by Bill Rowe
I dried off and dressed and wrote a note: “7: 48 a.m., Dear S. (for Splendid Superb Sumptuous Sian), I’ll be waiting across the hall to serve you breakfast and coffee whenever you want it. Just come on in. Love, T. (for Tumultuous Turbulent Tempestuous Tom.)” Feeling not in the least idiotic at what I had just written, but indeed rather gallant, I went out, slipped the note under her door, rapped gently, and went back to my room to wait.
Thirty-five minutes stretched out on a rack before I heard Sian’s knock-knock and my door opening. I stood up to greet her as she slipped into the room. She was in her bathrobe and her bare feet. Her face looked freshly scrubbed and her hair was still damp. “Sorry I took so long,” she said. “I was in the bath. I practically died with joy when I saw your note. I couldn’t take the time to dress.” We kissed. Fresh toothpaste was on her breath. She moved her right foot up my right leg and rubbed her sole high on my inner thigh. “Brr, my feet are cold. Tomsy, fetch us a pair of your woolliest socks, please.”
“You don’t seem to be hungover at all,” I said, going to my drawer and pulling out a pair of hiking socks. “You look great.”
“A little hazy, that’s all,” she said. “But I held back and made you drink the lion’s share so that I could take advantage of you. After you left I was sorry I’d copped out. I was thinking of coming over again, but I fell asleep before I could act.”
“I was too out of it anyway. But this morning in my bath, I felt like— whoo!”
She sat down on the floor to put on the socks. “You know, all this is threatening to throw a spanner into the works,” she said. “You were determined to stay good for your Rosie O’Dell while you were here, and before I came down to London I took the firm decision to remain celibate till I finished here.” She placed her left ankle on her right knee and brushed off the sole of her foot, exposing her entire thigh under her robe and giving me a glimpse of glossy pubic hair before she pulled the garment tighter over her legs. The view had been so patently designed for my benefit that I loved her. In one pulse I became erect.
“I’m writing her this morning to say it’s over.”
Sian smiled at me and nodded. “That’s best.” Then her eyes dropped. “Cor blimey.” Her smile widened as she stared brazenly at my crotch. “Whotcha got there, mite?”
“I appear to be in a rather excitable state.”
“Moi aussi.” She pulled on the other sock with her foot in the air, heedless of the bathrobe falling away, and hopped to her feet. She pressed her hips on mine, grinding against my erection. “The very sight of you turns me right on.” She took my hand and placed my fingers between her legs. “See? Oh cracky! You wouldn’t have any condoms about the place? No. And I went off the pill when I took my vow of chastity. I’d go round to the chemist, but I don’t think it’s open yet. Never mind, we’ll simply have to make do for now.” She undid my belt and pulled down my trousers and underwear and took my penis in both hands for a moment and kissed it. Then she slipped her robe off, folded it, and placed it on the floor between us, and knelt upon it. Naked except for the woolly socks, looking up at me with irises that looked black instead of brown because her pupils were so dilated, breasts pressed against my legs, the fingers of one hand around the base of my penis and my scrotum, the other hand gripping my buttock, Sian rather skilfully blew me.
Twenty minutes later I sat at my desk composing a letter to Rosie and visualizing Sian as I’d stood over her, feeling somewhat sheepish until she changed my mood to heroic with, “I never had an orgasm doing that before.” Now I was waiting for her return. She had just left to get dressed, grab her anti-preggers prescription, nip round to the chemist with it, and pick up, to tide us over till the pills kicked in, she’d said, a couple dozen French safes.
Even more aroused now than before Sian’s fellation, I wrote in my letter to Rosie that I was considering joining the university excursion up the Nile over the Christmas break. It seemed a waste to be all the way over here and not take advantage of such a good opportunity to expand my horizons. Hence I would not be returning home till next June. That being the case, I didn’t feel that I was being fair to require of her—of either of us, really—over so long a period of time, the absolute fidelity normally associated with a formally engaged couple. Therefore I wished to free her to form relationships of a perhaps affectionate nature with other persons. That would be a good test of our own relationship, and if we both felt the same way about each other in June, after this separation of a year, then we would have profited from the freedom we had accorded each other. I wished to convey to her every success in her studies, and I looked forward to hearing from her at her convenience. I signed off with “All the very best,” in place of my usual “All my love.” Folding the letter, I congratulated myself on breaking it to her gently.
I prepared the envelope and placed it on the corner of my desk to be mailed the next time I went out. Into my mind came second thoughts about what I was doing. But I didn’t want any second thoughts. If I didn’t mail it now it might lie around haunting me, unmailed for days. I picked up the envelope, took off out the door, ran to the mailbox, and dropped it in. I was double-timing back when I saw Sian hurrying down the sidewalk from the opposite direction. We met in front of our building, slightly breathless, big cheerful smiles on our glowing faces.
“Did you post your…?” she asked, glancing the way I’d come.
“The knot is severed.”
She put an arm around my waist and pulled her other hand out of her jacket pocket to flash a small tinsel packet in her palm. “We’re all set now, guv,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth, giving me a squeeze. “Come into my parlour for strawberries and cream.”
