up to run my fingers through her hair. And then they go down again, down to her hips then circling in with the lightest of touch from my fingertips across the tops of her thighs. She shifts her stance slightly, kissing me with more urgency, parting her legs so that I can touch the insides of her thighs but again I concentrate on the lightness of my fingers, brushing the skin almost teasingly, dabbing the lips of her vulva with restraint, and then breaking off from her kiss to place one of my own behind her ear as my fingers make their way towards her clitoris. Her arms are around my neck, hugging me close so that I can hear her quickening breaths. I can sense her whole body tensing as the circle my hand is drawing centres more and more on her velvet lips and the moistness around them. She pushes her legs further apart and tilts her hips towards me. She lets out a sigh and then begins to sink, sliding down against the wall, down to her knees.
She unzips me and draws my cock out, she strokes me and kisses its sides. Then her mouth is open and I’m in then out of it, in then out. This is not unpleasant, but it leaves me with nothing to do. I turn my head to one side and see our silhouettes reflected in the bar window. A man is having a blow job, he’s still fully clothed. I feel remote somehow, even though that man is me. I pull off my shirt, throw it across to a chair; my aim is good, a thought that seems to demand my concentration more than it should at this moment. I bend to put my hands under her arms to lift her up. She looks puzzled – did I not enjoy what she was doing, was there something wrong with it? I look at her; no, nothing wrong, just me going mad, my mind wandering off for some insane reason. Occupy me, please, involve me somehow.
With one hand I separate her legs and with the other I guide myself into her, pushing hard, full penetration in one thrust. After the tenderness, the rough selfishness, my preferred combination. Show them a tender side, and a tough side, it works every time. I’ve seen women leave a gentle man for a rough one, and vice-versa. The trick is to offer both, to explore both. I think of good sex, the best sex, and I always think of Jim Morrison singing with the Doors, how his voice could be soft and gentle, but what gave his performance its edge was the knowing that at any moment it would break into something more base and brutal and that he was almost struggling to keep that element within him under control. That’s what makes it compelling, particularly for women who have their own take on this, that it’s their destiny to accommodate both in a passionate man.
So.
That was why we were now doing it standing up, then doing it sitting down with her astride, doing it both of us on the bar I’d only recently wiped down. I liked to look at her against the marble, her delicate tanned skin against the stone; I put my weight on her, pinning her down by the shoulders, pushing and grinding so hard into her pelvis. A real work-out, and if there was a down-side to it at the time it was only in the way she kept stopping me and then grabbing my scalp to pull my face right up to hers – not to kiss, but so that our eyes were an inch apart. This was the signal she wanted to give to me; that this was intense, special, a one-off connection of soul-mates on an astral plane rather than a holiday screw with a horny bar-owner. Pulling me away from kissing her nipples so that she could head-butt me again with her passion and our special togetherness in that moment. So it’s this staring, staring, staring. What the fuck was she looking for, what did she want to tell herself she’d found?
I came the once and then we shared a couple of lines that she’d brought along – good stuff, actually – so that I was ready for round two which lasted longer, almost too long, so that by the end I was squeezing and pulling and pumping everything so I could just shoot and get back to cleaning up the bar. We finished when I finished, right that very second. I knew it was selfish but I was looking to lock up and get out of the bar sharp. This must have upset her; I think she was hoping for us to go off somewhere together at that point, perhaps to watch the fucking sun rise, and for her to ask more of her questions – when did you know that we had … you know … clicked, when did you first notice me; Martin, how did you know we’d be lovers? My English, she says pleadingly, my English not good enough to tell you how I feel. Thank fuck for that, I don’t want to hear it. I put a finger to her lips again; silence please, we had our moment, don’t spoil it now.
So by then time was running out for me to make it home, as in ‘home’ home, and I knew I was heading for another couple of hours in the flat I’d been loaned round at the side of the complex by one of Herman’s colleagues. I’d taken the key never intending to use the place but by now had spent most of the week there with one thing and another. When I let myself in and looked at the bed lying unmade from the night before I felt a wave come over me, maybe a feeling of regret that here I was again, or a sense of resignation or whatever. A completely bare flat with nothing in it but that bed; yes, something stirred when I saw that. Home, I told myself, make it there tomorrow, slip off for a few hours in the afternoon, it’s overdue. And then I sat down to think about this some more. I woke up three hours later, mouth dry and every other inch of me sticky and clammy. Cocaine always gives me night-sweats and I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on.
Time to get moving again, it must be around seven. Time to pull myself together for another day only I’m staggering from room to room in exhaustion, a ghost let loose in the blinding daylight. I peel off my clothes as I wander towards the shower. And when I make it into the cubicle and slouch against the tiles and watch the water that has flowed from my head to toes disappear down the drain I start to dream, the same dream that haunts me in moments like these when the day ahead is still to happen, the dream about water.
There are six of us in a boat far out in the ocean, floating in a calm in the middle of an endless expanse. Five of them surround me, sitting silently, waiting for me to make a move: for whilst I am the one in control of the situation, it is me they all want dead. I know this with a heavy certainty that could drown me even before I hit the waves lapping the sides around us. The sound of the water becomes a call, an invitation to step over the side out into the deep, to walk the plank into the only means of escape. The water will one day take me, always waiting to take me down.
And this is the thought always haunts me in my waking moments, when I’m moving too slow to distract myself with the shit that makes up my life. It casts its grip on me, almost impossible to shake off, even without the drug-induced paranoia that I’m trying to rinse out of my head after the night before. Today, there is help from outside; a blast from a car horn and a squealing of tyres on the bone-dry coastal highway outside is enough to snap me out of the morbid premonition and return me to the present. The noises serve as an abrupt reminder that out there Mallorca is waking, outside the traffic is already building and jousting in the macho Spanish way. Outside, the island is kicking and screaming its way into the day, tetchy and irritable, like a newborn baby left hungry and hot under the stifling heat. I turn the shower to cold and raise my face to take the shock.
Once I dry off I face my next immediate problem, clothes, or lack of clean clothes. I’ll go without underwear until I make it home and I’m lucky to find a black T-shirt that I had left behind at the flat a couple of days before. Doesn’t smell that great, but better than the one I slept in. The trousers are a matter of real concern though. My fawn linen pair look creased and lined enough to pass for a pair of pyjama bottoms, which in a way they were, and that’s nowhere near the worst of it. Somehow, although I don’t quite remember the particular detail, I must have started with the girl last night when I still had them on. She herself, lousy bitch, presumably in the heat of the moment, or in the middle of squeezing my hand and locking on her full eye-contact number, had forgotten to warn me that she was having her period, or having it all over my fucking trousers. The shit I find myself in, desperately scrubbing the crotch of my priceless designer gear with shampoo so that a blatant red stain can become a fairly obvious maroon one. No wonder she was so fucking horny, she’d found a man who cared enough to want to connect despite all that. Or one who failed to notice. Until now. How am I going to pass this off and serve breakfasts without looking a complete dick?
This, truth be told, is the final spur to me going home that morning, going home to throw on an unsoiled pair of jeans and consign the present pair to history. That is what made me do it, to walk over to the bar with my
