A Friendly Game

Tina likes listening to music more than talking about it, but we talk about it anyway.

"U2, Joshua Tree." She impresses me with her desert island disc. "You?"

"Johnny Cash, American IV." I seem to impress her too.

"Hurt?" She guesses, I was going to say Streets of Laredo, my official answer, but I realise she's right.

"Yeah. With or without you?" I realise I'm making a blind leap and perhaps underestimating her by going for something at the top of the album that's probably always on the radio somewhere.

"Trip through your wires." She impresses the fuck out of me by picking the bluesiest song on the album, sentimental for the bottle and old loves without getting too serious.

"Fuck..." We both mentally replay it a little. "Yeah, that's a much better answer." I admit.

"Swing and a miss." She tilts her almost empty mug at me in solidarity regardless.

Tina takes a long look at me.

"Blade Runner?" She appears to have hacked into my brain and made me transparent.

"If you can tell me why, you could start your own religion." I meant it as a tease rather than a challenge, she gives me a look like a fortune teller limbering up her third eye.

"You read the story." She takes an inspired try, but falls short. I shake my head. "Damn, my powers are at a low ebb today." She finishes her coffee, we never quite got around to breakfast, just snacking while we talked.

The relate-o-tron comes back with the latest results. Apparently her showing me her Tasmanian Devil was a clear sign of interest, I leave the thing running but don't hold my breath for wisdom.

It's starting to feel like the morning after a really good first date; I remind myself that even though I've pretty much seen her naked, and she is wearing my clothes, and I am taking her out for breakfast, she wasn't who I woke up with.

If we'd both been sober, or at least only drunk on alcohol, maybe I would've woken up with her on my familiar sofa. Maybe we'd both be here right now but it would be her I could still smell on my skin instead of Kel's aftershave.

I think Kel wears it as a gender thing, 'as female as I feel like' she told me once. But she shops for scent like I did when I was thirteen, trying to impress a girl at school with my magical talismanic scent.

"Hey..." Tina's grinning at me. I realise I was trailing off for about a minute there imagining Tina as my alternate reality girlfriend. Damn that relate-o-tron, hogging all my RAM.

"Sorry, I think I'm still a bit..." Her hand slides over mine on the table and I feel it rush through my veins. A little re-assuring gesture from a new friend hits me like a sex demon's French kiss. I actually tremble a little.

"You okay?"

"Fuckin' fantastic..." I smile. I wonder why I can feel it more now than I did when I woke up. Sal said something about that...

"Wow, you only had one right?"

"Yeah..." She rubs her thumb across my knuckles, strange how a touch can bring back a memory. I brace for sadness but just feel... love. Love like sunlight creeping up my arm.

What was it she said? Sal told me something just before we all fell asleep last night.

"You're a real cheap date then." She smirks and just the sight of her face makes my brain crackle with current as everything lights up.

Our kids would be perfect. Y-chromo tells me, I shut it up, but I agree with the sentiment. The human body has remarkable ways of comparing DNA remotely, we like what we like for good reason.

I smile back and even that feels good, muscles I haven't used much for a while ache a little.

"Yeah..." I remember what she said now, she said; Don't smoke Tina's blunts, they're not just weed. "Ah."

She laughs and it's funny so I join in, and that's funny so she laughs harder. We both stop for breath eventually.

"Come on, I'd better get you home." She says. I have to keep reminding myself to keep doing things, or I'd just stand there staring at the beauty of it all.

She pays but I tip. Outside is the sunshine.

I find myself walking arm in arm with an insightful woman. The street almost to ourselves, no work to rush to, nothing to worry about.

I wonder if this is what normal people feel like, if my strange brain can run just like the real thing with this specialised fuel.

There's no pangs anymore. Everything feels too good, the little things are precious again like I've escaped from prison or come home from a war.

I think about Tina as a person rather than an event or an impression. Only known me one night, already looking out for me. Bless her.

You're a fun new pet right now, but that doesn't last long. The astringent mixture of my bitter experience and cutting paranoia takes one final swing at me before dissolving into the molten MDMA, middle finger raised in final defiant salute.

