by Angela Peach
“I wanted you to pose for another hour so that I can finish my painting of you. I’ll be able to do the rest on my own from memory once I have done a few more bits,” I told her.
“I will gladly sit for you,” she said, agreeably, standing in front of my sitting form, pushing herself in between my knees a little. A little but enough to send longings throughout me until all I could think of was grabbing her and pressing my lips on her.
“You know, Nick,” she said, slowly, looking deep into me with her eyes of blue. “If you want to kiss me, you can.”
It was all the invitation I needed. I jumped up, pushing my lips on hers and opening her mouth with my tongue. My hand clasped her neck to keep her tight against me and my remaining hand grabbed her buttock, thrusting her up into me.
Her hands were ripping at my t-shirt, and we separated our lips momentarily as I wriggled it over my head. Her fingers clicked at my bra strap and it fell loose for me to let it fall down my arms and drop to the floor.
I could not take my eyes from hers. She was possessing me.
I kissed her again, slower this time, letting our tongues find a rhythm with our lips curling around each others. I enjoyed the taste of her and savoured it, kissing her harder and holding her closer.
I was overtaken by passion, feeling an explosion in every nerve-ending throughout my body as I felt her hands work my jeans free and she grabbed my buttocks as the denim slipped down my legs.
I jerked with a pang of lust that began in my pants and ran through my body because Freya’s fingers had found their way inside and were working me gently.
I gasped and she smiled into my eyes before lowering her mouth to kiss my erect nipple. I closed my eyes as I felt her wet lips touch me and her tongue begin its mesmerising circles.
I was lost to Freya and the touch of her skin on mine and for the next hour, I forgot anything else existed but her.
For that hour, I believe I was truly happy.
Happiness is not an emotion I am familiar with experiencing: it’s a watering hole in the oasis of my life; always in the distance within view but out of my grasp. I had gotten so used to my own self-inflicted misery that I had forgotten what it was like to smile and laugh without restraint, to have soft arms around me that held me in their love and eyes that looked on me with passion, not pity.
Lying in Freya’s arms, with her naked body draped over mine was the moment, I think, that I began to let my walls down. The moment I realised that I could actually love someone else beyond the obsession I felt for Helena — which wasn’t love at all, I saw now — was the second I felt a spark ignite in my heart.
We all know the flame to make love burn needs a spark.
“Let’s shower together,” I said to Freya.
She gave me a tight, little smile. “I shower alone, my love,” she answered.
“But I could soap you all over,” I began, licking my lips at the very thought.
She put her finger across my lips to shush me. “No,” she said. “A girl has to have her time after the making of the love to gather her own senses.”
I shrugged and lay back down, as she pulled herself up. I devoured her body with my eyes, desperate to know every curve, every pimple, every hair. Her skin was so white I could see the red imprints still of where my fingers had dug into her, when my ecstasy had been at its height.
I heard Freya’s shower spray into life and got dressed. I poked my head around her bathroom door and shouted, “I’m going upstairs to prepare my paints. Let yourself in.”
“Ja, ja,” I heard.
I took a boot off at my own front door, to prop it open and kicked the other one off in the direction of my bed.
It was a dull, grey day and no sunlight shone in my large windows to illuminate where Freya would stand. I frowned, looking around my room where I would soon paint the curves of her flesh and the lines that made up her face, eyeing the small pack of white I would need for her voluptuous mane.
I put my radiators on to warm the room and keep her skin warm, and went around lighting some candles.
I caught myself humming.
“Jesus,” I muttered, but happily. “A flash of boobs and I’m singing Celine fucking Dion.”
I had just set down the last candle on my window sill when I felt arms tickle my ribs and hold me tight across my stomach. Resting my head back, I could smell the cleanliness of Freya, and I sighed contentedly.
“I never heard you sneak in,” I said.
“I don’t sneak,” she replied. “You just listen in other places.”
“Get your clothes off,” I growled. “Or it won’t be listening I am doing to your other places.”
She did her gliding twist across my dusty floor, dropping clothes as she turned this way and that, all the while me thinking I might pass out from the lust that was flowing through my veins.
If I don’t have this woman, I’ll…I’ll what? Wait for another ten years, driving myself truly mad? It was not the time for me to get lost in my head and I picked up my brush, as Freya stood posing where she had before.
I pulled the cover off my canvas and began to mix my paints.
“You are beautiful,” I said.
“Vakker,” she told me.
“Vakker is beautiful?” I asked. She nodded. “Vakker,” I repeated.
Then I remembered words spoken before. “Vakker kjaerlighet. What does that mean?”
“Beautiful love,” she whispered.
I tried to bring up the memory of her saying this, desperately trying to hear her say the words but my mind would not obey and I gave up, knowing I would remember one day because important words always burn somewhere deep down.
I forgot about this, like I try to forget about all unpleasantness when I can, and started to use my brush. I filled my eyes with the beauty of Freya’s body and let the flutters of delight it sent through me find their way down my arm to the hand that guided the swipes.
She was going to be my work of art.
