He stepped in and she came alive. It was barely perceptible – her shades hid the sparkle of interest in her eyes. One hand rearranged a curl by her ear, almost absent-mindedly, and drifted back down to her glass. Once there, it was awkward and the fingers stretched out to twiddle the straw between the ice cubes – as one does, as anyone does, quite naturally. Her face was angled towards the panorama of sea through the French windows, through the door by which he stood hesitantly.
He’d seen her here every day this week and her presence, like a cloud of perfume, was spoiling his favourite haunt. He could no longer saunter to the bar, knowing her eyes were in the room. He could no longer sit at a table and lose himself in a book and a cloud of cigarette smoke, with his spine tied to hers by invisible string. This was his coffee shop, where he could be a recluse, and all week he’d only been able to orbit her. Now, standing within the range of her gaze, even his hands were shy and made to hide themselves in the pockets of the jacket he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing. Day by day, her skin was turning to pale gold, though he never saw her lying on the beach, steaming and sweating under the sun, like the other tourists. She wore three long dresses, by turns: a white one that whispered at her ankles (could he but be that hem, to kiss those ankles), a pale-blue one that knotted together at the back, exposing her angular shoulders, and a pale-pink silk one with cream and maroon flowers softly splotched across it. Luggage restrictions, of course.
He knew what she was, that she would leave and he could have his coffee shop back, that her presence here would evaporate like the early spring morning mist the tourists never saw, and he would be left clutching at air, yearning for a woman whose name he didn’t know. But he did know her – he knew she was only pretending to be what she was. He saw it in the consciously elegant curl of her spine when she sat, the way her foot trembled to feel the sandal dangled but let it hang nonetheless. He had to speak to her.
He’d spoken to her already, of course. Every night when the cold salt air blew in across his room carrying the babble of voices and thrumming of music from late-night bars, when the orange lights of the boulevard bounced up onto his ceiling, his body lay in bed and his mind drifted through the streets with her. When he climbed the metal stairs to his concrete box of a room, her ghost trailed behind him. When he opened the door on his almost-empty room, she saw what he did: not the poverty of furniture and unswept floor gritty with sand, but the moonlit breakers rushing towards them framed by the long window. Lying alone, he turned to her imaginary face and let his hand be the soft brushing of her lips against his. Then his hand became hers, small and sweet as it cautiously explored beneath the covers, and the pillow was her body against his, and he made her cry out many times before he let himself be buried completely, no holding back, in the clasping warmth of … his fist. She always vanished when he came, so that he was left alone in bed again, gasping, holding only his own faded pillow and wilting cock, and feeling a little desolate and just a little ashamed. Only then, could he sleep.
‘You have ruined my coffee shop with your beauty.’
‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘Since I saw you, I can’t sleep without the fantasy of you coming repeatedly under my hands, my tongue, my cock.’
‘Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice you …’
So far past the opening moments in his head, he couldn’t think of an opening line, and walked to the bar rather than stand vacillating by the doorway. Never mind butterflies, his stomach was a lake of lava and ice: would he buy her a drink, would he approach her table, would he peel back the cool façade and pry into her elegant untouchability, through which her real thrumming life couldn’t help but shine? Would he teach her to drop her dress and pretences onto the sunset sand?
She can feel his presence behind her, the admiring eye that completes her seeming. He’s a blur in the background, daubed in and suggested at rather than exactly delineated – but then she too is not so precise and her edges blur into her surroundings. A suggestion of a white T-shirt and blue jeans, body leaning against the bar, head twisted over his shoulder to look at her. Her back is to him, but every aspect of her posture is angled for him: the tilt of her chin as she stares out, the brush of her hair against her bare back, the slow swing of her foot, the restless mashing of ice cubes. His eyes burn her skin and lift her breasts. She knows she is a dream, right now, and wants to play out the dream to be it better. He is the permission she needs to be beautiful. So she stays where she is rather than moving out into the world of sunlight and water and holidaymaking that is only refracted into this scene.
