Smoke

She lit a cigarette and, her lips pursed around the filter, the tip glowing, she shook the match out and carelessly tossed it onto the bedside table.

"There was a man, once." She exhaled long and hard, blowing smoke out of her nose like a dragon , her eye dull and reptilian in the lamp light.

He propped him self up on one elbow the better to see her profile.

The light was kind but even so it couldn't hide her age, the lines that bloomed away from her lips, the corners of her eyes. Her jaw was by no means saggy, but it wasn't the firm skin of a woman twenty years younger.

She fascinated him though, his gaze roamed her as she talked.

Girls his own age would hide their bodies under blankets, shirts, shyly fold their hands over brand new breasts.

She sat naked on the bed, unabashed in her skin, unfazed by her own breasts that seemed as tired as her spirit.

"Just one man?" He asked .

A puff of smoke escaped with her cracked chuckle.

"Sweetheart. One thing you'll learn soon enough is that it doesn't matter how many lovers you have, there will only ever be one."

The corner of her mouth twitched, barely a smile.

"So what happened?"

With a sigh she stubbed out the half smoked cigarette, ground it into the ashtray viciously.

"I should give these up." She exclaimed, snatching up the packet and tossing them across the hotel room so that they fell with a metallic thump into the waste basket.

"Ten points!" She laughed girlishly and there was a tiny glimpse of who she'd once been.

She lay her head on his chest and he absently ran his fingers through hair.

"Tell me about him."

"It's a long and boring story darling."

"Tell me anyway. What happened to him?"

"What happens to all men in the end. They run off and get married. Have a couple of kids, move to the country, buy a dog. Blah, blah, blah."

He ran his fingers up and down the soft flesh of her arm and felt the muscles there tense.

"You're holding out on me..."

She sat up and turned on him with a sideways smile.

"You always try to get life stories out of strange women you meet in bars?"

He smiles and pulls her onto him, his hands grasp at her full thighs and she leans forwards to kiss him, explores his mouth with her tongue.

He tastes ashes and pushes his mouth harder to her.

"Only the interesting ones."

"You think I'm interesting?" She sits astride him and puts her hands on his chest. "I'm far from interesting, I'm dull, I'm boring, I'm barely alive."

He digs his fingers into waist and she throws her head back, smiling.

"You make me feel alive"

"Boy. You don't even know me. What are you? Twenty? Twenty one?"

"Twenty four." He can't quite keep the petulance out of his voice and she raises an eyebrow at it in amusement.

"Twenty four." She grins slyly and moves her hips lazily back and forth. "Boys like you are only good for two things."

"Is that right?" His voice is husky, his grip on her tightens.

"Uh-huh." she grabs at his chin and squeezes it affectionately. "Fucking and helping me zip my dress up after."

She takes his hand in hers and brings his fingers to her mouth, sucking the tips delicately.

"You're changing the subject."

Her eyes widen in mock coyness. "I am?"

"Tell me."

"What is there to tell? I loved him but he didn't love me back. At least, not enough."

The girl in her is gone and, stiffly, she climbs off the bed and goes to the waste basket, plucking up the cigarette carton and tapping one out.

"Why should I stop now? Practically dead anyway."

She does cross her arms over her chest now, but it seems less an act of modesty and more an unconscious attempt to protect her heart.

"He was older than me. A lot actually.... Did I tell you I wrote a book?"

He shakes his head.

"Yes. While we were together, I had grand notions of being an author. Some girls were obsessed with ballet, others with horses, most with boys, I was obsessed with writing."

She moves over to the window and pulls the curtain back a fraction, letting the sick orange light from the street below slip in, bathing her so she looked like tarnished gold.

"He was my teacher you see. Oh don't give me that face!" She's looking over her shoulder at him and smiles sadly. "I was eighteen, he was a private tutor my parents hired in a failed attempt to get me into university.

At the time I thought he was the most well read, intelligent person on earth. I worshiped him, hung on his every word, wasn't a thing I wouldn't do for him."

The tip of her cigarette seemed to float in the gloom as she closed the curtain and walked back across the room to the bed.

"Of course, he soon realised this and was able to take full advantage of poor, little, naïve me."

