Wash Away The Past

It was almost 4:25, and many of my co-workers were already under Starters' Orders, terminals getting switched off and file bundles tied up to be put into locked drawers, and my phone rang with the brrrt-brrrt-brrt-brrt that even in the tower block offices of a public utility meant "outside call".

"Good afternoon" I said, picking it up and cradling the earpiece against my shoulder as I pulled a notepad out of my top drawer. "You've reached Engineering Division, Communications Planning, this is...

"Ted!" sobbed a familiar voice "I've had enough, and I've gone back to Mum's place, and oh, I'm so unhappy what do I do?"

"Hold on, Bonnie" I said "what do you mean, 'you've had enough and you've gone home'? Had you moved in with your fella?" Bonnie was my first proper can-I-put-my-hands-in-your-panties, oh-my-god-you've-touched-my-dick girlfriend, and while it didn't work out, we'd kept in touch. Enough that she knew my work number, anyway. "Last time we spoke, you were seeing some guy you met at work, and now it's gone sour?"

"Oh, really sour. I can't stand the interference from his family, he won't stick up for me, he won't protect me from them, he won't..." I let her run on for a little while, to get it out of her system. "I want to see you, if you don't mind" she eventually said.

"Sure" I said. "We haven't met in person for, what, 5 years now? It'd be nice to catch up, but I could wish you weren't quite so upset. Still - what good would I be if I let you flail around like that after a break-up. You were there for me, even if only over the phone"

"I'd appreciate it, mister" she said. "I'm not ready to talk to Mum about it, not the worst bits of it all." She audibly shuddered. "How can I find you? I don't know what your address is anymore." The office was emptying. It was Friday, and a lot of technical debriefing would be going on in the King's Head downstairs, so that was out. Fuck it! I thought - either I can trust her not to move in on the rebound, or I didn't know her as well as I thought I did. I told her to meet me outside the office, that being the easiest with connections and such - she'd be only a few minutes away anyway. She hung up, and I was left wondering what was going to happen next.

I tidied up some more of the failure statistics I was working through when she'd called, and after 45 minutes or so, packed up and headed downstairs. As I guessed, she was just coming up the escalators from Museum Station when I got out of the lift. I waved at her through the glass walls of the foyer that looked soooo fashionable in the 70's and now just meant the security guard on the front desk cooked in the three hours of Sydney daylight saving sunlight that were left to endure after the building HVAC shut down.

She almost didn't wait for the doors to close behind me as she ran to me, dropping her handbag at our feet so she could throw her arms around my neck and hug me tight, tight, tight, pressing her body, her belly, her mound against me almost as tightly as she pressed her face into my shirt. She sobbed, once, deeply, and stepped back. "I'm sorry" she said, catching her breath.

I said it was OK, and I meant it. I looked up and down at my old friend. Her figure was still awesome, but her hair wasn't the wavy, glossy black waterfall I remembered. It was obvious she hadn't had a decent hairdo in a while and she'd been using cheap shampoo. Yes, it was hot, but she was only wearing a cheap strappy sun dress, which looked out of place in the middle of Sydney after 5:00 on a Friday afternoon. She was wearing sneakers that had seen better days, her handbag wasn't new, the cardigan she had tossed over the top of it didn't really go with her dress - whoever she'd been living with, he'd been tight with the money. Maybe he'd been drinking her wages as well as his own. It happens. Her self-esteem had gone, too - years back, even as a teenager she'd never dress like that to 'go to town'.

"Yeah - I know" she said, catching my gaze. "Him."

"I gathered." I replied. No make-up, not even foundation. Fresh worry lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth that didn't really belong on a woman in her late 20's.

"I'll talk more later. I don't feel like hanging around in here. Fuck him. Fuck her. Fuck them. Take me to your place, will you?" I didn't ask who her or them were...I figured I'd find out. The train was crowded, as they can be after 5:30 on a Friday, so she stood close to me. So close the mound of her pussy was pressed against my thigh and one of her erect nipples kept brushing against my chest. She maintained a constant stream of chatter the whole time, talking about the blue-collar jobs she'd had since school, and following my unspectacular amateur boxing career in the sports pages, and what was my sister up to, the one that married a minister, and how did my father like retirement. All the time with the warmth of her pussy against my leg, in a crowded train. Briefcase in one hand, hold on to the train with the other there was nothing I could do about it, and I didn't want to, but God only knows if any other passengers noticed and if they did, what they thought of it.

