Waterbed

The first thing I bought was a bed. A bed and sheets. I had an image in my head of silk sheets, thick and heavy. Sheets that you could wrap your naked flesh in and have pleasure just from the shrouding. The satin was a concession to my status as a student. The sheets were cheap but they were a bright red and they looked beautiful and felt quite nice until the airlessness of synthetic fibres dragged a fine layer of sweat from my skin.

A bed was more difficult. I wanted something large, some king sized wonder of engineering. I wanted a bed for languid fucking. Something that you could spend months on, a virtual boat of a bed, pillows like marshmallows, smelling faintly of expensive perfume.

Maybe I didn't think it through. I decided on a waterbed on someone else's recommendation. There was the glitz of porno-chic that appealed to me. An excessiveness that suited. I imagined a thousand liquid nights and the delight of a back and forth rocking, a boat tied to the shore, but still caught by a gentle tide, tugging me towards a boundless ocean.

We lay on the bed and the ice cold caught me in the kidneys. I shivered. The thing would take 24 hours to warm up. I was determined to have sex on it despite this, but the positioning was impossible. If you lay on your back there was the issue of the cold. If you knelt there was the impossibility of the waves, each little thrust caught on a tide and magnified in a series of ever larger ripples. It made us laugh. It made us tumble over onto our sides, in this position we took to shivering. We put on jumpers, coats, socks. We made a wooly bundle of our bodies leaving peepholes in the layers through which to touch each other. We spent a joyous time experimenting with the oceanic roll of waves. There was much laughter, but at the end of it all we climbed down onto the carpet, shedding layers of winter woollies on the way and we burned our knees on the old short pile. We lay on the post-coital carpet and I dragged the satin sheets off the bed and they were too hot and made us sweat and gifted me with dreams of abandoned babies, lost to a shoe box in the cupboard. I woke and rolled over onto the hard ache of the space beside him and I told him about the dream and my dissapointment of the sheets and the fact that I had probably spent everything I had on a kingsized bed that I couldn't fuck in.

"We'll fuck on the floor." He pulled me to him and he had the most beautiful clear blue eyes, full of a need for me to like him. I liked him. I lay on the floor beside my waterbed and I shut my eyes tight and I hugged and I wondered if I had finally come home.