What a Broken Heart Looks Like

^^^this?

The Wild Rose

Each fuck is also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions.

As seen from a taxi window, sitting on church steps, waving a cigarette at the world. Defiance and nonchalance and insouciance and that tireless laser beam glare cutting through crowds. Skirt riding too high? She doesn't mind.
But then the light shifts and you see her biting her tremulous lips, her fidgeting fingers. She looks as if she might blow away, off the step, like a daisy petal.
If you were ever to hold hands with her (perhaps while helping her into the darker recesses of the church to make textual sense of the beauty) you'd be surprised that they're as hard as they are. Guitars and horses and enthusiastic handjobs are some of her passions, so maybe you shouldn't be so surprised.

We caught up over drinks in a nearby boozer. She was still the same. Funny. Hilarious, in fact, funny and quick and up and down and chatty and needing and pleading.
You hear of people being described as an old soul. She's a young soul; her busy brain constantly evading boredom, her mouth never saying a commonplace thing. The things she came out with! Where did get this stuff? I would play along, delightedly, trying to keep up. She would admonish me loudly, like I were her annoying brother, if I erred too long and fell too far behind her charging mind.
Obviously, it can grate, all this, but her company is never boring.

My hand just 'happened' to graze against her thigh and she slapped me, actually slapped me across the face right there in the pub, filling up with after work drinkers. It was playful slap, but hard. I looked at her as if she was fucking mad, which was about right, and she stared me down in that way of hers, before collapsing into loud hoots of laughter. "Don't!" she said, meaning, as always, okay... do.

Would she always be like this? A firework that explodes and re-explodes and bursts again into a cascade of fiery light with a crack, then silently falls in the purple sky, but still flickering bright. Then, a surprise, and all bursting anew.

Bye bye tower blocks. Overnight in a small and grimly yellowed rented room in Kentish Town, fully reacquainted over much wine and hurried shagging, then, in the bleary-eyed, mumbled morning, push on, out, to the country, to her family's cottage in the Cotswolds.
So.
And so. Broken brick and plaster and battered, boarded-up shops eventually giving way to claggy mud and the smell of livestock shit.
Then we're there. After much broken dozing our train shakes, rattles, rolls into our station stop.

Where's this going? She wants to talk and I'm as subdued as fuck; I'm fucked, my brain feels like it's been sat on by an ox. I don't know what I want anymore. What the hell am I dong here, I thought, soon as I got there. Oh well. Hell. Here I go again.
I annoy her, and that irritates me. She's willful and stupid, but more alive than anyone alive or dead. Her wordgames and questions questions questions. Hang on...
give me a minute.

I'm hopeless at this.

I flop onto a bed hard as a mortuary slab and try and sleep the ache in my head away. A quick snooze, a shower, a shave with an dull, rusty blade I found in a mug in a cupboard by the sink - I knew I'd forget something - and I'm as right as ninepence. Or near as.

She's dishing up cottage pie, in the cottage kitchen. The old cottage is cramped, and roomy. As in it's got lots of rooms, most of which are empty, apart from all the... I don't know what. Things. The kitchen gives a good indication of what the place is like: it is in chaos; a large, handsome and sturdy table sits centre, covered with newspapers and books and bottles and final demands and more of this stuff that's everywhere. Clutter creeps onto every surface and even where there is no surface. A rustic idyll encrusted with the detritus of mad living. It's not a mess, just very busy, she tells me. Doesn't matter to me, I tell her, I like it.

Her food scolds my tongue, but is fucking great and we scoff it down. Madly she opens two bottles of red at once and sploshes out two large glasses worth. It's going to be one of those nights.
I'm still only wrapped in a towel from my shower, and as I'm clearing the plates away - an accident I swear - the damn thing just drops from me. A plate in each hand and nothing to protect me from her vocal amusement, nor from the tea-towel with which she wastes no time in flicking at my bare arse. The bitch.
I feign stoicism under the attack. Later get her back with a handful of soapsuds in the face and hair. A grapple and she's pushed back onto the table. A hand under her skirt and her knickers pulled down. I try and get my end in. The table is too high, really. It's not ideal, and requires awkward positioning of the body, and a leg on a chair, but penetration of her sex is eventually achieved, ground control. We have lift off.

A fun fuck rather than anything satisfying. No climax, instead bruised knees, but it's raised the blood. By the time I went to join her in the other room she had already stripped off and had arranged herself attractively on the couch.
Naked, I came towards her, and she giggled and made fun of the way my cock danced about as I walked. The bitch.
Just for that she got a faceful of my cock and balls as I pushed her head into my crotch and rubbed it in. She squealed, "Don't! I'll bite your dick off!".
I grabbed her hair and pulled her head back, her attitude softened. "Apologise to the cock or he gets put away for the night"
She sighs, "alright, I'm sorry Mr Penis for laughing at you". She cradles the cock in her hands, fingertip strokes gently down its length. Her touch magics it into life and she watches keenly it's strange transformation. Her dark eyes flash up at mine "Shall we kiss and make up?".

