Friction

"Mmm. Just what I always wanted." That’s what you said to me. You breathed it into my ear the first time I let you have me.

"About time." That’s what I said. Maybe. That’s what I wanted to say but I’m not sure if the sounds ever came out. It was an emotional moment, I was very distracted.

You came to my hotel room at night, in secret, like a burglar. A house-breaker. Home-wrecker, heart-breaker, all of the above. My hotel room reminded you of old times. Lots of them, little arrogant notches carved into bedposts from Angel to Marble Arch. You came in through the window and we had beer and conversation and sex. After months and months of denying ourselves that pleasure...but I always knew. I knew what you really wanted, in spite of your protestations to the contrary. Whenever you dropped your guard, I was there to pick it up. I just followed your trail of little inconsistencies and it lead to me face down on a beige veneer counter with your fingers roughly exploring my body. I put it together, two plus two, and I knew it would add up to me and you eventually.

It’s funny how things work out. That’s what I thought last week when I came round to visit you and we were left alone together. It’s funny where my mind wanders when you’re sitting on my face. It didn’t feel wrong. It didn’t feel like me leading you astray again. It felt good, like it always does. It felt like you coming and me swallowing. It felt like your fresh cream dribbling onto my lips as I lay there with my thumb up your arse and my tongue in your cunt. I thought, what is heaven like if this isn’t it?

I thought it would be awful, after that first time, because we are so wrong together in every single other way, and we’ve never been anything less than complicated. I thought there would be guilt – great crashing supertankers of it, disgorging their poisonous contents blackly through the rip we’d made in reality. I thought some terrible confusion would sink you. I thought that she’d know straight away – see my name written all over your face. Smell me on your hands. See the fading scratches that I screamed across your shoulders and cried, writhing, all down your back.

We had beer and conversation and the room got smaller and tighter and darker and hotter with every look we held. The beer ran out and so did the words and then there was only the tension. The same tension that’s been there since Day One, the day I met you: an invisible friend, always loitering between us. A thing we studiously ignore. Finally I asked if you had noticed it. I asked you if you could feel it.

You shrugged, and I almost left it there…except my eyes met yours and in that soft stare I saw straight through you. It was as clear as day, after that. Slow motion. Zoom in. Action.

You joined me on the bed without a word. I put my fingers to the pulse in your neck and felt that tension racing there. Your hand came over mine and held it to the vein. "So what’s that all about?" I could barely breathe to ask, and you had nothing to say in reply. But you did reply. Your lips moved and you showed me. You left by the window and the first rays of morning. I couldn’t eat or sleep for weeks. We had opened a door and we could not close it; we’d blown the lid right off Pandora’s little box. Once is never enough with someone like you, you are the kind of situation that escalates.

But it is funny how things work out. It must be said, such familiarity does breed a certain degree of contempt. This afternoon I was asleep before you even roared out of the carpark, and I wasn’t dreaming of you. I think I’ve exploited your weakness long enough. I’m afraid my bag of sweets is almost empty now, little girl.

Oh, I know, but life's like that so what can I do? Every new trick becomes an old dog eventually. Besides, I need to meet someone special to call my own. I need to be the centre of someone’s world again instead of an optional extra. How wonderful must it be to have a partner who dotes and is devoted; who only has eyes for their chosen one? I can’t remember what that’s like.

Perhaps I’ll ask your lovely wife when she comes to see me later tonight, in my hotel room. She knows a thing or two about commitment, doesn’t she?