They stayed in their places while the sun drew its reflections off the water and behind the mountain, turning the sea view into three bands of dark blue, pale pink and pale blue. They lingered over their separate drinks while the bartender walked around the near-empty café, lighting the candles, preparing for the crowds that came out with the stars. She walked to the bar with her empty glass and he glanced towards her, away at the wall and down at the bar where her wrist rested.
‘We could just carry on getting quietly slaughtered,’ she said shakily, ‘or we could actually say something to each other.’ Her vowels were neatly shaped, rounded, high in her mouth – all orderly Englishness. Her consonants ended quickly where his would linger.
‘Um, how’s about getting slaughtered together?’ he said, before he could think – but it was OK, she was laughing, she was slipping onto the barstool next to him.
‘Hi.’ She gave him a smile she’d only ever given the mirror before, and felt the power of her eyelids over him.
She lies on his bed in the orange dark of his night-time dream place, at the hour when all souls weep, but they are smiling. Her arms are behind her head, a slight fuzz of hair beneath her armpits which she needn’t hide because he’s already licked them hungrily and buried his nose in the scent of her. Her breasts are pulled taut, at this angle, and her nipples still stand firm. Though his kisses have subsided, for now, the sea mist is clouding outside and cooling her skin. His duvet is half under her hips, half tumbled to the floor, and the faded pillow which played her part is squashed and folded beneath her head. Her hips are twisted at an angle, so that her waist dives into a deep curve and she can feel the swell of her hips as succinctly as if she’s running her own hands up and down them. In the low light, her pale-gold skin is copper and sunset gold, her eyes are huge and black, her lips are knowingly parted. The bright flush still glows on her cheeks and breasts. He sits on the chair, smoking a cigarette and studying her through the feathers of smoke. In another place, in another world, she might be the sort of person who would complain about cigarette smoke – fully dressed, with her hair tied back and not squandered all over the pillow, she might object. Here, she can be the sort of person who doesn’t care, who links this moment backwards in time to nineteenth-century Parisian flings, who can see his examining of her, reflectively smoking, in the light of philosophy, expressionism, art-house cinema. The light is right, for that. She is still floating on the things he has done to her, she can still feel the outlines of her pussy where he rubbed so frantically in and out of her while she screamed her voice ragged and gulped in lungfuls of his unfamiliar skin smell like sandalwood or cedar, hints of musk, a haunting bouquet of salt, Shiraz and sex. Just by looking at her lying there, one can know that this is what has happened. One can see: she has been well fucked and the person watching her will return to her side. She is clearly between bouts.
He stubbed his cigarette out, the rickety desk wobbling on the floorboards as he did, and sat down by her on the bed again. His hand ran over the tickling mass of her hair, tenderly.
‘You’re incredible,’ he murmured, making it so with his words. They had talked, earlier, of things she’d forgotten she knew, or left behind for too long, or didn’t even realise she knew. In the humming tension of their skin not touching, at the bar, they had used words instead of fingertips to play with each other and send frissons down their backs. He thought her glam
orous and knowledgeable. She thought him more whole and true to himself than anyone she had ever met. Best it stayed that way.
*
They’d walked across the road, in a bubble of sexual tension and talk which removed them from the short-skirted tottering crowds and striding lads out to play for the night. In the consent of silence, they left the masses behind and their legs took them across the endlessly stretching beach.
‘The bare and boundless sands stretch far away,’ he said, and she didn’t recognise it for the misquote he suspected it was. Instead, the rhythm of the lines carried them in acquiescence through the night. The bars fell behind them until even the music was just a thin trail hovering like a thread between the stars. The hotels dropped away, the houses became sparser and finally the beach ended by a piled-up wall of broken rock and boulders, long since tumbled down the slopes from the mountain to settle here. They stood still then, knowing they would kiss because they were alone by moonlight on a beach and had kept walking, further and further, to find this moment. His hand touched her waist, lightly. She slid towards its warmth and raised her face upwards. He bent and kissed her, pulling her slowly closer, as she returned the brushing of lips and hesitant darts of tongue. It didn’t matter that she had never been the best of kissers: on his lips, she turned herself into an artist, playing with the space between them, letting her tongue slide across the edge of his mouth, pulling his lower lip into the embrace of her teeth.
