Cosh

One thing she had learned was to expect imperfection. Every bloke alive had nasty tendencies, no matter how well some managed to disguise or sublimate them. She found things in Cosh's mouth that she didn't like – he had a dangerously high opinion of himself, for one – but decided that they were outweighed by the quality she also found there. His breath was thick and bitter like stout and just as potent. He didn't overreact at the onset of their embrace, preferring, like she did, to let it build, see where it ended up. She kept her eyes open throughout, taking him in, feature by feature – his lips, the hollowing of his cheeks, the angle at which his neck was crooked.

She touched his face away from hers and ran her hands down his shirtfront. When she looked down into the diminished space between them, she saw that they were still dancing. The rhythm to which their bodies moved was no longer an external thing. Now it seemed to be generated by that same movement, but deeper than before, funkier. The bass that set the glasses behind the bar to trembling was sent down into the floor from inside them. His whole body pulsed beneath her hands.

He lifted her chin with one finger and kissed her again, undoing the button of her blazer. The strangeness of him left her mouth tasting like the blood of rare meat. This time she got a bare sense of his tongue, more a reminder of its presence than the type of flailing shark attack that left her with a desperate desire to wash her face. If it wasn't sex, would a person be so full-on? Amazing how quickly people forgot their manners. That frenzied business – all that bustle and whingeing – that people saw in porn and felt obliged to imitate had always seemed to her a regression to the indignity of childhood tantrums. They called it adult but it was anything but. To be adult, you had to be patient, willing to dispense with instant gratification. The pleasure was all in the gradual letting go. And Cosh seemed to understand this as well as she did.

His hands touched the tight silk about her waist like it was something precious. She could feel every groove of every finger much as she discovered a world of contrasts in the texture of his lips. Her groin rode up and down the bone of his thigh, greedy for its hardness, as he moved his hands down, one to each buttock, and lifted her towards his crotch.

'You okay?' he said.

'I'm okay.'

They had been moving backwards all the while and had now reached the furniture at the edge of the dance-floor. Cosh sat into the chair he lifted down one-handed and placed his hands on her hips, spinning her around until she had her back to him. She looked straight ahead at the empty stage at the opposite end of the room, glad to be done with pretence for a while. It felt lovely to let her eyes close, to exult in his adoration of her physique, the knowledge that the arse and hips she detested could be as yet a source of wonder. Her descent into his lap took seconds but it felt like much longer. Who knew where this would end up? That the fingers that guided her down towards him had throttled Argie conscripts and cut the ears from their corpses for souvenirs made her both nauseated and intrigued. You have a killer's hand upon your thigh and it feels so right, like the best thing ever. She thought about the scar on his stomach and wondered if he was being entirely truthful about how he had come to have it. As their bodies docked, she saw herself kissing it, running her tongue along its length, her pleasure at the thought enhanced by the knowledge that anything was possible, that now she could search for hints of its origin with the meat of her own mouth.

You won't fucking lie to me, sweetheart. I want to know every scrap of you.

She sat forward to allow him to take off her blazer and on her return found that his mouth was there already, exactly where she had thought it would be. The move was almost too slick. She squirmed down into the hollow of his crotch, gratified by the hardness she discovered there. Nothing more disappointing, she thought, than those promising build-ups that rapidly deteriorated, ardour divorced from ability. There was more to sex to penetration but it was reassuring to know that it was on the agenda.

In the distance, she heard the music fade out, leaving a silence broken only by the soft clicking of their joined mouths and the rustle of pawed fabric. Without breaking the kiss, she hoisted a leg and swung her body around until she was straddling him, humping his crotch until she found a groove of him that suited her. The exalted position occupied by her body in their arrangement excited her as did the look of seeming confusion on the face she held between her hands.

-You know what you're doing to me? said his expression.

The chair creaked beneath them, one leg screaming against the stone floor as their fervour jerked them backwards. Cosh kissed her breast through the silk of her top, his hands huge upon the cheeks of her arse, meeting the force of its agitation with a countervailing pressure that she could already see as half-moons of bruises upon her flanks. She unbuttoned his shirt, surprised at the deftness of her fingers, and after a brief glance behind her, shrugged the straps of her top from either of her shoulders.

