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EXIT 22

by Maartje Wortel

Short story

She’d already rung the bell a few times, and when she got upstairs she said she was sick and tired of having to keep climbing the stairs, and ring the bell in the first place. She couldn’t just drop in on me whenever she felt like it, because there was always advance warning.

I don’t really know what you’re like when you aren’t prepared, she said.

It’s for your own safety, I said.

She said she wasn’t in the mood for arguments – she’d rung the bell and walked up the stairs, specially to see me, before having to drive back home in a traffic jam. She always came for the same thing.

I got up from my office chair and kissed her mouth and the back of her neck. I pulled her over to my desk by her hips, and slid my hands under her shirt. Her nipples were erect. So were mine. I reflect what she does: if I see her as she wants me, then she sees that I want her.

Take your trousers off, I say.

And, clearly still annoyed from climbing the stairs, she says ‘It doesn’t bloody work like that’.

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, I thought, but I let go of her. I asked if she wanted a cup of tea, and what did she do? She started off about some video her psychologist had told her to see: Tea and Consent.

She said the video showed in a simple way that you can always change your mind – you might at first want tea, but then you don’t.

Fine, I said. Do you want tea, or don’t you?

She said she did, tea, and she slid her trousers down over her bum and I knew she was here with me and would keep on coming to see me for ever and ever.

At home she had a husband who was a farmer and had to get up so early he often forgot to touch her. When he did, always in the same way that had once worked, she got so bored she thought ‘I’ve got to buy some ketchup’.

Recently he’d gone down on her rather clumsily up against the cowshed door, with the milking machines hanging down from the cows’ udders and the milk squirting through the hoses. It had briefly aroused her, that big farmer’s tongue between her labia, she’d fantasised that it was a cow’s tongue, rough and uncaring, and also the possibility that someone might come in and catch them at it; she let him get on with it for longer than she was used to. Her labia were red and swollen, and then she suddenly heard herself saying ‘I’ve got to go to the gym’. And that was what made her come.

The gym was me – it’s my nickname. We’d met in a traffic jam. I lived in the city centre and really had little use for a car. It was too big and too expensive, but I thought ‘If I get rid of it, I’ll lose my freedom’.

I was on my way to the coast, and she was on her way home. We were stuck in the jam for about twenty minutes, and after a minute or two we kept crawling past each other, or stopping side by side. And then we looked at each other – like, really looked. I’d never known what people meant by that – I mean, you always really look? But now that she and I were looking into each other’s eyes I realised really looking simply means not looking away. She had bright green eyes, dark hair down to her shoulders, a perfect hair line. She wasn’t wearing jewellery, and kept both hands on the wheel. That was what struck me most – driving so slowly, not keeping her eyes on the road, but still keeping control. I wanted her straight away. I thought ‘This jam mustn’t last any longer, or else I’ll get out and kiss her, and finger her with cars honking away behind us, impatient people who’ve almost forgotten that you have to take the time to caress a body, stroke it, take it, make it come. I wrote my number on my forearm with a fat marker pen. She texted me: exit 22…

She was on her way to the Seaview Hotel. But we didn’t even get to, make it to, a room. We parked next to each other in the car park. We started kissing at once. Her skin was smooth and soft, and smelled of sun lotion. I pushed her up against the car door, which was hot from the sun. My hand slid into her trousers. She was wetter than anyone I’d ever felt before. I slowly slid two fingers inside her. She bit my neck, making soft noises. I told her what I was doing with her. I said ‘Shut your eyes’. She said ‘Yes’. I said ‘You’re bending over the bumper and I’m fucking you from behind’. Again she said ‘Yes’. ‘Don’t come till I say so’, I said. Then I pushed her into the car. And I went down on her, my tongue sliding gently over her clitoris, and then flattening my tongue against her labia with the weight of my head and licking the whole of her crotch. ‘Oh Christ’, she said. ‘And now come’, I said. When she did it was like an earthquake. I kissed her still shuddering body, licked my lips and walked away from her, to the sea, to be swallowed up by something bigger. When I got back to the car, there was a message: where and when’s the next time?

I wanted to send her: wherever, whenever. But I kept myself under control.

Instead I texted her: come round and see me.

She said ‘I’m not really into women’.

And I wrote back ‘Don’t worry – I’ve got the biggest cock of all.’

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Published in Extra Extra No 11
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