LITMIR.BIZ

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noise and the music made it necessary to speak directly into each other's ears. Every breath in her ear evoking a longing for aural intercourse between the lips and the tongue and the lughole, every look and casual touch leaving napalm trails of desire along her skin. Her heart was pumped up, pushing her breasts out and upwards towards flinty nipples, with fairylights flashing at the peaks. She shifted on her stool, straining towards him.

      Each time her shallow breathing allowed her to speak he would look at her mouth, then up to her eyes, then his gaze would drift downwards, sweeping her like spotlights mounted on a prison wall from which there was no escape.

      To a soundtrack of sixties soul ballads, everything became velvet and honey. The smoky air, the bar, the glass containing the third and fatal chardonnay, his cheek lingering against hers and then his mouth moving towards her lips. Ronnie had fallen into his face as if her whole life had been moving towards that one point. Towards that kiss. That one kiss. That long, tender, orgasmic kiss. She let it happen. It was done. Her cards were on the table.

      She could feel the graze of new beard pushing through his luscious skin, smell the tang of his sweat. 'I love you very much you know,' she whispered.

      He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. For a few seconds he just looked at her. Then, he touched her face with the palm of his hand, let it slide downward tracing a line with his forefinger along her throat, slithering beneath her gold charm necklace, toying with the tiny pyramids and palm trees.

      A burst of high-pitched laughter erupted from a few feet away as The B-52's 'Love Shack' came blasting through the sound system and within seconds everyone was singing along and air-punching.

      'Let's get out of here,' he said as he kissed her ear. 'My place is just around the corner. I'll fix you a coffee and you can maybe call a cab.'

      She looked straight at him and he looked back. There was no mistaking what was happening. This was the point at which she could have, should have said, 'No, it's okay, there's a rank on the corner.' But she didn't.

      They plunged into the night outside, fast-forward, hand-held camera - unsteady-cam. Foot in front of foot through the sticky night. Arm in arm across the tramlined street, stopping every now and then to lock torsos. His key turning. Short, sharp kisses, a hand on her breast. A long arm pulling her long arm down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, into a room where she steadied against the door.

      Then, as she watched him sitting on the end of a bed, taking off his shoes, his head bent to the task, Ronnie began to unravel.

      What did she think she was doing? Had she gone mad? She realised with a sickening jolt that she was about to have sex with a man who was not her husband. She wasn't just going to have a quick pash: she was about to commit adultery! Yes, mother, the seventh commandment!

      In the fractured light of the street lamp shining through the cracks in the blind, Ronnie watched as Lawrence smoothed the bed a little and continued removing his clothes, without a glance in her direction. She saw him stand and walk to the bedside table, pull open the drawer and take something out, his back towards her.

      She wanted to run from the room, screaming, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I've made a terrible mistake!' But she was paralysed somehow; paralytic, in fact.

      There she was, in the bedroom of a man whom, Ronnie suddenly realised, she didn't know all that well. A man she had just kissed in a bar and professed her love to, a man to whom she had given every indication of availability and interest, a man who was, right now, standing naked in front of her, vinyl-sheathed and ready to take up the offer.

      Was it just the light or did his shoulders slope more than she had been aware? And were they covered in fine, soft, curly hair? As was his chest and, she somehow knew, his back.

      Black hair. He was not a natural blond. (Faith would have a field day with this!)

      She'd never noticed any black roots! He must have bleached the regrowth every week! What kind of a man spends that amount of time at the hairdresser? There must have been times when some tell-tale hairs had pushed through the fibres of his shirt or fell out of his cuff or peeped out at the top of his tie? Why hadn't she noticed? Women notice those things! What kind of a man is so alienated from his black furry self?

      It was strangely unsettling. What did it matter what colour his hair was? It wasn't simply because she didn't like hairy-chested men with weak, sloping shoulders; it was that she had spent the last two or three months having a fantasy relationship with a blond man with broad shoulders.

      She'd been shafted! The man standing in front of her was an impostor!

      And hung, furthermore, like a Mapplethorpe. Jokes about babies' arms and elephant trunks rolled helplessly around the floor of her gin-soaked brain.

      Had she fantasised about him naked at all? She must have done but, for the life of her, she couldn't remember. The odd naked arm might have strayed into the picture a couple of times, but not the full torso festooned, as this one was, with nests of armpit hair, alongside pectorals barely visible through the early-primate-style coverage. All her fantasy scenarios had been romantic rather than hardcore, Erica Jong-style zipless-fuck mode. They had been all head and shoulders, with kissing and soft words and the touch of a hand and a warm embrace - like some 1950s doo-wop love song. All the ingredients that were missing from her long-term relationship with Boyd.

      Whether her fantasy had been sexual or not, however, was immaterial at this point, because the fantasy object had evaporated. Cold, motherless reality was now staring Ronnie in the face.

      Not so much staring, as looking at her quizzically, almost impatiently. She realised that she was still dressed and rooted to the spot. A nervous giggle escaped her lips at that particular pun as he continued to stare. You're on your own now kiddo, she thought, as her clumsy fingers struggled with the buttons of her blouse, and all desire seemed to drain from her as if someone had pulled out a plug.

      He slid the blouse from her shoulders and cupped her breasts as her bra fell away. Exploring her throat and the back of her neck with his lips, using his tongue to switch on long-forgotten erogenous zones, his hands ran the length of her arms and locked fingers with hers as their bodies connected; soft skin to fur coat. Kneeling in front of her he eased her skirt down, caressing her thighs, encountering no resistance as he slid down her panties, kissing her belly, her hips, his hands running circles round her buttocks; his mouth was everywhere.

      Ronnie stood in front of him on a little pile of her own clothes, a bare-arsed, married mother-of-one, golden brown all over except for the ghostly flesh in the shape of a swimsuit, with a puckered navel and a belly full of acid. There she stood, in front of the naked ape.

      It was too late for a polite refusal. Or a headache, or a bout of tiredness, or anxiety brought on by belated marital guilt. Too late even for a declaration of herpes.

      She had fucked up.

      She was shepherded without further ado to the turned-down bed and pressed gently but firmly onto her back. Every girl's putative dream - the moot point of all feminine desire - was suddenly looming with intent between her thighs: the man was on a missionary.

      During the four and a half minutes which ensued, between entry and exit to the giggle palace of love, several strange things occurred; stranger even than making love to a donkey. Incapable of either closing her eyes or of concentrating on the floral design of the pressed metal ceiling in order to file it away for future use, Ronnie tried to imagine what the ancient Greeks would have made of this encounter.

      Would fair Kylie Mairassass of Tzatsikia have convinced herself - once her Adonis had un-toga'd and proved to be more hirsute than the rear end of a satyr - that her lover was none other than that naughty old polygamist, party animal and omnipotent Olympian, Zeus, disguised as livestock? At this revelation would her fellow Tzatsikians have cried out as one 'All hail the beef'?

      While her mind swirled with Doric columns, serpentine dreadlocks and swansdown, Lawrence told her, not once, but several times and in a monotone, that he loved her and that they would be together For Ever: an announcement which came as a bit of shock to Ronnie who had just that minute made up her mind to make her mother

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