Triennial
by Jonathan Quince
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 18:52:14
An hour’s train ride intra-city was the lynchpin of the adventure one bright winter’s day. There, in plastic seating hardened against the razors of vandals, she sat wrapped in her quilted red coat; he beheld her as a jewel taken out of context. Had he a palace at the time, he would gladly have swathed her in silks and placed a gold cup in her hand.
Umber ringlets cascaded over her shoulders, bouncing gently with each motion of her head and continually drawing his attention. His eyes followed them downwards, then moved back up over the curve of her neck, the line of her jawbone; her face drew his gaze back up to her eyes where he became lost in their coy sparkle as she chatted with him. Underneath that red coat, he had some vague idea that she must be warm and soft and very inviting. Sitting less than twelve inches away, he yearned for her—for her lips against his, the play of her muscles in his arms, the tight, liquid embrace of her inside.
Virginal and never-kissed, she was the image of vivacious youth and naïveté. Worldliness and sophistication were alien to her; indeed, this was the furthest she had yet traveled in male company outside the paranoid reach of parental supervision. Unfortunately, whether for inbred shyness or his own boyish inexperience, he was flustered in his heart and failed to seize the day. He kept a bright, brave face and carried on divers conversations with calm wit; but his desires remained untouchable to him as if she were across the world.
Thus, for all that they could have given each other in the flesh, did they sit apart and talk. The day’s theme, fittingly enough, was that of beauty. He believed, as he had from childhood, in absolute standards of beauty—indeed, in beauty as God’s and Nature’s commandment when speaking to mankind and biding him create. While speaking at length of statues and of concerti, of poetry and paint and golden sunlight falling through the treetops, he dared not broach the subject of the beauty sitting inches and miles outside his reach.
Her breasts verged on the perfect from the first he saw them. Shape, not size, was his quality of measure; and at the moment their petite radiance was bared to his touch, with each one fitted to fill his hand, he realized that the idealistic visions and dreams he so long had of her body were no less true than the living, breathing female flesh in his presence.
She was a hesitant girl, but her naked figure was that of a full and heat-bound woman. Tall and statuesque, willowy and lithe, her body rose from toe to head as an outline of curving warmth that bespake the fertile ground inside. Form and function were married true in this instrument of passion; and for an instant, he was steeled by the confidence that what is meant and what is right must certainly come to pass. When he touched her with fingers, lips and tongue, the scent of her cunt wafted up as a perfumed message to tell him what purposes Nature had dictated for her body.
Still shy was he yet, however, even with his fingertip at her unpierced hymenal door. The crimes of missed opportunity and life passed over bit sharply in his conscience; but he was under her spell, powerless, and thus did he dally long hours with her in unconsummated intimacy. Nights passed with them sleeping locked in a naked tangle of limbs; the nights punctuated days that melted away into months and the months, to seasons.
And he never fucked her.