It's half eleven on Saturday morning. The girls are watching this depressing, gruesome DVD about zombies, so I've left them to it and am having a hair of the dog in The Seat of Learning, the thick pleasure of layering drink on that from the night before, like your head being stuffed with paper.
My eldest was in an open-air performance last night as part of a kind of Lancashire Diwali called Light Up Lancaster. They pranced about with paper lampshades to an electronified Four Seasons. Kitty, Wendy, and The Little Dictator were there too. I don't enjoy this sort of thing. It's too spectacular, a manufactured attempt at wonderment by electronics. There are too many children there, giving me myriad opportunities to accumulate slight irritations with others' child-rearing practices.
"So, Wendy, have you, er...started on anything?" "Well, not really. Well, just a bit of mdma, and some speed. And a bottle of Prosecco." "Oh right, just a nice quiet family teatime then."
In the loos in the Fur Coat And No Knickers Arms, I caught up with them somewhat. We were all wearing these ridiculous Minnie Mouse flashing ears. Kitty bumped into her headmistress, who knows me slightly through my girls. She's one of these good-looking, stylish women married to a lump of a man who dresses in black jeans and bomber jackets. Kitty and I chatted amiably to her before we returned to our respective tables.
Kitty made an alarmed gesture with a twisted mouth. Outside, she said "Fuck. Sitting next to your headmistress when you're shitfaced." "You were fine, Kitty. Honestly, you don't look shitfaced. She's really good-looking though isn't she? Makes me wonder I bother trying to make an effort if you can dress like a fucking binbag and get women like that." "Shhhh looby!"
Later, back at Wendy's, The Little Dictator sloped off to bed, then Kitty went too. Me and Wendy put some better music on, racked up a bit more, and danced around the room. She looked gorgeous as she danced, in her tight brown dress and her new haircut, an untrammelled bob. I like looking at her, and she likes being looked at. I mean, really, sexually, looking at her, more scanning than looking. I was getting turned on; the pleasure of my stiffening cock stuttering up against fabric. She has this movement she does, whether deliberately or not I don't know, of taking hold of her skirt hem in her fist and pulling it up slightly. I was stroking my mouth watching her, and caught myself murmuring, "Go on Wendy, go on, higher."
I can't remember what preceded the moment, but we ended up in a long holding of each other. I felt like I was collapsing, into a nowhere of her. I stroked my hands through her brittle, treated hair, over her shoulders and along her body, before stilling with my hands clasped in the small of her back, pressing her gently into me. I opened my eyes for a moment at the same time as she did. I closed them again, and parted my lips. We were on the cusp of kissing.
One of her favourite tracks came on and she separated us, smiling broadly. She checked to see if I was looking at her, then did that stroke of her eyes down my body and on to a spot on the floor between us, a look which says "watch me turn you on."