It's right of course. Somewhere between Sal and the woman I so recently loved were a lot of bad, one sided, neglectful relationships. I have a thing about saving people, should've just been a firefighter like I wanted to when I was five. Chicks dig firefighters.

But for now at least, I ignore it.

We make a show of sneaking back in but no aural stimulation awaits us. My immediate guess is that Sal has gone into post-coital hibernation and that Kel is going to...

Kel walks down the stairs, in her men's boxers and a sports bra worn for decency rather than function, and decides to ascend the pyramid of needs a few steps from sex to food and social contact.

Sometimes I wonder if Kel is doing an impression of me with this stuff. The walk, the stance, the expression; It's a bit of Clint Eastwood and a bit of John Wayne and a whole lot of Bogart. I'm very much a self-made man, but it helps to have blueprints.

She's not transgender so much as she's... fuck, if you thought I was gonna muster the nuanced vocabulary necessary to describe modern gender identity then you've come to the wrong show. Kel is a woman comfortable enough in her femininity to occasionally enjoy slugging down a cheap lager and then engaging in some schoolboy posturing. I suppose freedom for Kelly has wider margins than it does for me.

Kel sees the state I'm in and grins.

"What'd you give him?" She asks Tina.

"He smoked the other half of the one we put out last night." They both take a moment to laugh at me in the nicest possible way. Then, after a good long guffaw and a few residual sniggers, they help.

"How do you feel?" Kel brings my eyes to hers with a loving caress I realise was probably just a business-like grab.

"Great." I'm still all smiles, it's not like I have anywhere to be or anyone relying on me.

"Ah, you'll be alright. No more drugs for you, lightweight." Kel pats my shoulder and raids the fridge. She leaves a moment later with what looks like an impulsive breakfast in bed. That Kel is a force of nature, I think I'll buy her some decent aftershave for her boyish days. To say thanks.

I find myself on the sofa next to Tina, the TV is on but suddenly people are more interesting.

She's stroking my upturned hand in an absentminded sort of way, one cuff left carelessly unbuttoned that she pushes up, following my tattoos up to...

I realise about five seconds too late she's staring at the scars. They say suicide is the only truly philosophical question, and those scars are how I told myself to stop asking.

Another few weeks and I'd have the sleeve piece finished, it would be covered to the point you'd have to really be looking to notice. A long time ago, but I suppose the point of self-scarification is to remember.

I stare at the TV and try to think of a way to have this conversation without seeming like more trouble than I'm worth. I'm taking too long.

I turn to her, to stall for time or something, ask her a dumb question and then throw all my hopes behind the relate-o-tron.

She's looking at me, right into the backs of my eyes. Her face fascinates me, I struggle against the urge to lean in for a kiss.

It would be a distraction too, I hate to lie. I'm entirely at her mercy and too stoned to think of something in time. It was nice flirting with her but this is going to turn into the 'good listener' conversation in about ten seconds.

She leaves my sleeve alone and puts her hand over mine. I'm still trying to think of something, the relate-o-tron is just hissing steam and spewing bits of punch-cards, no help there.

She stands up and I'm just about ready to throw in the towel and make small talk, make a new friend instead of something better.

Sometimes when you spend your life flying blind, stuff just happens right in front of you and you have no idea why at the time. You could have sworn there wasn't supposed to be a mountain there and now it's too late to do anything but yank on the stick and pray.

Tina turns to face me, fixes my eyes to her with a long look, and then shrugs her jeans down from her hips and lets them fall. The sound makes me realise I'm not just imagining it, strange things seem to happen to me like this more and more.

In my experience I've never flirted with a woman to the point where she stripped for me without so much as a cuddle for pretext. I'm so slow on the uptake with this that even you have already figured it out, right?

"Are..." There was going to be a question there, but I see an oh-so familiar criss-crossing of scars, like a barcode halfway along the inside of her thigh. Something she'd hidden better than I had. There had been a time when every single millimetre of it had been bleeding, stinging, self-inflicted agony.

"Tears in the rain." She gets the question from way back at the coffee shop right.

I stand too and without so much as a look of affirmation she's in my arms, kissing me. Her holding my hand felt like some kind of deep psychic tantra; this slow, breathless smooch is entirely erotic.

