After a shower, I collected Ruby's and my scattered clothes and underwear and placed them in the laundry basket. As I released her scarlet brassiere from my fingers to the top of the pile, I mused, the only evidence of our dalliance rippled in our minds.
I breezed out in the cold and shopped for dinner items. Returning to the apartment, I ate and left plenty, hoping Ruby would eat later, even past midnight.
Next, I opened my pre-Paris reading material, Germinal, at the gritty part where Étienne and Catherine are underground in the mine.
I checked my watch often and kept reading, kidding myself that it was the novel's drama. In reality, I waited for Ruby regardless of the intermission.
Post-midnight, she returned.
I pretended to read as she closed the door. I wriggled and lounged on the sofa, wishing to possess her.
Don't, I told myself, don't show your excitement and intent!
I peeked; Ruby occupied my vision and yanked me towards the kitchen.
Germinal fell to the floor like a collapsed mineshaft.
Then, in a rush of words, Ruby elaborated on how she cut a deal to avoid a 2 a.m. finish.
Dumping talking, the pixie preferred to speak with bodily urgency. We breathed like sleazes in a darkened adult cinema and groped towards the kitchenette.
Ruby perched on the small bench; she wrapped her legs behind my butt, minus her boots. Her arms locked high around my neck. Her tongue swivelled in my ear before her pink tip tried to find my tonsils. Finally, after five minutes of intense lip-locking, she relaxed.
She organised me to pour us a glass of wine. Ruby helped herself to some bread and cheese. She picked at the deli meat and salad greens I had prepared earlier. The processed meats tasted below par compared to her family salami—the subtle and divine combined in her mum's recipe.
We drank the wine I opened, avoiding a quality comment. The cheese tasted better. Ruby and I nibbled away at both sides of a slice of bread till our lips met. She ran her tongue on the rim of her wine glass, Pinot red complementing her soft pink lips.
She popped a couple of my shirt buttons. Ruby teased her hand over my crotch and ran her fingers through my dark brown hair. Next, my earlobes and exposed chest received various degrees of attention. She licked and kissed on and behind my ear. Next, the pixie puckered her lips and kissed my nipples. I admit it was a sensitive manoeuvre, yet the nipple play left me uncomfortable. My body tensed.
Ruby sensed this without looking at me but continued tweaking. I twisted under her. I touched her breasts in my escape, and the brunette moved on.
Ruby never ventured to my nipples again in foreplay.
My head burgeoned to please a young woman as I removed her jeans and started licking her inner thighs. This touch captivated the pixie.
Her regular 'yes, yes' urged me on.
I kissed her knees, and Ruby laughed.
Then, as I grabbed her ankles and spread her legs wide, she released a cushy moan. After that, my set of actions developed fast.
Holding her left foot, I wriggled her toes.
Then, as I moved to suck her little toe, Ruby kicked her legs like a startled horse, drawing her knees to her chest and locking her fingers tight at her ankles.
"Sorry," I exclaimed, though her strike to my temple stung!
I ducked an intense inquiry.
"Not me," she replied.
Her tone stayed neutral as her sealed fingers kept a relentless grip.
Knowing Ruby since her teenage years, I knew she wouldn't add more.
Step away, I thought, the wise option.
She acknowledged my bewilderment fleetingly; her eyes darted backwards and forward between her knees and me.
Though, Ruby uttered nothing since, 'Not me.'
An awful thought surfaced: I'll never touch her again.
She surprised me; the pixie turned and swayed her stunning caboose.
"Kiss my butt cheeks and think how lucky you are."
Ruby stepped out of her underwear. She crooked her finger, and I followed her rump to the lounge settee as she tossed her bra aside.
While exploring her butt with puckered lips, I reflected on the two sides of Ruby's sentience: her attired, controlled self and her seducing nude ego. Until seen, the latter had lain in the realm of guessing what she looked like undressed in intimate accuracy, alongside anyone else who ever fantasised about the pixie.
Life denies us the opportunity to see an individual in their two polar states simultaneously. A concurrent body viewing of others or ourselves, clothed and in our birthday suit. To view our two faces side by side. This is an experience even denied to our most intimate partners.
