Last Date

This was our last date. Our first and last date. The band played slowly, a waltz, and as we spiralled together, our hands clutched each other, defying our imminent separation, our closeness its cruellest reminder. This was our last date.

We were in the same class at University, both studying English for wont of a more specific subject and, at first, this was the source of the hesitancy that characterised our relationship. After all, what could be more uncomfortable than having a failed relationship with someone you would see for another four years?

I still remember my first sight of her. It happened in our second of four years at University. She was shorter than I, perhaps two inches under my 5’ 11”. She had shoulder length black hair that fell luminously to just beyond her shoulders. Her eyes were dark and framed by slender-rimmed glasses, her mouth was a pale red. We had been in a tutorial, its subject Dante. Appropriate, then, that here I had found my Beatrice.

Her voice was coolly English, a gem unflawed with a regional impurity. That’s not to say it lacked emotion - every word she spoke embraced multitudes. A burble of laughter in every syllable when she was amused, tight exasperation when she was in a temper and, best of all, genuine pleasure when she saw you. Whenever I said hello to her, her reply was enough to banish even the worst bad mood. When I first heard her speak, though, it was in anger.

There’s no greater hive of mediocrity than a University, where the majority of every class is made of inferior minds who attend because, like prisoners, they cannot exist without the routine - school, in this case - they have followed for 13 years. One of them had just said, of Dante’s Divine Comedy, that it was meaningless reading such a work nowadays - times had changed and it was now irrelevant. The usual banality of what might be called Pop Idol culture.

Celestine - not her real name, but what else can I call an angel - was furious, her cheeks turning the pale pink of her lips. “How the hell can you say that? His imagery, his themes… they’re unmatched in literature.” The lecturer supervising the tutorial clearly agreed. The frown he had worn when the first student had spoken had been replaced with a pleased look.

There’s something perverse in me, and something arrogant, and it was this element of my character that made me reply: “But then, is it worth reading it in anything other than Italian? Look how, when rendered in English, so much of the work’s subtlety is despoiled, in, say, the canto of Inferno dealing with traitors.” My redeeming quality is that I can usually present my brasher statements with enough humour to render them palatable. The lecturer and Celestine smiled. The other student, who presumably hadn’t heard of the poem before the class, covered his look of bemusement with an attempt at superiority.

Of course, the other reason I had made my highly academic comment had been the feeling when I had seen Celestine, rising from the sea of students like a messiah. It was a romantic cliché. My heart shuddered desperately as my blood turned solid and my chest seemed to shrink until air and life were reduced to a moment. My legs had felt strange, not as though turned to water, thank god, but as if a surfeit of electrical energy seared my nerves and invigorated them at the same time, making every motion both clumsy and over-responsive.

That was our first meeting, and it was where I fell in love with her. That statement is absurd - it insults love to claim that the lifelong bond developed between two people whose temperaments, natures and intellects mesh so perfectly that in the end they are one entity trying to dissolve their unnatural separation in the poor solution of sex. I’ve always loved easily, becoming entranced by the curve of a neck or the sound of a laugh or the variations in an expressive face until the next sea change of my life carries me away to some new infatuation. Perhaps it is most true to say that it was at first sight that I sensed I could love this woman.

Over the next two years we grew closer. We began by talking after class, then sitting together in it. We’d go for coffee together between lectures and write our essays side by side at the University computers. Superficially it may seem surprising that, with what I felt for her, nothing happened in those two years. But lacking the contrivances of an erotic fiction, nothing did. Both she and I were quite shy.

Celestine had had few boyfriends, her beauty putting some men off and her lack of awareness of said beauty colouring her impressions of what the men who asked her to accompany them to dinners and movies wanted. Perhaps she wondered if some malicious acquaintance had spread rumours that she was easy and that made her colder on her few dates than she would otherwise have been.

As for myself, my tendency to set the woman I truly felt something for upon unassailable pedestals meant I had as few serious relationships in my past as Celestine. I am reasonably attractive: quite tall and well built, the muscles of my limbs move sleekly beneath my clothes and my face is quite handsome, my best feature being perhaps my grey blue eyes. In my first two years of study I was pragmatic and, like all young men, in a state of near constant horniness - the mere sight of a smooth swell of breast in a low cut top, or a dance of nipple beneath sheer fabric, or the firm curve of an ass cupped in tight jeans, or a thousand other minor erotic flutters was enough to send the blood raging to my cock. But these encounters were either short affairs - a few nights after a drunken seduction in a club - or of maximum duration a few weeks, when, perhaps out of loneliness or convenience, I would seduce some girl whom, though I did not love, I did not tire of as quickly as my one night stands.

