Blue Dress with Yellow Flowers

Author's Note: Back with part 1 of a 2 part story. Both work as standalones, in my opinion, but they're connected. The usual disclaimers etc.

The sweat was still running down my back as I held my hands under the tap in the bathroom in the basement of the coffee shop on Singleton street. The heat, not the nerves, was what made me sweat, though I'd not seen Paul in two years. I let the cold water run over my hands, splashed it up my forearms. Down south, where I'd gone for college, tap water didn't stay cold in the summer. But here, home, even in the eternal heat, I could count on the ice chill. I dried my hands, tried to fix the lay of my blue dress, the one adorned with little yellow flowers.

Paul waited for me upstairs, at one of the tall tables along the brick pillars in the middle of the coffee shop, where he could hear the barista up in the raised kitchen call out the order numbers.

"Twenty six," the barista called as I emerged from the stairwell. "Two cold brews, one cream and sugar, one black."

Paul started up, but I beat him to the counter.

"Thanks, Noora," he said when I set the coffee down. "How long are you in town?" Even half-seated on the stool at the table, Paul was taller than me.

"End of August."

He had thick, dark hair, cut close on the sides and combed to one side, gelled down in an imitation of mid-century masculine order. When I'd known him first, that hair had been wild all down to his jaw, a rebellion against the sportcoat, high-and-tight professors and politicians who comprised the leading men of our town. But Paul had gone to Oberlin three years ago--he was two years my senior--and found that the powerful there were loose and unkempt.

He always had to rebel against something. It was what I'd liked about him.

The coffee was good, nothing to remark on. I passed the sugared one to Paul and set mine on the table. He touched my arm, as we drank.

We'd been close once. Not sex close. Not kissing close. But maybe almost. He asked me to homecoming his senior year and I turned him down. He went with a bottle; I went with my friends.

"And you?" I said.

"I'm gone tomorrow," he said. I felt some vague hope I'd had for a summer romance slip away. I'd seen him walking the west-side river park while I drove around earlier in the week and figured I'd text him. The high summer was on us, late-July, after the first wave of summer camps at the university that dominated the town receded, but before the arrival of the August cohorts. That stretch, that long, holy week, was always the quietest, the hottest point of summer.

For days, nothing moved. From the high ridges north of town to the low sweep of Winthrop bay and the barrier islands beyond--so close that on a still day the exhaust from the cars idling on King Philip's parkway hung shimmering over the low, dark woodland--the only movement was the trickle of sweat down the center of your chest. No one in the streets, no one on the buses, no one in the basketball courts or the super markets, the parks and libraries, the churches. Even my father's masjid stood empty then.

On those long days I woke early to the sound of my father praying the fajr with just enough time to join him, even though he knew that outside the house I never prayed. Then he went to the water department and I would put on one of my light dresses, pull back my long hair, and drive downtown for my shifts in the little bookstore on Cathedral avenue. In the heat they ran slow, and I could text my friends, my acquaintances, and all the other fevered returnees in the opening movement of the flirtatious dance of the townie kids. The yes-but-nos, the stolen kisses, the coffee and ice cream under the motionless sun.

In the heat, anything was possible.

Not that I'd considered sleeping with Paul, or even kissing him. At least not since the summer after my junior year of high school. That summer, when my mother died, Paul didn't even come to her funeral. I guess I wanted some closure to that wound and to all the little moments that might've been. Sometimes you need that tension to pull you across the summit of summer.

"Gone where?"

"Vancouver," he said. "My roommate invited me out for a long trip. We'll be doing trail maintenance. I'll be back a day before school starts. Maybe two days."

"And what are you planning at Oberlin this year?"

"I intend to cause trouble," he said. "I've got our literary magazine to run, we finally got it going, and now we can publish stuff no one else will run."

"Like?"

"Well, all those kids think they're libertines, but they're really puritans." He withdrew his hand from my arm, leaned forward. His hair shifted, fell a bit in front of his face. "They're easy to scandalize. Put some sex in a story and they get all Hays code. But enough about me, what are you doing down in Virginia?"

"I don't know," I said. "It's not like that in the south, you know. There are the aristocrats, the greeks to counterbalance the puritans."

He lifted his lip in a tight little sneer.

