Cinematique

[Prologue]

His kisses were from the French movies she saw long before fully understanding French. And now, Paris was all they had. Not because it belonged to them—the other way around. It was far from feeling like home, and that was exactly why. Her Mediterranean insolence had long stripped him of his presumed British armor. They were perfect inconnus to that mesmerizing city.

Paris was A Moveable Feast, again. A new revolution set the streets ablaze in such a perfect convulsing cocktail no one would question what two foreign journalists were doing there. They stepped out of the Hemingway Bar, deeming it too classy, far from what the sour dead writer would have aimed for a night out.

[Settings]

In a taxi. 

Hand looks for hand, both of them looking through the same back window. A Taxi was a momentarily common destination, a rare event in their tantalizing hide and seek. A bold hand would look for tights, fingers would venture up – the possibility of being caught by the driver's eye just the first of many risks they were beginning to take. 

In an elevator. 

Doors opening and closing too slowly, only to go up or down too quickly. In museums, in offices, in official buildings. An elevator was a massive block of stone to be trapped in when she was not there; an overshared annoying cubicle if only one more person was inopportunely standing with them, but rarely, a blessing—a sudden intimate time capsule. 

In elevators, as in taxis, the ride was always fatally short. But right then, in those moments, there were no phone calls, no watches ticking on each other's wrists, no rings on each other's hands. When he infrequently ran out of his many handcrafted, poetic, unsettling words, her pragmatic self would tell him not to feel unfortunate for the life circumstances they met in, but rather grateful for having their paths cross at all. He used to nod. 

In a mansard.

123. An easy to remember progression. As if someone feared they could forget the number. 123, as to provide a much-needed sense of progression. 123 was the number of a room in a mansard. A mansard, one of those attics in which the inclined walls lean on you. She leaned on him with a delicacy she only devoted when she put an LP on the vinyl player.

[Scene]

If anyone ever managed to reincarnate, it was Cary Grant in the mansard in Paris that midnight. Occupying the whole space with an unnatural grace put her at ease, uncorking champaigne rosé and sparkling water—for life without bubbles didn't make sense. 

Mansard. Windowsill. Duvet on the windowsill. Bed with no duvet.

Sex was too short a word for the long dance of arms wrapping around, dress going up, hands going down. ‘Some scenes require the right French actress to star in,’ he said, rolling his tongue down her neck, unrolling her thong down her knees. The streetlights of Rue de L'Université reflected on the zinc roofs across the wide-open shutters. The spring breeze of the newly arrived season was as ephemeral as their newfound sense of false freedom. 

He embraced her in a kiss as though there were no tomorrow. There wasn't, for 'them', at least, as they were in the tomorrow already, being past midnight, and there was definitely no day after that tomorrow. They had flown in earlier that evening. Two days was all their curse would allow for. Their mutual contradictions amounted to an impossible dead-end. She held onto her freedom; he was bound to a bigger sense of purpose. But they were blessed with a light-hearted conscience then. And it was bliss.

Red lingerie. She knew how susceptible he was to brightness and exactly how much he would need to take her bra off when he discovered it. He resisted his urgency for a second, to gather pillows around her as if he was creating her throne... then down on her he went. He kissed her all the way from her neck, circling her navel so carefully, so preciously, she thought it would take him all night long to get to it, fearing sunrise would take them apart again. Her yoga-trained legs easily spread to his touch in a lotus-like pose. He looked up at her, fond of the move of her body to his touch. He softly kissed her clit then, with such tenderness and devotion as if there were no other clit on earth. Their eyes met, she was wet. 

Fingers entered the scene, tiptoeing through the terrain, barely caressing, softly drawing a circle, until they –first two, then three– flipped in. She grasped all the air in the room. She thought: this is right where his fingers should be. All the time. But his hand was not gonna be resting inside her, for he was restless. In and out, out and in. He soon got the rhythm—a musical repetition that hypnotized her. He was fucking her with his fingers. With his hand, with his fist, with all his arm, really. Also with his blue eyes penetrating her narrowing dark pupils, with his mind on her mind, with his heartbeat adjusting to her moaning gasp. 

She looked down at her abdomen, he disappeared at the bump of her pussy, now fully on his mouth. He was perfectly framed in the balcony, behind it the zinc roofs rising, and the streetlights that glowed on other midnights in Paris. A sparkle burnt on her mind and she threw her head back in sudden glory as he continued his thoughtful job. She couldn't help but laugh at the curated cinematic scene he had uniquely crafted. 

“[She] did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love”, she had read in the pages of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'. It would take her much longer to realize that cinematic scenes were equally dangerous. But more on that later, she just squirted.

[Fin]

Photo by Yaroslav Shuraev