Naked Girl in the Road

She ran out naked onto the road and I stood on the front steps looking like I'd just survived a toga party, naked but for a white sheet wrapped around my body, a chrysalis shuffling out onto the front stairs. Bare, cold feet, a little drunk, kissed lipstick bleeding out from my bruised mouth.

She stood in the road and anyone who was awake at 3.30am could have seen her.

"Just come inside Cyn." I tried to whisper, but she was too far away for that. She was halfway down the road and sobbing. The police would be called. Domestic violence situation oh Grey Road. Female victim standing naked in the street. Female perpetrator near-naked on the stairs.

"I just can't do it,"she wailed, and if the neighbours had been sleeping, they certainly were not asleep now. Cyn was distraught. Cyn was crying. Cyn was drunk and disorderly and if the police weren't on their way, I would have to call them before she did some damage to herself.

Cyn had seduced me. She was younger than I was, still at school, but she had been talking about sex before I had even seen a penis properly. There were nights when we would lie in front of the television, watching Rockie Horror over and over and talking about how it was OK to be queer.
"If you were, you know, like that"she said, shuffling closer to me on the couch, "Then it would be fine. Perfectly natural."

One time, late at night she touched me high up on the thigh, a sleepy brushing of her fingertips but when I rolled towards her she pretended to be sleeping. Once she brushed my breast with her shoulder and I thought that it was deliberate, even though she pretended it was an accident. She talked about how it would be okay to be naked together, but we never were.

The seduction lasted years. I had grown and left home, she had grown and whined about leaving home but hadn't. We had drunk too much and Richard was in the other room. She talked about all those evenings watching Rockie Horror. She laid her head in my lap and cried about how she had the opportunity to seduce me and how that opportunity had now passed. She touched my knee and sighed through a thick clog of tear-induced mucus.

"Its fine for me to have sex with women." I told her. Richard and I had a kind of loose arrangement. He wouldn't mind. "I could clear it with him first."

But she didn't seem to want the bother of me 'clearing it'. When she kissed me it tasted of passion fruit. I hated those terrible premixed drinks, but now, on her breath, they tasted sweet. Most of it went as expected. Drunken fumbling, slippery fingers clumsily inserted. The carpet hadn't been vacuumed for a while and there was dust and fluff stuck to our backs and an itch of carpet burn on our knees.

Fun. Drunk fun. But wen I kissed the soft underbelly of her she moved my head back up, away from my target. I tasted the passion pop of her mouth.

She ran out naked onto the road because of my vibrator. An over-reaction. She backed away from the thing as I were about to attack her with a cattle prod. I had nuzzled into the split-fruit flesh of her until I was drunk with the scent of her, sweet and sticky wet, my face awash, catching the slippery drips on my fingers, sliding them up over her parted thighs. She seemed to be enjoying this. I felt the insistence of her hips pushing into me and I slipped my hands under her soft lightly furred cheeks and held her closer. She even moaned.

I brought the vibrator out because I knew how good it would feel. Her, all wet and open and on the edge of things, the whir of it echoing through her body like a song. She would perform that death-plummet for me and I would watch it all, close up. Testing the pulsations with the tip of my finger, breathing cold air over her when she gasped back into the world, her heart pounding.

She opened her unfocused eyes when I moved away from her, looking at my body as if I were something that she might eat. I hoped she would. I so hoped she would.

"Right back."

But when I returned she looked at the vibrator, small, yellow, an inoffensive stick of moulded plastic, and she stood and ran out naked onto the road.

She was wailing something about Richard, something about breaking up a beautiful relationship, she was drunk and slurry and I suspect it was not about Richard at all.

"It's bloody raining." Just a light drizzle, but I didn't want to be wrapped in a sheet in the rain in the middle of the road.

I felt something beside me and it was Richard. He rested his sleepy hand on my shoulder and watched Cyn, naked and teary in the light drizzle.

"You should go and get her."

"Every time I go anywhere near her she runs away."

He sighed. He was a small man, thin and slightly hunched and skittery as a foal. He stepped out into the rain in his pyjamas. Old man Pyjamas with blue vertical stripes. He was a gentle man. He put his hand around he naked waist and said something and she folded herself into him. He brought her back to the house, little slow steps, whispering all the time and stroking the soft curve of her hip. He brought her in and we sat and she wouldn't look me in the eye. She nuzzled into his shoulder and I saw the difference in her body, all of her pointing at him, breasts, nipples, knees, wanting him to touch her. He noticed. He gentled her away.

He wasn't straight and she wasn't gay and I wasn't particularly discerning but I had slept with both of them. I shook. My head. I made us all a pot of tea.