So she had never asked a boy out and I could never approach my Goddess with so coarse a request as “Hey Celestine, you feel like having dinner with me tonight?”

We knew, though, what we felt for each other. It was there in the way my voice thickened when I spoke about her. In the way she would look up when I entered a room and smile… no, not smile butbeam. She lit up the room then with her beauty. But we lacked the confidence to articulate what our behaviour conveyed so clearly.

Our friends saw it too. Initially I could sense mine’s bafflement that I didn’t ask Celestine out, and hers anger at the way I appeared to be leading her on. For them understanding came quickly - this slow romance would not end with a wedding or a storm, but with a quiet parting.

Time, too, became an obstacle. As we spent more time together, our friendship became a barrier to anything more intimate, as the plain walls of familiarity present too concrete a form for the mystery and shadow of passion.

It is no coincidence that sand is associated with both sleep, as the Sandman, and the passage of time, as in an hourglass. For we pass our lives in dream, seldom conscious for the decisions we make at every moment, our knowledge of consequence hazy as fever. And as when sleeping, some cataclysm must awake us, so our world must be shattered before we realise that with every moment that passes we have one less opportunity to seize that which may make our lives whole.

Revelation came for me in the University café two weeks before graduation, sitting on a couch frayed by time and stained by neglect. Celestine leant against me, sucking the last juice from a carton of Ribena with a lack of sexual awareness bred by long familiarity. I was lifting a bottle of Pepsi to my lips but I paused. I could feel Celestine’s body against my right arm. The soft curve of her left breast pressing innocently against me. Her delicate thighs and calves brushing my plainer legs. The light floral scent of her shampoo and the stronger, sweeter smell of her body wash but beneath that the rawer, sensual smell of her body, for which a thousand metaphors suggest themselves but none truly fit. It was the smell of her sacred flesh.

And I realised that in two weeks, I would never see her again.

Hilariously, bitterly, like laughing until acid tears burned your eyes and scarred their way down your face, now my silence was not through hesitance or friendship but through lack of inspiration. What words could I summon to my cause? What could I possibly say? “I love you and we’re going our separate ways in two weeks.”

My silence persisted until the day of graduation, bleakly shading my days and my relationships. Inadequate words swelled in my throat, choking me, when I was around Celestine. In my larynx they built, growing until, at last, at the graduation ball, they finally sprung free.

Celestine and I were at the same table. She wore a simple green gown that flattered her figure by showing how little help it needed to stun anybody. Or perhaps I’m biased. I was hypnotised by her, her dark eyes like cooling lava, her skin pale and flawless, her hair liquid darkness. The words came. I got up, grabbed her and took her outside.

The moon was new, perhaps, I thought, signalling a new beginning in my relationship with Celestine. The dark was almost complete, dark enough that even Celestine’s radiance could not dispel it. For this I was grateful - if I had to watch her reaction as I spoke, I might freeze again. Above us, the stars’ flickering white light speckled through the cloud haze and blessed us.

“Celestine, there’s something I need to say.” She went to say something, but looking at me fell silent. “Since the moment I met you, I’ve loved you. I couldn’t say anything before. Ironic - a literature student not being able to find the words. But over the last few weeks, realising I was going to lose you… and then tonight. Looking at you tonight, I knew if I didn’t tell you how I felt, I would regret it forever.”

I looked her in the eyes, and forced the emotion out of my voice until I could say, with ringing clarity, “Celestine, I love you.”

The light of the stars glinted in the moisture of her eyes. “Oh Roland, I…I feel the same way. I was just so afraid to spoil what we had… I didn’t know you felt the same way.”

I gently brushed the tears from her eyes. She recovered and looked back at me calmly.

“So what now?” I asked.

“We go back inside, Roland, and finish our first date.”

“Our last date.”

She smiled sadly, and, looking up, her white teeth flashed even in the little illumination around us. “Tonight is a night for endings,” she said, “and perhaps this is one. But let’s not admit it yet, if it is.”

And so we danced. As the hands circled the clock, so we circled the floor, and as the hours peeled away, so did our fellow dancers until only Celestine’s and my feet moved over the polished wooden floor. We pressed close, our bodies trying to memorise each other’s feel. Our hands wandered over each other and lingered. Our eyes were closed the better to let sensation rule.

