A Tempting Fate & The Loved One

The thought of you running your hands over my naked body in the dark excites me so that I can’t sleep. I rise hurriedly, light a fag, make coffee with the lights off.

You have joined me as my life enters the dynamic phase. You’ve caught me in transition from old to young, fixed to unfixed. You’ve come in when I’ve been putting my house in order; cleaning out my closets, sweeping the grate.

The mobile purrs on the pillow like a cat, it’s green eye beaming brightly, demanding that I see, I touch. I want to touch somebody. Your body.

Or perhaps you’re the one who found my stone, my careless rock: came upon it quite by chance and picked it up; overturned it, and sent me out blinking into the light. Maybe you’re The One, come better late than never to cross my palm with silver and scatter rose petals across my uncertain path.

It’s a light and heady fantastic that I trip tonight. The phone’s enticing glow fades in a moment as I watch, but the message I know will linger. The cigarette, the coffee, the light, the dark. All is well. You will be home soon to take me in your arms and hold me against your body, perhaps to love me in that way – with tenderness and gratitude and the shiny black absence of heat. I switch on the television. I won’t know until you’re here.

To truly be a part of Love you have to surrender to it completely. Pain has been the only constant in your life: the one thing that has never abandoned you. You think that pain is yours to keep, to bear alone...but it’s not. I want it. Give it to me and free yourself. Be nice to yourself.

Two comets passing, overlapping in Time for the duration of the length of their tails; two believers sharing a hymn-sheet until the organ-grinder changes the tune. Two riders, clasped together in the saddle until the tormented mount casts us off into separate ditches.

I need silence. I lie back and close my eyes and you’re there again, crouching over me, feeling my heart with your hand pressed between my breasts. That’s the power transfer – the exchange of strengths, as equal as it can be on the basis of need. You take, I give. Tomorrow it will be reversed again. I take a deep breath and pick up the message. Liberty X. It’s coded of course, a clue to a song by that band and I know which one. That’s sweet. I think the words through in my head. She must really think a lot of you. Message erased. I’ll pass it on verbally when I give you your phone back.

Ten minutes ‘til you’re home. Ten minutes ‘til you take me in your arms and I smell her all over you: her saliva on your neck, her perfume on your T-shirt, her juices on your face. And if you’re still high you’ll take me too, on the floor in the hallway or maybe over the dining table, because you can. Because you’re fucked up and because you know I’ll let you. Maybe in your own bed, like a man, with that cornered-animal look in your dark, beautiful eyes.

You’ll take me and possess me – mark me with a lover’s touch, break my skin with your teeth, make conquest of me over and over until you’re exhausted and I’m too weak to move. You’ll tell me you’re coming inside me because it gets us both off. And in the morning when the drugs have released you, you’ll release me. Deny me. Blame me, because you know I won’t break. I’m a very good lodger to have.

There’s the car. There’s the key. What’s it going to be tonight?

*

The loved one lies in my heart but does not know it. She lies lies lies because she wants my hand between her thighs. Her hands are great, how deftly they placate me, her fingers swift and sure but fickle – my love runs from me in a meaningless trickle. Bulldagger, cockswagger, it squares up at my gate and I wrap my legs around her back to better angle her attack. She dives deep to plunder the wreck of this relationship I keep. She's got big stones for someone living in a glass house.

She keeps telling me she's leaving and so I keep grieving as her absence spreads like ice across a lake. I try to stay numb, but her insistent thaw always comes. Head up her own ass and a mouth full of shit but still, I kiss her freely and my heart rips. Thus I complete my education whilst hers is only just beginning. I am her future and she looks to me, grinning.

The taste of her is stuck in my mouth like a hook. In my head now she is walking towards me, unzipping, stripping, taking me down easy. She drops me to my knees and I am begging to please. I think of her and me in that stinking alley, fighting each other, fighting our urges. How she stood up to me and then I stood up to her – for her – for the 300 seconds or so it took to get me brick-burn across my shoulders and a good deal more besides.

A good deal... How much did I pay? I can feel those hands under my buttocks as I clung to her body and we lowered me down, her penis slicked with spit. Worked up, stood up, in for the kill, working as a team, my cream and her dream. She moved in me, so fine, until I cried and came. Watching my eyes, the loved one claimed her prize and then let me down. Her hands in my hair, she fucked my mouth while I sucked her cock clean. She came for me with her eyes closed, her back against the wall. We are nothing but victims of time and circumstance and our own weakness. My weakness is a road one hundred miles long. My weakness is rubber and leather straps and wrong.

I pass a bakery selling off chocolate ring donuts and my mind wanders further afield. A field, late last summer and a hot sticky estate car. I blush red. I wish I could wish her right out of my head but she's there like tumour, an abscess, a growth. A yawning fissure I just cannot close.

We went to the Health Club one day after lunch, the loved one and me, and her fingers found me in the jaccuzzi. Under the cover of the foaming bubbles she let herself in and I gave her no trouble. To my brief shame it was my absolute pleasure. I felt her hand on my thigh and she pulled my legs apart. I moved for her, and opened myself to her suggestions. I surrendered with a sigh. My eyes fixed on the Speedo clock, with never a word. She looked out of the window while she screwed me and brought me off in the hot water in silence. I let her explore and I played the whore – it's all part of the game.

I drove her home then, my hand on her knee, and fucked her like a bitch. I kissed every inch of her, devouring her, starting at her feet, flicking my tongue between her toes until she laughed and writhed and soaked herself, ready for my hand already, still hot from before and begging for my mouth on her nipples. In the empty bedroom overlooking the back, in front of the window I laid her out naked in a sunbeam, and made enquiries with my fingers, and answered all her questions with my lips.

It is me she loves, the loved one. I lie in her heart but she does not know it. Yet.