Part One
Thing is, Ella and I got together on the last day of term, before the summer break of our post-grad art course. Our relationship hadn't even started before she went away. And when I say 'got together' I don't mean anything heavy. On the station platform - before she shot off to her parents' in the south of France - we admitted we had feelings for each other. Well I admitted my feelings. Ella burst, "Fucksake!" then attempted to snog all six-four of me into her massive gob.
We squashed our bodies together on the busy station platform as if our admissions weren't enough, as if we might still squeeze through the barrier of each other's clothes and skin. Our tongues squirmed, hips rutted, hands groped. The platform guard blew his whistle right next to us three times to announce the train and break us up.
It was like an appalling outtake of 'Brief Encounter.'
The train carried Ella away. My girlfriend. My new love. I swallowed my heart back down along with the vanilla taste of her kiss. That's all it took? After two years of worshipping from afar? Not only that - if I'd decoded her panted confessions correctly - she felt the same. All this time. About me. Me?
I blinked.
I blinked again.
Yep, I had been teleported into a parallel universe where I was no longer the morose giant who lived alone in the woods, I was Prince-bloody-Charming.
Around me, commuters nudged and smirked. Probably at my wobbling chin, if not the ferret still trying to climb out of my trousers. I puffed up my chest with the biggest, gladdest breath of my life, stepped into the sky and looped-the-loop all the way home.
Ella was the prize of the art school. A French waif with medusa curls straight out of a Klimt or a Mucha. A snow-white, black-clad, red-head known as: 'The-Fire-and-Ice-Maiden'. So, when I let on how I felt to my best mate, Tony, it was met with, "Well, duh. Who doesn't fancy Ella?" Though he added, "From afar. And never by looking directly at her." Tony didn't even study at the college.
Ella had a reputation for an aggressive kind of heartlessness based largely on her dour, even sulky expression. Not to mention the number of hearts (egos) she'd broken. I got the feeling - based on her shapeless clothes, work boots and the serpentine tendrils forever over her face - that her looks embarrassed her. Especially the moronic cocks they attracted. Myself, included.
I know everyone would say this, but it wasn't her looks I adored. I adored the Ella under the immaculate skin. Ella, who was happier to glug snakebite in the student bar with the lads, than swank around fancy galleries with artists. The Ella who worked nights to pay her own way through college, even though her family was loaded. Who arrived on the Masters course with no English and now cursed like a native. Most of all, I adored the Ella who was friendly to a dark-skinned roofer's son, chucked into an ocean of pasty trustafarians. The Ella who talked to me when no one else would.
So I tell Tony this, and what do I get?
"Yes, she has a gorgeous, round, pert sense of humour, doesn't she? Nice pair of morals, too. Apparently, she got an A-plus in her French oral. Know what a dream-girl like that needs? A lumpen great caveman at her side!"
Friends, eh?
I must have stood in front of the mirror for an hour when I got home. Glowing in the knowledge that whatever my fuckwit mate thought, Ella - my Ella - was happier to snog a caveman than any of the dandies that strutted about for her attention.
It wasn't until after winning the 'smug-off' with my own reflection, that reality hit me. I wouldn't see Ella for six weeks. And I didn't have her address or phone number. And this was before email and smartphones; there was no way to contact her, if she didn't contact me.
That's when the doubts set in. She wouldn't write. She wouldn't call. She would find some tasty grand fromage over the holidays and forget all about me. What was I thinking?
Two days later, I got this in the post:
Sweet Jon,
To think you feel the same of me as I do of you, it is like a dream. I have watched you work so many times (and imagined it even more!) with your axe hacking hard wood, and hammering and chiselling it. When I try so hard with my little brushes to make my art, I cannot believe that you - such a quiet, gentle man - rips such beauty from lifeless things. And just by banging!
It is the sexiest thing I have ever seen.
Now I must tell you what I mean by this. The thoughts I have. So you understand what you do to me.
In lectures, I try to sit by you. I breathe you into me. I hold my breath to keep you inside me. And all the time I am willing your thick hands under my skirt!
Your arms make me want to eat you. They are big as my legs! I fantasise them wrapped around me. And my legs around you... Your arms around my hips, my legs around your neck!
So you see, even before I knew you wanted me, I was already in quite a head-fucked state. But now I know that we could be together...
Well, this is what I am like now. Right now, as I write this.
I am naked in my room. Seated at my mirror with my legs very wide apart! And you are in my mirror! You watch me drip. And my drip is for you. And I ache for your cock. Down here, where I slide my middle fingers. Two of them, deep inside. Come and do me. Come now. Quickly!!
X
(put this kiss where you need it most)
Ella
The letter, written on the back of an old painting in neat, tiny script, came with her address and an overnight train ticket dated the next day.
I did nothing other than read and re-read that letter that night. Well, I did manage one other thing. Three times.
The next day, while I was packing, another letter arrived. My mouth turned to paper. My heart thumped so hard it trembled the page. My dick tensed on the start line. Ready, steady...
It wasn't what I expected.