The afternoon heat lies heavy on the landscape like a spent, sweating lover. The breeze is hot breath, stirring the dark leaves of August. The gloom of thick woodland offers me no cooling shade. Its green blanket hugs the heat close to the ground. Here and there white, penetrating shafts of sun bore into the earth, making little pools of fire in the soft, velvety grass beneath the trees.
I am lost. Off the beaten track. My map taunts me, as does my water bottle with its last few mouthfuls of warm fluid. I had left the footpath several miles back, captivated by the distant beauty of a wood that now holds me as its prisoner. I stop and listen for the sound of traffic or agriculture. The silence is deafening. Insects cower. Even birds are struck dumb by the weight of the sun. I carry on, in what I believe is a straight line. I must come upon something, surely?
At last a track, grass covered and indistinct. Wide enough for a vehicle. Hardly used, but I can see the grass has been flattened by tyres. At last something that can lead me to somewhere, away from this cloying green infinity. I see the direction in which the grass has been squashed and I follow it.
A car, pulled off the track. As if it is hiding in the trees. I approach. Tidy and empty. No clue as to the owner or when they may return. I try the door, then look round guiltily. A hundred yards from the car is a larger pool of sunlight. My eye catches a golden glint, a movement, something other that breeze swayed foliage, something deliberate and animal.
She is lying in the little glade, naked but for a necklace. The movement I had seen just a moment ago is her left leg, knee bent, swinging gently from side to side. Her right leg is stretched out flat on the soft, warm grass, as is the rest of her. I stop in the shadows that surround the sunny opening. I draw in a hot draft of air as I realise she is pleasuring herself. Her right arm lies over her nakedness and her index and middle fingers play small strokes, to the same gentle rhythm as her swinging leg. Her left hand teases her right nipple in gentle, self inflicted torture. Her head tilts back a little, light golden hair spills out on the ground. She is not a young girl, she is perhaps middle aged. There is a natural physicality about her, the body of someone who keeps themselves fit. She is lovely. Her neck and her back arch in time to the strange and secret waves that must wash within her.
I am overcome. I have never watched a woman, thinking that she is alone, masturbating. As soon as my mind utters the word I know how wrong and ugly it is as a definition of what I am seeing. For this is something wonderful and beautiful. Too captivating for me to be sexually aroused by it. Only by being still, hiding in the dark, can I preserve the fragile beauty of what I am seeing.
Her back arches more urgently now, and I hear her breathing, her noises of joy. Soft moans of femininity that break my manly heart. It fascinates me, this unknown that she builds within her, made strong and terrifying by the simple and loving caress of her fingers upon herself. What is she thinking? What is she feeling? I am dizzy with the precious sexuality of it. Of her. Sex. Nature. Oh, please come my darling. Come, and release this dreadful delight of yours; it overpowers me.
And then she comes. I gasp in sympathy at her cry of anguished ecstasy. The release of her joy is a thousand invisible birds. They alight on leaves, on trees. Some come to rest on me, burning my skin with the passion they have carried from her. Oh, my darling woman. I feel a closeness, an intimate connection with her. Yet she does not know I exist!
I am made breathless and confused. As if a woman had suddenly rushed up to me, clasped my cheeks in her hands, kissed me with full passion full on my open mouth. I do not know what to do. I step back. The cliché of a snapped twig. Laughably inevitable. She looks towards me, turning her head on the grass, not lifting it nor gathering herself up in startled panic as I would have expected. She is looking straight at me. Surely she cannot see me from her pool of golden fire. Surely I am lost in green gloom.
Something, like a mindless, instinctive push from behind, makes me step forward into her bright, golden world. The sun's hot, dry tongue rasps over my neck and shoulders. The woman continues to look at me with no visible change in her cool, dreamy expression as I become visible to her. And what does she see, lying there on her bed of grass and wild flowers? A man older than her, with greying hair, broad and strong, yes, but with round flabbiness where I now so badly wish hardened muscles would be. Certainly not the vision of athletic perfection she deserves. Because now I can better see her firm, toned body. She must do gym work, or run perhaps. Did she run here? Did she stop for breath in this secret glade and in sensual, sweating joy, peel off her clothes and lie back so that the sun could become her lover for a few hours?
Her eyes remain locked on mine. Then she smiles. Not in a kindly way, but with warmth and acceptance, as if she had beckoned me to come to her. Her fingers have stopped their rhythm upon her nub and her nipple, but they lie in those places, as if waiting to play another tune of delight for her. Her smile and her eyes speak to me, in the softest of voices. I want you. Her eyes drop to my left hand, see the glint of gold there. An answering flash from her own hand as it drapes over her breast.
We both belong. To another.