Her tones self deprecating, she's making light of it, but he can see the way her eyes shine, doubled in size, magnified with well balanced tears.

"He nurtured me thought the book though."

"The book? You never wrote another?"

She shrugs and slips back into bed. "Seems I only had the one in me."

"What was it called?"

"The Vanity of Eros." She proclaimed regally. "I know, I know.. it's a cringingly pretentious title. But then it fits rather well with the content."

She stretches till her joints pop then turns to him and smiles slyly.

"The things he did to me, that I let him do, that I wanted him to do. Wicked things, terrible things."

Her fingers are running up and down the inside of his leg while she talks, long smooth strokes that make him hold his breath and twitch.

"I was his pet, his toy. He'd press his old man body against my young one and violate me."

She traces the length of his penis with her fingertips, her lips twitch to a smile as she hears his breath hitch and sees his abdomen tense.

"He liked to hurt me. Pinching, slapping, pulling, never satisfied until I'd cried for him, then he'd fuck me like an animal."

Her hand wraps around him firmly and she laughs.

"So this is why you wanted to know? Does it get you off? Do you get all the women you fuck to tell you about their past?"

He ignores her goading, merely moves his own hand past her belly and starts to work his fingers into her.

She gasps then recovers herself, moving her hand slowly up and down his length, almost without thought.

"He was a brute, Mon Attila Marcel ..."

Her lips replace her hand so that she's delicately kissing him, running her nose up and down from base to tip.

"When he first pushed me to my knees and got his cock out I had no idea what to do." She whispers. "I just stuck my tongue out a little and licked it."

A flick of the tongue and its hidden again, as though she'd tasted something bitter.

"Then he grabs my hair and says "Open your dirty little mouth", so I do and he showed me how to please."

And now her tongue snakes back out. Twists and slides along him, pulls him into her warm mouth so that he arches his hips off the bed and groans.

He knows she must be able to taste herself on him from earlier, and its that thought that's nearly his undoing.

Grabbing at her he pulls her up the bed and positions himself between her thighs.

Her eyes are wide and hungry and at his hesitation she grabs hold of his buttocks and croaks "Fuck me. Fuck me now."

He's quick and hard, full of bullish importance, but she knows how to move, how to manipulate each stroke so that as he's about to come she's already there, her head thrown back, her shoulders pushed into the pillows, her hips bucking off the bed.

In those few seconds he looks down on her and she's glorious.

**********

Later, as they dressed, and he helped her with her zip, he asked what had happened, in the end.

"I told you. Wife, kids, country, dog."

She's brushing the knots from her hair as she speaks, quick, sharp strokes that look like they must hurt, although her face is passive.

"He had to choose and decided I wasn't worth the gamble. The risk of being alone later.

All the time we were together he'd say "You're so young, you need to go out with boys your own age, you'll get tired of me in the end". I never did though."

She stuffs the brush in her bag and quickly collects up her things, as though she now wants to be gone as quickly as possible.

"He chose to stay with a woman he didn't love and with kids he hardly knew, rather than risk being alone because he chose me. All men are the same, they pretend they're the stronger sex, when in actual fact they can't even function on a base level without someone behind them."

She laughs bitterly. "They chose a lifetime of apathy rather than risk it on passion, fire..... You don't think that's you? It will be, one day."

Suddenly he wants her gone as fast as she wants to leave.

She no longer looks like the triumphant Goddess she was a few hours before, now she just looks old and tired.

"I had a great time...." She smiles up at him and pats his cheek affectionately. "We won't be doing this again though."

And without another word, she's gone.

************

Years later he happens upon "The Vanity of Eros" in a second hand book shop.

He's delighted with the slim volume although his wife wrinkles her nose at it's aged hardback missing its cover.

Its a hard read, meandering, touching in its naivety, its easy to see the girl who poured her heart into the words.

As the book progresses though it takes darker turns through her mind.

"I decide to smoke not because I want to, or enjoy it, but because I need the taste of ash on my tongue to remind me that death is imminent and he can't touch me there."

He finds himself touching his own tongue with his fingers and imagines he can taste the ash from her kiss.