Matte stays for a week
I hadn’t seen her since she went to Belgium to live in a forest for a week. I realised that, worryingly, I’ve been waiting to spend time alone with her since I died. Before that happened, I felt suspended, the same way I feel when I am away from my laptop for more than a few days. I felt like my life wasn’t going forwards.
She arrived at the railway station and we kissed. The Moms gave us a lift back home and we hung out. It was so good to share a bed with her again – that was what I wanted more than anything. After a couple of days, I couldn’t handle the distance. As we lay in bed on the third morning, arms around each other, I asked her what she meant in the letter she’d written while I was in hospital that said she felt she should take me more seriously. I asked her whether me dying had been a temporary aphrodisiac. Because the things she had said and the way she had acted while I was in hospital felt incongruent with the way she was being now. I said I felt like she wasn’t really here with me. She agreed and said that Belgium had been a headfuck. We talked later in the kitchen. She said she was seriously considering moving into a permanent forest eco camp; probably the one in Brighton. I went on a very rare tense and even-voiced rant. I said that I felt like I didn’t know where I stood. I said that if she moved to the forest, she must know that her and I would be finished and I did that two-handed, palms-down, lateral cutting gesture that Serpico does when he tells Inspector McClain that he’s done waiting for the justice department to contact him about the police corruption.
She said that her feelings for me hadn’t changed, but that everyone around had. We talked things over and I proposed that maybe things could work if she came and saw me every few weeks and I went to stay with her in the forest occasionally. Her face shone.
After all that, we got down to spending time together. We went on a walk through the woods that left me completely fucked. At the University Observatory, we fantasised about life as a Cambridge academic. We went out for supper. We looked at potential new pairs of glasses for me. We sat on the sofa and read. We had an awful lot of sex.
Since we started seeing each other again, our sex has been very different because I let her touch me, now. I lie on my back as she holds me and fucks me with her hand and I buck my hips onto her fingers and moan and squeak and sigh like a slut. This time, things were even more different.
First, I made her come five times in a row. I fucked her with my hand and she came. Then, I lay beside her because I haven’t recovered the strength in my shoulders and stroked her clit until she came. Then, I did it again. And again. I stroked her again and asked if she wanted me to stop and she said no and came again.
Second, on Sunday night, she lay on the bed and I crouched alongside and made love to her with four fingers. I stopped to adjust my angle and she said, “You could try putting your thumb in as well.” I felt like crying. I pushed my thumb in a little to make that shape like you’re eating rice with your hands. I very slowly eased inside, drew out a little, went further inside. Finally, my fist was in up to the wrist. I just twisted a little and she made sounds from her chest. I stored the image of my handless arm in my brain like you’d take a photograph from the top of a mountain you’d just climbed.
She has now gone to Brighton to recce the forest. She then has a bunch of volunteering to do and will visit me in London in mid August. At the end of August, we’ll go for a week to Cornwall to stay in a cottage.