Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette

Strain Free     

Early in summer, when it was warm enough I didn’t need a jacket at night, this girl I usually traveled around the bars with on Saturdays didn’t come for me. She had a date. So I drove to this place farther down the main road than the one we usually went to, this new three-story bar with a roof garden.    

It was no good walking down that far in the dark that late, not even on the main road. It was a weird neighborhood like that, friendly enough in the daytime, but after dark, the nicey- nice covers came off, and being out alone after dark, you were asking for trouble. 

I talked to a couple of bikers on barstools I saw just about every week, whatever bar I ended up in, and I had a beer with them in the acoustic guitar room. Then I walked into the room in the back with these big black box speakers spanking out sound, and I talked to a few people standing around, and I kept on drinking. 

After a while, I was feeling like I’d been planted there for days waiting for somebody to find me, and finally, somebody did. I didn’t know his name. He said it to me there in the dark with the cacophonous whirling busy busy talk talk bar sounds all around us, but I didn’t hear it, and I didn’t ask him to repeat his name, please. 

And then he was driving my car in the dark and then we were on his bed in the fierce and immediate quickened way you can only feel when you have been transported, when you are so drunk so very drunk that time skips unimportant daze beats, and we were stripped warm naked and we were on his narrow line of a bed with the streetlight pouring in on us through his yellow blind. 

I started down his front, where the trough line lived at the line of the bones of his collar, and I started with my tongue and my fingers and I felt all the hollows and the curves of his skin and his hard bones down beneath them. 

He shivered when I did things to him. I liked feeling that shiver run down through him and on into me. 

The dark hairs started down near his belly. They were soft and easy to suck. I felt his hands move from my shoulders to the back of my head and they were holding onto my hair and they were grabbing for my hair and feeling for a thickness to hold onto as I went down the hairline on his belly. His legs moved in a soft convulsion, waiting for the feeling of my wet mouth to find him. So I found his legs and I fondled the inside of his thighs with my warm wetness and he opened up, he opened up for me and I moved up and found him there in the center of his body and he was ready for me to find him. 

He tried and strained to move from his side onto his back but I held him fast there so he could suffer a strong pulse of need for a while longer and make it stronger for us when it came. I loved him right then. 

After, I stayed with him through the night. The way he held onto me, the way he stroked the hair on the back of my head, with a soft stroke down, over and over, taking his fingers away at the tips of my hair, pulling his hand away, and starting again, and cupping the back of my head with his hand after, it seemed to me he thought I’d maybe stay longer. 

In the morning I climbed out of bed early and pulled on my jeans and my T-shirt. He watched me from his skinny bed. 

I whispered to him that I needed to go home for a while. He smiled and said he’d see me later, but I forgot to pay attention to the street sign when I drove away, and I didn’t know his name. 

—————— 

Brief bio: Robin Billings lives in Alexandria, Virginia, works for a large association across the Potomac in Washington, DC, and is working through edits on her first novel.