As she pushed apart the sides of his shirt, she felt the trickle of silk over her breasts and down her stomach, flowing down her body before pooling at her waist. His flesh, far from being black, was the colour of expensive leather, that of a pair of handmade boots she had bought in Florence. When she had put them on for the first time she had been thrilled by the sense of their former vitality, the quickness of the beast from whose hide the material had been fashioned still evident in their snugness about her calves. Cosh was the same shade of brown but there was nothing illusory about the vigour of his flesh.

He snatched at one bra-covered nipple with her teeth and she pinched both of his in retaliation. It was a moment when things could have gone wrong. Paula felt the danger of the situation becoming distinct from the passion that had concealed it up to that point. Yet no sooner had it become apparent than it was gone. His hand ran up through her hair to envelope the back of her head, pushing her forward on to his contrite mouth.

-I'm sorry.

-No, I am.

The back and forth passed from his tongue to hers and back again, petering out eventually in a reinvigorated ardour that was the sweetness of lovers reconciled. Cosh unclipped her bra and touched her breasts together, kissing both nipples while she ran her hands over his chest, trying to recall if she had ever touched anything as hard as his breastbone or as soft as the flesh that held the scar in its midst. The tips of two of her fingers traced its length, jerking it off like a cock. In her fever, she imagined it was becoming swollen like one and became hungry for the touch of the real thing. She followed the scar to the waistband of his jeans, shifting back her body to allow her to mould the denim about the slab of his cock. Its texture, tangible even through the heavy fabric, filled her mouth with saliva.

Size did nothing for her. It was all about how hard a man could get, whatever his dimensions. Given the choice between a rock-hard pencil dick and the incomplete nature of erection that had been her experience of the well endowed, Paula would have always opted for the former. Twelve inches might have looked impressive but it was called a tool for a reason. There was no point in trying to plough a furrow with a length of garden hose. And though she was told it had nothing to do with her, she always took it personally when a man couldn't get it up fully. I'm giving you permission to be inside of me and that's your response? What the fuck is your problem?

There was no danger of any of that with Cosh. And even though she was enjoying his mouth upon her nipples and the feel of his bared flesh against hers, it was trifling in comparison to the desperate absence she felt between her thighs, a gap that only he could fill. She opened the button of his jeans and unzipped him, then stood up, turning her back to him again, bending her body forward slightly to show her arse at its best as he pulled her slacks down over her hips. Both his hand and hers reached between her legs at the same time, his from the rear, hers from the front, making contact upon the damp facing of her thong. He lifted the string from the crack of her arse and snapped it aside, his fingers reckoning the weight of her pelvis, guided by hers towards the places where she needed to be touched.

'There...'

It sounded more like a plea.

She hadn't realized how wet she was until she heard the slick of his fingers upon her. The slightest pressure was enough to make her lips part in greeting, its rhythm along the length of her reproduced in that she felt moving the bones of her hips. Her hand reached down blindly and found his cock at the first attempt. She drew him out and rubbed the blunt tip against the flesh of her arse, her thigh muscles tightening as she felt the the tip of a finger breach the mouth of her vagina. Work that fucking bone...Cosh knew what he was doing. Another fingertip joined in the coaxing at the underside of her pubis and she knew that she wouldn't need much more. But she wanted to have his cock inside her when she came.

'Do you...?'

'Wait.'

Paula heard him searching in his jacket and then the rip of foil. Falling to her knees, she took the rubber from him, breathing hard as she looked upon the bliss-struck anguish of his face. His cock was ripped, a violent bruise from head to root. The lips she touched to it before rolling it over in latex were guided as much by a maternal impulse to kiss it better as they were by lust. His shirt fell from his shoulders when he took her arms and helped her up, falling to the ground in the dim light to join her discarded top in an embrace that anticipated the contours their own would take. She straddled his thighs, reaching down for his cock, now at ground zero beneath her crosshairs. His tongue licked along her stomach and up to her breast as she eased her body down on to his, wincing as the initial smart of penetration and her distaste for the feel of condoms gave way to the ecstasy of the stretch. She kissed him, her knuckles skull white upon the curved back of the chair. Cosh held her hips steady, raising his body slightly to give her the bare tip of his cock, his eyes imploring her to help him out. Their bodies hit a rhythm, an alternate rise and fall that would have appeared negligible to an onlooker.