Her lips soft on the blushing, tautening skin. Sweet kisses for a swelling cock. A tongue circumnavigates my balls and a swarm of tiny dragonflies flutter ecstatically in my abdomen. A female tongue maps the geography of a male sex. And into the sweltering mouth I'm taken, wetly massaged and suckled. A ticklish sensation pulses down in the centre of my sex. Those dragonflies again.

Curled like kittens, entwined on the couch. Hendrix and hip hop on the record decks. The way she danced to it, before me, for me, for herself, was sexy then funny then both; 'ironic' ho girl booty gyrations, and a send-up of dances remembered from Showgirls. She is quite the comedienne, as well as having a set of eye-catching moves in her repertoire. There is freedom in her nakedness. She has a '50s pin-up body; all hip and breast and bum. Her waist to hip ratio alone stokes the fires of a primeval, biological urge deep inside me, calling me to go jungle ape crazy on her dizzying softness. Her wild dance; a full and carefree display. Alive. I'm thinking I join her in jumping around the room like a loon in the nude, but something stops me.
I also decide to suppress the more animalistic urges welling up within those crazy loins of mine. For now, at least.

So here's to a old-fashioned kiss and a cuddle. We break and I look into her to eyes and try and find what I'm looking for. There's a coldness, a sadness and something unknown. That unblinking stare, where swirls a golden-green galaxy of mad little lights, phoenix feathers and something that looks like cocaine, all sluicing around a yawning black hole.

Am I a novelty that is wearing off, again? Is she the little girl still riding on the carousel of her own outrageousness, and on each pass the face you catch a glimpse of, each tellin a different story, from exhilaration to fear to the face of a girl just lost in the whirl.
Is that where this is going, around and around to nowhere, but the end more unsteady than the start?

"See?" she says, and I feel her fingers back on my sex, and her eyes still trying to stare down mine, "I worship your penis".
A line aimed to disarm. She has many such in her arsenal, and a canny knack of knowing just when to deploy them.

"But", she continues, those eyes now hooded and cruel and mischievous, "you have to admit, it looks completely ridiculous flapping about between your legs as it, swinging like the neck of a dead turkey".
The bitch.

I shove her over and push and pull her body into a position where she's on her knees and leaning forward over the back of the couch. I take my place, take her hips, she cranes her head round to look at me. Silently. I give her what she asks for.

And it goes from there.


Some other time and place, back to where we first...

Seated sunnily outside a Clerkenwell pub with her friends. The male ones, all of ruddy, public school complexion and tall, lean, and talking with loud, confident tones. Highly amused and impressed with themselves and each other. The females all similar to her, but perhaps more self-possessed, and glossy-haired and golden and shrill. But they didn't share her overcast face or away looks to wayward.

She had been something of a wild child, a runaway who fled the cosy certainties expensively mapped out before her, to a Brixton squat. The usual nice girl turns rebel, dances with the devil story. Precocious and promiscuous, she swan-dived into the depths of South London's dark pleasures and came out smiling. But not entirely unscarred.

Now, and naked, she steps out onto her lawn. At first hesitant, a kitten's first experience of snow.
"Come on, this was your idea" I say.

Go wild in the country. The lawn swept down to a thick hedgerow, more fields and a wood lay beyond, lining the horizon. Flowers in full bloom in the garden near the house, and to a patch of grass there she ran, whooping and twirling and skipping, and then attempted a cartwheel - not entirely successfully - before collapsing onto the ground in a star shape. Her breasts rising and falling in heavy breaths.

I pounced on her, and we rolled about for a short while, giggling and tickling and biting each others bodies.

A hot sun hung high in a largely cloudless sky. The heat prickled our skin and up she jumped and fled to the house, only to re-emerge, now donning sunglasses and a tatty straw cowboy hat she had bought back from - where else - Marrakesh. A cigarette was now wedged between her pouty lips. This, otherwise completely naked, vision stood before me, hand on hip and waving a bottle of sun cream at me.
"What happened to the go-natural idea?"
"Too bright. Here's a job you'll like - rub this into me please"
A minute later:
"I think my tits have quite enough cream on them now, thank you; can you do the rest of me please, before I frazzle?"

Dutifully I let my fingers trace over the plains of her body and limbs; carefully negotiating the swells and swoops, massaging her soft, pink skin as she lay supine and placid before me.

All is calm in the garden. Only the hum of a wasp darting about the nearby rose bushes is enough to send a tiny frisson of worry through the mind of a naked man.
I looked over at her, lying quiet on the grass, her fingers idly pulling at a patch of clover. I let my gaze wander her body another time. Those breasts pooled out, and still glistening from the generous application of sun cream; the sunlight picking out the line of otherwise near invisible downy hair on her belly, and down to the dark hair there, which was neatly contained to a small patch on her pubis, but, unusually for a young woman, not cut back but left tufty. As if her own bush was left to match her garden's rose bushes: a little wild and overgrowing.