She was the one who pulled her dress over her head and dropped it onto the sand, so she could be perfect in moonlight – even though she was the one who dressed under a towel in the gym, here she was fearless. And anyway, it’s easy to be perfect in moonlight – daylight is harder. She had no bra on. Usually, she always did, but with that dress it was impossible to wear one, because the straps would show, and blah blah blah – who cares about why, who explains, who thinks the truth of the film is to be found in the projection room? She had no bra on, and he fell to his knees. With his arms raised to cup her loose free breasts, he kissed her stomach and trailed his tongue around her belly bar. His hands moulded the shape of her breasts, her back, her waist, her bottom, making her shapely; she rested her hands on his soft thick hair and looked up at the upside-down moon, crying softly with bliss as he held her panties aside and pushed the tip of his tongue down through her slit. Her legs bucked repeatedly, she could hardly stand, he guided her fall onto her dress and knelt between her legs, cradling her thighs as they fell apart, then drank and tasted.
New taste: sweet and sharp, like sour cream and seawater, with a whisper of bitter iron. It was as strange as the first time he tasted olives, or Brie, or mussels, and he licked again to learn it better, found that it sent him wild with lust and pushed his tongue in deeper to get more. He was French kissing her parted lips as if it were her mouth, forgetting to be Good At It in the maddening taste of her. He only emerged from his trance when she came, wailing softly.
Standing again, with her dress shaken free of sand and slipped back over her head, he kissed her and she smelt herself on his lips and chin. They were conspiratorial now, giggling at the sand and rocks and scrubby bushes which had borne witness to their secret. He held her close to the hard swelling that his jeans trapped against his thigh.
‘Would it be forward to ask you back to mine?’ he whispered into her flyaway hair.
She shuddered with still-subsiding bliss, chill and excitement. ‘Yes, it would,’ she said, low and soft, bright-eyed, ‘but I’ll come anyway.’
*
They had no patterns or ritual to follow when they walked into his room. His hand fluttered by the light switch and pulled away, without touching it. She was the empowered one, because she was the stranger in his place, and she could call the shots while he flickered on the edges not knowing whether to open wine or offer food or kiss her again, this time not just for the sake of a kiss but as a signal to recommence activities. She sat on his bed and pulled him to her so he could feel her hot breath on him through his jeans. He’d rearranged himself, surreptitiously, on the walk back and now the soft skin on the tip was pushing itself up, peeping above his waistband. Her tongue flickered across it, curious and judgemental – was this a taste she wanted in her mouth? She tasted around the glans, letting the strong red flesh of her tongue tip wiggle to find its way beneath that peeling-back sheath of skin, and her lips closed over it. When she unzipped him and pulled his jeans and underwear down, he sprang out, shuddering like a ruler. She clasped him in both hands and nuzzled him, breathing him in. The memory of the shape of her breasts was fresh; he wanted to see them again, in this light. While she crooned over his cock, hardening it still more against her cheek, his shaking fingers found the tie of her dress at her neck beneath the masses of uncontrollable hair. When he finally fumbled the knot loose, the dress fell to her waist and a vision of sweetly wanton womanhood looked up at him and smiled. They hardly knew what to do next – follow the imperatives of their bodies, yes, but how, in what order, should he break from the delicious clasp of her fingers to feel her nipples in his mouth? Without habit, they were carving each moment out of untouched time. But they grinned, and she drew her hand up and down him, delighted by the firm feel of it against her palm, discovering and making the length and breadth of it.
His jeans were around his ankles and she had to let him go to pull them off and then slide his T-shirt over his head, his arms raised like a child’s, because unfortunately clothes don’t simply ‘fall away’ – or at least, men’s clothes don’t. When she stood, her dress descended her hips and made a puddle of white fabric on his floor, next to his bed. Seeing that, more than seeing her near-nakedness, made him realise wildly that she was real, really there, ready to succumb to him – or him to her, or them to their images of each other, or to the images of themselves they gave each other. It didn’t matter, they were all these people, and mostly bodies whose skin tremored with proximity and nostrils flared and tongues discovered. She raised her hips with her hands to let him remove her panties, and so he couldn’t help but bury his mouth against her again.
