Huts61

‘Is that you in there?’ said Gillian Ambrose, loudly enough to let everybody else in the building know that there was somebody shitting in their toilet that shouldn’t have been.

And I wasn’t really sure what she meant. I was maybe being a bit paranoid, but thought she hoped that it was somebody else, perhaps, even, James Munn. I shook such thoughts from my head, like tap water. I pulled the toilet door suddenly open, but there was just Gillian there, nobody else.

‘Hurry up,’ she said, ‘I’m bursting,’

And she was dancing on her toes as if she was. But I couldn’t let it go.

‘How many times is that you’ve been to the toilet? You went when we came out of the pub. You went when we came back here. And now you’re going again.’

‘It’s the drink,’ she said, all out of breath, as if she’d run up the Old Kilpatrick Hills, pushing past me, bunching up the goony thing she had on, wrenching down her knickers and peeing as if the communal toilet was her stage.

I didn’t know where to look. But I didn’t look away, even when she washed her hands and pulled the communal blue Shanks ‘towel down to get a clean bit, which was probably a good thing, because I’d also automatically rubbed my hands with it, without washing them properly, or at all, with all the commotion.

‘Come on,’ said Gillian Ambrose, turning to face me, as if she was going to kiss me, in full view of everyone, although there was nobody else there and swishing slowly past me, as if she’d been practising, stirring my thoughts, smelling of some kind of flower whose name I couldn’t quite grasp, and leaving me out of breath too.

Then I noticed what she was wearing. She had only on a nightie. And if you looked really hard you could make out the outline of her nipples though it. Anybody could have seen her!

I sprang down the steps after her and bound into her room. Gillian sat on the edge of her bed, with her hands arranged decorously on her lap, like a nun.

‘Ssshh,’ she said, as if I’d said something, 'I like this bit'.

It was some kind of classical shite she’d on the stereo, something I’d never heard before all violins and bleeding hearts voices that sounded as if they were gargling in some great ocean. I couldn’t believe it.

I looked at her. ‘You’ve been shagging James Munn,’ I said blankly.

Her mouth twitched, like one of those big Mamma opera singers, whose bodies are like double wardrobes, so their face had to convey every emotion. The twitch turned into a mischievous grin. Gillian Ambrose looked at my stony face and started giggling. I smiled back. I couldn’t help it. And I started laughing too.

The first kiss seemed to catch her unaware as if we hadn’t done it before and our mouths didn’t seem to fit together. We pecked at each other’s lips like little kids holding Action Man and Barbie’s lips together. But a taste of her was no longer enough. We rolled our mouths and tongues finding there own way, and my hands glided over her face and onto her nightdress, feeling the heat from her, touching her, and wanting more. It was never enough, until I touched bare skin and the aureole and stopped, waiting, with the shock of it as my fingers touched one solitary wobbly nipple. I was all bunched up, like her nightie had been earlier, lying on top of her.

‘Wait,’ Gillian said, pushing me off her.

As the classical music on the stereo came to an abrupt stop, I balanced my weight on one arm, cautiously, letting her out from under me, as if she was going to suddenly fly out the window. In the room’s sudden silence I cautiously held my breath, as Gillian reached down and pulled her nightdress up and over her head and lay back down beside me, as if we were playing Doctors and Nurses.

I licked my dry lips, but my body was shaking. I went to kiss Gilllian again, but there seemed to be anger in her eyes. She pushed my face roughly away.

‘I’ve got sensitive skin,’ Gillian said, ‘you’ll need to shave’.

I hadn’t had to before, was framed in my mouth, but the touch of the smooth skin around her stomach soothed me. I watched her watching me, making little whorls, patterns of nothingness on her body, which meant everything to me, as they reached higher and higher. She gasped as my hand framed her breast and my fingers found her nipple. I dived down and fed with the subtlety of a newborn. My hands moved insistently down brushing aside the flimsy gossamer of her pants, framing her pussy, like a dog at a cat flap, not sure what to do next. The smell of her wet sex filled my mind and the room like frankincense and myrrh.

I scrambled off the bed, my fingers bunching up on my shirt so that I gave up and pulled it over my head. Gillian lying beside me, watched, as if from a great distance, as I pulled my denims down and stumbled, as if the weight of my cock springing almost out of my pants, had pulled me forward, but it just general clumsiness as I put a hand down, on the bed, to balance myself.

I tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t, as she lay on the bed like a stranger. So I was glad when she spoke first.

‘You’ll have to put a condom on,’ Gillian said, in her Brummie accent, reminding me again of the foreignness of her.

I’d already explained all that to her- how I couldn’t have a condom in case she thought I wanted sex and that would make her easy- but it all seemed such a long time ago, when it didn’t really matter, because she wasn’t going to have sex with me, at that time, anyway.

‘It’s ok,’ I said in a voice that I would have used to sooth kids under five, but I could see it wasn’t ok. She lifted her fags from the bureau beside the bed.

I lay naked beside her, my face redder than her fag, stroking her stomach and trying desperately to think of a way to make things the way that they had been before.

‘We’ve already done it without a condom,’ I pleaded.

She took a deep puff and seemed to consider this. ‘That’s true,’ she said, but her answer was as ephemeral as a smoke ring, with her soft body, set hard against me.