He fell to his back, took in a large gulp of air, squeezing it out slowly with clenched chests to silence the wheezing.
She rolled over to the side in a waft of thick, dizzying perfume. Their eyes never met. Not even when he leaned over awkwardly to kiss her. “No”, she said.
He stopped himself, his lips inches away from hers. They were the aftertaste of cheap booze and sweat and cum. And so they lay with their backs to each other and in silence.
The night began innocently enough. Gossip. Bar crawl. Slow walk under the streetlights that stretched into hours until they were left with shallow, vapid exchanges of hopes and dreams to fill the silence. Still it was preferable to a vacant flat and the battered suitcase filled with the entirety of her life, and the gnawing question buried under a tangled mess of sweaters, books and underwear: “hey, what they fuck are you doing here?”
And he was just lonely. It had been so long since he felt any attraction to anyone. So when she asked him to show her around town, for that very brief moment, impulse took hold of him and said yes. Even though he hasn’t been on a real date since 2012. Even though he’s so withdrawn that in the 3 years he’s been in town, he’d seen only his corner of the city. Even though he doesn’t even have a set of nice clothes to wear.
It was her eyes. Her dimples. Her hair. How she smiled and flustered with nervous energy. The way she seemed to withdraw into herself each time she thought she said something outrageous (she wasn’t’). Her overuse of interjections at the end of every message. All of her made his stilled heart flutter, his mind blank, and the little acorn of emotion to bash aside all fear and anxiety and embarrassment.
The sheets begun to chill.
He turned to her, reached out a hand and tentatively traced it from her shoulders downwards along the silhouette of her body. She shuddered a little, and her breath deepened.
“This is not a relationship.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“You’re quite awful in bed.”
“I’m rusty”.
Giggles.
“Well at least you owned it”.
“Practice makes perfect, right?”
She turned to him. Her eyes looking into his. Were they black or brown or grey? He wondered. It was one of those colors. Her breath was warm against his face.
He snuggled towards her, close enough that his skin tingled.
“This never happened.”
“Sure.”
He could almost taste her. He could feel the heat radiating from her. He brought his hand up again, brushing against the flat of her stomach, all the way up. She shivered. He felt his excitement building.
“Then fuck me again.”
~
#00117F 