Mule

“In Medias res - to start in the middle of a narrative, without preamble”

I put the book down. It was quarter to three in the morning, and there was something about the word ‘preamble’ that made me really angry for some reason. I wasn’t tired though, I had this kind of intense frustration in my stomach from reading for this long, which either meant I was hungry or horny and I wasn’t going to go downstairs and make some food. I ppulled down my boxer shorts and closed my eyes.

I went for about twenty minutes, until it started to feel so good I realised that my knuckles were almost red from clutching at my bedsheets, my nails digging into the fabric like knives. The hand I was using was warm and soft, and when I began to speed up, I heard myself moan. I never usually moaned to myself, just when I was really doing it, because it sounded hot, and I knew it made the other person feel good about themselves because despite claiming it isn’t that important, it is to most people.

Either way, I was on my own, with no one to impress, so I found it curious.

I felt myself getting closer, so I started thinking about stuff that turned me on, scenarios and the like. I imagined myself doing it to someone, someone doing it to me, multiple people doing it to me. I had found a particularly fun scenario where I had someone on their knees begging to put me in their mouth. I didn’t picture them with a face, until they looked up, somewhat out of my control, but if i’m honest, in those kinds of moments I kind of let things happen.

The face was Adelaide from work.

All of a sudden I had finished, and I was empty, my body convulsing and my breath hoarse and heavy.

I lay there for a second. The image of her tongue gliding along my inner thighs still fresh in my mind. I decided to not linger on it for fear of it developing into something, but it was hard to deny that I was thinking about her slightly differently. Stuff I had ignored in the past, like the way her breasts somehow perfectly fit into her tight button up shirt, or how she had noticed me looking one time and didn’t say anything about it but just smiled slightly sprung to the front of my mind. I started imagining her dragging her tongue across my legs again, and closed my eyes and relished in it for a moment before realising how fucked up it was to think of her that way. I hadn’t had a female friend or coworker that I hadn’t imagined doing things to when I was on my own, but I had never done it with Adelaide and I wished it had never happened, because I knew now that I was gonna fall for her, which would make things awkward. But I actually liked her, I liked how I felt when I was around her. I decided to just get ready for work.

The walk to work was dreary. It was raining heavily, and I didn’t have a coat so my hair and uniform was soaked almost immediately. Funnily though, as the rain poured down and my legs ached from last night's close, I could only think about one thing and that was the smell. The trees were caked in rainwater and so was the pavement, and with each kick from my Converse the scent of my childhood filled my nostrils. A sort of damp, earthy familiar fragrance that made me want to suck my thumb and cry to my mother. Makes you think that Patrick Suskind was on to something, aside from the murder and creepy sex vibes. I had hardly thought about Adelaide until her smiling face was greeting me from behind the bookshelf I was working at, stocking David Walliams’ new bullshit children's book. I wish this place sold actual literature instead of crap like that. Before Adelaide had interrupted, I had been thinking about my own bookshop and what I would sell there, and it made me realise I only liked about four books enough to want to sell them: “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, “Norwegian Wood” by Murakami “House of Leaves” by Mark C. Danielewski, and “1984” by George Orwell. I’m not claiming to be a maverick with those choices, I just liked them all, and when I finished reading them I felt different inside.

“Have you got a pound?”

She had crimson lipstick on.

“Huh?” Adelaide was asking me for money, probably to help buy cigarettes on her lunch break, I had always found it kind of hot how much she smoked, that much I’ll admit, I always loved tasting tobacco smoke on someone's breath when things started heating up, it made me think they were kinky, even if it weren’t always true, it quite often was. Then I imagined Adelaide smoking in my bed with no clothes on, so I stopped thinking and just gave her a pound.

“You owe me Ade” I said with a smile.

“Whatever” She said to me, walking away in those Vans I bought her for her birthday after she bought me the Converse I was wearing. God I wanted her, I wanted her so badly.

I didn’t really see her for the rest of the day. I had been partnered with Micheal, the work experience from the local school who seemed to hate everything and everyone. For some reason he wore his uniform to work even though he didn’t have to. His hair was shabby, and so was the uniform which made me think he didn’t have any other clothes he felt comfortable wearing in public, so despite his attitude not being spared on me, I was still friendly and patient with him. We spent the afternoon unpacking boxes and recycling the cardboard. It was dull and brainless, but it took my mind off of Adelaide so I almost enjoyed it.

We hadn’t been friends before I started working at Waterstones, but we were soon close after being partnered together one day, and discovering we both had a love for Bluetile Lounge, a local band which wasn’t very popular, so we were surprised we had never seen each other at the shows. We surmised that we must have, and decided that we’d meet up at the next one that Saturday. I had brought my friend Liam and his boyfriend Othello (he had it legally changed) and whilst they assaulted each others faces to the song “Ambered” me and Adelaide sat at a booth and drank pints of beer, and then shots of rum, and then shared a big cocktail that was on a deal. I remembered at the time thinking how I wanted to fuck her, until Othello came back over and the moment had passed.

I walked her home, and she invited me in, but we just drank more shots of Smirnoff until she fell asleep on the sofa next to me, and then I did in tandem. I hadn’t woken up in an unfamiliar house with all my clothes on for a long time, and when I looked over at her sleeping on the sofa, I realised I liked her. But not in the usual way, in the way that you felt when you felt affection for someone before you knew what intimacy was, I just liked being around her.

She wore an oversized ‘Polvo’ band shirt with sweatpants whilst she fried us up eggs and bacon sandwiches, and we ate and spoke and things were just nice for once, not tense or uncomfortable. She invited me around for dinner the next week but not in a romantic way, she just had more pasta than she needed and wanted to cook up a big meal. We got wrecked on red wine, and laughed at her favourite shitty T.V shows until midnight, when I left. I had looked back at her as I walked into the street, my shoulders hunched, and she had been watching me go, her head tilted to the side, and her hands behind her back. It was like some kind of fucking movie.

But unlike the films, we never went any further. She would get a boyfriend, or I would get a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, and there just wasn’t a good time so it never happened. We stayed friends the whole time, but it never went further than that, which made me wonder,

Where did this come from?

Some part of myself from that first night drinking cocktails had reared its head again, and it was uglier than before, more desperate and needy. I didn’t just want to fantasise about her whilst I touched myself, I wanted to do it for real. I wanted to feel her warm hands on me instead of my own. Feel those breasts of hers rest gently on my chest whilst she kissed my neck and ran her nails down it until she reached my stomach, and then put all of me deep inside her throat and…

I stopped myself before it went any further.