In the low-ceilinged room, the polka dot lighting skated along the floor and spangled off the foil decorations hanging from the ceiling. The music was irresistibly dancy, the sound quality was like a caress, and the scenery was excellent. The most attractive woman there, someone I've had my eye on for the four years I've been going there, came over to me on the dancefloor, put her hands on my shoulders, and started talking to me.
I'd had a Smartie earlier, one of the ones known for making one excessively openly affectionate. I smiled and slid my hands down the sides of her shiny, tight, blue, knee-length dress, pulling her against me as I kissed her on the cheek. I was in paradise.
Releasing her (but not very far), I noticed her husband watching us from the bar, with the same immobile expression that his face has carried for four years. "It's OK," my Smartied mind thought, "I'm just stroking your gorgeous wife's body through her tightly-fitting dress," with as much concern as if I were talking to her about the air conditioning at a yard's distance.
Later on we had a dance together which went on for several minutes. I was blind to Trina, but she had moved away considerately. When she came back she said, with a lack of rancour as surprising as it was welcome, "I thought I'd leave you alone while K--- chatted you up." I told her that she's married, and noddingly indicated her husband.
On the way out we bumped into a couple who extended a half-hearted invition back to their room in the hotel for a bop, which we didn't take up, I think to our mutual relief. She made a reference to drugs which sounded forced.
Trina started her nocturnal bellowing, so I took all the pillows in the room and a bath towel and went to "sleep" in the bathroom. I tried running the bit of film in which I stroke K---'s waist over and over again, adding a voiceover in which I tell her how gorgeous she is and how much I like watching her dance in that dress; but it's difficult to get turned on when your feet are clanking against a pedal bin.
The following night we had sex for the first time in many weeks. Even by our tepid standards it wasn't the greatest of fucks, and my imagination had to work hard to shut out her well-meaning but unspontaneous talking in which she tries to be "dirty". She was trying to please me and make me come, but it had the opposite effect.
Afterwards, I felt ashamed of myself. It was opportunistic and venal. We cuddled for a while, my smiling and kissing as false as her sextalk. She got up to go to sleep in the front room. I spread myself out luxuriantly in the futon, smiling genuinely this time in anticipation of mentally fucking K--, Donna, and whoever else; but I had to correct myself quickly a minute later when she walked back in.
Through a chink in the door, she'd seen the young postgrad Christian lodger sitting topless in the unheated kitchen with a computer and headphones. We both imagined the same thing about what he might be doing. I asked her if he was naked, but she said she'd recoiled at seeing only his bare torso and had hastened back upstairs.