I licked a nab of bitter chocolate off my finger and felt dimples appear as I grinned tipsily to myself, a brilliant day had turned into a raucous and energetic night.
One of my favourite friends was visiting and we'd spent the afternoon catching up in the sunshine in a pub garden that was so pretty it felt wrong to call it a beer garden. She's been living abroad and it was so overwhelming to see each other again that we'd been spontaneously hugged and grabbing each other when we spoke. Even when the excitement calmed some the warmth stayed, playfully tickling each other with bits of grass and idly stoking the others wrist keeping contact as we rushed through stories and giggled helplessly at each others adventures. We burnished nicely that afternoon as we lolled arms thrown over our heads to save us from squinting, moving restlessly to catch breezes through slits in our light skirts, avoiding tan lines, shifting straps down our shoulders, moving to catch rays down another shadow, another angle. We nodded to each other to point out nice looking lads passing by, but I was content enough to let my gaze rest back on her, taking in the fact she was back. More tanned than me from her travels, I realised my sun-induced frown was relaxed because my eyes were half closed and absorbing lower down her body. She had her shirt shucked up high on her ribs, and the light was diffusing a beautiful pattern of blond down on her small tummy, and my eyes had been tracing the shade of the soft dip between her belly and hip bones and my fingers were tingling. I caught her eye, then sat up and looked away. She pinged my thigh with a finger and instructed "Rosie, get me another drink if you're going".
Charlie and I had known each other going on 7 years, I had met her as she had been the school romance of my first ever boyfriend, and had gone out with us her first Easter back from uni. We'd had a messy, fun, fucked up social circle but somehow what had been drunken bonding over indie music and stoned visits to her student lifestyle had endured.
Charlie is attractive, slightly tall, slender, but geeky body language like a marionette doll, an unusual face, beautiful rather than pretty, polish nose, with soulful thick lashed brown eyes. The pleasure of looking at her wasn't what brought me short, then. We had slept together once, as teenagers, after getting very turned on watching lesbian porn for it's novelty. It had been pleasant, but decidedly inexperienced. But she had had a supposedly open relationship at uni at the time, and as it upset him it didn't get repeated. I had never nursed an infatuation for her, I loved them together with their hippy arty ways and it wouldn't have occurred to me to be a threat to that. Charlie had originally gone travelling with him but they'd burnt out on each other while she made a career teaching English and he worked minimum hours and continued down the experimental drug-taking path that she had bored of the thrill of.
The surprise for me now then, was rather the desire for her, not abstract comfortable appreciation, but the bold image and confident moves playing through my head. I had felt she would catch the fire in my eyes, so had gone for the cranberry and vodka for me, and shandy for her, but with visions playing even more vividly in my head as I entered the contrasted dim inside of the pub.
Charlies return was an occasion to catch up with the boys, now in other relationships, settled, and often tierd from work and unavailable. Our first boyfriend was now with a woman who organised him, and was happy letting him know what she wanted, which had been completely inexplicable when it happened, but somehow I told myself it freed Lee to be happier than he had ever been before, and he deserved to have someone choose just him. Lee is a big blond bear of a man, getting finer with age, more defined in the face, more ruddy and stubbly, less soft round of cheek and cute. Our other mate was Ralf, a lanky intelligent bastard, with a face as long and thin as him, and the most attractive wry smile. Charlie had briefly dated him after meeting him at a music festival before she went to uni, but his reticence and need for privacy never managed to mellow with her demanding high-maintenance dramatics.
