Waisted

I was walking into town this afternoon when I bumped into Wendy, Helen and Kitty's friend, the tightly-dressed slender dancey girl at my last party who came up to my room to get a bit more self-raising flour and started talkingly keenly about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles before I lowered the tone by talking about teeming sexual desire and wanking. She had on a secondhand dress in an old print with green and dull brown from the age before optical brighteners; a glance to her beautifully-triangled small breasts, and a glancette at her strokable waist.

We kissed sideways. I tried to judge my holding her to a suggestive but unobjectionable degree beyond the friendish. "Yeah, fine," she said. "I'm pissed, and stoned, and I've been buying [her daughter's] birthday balloon." She showed me this bag from Clintons with a massive Jeff Koons-shiny balloon in it. I'd like to see her more often and I was glad when she suggested we spent one day of her four days off this week sitting around getting pissed. I'm going to get some sherry in for it. Sherry is the MDMA of alcohol: calm, empathetic, slow, close.

In bed the other night, after our argument, I was laying on the edge of the bed, trying not to touch Trina. I started thinking about an unsent letter I wrote to Donna while I was on holiday in Dieppe with Kirsty and the girls. A couple of days later I sent her a filthy text, then apologised for it the next morning. We had an agreement -- twenty-four hours, and it's not right for me to break it further than we have done already. It's the one relationship I've conducted honestly, (yes, I can manage relationships of up to twenty-four hours' duration) and I don't want to spoil it. I have an unforced interest in her happiness with someone who lives closer to her, just as I wish Trina could find someone.

Then, a few hours after I'd stroked myself deliciously into a Donna orgasm, a postcard from her arrives from Paris. It's one of those things where you send a photo to be made into a postcard. I thanked her for it by email, aware that I mustn't spiral again into a sexual desire for her that I tell her about. "Oh Donna! That's a lovely picture. I love any and all pictures of you. The ones in my head are incredible!"

I stared at the card, as I used to stare at her in between every item of her clothes being undone. There is a mystery about it: "why do you make me so electrified with sex?" The image, of her face and shoulders, is a glossy synecdoche of first, our sex; second (for me so very rare) the decency and honesty with which we conducted ourselves; and third, the adrenalined reminder that almost without talking, we negotiated ourselves into a relationship of power. "Put my cock in your mouth," I said once, as I lay selfishly out on her bed with her in her sex clothes. "'And suck it, bitch', you meant to add" she said, before she pushed it past her lips.

Edit: It's highly unlikely, even in erotic circumstances, that I'd use the word "bitch" myself. There are far dirtier and sexier ones. But she had exactly the right idea.