Exquisite

He watches her throat as she drinks from the bottle of water; the ripple of her oesophagus’ press against that thin layer of skin as muscles contract and expand to pull the water down into her stomach. She drinks for a long time, really slakes her thirst, her head tilted back, angled, and he thinks of all those times he’s stroked that tender flesh from tip of chin to top of throat.

He could trace the outline of her jaw from memory. The specific undulations of bone, unique to her, are like the ghosts of Braille beneath his fingertips; the code now embedded in his flesh.

She stops drinking for a moment, to catch her breath. Her stomach is slightly distended by the water she has filled it with. She smiles at him, lips closed, her mouth still full of water she can’t yet swallow. She’s breathing in and out through her nose, shallow but deep. The smile reaches her eyes. She’s not a pathological liar. She can’t fake a smile.

She swallows, breathes through her mouth at last. A gasp, a sigh, one following quickly from the other. She smiles again, then finishes what’s left of the water.

No, she’s not a pathological liar, but she has still lied. He’s checked her phone. He knows the calls she’s made, the calls she’s received. He knows the calls she’s missed. The ones she didn’t take because he was sitting there with her, listening to her phone ring out, asking if she was going to take that call, hearing her say “No, it’s not important.”

Important enough to lie.

He thinks about the poor fuck she’s toying with. She doesn’t care about him. She’s dangling him, using him. Give it a couple of weeks and she’ll get bored. She’ll miss the calls because it really isn’t important. She’ll reject them, send them straight to voicemail. He knows this. He’s been on the receiving end. He’s weathered the dip in interest, though. So far.

And what if this time it’s him she loses interest in. What if the poor fuck isn’t such a poor fuck after all. Her indiscretion, the ease with which he has discovered his name, her game, the whole clandestine bag, smacks of her wanting to be caught.

Her smile begins to resemble a challenge. “Catch me if you can..”

‘Already caught, darling,’ he thinks to himself.

Is she trying to be like Holly Golightly, he wonders. Is there a resemblance there? Not physically. Psychologically. Is she flitting from man to man, not for financial security, but for some other deep seated need that nobody so far has fulfilled?

She comes to sit on his knee, her arms around his neck, looking into his eyes. She’s happy tonight. It’s warm, still, and the sun has shone all day.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks him.

His turn to smile now. How can he tell her that he’s thinking of ways to stop her in her tracks? How would she understand the dream he just had, with eyes wide open, of slowly, gently, stroking his fingers along the underside of that exquisite chin, and then pressing against that windpipe?

“How lovely you are,” he says.

She laughs, pleased with that response. Her phone begins to ring, buried and muffled somewhere deep inside her bag.

“Are you going to get that?” he asks.

She kisses him, stops him speaking, stops the need for her to answer. Then she leans round slightly, to place her lips against his ear.

“It’s not important,” she murmurs. “It’s nothing that can’t wait.”

“How do you know without looking?” he asks.

“I just know,” she says. “Trust me. Nothing is as important as this.”

She begins to unbutton his shirt, stroking her fingers gently into the hairs on his chest. Her fingers are nimble, and they unfasten the buttons quickly.

“What are you doing?” The words drop slowly from his mouth, mostly exhaled air, less speech.

Her hands go inside his shirt, round his waist. She wriggles on his lap, hiking her skirt up, getting comfortable. His hands go round her waist, supporting her. Her hands re-emerge and drop, to unfasten his belt, his fly. It takes mere minutes before he’s inside her and she gets this look of concentration on her face. She looks straight into his eyes, a half frown on her face, a glowering look that he supposes she thinks is erotic. It will do. It doesn’t put him off his stroke. He’s deep inside her and her back is arching. She bites down on her lower lip, and all he knows of what he’s done, what she’s achieved, is the slight gasp from her mouth and the waves of muscle spasm, sending out their own unique Morse code or radio signal.

Her phone begins to ring again, almost as though the caller has a sixth sense; almost as though he had been showing them some courtesy while the act was underway. She’s still sitting on him, he’s still inside her. She moves, as if to get up. She tosses her hair slightly, her attention is elsewhere, and it would only take the slightest change in position for him to put his hands around her neck and squeeze the life out of her.

She does get up. She straightens her skirt, goes up to the bathroom. He listens to her cleaning up, washing away escaped traces.

Her phone is ringing still. He could answer it, see what the other man says. He gets up, moves towards her bag, reaches for it. Gets no further.

A dulled thud of air. A thin trickle of blood and a surprised expression on his face. He stands for a moment, suspended in mid air, then he falls forward.

She comes back downstairs, into the living room and hands over the money.

“You took your time,” she tells him.

He snaps shut the phone he’s been holding all this time. Her phone stops ringing. She walks past him into the kitchen. She does not touch him. She steps over the body lying in the middle of the kitchen floor, still warm, a pool of blood flowing from his head.

She looks round, finds the kettle, fills it at the sink. She puts it to boil, then turns and steps back over the body.

“You should get on with cleaning this up,” she says to him.

She goes back upstairs, and he hears her turning on the taps in the bathroom. Drawing herself a bath.

He’ll fuck her later. But for now, he knows he has to clean the mess up. Like tidying your bedroom when you’re a kid. There’s no point pissing mum off.

© J R Hargreaves 2006