Freya stood in front of my windows naked, her hands clasped behind her back, her head turned to her right, gazing away from me. Seeing her filled me with a joy I could not contain, as I realised I was painting furiously with a smile on my face. I took a moment to consider her form, to see where the shadow of her breasts fell on her stomach and I knew then I was falling in love, because love is safer looked at from a distance.
I felt the breath run from my lungs as the shock of this knowledge hit me. I couldn’t decide if I was in Heaven or in Hell. Life is always a choice: to break the heart or to heal the heart.
Freya or Helena?
Helena was married, having a child with a man called Edmund.
Freya looked at me with animated eyes full of longing and offered passion.
I unconsciously took a step towards Freya because it was the only thing I could do to protect my fragile heart. Love is the fiercest armour you can wear.
She saw me smiling and asked, “My Nick, I see you are amused by a comedy. You must share this with me.”
“I must?” I teased.
“Oh, you must,” she insisted, bringing her hands to rest on her hips.
I smiled harder. “You are just fucking perfect,” I told her.
“No thing is perfect,” she replied.
“You’re as near as I’d like to go,” I said.
I painted what I could that day before the urges in the tips of my fingers overtook me and I had to touch Freya’s body.
I had to. This was no longer a choice. There was a pull to her that I felt each time our eyes met that closed the distance between us and created a heart with chambers of eight, not four.
If she ran, my heart beat faster.
Those moments when I opened my eyes to begin a new day that was mine, I immediately found my thoughts turning to my beloved Freya, who with her ice had cooled the flames that had burned only for Helena. I felt the scales I had put on my eyes, to blind me, had been ripped off and the world I now saw was beautiful and full o
f light.
“I love you,” I panted to Freya, as I thrust on top of her, feeling the slide of her skin over mine and loving the textures of her touches.
“Jeg elsker deg,” she whispered.
When words are spoken at the moment where your love is riding a wave and the fingers of your lover tweak the veins to your heart, they are embroidered on the soul.
“Jeg elsker deg,” I repeated.
To a Norwegian, this is more than love and I understood I was the world to Freya. It made me humble, and nice, and all I could think of was ways to please her. I sat with her, asking questions to learn her background, what she liked and hated, to know why plants flourished when she fed them and, most importantly, to see where her passions lay.
Because a heart that cannot be passionate about even a slug if that is its choice, cannot be passionate when it matters most.
She brought a laughter to my face that hurt my cheeks and when she would ask what I laughed at, my stomach would hurt trying to get the words out. She was a joy so delicious I wanted to spend every second with her beside me, because that kept me calm and quietened the voice in my head.
Behind every love is doubt.
I would sneak off to my bed alone at night, waiting for the black of Nikki to overtake me, and even before she arrived, I could hear the mocking taunts.
“Poor. Ugly. Bitter. Lonely. Unloveable.”
Nikki made me want to cry. All day I was being kept happy now by Freya, now that I had let her in and still that twisted voice found its way to me.
I would never be free. Not completely. Unless…
I was head over heels in love with Freya and I had never been more afraid in my life. After all, what is love but a delusion? A trick of the mind to bring the veneer of happiness to empty and lacklustre lives.
My life is someone else’s.
Now I need it to be mine. That is my only chance at real happiness. I knew instantly what I had to do.
Searching for a card that read ‘Mavis Street: Dwarf Adventurer’, I rang the number.
“Hello, this is Mavis Street speaking,” I heard, remembering the honey drips of her voice.
“Hello, Miss Street. My name is Nick, I’m a friend of Freya.”
“I remember you, Nick. I never forget a face. What can I do for you?”
I cleared my throat because I am not pushy by nature but I had a goal now to strive to. “You mentioned that you’d like to have your portrait painted. I was wondering if you were serious.”
“Of course I was. Five thousand,” she said, tossing the figure out. I’ve come to realise that the rich throw money around like buttons while I, the poor, scramble for pennies.
“You’ll pay me five grand?” I said in disbelief.
“Is that too little?” she asked.
“No, no,” I assured her.
Five thousand pounds was more than enough for what I needed, so we agreed the details. I would paint a portrait of Mavis Street but as she was departing soon for an adventure, she did not have time to pose. I would paint her from photographs I would take at my earliest convenience.
It was a perfect excuse to walk over with Freya, as I had to borrow her camera, and we swang our hands together as we walked through the sunshine streets that would take us to the home of Mavis.
It made my heart thud with happiness to spend simple hours with Freya, whose calm washed over me. I couldn’t help but smile when she spoke to me, telling me everyday things, because these were the thoughts from her mind I was honoured she would share with me.
“Jeg elsker deg,” I whispered, as she chatted on about something or other.
It stopped her, because she always heard my love calling to her. “Every time you say that,” she told me, “My heart jumps up in a million pieces and falls back into one.”
At Mavis’ house, we had a cup of tea while her and Freya caught up on their gossip and I figured out how to use the camera. When I was ready, I took snaps from all angles. I would get them enlarged and printed, to hang on my walls for me to paint from. I’d done this before so I was confident I could do a good job and Mavis had an unusual face: what painter would not delight in this challenge? Beauty is not always a straight line.
