Automaton like I drove out of the car park and negotiated traffic lights, lanes and turns.
I hit denial.
Kissing her sealed lips was unpalatable, too unpleasant to have happened.
Yet it had.
I plunged into the 'if only' scenarios.
If only—I hadn't ignored her warning signs.
I was at a loss for where to go!
Go home.
My driving became numb and automatic.
Ruby told me that she might not be the same girl at home. I convinced myself to hold my love course. She counselled in Paris; she said, wait and see. I held my confidence from our startling sex: nothing could render our woven mesh.
The lack of contact since Paris, I thought, it unimportant.
It predicated everything.
I thought you knew it was over.
In the café and after, I failed to read her.
She parked at a curbside meter.
She allocated me brush-off time.
If only I had prodded: can I see you tomorrow? She would have stipulated, 'No.'
I wouldn't have kissed sealed lips.
If only I moved into her space at her car and tried a cuddle or sought her hands. She would have stepped away.
My final intimate touch with Ruby forever is — sealed lips.
I realised I hadn't driven robotic; I deviated and knew where. My drive took me parallel to the riverbank.
I stopped outside Coral's boathouse. Relieved, I sought the hidden key.
My best friend was an Ocean, and more away at Princeton, yet I hoped my being in her place would sooth my screwed-up core.
I lifted the stone, vexed, no bloody key!
Baffled and craving respite in my shocked torpor, I stumbled towards the boathouse door.
Unbelievably, it pushed open.
My mind flooded with a salve of relief.
"Coral," I croaked, dazed.
Through welled eyes, I saw a bob of golden hair. A woman spun from preparing food on a small square table. A middle-aged lady in a floppy dark dress held a knife. Mystification spread across her pale face.
A scraggly, pot-bellied, bearded bloke jumped up from a red leather sofa, and he shook his fist.
His nostrils flared as he shouted, "Leave you trespassing arsehole before I call the police."
I apologised profusely as I backed off, my hands raised.
I stumbled to my car and drove off bristling.
Nothing was going right today!
Farther along the riverbank, I parked at a reserve. My head slumped on the steering wheel. It lay there for ages. Eventually, my fingers fiddled with my key chain. I pulled it roughly from the ignition. I skulked out of my car and locked it. I walked the riverbank path, my keys clenched in my hand.
The boathouse filled my immediate thoughts. Coral's parents must have sold it! This compounded my horrid mood. Our youthful memories vended as chattels. I needed Coral to tranquillise me.
The table in the boathouse fixated in my mind—an uncanny resemblance to the one in Ruby's Paris apartment.
I gripped my keys in my tight, closed fist.
And memory spiralled me to Ruby.
We shared breakfast at the table in her Parisian apartment.
Bread and a jar of honey. Black coffee. I kept buying milk, yet her small fridge lay perpetually empty. I recall Ruby seated in high-cut black panties and no bra. I had on a pair of boxers. We bounced her bed springs the previous night. She milked me twice, the stamina of the girl.
At breakfast, a glint in her eyes before her fleet-footed action. My boxers yanked down, and my boner raised between her hands. Ruby, kneeling, her mouth commencing work. The ability of youth to keep rising to the occasion was unquestioned.
The brunette infallibly craved sex, and she delighted in adding a twist. Whilst taking head, she dipped her fingers in the honey pot and smeared it over my balls, creating a sticky, tacky mess. Ruby licked my shaft and sack in sweet, self-consumed happiness.
I watched in awe. She gave me perfect head, working my rod 'till my load flew high. Considerate Ruby gave me thirty seconds of clean-up and recovery time as she reached into a cupboard. She emerged holding a ribbed, flesh-coloured dildo.
Ruby never ceased to surprise me, though the dildo looked familiar.
It reminded me of the one the brunette claimed to have found at the jumble sale preparation at my church. The toy she used to snare Coral. I watched, unsure, as she drizzled honey over the dildo's head. She guided me behind her as she bent over the table, wriggling her panties to the floor. Whatever her plan, she led me into it, step by step.
"Kiss my pucker," she told me, matter-of-fact.
I tongued her crinkly balloon knot.
Ruby's moans of delight built in her butt as they spiralled to her brain. She handed me the sticky dildo. She didn't have to give instructions where she desired it.
Christ, was I ready for this?
Her butt winked, defining an astounding woman.