But it doesn't need to be dramatic, she thought. Only a touch. He knows it as well as I do.

She felt the question mark forming somewhere deep inside her, coiling about her womb like a feather boa. Coming was a mass of contradictions – density and weightlessness, control and impotence, tension and unravelling. She felt them all at once as Cosh pushed a fraction deeper into her vagina with a showbiz buck of the hips and she greeted the augmented stretch of her insides with a powerful grip and release. Her pussy could be a moody cow if she felt herself getting the wrong sort of attention. A clumsy touch, a lack of respect...blokes, hardwired to delivery rather than receipt, couldn't possibly understand. To them it was a simple matter of jamming it into a hole, one that Paula suspected made a lot of them a bit squeamish, in spite of their avowals of its beauty. They only acknowledged the absence they plumbed, unable (how could it be otherwise?) to appreciate its dual nature as both a lack and a presence, a conscious, physical part of a woman's body. Perhaps it wasn't surprising, given the poor bitch's history of being constantly misunderstood, that she had developed issues. The best you could hope for was a degree of empathy. All men wanted to get it in but luckily there were a few who took care to be mindful of their surroundings.

'Be good to me...' she said.

The rhythm modulated, rumba to salsa. Paula nipped at the underside of his earlobe as his hands slipped underneath her arse, his shoulders tightening as he took the full weight of her. She increased the friction upon his cock, feeling the pleasure of clawing at an itch with bloody nails. The irritation ran deep, through muscle and blood and into the core of her bones until it seemed that the only thing to bring relief would be the turning inside out she felt herself undergoing. Cosh buried himself to the root in her, the muscle of his pelvis working hard to keep his cock inside her as her contracting vagina made to heave him out. She transmitted the critical tension that petrified her body to his via the fingertips that gouged the flesh of his back. Half blind, she saw him laughing, although not entirely with joy. Her climax was a monster. You couldn't blame a man for being a bit intimidated.

She came again as he kissed her, relishing the change in the balance of power. He was strong but at that moment, she was stronger. She felt a trace of malice that devolved into pity and finally into the same heatwave of affection she had felt earlier when watching him return from the bar. He was her man. You got one or two in an otherwise exasperating lifetime and you cherished every second you spent with them, all the good things that only your man could make you feel. Sex was just one part of it. To trust somebody absolutely and to know that he felt the same way about you could be as much, if not more, of a pleasure.

Cosh became tense beneath her restless haunches, the subtle realignment she felt in his axis telling her that his coming was imminent. Fuck the fucking rubber, she thought. Her annoyance was tinged with self-pity, so great was her desire to feel the full impact of his coming inside her, every flicker of heat, every spasm of propulsion. But she would make him come anyway. She wanted him to.

Her hands cupped his face and she breathed upon his mouth as she began to buck her hips, riding the length of him with slow and thorough undulation. There was no trace left of the slow burn of their initial contact. This was the meat and guts of fucking, the physical expression of raw hunger. Paula bobbed her head in affirmation, goading the animal dilation she saw in his pupils with her own version of the same thing. She smelled the burning sugar of cane fields set ablaze above the scent of a thing she couldn't put a name to, but which made her think of wild cats and the compulsion to fuck amidst the rotten tarmac and pineapple weed of a lane at the rear of a row of council houses. Meanwhile, Seb typed out a put-down to a rhythmical ignoramus; Charlotte flushed hot and cold in the course of a series of increasingly salacious IM's; and beneath the earth of East Acton, Paula kissed her lover as he came...

She wasn't sure which of them started laughing first. Cosh's laugh was Sid James dirty, impossible to resist. Her eyes streamed and she had to wrap her legs around him to prevent herself falling to the ground, a prospect which made her even more hysterical. It was beautiful and ridiculous. She tried to stay serious as they kissed but could only manage a few seconds before her mouth exploded away from his and they were both off again, worse than before.

'Saskia...'

