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Mason
Then…
The first time I saw her had been in an explosion of lights. Lights so bright that they blinded me. Lights I had to shield my eyes against.
I saw her there on the stage. Feathers extending from behind her like Venus’s clamshell. Sequins on her face like dazzling, sunlit scales. Tangled, wild hair caught up with tinsel like she’d been dragged up from some distant sea. Maybe halfway across the world. Maybe from halfway across the universe.
The second time I saw her was in another explosion. An explosion of words. A violent, frustrated, end-of-her-rope explosion. Eyes screwed up tight like she was strangling someone. Or coming. Fists clenched like there was a dying pulse against her fingertips. Or a racing one. An erratically beating one. One that was going to explode itself. Her voice shouting like it was only her and me. No one else. Like there had never been anyone else.
I didn’t know why she was exploding. Why she was yelling. Why she felt that everything that had been pent up inside of her had to escape then, right in that very moment. All I knew was that I was in love.
Whoever she was, this woman I had seen only twice. This woman who I’d never uttered a single word to except maybe to utter in the theatre under my breath, “She’ll be the death of me.”
This woman who I couldn’t even be sure had truly laid eyes on me. The first time blocked by the glare of the stage lights. The second time blocked by her rage and fury. This woman who lived life violently. Thrived in explosions. Dazzled in them. Attracted them to her like a magnet. This woman who I knew, just knew, had to be mine.
The woman stopped screaming with this delicious heavy pant. It made me think of the early hours of the morning. It made me think of sweat-soaked sheets. It made me think of gritting my teeth to try to stave off coming for just a minute or two more. Just a minute or two more.
The woman sagged in her bar stool like she’d found her release. Like she was about to fall atop me. Breasts slick. Heart struggling to return to a semblance of normal beating. Fingers slipping into the hair at the nape of my neck. The woman opened her eyes like she knew exactly who would be there at her elbow. The dynamite to her explosion. The kindling to her fire.
Her surprise aroused me more than I could say. The slight widening of her seductive, cat-like eyes. The parting of her pillowy lips. The small exhale like my thumb had just brushed across her erect nipple under that skin-tight latex.
“Oh,” was the first word she gasped at me.
I imagined a thousand “ohs”. Each different. Each beautiful. Each worthy of making me collapse to my knees in front of her. “Oh” when I wrapped my arms around her at the kitchen sink. “Oh” when I lifted her and put her on the counter. “Oh” when I lowered myself between her legs as the pasta water boiled over. “Oh” when she felt my tongue on her throat. On her navel. On her clit.
“Oh” when we made the bedframe rattle. “Oh, oh, oh” when I fucked her hard enough to drive the posts through the wall. “Oh” just before we both laughed because there was no way we were getting our security deposit back at that point.
A life of “ohs”. A world of “ohs”. A future of “ohs”.
Her and me. This woman who so far had said only one word to me. And that one word more of a sound than anything else. A delicious, beautiful, irresistible sound.
“I thought you were someone else,” the woman said before turning away and returning those lips to the straw of her mojito.
She didn’t apologise. Didn’t invite me to sit. Didn’t acknowledge me any further. I was not the man (sure an assumption, but one I was fairly certain making) she had meant to yell at in a very public place. Despite realising her mistake, there was still…tension in the way she sat. In the way she drank with her fingers gripping her glass. The way her narrowed eyes darted quickly toward me and away from me.
“Are you mad at me?” I asked, holding back laughter from my lips.
The woman flipped her long honey-coloured hair from her shoulder and glared at me in the mirror at the back of the bar.
“Yes,” she said and then, “No.”
I drummed my fingers on the polished countertop. “But yes?”
This drew the woman’s face toward me. She tucked her hair behind her ear and studied my face. I could see in the way she was looking at me that it wasn’t to see me for the first time. It was like she was checking something. Checking against something. Like I’d somehow existed in her mind and she was comparing the images. The me of her head. The me of real life. Probably too close.
Only then did she pull her elbow away from my hand. Like she’d only just realised my fingers were still on her bare skin.
Had she liked my touch? Or was it somehow already so familiar to her that she’d not thought to pull away? Like a lover’s chest against your back at night. Night after night.
“Yes,” she said irritably, again returning to her drink.
Her straw slurped. Before she could raise her hand, I caught the bartender’s attention and ordered her another. A whiskey for me. Anything Irish, I told him.
“Bit of a cliche, no?” the woman grumbled at me, her eyes darting toward me in the mirror.
“When it’s good, it’s good,” I said with a shrug and a smile as I lowered myself into the bar stool beside her.
The woman looked at my reflection. “No, I mean inviting yourself to drink with a woman who clearly wants nothing to do with you.”