Never been seduced with understanding before, for me this is a new one. Never heard Blade Runner used as a pickup line either, but it worked on me.

The quiet sounds of skin against skin as her hands drag along my arms and drape comfortably around my neck. My eyes shut to let my lips pull focus, we're dancing standing still. I hear the stairs creak and open my eyes, look around Tina to see Kel standing there with a look of total disbelief on her face.

"How the fuck?" She mouths at me silently. I realise she's only seeing the punchline, Tina standing there kissing me with her jeans around her ankles and my hands on her ass.

I ignore the audience, this feels too good, we're having too much fun.

I feel Tina grin against my lips as she struggles to get her feet out of the legs of her jeans, kicking off her shoes as I guide her back to the wall next to the open doorway.

I hope Kel has gone back upstairs but don't pay any attention to anything but Tina. I realise the Q&A at the coffee shop had just been small talk, this was where I really got what she was about.

After the immediate, urgent lust of it all dawned even upon me, I picked her up, thighs around my waist, and made for the relative privacy of the kitchen. At least the doorway actually had a door in it, which I kicked to behind us.

Boots are a bad thing to wear for impulsive sex, impossible to kick off when laced up. Her trainers were still with her jeans by the sofa; always a step ahead of me, this one, but we made it work.

It's wearing off, synthetic ecstasy and herbal remedy, the booze, all of it pulls back from my consciousness. Just Tina and Me pulling each other's clothes off on the kitchen floor. The real thing is a strange sensation, warm blood back in my veins after a long winter spent frozen.

Our eyes meet as she fiddles with my shirt buttons, I get shy for a second. There's plenty more scars she hasn't seen, my doubt tells me, a couple of marks that were the reason Sal insisted I stay here in the first place.

It's an odd thing to be eagerly undressing someone and then find a worryingly fresh injury, like I said I chased around after anyone who I thought needed saving. You see some stuff, you hear some stories.

She finds them, the fresh ones I put there for a woman who would never know about them. A lot of things she didn't know about me, as it turned out.

I was expecting a lot of things, a glance, a well-hidden non reaction, a long conversation. She pulls off her shirt and unsnaps her bra with a sudden urgency, I can only sit beneath her and wait for more information.

"God..." I say. Apart from a particularly memorable example of my very favourite feminine physical characteristics, there was a tattoo of a man's name. With an X slashed through it, recently.

We share a look. Protocol dictates a long conversation followed by platonic bonding.

Instead she puts her hand over my cuts, salt on her palm stinging. I put mine over hers and that seems to be the end of the topic.

I'm proud that it didn't fuck with our chi. We went straight back to what we wanted to be doing, not what we felt we should be doing.

I can taste her mouth, her skin. I nip her lip playfully, pull her eyes back to mine as my jeans are undone and then dragged down to my knees.

My lucky shirt comes off too, it's more than earned its name.

Only thing left between me and her was Taz. I'm on the floor leaning back against the fridge as she rises up and shifts around a little.

If I hadn't been flying on wings made of MDMA then her quick teasing grind, a playful preview, probably wouldn't have almost made me come right there. As it was my eyes rolled back and despite my usual sexual role as the strong silent type, I let out a sigh that held no secrets. God damn, I've either been single too long or I've been taking the wrong kinds of drugs until now.

I'm starting to experiment with my new high definition sensations. It might seem horrible to never really want to look someone in the eye, but if you saw what I saw you wouldn't look either. Now when she looks at me I want to look back, never want to see anything else.

"..." She asks with her eyes.

"..." I answer. One day that relate-o-tron is going to be capable of subtitles, but for now I go by limited intuition.

As fond the memories I have for Taz the Tasmanian Devil are, what we did was way beyond his suggested age range. Tina left him on the floor and knelt back astride me.

"You takin' advantage of me then?" It feels like the time for some dialogue. Sex without talking is like sex without kissing.

"In your addled state you mean?" She plays along. You never know where a naked conversation can lead. "Yeah, I'm gonna have to have my wicked way with you I think."

"Scandalous." I grin.

There's a difference between sex and good sex, it has nothing to do with the number of orgasms divided by the number of people.

You can lose that after a while, in the height of summer you forget the taste of snow, the quiet sounds lost in the noise.

