Dinking

Too many tequilas.

He balanced me on his handlebars and we flew down the hill.

It was an old bike, heavy curled metal, a Rocket. I often walked past the old man who had made it, his shop still clinging to it's place on the street despite the rampant gentrification of the area. He wore old clothes, a pork pie hat, a loved jumper with a dozen threads skittering off into the night. When I clapped him on the shoulder I felt the strength beneath the threadbare shirt. He lifted me up onto the handlebars like a doll. I held myself up and opened my mouth to suck in the night air and laughed it out again.

We had to drink the last few fingers of the bottle. It was because of the worm. We tore it apart and swallowed half of it each. If there were any halucinagenic properites we were too drunk to notice. We laughed into the night.

At the top of the hill we sat and drank in the city lights, the wormy glint of traffic creaping in catapillar lines.

"I want to make love in the dew."

He just laughed and hoisted me back up onto his handlebars.

In his bed then. I watched him itchy with restlessness, smoking, turning to me suddenly and reaching out with his nicotine yellow fingers. He traced a stop start map on my flesh. He hummed. I sat as still as I could because when I moved he would retreat to pace in a corner of the room, reaching for his guitar to pluck a few chords out of the air, his body thin and pale against the warm round wood. My stillness sat in counterpoint to his itch and twitch. He tore pieces of his clothes from his body and then, shivery, wrapped the scraps of fabric around him.

Perhaps we would make love. I would have to let him settle first, like a trapped animal adjusting to his cage. I concentrated on my stillness, carefully occupying my space in his bed, an odour of calm emanating from my pores. Perhaps he would join me on the bed, hurrying into sex without warning, hurrying away at the end of it. This was a pattern I was used to with him. I tried to modulate my breath, to stop the heart-thudding rise and fall of my chest. Only in my stillness would he feel safe enough to join me. And so, I waited.