Sin and Zen, #1

by S. W. Stribling

  I slept.

  I took a shower the next morning. Kissed her and left. I responded to her text out of courtesy for two days then fell off the map. She’ll find somebody better for her.

  IT WAS THE WINTER HOLIDAYS now, and I was walking with one crutch rather than two. I spent actual Christmas back in my original regiment in Calvi; the colonel wanted all his injured boys to be there for the holidays so he flew us in. I could have cared less, but it gave me a chance to grab all my stuff I had left behind. What was left of it after the scavengers had had their way. It was boring and left me feeling deprived of feminine affection so much that I ended up reconnecting and losing touch again with my ex-wife back in Virginia. I survived thanks again to the amount of alcohol they shoved in front of us.

  CLAUDIA WAS BEAUTIFUL, intelligent, and cocky to the point it could be hostile. But she was mature and knew what she wanted and knew she could get it from whoever and whenever she wanted. However, she was polite and conservative when I had met her, even though I could see she had a hidden side. Ms. Claudia was like a schoolteacher you wanted to bang but intimidated you, calculated and indifferent to anybody else but herself, one woman taking on the world alone. So when she asked me to go out for New Year’s Eve, I said yes.

  It surprised me as there seemed to be no connection between us when we first met. I had only met her twice before, both times at dinner with Eeva, a mutual friend of ours. They were both neighbors and just down the street from where I was sleeping. Working as fille-au-pairs for two different French families. Taking care of the family and the house for a bed to sleep in and the opportunity to learn French.

  At the time, I thought Eeva was introducing me to Claudia to ‘pass the friend test.’ As Eeva and I had been spending some intimate months together walking and talking but barely made it to a drunken kiss. Maybe it was the dog and pony show for her friend’s approval, but apparently, I didn’t pass, or Eeva just wasn’t bold enough to take a chance with the likes of me. It wasn’t long before that she finally admitted she still had a boyfriend back in Estonia, and I backed off after that. I had known since the day I met her she wasn’t the girl to sleep around on her lover, even if he was thousands of miles away. And despite my faults, I’m not much of a home-wrecker and she seemed too good for me. But despite this revelation and split between our false connection, she still occasionally invited me out afterward and seemed to show interest in a very timid and endearing way, innocent and pure as the snow she was probably born in. And I continued to see her and have dinner with her because I enjoyed the female company. It was a hell of a lot better than sitting at a bar of testosterone that was always waiting for me at the Legion bar.

  It had been a year since I had really been on the make despite being lucky from time to time at the bar and chasing a young girl that was unavailable and only seeking friendship. So on New Year’s, I was nervous about my date or non-date. I wasn’t the same young man when I used to think I woke up in the morning and pissed excellence. A blessing and a curse to the opposite sex. Even back then it was just an inflated ego the army brainwashed me into believing. But now I was broken, alone, and in an unfamiliar world where the language was alien, the culture made little sense, and I left my confidence on the ground with the rock that shattered my femur.

  Claudia had a friend that came to pick us up. I assumed it was her date, and I had just become a third wheel, another point of sympathy for me. Well, shit. It’s a free ride to a town outside of Marseille that I hadn’t visited yet and a chance to sit and drink in a different hole.

  I kept mostly quiet since she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak French or Romanian. She spoke French fluently, or at least well enough to piss on my French. She would giggle and smile every time I would say something, which wasn’t much. I expended all the vocabulary I knew just to make the effort; her favorite word that she teased me about all night was brosse à dents.

  The bar we went to wasn’t so much a bar as a student recreation center set up like prom for a small town. And it seemed to be primarily Asian in ethnicity. The music was playing but nobody was dancing. The drinks were there but not being drunk. I was in New Year’s Eve hell. Luckily the drinks were cheap and I, therefore, headed straight to the minibar to keep my buzz going.

  Claudia and her friend, Olivier, walked in slowly as if absorbing the overwhelming grandiosity of the place. I was still unsure by the conversation in the car if they were together or not and therefore unsure of my role to play in the night’s events. They hadn’t made any physical contact yet but had been talking friendly in the car ride over. I didn’t understand most of it and didn’t pay attention to the rest.

  I had my drink by the time they arrived at the bar and Olivier ordered a drink for both of them. I sat there and took a drink every time I tried to think of something to say but couldn’t. By the time we sat down, I was on my third whiskey and they still had their first punch.

  We found some chairs near the music and around the dancefloor. I was happy to be sitting down as my leg kills me if I stand on it for more than a few minutes.

  Olivier kept chatting up Claudia, and I could see a better picture of their relationship. She would smile and talk, but despite his best efforts, she wouldn’t budge. I could hear this and I didn’t even know what they were saying. Olivier was sitting on the other side of Claudia from me. All three of us knew that he wasn’t getting anywhere with Claudia, but he just kept talking. And he talked, and he talked. Thankfully, I couldn’t hear him because the stereo was too loud.

  Eventually, he got up and asked her to dance. There were a few Asians on the floor at this point. Some 80s pop music bumping that everybody knows but never said the correct lyrics. She politely declined and turned towards me. He looked over at me, got all pissy and went to play pool with some girls over at the table.

