A Guilty Pleasure

She eats ravenously, her hair falling forward as she leans over the dish, her spoon hungrily scooping the food into her mouth. It’s as though she hasn’t eaten in months. She looks up every so often and grins at me, chewing on the chicken that seems not to cost her anything to eat.

I watch her devour every last morsel in the dish, mopping up the sauce with a piece of naan.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she says when she is done, and I promise that I won’t.

There is nobody I could tell, even if I wanted to. But that’s not what she means. She means don’t mention it to her in conversation, this return from her self-imposed exile. This fall, it must seem to her, from her moral high ground.

She looks happy. Happier than I have seen her in a long while. She pushes her hair back from her face, sits back in her chair, pushes the dish away from her. The spoon clatters inside the bowl as she moves it.

She looks smaller, too. Younger. Like she must have looked when she was 18 or something, although I didn’t know her then. The expression on her face makes her look younger, the way she’s sitting. She’s half slumped on the dining chair, pushed back from the table, arms outstretched and hands resting with the base of the palms on the table’s edge. Her posture is teenage, but not sulking. She’s smiling. Content.

She looks up at me and sits up in her seat. She laughs.

“You’re studying me,” she says.

“I’m looking at you,” I reply.

“You’re studying me,” she repeats, holding my gaze, looking straight into my eyes. She smiles, and suddenly I feel bashful. I feel coy about having looked at her, about having been looked at in return. I feel shy of the way she has been transformed, with that smile, from teenager to woman.

We look at each other and we know. We can’t move. The world seems to slow around us, and we are sitting here oblivious to all else except each other. Eventually I have to break the spell. I have to bring reality back.

“Do you want pudding?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer for a moment, just keeps looking at me and smiling. Then she looks away and it’s as though a light has been taken off me. She’s still smiling, but she’s looking to her left, through the window at the garden.

“What have you got?” she says.

I get up and go over to the fridge. All I have is yoghurt and fruit. Not really pudding. Not really anything.

“You haven’t got anything, have you?” she laughs. I’ve taken too long to respond, you see. I should have had my answer ready, not had to think about it. I look back at her, round the open fridge door, and affect sheepishness.

“Sorry,” I say.

“That’s okay,” she replies. “Take me to bed instead.”

I undress her upstairs. I take my time, peeling away layers, slowly revealing the skin I thought I would never touch again. She came back, though. Unexpectedly. She appeared at my door tonight and demanded food. All I had in was a microwavable chicken balti. She was so hungry, she said, that she’d take it. And with that, almost twenty years of vegetarianism came to an end.

As each piece of clothing comes off, I kiss the bit of her skin that is exposed by its removal. Arms, wrists, shoulders. Neck. Feet, shins, knees, thighs. Stomach. Throat. The perfumed dip between her breasts.

She touches me when she can. Her hands, her fingers, in my hair, cradling my head. She strokes my arms, grips my shoulders, pulls me to her so there is no air between our bodies, no space. She pulls me to her and I sink into her warmth.

She hasn’t changed. She smells and feels the same. We glide around each other, we pull and push and wriggle and sigh. She laughs. She laughs. She laughs and cries out, and I can’t get any closer, though I’d climb inside her if I could.

She holds me to her for a while and I feel her pulse against my skin, surrounding me. Her heart bangs, then slows. Her muscles relax and eventually we sleep.

I wake in the morning, and she’s gone. A note on the table, by the dishes left to go dry and crusty. Thanks for dinner. Those three words on the paper. More words I hear inside my head. Thanks for dinner, for pudding, for everything. Perhaps she whispered those words to me while I slept. Perhaps they’re memory, and not just wishful thinking.

I know, though. Thanks for dinner is all it is. She needed to be fed. She needed to cut free for just one night and be touched and held without reason, without permanence. She needed to eat chicken. She needed to be here.

I pick up the note and crumple it in my hands, then put it in the bin.

© J R Hargreaves 2006