The Girl in the Sunset

She was a dusky hued woman, Bethany was. When I remember this night, as I often do, she stands alone on the hillside. The sunset sifting down on her as she whirls and twirls with a burlesque air, she is dancing and if you saw her you would have thought, “She is mad, she is dancing to a melody she is humming herself.”

Her finger beckons to me on the steps beneath her. I stare straight back, and my heart mutters for a second there. Her raven curls, which normally drift like nectar down her back, blow through the wind as the evening falls. Her summer dress clings to her chest as she stills and looks at me. Against the backdrop of the deserted hill top ruin, her eyes spark a challenge that thrills me. I chase her. I always chased her.

Up we run over ancient cobbled steps, the ivy and other plants overgrown waiting to trip those who pay no due care. I pay no due care. My need is to catch her, if only for a fleet moment. To me she is a nest of thoughts cast in a soul of rose, her eyes a whisky of demons angelic where all her love and passion showed. My heart pounds through my ribs, half from the run, half from wild desire and all from adrenaline. Her long legs turn and she breaks to the left, subtle and deft.

This is right on a myriad of levels, as right as only wrong could be. If we’re caught indecently exposed it could get us fired you see. But when the fire is in you, the fire is in you. You know what I mean? That we might get fired makes it more exciting.

I break left after her, my eyes glowering like smouldering coal. She knows she wants to be caught. I feel alive; the game of adult kiss chase fires my blood completely. It’s like oxygen rushing my soul. Do you know what I mean reader? She was so good looking you’d have to see her, to believe in her.

In these moments, dashing playfully across the crumbling structure the world for two is one. I glimpse her now and then when I close, or when she allows me to see her aching to be caught, yet still not allowing herself to be caught.

In these moments she is without thought. To me she is the flawless, untameable princess, the light of the darkness, the art, the art and the answer with the soul, the soul of the dancer.

She dashes through bushes and around trees. She runs along low stone walls, sometimes a sheer drop on one side. She has no fear and no wish to hide. She runs along a cobbled walkway, low stone walls on either side. They grow in height with elms and oak tress astride, dominating the walkway making arches with their branches, making shadows.

I hunt her, I am nearly on her, reaching out I grasp for her. But my foot snags on some outstretched vine and my fingers brush down the back of her spine as I tumble to ground. The breath knocked out of me, no pain, but a whoosh of sound and static in my fingertip.

Bethany slows and turns, feeling where my fingers have been. In her gaze there is no concern. Her deep brown eyes mock me and she cocks her head. She smiles a smile that belongs only to a Queen of Darkness. Then she flees again as light as pollen on the breeze. I pound both palms flat to the cobbles and rises from my knees, one swift liquid movement.

If my blood had been fired before it was now molten. Like a pain free heart attack. It thumps through passages of my brain I haven’t yet lived to acknowledge. I focus on her curve of her back, the soft skin of her slender arms, imagining the touch of her hands on my neck, the taste of the sin of her lips, the hypnotic swing of her hips.

She slows down, she is now surrounded by three crumbling cracking roofless walls twice her height. Her only way out is back down the cobbles towards me, an end to her flight. I breathe, the clean air filling my lungs. Bethany’s eyes shine as cherry blossoms fall across the alcove, into her dark lustrous hair.

“What am I? Captured?” she says effortlessly. “What a tremendous shame. I’d hoped for so much more, we can’t do it outside Jack.”

“I know,” I say, testing.

“We’re just playing,” she whispers in a half breath. The tremor in her voice caught the words out in a lie as old as language. To me, she was arresting.

“Nothing wrong with that then,” I say like a wolf stalking, careful not to scare her, my hand moving to the hollow of her back. She rests herself into it revelling in the pressure of the touch. She leans her head away but her hand drifts to my waist.

“There are a thousand things wrong with that.”

“I want to marry you,” I say on impulse.

“I want to marry you too.”

“Good.”

We kiss, that kiss is ten thousand stars exploding like thunder through what seems to be one person made whole and separate over again. Drifting like one star above the meandering lives of the billions of Earth’s peoples when suddenly, the clouds rain. Lives are made for moments. Moments lived for lives. Lips and tongues scarcely touching, exquisite sins. Half a second or half a lifetime later Bethany spins away.

“But you have to try harder,” she half teases flowing away like a nymph in a dream. Fleeing again, chase on a whole other level, time out of mind, wine from the vine. Back down the now wet cobbles away from the alcove. She brushes the walls slipping through a gateway where once gate lay.