Pleasure was never pleasure denied to Ruby.
I teased without inserting it.
Uneasy, I wanted it over before it started.
Ruby could have demanded me in her ring if she hadn't milked me first.
What would I have done?
The minx craved butt action.
"Like the view?" she stated.
Followed by the sultry, "Be Adam and sin with Eve."
Ruby was unconcerned about what fantasy I played out as long as it involved her butthole.
I did everything, apart from inserting the dildo into her butt as I slid it around her cute toosh!
My tease vexed the brunette.
Curt and blunt, "Oh, for God's sake, think of bloody Coral's arse if it will help you do it! Give a girl what she wants!"
Ruby knew what she wanted.
I wanted?
I held the toy upright in my hand. The honey dripped. It dribbled in the ribbing of the toy.
Ruby posed explicitly and gracelessly, without sexual activity.
She waited, one leg perched on and across the table. Her buttocks twitched.
She still hoped for the dildo in her caboose!
Her face relayed her expectations. In the end, she shook her head. Though she added a butt shimmy. Ruby's butt twerked, and the table legs wobbled. She jiggled her rump, backwards and forwards, towards me. Finally, she spun and plonked her buttocks on the table, legs closed.
If she had sustained her shimmy, she would have broken my resolve not to put the dildo where she craved it!
"You untrained puppy, we've got some work to do!" she huffed, her lips locked.
Ruby eased off the table; her butt released a tacky squelch like an extended fart as the wood and her rump parted company.
She moved towards the bathroom.
My eyes followed her. The dildo remained vertical.
She pivoted at the bathroom door and glared, "Oh, stop holding it like a processional crucifix."
Next, I heard the shower water drumming. I cleaned the kitchen after I pulled up my boxers. I washed her underwear and the dildo in the small sink. Next, I hid the toy in the highest overhead cupboard.
Ruby finished her shower and changed inside her bedroom. She returned to the kitchenette in jeans and a polo-neck navy jumper.
"Thoroughly domesticated, eh," she muttered.
A reference to her knickers spread across the t-towel rail drying.
"I need to go out," she informed me.
She paced to the apartment door. I liked her butt in denim.
"Not because of me—" I started.
"Hell, no, this place has bills to pay."
"Will you be back later?"
I was pleading as I tried not to plead.
She spoke across the room,"Find someone who cares."
Ruby lifted a key off the hook on the wall inside the apartment door. She gave the Eiffel Tower key chain a cursory touch.
Leaving the door unopened, she gave me rare surging eye contact.
"Deeply cares. Find what I don't believe in – a soul sharer. Find her."
She wrapped the door key in a clenched fist. I figured she loathed me and she would ask me to leave her apartment.
She responded to my downcast face.
"Oh, you lost puppy, go easy on yourself. I'll be back for the sack."
She closed the apartment door behind her with the gentlest of clicks.
Ruby, it appeared, never held a setback.
The brunette worked around my backdoor reticence, providing alternative expressive experiences.
Though, her derrière was proffered as her constant temptation.
Apartments have expenses, so I paid my fair share of the Paris bills until I returned to Melbourne. Even as offered free accommodation, it was the right decision.
I kept walking along the river bank. The past seemed preferable to the present. I wondered what I could have changed.
If only I used the dildo as Ruby solicited. If only I summoned the balls to call her 'Rubes.' I sifted Parisian memories. They blew and scattered like the pixie's pappus tattoo. However, my heart held Ruby's hypnotic, joy-defining skin.
I circled the river path, returning to my car. I drove home and focused on work-related tasks.
With time, like months, if only, faded.
I moved into coping.
However, I lost my ability to communicate regarding myself with anyone for a fair while. My ego contained upbeat moments: Coral's anticipated return to Melbourne, her Princeton course complete.
Of course, I bumped into Ruby inadvertently, here and there. We kept it short and polite, the generic civil.
A passing chat composed of, 'How are you?'
It wants to hear, 'Fine.'
And vice versa, and no extended stopping on our movement elsewhere.
I attempted acceptance within myself. Ruby was now outside my life.
My soul refused to lay blame at her toes.
My ego— hated sealed lips.
The days that passed behind me became my sole friend in Coral's absence.
Let time and separation do their forgetting job.
Yet, memory betrayed me.
It does.
The women in my life are permanent in my mind.