Body
It sprouted like dry grass, her hair that is. Washed enough, but not more. It was matte and rust-coloured and never a constant length but never above her neck. I liked it between my fingers as we kissed, and she did too. One time it had my seed in it like a glob of glue, and she liked that less. The hair in other places was ruthlessly expunged except between her legs where it was trimmed but only for shape and stayed dark and course.
They had the hue of pine, except when she was sad and the sea washed subtly over them. They were evenly-placed but small and would dart, spasmodically, like a spider's legs over the pages of her books or the company she kept or -- at their widest -- the sights and splendours of our travels. I've known women whose souls spoke through their eyes, but she wasn't one. It was her id, her instinct, that instead gave itself away.
She was always sipping tea, usually Darjeeling but it could be smoked or bergamot-infused or a different herb altogether, her thin little lips and slightly pointed tongue lapping cat-like, and so her taste was usually that fragrant earthiness. The voice it produced was rich, maybe artificially like she imagined herself as one of those sharp-witted aristocrats from one of her classics. She was tight in many ways and when she kissed she suckled tightly, and when eventually she used her mouth for other kinds of romance that tightness was a great joy.
I'd once thought that small-chested girls like her ought to be less prudish, and with their curves so gentle and their nipples (most of the day) so undistinguished that even if you thought some women should cover themselves at the pool or the beach or even when shirts come off on the hottest days at home, the more androgynously-torso-ed needn't be thus repressed. Yet I think in our two years mine were the only eyes ever laid on them.
Her tummy was flat too, so many of her twenty-three years in triathlons and the hockey team and so few excesses of gluttony or drunkenness. And its pinched-in core was much more sensitive. She weighed so little it was no real strain to lift her over my thighs to enter her in midair.
The entryway -- decorated but not hidden by that thick, neat carpet -- was long and slender but roughly hewn. Except when I could map its folds with my tongue, as she squirmed and issued whispered yelps, it was not generally made available for observation. The interior was cosy and drained quickly. She claimed only a handful of former tenants, some only for short stays and all before me (and indeed me for, many months) not permitted to take their shoes off at any time during their stay. I believed her (and still do).
Her actual shoes were rarely off unless her underwear was. We had been together several months before, in the heat of summer, I visited and found her wearing only a t-shirt and memorably fuchsia skirt, her bare feet, long for a short woman's, rudely propped up on the sofa. I'd seen them, touched them, many times in our love-making but realised they were in some ways more private than any part of her, and she wanted it so.