The falsehood hung in the air. It sobered her up. How could she lie to him now?

'My name's Paula,' she said. 'I lied to you. I don't know why. I'm sorry.'

'It don't matter. Everyone lies to everyone. I know who you are. It don't matter what you call yourself.'

Her cheek found the crook of his neck and their bodies became still.

'Paula.' He laughed. 'Pleased to meet you. Actually, it figures. You look like Paula.'

'What's she look like?'

'You looked sad. When I used to see you.'

'I didn't think you were looking.'

'It's hard not to. You should know that.'

She heard the murmur of voices from beyond the double doors.

'Do they know what we're doing in here?' she said.

'We're dancing. You said you wanted to dance.'

'I did. And I do.'

*

The cab pulled away and Paula looked at her phone. 8.40. She was only forty minutes late. Inside the restaurant, Saskia was drunk already, having come straight from an exhibition opening. Red wine. She had a rim around her mouth.

It was all over with Patrick, apparently.

'Patrick's a cunt,' said Saskia. 'You do something to your hair? You look different. Pretty.'

Paula winced and made shush motions, noticing Robin looking over at them in concern.

'I got highlights. Why don't you have some water?'

Paula tried to keep the conversation unsensational but all roads eventually led back to Patrick.

'We stick to our own, babes.' Saskia nodded definitively. 'That's the way God intended.'

"Intended" came out with a train of superfluous d's.

Halfway through her starter, she started to cry.

'Don't.' Paula touched her hand, conscious of the swish of disapproving linen on every side. Fuck them...

'Next time we should go somewhere else,' she said.

'I hate this place,' said Saskia. 'I hate my life.'

You have Matt. The boys. They love you. It's not all bad.'

'I just want to be happy..'.

Saskia's face crumpled in anguish. Give it some time and they'd be right back at this point. Another bloke, another catastrophe, another public meltdown. Paula took her hand.

'Let's get out of here,' she said.

When the cab arrived, the driver took one look at Saskia and refused to take them.

'She won't get sick, I promise,' said Paula. 'She'll pass out. She always does.'

'On your head,' he said. He took the extra score she offered him. 'Where to?'

'Richmond. Then back to Chiswick.'

Saskia was asleep before they reached the Hammersmith flyover, her head lolling against Paula's upper arm. Paula made several attempts to move it but gave up in the end and let it stay where it was. She put her arm around Saskia's shoulders, looking down at the the city below them as they headed west. It was hard to be angry with her. She brought all that grief on herself and, being Saskia, would continue to do so. But maybe, some day, she'd find the thing she was after; that raw, transfiguring moment that made a lifetime of striving and disappointment worthwhile. If it hadn't been for Saskia, would she have taken that step herself?

Matt was aghast but resigned when he saw what fetched up on his doorstep.

'I'd love to stay but I can't,' said Paula. She transferred Saskia from her shoulder to his. 'The meter's running. Give the boys a hug from me.'

Back in the cab again she said, 'Scratch Chiswick. Ealing Broadway station.'

Now that the soiling threat had receded, her driver softened. He started an entirely predictable monologue about the riots. Shoot to kill. Throw away the key. Conscription. Send the fucking toerags to Afghanistan...Paula made assenting noises as her thumb skittered about the screen of her phone but she was only half listening. He was an army fetishist, like nearly every other bloke was that year. Worse than Eyeties, her Dad used to say. All mouth and no bottle.

She finished her message and took her compact from her bag, dropping it when her phone buzzed sooner than she had expected. He was on his way back from Heathrow. Might be held up. No matter. She'd wait.

A lone gypsy woman was begging at the railings in front of the station. Paula threw her a pound coin to preempt hassle and went to wait at the bus stop. Ealing was post-traumatic calm but she didn't buy it. The physical damage had been repaired but there were still traces – a semi-effaced scorch mark in the road, splinters of broken glass in the debris at her feet. Nearly all of the Clockwork Orange type stuff that had been reported during the riots had turned out to be fantasy but it said a lot about a certain type of person and their worst fears. She had been prepared to kill that Monday night had anyone tried to get into the house where they were watching TV and monitoring Twitter feeds in disbelief.