He licked. She stretched out backwards, running her outstretched arms over the bobbled texture of a cheap much-washed unfamiliar sheet. Someone else’s sheet, while the someone else dabbled his tongue in her and drew light wet lines up the sides of her lips. She moaned aloud, and the new sound of her own pleasure sent a thrill through her. He raised her hips with his hands, as she had, and wrote secrets on her clitoris with his tongue. I want to penetrate you, he patiently spelt out with tiny upstrokes, circlings and dashes of his tongue. He listened to the crooning whimpers, and licked in cursive. Her eyes wide open, unseen, stared at the streaking car lights across the half-lit wall and ceiling, how the shadows flowed across the room and leapt back into place. She didn’t need to think of anything in this hiatus: no day-to-day responsibilities of home flitting through her head, no questions about where this was leading – that was unquestionable. Just the feeling of his tongue exploring her, just the burning gold of pleasure washing over her, just the feel of her arms swimming across his sheets and his fingers swimming in her flesh. He rocked against her in time to his fingers sheathing themselves, hypnotised with the sight of her clasping round them and the thought of pushing into her. Her breasts, flattened by gravity and pulled up by her outflung arms, were two low soft mounds, pale as beach sand, tipped with crisp nubs of pink. He had a vision of erotic ecstasy, and fulfilled it: he held himself above her and took one bright hard nub in his mouth while his hard cock-head touched her entrance. Her cry arched her breast into his mouth and rubbed his tip between her juicy lips. He nibbled and jabbed, trying to find the way into her sweetness, meeting wet succulent flesh everywhere but always slipping away – until there he was, there she was, a sweet tunnel waiting to be dug. He bit gently, folding her narrow shape into his arms, pushing slowly inwards, inwards, inwards. She felt his shaft forcing her warm walls to part for him, little shoves bringing him closer to the crowning centre deep inside
her, and she let her body give itself up entirely. Spreadeagled, moaning, her head rocking back and forth, her pelvis rising against him, she was cool and ecstatic.
But the calm, remote little centre of her mind couldn’t withstand him forever. He plunged into her deliriously and swung her over, dragging her legs off the bed – she knew her thighs slammed against the wooden frame, but it was lost in his repeated stabs deep inside her. Her legs raised to wrap around him backwards, he held her horizontal and shoved deeper. Her hands pressed flat against the wall to meet his strokes, her throat roughened with screams they barely heard. He fucked away the sort of person who floated into coffee shops hidden behind sunglasses, who folded elegantly into a chair, who toyed with a chic drink, and fucked into being the sort of person whose hair was damp with sweat, whose back shone slickly as she sat astride him and flung her arse up and down his length. Holding her against the cool wall, staggering on the uncertain ground of the mattress, he heaved his cock up through her, destroying the palely interesting face as he made her flush red and contort her features in spasmodic glee. The fascinating silence of her became squeals and guttural gasps. The foot from which her sandal had so coyly dangled was in his mouth, his lips wrapped around her toes, and his tongue found the embarrassing joy of the skin between them. His eyes were meeting hers as he sucked – there was no escaping his recognition. His hand fondled between her legs and prised her open to his gaze. Each time she came, he said only, ‘You’re not finished yet,’ and forced yet more pleasure on her. She came riding him, she came squashed against the mattress, crushed to the wall, on her hands and knees, with his cock buried inside her, with his fingers deep, with both their fingers tangling together to twirl and dive, with his tongue whisking her swollen clitoris to another howling splashing collapse into joy. She hadn’t known she could come so much. She was half off the bed, almost handstanding on the floor, when his plunging strokes spiralled out of control and he shagged her to the floor, and made her the sort of person who cried uncontrollably on the cold boards of a seaside room while her hungry, insatiable womb filled with his spunk.
Sex with Strangers Page 7