Yet, in the nineteenth century, Goya painted two versions of the same model: nude and clothed. The artworks are, La Maja Desnuda and La Maja Vestida. The first canvas spreads an uncovered model for a private collector. In the second, the attired model is—a commissioned canvas for public display. The artist didn't intend for the paintings to hang together. Yet, they do today. We can see in art the body compartmentalisation we hide.
I could picture Ruby nude. I could picture Ruby clothed. But never dressed and undressed, parallel like identical clones. We, therefore, accept our dichotomy of being. The rational clothed mind and our nude boisterous sexual.
My hands massaged her butt. I kissed Ruby's sweet cheeks.
Her hand found my zip, and her fingers stroked my rod. Not only did the column heater's temperature rise in the room. Then, faster than a schoolboy can hide a dirty magazine, Ruby slid and went down on me. Her lips operated as no-nonsense immediate pleasure activators, like an artist, except shaping using spit, a personal erotic installation.
I watched Ruby, self-absorbed in my manhood.
Yet my mind strayed.
Where did the brunette store her youthful Melbourne memories? Had Paris changed her? What were Ruby's relationship dreams? Who was this woman here with me?
As my orgasm raced to assured, the moment of bliss gathered a melancholy. I wanted to pause the fellatio to access the inner and outer Ruby here and now.
But time moved as it did, changing myself and the Ruby I knew and the parts unknown. I grasped this, even if I didn't acknowledge it.
Nothing exists like an orgasm to release reflective wistfulness.
"Your turn," I recall hearing.
There are no breaks for the young in sex.
I realised Ruby had swallowed my wad.
Though unstoppable, Ruby bounced up and anchored her feet on the sofa's edge. Her legs bent at the knee, her hands positioned inside her inner thighs to spread her sexual self. More than Eve displayed, more than the passaging of our births.
Face first, I headed to the raw of her sex, yet present too, her boutique allure. Plunging between her thighs like a diver, I explored exquisite crevices—Ruby's divine, exclusively mine.
My tongue, Ruby's clit, and the pelvic grind competed against each other as we searched for a compelling cadence. We alternated between being in sync and out of sync, like how we spend periods of our lives.
No Kama Sutra knowledge, I aimed to deliver Ruby into ecstasy.
Pleasure ignited by pleasure's ignition as pleasure for two.
I peeped at her darting blues, kneeling between her legs—a glance in a search for feedback.
"Boy, does it do the job," Ruby managed, relaxing.
She guided me beside her, and we cuddled on the sofa: a shared tranquil lull, minutes in each other's arms.
Ruby yawned.
She cruised to the bathroom.
I sidled to her bed and lay in it, naked, under the doona.
In the dark, it crossed my mind; I shouldn't have assumed the right to share her bed. Or at least put on some boxers.
Ruby entered the room in the dark and slipped beneath the doona. Her warm skin, next to mine, in her birthday suit.
We lay together, not touching.
I listened to her quiet breathing.
I can't recall who fell asleep first — a long, sound, dreamless night for myself.
Ruby's dreams, Ruby knows.
Morning pushed reality to the forefront: Ruby busied showering and dressing. The girl skipped a proper breakfast and gulped a strong coffee despite the bread on the table.
I munched on a crusty slice, enjoying sweet strawberry jam and mulling: a morning shift or a lecture would fill her day.
I gazed, amused, as she foraged the lounge area for a coat.
She mumbled, "Dang! Where is it?"
Ruby lifted the coat off the floor from behind the sofa.
She heaved on the overcoat and zipped towards the rack inside the apartment door. With caressing care, she lifted a scarf off the hook. She then wrapped it high around her neck. An end tapered as it fell across her back, whilst the other fringe draped one shoulder to her chest. The wrap commanded a classic class.
Ruby spoke to me for the first time that morning at the door.
"Get out for the day."
She swung the door and nearly closed it without another word until her head swooped around the frame.
Ruby's face expanded in puckish relish.
"Catch you later."
And the forever dateless impression before she shut the door, the swishing of her watermelon scarf.