Grey and wispy smoke curled through the sultry air, sensuously lingering over their bed. Her red painted lips smacked together in sumptuous delight and were brought together in a tender kiss against the cigarette. Her emerald eyes stared back to the rolling city skyline, a prefecture mixture of euphoria and otherworldliness. Every curve was caressed, every possible pain endured and pleasure experienced.
He lay beside her, his hand still endlessly worshipping the temple of her flesh. The passion and energy released in the consummation of love had all but subsided, but yet as his body rested, his mind grew weary. His fingers roamed her hair like it was an oasis in the middle of a vast desert of humanity, and his thoughts traversed his heads like raiders on a spice caravan. The worried glances and awkward stares and agitated moments had died away to one blissful night of love and courtship. And yet, not everything had been resolved.
In his cluttered brain there floated around spare thoughts of dread and despair. His mind flashed with images of pregnancy. He saw the angry glares on the face of his mother, the disappointed looks splayed across the eyes of his father. He glimpsed the bittersweet wedding, the tears of feigned joy and the real of drops of disguised sorrow, the smirking toasts and the snug stares that punctuated the dismal affair. Then he witnessed his woman lay bloated and bloodied, screaming with pain mingled with the cries of a new born infant. He imagined himself raising a child in swaddling clothes. He would have to work extra shifts in the mill, and come home to a needy wife and hungry child. Of course there was also a house to be purchased and a mortgage to be crippled by. How could he have known that it all would have been worth it the instant he first laid eyes on his newborn son? How was he to know that the brutalities and lost dreams of life would be healed by the benevolent laughter of his own child? How could he feel the strengthened tie between the one he loved, made sweeter like an aged wine or cheese, instead of spoiled and rotten as he envisioned?
Her beauty stirred and she tilted her head to look into his eyes. On her lips a perfect smile has carved, deeper than fresh-cut stone and more heavenly than the blessing of an angel. For a moment, for the most majestic and fantastical moment, his worries all melted away as he lost himself in the pond of moon tinted waters that were her eyes. And then as he looked deeper into the glinting pools he began to see forms take shapes as well. What did she want? Was she thinking of them falling intensely in love, becoming parts of the same being entwisted forever in adoration? Could she imagine a white wedding in the crisp fall afternoon, leaves crunching under their lover’s feet? Could she see in her mind’s eye the quaint house, overlooking a pleasant valley, where their children would be raised in peace and tranquility? Did she picture them growing old together like two oak trees of ancient times, forever enraptured in love and affection? Or perhaps there were other ideas lurking behind those intriguing eyes. Was she just hoping for a fly-by-night affair? Would she sleek through his life, covered only with lace and leather, making fiery false-love for hours on end and then have a steamy, final exit? Would she share the beds of hundreds of men like him, feeling no more interest or care in any? Was it that she wandered through the world in a state of bland apathy, not feeling alive except in this fleeting moments wrapped up in the ecstasy of passion? Her eyes betrayed no trace of loyalty and yet that longing glance made him almost believe that there was love behind those verdant oceans. Then again he could easily be imagining it. In truth she was unreadable. That quality of surprise and wonder he had found so attractive was starting to leave a pulled string in his heart.
He doubted he was deceiving himself. The more he looked, the more he found the inaccuracies, the stumbling blocks, the dropped points and incalculable odds. They hadn’t known each other long enough. A few dates and she had practically dragged him into her bed. In hindsight the wait hadn’t been monotonous and dawdling, it short and pointed. It was as if some divine pornographer had written their lines and they’d been puppets of his immoral cause. And yet she had been the perfect performer, hadn’t she. She read her lines more astutely than banker his cheques, and yet had dripped every line with contrived emotion and sentiment. Never had the act been more convincing or a cue more jealously guarded. Was it all an act? Was he just some instrument meant to make her feel alive for a few moments and then to be discarded when the inner corpse rose again from its grave?
Twisted thoughts of envy and rage began to swirl in the great battlefield of his mind. How many others would know the secrets of her flesh? How many more men would hear her words of ecstasy or see the lines of pleasure stretching through her features. His fists began to coil, the hot snake of fury winding its way down his arm. Had what they done meant anything to her? Had she laid on her pillow and dreamt of other, better lovers, wholly unnoticing what was being done to her. Had the simple act become so ingrained in her that she only ever awoke from her stupor to say a few pleasant words and run her fingers in the correct places at the correct time?
And then suddenly everything changed. Her angelic form shifted and she placed her lips firmly on his. They drank each other’s souls, their loves, desires, wants, needs, futures in one simple embrace and when it was done the world had moved millennia in the space of a few seconds. She moved her lips upward, almost touching his ears, and a voice that would have turned over more votes than Churchill’s and healed more hearts than Gandhi’s she said: “again, perhaps?” His troubles forgotten, his worries lifted, they became wrapped in each other’s arms, not knowing where one ended and the other began. For that one fleeting second in the whole history of the universe, for that moment that no poet would sing of and no historian would ever bear note, in that one moment that meant nothing to other seven billion people that shared their planet, it seemed like they had all the time in the world. And for them, it was enough.
