The trouble with Kathryn

At some point in my life I'm going to wake up one morning and realise that sleeping with capricious, flighty, self-dramatising Euro indie girls is just a coital chest x-ray. Literally, its impossible to have sex with a female boho chick without it turning into some massive drama that saps three or four weeks out of your life.

So anyway, my latest bout of Woman Trouble involves a chance re-encounter with an old flame who I caught on the re-bound from her last relationship disaster. Oh, and she's French. Worse than that, a Parisian. Alarm bells rang but, as usual, I shut them out.

The reason is, Kathryn's a girl I find myself irresistibly drawn towards. She's the personification of the dark, gamine, doe-eyed 'free-spirit' girl from the French films, who, when someone says they love her she looks sullenly into the middle distance and mutters "We do not need to know each other to love. Perhaps... perhaps we do not have to love." Before walking out and skipping along the side of a canal.
You just know that, magnetic as she appears, as a lover she would be a total nightmare. Naturally I fell in love with her.

The first conversation we ever had saw her talk for around ten minutes about her love for various earnest female singer-songwriters, and the moment in life you get a gold star on your work is when you realise that kinda stuff doesn't actually matter when you're falling for someone. We even had sex for the first time whilst listening to Joan Baez singing protest songs. Nevertheless, I made sure I had a say in what was and wasn't played during love-making from then on.

Our first goodbye was on a winter's dawn on the south coast. I stood looking out into the thick fog lying over the English Channel, freezing my knackers off while Kathryn was sorting out her ticket for the ferry. She refused to fly and 'morally objected' to the Channel Tunnel, so it was to be a seven hour journey, or whatever it is, in a giant, floating motorway service station for her, and an awkward farewell for me.
Her studies over here had come to an end, and our increasing amount of arguments had helped her make up her mind that she would heed the call of her father - who, disconcertingly enough, was someone very high up in the Paris police force - and return home.

There was nothing ethereal or romantic about that foggy morning; it was leaden, chest-clogging thick and grey, grey everywhere. Breakfast in the caff was a bitter, tar-juice black coffee for me and a cigarette for her. Even here was drained of all colour, except...
All except, I found myself noticing, Kathryn's tongue, seen in glimpses, stirring in the bed of her mouth, as she rattled on about god-knows-what. My eyes were drawn to its girlish pinkness as I watched her speak - not listen. Wet and candy-pink, petal pink, the same pink as her private parts and, surely, tasting of sugar and spice.

I could write an epic poem about her tongue. I should write an epic poem about her tongue, instead I'll just type some unreadable shit onto the internet. It's just the way I roll, baby. But just let me say that receiving fellatio from Kathryn was like being benedicted by angels. The pleasure focus, the room-spinning gentleness, the planet-colliding insistence... and that tongue wandered over me everywhere; in my mouth, in my ears, everywhere. Up my bum, in between my toes, in my navel, everywhere.

And, yeah, she was - is - a great fuck. Even though things between us had gone as sour as my coffee, I still, at this too fucking late a stage, found my fondness towards her resurfacing. Never mind the tongue thing, I remembered how much I loved her soft, charmingly small hands, and the curl of hair behind her ear that had escaped from her hair clips, which probably annoyed her, and how her eyebrows were like two quick dashes from an artist's brush.

But we just couldn't stand each other anymore, so we said goodbye.

Now we lie curled in a familiar pose: me nuzzling the back of her neck, my hands holding her breasts something like a human bra, and I'm nestled comfortably in-between her buttocks. Now what, I wonder?

It's not about carrying torches or an inability to move on or anything, but I tend not to fall out of love with women. There just doesn't seem to be an 'off' switch. It never feels as absolute as all that. When relationships eventually come to an end, then the scales have tipped in negative favour. There is anger and hurt and what-have-you, but they all subside over time and all past relationships are left as symbols of my own failures or 'treasured moments' that can never be recaptured.

Even as I hold her body to me, I know I'm - we're - making another silly mistake. I breathe in the smell of her hair and she stares at the wall.


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