Old Life

Old Life

By Ceefax

She's lying on the bed when he comes in, damp towel on the floor, her arms over her face, wearing only a t-shirt.

The sun's shining through the window. He sits on the bed and slides a hand up her leg, over her hip, over her belly, and under her shirt.

She sighs, and doesn't move.

He pushes the t-shirt up over her breasts and cups them in his hands, feeling the nipples harden against his palms. He leans forward, half-lying over her body, and squeezes her breasts together, pushing them up into the perfect spherical social ideal, then letting them fall back.

He kneads idly, while remembering shopping in the summer, her reaching up on tip-toes to reach a high shelf, and the way her breasts had bounced as she'd come back down onto her heels.

She stretches her arms out above her head, tenses her body, arches her back, and yawns hugely.

"You three have fun," she says. "I'll be over here."

He leans in and closes his mouth over her nipple, mentally pushing aside the Freudian implications with the ease of practise.

"This wasn't an invitation, you know," she says, shifting her hips so she can rub her clitoris against his leg. "It's rather presumptuous."

"If I waited for an invitation, I'd never get anywhere."

"Cheeky sod." She winds her arms around his neck. "See if you get any now."

It feels eternal. As if they're always going to be making familiar uncomplicated love on her bed in the afternoon sun.

("When was the last time you changed these bloody sheets?"

"The last time you whinged at me about them. When I spilt the ketchup.")

It feels as if this is going to be their life. Their routine. Forever. The patterns they make digging deeper and deeper furrows.

They argue in a friendly way. Sometimes the arguments get a little more spiky, but they both know the patterns, know when to shift away before it gets more dangerous. Mostly.

Once (while drunk - a convenient excuse for any number of things), he'd complained she never told him she loved him. "I'm still here, aren't I?" she'd snapped back. "What more do you fucking want?"

She'd still been there. What more had he fucking wanted?

It was easy to see, looking back. How different this new Lisa was. She was always careful to say what he wanted to hear. What he'd always wanted to hear - they were together, they would always be together. When it had never seemed less likely.

But he had only heard what he wanted.

fin