I wrap my hands around her hips and we're moving together. Now I'm learning to handle my newly amplified senses I already want to see what the next boundary looks like.

I kiss her neck, her mouth. I watch her eyes. She seems to pick her moment, I become aware of the sounds of her breathing and the sheen on her skin. I think about the kind, shy, cool woman I've spent the morning with and then I think about how very much I'd like to show my appreciation.

Social skills is a wide category, I might not see a hint coming without a written invitation; but I do know some things. Sal didn't keep me around for my knowledge of forensic metallurgy.

"Come on then." She pulls my gaze to hers.

Tina's moment arrives, and she doesn't tease me anymore. The fumbling foreplay and our mutually exposed scars were a different sort of sex, and she gives me one more soft kiss to remind me of that fact.

Our shared mood shifts back from sentimental to serious. She pulls me into her and we both take in some breath. I think maybe I keep surprising her, she hasn't seen anything yet.

That kind of sex is a hard thing to describe. It might have been less than a minute or more than thirty, one long shared moment that started with that last soft kiss and ended when she leaned back for a better angle and I decided to take a turn at the wheel.

Without really stopping anything that we were doing, I pull her legs around my hips, kneel, and then stand.

"Here..." She says into my ear, one hand running between us for an emphatic squeeze, the other wrapped around my neck for balance. Never keep a lady waiting.

Kitchens are great places for sex. Countertops are just the right height, an abundance of chairs, usually a good solid table that will either stay nice and steady, or be an amusingly creaky and mildly dangerous approximation of a water bed. That's not even starting on the erotic potential of things like honey and ice-cream and washing machines and certain kinds of Ikea cabinets.

We didn't make it any further than the fridge, but I did turn us around so as to at least metaphorically be on top.

Happy to let the lady drive, of course, but first dates are about getting to know each other and I want her to know what I'm really about.

We hug while we move, even inside her I feel the urge to stay close. She's a really good fuck, and that's a bigger compliment than you realise, dear reader.

It's like being a really good dancer, a really good listener, a really good friend. Her soft sounds in my ears and her hot mouth on mine, from moment to moment it's a waltz and a tango and a duet and a savage drunken mosh and a gentle walk holding hands. A moment worth holding on for. Fridge magnets clink to the floor to punctuate little changes in position, I have to change rhythm slightly as we discover the resonant frequency of a fridge rocking on its base.

It's not earth-shattering news to me but I realise I'm in love. Love comes in small doses, a kiss in the morning, a deep talk, a long sweaty carefree fuck on the floor. It's all just different ways of saying the same thing.

I've been hanging on for a while now, somewhere between the teasing and this intimate dance I've been ready for the mid-movie action scene followed by an intermission of coffee. But, ever the gentleman, I want her to meet me at the finish line.

I drop to my knees and I hear her appreciative moan as I get a hedonistic taste. This is the part I enjoy almost as much as she does, not just the power of it or the reaction, not even the intimacy. Some people have flat abs or piercing eyes, something makes them stand out and I have to keep up somehow.

You can't describe the taste of a woman without tasting her, and for now this one is mine.

I have one hand supporting under her thigh as she stands before me, her other leg draped over my shoulder as I kiss and try to show her the same consideration she showed me. My other hand is clasped in hers, her grip on my hand changing with her sensation, tightening up as I find the way she likes. Some girls are like cracking a safe, and I love a challenge, but there really is no substitute for compatibility.

"Yes..." The last syllable becomes a long hiss as I feel her hips softly rotating under my mouth, putting me right where she wants me.

I look up and see her enjoying herself, a pierced nipple being twisted this way and that, slitted eyes and a constant hum of lustful noises.

It doesn't take long, a good partner makes all the difference and honestly I wasn't about to tease her. She shudders a few times, tremors, and her grip squeezes my hand. I can feel her tensing up and caress her tension with a soft tongue. A stifled noise is finally released as a gasp and her gyrating hips buck in reflex.

"Fuck..." She says, with feeling. It was going to be my next plan anyways, so as soon as she is finished with that first orgasm she drags my mouth slowly along her body to her lips.

She kisses me like no-one has done that for her in too long. I lament the state of my gender, but at the same time it's good being a hard act to follow.