But inevitably the musicians stopped and the lights, already dim, darkened further. It was time to leave.

It was to her flat that we went, almost silently, but with eloquent gestures along the way. We held hands and wandered slowly, enjoying the magic time between evening and morning when the world existed for only the two of us. She took me into her bedroom and pushed me back until I sat on her bed, with Celestine standing in front of me.

“I said this was a night of endings and this is one of them. I don’t want to be a virgin anymore.”

With that she slipped the dress of her shoulders, from where it sussurated to the floor. Her underwear soon joined the dress and she held back from me, nervous as she let me scrutinise her body. It was flawless.

This was to be her first time and because of that I gave thanks for every other girl I’d had. For the techniques I had learnt and the familiarity with the act that would allow me to slowly consummate my relationship with Celestine, making her first time as perfect as possible.

And slowly I went, eking every molecule of pleasure from every region of her flesh as best I could. I built up to that old familiar act, when finally I penetrated her, telling her that, when she felt that brittle snap as her hymen broke, she was to pinch me as hard as she could. This she did and I felt glad that I was able to share her pain. I kept up my slow pace as she climaxed again and again, until finally I could hold on no longer and finished in an orgasm purer and more intense than I had conceived possible.

Like a child with a new toy, Celestine was eager to explore every possible aspect of this act and this we attempted as the dawn invaded our sensual island and shattered the fortress holding back time.

But we could only escape real life for so long and in two days of shared sweat, of semen and of that more sacred fluid which our language is too wise to have a word for, our time was up. Celestine had to travel for a job interview, which she was almost certain to get and which would, if she did get it, start immediately. I would be starting my own job soon in, of all places, another country, and another continent.

I took her to the train station and again we held hands. We had each had to pack, and wrap up the last details of our old lives. I had found time to go to a rare bookshop whose owner had become a friend of mine. At the station as the train pulled in I gave Celestine her present.

“Open it when you’re on the train,” I said.

“Roland…” she began, her voice holding tears back with an effort. I stopped her with our last kiss. Our last kiss.

“This is our ending,” I said, “and there are no words that would encompass it.”

She grabbed me, violent and desperate, and I could feel her tears on my cheeks.

“Roland…Roland.”

There were tears in my eyes now. “At least we had some time together.”

The train was getting ready to leave, and though I was tempted to hold her here, keep her for even only another hour, I knew that this was the best ending we could have. I forced her to board and pressed my hand against the window where she sat, only lifting it when the train’s motion carried it past the end of the platform and I could no longer follow it.

The book I gave Celestine was an Italian Divine Comedy. I had thought long about what to write in it, conjuring much purple prose comparing our coupling to Paradise, our parting to Inferno and our lost years as Purgatory. In the end, I followed the writer’s dictum and went for simplicity:

“This is what we were reading when I realised I would love you for ever.”

I left the station and discovered, when I put my hands into my coat, a book there. It was not wrapped and I saw it was a plain paperback edition of a miraculous book - Paradise Lost, by Milton. I opened it in a fever, desperate to see if she too had some last words too private to speak even to the air. She did.

“Roland,

We can never know what happens next.

But what I do know is that with each year the world becomes much smaller. And that the only thing that is impossible is that anything is impossible.

I will love you until all love dies,

Celestine.”

It has been two years since our perfect parting and, as we knew would happen, we have lost touch as our contact information has been lost in the electric effluvia generated by our lives.

But two hopes remain: memory, which can conjure the taste of Celestine’s body from the mingled aromas of a grocer’s stall, or the sound of her voice in the flutter of a brook over pebbles shaped by decades; and that electric feeling that still possesses me completely when I see a flash of dark hair, a particular walk, any of a million echoes of Celestine in her pale imitations inhabiting the metropolis I live in. Perhaps, someday…

The End

Dedication and Author’s Note

This story is for three people. It is for my good friend Zoe, who has an unaccountable faith in me. It is for another friend of mine, who did not want to be named and whom I thanked previously by the pseudonym Michael. And finally, and most importantly, it is for Celestine.

This is somewhat different from my usual stories, and I hope you’ll forgive the difference, as this story is perhaps the most personal I’ve ever written. As such, I’d love to know what you thought of it and feedback is desperately craved at the link below.

At the moment I think this may be the last “erotic” story I write, at least for a while. If that should be the case, I hope those of you who have read them have enjoyed them as much as I enjoyed writing them.