© DAR 2000/2006 All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the author.
I can't actually remember what started the row. David was being pushy about something I expect. I mean, he was always being pushy, and it pissed me off because I didn't need all that. Looking back I didn't love him, I can't have done, or it wouldn't have been over so completely and so fast. But at the time I thought I did.
It was lust, I suppose. I mean, once he stopped messing me about and got to it I thought he was pretty good. He was certainly hung well, and a girl needs to feel something going on down there, you know? And I thought that meant someone, well, big.
So anyway, we were at the flat, and we started this row. I said something awful - don't know what it was, can't remember a word, but I can still remember the look on his face. Horror. Disgust. Hatred, or a fair approximation of it anyway.
He hit me. Hard, with the flat of his hand on the side of my face, sent me spinning. I was up in no time, started screaming at him and going for him, clawing at his face, drawing blood, I think, because my fingernails are quite long, and yelling like a banshee.
He was out of the flat and down the stairs like the devils of hell were after him. I suppose one of them was, happening to be disguised as me. I slammed the outside door shut behind him, and he went to his car, looked back, and saw me still inside the door. He came back then, and tried to talk to me. There was some blood on his face. There was this big red mark under his eye, too, and I thought "Bastard, serves you right."
I went back up to my flat, which was how I discovered the problem. The door had swung shut behind me, so it had locked. I hadn't taken the key from the hook on the burglar alarm control box; I'd been a bit distracted what with screaming at David and trying to catch up with him so I could claw his other eye and stuff.
I was locked out of my own flat, and David was downstairs outside the front door bleeding, and my face hurt. I stayed in the little lobby on our landing for a while, wishing one of the other residents was in so I could maybe phone somebody to get a key. But one of the flats was empty and Mary who lived on the ground floor was at the hospital working.
Tessa and David, who lived opposite me, were on honeymoon, though why David had married Tessa when she spent several hours a week screaming abuse at him and telling him how pathetic he was I could never understand. Perhaps he liked it.
Jimmy, on the top floor, I hadn't seen for days, so he must be away again, and the two new girls in the flat above me had gone out for the evening. I'd seen them leave when David arrived, so they wouldn't be back for a while.
David seemed to have gone, at least he'd stopped banging on the door downstairs, so I slipped out of the lobby and sat down on the stairs - the ones going up, where he couldn't see me if he came back - and I had a bit of a cry, which I needed.
The bastard. Three months of going out, and putting up with him pushing me into doing this and that and the other - mostly the other, though I didn't need much pushing for that of course. Three months, and then the bastard has to hit me. Well, that's it. Nobody gets the chance to hit me twice. Bastard.
I was crying again when they found me, the girls from the top floor flat. I felt a complete prawn, with my make-up streaked, my hair all over the place, bawling like a five-year-old who'd lost her dolly and my cheek still red from where bloody David had hit me.
But they were really cool, like it was normal after you'd been out for a drink to find a girl you hardly knew weeping on the stairs. So they helped me up, and I sobbed something about being locked out. I was still crying when they took me up to their flat.
The big dark-haired girl, Megan, said she'd put on the kettle for some tea. The smaller blonde one, Becky, said "Don't be daft, she needs something stronger than that."
So we went in the bathroom where I had a wash and sorted myself out a bit while Megan opened a bottle of something cold. I could still see the mark on my face. So could Becky.
"Look, what's this about? You haven't been crying because you got locked out - and that mark?"
So I told her, and that started me crying again, and she put her arms round me and held me close, and that felt better. Once I stopped crying she took me into the front room. I drank the glass of wine Megan handed me in one gulp. I couldn't have told you if it was Chardonnay, shandy or shampoo.
Becky explained why I needed a drink while Megan poured me another one, and Megan called David something very unpleasant, and sat me down on the sofa with her, and we talked.
I felt better after a while. The wine helped, of course, but it was all so calm and unthreatening. The flat was rented, they told me after a bit, but it was nice. The walls were cream, and the carpet a sort of pinky colour, and the furniture matched the carpet. That sounds very girly, I know, but it wasn't.
Thinking back, the only way you could tell the place was rented was the pictures; they were so varied you knew nobody had really chosen them, they'd just been hung there to fill up the walls.
After a bit the conversation got back to this evening, and Megan said something nasty about men. I started to say David wasn't like that before I remembered that actually he was, and I started crying again. Megan was really upset, and kept apologising, and I was sobbing that it was OK, but of course it wasn't.
So she held me close, and she was all warm and gentle, and I could feel the softness of her breasts against my arm, and I relaxed, and stopped crying. Then she looked at me, holding me at arms length, and really looking at me, you know?
"You need a shower," she said, "You'll feel a lot better." So she led me down the little hall to their bathroom, where they had a shower mounted over the bath. "You get undressed," she said over her shoulder, taking the shower head out of its holder, "And I'll sort this out."
So I did, while she turned the shower on and adjusted the temperature. I was in my bra and briefs waiting for her to finish when she looked over her shoulder and said "Oh, not ready yet?" and I realised she wasn't going to go, so I went a bit pink and took my underwear off as well, while she put the shower head in the holder again and pulled the curtain across to stop water going all over the carpet.
When she turned round she had a shower cap for me, and put it on me. It was really nice the way she did it, standing close, stroking my hair up off my neck under the cap, and those dark eyes focussed totally on mine. I couldn't look anywhere else, couldn't be embarrassed about standing in front of her stark naked, couldn't worry about the way her big breasts, soft under the thin wool of her jumper, pressed against mine for a moment as she moved forward and tucked the last few strands of hair away.
"OK, now, in the shower with you," she smiled, and it was like being a little girl again, almost. She helped me into the bath, holding my hand with one of hers, the other gently in the small of my back.. It was sweet ... loving, almost.
A couple of moments later, as I stood with my back to the stream of warm water, soaping my front, and beginning to relax properly for the first time, there was a little cough and Megan poked her head round the curtain.
"Sorry," she said, looking at me with a curious intensity, "I thought you might want this." She handed me a sponge, as her eyes flicked up and down my body almost, I thought, checking me out. "He's mad, of course." She was smiling now.
"Who is?"
"That boyfriend of yours. Taking a chance on losing you. I mean, you have a simply gorgeous body. He's mad." I blushed in more places than I had thought possible as she vanished again.
