Sarah and Stevie

Her husband dropped her at the gates to the spa, skidding off unceremoniously within seconds. His Toyota Yaris has been blocking the small country lane, and an angry gammon of a man in a white Range Rover had quickly become abusive at the delay that they were causing. She managed to shout "I love you" over the passenger seat, and her husband had waved back, but that was that, Sarah was on her own in the rain, a small wheeled suitcase by her side.

"Lovely," she said aloud.

She reached into her pocket for her packet of Richmonds, and produced a cigarette. Yes, it was raining, but she'd also been cooped up in the car for close to an hour. After several minutes of listening to the rain drops drip onto the fat leaves of the enormous trees, another car speeding past in the narrow lane brought her back to reality, and she turned towards the spa.

The wheeled suitcase was borderline useless on the crunching gravel. As she walked towards the building, ground level spotlights cast the structure in a yellow glow. It was beginning to grow dark, and the bright light highlighted the age of the place. It was a grand building, like a country house, but also imposing in its own way. A large sign read: "Sycamore Hall: Restaurant & Spa Hotel".

Sarah had been the first of her friends to get married. Others had children, but she was the first to have taken the plunge into the true binding contract of love that was marriage. Her own wedding had been only four months ago, so Daniel was trundling along at a close second.

Daniel was due to marry his partner Andrew in less than two weeks. Always the flamboyant one, he had set the location for his own joint stag / hen party at a secluded country spa. Sarah imagined that it would be very relaxing, but part of her had hoped - no, wanted - one last mad night on the town like in the old days. Alas, it was not to be.

It dawned on her suddenly that she had not seen some of the people who had been invited tonight for several years. She wondered how many of them would bother to actually show up. Time had a way of distancing people, often permanently, and the rooms at the spa were not cheap.

A concierge dressed head to foot in burgundy ran out to take her luggage as she approached the large, flat steps that ascended to the main entrance. Two grand old oak doors flanked a more modern glass front, both of which were held open by heavy metal hooks. Hot air was blowing down from heaters in the ceiling, taking away the brisk chill of the evening.

"Please, let me take that, Madame," the man purred, whisking away her comically small one night's worth of luggage as if it were a priceless stone. He began clopping back up the steps.

"Oh cheers, pal," she said, following him up into the foyer.

The interior was obnoxiously grand. Most of the floors and walls were covered in marbled stone - artificial or otherwise - and the reception desk seemed to be cut of the same material. A massive chandelier constructed of seemingly millions of shards of cut glass shone brilliantly in the light. Below it ran a thick red roll of carpet leading to a staircase, and in the corner stood several decadent velvet chairs and a white grand piano, which had its lid propped open but was not in use.

The room Sarah had booked online had been expensive, but even so, the opulence of the place surprised her. She began to feel slightly conscious of herself, having tromped into the foyer in purple Dr. Martens and with half of her head shaved. She pulled her leather jacket more tightly around herself, covering up her self-mutilated Guns 'n' Roses t-shirt.

Everything was already paid for, so after checking her ID with the receptionist, the concierge carried her luggage and showed her to the room. It was all the way down a long corridor; up the grand staircase and all the way to the end, number 119. The concierge opened the door for her, and disappeared with a little bow.

The room continued much in the same vein of opulence as the rest of the establishment, with marbled features and slashes of red carpet about the place. The bed, a grand king, looked big enough to sleep four people.

Dropping her luggage to the floor, Sarah ran and jumped head first onto the covers, lying face down and inhaling their fresh scent. It was so comfortable...

There was a knock at the door. Shit, she had fallen asleep! Sarah sprang off the bed almost as fast as she had jumped onto it. Had she been out an hour? Or five minutes? Brushing her brown hair out of her face, she opened the door.

"Sarah, darling!"

It was Daniel.

"Oh my life!" Sarah shouted back.

The pair hugged excessively.

"I was beginning to wonder where you were," Daniel explained, inviting himself into the room, "when you didn't answer your phone I checked with reception to see whether my favourite guest had arrived yet and a quick nibble on that cute bell boy's ear later, he told me that you were in room 119, and here I am!"

Daniel had on a red Hawaiian shirt, sandals and grey shorts. He looked like he was on holiday in Majorca. He shrugged and showed his hands.