We got off at my stop, and she dawdled along towards the stairs, still chattering away, stopping to peer into the shelter that worked as a waiting room on that platform while other commuters streamed passed us. "This is the one we 'christened' that day, wasn't it?" she said.

I chuckled and said yes. Naughty teenagers mucking around in shelters and leaving condom wrappers in unexpected places. That was a while back. Such thoughtless littering!!

She paused, lost in thought for a moment. She looked over my shoulder at the other platform, then stepped inside the room, so she'd be shielded from outside by the doorway but I could still see her. Quickly, she lifted her skirts up, smoothly grabbing the waistband of her panties at the same time to snug them tight against her bottom and turned away from me to show her lovely arse me, sticking her tongue out over her shoulder at the same time. She laughed that throaty laugh I remembered, smoothed her clothes out and took my arm, smiling at my shocked expression as we walked to the station stairs and out on the street.

"I'm still cheeky" she said playfully.

"You sure are" I said "and I think you haven't been able to for a while now."

The spring left her step. "Sex was fucking, cuddles were for babies, kisses were for birthdays, and makeup was for whores" she growled "...and women did as they were told, except his mother." The venom in the last word startled me. We walked down to street level in silence.

"He didn't get handy, did he?" I said after mulling it over. I stopped on the concrete footpath and turned her to face me. "Bonnie - tell me he didn't hit you"

"No, Ted. You'd break him in half" she said eventually. "I don't want you to do anything. I know you want to, and I'm happy for that, but leave it. Please." I scowled. She went on. "Yes, we had some fights, but they usually weren't too bad, even if he'd been drinking. Just shouting most of the time. It's just - his mother interfered with us All! The! Time!" She spat the last three words. "That was what got me down. She'd get on his back about something and that would get him mad and..." she broke off and started crying again. I put my arm around her shoulders, letting her sob into my shirt. This time, no pressure from her body. It was just grief. She took a tissue from her bag to dry her eyes, and held it balled up in her fist as she settled herself down. We walked, me guiding her to my flat and let her choose the pace. She talked about meeting him, going out together, being at first unsure of how much makeup to wear and how to dress, liking that he wasn't fussed about either, and going to the races. The dogs at Wentworth Park. The trots at Harold Park. If you got a good pay, some overtime, it was on the train to Randwick and the big times!

I let her talk.

I didn't judge - I grew up with an ex-serviceman who managed PTSD with beer and loved playing euchre. He'd tried to teach the rest of us how to play. Mum hated it and refused to learn, but my sister took to it. He'd get home pretty late most nights, but at least in a euchre tournament at the Golden Sheaf it was hard to blow the rent on a sure thing - it sounded like Bonnie had woken up one morning and realised what her future was likely to be.

We got to my place, and I held the street doors open for her. "This is it" I said. "Second floor. No. 7"

"Lucky 7" she said. She looked around the foyer of the block of units my flat was in. Kind of Art Deco, but it hadn't been looked after. I didn't mind. The metalwork was all in good condition and it had been built when blocks of flats were meant to manage without much maintenance, so it was cool in the summer heat with double-brick construction. The ground floor was shops with a big apartment that had been swanky in its day and now had the noisy family of the guy who owned all five of the tiny bed-sit apartments on the first floor. I had the two-bedroom south-facing unit of the three on the second floor, and my balcony was a haven from Sydney summers on these long Daylight Saving summer afternoons. Cold as charity in winter, though! The top floor was apparently intended for warehousing for the shops, but I think an artist community had taken it over. They burned incense at strange times, and there were always cute women hanging around, but they were pretty cool.

She was a little out of breath when we got to my front door. I apologised for going up the stairs too fast as I opened the door to my place. I hadn't had a fight for over a year and didn't want another one, but I liked the discipline and I was still a regular at the gym. I shut the door behind us, and almost in one motion she dropped her handbag, threw her arms around my neck again and with one hand on the back of my neck she proceeded to snog the living daylights out of me, pressing the mound of her pussy hard against my thigh and her own thigh and hip against my crotch, and I mean leaving space between her belly and me to get more leverage! She buried her face into my neck and inhaled, as if she needed the smell of my summer-afternoon-sweat shirt like a drug and ground herself against me for a few moments longer. "Oh, how I needed that!" she said at last. "You've got no idea how much I've missed plain physical contact with a sober man, and there you were with that body and those arms and those hands my God it's a wonder I didn't race you off in the train! You still smell as good as you did when we were dating."