"But good luck getting anyone on that campus to read anything interesting," I said. "I'm just there for a good time." Which was true. My life there was full: intramural sports, the sociology department journal, work-study in the library cafe, poetry readings in the low-slung suburban houses across the state road from campus in the lingering heat or the damp of winter. Or teaching the sorority defectors how to French inhale, telling them about Celine and Pasolini and Sappho. In the south, I got to play the intellectual, the northern sophisticate. One of my friends had given me a stick-and-poke tattoo, a design that verged on the abstraction of a Rohrschach blot; it was blurry enough that I could make it mean whatever I wanted.

"Have you had some good times?" He said. "Down among the seceshers?"

"A few. And you, what happened to, what's her name, Alison?"

"She cheated on me while I was abroad."

"I'm sorry."

"I wanted out anyways," he said. "There's hotter girls than her, and more interesting." He looked hard in my eyes. I blushed. In high school we'd both been Model UN kids. I always represented a beleaguered middle power trying to plot a course between American hegemony and isolation. Paul volunteered to take North Korea, Cuba, Eritrea, all the little countries that no one ever wanted. We had, at some MUN parties, danced, his big hands on my slim waist. But nothing ever came of it.

I sipped my coffee. Cold brew always sits high in my stomach and the caffeine goes right to my head. My eyes seemed clearer, as if they'd zoomed in on everything around us. My legs shook a little, with restless energy. I needed to walk.

"Out, yeah, sure," I said. "Want to take a lap around the block?"

Out behind the coffee shop, which occupied the ground floor of a 19th-century stocking factory, was a courtyard covered with crushed oyster shells and shaded by immature elms. A disused canal, long dry, separated the courtyard from the blank brick of the old rowhouses turned to offices and the low parking garage opposite. To the right, the offices of a non-profit blocked the way to Adams Avenue, and to the left, a university building with irregular shaped walls, closed off the yard, save for a couple narrow alleys. In the school year, this was where students came to pace and wrap up their coffee dates. And this was where, when Paul asked me to homecoming, I'd hemmed and hawed and told him no.

But we were alone with burning heat and the perennials planted at the base of the elms and the rare dirt patches where the oyster shells lay thin. The sun shone dazzling on the oyster shells, a white so harsh I had to squint and Paul raised a hand to shade his green eyes while we stood on the back patio of the coffee shop.

We crossed the yard and took the alley out to Singleton and walked along the shadowed sidewalks, past the university buildings and shops, empty in the heat. It was an aimless walk, and I told Paul all that had happened in my family since we'd last spoken. He wiped the beading sweat from his brow.

The courtyard exerted a strange force on us, drawing us back in a slow loop around the block. I couldn't stop thinking of the empty silence and the wide stretches of white shells.

Summer wilts some men, but not Paul. He stood taller, his loose seersucker trousers and dark shirt, open over a tight wifebeater, gave him an air of alert ease. We turned the last corner of the lap and stood again by the front of the coffee shop and the alley beside it. For a second, we both hesitated. This was the natural end of an hour of coffee and conversation: I would drive home, he would go pack for Vancouver.

My father worked late that day at the water authority. My little brother was off at his science camp. There was no one else in town, all my friends gone off on their expensive vacations or working dead-end jobs in the suburbs, or still in their college towns. The only thing before me was a long evening in the quiet of my too-small childhood home with the ghosts of my mother and of my past selves thick in the still air.

If we turned back into the courtyard we could keep the tension going, the friendship that had always been a little more than friendly. And maybe we could drive the shaded streets between the big victorians up, out of town, to the north ridge, and there overlook the city and get beyond the formalities of catching up. Then, come November or December, when we both came home again, we could pick it back up.

I turned into the alley and he followed.

"I'm sorry I'm going away," he said, when we stepped back into the sightless white of the oyster shell courtyard.

"It'll be fun, working up there in the hills. As long as there aren't any fires."

We walked along the wall, into the shade of a young elm.

"I'll be thinking of you," he said. His left hand settled on my back where the dress pulled in a bit to show off my slim figure.

"Don't think about me too much. If there's a wildfire, you'll need all your wits," I half-turned to him.

"And when I'm back," but he didn't finish the thought.