I stroke the hair softly with the backs of my fingers and her stomach involuntarily twitches.

She owns a pair of horses. I remember being impressed with myself for bedding a girl how owns horses. That's posh, was that.
And here they stand: fat and dopey in a paddock. She got me to clamber on top of one of the fuckers and cling on whilst it clumped about. She - now in jeans and t-shirt, gentle reader worried by undercarriage chafing - relished another opportunity to best me, riding her nag around and around, pretending to lasso me, or chiding me to "giddyup!". But the joke was on her, my trusty steed and me were of a like mind: the beastie wasn't to be perturbed by being lapped and mocked, instead was only interested in taking it easy, lazily walking over to the hedge and chewing on some weeds there. Not only that but, as she rode past each time, I was afforded the attractive view of her hair and her arse bobbing nicely as she went.

Later, we sat in a muggy country pub, at a small sticky table. I idly turn my pint glass on it's coaster as she stares into space. I'm trying to read her mood, but, as usual, am at a loss. There's an edge to the silence, but I think that might be just me - she is miles away. She orders a burger from the menu and when it comes it is huge: a crusty bread toadstool of a bap and a thick, darkly overcooked, meat patty. She says it's too big for her and offers me half. I tell her it's got cheese on it therefore can't eat it.
"Just scrape it off then" she huffs.

We get there finally. She chats away absently about small things then drops the payload. "So anyway... um, yeah... oh yeah, I'm pregnant by the way... "

Not by me - some club DJ she hooked up with from her Brixton days. Big on the underground 'grime' hip hop scene, but since disappeared off the scene where she was concerned.
I saw photos of him, and her together, when he was deliberating over wether to delete the photos of them together from her MySpace page. I don't know, he was just some kid; an 18 year old black boy with an incredibly striking face, the kind photographers would love, pinched into a look of studied bravado. Absurd, trendy clothes hung from him baggily, and she also hanging from him, flushed, happy face shining towards the camera lens, but not able to see through the screen to now.

I felt tricked by all this, why I was invited here and all the rest of it, of course, but I couldn't feel angry. Only sorry. We had the talk. The future, the now, the in between. Her sad smile and small shrugs, the understated oh wells.
And I was left with What To Say For The Best. What can you say? I didn't have much in the way of helpful advice - nothing that she hadn't thought of - except for one small thing:
"Stop smoking".

Her mother didn't like me much, thought I might steal the furniture. Or, I don't know. Anyway, she now looked down at me from framed photographs as I had sex with her daughter on her squishy white bed, as I made her daughter orgasm loudly, or, as now as we sixty-nined. Her stuffed up pillows supporting my head as it snuffled between her daughter's legs. Mummy's bedroom echoed to the sound of her daughter noisily sucking on my sex, in between her whimpers and cries as I licked at her sex. In the middle of it I had the realisation I was licking the sex of a pregnant woman, which took me out of it, really. I couldn't get back into the mood, but it didn't stop me. If anything I intensified my tongue action, furiously thrashing my tongue inside her. Eventually her body tensed, then jolted a couple of times, then tensed again, then juddered in climax.

Curiously this got me my mojo back, and we continued to have sex, and for the last time. It was surprisingly energetic sex, too; raw and frantic and hard. Tenderness only came after, when, after lying there next to her, in a sheen of sweat and gaining my breath back. She lay on her side, facing away from me. She was quiet for a good while, then sniffed. The snot that comes with tears.
Placing a hand on her shoulder, "I'm alright" she said. Softly, I kissed her neck.

I didn't linger the next morning. I had fruit juice and toast as she phoned for a taxi to take me to the nearest train station. An strained mood fell over the cottage, neither one of us wanting to speak anything but ridiculous small talk. She washed and I dried the dishes as I waited for the end. Looking out into the unruly garden, and to the sky above. "Where's the sun gone then?" I asked, gazing at the cloudless morning sky of blank white-grey. She didn't answer.

The taxi man bibbed his horn outside. I hugged her and she clung tightly for a second before letting go. I picked up my bag and opened the door, then turned back to her. This was it. She stood in the hallway, her mouth pushed into a smile, her arms arms now wrapped around her stomach, hugging herself.
"I'll see you around" I said and closed the door.

As we drove away I looked back at the cottage. I could see the hedgerow that bordered the garden, then the paddock with my 1, 2, 3, 4 legged friend gazing balefully back at me as I went past. I even gave a little wave to the dumb creature. I don't think the driver caught me though.

We pulled further away and I looked out at the fields beyond the cottage, and to the trees, and above them I watched a small flock of birds wheel in the empty sky.