I saw a story, in the firelight’s flicker last night, a sombre tale as the day died. Odd isn’t it, the way the dark distends and elongates the shadows, thickens them like plots as yet unfolded, lending them substance until they are not so difficult to believe.

In the story you sighed and shifted, lazy from the ending day, replete and growing sleepier.

In the story I had nothing to say. It was a foreign place and I was wary. Too wary perhaps but even so, when sun set I went to put my money where my mouth is, that is I went out and had some gold teeth fitted. I found a dentist who will do it for me, in exactly the way I wanted. In silence. As you may already know I am a Trappist Monk, but I’m not talking about that. Not on our life, no. No I am not tempted to ta…...

Alright so it isn’t much of an erotic story so far but it is only the nineteenth line. For sex you will have to wait until line sixty eight. It isn’t a funny story either, not yet. That doesn’t happen until page three but as you are bored already I’ll get on and give you instead an outline of the days events.

That was the way it began at a little after five A.M. At that time of the morning I had absolutely no idea the day would turn out any differently.

This morning it was raining and the news on my PC was all about not finding Gaddafi yet and the hurricane not quite reaching mainland US. It looked like north Carolina was in for a beating and Gaddafi too, if they could ever catch him.

………………

She got up, as grumpy as ever, complaining about this and this as well as this and that. There was no way to pacify or appease and I didn’t bother trying. Five cats demanded attention, two of them wet through. I showed them their food bowls and the food still in them uneaten and they looked at me as if I was a serial cat beater.

I didn’t care.

She got into her car, started the engine and put the lights and windscreen wipers on immediately. By the back door the mat was like a sponge where the catflap has once again allowed the rain to leak in. I shall have to make a tunnel for my cats, I tell myself, one with a meow powered door on either end and movement sensitive lighting inside it.

It could come through the wall into the utility room on a corner where it is more sheltered from the weather, perhaps with a porch over it.

She goes and I put the kettle on again and make more tea. You can never have too much tea. Especially on a wet day and in the company of five cats. Why is the lawn so gree……

The phone rings, surprising me, making me jump, worrying me cos I immediately think she has broken down or had an accident.

It isn’t her, thankfully, it is him, my long term man friend, the man I‘d spent most of last weekend with. He always promised he’d never phone me at home, except for the direst emergency so I am immediately worried when I hear his voice.

He is very apologetic, saying he’d already emailed me and tried my mobile phone. I tell him I was looking at the weather forecast for the US eastern seaboard and not at my inbox and sorry, my mobile has been left out in the car. What’s the problem, are you ok?

He’s got to call on a council official in Lynn today, he tells me. In fact I am supposed to be having lunch with them. Business and all that but……

Its alright for some, I say to myself, business lunches and council officials are all very well but I know he’ll also want to meet me. It must have been my performance at the weekend, I say to myself. Well I know I made an impression on him, made him very happy, left him late and, I hope, satisfied. And for once I was actually reluctant to leave.

Its been four days and……shit I didn’t expect him to call me at home like this.

“Are you still there?” he asks the silence.

I tell him I am, tell him its raining, tell him I want to meet him, yes, yes!

There was sand in my shoes, I say stupidly, still thinking about his cock and the way it had got really stiff and hard. Maybe it was because we were outside, maybe it was simply because we were not in the confines of his flat.

His meeting is at one thirty, he says and ought to be finished by a little after two. He’s driving down and has permission to stay in an official car park.

I want him. Oh hell, I want him!

He says to meet him at two thirty in the coffee shop in Lynn, the one I know so well from many earlier encounters and endeavours. I’m known there so will have to be careful what we do.

I’ll see you there, I tell him, feeling a surge of excitement which cheers me up no end. We’ve never fucked on a Thursday before and never anywhere in Lynn. In fact when I think about it we’ve haven’t done it anywhere in Norfolk at all, so far as I can remember.

What to say before I hang up the phone? I can’t say I love him because I don’t. Not even physical love, I am sure of that. But I do love his body and the way he cam make me feel with it.

I make a kissing noise and he makes one back.

“Don’t be late!” he says.

I expect he is getting ready to drive from Lincoln, wonder if I should have a shower, iron a shirt, clean my teeth.

There are several shirts already ironed and already to put on. There are several bars of hand made soap, new ones, in a jar. One is supposed to be scented with Norfolk Lavender so I tear the paper off and sniff it.

Yes, it might be that.

It’s ten thirty and still raining outside. Maybe I’ll wait a while and have the shower just before I leave. The day is in ruins now, unexpectedly, happily but I am worried. Because try as I might I cannot think of anywhere we could be together in private. I think of all the woodland areas and remote car parks frequented only by people who walk dogs and wonder if any one of those would do. It’s a bit close to home for me, a bit too unknown for him. I mean, where out there does one man take another for sex in the middle of the afternoon?

I am at a loose end now. Directionless, wishing the morning away. It still rains and, and what to do……

I get my mobile phone out of the car and read the text message he sent earlier. Twice. Three times, then wonder about texting back. He’ll be driving by now I know, driving and thinking about whatever his meeting is to do with. Something in The Wash I expect. Wind farms or pollution, something like that. I want his body, need to feel him inside me again.

This is all wrong and I am writing badly, getting my tenses muddled and my desire mixed up. This was to be a silly story until the phone rang, full of witticisms and levity until he called. Now……now its little more than a jumble of words.

………………

I showered, eventually at half past twelve and, very excited was ready to go by a quarter past one. I think the Norfolk Lavender soap is wonderful, especially as it had a lot of scratchy bits in it which gave washing with it an added zing. I can still smell it and I hope, when the time comes, he will be able to as well.