"We could've been something," I said. "Back th--"

He leaned in, the fingers on my back stiff. I came forward to meet him, raised my hand to the side of his face. Our lips brushed briefly and I closed my eyes, stood a little taller and found his mouth.

"Back then," he said, breaking the kiss after a short beat. "Oh yeah. Could've. But now?"

"Well there's just no time," I said. "We're different people, Paul, except when we're here." My voice was low and sultry. I wanted to taste his mouth again. The brevity of our touch left me wavering with want for his tongue. I couldn't keep that out of my voice.

"Reasonable," he kissed me again, his right hand laying gently along my jaw. I opened my mouth for him, my hands on the back of his neck, his shoulder. "Noora. Always so reasonable."

His kiss redeemed the long balance of our friendship. It was all real now, all in the tight space between us and the subtle adjustment of limb and face and balance.

I broke the kiss, aware that at any moment, someone could round the obtuse corner of the university building and find us in the shade. I set my third-full coffee down near the wall and turned back to him, ready for a momentary embrace.

But he kept coming, planted his lips on my neck, both hands on my waist, his weight forward. I stepped back with one foot, back with another.

There was never anyone to see.

I felt his fingers down at the hem of my dress, mid-thigh. That morning, I'd dressed carefully, plain, gray panties, a dark, flimsy bralette, both lightweight without being sexy or provocative. Paul wasn't supposed to see them. The dress, which brought out the coppery tones in my skin, made me look healthy and tanned.

Now, as I paced another step back, his right hand inched up under my dress. The touch made my breath stop short. He was close. His hand ran up. He kissed me again and I stepped back and my head and shoulders made contact with the brick wall of the university building. His hand slid up, and I felt it move between my legs.

"Noora," he said, rubbing that hand over my underwear. "You always played at transgression, at rebellion. But you always wanted your way out. Your sanity. You always had to have your excuse for why you had to be a square."

I was wet. I'd first started getting aroused when he touched my arm in the coffee shop, and it had built since. But I didn't want to be fingerfucked in public by some guy who was flying across the continent the next day. I'd intended to save the memory of arousal for later. The ambiguity of a couple kisses would have been enough for me.

He focused the pressure towards my clit, his other hand gripped the back of my neck. Paul pressed his lips to mine, and I kissed him back, but no longer so willing. His fingers pulled at my underwear, slid it aside. The rough tip of his middle finger brushed the lips of my cunt and I stiffened, one hand clutched at his bicep, the other on his shoulder.

"Paul," I said. "Not here."

"You're so fucking hot," he said. "I can't see your legs without losing my fucking mind."

"I think you're hot too, but."

He kissed me hard and the tip of his finger slid inside me. It felt right. The friction inside me, the wetness, the smooth opening of my body.

I'd wanted him all through high school, with a powerful, unspoken yearning. I'd worked out to be fit and strong and active, and shaved myself on the off chance he might kiss me and slide a hand down my pants at one of the Model UN parties, I read the books he read (faster than he did), and tried to appreciate all those little mysteries that formed his person. Once, I'd found him in the Model UN club room, watching an Adam Curtis doc on the projector. He'd slid down in his seat and he stared up at the bleakness on the screen over him while Curtis laid down the great cosmology of the modern age. I'd tried, even then, to know what he was. But that was past, the adolescent infatuation replaced with the detached desire and calculation of adulthood. No longer did I believe that the melding of flesh in a single moment could bind people in a permanent union. There were others who I wanted badly, and Paul was just a man.

But the motion of his finger--pushing deeper, searching--inside of me drove those thoughts away. For the next crucial seconds there was only action and the memory of adolescent fantasies. He slid his finger to the second knuckle and I gasped. He drew it out, and rubbed my clit and pushed my head into the wall with the force of his kiss. My breath came in near moans now, though I fought it. My grip tightened on him.

He pushed that finger, and a second, back inside me. Pleasure, release, like the shocking cold of iced water, spread through me. He hooked those fingers forward, beckoning me, and I felt my hips come off the wall, searching for him. Then his hand grasped my throat, the web between thumb and forefinger pressed at my windpipe; air rasped rather than flowed. I was so wet I could feel it on my thighs as he worked his fingers in and out of my cunt, over my clit, then back inside of me.