  She tried talking to me, but not as she had done before. She was more open and warm now; it wasn’t quite the gestapo she had put me through at Eeva’s dinner. Unfortunately, we had already gone past my level of French and I proved to be the opposite of her French friend in talking capacity.

  We sat rather quiet, and I got up to get us both a drink. She took a sip but said she doesn’t drink too much. I wasn’t sure if I liked her.

  I got up to go see how Olivier was doing with the young coeds. They were cute, but almost annoyingly so. He seemed to have a laugh and showed them a thing or two about pool. I watched, and if they were learning something, it wasn’t about pool. We chatted for a minute and he either wasn’t too interested in them or was getting nowhere. He seemed to have given up for the night. I looked over at the girls and said a few hellos and made a few bad jokes. They were young, too young. I’m only a few years older, but they just felt young. It must be the school mentality. I left the student life behind when I was seventeen. They were twenty and still living it. At twenty-four I must be six or seven post-school years older than them. No thanks. I prefer them older and showing me a thing or two.

  I looked back over to the dance floor and saw that Claudia had gotten up and started dancing, moving around the middle of the floor. A few guys tried to get close, and she would keep them at arm’s length and then move on after a few seconds. I watched her, and she would glance over at me watching her.

  She waved me in. And I just pointed to my drink in one hand and crutch in the other. But she had a gaze. Eyes that seemed dangerous like a wild animal staring at you from a forest fire. She was daring me to come over and dance with her. I probably looked excited and confused. Why I thought is it scary to come closer, I couldn’t really tell you. To touch her? Talk to her? Bring her a drink like a good little boy? Or just to make the other guys jealous? She looked at me as if it scared me. Maybe it did. So like the abandoned house at the end of the street your friends dare you to go into, I did.

  She danced. I tried. We were closer than an arm’s length. I leaned in for a kiss and she leaned in to put her forehead against mine and gracefully avoided the kiss. We danced lik
e that until the end of the song. Then we danced again.

  We talked a little, and I tried being flirty. My spirit was up and for the first time in a long time, I really felt alive with a woman.

  We didn’t stay too long at the soirée and my midnight kiss was nothing more than the French bisous which I shared with every girl within stepping distance.

  OLIVIER DROPPED US off where he had picked us up on la corniche John F. Kennedy. It was a small walk to Claudia’s house from there. I was buzzing but not drunk, so when I walked her to the door, I said goodnight there and walked off back towards mine.

  It was chilly and misty out, but I didn’t walk home. I could hear the waves crashing against the rocks down the street from Claudia’s and just before the turn to mine. I sat down over a ledge and let my feet hang over the twenty-meter drop to the water. I wanted to kiss her and now it was driving me insane that I hadn’t tried harder.

  I sat there for twenty minutes until the cold finally forced me to act. I texted her asking if she would like to go grab another drink.

  She said no.

  I sat there for a few more minutes to allow my defeat to settle in before I went home to sleep and start a new day.

  ‘I don’t want to go out, but you can come over.’ she texted.

  I replied okay and started to feel warm again.

  I limped as fast as I could over there and sounded her buzzer. I walked up the stairs past the garage and towards the house itself. She opened up, smiled, and let me in.

  I was wetter than I had thought and took off my shoes and jacket at the door.

  She had been watching a movie and so we settled on the couch and continued it. I was braver now. I was in the lion’s den and here to act or be eaten. I played my role as smoothly as possible to get closer to her.

  Before I made it too obvious, she helped me out and quickly found her place under my arm and her head against my chest. With the momentum in my favor, I lifted her chin and kissed her.

  She kissed back and then pulled back.

  We watched a few more minutes of the movie.

  I tried again. This time it was more than a kiss. She pushed her tongue into my mouth and wrapped her leg around mine, moving it up and down between my legs. It didn’t take long for her to have something to rub up against. I had my hands everywhere. The back of her neck, under her shirt, my fingers sliding across the top of her ass and down her crack.

  She put her hand down my pants and started rubbing me off. I tried arranging myself to do the same for her when she said, ‘I can’t.’

  Fuck. Too soon, I thought.

  ‘I’ve got my period.’

  ‘Ah. Okay....’ I said.

  ‘You can sleep here though.’

  It was the holidays so no formation the next morning, not that I would have cared at this point. She wanted me to stay. Even if we didn’t have sex, I may get a handjob out of it. As unfair to her as that might be.

  Then the liquor started talking.

  ‘You know it doesn’t bother me.’ I said, ‘We could take a ‘shower.’’

  She just kind of smiled and didn’t reply.

  After the movie, I followed her downstairs to the little hole she called a bedroom. It was barely a single bed, smaller I think than the bed I had back at the barracks. Luckily, she was fifteen kilos less than I was and I barely weighed sixty kilos now after my injury. We would fit.

  I got undressed, and she headed towards the bathroom that’s just right across the hall. Laying down, I thought about how foreign and exciting it is to lie in somebody else’s sleeping place. The feel of their sheets and the smell of their pillow. Just how comfortable it is, despite not being your own. Maybe part of that comfort was knowing I could leave.

