Her fairy lights go out but the sparks still fly.
I arrived in London the week before Christmas. I had a job, a bedsit and a lot of regrets. The job was as a beauty therapist in a salon in Canary Wharf, the bedsit was in Tower Hamlets and the regrets were that I’d tried to finger-fuck my best friend on my couch in Pontypridd.
It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, though. Olwen and I had known each other since we were six. She was blonde and sweet, a typical Welsh cariad, or sweetheart, while I was had brown hair and was skinny, but we were best friends. Until I made my stupid move, that is.
We’d grown up together, smoked our first cigarettes together, trained as beauticians together too. She waxed my legs, I shaped her eyebrows. I gave her the first Brazilian she ever had, and every year she waxed me into a full Hollywood before we left to go on holidays. I would have said that she had no secrets from me. But I had one from her.
I fancied her. I always had.
I was thinking all this as I laid a set of fairy lights around the miniature tree I’d bought. The bulbs blurred as my eyes filled up with tears. I slammed the plug into the socket and shoved my knuckles hard against my eyeballs. I had no right to cry But then the lights didn’t light. I flicked the switch on and off, stupidly. They stayed dark. Great! What a perfect commentary on my life: lesbian beautician in the dark. I found a screwdriver and changed the fuse in the plug, but when I turned the lights on again, nothing happened.
Story of my life.
I looked in the bag but there were no spare bulbs so I couldn’t check if one of them had blown. What to do? I sat with my back against the wall and remembered that just three weeks earlier I’d been sticking tiny daisies to Olwen’s right leg.
We were preparing for a party – not just any party, but the one at which Olwen’s ex-boyfriend, Rhys, was getting engaged to his new girlfriend. Olwen wanted to look utterly gorgeous, so she’d plopped herself on my couch and I’d massaged and waxed and plumped and pummelled her body to absolute perfection
The thing is, she kept talking about how stupid she’d been about Rhys – how she hated him in particular but men in general too. How only women were trustworthy, how I knew her better than anybody and she was lucky to have me. ‘Have’ me – what a phrase that was to conjure with! I imagined her having me, me having her, my tongue inching up her soft legs to find the frilled luxury of her c**t. But still, I only imagined.
Then she produced the daisies – they were body jewellery, the kind that sticks to the skin with eyelash glue – and asked me to spiral them from her right ankle up to her hip. She jumped up on the couch and shucked her uniform and her undies. I took the glue and the daisies and started work. I had to bend close to make sure I applied the right amount of glue and her scent of jasmine rose up and filled my head until I wanted to lower my lips to her flesh and lick her like a sweet. But I didn’t.
“Turn over,” I said, and watched as Olwen’s mother-of-pearl rump bounced out of sight and her soft belly appeared instead. She had pubic hair as soft as candy-floss and the colour of a newly-hatched chick. I continued my work, sticking flowers to her thigh, spiralling them around her bent leg, my nose almost pressed to her glorious, fragrant flesh.
I looked down and saw that her downy pubes were dewy. She was wet. And it seemed as natural as breathing to slide two fingers deep inside her. They went in like a hot knife into butter – she was wet and she was ready… just not for me.
There was a momentary pause, while she sighed deeply, or so I thought, and then she yelled. “Cerys? Cerys! What the fuck are you doing?” She sat up, shoving at my hand, and I saw that her blue eyes were now colder than slate.
“What’s the matter with you?” She grabbed her tunic. “Are you mad? I know what they used to say about you at school but …”
What they used to say about me at school?Deeply shocked, I stuttered something unintelligible.
“They said you were a lesbian, but I said I knew you!”
“I am. I am a lesbian.” The next thing I knew was the cubicle door slammed and I was alone.
I never saw Olwen again. I told the salon I was ill and began to apply for jobs online. Within four days I’d got a place in a salon in London and I packed my bags and went.
So here I was; friendless, loveless and lightless. I unwound the lights and went out into the hall, sticking my ear against the door of the opposite bedsit. I could hear that they were watching Strictly Come Dancing. The sound of Gregorian chanting came from the next door. That was something I felt I could bear, so I knocked and waited tentatively.
A dark-haired woman in yoga gear answered the door.
“Sorry, have I interrupted your yoga workout?” I babbled at her, realising that I was staring at her deeply shadowed breasts, barely restrained by her tank top.
She grinned. “Come in.”
“No, I just wondered if you had any bulbs, Christmas tree lights I mean, because…” somehow I was through the door, nearly tripping over a double futon in the middle of the floor. She pointed to it and I sat, gingerly.
“I’m Sam,” she took my hand.
“Cerys.”
She didn’t let go of my hand. “You look stressed.”
I nodded. Her fingers were strong and warm.
“I’ve seen you around,” Sam said and I watched her lips move hungrily, wondering how they would taste. She was very close to me, then she smiled slowly and pulled my hand until it came to rest on her right breast. I stared at her, feeling her nipple under my palm, observing her eyes come closer and closer until her mouth touched mine gently. It was a moth of a kiss and she pulled away to look at me, but my fingers were already closing around her body, my knee sliding between her legs as I pushed her back so that I could push her top up and get my mouth around that hard nipple, my fingers pushing into her, taking the slick fabric of her workout pants inside too, her fingers twisting in my hair as I thrust my hand as deep as it would go, sucking her breast into my mouth, until she growled in pleasure and slid out of her clothes.
I took the fairy lights and wrapped them around her body, following the line of the flex with my tongue until she grabbed my ears and pushed my head between her legs, where she was as dark and sweet as a plum. After she came I laid my head on her belly and she stroked my hair.
“You wanted something?” she said.
“Nothing I haven’t already found,” I replied contentedly.