In his eyes I saw a burning lust, and when he kissed me as he stroked my clit, I shook and came. It was a sharp orgasm, bursting from the tense muscles of my pussy and lower back, and I pushed his hand out from between my legs, gasping as I turned away from him. But he would not let me go. His hand gripped my thigh hard enough to hurt and he looked into my eyes as I came down from the peak of pleasure.

"I," I started. "Paul. Jesus." I wanted to suck him off, not here, but somewhere I could take him in my mouth without shame, savor the taste of him, his sweat, the weight of his penis in my throat and the slick spread of cum on my tongue.

"You're a beautiful little slut," he whispered with his face close to mine. The word sent a thrill through me. What if someone came out and saw us now?

"Do you always cum so easy?"

"No," I said. "I don't know how you did that to me." I was relieved that the encounter seemed to be de-escalating.

He put his hand back at my cunt, his finger stroked my entrance.

"Let's see if I can replicate it."

"No," I said. "Lets go somewhere cool and private and I'll blow you."

"No." He pushed the fingertip back into me. "I don't want that."

I wanted to protest. The orgasm had left me with lingering sensitivity, and his finger felt intense inside of me, almost painful, unwelcome. I grabbed his wrist.

"Once is enough."

"I disagree."

"Pau--" He covered my mouth, pressed my head to the wall. His fingers slipped into me. I looked down, his hand between my legs, my powerlessness, the wrist hidden by the dark blue of the dress, and all around us the blinding white oyster shells and the black shade of the lone elm. I'd never felt such a cyclonic welter of arousal, resentment and desire. I couldn't stop him from pleasing me.

When he felt my little moans under his crushing hand, he lifted it and kissed me hard, his tongue pushing deep inside my mouth, an overwhelming assault of warmth and want.

"Cum quick," he whispered when he broke the kiss, his face looming close to mine.

"Noora's afraid of getting caught."

He pulled the fingers out of me, arousal dripping from the back of his knuckles. The fingertips pressed round my clit, rubbed it, and the low, sultry press of his voice filled my ears.

"Deep down, you're daddy's girl. You don't want him to know you say 'Jesus' and that you smoke and drink and top the white girls. You're not a whore."

It was bizarre, the words he said, a mix of acute psychological attack, desperate sexual arousal and fetishistic racism. They drove me fucking wild.

"As conservative as any religious girl, as good as any Hijabi. Better, because you'll protest. Then you'll cum."

He plunged his fingers back into me, kissed me hard and pushed himself against me as much as he could. I came, a more normal orgasm than the first one, a rising tide of pleasure with rolling waves of weak legs and contracting cunt and short, shallow breaths.

"Please can I suck your dick in my car," I whined.

I tried to redirect him, to turn out of this pen. If I could only get free, lead him somewhere I had control, out of this public, terrifying spot. I stepped sideways, turned.

He pushed me as I turned so I stayed against the wall, away from the open space in the center of the courtyard. One of his hands wrapped itself in my hair, and he pulled on it like a leash. His elbow formed the other end of that lever, pressing my bare shoulder into the wall. My neck hurt, my head went back, my shoulder forward. I had no balance. With the other hand, he unzipped his pants, unbuckled his belt. Fear flooded into my body, bitter in my mouth, electrifying in my limbs. The arousal of the previous minutes, so tinged even then with anxiety, gave way to terror at my powerlessness. Paul was going to fuck me.

No, not fuck. I didn't want this.

My foot struck my coffee cup and knocked it sideways. My shoulder scraped along the brick as I struggled. The mortar and baked clay tore a layer of skin away. That flash of pain was easier to focus on than the sounds, the feeling, behind me. I pulled my hips forward, away from him, closing my legs. Another sharp twist of his fist in my hair, a sheet of flaming pain along my scalp, and I lost my balance.

My step caught and damned me, for my legs were open now, and the whole of my torso was pressed to the wall.

His hand on my cunt again. He pushed my soaked underwear to the side. He lowered himself; he was too tall to fuck me if I was flat footed. I'd not seen his cock this whole time, but I felt it now, the tip pushing at me, growing slick with the arousal dripping from my pussy.

"Oh God," I said, looking up at the featureless red brick and the unmoving, prussian blue of the July sky. "Oh Paul, don't do this. You've made your point."