like that.”
He winked with both eyes and then left me to finish my tea. When he returned, he was carrying a pair of Wellingtons and some socks.
“They might be a bit big but I brought you these for padding.”
I slipped out of my high-street pumps, and before I could reach for them myself, he had drawn up the low drum of a small tree-trunk, sat down on it and pulled my foot onto his knees. I must have stared but his hands moved with confidence and without hesitation as he pulled a thick pair of woolen socks over my tights.
“Try that,” he instructed.
A little tongue-tied, I slipped my foot into the rubber boot.
“Still too big?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, I thought so, that’s why I brought all these. We’ll cheat your feet into fitting the prince’s boots, don’t worry.”
It took three pairs until I could walk comfortably, and I wanted to laugh when I saw myself in the dusty hallway mirror on the way out. My hair had come loose from the chignon that now more resembled a simple, messy bun. Together with the coat and Wellingtons under a skirt like over-sized puppy paws, I looked like a gilded picture from yonder times: a countryside maid going out to work in a field or deliver groceries. Just as if I’d travelled in time rather than space into this sleepy village by the coast.
II
The walk to the ocean took mere minutes. It was the smell of the air that hit me first—painfully fresh in my city lungs. It smelled of salt, fish and algae but together they formed a bouquet that almost blew me off my feet. I took in deep gulps of air like a tonic, like I was a mermaid on dry land and my lungs needed to learn how to breathe again.
I showed appropriate awe for the savage green-blue masses, swirling and rolling towards us, but Paul Archer just smiled and promised there were more treasures to be seen ahead. The sand and pebbles crunched under our feet and despite my reason for visiting, it was he who asked most of the questions, seeming as interested in my mundane little life as the magazine’s subscribers would be in his.
I don’t know what I had expected, but for a famous hermit, he seemed to be rather gregarious in his way. If he was aware of how much he differed from the reputation floating around the industry, he didn’t show it, however, and continued to speak knowledgeably about contemporary cinema. We laughed at industry jokes and exchanged titles of perfect but obscure little festival movies.
He appeared to have read most of my recent reviews and interviews, referenced them easily, and had me laughing at his inside knowledge about the people I talked to and who had made me so nervous at the time.
Where the beach had been relatively clean at first, the scenery changed the further we got away from the last seaside B&B and the quaint English pebble beach gave way to ruins of tiny huts here and there, to eternally land-locked boats rotting and rusting in the wind. Blue and red nets covered the ground like moss, an amalgamation of color that did not belong. The overarching sea motif of the rubbish created a certain sense of nostalgia, but the place was a dump, no man’s land nobody was willing to expend energy or money on to clean it up.
I must have looked confused because when I looked up at him, he was smirking. It felt like a test of some description, the kind of test that slams into you unexpectedly and makes your chest contract—the dream of returning to high school to repeat an exam you didn’t know was scheduled. Aware that there was a right way to react in his eyes and a wrong one, but
with only a vague idea as to what he might have been waiting for, I turned away from him.
“Is it just for looking or are we going down there?” I asked pointing at the little rocky outcrop to our right that seemed like the easiest way down and into the thicket of old sea rubbish. I could be adventurous for an afternoon even if it was just to charm my interviewee.
I walked ahead, clung to rocks and carefully felt for the outcrop in Paul Archer’s oversized Wellingtons. It was easier than I had feared and my heart leaped when he looked down at me with a satisfied grin before he followed.
“It’s the biggest treasure trove around,” he explained now that we were picking a path between upturned rowboats in various states of decay. Differently colored nets were still the most prominent of sights but on closer inspection, they were intricately interwoven with rough rope that snaked along the ground, sometimes vanishing into the sand, never to emerge again. We saw rusty anchors, cans of all descriptions, gloves and boots and windbreakers, buoys in different sizes and colors like so many beach balls lining the sand. Over, under and between everything was the ever present sight of driftwood—some new and jarring, some old, sanded down and beautiful.
“What is this place?” I managed to ask, a little afraid of stepping into something sharp, even as it all started to exude a certain unexpected charm.
“What used to be a small fishing community,” he replied with a shrug and squatted down to pull on a particularly impressive knotted and frayed rope. The beach clung to it harder than he could pull and he gave up. “Stopped being profitable years and years ago. Most left, others kept it up until retirement, nobody cared what they left behind. The rest was done by high tides, storms, a fire here and there,” still on the ground, he pointed to the blackened ruins of a small cabin in the distance, “and, of course, people like me: scavengers. Some of us are less respectful than others.”
