Fling

A Short Story By
Abhilash Gaur
Copyright 2015 Abhilash Gaur
Smashwords Edition
***~~~***

Thank you for
downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with friends.
This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for
non-commercial purposes, provided it remains in its complete
original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your
favourite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author.
Thank you for your support.

***

http://abhilashgaur.blogspot.in/

You might also like
these love stories:

Stories of Young Love

And this
memoir:

Dear
Girl

***

Doors

Rubber

Appraisal

Lights

Trick

***

“Shut the door,” I
said when at last her lively tongue withdrew from my mouth. We had
forgotten about the door. She was sitting on the edge of my bed, my
head was on a pillow in her lap, and we had just made one long,
lingering kiss. Our first. I didn’t care about kissing her, but it
had to be done if I hoped to get any further. I had let her linger,
absorbing all the saltiness from her mouth.

She was flushed and
breathless, and dazed. Her lips were swollen, her eyes were
slightly glazed, and she moved slowly, dreamily, rolling her small
hips deliberately as she walked four paces towards the wide open
white door of my room. She shut it noiselessly, drew the latch
softly and then knotted her curly hair in a bun before returning to
me with a wicked smile and hands thrust in the pockets of her grey
running shorts.

It was noon and nobody
used the steps outside my door between morning and evening. We
could have left it wide open and made love stark naked without
being seen, but we would never have done that, of course.

I had known her a
month. She was my colleague and lived down the block. We spent many
hours together everyday. We travelled by the same bus to office.
Evenings, no matter how late we returned, we lingered at the beach
where the bus stopped, and talked. We talked a lot. She told me
about her heartbreaks: a bad marriage and a messy divorce. I told
her imaginary tales about a faithless childhood sweetheart. We
talked about love, and cursed it. She said romantic love was
ridiculous, I said it was dangerous.

She came to my room
often. In the mornings, she came to hurry me. In the evening, we
helped each other carry our groceries home. On weekends, we went
out to see the city together. There was so much to see, it was a
big city. She waited patiently when I shot pictures, I never
complained when she shopped for clothes and street jewellery. We
gossiped about office and told each other about our folks.

When she came, I
always left the door open. It was my way of telling her I was a
good guy, I wouldn’t rape her. I made a great show of it. If she
made to shut it on her own, I told her aloud to leave it ajar. I
was advertising that I was not only a safe guy but also someone who
cared about her reputation, since we lived in the same block. I was
a man of honour, a perfect gentleman. I never touched her, not even
on the small double-seat that we shared on the bus. If her elbow
brushed mine, I promptly apologized and turned away a few degrees.
I was that safe.

But she was always
patting my back or ruffling my hair or tapping my wrist or nudging
me “good-naturedly”, and I didn’t object to that. We were friends,
after all. Just good friends. We couldn’t have fallen in love.
Every evening we swore that we valued our independence more than
anything else. We could see someone for a while but lifelong
commitment was impossible. Better a one-night stand than a broken
heart. But this was something we had started saying only recently.
We were on the same wavelength.

I had fallen ill in
office the previous night. We were working late on a project and I
had skipped lunch, then around 9pm I had popped an aspirin on an
empty stomach. And within minutes I had become terribly sick. My
stomach hurt excruciatingly, my head swam and I thought I would
pass out. She had called an auto and brought me home. She had held
my hand all the way. She had even offered to stay the night in my
room but I wouldn’t hear of it, and had sent her home. I had slept
after eating a couple of bananas, and woken up at her knock.

She said she had
called thrice, the first time at 8 o’ clock. My room didn’t have a
doorbell and she had knocked, waited and gone back. She had been
ready to leave for office but had changed her mind. She came back
two hours later and I still didn’t hear her knock. That’s when she
had changed into her running shorts and vest. The third time I had
heard her and opened the door.

She made me lie down.
The sun was shining through the frosted glass of my bathroom window
at an angle I had never seen before. She told me it was afternoon
and I held my head in dismay. There was a big office party that
evening. “Why didn’t you go?” I said. “It isn’t important,” she
replied, “you are all alone.”

“I am fine now, go,” I
said. But she went to the kitchen to see what she could make for
me. There was nothing there besides water and gas, some biscuits
and half a dozen bananas.

“Please don’t,” I
said, “believe me, I’m fine. You must go now. Really.”

“Lie down,” she
ordered. “You still have fever,” she declared after feeling my
pulse. I didn’t want to upset her, so I lay down. She started
rubbing my forehead, and that was, I thought, beyond the line of
friendly duty. But I closed my eyes and enjoyed it with an inkling
of what was coming.

“I think I should call
a doctor,” she said. “Stop fussing, I’m fine,” I replied.

Such a baby you are,”
she sighed, “turn this way so that I can rub your temples properly.
It will make you feel better.” But she was stroking my cheeks as
much as my temples. Something was coming over me. I raised my head
and she kept my pillow in her lap. Now when she bent over me her
curls tickled my ears and her soft, small breasts behind the soft
cotton of her vest sponged away the remnants of my headache.

My right arm rose
slowly, circled behind her head and brought it down to make her
lips meet mine. She gave under its pressure like warm wax.

*

We didn’t make love
that day. I had this block about having sex with nobody but the
girl I intended to marry, and I didn’t intend to marry her. But I
liked what we had started and wanted it to go on till the time I
found Ms Right. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to her the next
couple of days, and I wasn’t sure how things stood between us. Had
we slipped back into plain friendship or jumped orbit into being
friends with benefits?

