Laure awoke mid-moan, rolling forwards, pressing herself against the flat warmth of the bed. Eyes still closed, a dull pain registered a fraction of a second after the waking of pleasure.
The dryness of the roof of her mouth, the slowness of her tongue, and the thick weight of a movement induced headache contrasted strangely with the spreading heat of her groin and the languidity of her limbs.
She moaned again, a doubly committed groan, struck somewhere between horror and delight.
The fingers that had been gently stroking her mons and abdomen stopped, their cessation tolling in her like some bell of silence - disconcerting and agonising. Her breath caught.
She was in bed with someone.
As if to prove the point, and perhaps driven by her sudden tension, lips closed firmly on the back of her neck, their soft warmth drawing a ringing sensation from her whole spine and a slow, stuttering exhalation.
The fingers began to toy with the springy hair of her groin.
She was definitely in bed with someone.
How had it happened? She could not remember. The evening had grown hazy early on. The 'girly' evening to half celebrate and half mourn her newfound singledom.
Had they gone out? they must have done. Those fingers were too persistent to be a dream.
She groaned again as they brushed her clitoris and the lips released her. A foot stroked against her ankle.
Laure pulled forwards, away from the tightening arm and prying leg. Languidly aroused or not, her head was too thick for the inevitable penetration.
Why had she drunk so much? She had no memory of a club. Arousal was giving way to irritation and the painful ringing of her own pulse.
Her need for space growing, she rolled out of bed and stumbled towards her bathroom, grabbing her mobile from the bedside table.
In the mirror, she seemed pale, though her nipples were reddened. Another pointless one-night stand. Unremembered and unfulfilling.
Gently she probed her groin, seeking the aching signature of inconsiderate shagging. Nothing of that nature. He must have had too much to drink. A relief, though even more disappointing than the seven-stroke shock of her recent lover.
Cupping her hands to throw water over her face, she tried to recollect the evening. As her fingers brushed her cheek, she found the texture of her skin slightly altered, something slightly slick mixed in with the clean hardness of the water. Oral? With someone unknown. She felt slightly sick.
Bottles of wine, and cocktails of vodka and fruit-juice appeared in shimmering sequence. Memory began to fragment half-way through a film, somewhere around midnight.
She had gone to the door with one of her friends, Sarah, and wished her goodnight. Her dress had slipped and Sarah had tweaked her nipple and laughed as she left.
Had she felt better she might have smiled wryly at the memory, or perhaps blushed.
What then?
Her fingers were still slightly numb as she began to write a text to Catherine for a reminder. Presuming that she could remember anything herself - even when Sarah left, Catherine was curled on the sofa, standing an apparent impossibility.
No response. It was too early for Catherine to be alert to the vibrations of her phone. It was only because of those fingers that Laure had moaned herself into wakefulness.
She must face the moment alone.
She turned the lock, opened the door, and walked slowly back to the bed. Expecting the overcharged smell of alcoholic sex, she was slightly surprised at the smell of the room. But she didn't care at the moment. She did not want to see them. That would come all too soon, she knew how this went.
Climbing back into the bed, she planted herself with her back to the other body with the resolve of the condemned and fixed her eyes on the screen of her mobile, now returned to the edge of her table.
Her muscles tightened as the hand passed over her middle and took hold of her breast. She had known it would come. The pressure of the forearm pulling the mass behind her closer. The chest would come first, and then the penis.
She cringed as the chest met her back. He must be overweight. The softness was alien to her. She tried to pull away again, but the arm was insistent.
However, something was strange here. The warm softness of the man's abdomen absorbed her back, and she could feel the moving chest. Her buttocks touched his groin, but there was no hardness there. In fact there was nothing.
In confusion she tensed yet further, and those lips once more engulfed the back of her neck.
