A Date in the Albaicín

I love Granada in May and June and how I wished that I had a spoon to eat up all of the flavours thick in the air. My last hot green night, and after the thrill of my recent kiss it was good to be back once more in my favourite place, with my favourite palace before my eyes and the shooting star landscape stretching away to the west where the sun had just finally died.
She arrived in the best way possible – on time and smiling – and I led her through the violet streets of the Albaicín to the house over the hill. At first we used the full space of the white room, circling from a distance, eyeing each other. I cracked crap jokes as I tossed ingredients onto the side and sliced them with enough dexterity to show her I could use my fingers, but not too much to look mechanical. I dropped things and clowned around and even cut my finger once when I was looking at her arse, then nearly swooned when she came over and put it to her lips and licked up my blood. How I would like to mix my blood with hers, I thought.
Instead I mixed cocktails and talked to her of all my finest topics. Of Yoga – oh what a sensitive soul was I – and of my writings. I told her how I’d danced with Indian tribes and scaled volcano peaks, of how I loved the tropical forests of the earth – and Cubism. And more than anything I asked her questions, finding common ground between the two of us with any answer given. If she had told me she were a cannibal I’d have said – “You too?!” before naming my favourite human canapés.
And as the clock on the wall opened and closed its arms the circle which bound us decreased in size until we were sharing the same spotlight on the floor twirling around each other with bodies close until with a touch here and a kiss there we became a single intermingled beast connected at the hips and lips. We fitted together like a flesh jigsaw, without a single awkward limb or digging bone, everything touching and supporting perfectly, like one of those walls the Incas built, into which it is impossible to work even the blade of a knife.
And later we talked of how terrible it would be if the day ever came when we tired of the feel of each other’s mouths. Surely, if it all went right, this might not happen – could that not be so? Perhaps we’d smooch on into our nineties, oblivious to the loss of hair upon my head and gain upon her upper lip.

When you are recovering – desperate, wretched, broken – everyone tells you the time will come, but you never quite believe it until the instant the new person appears – like the shop-keeper in Mr Benn – and suddenly it’s time to change. At eleven when we awoke I found that the corners of my mouth had turned up overnight and the lights behind my eyes were once again on full beam.
She lay on her side, naked and brown, and looked into my eyes and opened her mouth to speak and I remember wondering what simmering words were about to spill over her lips.
Lips are supposed to say three little words at times like that. ‘I love you’ or ‘that was fantastic’ or ‘morning big boy!’
But she said four words not three: “I have a boyfriend.”

Extract from unpublished novel Killing A Friend