“LONG DISTANCE FOR YOU from Canada, ducks,” Sian poked her head into my room to say. “A female. I think it must be your little friend.”
I went down the hall to the communal phone, hoping Sian was wrong and that the female was my mother. “Hi, love,” said Rosie. “I got your letter and I think your idea of a trip to Egypt over Christmas is great. Those cabins on the boat would be doubles, wouldn’t they? Because I’d love to go with you.” Not a word out of her about freeing ourselves for affection with others.
Sian had just finished making the arrangements for two double cabins, one for Morton and me and one for his girlfriend and Sian, the big heterosexual switcheroo to take place clandestinely the first night on board. I missed a beat before replying, “Gosh, Rosie, they won’t allow unmarried couples, especially an underage male and female, to share a cabin, so that would mean paying for two cabins, which would be expensive for you all the way from there.”
“I could manage it, I’m sure, if both of us wanted to. Mother has a buyer for the big house. It would be wonderful for us to get together like that.”
“I’m sure that all the cabins are fully booked by now.”
“Could you find out? Perhaps there are dropouts.”
“The trip is only for students of the three universities.”
“Are you sure, Tom? Can’t a student bring a friend or—”
“I believe it to be the case. Of that I am morally certain.”
“Morally certain. That’s an interesting choice of words. Are you seeing someone else?”
“Well, I… naturally I have developed some friend—”
“Was that her who answered the phone?”
“Who, Sian? She has digs here in this building, yes, and she has become a pretty good friend, yes.”
“She has a nice voice. Sian, yes, she is very pretty.”
Dad must have shown her the photograph I’d taken of Morton and Sian and then sent him as a laugh because of his mistake over Sian’s name. “Dad,” I’d written on the back, “see if you can figure out which one is Sian and which one is Morton.”
“That picture was a joke between Dad and me, Rosie.”
“Yes, he showed it to me as part of the joke. But on a serious note, Tom, we have been away from each other for six months and we are only
human. It’s natural that we’ll have attractions and temptations. But I think we should be very careful before we destroy forever the marvellous love we have between us. I should come over there for Christmas and we should be together for a while under pleasant circumstances away from here.”
“I’ve pretty well decided I’m going on that Nile trip.”
“I’m getting the message, Tom. But for your sake and mine, let’s make sure, before we end something good for the rest of our lives, that it’s what you really want to do. Are you going on the trip with someone special?”
That one back there in the goddamned colonies was starting to get right on my nerves. “Someone special. Gosh, there’s a bunch of us going. I guess they’re all special.”
“Okay. Go on that trip, by all means. But give me the date when you’ll be back in London, and I’ll come over to see you then. We owe ourselves a face-to-face decision on our future relationship before either of us does something permanently irrevocable, rather than merely very hurtful, as this is now.”
How come I’d never noticed before what a pest she was? “Rosie, listen. I’m going on the trip with another woman.”
“I understand, Tom. I don’t just mean that I heard what you said, I’m saying I understand what you have gone through with me and why you would want to do this. What I am suggesting to you, imploring of you, as a woman who loves you more than life itself and who believes that, beneath everything that’s happening to you now, you feel the same about me, is that we not destroy that love, my darling. Let us renew it and…”
Destroy what? Renew what? What the hell was the silly broad nattering on about? I lost it. “Rosie, I’ve been having sex with another woman here ever since I wrote you that last letter, and I’m extremely fond of her. And now I’d like to say good—”
“Oh, Tom, I wish you’d had the guts to tell me how you were thinking last spring when you ran away from here like a—no, wait, I didn’t mean that. I know you have been very courageous to go through… It’s just that I’ve been afraid all these months—I’m very upset at the thought of losing you. I love you very much and I think you still—”
“Well, you should mean it, Rosie. Because that is exactly what I did. I couldn’t wait to get away last spring. I didn’t run away, I galloped away from all that crap at full tilt and I’m delighted to be away from it now. If I ever go back there again it will be a fucking miracle, so I think we should just say goodbye now, because it is over.”
“Oh, Tom. This is so sad. It is breaking my heart in two. We loved each other so much.”
“Goodbye, Rosie,” I said, before realizing I was speaking into a dead receiver. Well, that was over with at last. Now everyone could get on with their lives sensibly for a change. I could barely hang up the receiver, I was shaking so much.
Walking back to my room I saw that Sian’s door was ajar. She pulled it open as I passed and said, “That sounded a bit tense. Hadn’t you made everything clear to the poor maiden?”
“Apparently not. But it’s clear now, I hope.”
“Oh, it is now, lover, by the sound of that. When are you coming over here?”
“In a little while. I have to finish an essay outline.”
“Don’t be long,” Sian murmured. “I am very turned on right now.” In keeping with the pattern of three times a day we’d established since we’d begun a week ago, this would top off today’s schedule with our third copulation. I had a flashback to the fatigue I’d experienced in grade eleven after a triathlon.
An hour later, though, I slipped into Sian’s bed and ranged my hands all over her body as eagerly as the first time. Sian surprised me. She stopped my hands and held them in hers. “There’s something I must tell you first,” she said.
I kissed her and said, “I’m better at scintillating pillow talk after rather than before,” and tried to free my hands.
