My favourite moments of the day are during my forty-five minute commute between work and home. They're the only times of the day that I let my mind go where I don't dare all the other hours. There I stroke her hair and make her tremble with kisses. I have whole conversations there. Sometimes I dare to tell her. Depending on the weather, how my customers talked to me, or how lunch is sitting she may laugh, yell or just walk away, but usually she softens and allows me to draw near. Sometimes she approaches me, drenched in rain or glowing in Saturday sunlight, lips parted and eyes darting. These are my favourite because I always end up doing the whole manly shoving her up against a wall thing, pinning her hands.
It's a difficult balance cultivating these fantasies, surrounded by jostling commuters, and keeping them from going too far... it's awkward enough bumping up against the high schoolers and business women.
On either end of the commute is the rest of my life, the parts that don't allow for fantasies. The downtown side is in a department store selling women's cosmetics that cost more than a day's salary for me, sometimes more than a week's. But tips are good... those women with their tight pants and sculpted cleavage appreciate a carefully timed wink when it comes from someone so dewy and humble as me. The blushes I coax from their botoxed cheeks are so much prettier than the ones I apply with squirrel hair brushes.
The suburb side is the creaky little house with the powder blue siding and the cherry tree and porch swing. Too hot in summer, too cold in winter. Floorboards worn. Kitchen with those puke green appliances and turquoise walls. I hung orange curtains just to amplify the visual assault. The toilet will keep flushing unless you wiggle it twice while running the bathtub faucet. Each piece of comfy furniture is a dust mite ridden hug of wine stained velvet, corduroy or microfiber. Trinkets drip from every surface, even the ceiling. Things she's collected, found, cast off, and hoarded with intense, but brief, passion.
When I walk up the concrete, moss lined path she's sitting as usual on the porch swing, casually crooked and wearing a long floaty skirt, one bare foot on the peeling white railing beside a sweating glass of sun tea. She wiggles her fingers at me through the railings, a little smile lighting her porcelain face. I wiggle my fingers right back.
"So?" she asks without moving.
"Four hundred and thirty," I tell her. My most expensive sale of the day.
"And?"
"Fifty dollars... in my boxers." And I tuck my hand into my shorts and pull out the bill.
"Good flirting, cowboy," she tells me, only her eyes following as I clomp up the dry and cracking wooden stairs.
"So what are you feeding this cowboy?" I ask and push the rusted chain to make her swing back and forth. Tendrils of auburn hair under her head kerchief shiver around her face with the breeze.
"I was thinking pesto salmon and fresh minted peas."
"What about those strawberries?" I ask because I picked them yesterday for her and I know she's so proud of how well they grew this year.
This rouses her and she flops her bare feet to the hot, peeling-paint wood. She lifts one finger to me. "Ah but that's a secret." She drops a luscious wink and pads into the house, crooked screen door creaking.
"Oil that please, Ellis," she mumbles as she slaps dirty feet through the cool darkness of the hall to the sunlight of the kitchen and its stained laminate.
I test the door a few times before falling into the cool embrace of our home (their home). I slide off my loafers, tuck them underneath the table we found at the flea market a month after I moved in. The floor snaps and pops as my sock feet tread the distance to her.
The kitchen smells of fresh basil, garlic and powdered sugar. Sugar dust catches the sunlight and dances like miniscule fairies, landing in her hair.
"Spark it up, will you, cowboy?" she asks without turning around, fingers deep in pesto and fish.
The back screen door creaks just as much as the front door, bangs harder, but she doesn't bother to ask me to oil it. She'll forget about asking me about either of them for another week. Maybe I'll get around to it tonight.
The barbeque lights with a satisfying whump of air and whiff of rotten eggs. I always take the life of my eyebrows and floppy bangs into my hands when I light this old and rusted beast. A bee buzzes through the heat, becomes lazy, falls and sizzles.
Rowan manages to keep the grass out here a luscious green, the kind that squishes beneath your bare feet and commands you to drop and roll and giggle. The front yard simply crisps in spots, no matter what she tries. She's given up and calls it our polka dot lawn.
I go back inside and bring out the bottle of wine, slide it onto the counter in front of her. Her favourite: apricot.
She squeals and beams at me, throws her arms around my neck (being sure not to get her pesto fingers on my good flirting work shirt).
"Oh Ellis! Just what I wanted! Perfect perfect you're perfect!" She bounces as she hugs me and smells of lavender and strawberries. I lose her warmth as quickly as she flung it at me and she's outside placing the delicate fish on the grill. I'm sure the neighbours suddenly have a craving for garlic.
I open the wine and pour it into two mismatching glasses (mine thick pale aqua with rustic, Peruvian bubbles and crookedness, hers a paper thin crystal that sings the moment you touch the rim with a wet finger). I carry them both out and tuck hers in her waiting hand, flop in a hammock chair and watch the hummingbirds at the honeysuckle. She sips and sighs.
"Perfect, isn't it?" The salmon behind her sizzles. I don't answer but admire her in my peripheral vision. Thoughts swell and I have to crush them. Before I can my hand slips over her barely exposed navel to rest on one jutting hip. My fingers tingle with the imagined touch.