"The concierge?" Sarah asked, putting her hand to her mouth, "you didn't?"

Daniel waved a hand.

"Oh please, he wishes," he laughed, "that boy is further in the closet than I was when I was 15, besides, I'm a taken man these days."

He positively glowed when he spoke the final words. Sarah half expected him to do a twirl.

"Argh!" she scrunched up her nose and waved her hands, "I'm so excited for you mate, I could die!"

Daniel mocked a faint, raising his hand to his brow, and flicking his shaggy black hair.

"Oh, don't die, darling," he pleaded, "at least not just yet. We need to get our vino on, then get our gin on, and hit the spa, girlfriend!"

"So who's here, then?" she asked him, "where's the gang?"

"All downstairs waiting, of course!" he beamed, "Unfortunately Ashley couldn't make it, but Leah is here, some of Andrews boys from work, Greg and Mark are their names, Jade is here too and so is Stevie."

There it was. The gut punch. Subconsciously, she had been expecting it. She had been trying with all her will to blot it out, but of course it came anyway, right on cue at the mention of her name. Stevie.

She hadn't seen her now in... was it 8 years? Or 9? It was a full decade since they spent that summer together. That one summer. The one that Sarah always thought back to. It never left her. It had been on her mind particularly frequently this year too, for the whole summer past. It had been 10 years now since it had all happened.

It was during that fateful summer that Sarah found out that she liked girls as well as boys. Her and Stevie had been friends for a long time before anything had happened, but a sticky July night and an ungodly amount of vodka found the pair of friends getting a little closer than expected. Sarah could still remember the first time their lips locked, her first greedy handful of another girl's breasts, the wetness on her fingers... the escapades of those two months flashed across her mind.

Reality swam back in.

"Are you okay, darling?" Daniel asked, tilting his head like a dog.

"Of course, dude," Sarah replied, giving a thumbs up.

"Fab!" Daniel said, "So, the plan is to hit the spa first, get all unwound in the steam rooms and sauna, as they close that down at six. Then we gonna go get some nice food and get our drink on, girl! You with me?"

Sarah gave her most enthusiastic "fuck yeah" before high-fiving her old friend. They kissed on the cheek and hugged again before he left. She was to meet them in ten minutes outside the spa and they would all go inside together.

"By the way," Daniel informed her as he was half out of the door, "nobody is wearing swimsuits, because we are all fucking fabulous, okay? Greg and Mark are hung like oxen and I want an eyeful of that before I tie the knot, you feel me? So get comfortable, girl."

Minutes later, she was scrutinising her body nude in one of the room's full length mirrors. She had no problem being naked in front of people, not at all, but Stevie's presence left a knot forming in her stomach. They hadn't spoke in nearly 10 years, and they were going to meet for the first time since... whilst nude. Great. If anything, you had to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

She studied herself from head to toe. Every perfect flaw and feature. She loved her tits, ample as they were for a girl of her frame. She pawed at them. They hung voluminously, with fat, protruding nipples standing to attention. Those, she was proud of. Down she went though, down her body, with her continuing self scrutiny. She couldn't find much to be upset about, which was a nice feeling. She hated her feet though, she thought, as she reached the end of her study. Wiggling her toes, she wondered how people could ever get off on feet.

The next few moments she spent focussing on her face. More so, how her mousy brown hair framed her face. The tips had been given an ombré of golden blonde, but this has started to fade. She wanted to look good, at least on first impression, to the friends and lovers she had not seen in so long. Dark wings of mascara flared off from her eyes, and a thin layer of foundation lay on her olive skin. A small scar from a facial piercing just above her lips told its own story.

She winked at herself in the mirror. Then she poked out her tongue. Fuck it, she thought.

Armed with a towel, and wrapped in one of the spa's complimentary white dressing gowns, she locked her room and headed back downstairs. The receptionist - a slimy looking man with too much hair gel - gave her a strange look, but then pointed in the direction which she needed to go.

Turning a corner, and then other, the red carpet fell away, leaving just the marbled floor. The air grew hot, and there was a subtle rumbling in the distance. The stone remained cool beneath her feet as she padded down the hallway. A smoked glass door lay before her, which she reached out and opened, and there they stood, nattering and clucking like chickens.