On my way home, Freya said, “Who is Helena?”
I felt my legs stutter in their steps before I regained my composure because I hadn’t been expecting this. Ethel and her big mouth.
“Helena is a woman I used to love a long, long time ago,” I told her, quietly.
“You have no love now for her?”
“I don’t know.” I wanted to be honest with Freya but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings with my indecision. Since I had allowed her in, I had tried not to think of Helena, pushing down any thought of her that struggled to emerge.
“I mean for you to tell me who she is, about her. I need to know your past.”
My past. Where was it?
My life was like a figment of someone else’s imagination, thrown high into the air to see how it would land. I could conjure from memory a day that might be yesterday or tomorrow. Time didn’t always move forward, it was a ball of events that rolled around and sometimes, I came out on top.
Helena, Helena, the ball rolls around to a different moment in my life.
*** *** ***
I have a fizz of excitement sizzling at the bottom of my stomach. For a moment I worry it might be nausea until I realise it is anticipation.
Anticipation that any second now, my Helena is going to come gliding through the classroom door and join me at my table, where we sit together every Friday afternoon for double Maths.
As she arrives, her brown curls bouncing, I watch her as she immediately finds me with her eyes and, seeing me, her face explodes into a smile of delight.
The fizz in my tummy works its way down and I shift in my seat. Already we are lovers at this tender age and I know the joys that she brings me in the warmth of her bed.
She slides in beside me, deliberately scraping her chair closer to mine because every inch apart may as well be a mile. Under the table, her hand slides over my skirt, squeezing my leg.
“Helena!” I hiss under my breath, terrified that we will be seen and taunted.
She laughed, squeezing me again, before seeing to her books.
I took a minute to compose myself, to remember once again that she really did love me and that luck had shone on me to give me a beauty such as her.
Later that night, it was me who saw the other side of Helena, when she held me tight after our hurried love-making in her bedroom at her parents house and buried her face in my breasts.
“Please don’t leave me,” she sobbed.
“I’ll never leave you,” I tried to comfort.
“You will,” she cried. “And my heart will break.”
“Shh, my love. There will never be another you.”
When consoled she would kiss me, mixing tears and saliva with lust and gratitude. This was the Helena that no-one saw; where her heart leapt out to join mine and her arms opened to vulnerability; where every defence came down and she was just a lost, little girl in need of tender loving.
I was reminded of how our strengths and weaknesses had complemented each other. Alone, she was the one who needed my assurances but to the world, she was the glue that held me together and gave me the belief to put one foot in front of another.
The day a gang of girls surrounded us in the Physical Education changing rooms, circling us like vultures ready to pick at our bones at the slightest hint of weakness.
The biggest girl squared up to me, as I looked to the floor avoiding eye contact, hoping to divert a confrontation.
Her face was close to mine as she mocked me. “Like a bit of fanny, do ye, Nick?”
“No,” I mumbled.
She pushed me and I stumbled back. “You’re a fucking lezza.”
Helena stood forward, putting her face to the bullies. “And what are you going to do about it, eh?” she said, poking her finger in the
girl’s chest.
“It’s disgusting,” the girl said, but I could see her step back, realising perhaps the brunt of Helena’s temper was not something she wished to be on the end of.
“Your face is fucking disgusting!” Helena shot back. One of the girls behind the bully had giggled and was thrown a stern look.
I know if it had come to blows, Helena would have taken them on the chin for me. She always put herself between me and harm, knowing I had no stomach for upset.
“I don’t care about other people,” she would tell me, over and over. “I only care about you.”
We would hold each other, letting love fill the quiet and Helena would say beautiful things in my ear. She would tell me how much she loved me and that I was all she ever wanted. I was Tracy to her Hepburn, Burton to her Taylor, Bogart to Bacall. Then, she would talk of her daydreams and hopes for our future: that she wanted to go to University and study architecture, so that she might get a job designing; we would get a little place together and I’d have a room to paint in because she knew my passion, after her, was to create my visions on canvas; she went on that we could get a car, laughing that this is what proper lesbian couples did; but her final dream was to get married and start a family with me.
“Imagine it, Nick. Our own little family. The very thought makes me well up. That I could have you forever and we could bring up a child, that is the stuff that dreams are made of.”
“I’ll do anything for you,” I told her, unwavering in my complete devotion.
But don’t be fooled — the devotion went both ways, an unbreakable bond between two elements of love, making our life compound. My obsession was equalled by her own. When I smiled, she smiled and when I kissed her, she kissed me back harder. She made an hour with her pass in a second and a night without her became as though a year. All I ever longed for was her to be beside me, to lead our way with her bravery and strength, and I would hold her up with the ferocity of my love. Together we would face life.
Until, until…life got in the way.
How had I let this happen? Even thinking about it made me rub my head. I had promised her, I had given her my word, I had taken her heart from her only to desert her when she had needed me most.