  I could hear her spitting as she finished brushing her teeth with her brosse à dents.

  ‘Are you coming or what?’ she said.

  What the fuck would I be coming for? Then I realized she was in the bathroom.

  ‘Yep.’ I said and hopped out of bed and into the bathroom without a thought to my crutch, only my crotch.

  I saw her standing up in the tub, naked. She was skinny, not skeleton-like or anorexic; she had the body of a model. Everything directly proportional to her size. Perfectly shaped breasts that only seemed to exist on sculptures. I thought small tits must be a blessing as you get older because they still look so young. She was thirty then, but I bet they didn’t look much different when she was twenty, and probably wouldn’t change much when she was forty.

  I stepped in and had a hard-on by the time the second foot touched the bottom of the tub. We started kissing again. My hands on her ass, hers on my little soldier, using a nice twisting motion that sent my body shivering.

  ‘Assieds-toi‘ she said.

  I sat.

  She climbed on top of me. Just the tip, then a little more, and then she slid me halfway into her. She was definitely on her period. Up again and back down, this time all the way. Slowly then quickly. Rocking back and forth, then back to up and down. This was good and I may have just found somebody to see more than once. I’ve got to hold out. I’ve got to last.

  And I did.

  I came inside with no thought but ‘I did it’. Like a boy who just hit his first home run. It wasn’t my first time; it wasn’t my best time. But my blood-stained cock was my weapon of choice in this murder. This stabbing that led me straight through her body to her soul. I was the prey who had become the predator. I had won.

  She laid her sweaty chest against mine and I could feel her heavy breathing. She kissed me just above my left nipple. Then kissed me a few more times in rapid-fire succession all over my chest. She laid her head back down. I was still inside of her at the bottom of that bathtub. A tub without water. Just us. I put my hand on her head and lightly caressed the back of her neck where the hairline started.

  We both had won.

  3

  The first week Claudia and I spent together, she always told me that ‘this was the last time.’ I said okay and thought ‘this was just this time.’ Why spell it out? Why limit it? After that first week though, she gave up on telling me and without words admitted she enjoyed my company too.

  About a month later, we were having a get-together at her place. The parents were out-of-town, so she invited some of her Romanian friends, Eeva, and a few other fille-au-pairs she knew from her French class. We had a good time and since supposedly nobody knew that her and I were sleeping together, so we kept to ourselves, drank, and had a good time until it was bedtime.

  When things started to wind down, I pretended to leave and went to her room to wait. She told her goodbyes to some and gave blankets to those who crashed. One of those who stayed was a friend of hers from when she first moved here. A Romanian guy who helped new arrivals, particularly girls, find their way around Marseille and get settled. Claudia had been one of those girls. I guess they slept together a few times in the first few weeks after she arrived. He got attached, and she said get over it. That was months ago, but the guy was obviously still in love with her.

  Claudia came to bed, and we started doing what we had been doing all month. She was flexible, and I had her above me in a back to stomach fashion, only her arms were outstretched, so it was more like her holding a crab walking position over me.

  She was a squirter and after it happened the first time, it usually happened again two or three more times within the following minutes. It was amazing and messy. Sometimes it was like fucking a glass of water, but sticky and kind of smelled like piss.

  I was taking my time. I was enjoying watching her shake as I held her up and held her together when her friend walked in.

  ‘Claudia,’ Vasile said. He opened the door and saw his Romanian sweetheart being pounded by some American douchebag. Poor bastard.

  She moaned.

  He was drunk and emotional and ran out of the room crying. I like the idea of crying sometimes too, but Jesus, man, you’re thirty-six years old and you barely know the girl. I stil
l felt sorry for him though.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Claudia said. ‘Just finish.’

  So I did.

  ‘What the fuck was that about?’ I asked. Referring to the interruption by a crying, middle-aged man.

  ‘Uff.’

  ‘Should you go talk to him?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘He and I used to be together. It was a few months after I had arrived and he was always helping me out with papers and stuff. I slept with him once one weekend. Just sex. I thought he understood, and so sometimes after a party on the weekend, I would stay with him. He was nice.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘But after about a month he told me he loved me.’ she said. ‘I told him it wasn’t like that. That I had a boyfriend I loved and that I only wanted sex.’

  I had just found out she had a boyfriend, too. When the question came up on feelings, I told her it was just a good time. She saw me every night, not just on weekends. This could be because of proximity convenience.

  ‘I think you should go talk to him.’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  She got up and put on some clothes.

  ‘You aren’t going to fuck him though, are you?’

  She gave me a quick laugh and look. ‘No.’

  She disappeared for a good hour; it felt like four. I stayed up. I couldn’t sleep as I was waiting to hear fucking noises.

  Eventually, she came back in the room, tense and frustrated. Well, if she fucked him, I doubt she’ll do it again.

  She told me a bit, but not the whole thing about what had transpired. He was still madly in love with her and wanted her back despite the infidel American semen inside of her. She reiterated that she never saw him as more than a friend. And I imagined that five-minute conversation with a person in love and that drunk going in loops for a very long time.