"Sarah!"

Jade was the first to hug her, followed by Leah. Perhaps it was rather catty of her, but Sarah immediately thought how funny it was that the pair of them had put on a fair bit of weight. Sarah had looked better than ever, or so she felt. Leah held the weight better than Jade, but they had both changed substantially in the year or so since they had last met. They exchanged pleasantries and fawned over each other for a few moments.

Daniel stood with the two men, Mark and Greg, who awkwardly waved in unison. They both had cropped dark hair and thick eye brows, and could have been twins. They were nude, save for a towel about their waists.

And there, in the corner, again wrapped only in a towel, was Stevie. She, arguably, looked mostly the same as she always had; her face peppered with piercings, big blue eyes and black eyebrows. Streamers of dirty blonde hair framed her face, which were tipped off with oceanic blue dye. She was fairly slim and petit, and quite short. Sarah noticed that she still had those same dimples around her knees. The nail polish she wore on her fingers and toes matched the highlights in her hair. Sarah couldn't decide if it was cute, or trashy.

"Hi Stevie," she said, plainly.

Stevie smiled.

"Hi Sarah, long time no see," she responded with a dry, flat tone, as if she was purposefully trying not to reveal how she was feeling.

Sensing some sort of tension, although probably a bit unsure in regards to which kind, Daniel waved his hands about for attention.

"So then, ladies and gentlemen, if you would follow me," he said, trotting off into the steam, with Greg and Mark at his heels.

The spa was in fact a small but densely packed maze of facilities, compared to the sprawling size of the whole building. An empty massage room spun off to the immediate left, and then ahead were the sauna and steam room both facing each other, one with its arid wood seats plainly visible behind the glass walls, and one with its entire contents obscured by a thick steam. Straight up ahead, was a large 8 person jacuzzi which bubbled away softly. The bath itself had been dropped into a cutting of that same ornate marble stone. It was rougher here on the floors, to prevent slipping, Sarah guessed.

Jade and Leah removed their towels. She saw only their behinds as they opened the sauna room door and stepped inside. Greg and Mark followed suit with removal, hanging theirs on hooks next to the steam room. Sarah noted, with a quick pang in her chest, that they were both chiseled and groomed to perfection, and well hung to boot, as Daniel had promised. However, she also noted, neither of them took as much as a passing glance at the girls who had just bared all and tumbled into the sauna. The duo seemed much more interested in each other, not that this really surprised her.

Greg opened the steam room door, filling the corridor with mist as Stevie turned around and faced Sarah. She was about to remove her own towel, but the way the girl turned on the spot startled her a little. Stevie was staring at her. What the fuck was she playing at? What was her problem? Sarah was about to call her out, the little bitch that she was, when Stevie unhooked her towel and it fell to the floor.

The vivid reveal in reality mingled with a thousand memories flooding back all at once. There it was, that body. Again. Her pert little tits, with her cheeky nipple piercings and freckled chest, that toned stomach, that smooth, hairless... Sarah remembered herself, but it was too late. It had been, what, a second or two? It didn't matter. It was a second or two of weakness. Stevie, unsurprisingly, had clearly seen Sarah looking, and had a wicked grin painted on her face. She'd planned this, surely. The fog from the steam room had now as much as engulfed the vixen as she spun on her heel and entered the sauna with the other girls. Sarah did not see the door close, but she heard it.

So that's how she wants to play it, Sarah thought. Not a word for 9 fucking years, and now these games? She was glad that she'd dumped the bitch and moved on. Sarah harrumphed, flung her towel to the tiles, and marched into the steam room with the three guys instead.

As she closed the door, she could here kissing and giggling from an obscured corner. She paid the men no mind, fumbling for a spare seat. She sat, and the warm plastic cupped at her bare bottom.

"Wise choice," Daniel said out of somewhere in the fog, "I'd stay over there, out of the way; these two are getting rather animated over here. I fear I may be caught in the middle, darling. If I get any crossfire, promise you won't tell my future husband? I did go down fighting!"

All the men giggled like teenagers.

"You'll never change, Danny boy," she laughed.

He did not respond. He had clearly gone down without much of a fight. She put her head back against the wall of the steam room, and closed her eyes. The lighting was low anyway, and all it did was turn the steam into an orange fog. She enjoyed the heat on her skin. The steam seemed to free up her breathing, open her pores, clear her mind.