She tightened her grip. “No, now, please, Tom. I told you I’d been proposed to by a man. Well, that was a little white lie. In fact, he was a married man with a wife and child, and his proposal consisted of telling me he would leave his wife for me. I only had to say the word. On that, I finally left him, and came here.”
“I thought it was strange your sister gave you that bottle of cognac on the breakup of your engagement. She gave it to you because you got yourself out of a mess. Well, that’s a forgivable little fib.” I lifted a leg across hers, stirred by her confession.
“I’m not finished. This afternoon, he was waiting for me outside the door. He’d come down from Cardiff to London, he said, to beg me to resume our relationship. ‘Forget it, Gareth, ’ I said. ‘You’re wasting your time. We’ve been through all that ad nauseam.’ ‘But I’ve moved out, ’ says he. ‘I’ve left my wife and child for you.’ You could have knocked me over with a feather. ‘What did you do that for at this stage, you idiot?’ I said. ‘My life has moved on from us. You’re a figure from ancient history.’”
“Good,” I said. “What did he think, you’d be down here with your life in neutral, pining for him?”
“He said it was all over between himself and his wife, anyway, whether I go back with him or not, because he could not keep his mind off me. Kind of flattering in a stupid way, isn’t it? And besides, he said, if his moving out was to mean anything to me, it had to be done on its own, with no strings attached, rather than being contingent on my positive answer. The bugger seems to be thinking straight for a change, I’ll say that.”
I snuggled closer. “I hope all that hasn’t upset you too much to enjoy yourself tonight.” I tried to free my hands again, but she kept hers clamped around them.
“Oh yes, having two adorable men balmy about me is really upsetting.” She tried to kiss my lips, but she laughed in the middle of it. Then she turned serious again. “Tom, I loved Gareth very much before I met you, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still have strong feelings for him. But I have very strong feelings for you too. I don’t know what to do. I need your guidance.”
My first impulse was to say, “Tell him you have a new man and he should get the hell back to Cardiff and stop pestering everyone.” But my pride was a little hurt by her ambivalence over myself and the Welsh guy, so I fished for a compliment with a show of selflessness. “Well, to be honest, and thinking only of your best interests and ignoring mine, I’d say go back to him.”
“But your best interests enter into it too. Don’t you think it would be a shame to give up what you and I have together?” She took her hands off mine and moved them down over my stomach and made a new grip. The next twenty minutes seemed to firm up Sian’s decision. She said after a quiet spell of recovery, “I wouldn’t dream of giving you up, Tom, I love you too much. We are going to stay together forever and ever. Fate was telling us something when my former love came from Wales to see me, and your former love called you from overseas all on the very same day. That’s far too full of meaning to be just a coincidence.”
Where had all the oxygen in the goddamned room gone? I felt stifled to the point of suffocation. The selflessness I’d expressed before making love had felt disingenuous then, but it was right on target now. “You have to think of yourself, Sian. I’m a student with years to go before I finish. I have an undergraduate degree to get—I may even be leaving London in a few months to finish that in Canada—then post-graduate, probably law school. Christ, I have eons of studies ahead of me yet. As I said, if you do still feel anything for him, you should go back with him.”
“I’m a student too. Together we can decide to go anywhere and do anything we want. Our whole life is ahead of us and we have all the time in the world.”
I stayed silent. I wanted nothing more from my whole life at this moment than to get cracking on that comparative analysis of the gross domestic products of West Germany and East Germany that had lain dormant on my desk for two weeks but was now itching, screaming, for completion.
“Tom?”
“Yes?”
“Do you love me?”
“Sian, I don’t want to answer that, because I think you should do what I advised you to do earlier.”
“Tom.” She was up on her elbow and looking at me hard. “Do you or do you not fucking love me?”
“No.”
“No, because the only one you love is your silly little Rosie O’Dell, conveniently on the other side of the ocean, where she can’t see you humping your scrawny arse off.”
I got up and pulled on my clothes. An intense anger at myself, hollow and hopeless, prevented me from speaking. As I walked to her door, she said, “Or is it that you just like dunking your dick in anyone stupid enough to oblige you? You don’t need to love someone for that, do you, you little cock with feet? Any old cunt will do for that.”
That was twice now that someone had accused me of being a walking phallus. What kind of an impression at all was I leaving everywhere I went? I turned around. My anger at myself turned to pity for her. “I wish this were a few years later, Sian. You are one of the most beautiful persons, in every respect, that I have ever met. Go back to him and love him. I think it will be great for you both. You will have a man who will be forever aware of how lucky he is.”
“Oh, piss off, you fucked-up little shit.”
The next afternoon Sian knocked on my door. She was sorry for calling me dirty names, she said, and wanted to tell me to make other arrangements for the second berth in my cabin on the Nile cruise. She was going back to Cardiff next week to stay.
“Aren’t you finishing your year here?”
“No, I’m transferring to university there and moving in with Gareth. I’m glad you were so honest last night. You probably spared me and you a good deal of grief. Come over and say hello to him and have a cuppa. I haven’t mentioned anything, by the way. You and I are just student acquaintances.”