I spent a term in Bordeaux when I was twenty. I made a friend, Luc, from an old-money family and bagged an invite to his father's (or grandfather's, it was unclear) country home, a sun-soaked estate of mysterious grounds and near-ruined outbuildings replete with generations of material accumulation.
On the Saturday evening Luc played host to a soiree of the local gentry's scions: tall, tanned, hirsute mecs in stylishly tatty suits, and elegant young women in reassuringly expensive dresses and heels. We drank gins and tonics, rums and cokes, and Spanish beer to a booming EDM soundtrack, and I circulated Luc's acquaintances testing how far my French and caché as the rugged Scotsman (rather than the weird foreigner, I hoped, would take me).
Several drinks in, when everything was warm despite the sun setting and every background was pleasantly blurred despite an array of electric lights, I found myself in conversation with one Sophie. Sophie was a little shorter and -- not plump, but a little less thin -- than her cohort but no less visibly and audibly elite. She was close to me in a pair of chairs, her big brown eyes smiling over a thick nose.
"Your French is very good for an Englishman." She saw my disapproving eyes.
"Desolé, a Scotsman. How did you learn?"
"Years and years at school."
"Years and years. That is a good -- how you say?"
"Idiom."
"Idiom," she repeated, with a pair of open 'ee's and a 'yum' for a good measure.
We'd been talking about French politics, English food and Scottish tailoring -- specifically my kilt, which I'd brought out for this very occasion and was succeeding as an eye-catcher and conversational piece. The evening was cool but not cold, at least to my Norther, hair-strewn legs; Sophie's, bare under a short red dress, looked less resilient. "Jordan, shall we walk," she said as she rose suddenly, and a little (but not alarmingly) unsteadily. "I want to see the pond."
The pond was hidden from the main garden and its revellers, whose voices had trailed to a distant hum, by perhaps a kilometre's walk and a thicket of trees. We started the walk gingerly, finishing our bottles of beer which we jammed into a muddy patch. Sophie held (and sometimes lurched into) my arm as she navigated the stony path that took us half the way there. "Hold me," she said as we reached the end of the track and the soft ground beyond; she braced against me while removing her black heels. "Hold zese," as she strode barefoot onto the grass, and then led me hand-in-hand to the water.
I felt a frisson with her fingers in mine and then as she turned and looked in my eyes, with hers so vast and open and smiling that I knew she wanted me. But I stood at the edge of the water in my leather shoes and woollen knee-socks as her red-painted toes led her into the shivering pond. "Isn't that freezing?" I enquired.
"It's not so bad." Sophie smiled at me. "I like the water on my feet. It makes me feel...with nature." She looked at my shoes. "You should come with me. You are Scottish -- this is not so cold."
I laughed. "These take forever to take off, though."
"Are you in a hurry?" She raised an eyebrow. So off came the laces, the snugly-fitting shoes, and the scratchy feeling of woollen socks to be replaced by the soft wet grass against my soles, and then the chilling evening waters against my calves. I came up knee-deep with her. She looked me deeply in the eyes, and then without warning whipped cold water up into my face, smirking mischievously. "Do you feel at home now, man from Scotland, in the cold water?" I did the only things I could: I splashed her back, eliciting a playful streak as wet patches formed on her dress; then with a wet hand I grabbed her back, pulled her to me and kissed her; she reciprocated, her warm mouth and soft tongue all I could feel.
Then I felt her hand against my kilt, running down to its rim. She addressed me in an almost-whisper, "I hear things about Scottish men and their kilts."
"And what is that," I uttered back.
