Authors note: This is the first of a series exploring a slow, teasing relationship between couples. It's written in a narrative style with the intention of a gradual, tense build - while I may write straight-to-the-action stories later, this is not that! Please feel free to comment and criticise below.
Marionette.
1 - Flashes
She glanced away and lifted one leg to rest her foot on her knee. Her hair flicked to the side as she turned her face, but my gut felt her watching out of her peripheral. She spoke to a friend on the other table. Surely, I was fabricating. She wasn't paying me her attention. My gaze drifted to her bare leg, exposed from under the long skirt she wore. Her hand grazed softly under her thigh. It seemed to be sweeping the hem of the split skirt back with it, perhaps absently. It was warm in here. I couldn't imagine another reason.
Then, surely, she bunched her skirt further still and brought her foot in an inch closer. Her motion seemed casual, but she must have known that, sitting across the low table between us, had I looked, I could have seen... Her hand adjusted the skirt again, this time holding it back as far as the top of her thigh. Slightly, barely, she drifted her legs apart another inch. Betraying me, my eyes flicked down between her open legs.
Under her raised leg, I see the dark hem of her pants, detail of lace, a shape almost forming in the shadow between her thighs -- an outline, no. Controlling them again, I flick my eyes away. A few seconds at most, surely I'd gone unnoticed. My eyes raise back to her face, hoping to confirm her focus elsewhere, but my glance meets hers. I must have looked guilty, but a secret smile danced in her eyes as the corners of her mouth twitched into the slightest knowing smile. A seductive, deliberate, hungering smirk.
I feel myself flush red. I look away, then down. Adjust in my chair. I'm boiling with embarrassment, or excitement, or fear. My chest thumps loudly rushing blood out my body and into my ears, my head is a furnace. I'm sweating. I know her expression, there was no misreading it. I've seen it before in my own partners, on first dates, when footsie under the table is an addictive language, teasing the rising rush to have each other at the first moment you can be alone. But, of course, we weren't alone. We were in a crowded bar among friends. Our friends, and, stood at the bar buying the round, her partner.
* * *
A town in Scotland, 2011. The college year finishes and we break for summer with a newfound vitality for drinking, smoking and late, long nights. It's a time of discovering everything worth trying, and it's in this time I introduce two friends. After a wonderfully teenage courtship, playing symphony to their equally hesitant advances they finally unite as a couple. Most people had someone or other at that time, even in the cases of the unspoken hook-up partners that would cross paths at every house party, deftly avoiding each other until they had enough alcohol to blame their intentions on.
My friends, who I'll call Pete and Sara, though of course aren't called Pete or Sara, hosted one such party at Pete's house while his parents were away. We must have been too cool to join a family holiday to the hills at that age, instead making thorough use of a free house for quite clearly outlawed parties. The group of friends had expanded to much of our college course at this point and regularly exceeded thirty people at any one gathering.
Inevitably, by the time any spirits came out, one lustful teenage romance on the precipice of contact would encourage a game of spin the bottle. The game sat perfectly between satisfying the excitement of drinking and making guilt-free passes at anyone and everyone that attended. Different friends, partners, genders, all could be explored under the risk-free game logic of fulfilling your mandate. Of course, Pete and Sara were both playing. They were the hosts, they couldn't have talked themselves out of it. The girl I was seeing was equally eager, and we all knew each other well. We had even had a few double dates together, thinking ourselves to be ten years more mature than we had been.
