New Sensations
You don’t regret the things you do, only the things you neglect to do and probably should have done. I believe we grow from new experiences, new sensations, and came to understand during my last weeks at university that nothing is ever how it seems. Perhaps life would be too dull if it were.
The exams were over. Everyone was relieved and terrified. It feels as you wait for your results as if you have leapt into the abyss from the body of a plane and hang suspended waiting for the parachute to open. You are, at this moment, neither who you are, who you were, or who you might turn out to be. Years of cramming and revision have fused in crafted words on final papers and the outcome is an invisible map to an unknown future.
The only antidote to these confused feelings of hope and anxiety is drinking and the wine flowed liberally on punting trips on warm slow days on the river, in riverside pubs, in professors’ rooms with their view of the universe through dimpled windows like weepy eyes through which I recall seeing Guy Sieghart for the first time marching along with bent shoulders as if in imitation of Atlas with the world on his shoulders.
Guy soon after we met had suggested we go for a drink and must have read the worry lines on my brow when I told him it was impossible at that moment. All things in life, all opportunities and mishaps, are a question of timing. My tutor ran hot and cold, harsh one moment, sickly sweet another. My nerves were raw as I edited my final thesis, a comparison of 20th century French and English literature, and each word and comma I took out in the morning I was inclined to put back in come the afternoon. Would I march into Marie-Claire as a fashion editor or wait tables at corporate events between scribbling stories in notebooks that no one wanted to publish?
Guy was studying philosophy and regularly talked at university debates on art, his great passion. He believed all art had to be political, or it had no intrinsic value. What’s the point of being a rebel if you have nothing to rebel against. Anyone with a good hand can draw a landscape, a reasonable likeness, but that, in his words, is merely decorative, not art.
He was tall with dark hair, misty brown eyes and a baritone voice that projected his enthusiasm in a way that left echoes in my head and, I should imagine, in the heads of many of his listeners; certainly the girls. His style was a mixture of persuasion and allegory: Turner might thrill us with vast skies lit by mysterious lights and colours, but Picasso with Guernica was ‘a fist reaching through your chest and grabbing your heart,’ a phrase I wrote down and remembered.
His rival was known always by his surname, Blake. They dressed the same in black jackets, white tee-shirts and jeans, the undergraduate uniform, but in every other way they were opposites. Blake was all angles and bones, stick thin with ashen hair and ice blue eyes that grew colder as he hammered the lectern to make his points. He had that way of staring at you until you looked away and lacked Guy’s charisma, which Blake once described as his opponent’s ‘lack of intellectual rigour.’ Blake was studying art history. He believed there was no such thing as “art,” political or otherwise, only artists, and defended abstraction as if his life depended on winning over audiences at those debates.
Discovering New Sensations
When I saw Guy after the last debating club event of the season, he asked me to go with him to a party at a farmhouse in Bar Hill owned by a well-known sculptor and his student girlfriend, a ceramicist. This time I said yes, and he scooped me into his arms.
‘You’ve finished your thesis?’
‘Abandoned it more like,’ I replied, and he laughed.
‘You’re an original thinker, Katie, that’s what I like about you.’
‘I hardly think so.’
‘No, I mean it,’ he said. ‘Don’t you like new things, new ideas, new sensations?’
‘Yes, of course I do.’
‘Then it going to be fun.’
I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly and, as for my being an original thinker, he was probably talking about himself. I carried my fair share of self-doubt, the English disease, and have always been suspicious of compliments.
Guy had a motorbike, an old BMW with a torn seat, and I have no idea why I wore a dress that night, not jeans. We tore along the Hungtingdon Road, engine roaring, weaving in and out of the stream of cars, the beam of the headlight scanning the trees, terrifying and exhilarating. The exams were over. There was no future, no past, just that roaring moment flying over the abyss.
The house was L-shaped on three floors with small windows and bodies spilling into the open courtyard with its display of twisted metal sculptures like scenes from the bombing of Palestine. We squeezed together. We drank punch from large pottery cups and everyone looked glazed, happy, lost, suspended. It’s lost time that matters – the time between time – the moments when you forget time and life just happens.
Guy put his arm around me like a new possession. Shakira and the Scissor Sisters streamed through big speakers, shaking the dust from the wooden beams supporting the ceiling. My heart pounded to the beat. When you gather in a group some native sense of self takes over. You move and sway like you are on the deck of a ship on a rolling sea. You laugh at nothing. You can’t hear a word anyone says, and it doesn’t matter. After three years attending lectures and debates you never want to hear another sensible word being said for the rest of your life.