I laughed at that one, holding her and watching the life come back into her deep brown eyes. She used to like to tell me "it was hot" and "aren't you hot?" and "Mum, isn't it hot today - don't you think Ted might want to take his shirt off" and I would, and she'd grab it and run away with it and take a big, deep sniff of my sweaty shirt like a guilty secret. Her mother would smile and shake her head and wink at me and go and make us cordial and we'd sit on the balcony, me with my shirt off, her with her shoulder or her forearm or some part of her touching the skin of my bare chest.

I nuzzled the side of her nose with mine, gazing into her eyes, just looking, just breathing her breath. "That thing with my shirts was a while ago" I said. I kissed her then, just gently, squeezing her bottom lip with my mouth. She let me guide the kiss. I think she'd been starved of physical affection, even if she was getting 'just fucking', and her body relaxed against me as I let my hands go down her back to her hips, eventually to her bottom. As the kiss deepened, I walked the skirts of her dress up until I could slip my hands into her panties and hold her beautiful bare arse in both hands.

We stood there, just inside my front door, kissing as I fondled her bum, for some time before she broke away first to ask "am I staying the night?"

I kissed the tip of her nose and said "I've got my hands in your pants. I can't think of a reason not to let you if you want to stay." She smiled at me, then rested her forehead against my chest.

"I've got to let Mum know where I am, then." She started to pull away from me to look for the phone, and she paused. "I'd better ask - if I can't fuck you, is it still OK?"

I raised an eyebrow.

"I've been in a bad relationship for three years. I'm so hungry for sex that is meant to make me feel good about being a woman instead of something to 'relieve a man's needs'..." she shuddered before going on. "...that I might be naked with your cock against me ready to enter me and I'll just start crying and I'll..." She buried her face against me.

"Shhh..." I said. "You were there when I had the breakdown after my final exams. You were there when I went to the pshrink to fix it. You talked me into going down to the gym that first time to rid some devils." She nodded, moving back to hug me again. I let her skirts fall down, putting my hands onto her back instead. "You even went to my first fight, although you swore you'd never go to another one. If you want a damn good seeing-to, you'll get it. I still think of you like I did when we'd just left high school. I maybe always will..." a smile I felt rather than saw. "...but you were determined to be my friend after we parted, even if at times I didn't understand why, and you looked after me as best you could. Now it's my turn. There are two bedrooms, you know."

"Thanks" she whispered.

"But..."

"...?"

"...if we're both naked and you've snogged the face off me and sucked my dick until I'm ready to burst and I AM about to enter you and you start crying, don't be surprised if I go sort myself out before I come back and cuddle you, OK?"

"No!" she said, pouting. "That's my job!" I snorted, and swatted her bum as I pointed at the telephone. When we'd been dating she'd quizzed me about masturbating, and would always tell me that that was her job, and that I should save up my ejaculations for her personal enjoyment. Golden Sunday afternoons with Black Sabbath on her little record player, getting up to all sorts of stuff in her bedroom...

I busied myself in the kitchen doing things with coffee and sugar while she reported in to allay maternal concerns. My place has a nice balcony, more a loggia that is actually built in to the structure of the building rather than a tacked-on appendage with ugly wrought iron bars you had to paint every 5 years if you want to be fancy about it. It makes it a good place to sit on a stinking hot evening, and you get pretty good privacy, doubly so because I had the advantage of no neighbouring buildings as high as our 2nd floor, so no-one could look in on anything happening on the balcony. I think they were intended so you could leave some of your windows open on a hot night and still have some weather protection if the rains came before morning. These old places had some good architecture, but it also limited the internal space a bit, which was probably the reason the fashion didn't continue past the 50's.

I wandered out there with our coffees and sat on one of the cane chairs I liked to have. I put the mugs on the table between them and leant back to watch clouds. There weren't any, at least not on the horizon south of us.

Bonnie wandered out after me and accepted the mug of coffee when I picked it up and handed it to her. "Two sugars and milk - you remembered" she said.

