I dream of lovemaking. Not the hard, angry sex that M and I shared, but soft, tender, beautiful lovemaking that the romance novels witter on about. I writhe under an imaginary lover, and when my eyes begin to flutter open then drop closed again, when I wander into that no-man’s land that's neither asleep nor awake, I slide a hand down my stomach and between my legs.
A low gasp escapes my lips, then another, my breathing quickens, and my imaginary lover and my fingers merge in the nightscape of my imagination, until soon I'm panting with my eyes closed and before I know it I climax with more intensity than any orgasm I can remember, certainly nothing I ever felt with him and as soon as he enters my mind, my nostrils fill with the sickly iron of blood and all I can see under my eyelids is his face, all I can hear is the desperate, almost sexual grunting as the breath leaves his body. I open my eyes, gingerly place both hands on top of the duvet, and I know with strange certainty that it is the last orgasm I will have for quite a long time.
I spend the next few days in my flat, wearing nothing except occasionally a bra and panties. I rarely eat, I drink a little wine, I smoke a hell of a lot more than I should. I sit at my laptop and type for hours on end, only to delete everything that I have written. I sit on my tiny balcony in a bathrobe, listening to distant police sirens and wondering if some day soon one of them will be coming for me. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, and I think of my mother.
The last words she said to me; "If you walk out of this house, don't ever think of coming back." I stuck to my word, I never ever returned. I was eighteen then, barely. Tomorrow is my twenty-sixth birthday, or is it the day after... Home feels like a million years ago. Mum and dad are echoes - people I knew for a while but who won't ever come back into my life. I feel like crying, for them, for me, but the tears won't come.
St. Elmo's Fire is on the TV next door, I can hear it through the paper-thin walls, just like I could hear the loud grunts of gay sex through my bedroom ceiling last night - a far cry from my old angels. A muffled Demi Moore spirals out of control, and for a moment I fantasise that her character is in exactly the same situation as me. Except as far as I can remember, no-one in the Brat Pack ever killed their lover. I walk into my room, slam the door, collapse onto the bed and wonder if the boys upstairs will start fucking soon, if only to take me outside my own head for a while.
This passage was taken from a short story I wrote four and a half years ago, entitled "Camille". The rest of the story was pretty much un-salvageable.
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