Delilah took the towel from me and brushed her hair dry, her naked body dripping water onto the bath mat. Many women would have wrapped a towel around themselves and used another to dry their hair. Not Delilah. She stood in the middle of the bathroom floor and dried herself, head to foot, as if I wasn't there. I loved the way she tilted her head forward to make her hair drop, making it easier to dry with the towel. Her breasts dropped too, and swayed as her body moved. The puff of her nipples seemed fuller with the weight of her breasts, the nipples extended.
I remembered her words from the night of the storm: 'I don't often have a man in my house,' and thought she was so accustomed to being alone that it never occurred to her to hide. I was the same, often walking around my own home nude. I'd stand, sometimes, boiling the kettle for tea, quietly stroking my cock while I waited, simply because it felt so good. I wouldn't always be hard, but that heavy feeling, that weight... yes, that felt good.
I watched Delilah put her rings back on, a pair of small sleepers in her earlobes, and finally the little gold cross on its chain. It fell to its place in the shallow valley between her breasts, lying on that delicate spray of freckles. I'd counted twelve, and there was a larger heart shaped freckle on the inner curve of her breast, off by itself, like a star near a small constellation.
"There," she said, "I feel dressed now." She pointed to a thick dressing gown hanging on a hook on the back of the door. "Be an angel, hand me that gown." She took it and hid her delicious beauty from my eyes. "I don't always cover myself up when I'm alone..." Delilah looked me straight in the eye, "...but with you here, there's someone to tease."
She said it so matter of factly, I barely registered the words. Then I did. "I'd better cover myself up then, if we're going to play that game."
"Oh yes. You should." She handed me her lighter gown, the one that smelled of her skin and her perfume. "But first," she declared, "I shall cook."
We'd not set any rules, Delilah and I, but the flavour of our love making seemed to be look, don't touch. I grinned to myself, but she caught it. "What, Adam, you don't want me... to cook?" She laughed.
"I want to see what you'll do with that zucchini," I prompted.
She glanced down, and remembered. "Hmmm, we'll have to see about that." She paused. "It wouldn't be hot, like your rod."
"You dirty girl. You've thought about it already."
"Maaybe," she whispered slowly. "Maybe not." She winked, and I contemplated the vegetable's luck. "I did think chocolate for dessert," she added. "We both could have some of that."
"I'm beginning to think you don't need me at all, Delilah." A vision of her long fingers breaking off a long strip of chocolate from a jumbo block darted into my head. I pictured her licking her fingers. And me licking mine.
"Oh yes. I think I do." She revealed one beautifully curved breast from within her dressing gown. "It's so much better when someone's watching. Don't you think?"
"I don't know what you mean," I replied, just as slowly and deliberately hiding my body inside my gown, wrapping the cloth around and tying the sash into a simple knot.
"Be careful how you sit," said Delilah, moving ahead of me down the stairs. She looked over her shoulder. "Make sure the angle's right." So matter of fact, Delilah. The rules of our game were slowly falling into place. She liked to see flesh, too.
Down in the kitchen she was methodical, chopping and preparing the meal, making a sauce, slicing the mushrooms fine. She left the zucchini for last, leaving it on the cutting board next to a sharp knife. As she prepared the raw ingredients Delilah told me where the crockery and candlesticks were, and I laid two settings on a small table in a window nook.
On any other day I might have placed the settings on adjacent sides, so between courses we could lean in to each other and kiss. But in these instructed and fearful days, the words of the prime minister's twice weekly press briefing in my ears, I laid the places opposite each other. We could gaze into each other's eyes.
The bottle of wine I opened was better than the night of the storm, and I drank to Delilah's good health and she drank to mine. The wine, a Shiraz, was smooth, the taste like soft red velvet on my tongue. Delilah's flavour on my fingers would be smoother, but she was by the stove and too far away. Besides, we weren't touching, we were following the rules of the game.
"When would you like to eat?" she asked."I'll cheat, use the microwave for some things, so really, it's just the meat."
"You've not chopped the zucchini." I pointed to it with a small tilt of my glass, then took a small sip.
"I'm saving it," she replied.
"For a rainy day?"
She looked at me with her steady look, her lips slightly apart so I could see the white of her teeth. Her eyes creased with a smile. "It's not raining, Adam. I meant for later."
"How much later?" I asked.
"A few minutes, so it's freshly chopped for the pan."
"Oh, I see." But I didn't see at all. I sensed I was being toyed with, and wondered how that happened in a kitchen. Then, in a vivid flash, I remembered the remake of A Postman Always Rings Twice, with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, where he swept the bread she was kneading from the kitchen table and her bare ass was covered in flour as he fucked her.
Fuck. My cock stirred at the the thought of Delilah leaning forward over the island bench, her feet wide apart. She'd look back at me with that certain look. I realised she was too young to know the movie. Did that matter?