"Mmmnmhm"

"It's so humid" she said, leaning on the edge of the balcony. "Aren't you hot?" I was waiting for her to say that. I took my shirt off over my head without unbuttoning it, and tossed it to her. She caught it deftly and buried her face into it, resting her mug on the railing so she could bunch it up in both hands and get a good sniff. She leant back against the angle of the wall and the balcony, holding my shirt like some sort of bouquet. "I used to do this when we were young, didn't I?" she said. "Mum thought I was a nut."

"So did I, at least until I understood about pheromones and how different people like different scents. I'd have to put you on a chain if I took you down to the gym!" She laughed a little at that.

"Better make it a strong one" she said. "Mmmm - sweaty men. Yummm"

"Sweaty unwashed men with liniment and leather and..."

"Stop it" She grinned, impish deep brown eyes twinkling. "My knickers will fall off."

"That might be indicative of a design flaw. As an engineer, I'd have to look into that carefully to make sure nothing untoward was happening." I tried to look studious over the rim of my coffee.

She took a last deep gratifying sniiifffff! of my sweaty shirt before tossing it onto the unoccupied wicker chair, and gracefully reached under her skirts to slide her underpants off, stepping out of them elegantly and quite spoiling the effect by attempting to make them go 'pyoing!' at me with the elastic, only to have them fall halfway between us. I picked them up and put them with my shirt. She poked her tongue out at me, and turned to lean on the balcony and look at the outside world. "I haven't felt able to do silly things like that for three years" she said eventually. I waited for her to talk more. It seemed right. "We went to the dog track once, on a really hot night. I wore a long wrap skirt and I had nothing on under it, just being cheeky." I nodded. She'd been like that even when we were together. Spontaneity was part of her charm, and she'd revelled in it. "He was horrified when he patted my bum and realised what was going on. I mean, he felt me up in front of people, really making sure there wasn't a waistband or anything, and making sure they knew I wasn't wearing panties. He said he was worried 'someone might see'. I got into trouble!" I made sympathetic noises. "I mean - you remember the see-through blouses everyone was wearing at the time, right?"

I nodded. 'Alvin Purple' was playing and Number 96 had thoroughly scandalised the wowsers and made television history. She said yes, and that was part of it, and went on about miniskirts and those big floppy peasant tops, and cheesecloth. She had a point. I hated the sort of guy who met a woman at a disco or a nightclub, and then forbade her to wear 'those sort of clothes, you know'. Don't these idiots understand basking in reflected glory, or the fun of smirking at someone to say "yeah, man, I know - and guess who she's waking up next to tomorrow!" Some guys don't get it.

I put my mug down to get up and leant on the balustrade next to her. The sky was starting to darken, so it must have been after 8:00pm. She let her elbow brush against my bare chest. I didn't mind. "Are you getting hungry?" I asked.

"A bit. I haven't eaten much today. Too upset. Please don't be angry, but I didn't eat much yesterday either. I spent most of the day on the train - I did the $2 Hotel thing" She meant the $2 pensioner ticket that gave you unlimited travel. On the Blue Mountains trains, it was a three-hour journey from Central to Lithgow, 20 minutes lay-over and three hours back. Time it right and you got over 6 hours of dozing in a dry, safe train carriage, with toilets that locked and were kept clean and guards walking through every now and then to make sure no funny business happened. Lots of people down on their luck did it back then. I was angry, and she must have felt me tense, as she went on "I wanted time to think. Since we'd last seen each other, I've lost a baby, had an affair with a married man, did all sorts of things, and when I met Phil, Mum thought I'd settle down. You should have seen her when I turned up in what I'm wearing this morning."

"There's more than that, isn't there? You didn't just walk out the door and get on the bus to Central Station did you?"

"Yep. At 10:00 o'clock at night, too!" she said defiantly. "We'd have one too many rows over how I should do the housework." She stared into the growing dusk. "Did you know you had to do the buttons up on jeans, and turn them inside out or the zips would break? Or that every time you washed up you had to pull the elements out of the stove and wipe underneath them? Or that you had to wipe out the fridge with vanilla essence when you defrosted the freezer every month? I didn't, but after he quit his job his mother made sure I knew!" She glared at the horizon. "Before you say it, the baby wasn't yours. Nor was it the married man's" she said without looking at me.