Now she is in an abandoned garden. Creeping plants covering the walls, creeping like whispers of the darkness to come, cloaked in their secrets woven and spun. Her hands are cascading over wild plants in the breaking sun. I saunter around, sleep walking awake. The chase has a slower softer urgency, a soft yet desperate carrying of feet over the deep green grass. The hidden life of this secluded secret place makes the proposal feel holier than a mass.

She moves delicately and with gentleness and clarity. Where was this place? How had this become possible? She picks a flower, clutching it to her breast and swaying moves deeper into the garden. I’m so happy it must be madness or a dream It must be. It must be. The rain drops dripping down her skin. She’d said she’d marry me. Did I invent this memory? When she was killed days later? Was she my first fiancée’? Or is this something I invented?

My eyes feel drunk on the wonder of female beauty…desire’s hard divinity… savouring the sounds of her breath…of her footfalls…the scents of jasmine and rose… perfume and summer…the taste of her on my lips…the taste of summer, electricity in my fingertips…fires in my blood.

I’m in such a strange mood, a trance. I become aware only of her eyes, moving like a masterpiece. Slowly she turns, by an old stone fountain. Already surrendered, flower over her heart, her deep brown eyes look away…a strap from her dress falling over her shoulder… cotton scarcely clinging to her bosom…her breath rising, floating and falling.

“The Dushman will try to kill you. You don’t have to do this. I won’t dump you if you quit.”

“I won’t quit,” I say.

“You’re a fool.”

“A fool for you. What of it?”

She shrugs her dress from her chest; it is manna from heaven in the luxury of the setting sun. I’m so far in love. So far gone, that her desire is like a loaded gun.

She whispers on the wind. “What do you want?”

“I want you to shut up.”

She turns away, pretend offended and I slip a hand around the most gorgeous waist in the universe. I clasp another to her breast…kissing her neckline…my thumb brushes across her flawless white skin to her hard nipple.

She stirs in my arms and murmurs, her summer dress ripples. If I could catch and hold the very feeling of this moment in time, then I swear I would live until all the rivers, all seas and all oceans run as dry, dusty and desolate, as the sands of the Red Desert. I’m drunk from being so in love with her. It’s a lifetime high, just like the best thing that ever happened in your life…that’s if it like this happened anyway.

The moment breaks as it always does…like shattering glass…she turns kissing… now time is as irrelevant as all other things save desire…the moment is captured and grasped…off comes my white shirt…her mouth on my chest…her dress is now a skirt…time blurs… she begins to quiver and the blood rages in my veins…the garden is our temple…her mouth is desire’s reigns.

Then suddenly, she’s away again. She is running to the distant corner of the garden, a tormentor, a tease…

‘”Harpy, jezebel,” I say, she could bring a man to his knees.

“If you want me, come and get me.” … I want her… my heart is drawn…quicker than I ever will be…I pin her to the garden wall… clinging and climbing clematis on her bare shoulder…her eyes level with mine…I hold her far harder than needs be.

“Beg,” she defies me for a time.

“Never.”

“Come on Jack.”

“Never.”

“Fuck you,” a hiss.

“I’d love to.”

I lift her and take her against the wall… a dripping wet heaven of hedonism light years away from what I could dream possible…. drink of the gods in heaven…. somewhere, sometime I throw her hard to the grass…

I follow her down, she laughs and rolls me over… she raises, floats and falls above me…nymph of passion incarnate…chest heaving hard…

“Faster…harder…” I tell her.

“Come for me Jack.”

Murmuring… moaning…sweating…gasping for air….my hands everywhere they can be… I lift her off… the feral femme fatale herself… it is night now; the stars are out in spates… I turn her over and push her face to the grass…

Pinning her beneath me…breathing in all the atmosphere life has… to the base of my lungs and the centre of my soul I fuck her hard and fast… faster… frantic now like a tsunami… in pleasure beyond measure… I hear her cry out and beautifully, wildly we climax at the same time…the wine from the vine.

It doesn’t sound realistic does it? Maybe I dreamt it.

We lay on the grass. “What garden is this?” I ask

“Eden,” she rises and picks up her dress.

“Oh. It’s overgrown as jungle.”

“This whole thing is a mess.”

“You mean more than the garden,” I say.

“Yeah, I mean more than the garden.”

“I’m sure we’ll do fine…”

More tomorrow xxx