She didn’t come to
office the third day, and I heard from her girlfriends she was
unwell. Too much work. I always avoided going to her place because
she was a paying guest in a single mother’s house. There was no
privacy there, and I didn’t want people to think I was courting
her.

It was after 10pm,
rather late to call, but I was desperate to find out. A dim night
light shone in their drawing room window. I rang the bell
hesitantly and was relieved when she answered it. The house was
very quiet.

“Sorry,” I said, “I
just returned from work. How are you?”

“I am fine, come
inside,” she said.

“No, I’ll go. It’s
late. Will see you tomorrow morning.”

“Come on, it’s
alright.” She caught my wrist and drew me inside.

I left the door open
and dropped into a chair beside it. She went into their kitchen to
fetch a glass and poured me Coke from a large bottle. “Come to my
room, you’ll be more comfortable there,” she said.

“No, I’m fine here.
Your landlady wouldn’t like it.”

“But she’s not home.
Nobody’s home, they’ve gone to watch a movie.”

We were in her room
the next moment, leaving the glass of Coke on the fridge-top. She
didn’t turn on the light and the room was lit only from a
streetlamp outside the open windows. We hugged and fell on her bed,
overdoing the smooching like the first time. She tugged out my
shirt and ran her hands up and down my back. I didn’t have to pull
at anything, there was nothing under her T-shirt but the pneumatic
firmness of freshly filled birthday balloons that I wanted to
feel.

“Oh no,” I said,
stopping suddenly.

“What’s the matter?”
she said.

“I left the front door
open.”

She fell back and
laughed. “You and your doors!”

I downed the Coke at a
gulp and tucked my shirt in on the way downstairs.

***

“Why can’t you buy
some?” she pleaded with me every time. She liked it too much but
had been starved of it after separating from her husband. “It’s
complicated,” I would say, and had told her the real reason too. We
were only friends with benefits, not committed lovers. Marriage was
not a possibility between us. “Fuck off,” she would growl, “what
century are you living in?” I would do her with my hand then and
she would be fine but not completely satisfied. “It’s not the same
thing,” she would say, and she was the best judge.

But it was good
enough, I guess, because she kept coming back for it. For me, there
was satisfaction in holding her close. The feel of her warm, supple
skin on mine soothed me. I liked the way my fingertips raised
goosebumps on her thighs and the down on her back and neck. And of
course, the way my tongue could tease into existence two turgid,
throbbing, mutinous rocks.

We met in my room
every second evening unless we got back from work very late.
Sometimes, she cooked for us afterwards, and then I felt a pang of
guilt. It was hypocrisy, of course, to remain a virgin while going
the whole hog digitally. Couldn’t I marry her? Why not? Of course
not, she wasn’t my type. Really?

I didn’t want her to
cook for that reason.

One afternoon—it was
nearing the end of the rainy season and the sunlight felt like a
blowtorch—we walked to a cinema down the road to catch a new movie.
It was a B-grade Hindi movie about an advertising executive who is
30 and desperate to lose his virginity. I didn’t have a clue about
the story and she kept nudging me and giggling all through it. When
we were walking home, she said it once again. “Why can’t we do it
properly? You’ll like it too.”

She said it calmly,
earnestly, and it was the first time she said it out of bed. I
couldn’t dismiss it as a symptom of arousal.

“Buy rubber, please,”
she said.

“Yes,” I blurted
out.

I went to the market
after dark, and realized that buying condoms is the toughest thing
a man can do. Every time I queued up at a chemist’s window I lost
nerve at the last moment. I had bought four or five Crocin and
Disprin strips by the time I found a self-service shop. Even there,
everybody’s eyes seemed to be upon me, and I waited for the counter
to empty before rushing with a tiny, card-size three-pack. It was
the smallest, most unobtrusive size that I could carry home in my
trouser pocket. My heart was thudding as I paid cash and didn’t
calm down till I had walked several blocks away from the shop.

She came late that
night but I lied I hadn’t bought them yet. The next night, and the
night after too. I would chicken out at the last moment. It was my
commitment phobia, of course. I feared that if we had sex I would
get trapped. She sensed it too and the third night she came with a
three-pack, the same brand that I had bought.

I felt ashamed for
having lied, but refused to use them. I couldn’t do it to her
because I wasn’t going to marry her. Period.

She left in a rage,
and didn’t come back for two weeks. I missed her but didn’t regret
my decision. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the consequences,
the bitterness and the recriminations that would come when we broke
off.

But I had six condoms
lying in my room with no use whatsoever. And if she came back some
day and I still had them around, maybe they would weaken my
resolve. So, I decided to get rid of them. I tried on one because I
was curious, and for a few moments the oily aseptic feel of the
sheath made me consider using it. With it on, it would still be a
perfectly virginal job, no? No.

I filled another with
water at the bathroom tap to see how much it could hold. A
surprising lot, I realized. The rest went unopened into the
dustbin, wrapped in a sheet from a newspaper, of course.

***

I was trying to get
used to life without her, and intimacy. She had stopped travelling
with me. If we reached the bus stop together, she didn’t take the
bus. So, I started leaving a little later. At office she looked
right through me. We didn’t sit at the same table over lunch and
coffee. It wasn’t easy for me. Maybe I loved her, just a bit. She
was my emotional anchor in that vast and strange city. Everyday,
alone in my room, I considered going down to see her, doing what
she wanted.