Lust
by Zack Wilson
I split up with Juliet about 2 weeks after we’d first gone out. I really only went out with her to say I’d had sex with someone and not lie. It hadn’t been much of a relationship. The first time we’d gone out I’d drunk too much Lowenbrau and she’d ravished me in a graveyard and after 10 minutes of my dry banging she’d moaned and bellowed she was coming. I was glad I was drunk and I’m still trying to work out whether I enjoyed it.
The day we split up we’d gone out in the morning, around eleven o’clock or so, another pseudo date where we could pretend to like each other and be interested in what the other was saying. This was a girl who’d pulled me by drawing in marker pen on my arms in the school library and sitting opposite me in the Sixth form common room with her legs too far open revealing grey, washed out knickers. At least they’d been washed. I remember a smudge of chip fat being on the left hip of her grey school skirt for several days around that time. I later found out I’d been the subject of a bet with another, attractive girl.
She was going on holiday the net week and so we went to get some travellers’ cheques from a Tourist Information office. I waited outside for her feeling the fakeness of the domestic situation. We were both acting and once she’d got the cheques we wandered around asking each other what we wanted to do. We sat by the river pretending to be tender, she resting her back against me, holding my arms around herself, on a bench by the statue of a poet. We were running out of things to say to each other. She said, “We could go back to mine and have a shag.”
“Won’t your brother be in?” This was a genuine concern for me. Her brother was something of a cult figure in the town. He was called Simon. He had long curly hair, badly tended to, and dressed appallingly in clothes that were too small for his increasingly lardy body. He liked bands like Megadeth and Slayer. I’m pretty sure he once mentioned Stryper too. He worked in Macdonald’s with my best friend, S.G., who told me disgusting stories about him. Once, when I’d been in Juliet’s bedroom after a night out, sitting in semi-drunk, bored 17 year old, relative innocence on her bed, he’d kept walking past the door making shagging noises, all deep breathing and panting. It wasn’t funny and made me uncomfortable.
“He won’t care,” she replied.
“Really?!” It bothered me.
“It really won’t matter. He’ll probably be out anyway. Or in his room.”
I didn’t like the idea of him being in his room. He’d had a party the week before that was horrible. I’d been drunkenly screwing his sister in her room when a load of rugger buggers I knew from school had burst in and then run out loudly. One of them had been a character called Julian who had the face of the kind of dead pig’s head that Spanish football fans throw at traitors. He was also short-sighted and when he pretended to study in the library at school he wore tiny glasses that swelled his eyes into obscene ovals, removing his eyebrows from view and giving him a freakish, offensive, troubling aspect. I think he lied about his vision and joined the Royal Marines. Another kid was with him who didn’t play rugby and was homophobic and a virgin until he was 27. Juliet had got rid of them whilst I lay drunk and naked on the floor. I don’t know how naked she was when she’d got rid of them. Simon had been showing off a porn video downstairs and a load of blokes in suits had been sitting against a wall watching it. They were sitting on the floor with their legs hitched up close to their bodies. They said they were going clubbing.
That had been the week before. Now I was working on a compromise by the river. Juliet kept kissing me a little too deeply, accompanying her tongue movements with intimate and uncomfortable explorations of my torso with her hands. I’d been as bad in the recent past, a similar sitting down bored session in the park a few days earlier had been punctuated by my frequent rubbing of her arse with different bits of me. Vile, embarrassing, public.
She was persistent. She kept licking my ear and trying to persuade me to her parents’ home for a shag. The presence of her brother was still a handy argument but was wearing thin. I said, “We could try somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“A field.” It seemed so silly and unsavoury to me that I didn’t think she’d say that she thought it was a good idea. She stood up and said she knew where a good place was. It wouldn’t take long to get there. She pulled me up to my feet and didn’t tell me where we were going. We walked away from the statue and over the main pedestrian bridge, crossing the river. The bridge was part of a disused railway line that was now a nicely surfaced footpath along the top of an embankment that ran into the countryside. Many tourists were using it as we followed it out of town.
I tended to walk to her rear. Even in this public place she pulled me in behind her so that my hard-on rubbed between her buttocks. I couldn’t help myself making silly noises and kissing her neck. She sometimes moaned and occasionally I saw her eyes go glazed as she panted. It was cartoonish and unfamiliar. I was sure people were laughing at us. We walked for ages. Soon there were no people around us and my crotch was aching. I was desperate for relief.
We must have walked for half an hour. We had passed many houses and had now turned off the embankment, followed a public footpath through a field, crossed a main road and climbed over a gate into another field. The wheat had recently been cut and sharp, headless stalks stood in neat rows. She led me by the hand. She was almost tender.
“You don’t think anyone’ll see us, do you?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter if they do.”
“Oh…Well, I can’t see that house behind that hedge anymore, so they can’t see us.”
“That doesn’t always work,” she said and took off her coat and lay it on the soil between some of the stalks. She lay down on her back and pulled me on top of her. There was little foreplay and I came quickly. I remember looking behind me at one stage and seeing my black shoes get dirty as my jeans were pushed closer to my ankles.
Afterwards, I pulled the condom off and threw it away amongst the stalks. She wasn’t satisfied and continued to kiss me deeply on the mouth. I had risen to my knees and she pulled me back down. My jeans and underpants were still around my ankles and it wasn’t a warm day. Slowly and forcefully she pushed my head between her legs. I knew what was expected and started to lap dutifully.
She tasted bad. She didn’t smell bad, it was just the taste. I later found out that she didn’t taste typical, so it must’ve been the lubricant off the condom or something. I found it hard to keep going and kept trying to stop. She kept forcing my head back down, a wide and grotesque smile on her face whenever I looked up. Eventually it all just petered out and we separated and dressed.
We made our way back the way we had come. We were silent and I felt odd touching her. When we reached the embankment I turned and said, “This isn’t working.” She cried for a bit because she had to and I put my arms around her wishing I could be somewhere else. She stopped crying and agreed with me. We walked back into town together trading relaxed small-talk. I felt free and couldn’t wait to get way from her. I waited politely whilst she bought some chips and then we parted.
“Stay in touch,” she said. We didn’t.
A year later I was working with her brother at Macdonald’s. I only ever spoke to her once again. She told me she’d slept with a lot of cricketers.