After an hour or so in the spa, they all returned to their rooms to change before heading down to dinner. In lieu of spending another hour prepping, Sarah had already taken a quick shower at the spa. Back at her room, she removed and reapplied her eye make up, and dry shampooed her hair. She texted her husband as she sat in her bra before a vanity table, tousling at her mousy brown hair, trying to decide whether to wear it up or down.

She decided on down, letting it fall loose. Ditching the butchered Guns 'n' Roses shirt, she went for a black blouse tucked into high waisted jeans. She kept the Dr. Martens, purely because she hadn't brought any other shoes with her. She couldn't decide between two travel-sized bottles of cologne, before she got angry with herself and tossed them back into her suitcase. Be yourself, girl, she thought. You've got nothing to prove to anyone.

Dinner was uneventful, although she did sink three glasses of white alongside the starter and the main. Sarah had tactfully avoided sitting near Stevie, but the sacrifice meant having to sit instead alongside Jade and Greg, neither of which seemed particularly fussed on making too much conversation.

Daniel spilt half a pint of cider over Mark, which was done is such a ridiculous way Sarah suspected that it may have been done intentionally, but she couldn't think of a good enough reason why he would do so. Mark was hardly going to take his trousers off there in the restaurant.

After the meal, the gang headed to the bar area. Sarah was surprised to find that it was rather busy. There appeared to be a mix of older couples on vacation, or business types that were milking the expense account by staying out somewhere nice in the countryside.

The bar was also probably the one room in the whole estate that did not have any of the marble stone found elsewhere; the luxurious red carpet prevailed, with green leather benches and chairs, and dark wooden tables. The bar itself was also dark wood, with a strip of brass running its full length. The range of spirits available was mind boggling.

Mark bought the whole gang a round of drinks. He appeared to be feeling flush, which impressed Daniel to no end. Stevie milked him for a double gin and tonic, some artsy fartsy shit from Cornwall, which angered Sarah. The gall on this one, she thought. The wine had gone to her own head, so she nursed a single Jack and Coke, which probably didn't cost all that much less than the gin, in reality.

As they all shambled in around a large 8 person table, Sarah took a moment to note how strange her company was. It was a weird combination of people. A lot of friends hadn't come through for Daniel, and the crowd that had was a mixed bag.

She heard the chair next to her being scraped out softly on the plush carpet, and then someone sat down.

"Hi Sarah,"

It was Stevie.

Sarah wanted to curl up into a ball, but the wine had made her bold, so she turned to face her ex.

"Steve,' she acknowledge, formally.

"You alright?" Stevie asked immediately, "You've been really quiet."

She batted her eyelashes.

Sarah ran her fingers through the condensation forming on the outside of her glass.

"Haven't really got anything to say, love," Sarah said, "I'm here for Daniel."

Stevie leaned back. Sitting sideways on her chair so that she was facing Sarah, she slung one of her arms over the back of the seat.

"You don't even wanna talk? After all this time?" She asked.

Sarah sighed.

"Maybe some things are best left lying," she replied, feeling rather solemn in saying so.

Stevie laughed, and bit her lip.

"Mate, what happened?" She said, "When did you get all serious? Who are you and what have you done with Sarah?'

She couldn't help herself. She smiled.

"Fuck off," said Sarah, cracking a smile.

Stevie swirled her straw around in the massive bulb of the gin glass, before tentatively taking a sip.

Sarah surveyed the table. The others had fallen into their own little groups. Jade and Leah whispered in hush tones. The three guys chatted in an animated fashion.

"So what have you been up to then, all of these years?" Stevie asked.

Sarah sighed at the ineptitude of the question. How do you sum up nine years of your life in one sentence?

"Not much," she said dryly, "went to uni for a bit. Worked in some bars. I got married."

She showed Stevie her ring hand.

"Fancy stuff," Stevie said, her eyes narrowing.

"How about you?" Sarah asked.

Stevie stretched.

"Where do I start?" She giggled, "I've got two beautiful kids. Little fuckers they are, don't get me wrong. 7 and 5 they are, one boy, one girl. Yeah. Bless 'em."