The road to Lynn from where I live is often slow and tedious with holiday traffic but today I travelled along it in a dream. I found a parking space without trouble, paid for a four hour permit and made my way to the coffee shop feeling rather like a teenager going on his first date.

I always have a large cappuccino and one of those little flavoured wafer biscuits when I am in this coffee shop and today, although it was crowded I managed to secure a couple of the old leather armchairs and a little table right in the window.

Busy and crowded inside and out, an endless throng of people bustling up and down the street. Its still a mediaeval street mostly, though most of the buildings lining it are Georgian. All of it is now, thankfully, part of the towns pedestrianisation scheme which began in the eighties and did so much to regenerate many run down areas.

I didn’t recognise him when he first came in. He looked so……so, well proper and official and I realised it was the first time since we’d met I’d seen him in a suit. And with a tie on too! Oh how he secretly hates those things!

He grinned, a touch self consciously I think. Self deprecatingly at the very least. I wanted to kiss him, hug him, say hello to him in the way I usually did. Instead I got up and touched his hand lightly, returned his grin and sat down again.

He got a latte and another cappuccino for me and after a moment brought them on a round brown tray back to our table.

What to say and what to do! Suddenly I found myself running hot with thoughts of him. I didn’t really want that coffee and it was pretty obvious he didn’t want his latte either but we persevered, sipped and gazed at each other stupidly.

“You look different in your working clothes” I told him.

“I know!” he said “But it is still me underneath”

I wondered if I looked different to him in the same way, seeing me on a Thursday instead of on a weekend. He didn’t say and I didn’t pursue it.

He looked tired, worried even, enough to make me wonder if he’d come to see me not for sex but for a different reason. But he lightened when he’d finished his coffee and I hurriedly spooned the froth out of mine. It’s the best part of a cappuccino!

I wanted to ask if he had any plans, if he knew of a place where we might go together, where we could be alone and undisturbed for a couple of hours. I wanted to ask but to my surprise he pre-empted all that.

“I am going back to the records office for an hour” he said, putting his coffee cup onto the tray and looking at me carefully. “They’ve given me the key……”

I felt shatteringly disappointed. Two cups of coffee I didn’t really want, not to mention the expense of a parking permit, and for what? To sit and stare at him like a lovestruck schoolgirl for a quarter of an hour.

“Do you know where it is?” I heard him ask.

“No I don’t” I heard myself saying.

Why did I bother?

“Its in part of that big old building at the top of the High Street” he told me “Some basement rooms and cellars……”

Why did I fucking bother?

He can be the most aggravating man sometimes while I, yes I can be much too sensitive.

“We’ll go up there, shall we?” he suggested “There are a couple of things I want to look at……”

“Alright” I say, not wanting to show my disappointment.

As it turned out there were some eighteenth century documents he wanted to examine again, a deed of easement concerning a waterway which once discharged itself into The Wash. He’d been there a couple of years ago, he said, around about the time we’d first met. When we were still feeling our way. Now we are not feeling our way, or perhaps we still are. For a moment I don’t know if I am coming or going. Even, for a few mad seconds, even if I still want to be with him.

“We’ll be on our own” he says, sort of leering, sort of smiling, as we rise, which doesn’t really make me feel any happier. The heavy feeling inside is more than the weight of two cups of coffee and it grows heavier as we walk quickly along the narrow streets not quite side by side.

I don’t look at him and don’t want him to look at me, as we turn into the High Street. I don’t look at him, don’t look at anybody, don’t really care where I am going any more. I’d high hopes when he telephoned and outlined his arrangements, such high hopes, now look at me! If the ground opened up and swallowed me I’d be happy. If two bald……

Then we are there, walking under the stone archway I’d passed so many times before with scant regard.

He goes ahead of me and produces a key.

………………

It is cool and gloomy inside the old building, still and quiet with the vague scent of mothballs or something. Cool and gloomy which serves only to heighten my already astronomical misery. I know I ought to be happy simply being with him, pleased that he took the trouble to contact me. I ought to be, ought to be……

Resignedly I tell myself I ought to be damned well grateful.

“I’m so pleased to see you again!” he says abruptly “You know I…...”

Damned well grateful! I tell myself firmly.

“I lied to you earlier” he goes on “I didn’t have to come back here to look at those maps. I’ve already got photocopies of everything I need……”

Now I feel sort of foolish writing about it, putting it all down for anyone to read. It was going to be a silly story, like I said. One to make you laugh not one to make me cry and I don’t do so, not yet.

Not quite yet because even as he shoves open an inner door I don’t realise what he’s up to. But it’s a rest room of some sort and there is a big, old fashioned sofa in there.

Foolish and girlish and all in a fluster. A silly story to begin with and that’s what it turned out to be. Not with cats sliding indoors down a plastic chute or me forgetting, again, to put a teabag in my tea but with me and him standing stupidly in a little basement room in some mediaeval building or other in the town of Kings Lynn.

It was the caretaker’s office but he was on holiday, which was why the whole place was locked up and no-one was there. But as it happened I didn’t get to look at any ancient documents relating to waterways in The Wash. Instead he took his jacket off and hung it on a chair.

“Ten bob to a tanner you hadn’t got anywhere else to go!” he suggests.

I shake my head.

I don’t need to say anything else, don’t want to, don’t have to. Our shoes thump lightly on the carpet together. I unbutton his shirt and he tugs out the tails of mine. The sofa feels peculiar against my bare skin but I couldn’t care less because, naked and eager he sits right next to me.

“You smell nice!” he murmurs, putting his face close to mine “its lavender isn’t it?”

“Yeah!” I agree “Norfolk Lavender!”

© Aahlu. Thursday 26 August 2011