The punch was ice cool that hot night, rum, vodka, pomegranate juice, the taste of faraway places. I was welded to Guy’s side, the warmth of his body pressing through my dress, his lips like sweet water when we finally kissed. The clock set in a sculpture consisting of a dozen brass stick figures holding the numbers 1 – 12 chimed twice.
The crowd had thinned. Blake was arguing with a girl I knew, Lizzie, an art historian. I thought Guy was going to join in, lose the momentum, but as he caught Blake’s eye, he wheeled away from the knot of listeners and led me up the curve of the stairs, one flight, then another, the beat of my shoes and the pulse of my heart in some preordained synchronicity.
Feeling New Sensations
We entered a room with a dormer window looking out on a black night lit with stars, a quarter moon shedding its silvery light over the sloping walls where I watched our shadows draw closer. We kissed as if the time on the clock was spinning. His hands ran over my back like moving water. He turned the big key in the old-fashioned lock and pulled down the zip at the back of my dress. I stepped away from the puddle of material and we slipped between the sheets below a crocheted wool blanket.
We shed our clothes in the scramble, kissed lips and necks. The music was muted beneath the stone floors. He slipped inside me as you would a train about to leave the station. We swayed gently back and forth like a rocking horse rocked by the wind. I pressed my eyelids down. My head was swimming, spinning. He reached his pleasure point and faded, breathing deeply, mumbling something I didn’t catch. It was gentle, caring, without drama. His breath became regular and my heartbeat slowed. The silvery glow faded as the moon lowered and I slept the sleep of the hour with my blood fired by alcohol and the exams forever over.
The door opening woke me from a dream where I was on a train watching a horse racing along the side of the track. Guy’s silhouette was lit briefly from the light in the hall and the door closed. I was half sleep, trying to get back to the dream, when the door opened and closed again. He slipped beneath the blankets. He kissed my neck, my throat, my shoulder blades. I was lying on my front. He straddled me and I felt a momentary wave of cool air as the covers fell away. His hands rolled down over my back bone, pausing at each chakra, which he massaged with his thumbs, digging out the tension and moving on down to that dimpled spot at the base of the spine.
He eased me forward. I pressed down into the pillow and rose up, pushing out my backside. As his tongue slipped into my vagina and curled about my clitoris, I felt a spasm run through my entire body. He moved the fluids pouring from me into the dark hole of my bottom. A tide of want and desire bound me to the sheer energy of the moment. I was on my hands and knees, my breasts throbbing and full. I was no longer chilled. I felt wanton, feminine, totally alive, my skin burning and damp.
The sound of his hand slapping my bottom was loud and unexpected. The pain was brief, fiery, jolting. I pushed away, but he was strong. He held me still as the pain transformed into a strange, unforeseen pleasure. His tongue wormed deeper inside me, into the core of my being. The second slap sent silver stars cascading across all my nerve endings, lighting my vagina. The contractions came in waves. As I began to reach the moment of eruption, he plunged into my anus and I screamed in shame and pain and a mysterious kind of ecstasy. As I climaxed, he came, pumping into me. He emptied himself and collapsed like a fallen warrior at my side.
We slept, pressed together like two books on a shelf, and I awoke with a slither of dusty light shaping a triangle on the sloping ceiling. When the door opened and Guy walked in with a tray containing a teapot and four ceramic cups, I thought for a moment I was dreaming. I could still feel the warmth of his body against me, one arm over my hip. I turned over and my breath caught in my throat.
It was Blake lying there. His eyes opened slowly. He smiled. I don’t think I had ever seen him smile before.
Guy poured tea. ‘Milk and sugar?’ he asked. ‘Or there’s honey.’
‘Just milk,’ I said.
‘Try it with honey,’ Blake suggested. ‘Guy said you liked new sensations.’
I took my tea. ‘Why are there four cups?’ I asked.
‘It’s for Lizzie. She’s making some toast.’
Guy and Blake had played the same trick on Lizzie as they had played on me. We had been duped, used, made to feel foolish. But I came to see that sex is not bound up with emotions, that one man is much like another, and I always take honey in my tea.
© 2015, Chloe Thurlow
Reviews for Katie in Love – just CLICK to visit Amazon
5***** “Chloe is an amazing writer and this is a delicious book.” Ashley Morales, Amazon.com
5***** “Katie has the same problems with love that most young women face today and the way Chloe Thurlow peels back the layers of meaning to get at the core of what love really means is a journey that held me riveted to the very end. Beautifully written with an eye for detail, and some passionate scenes that make your fingertips tingle, Katie in Love has all the hallmarks of success from the very first line.” Rybak, Amazon.co.uk
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