An Eyeblink Spanning Eternity

Turning round, lying face to face, giving Jenny a long sweet postorgasmic hug. Her skin silky against mine, hair still damp from her shower, smelling of freshness and intimacy and domestic togetherness. Her arm across my chest, lips kissing my shoulder. The world slowed down. Two hearts beating together in a small dark Marylebone bedroom.

Finally, arising, getting dressed. The bedside clock showing only twenty minutes gone, an eyeblink spanning eternity. Jenny sitting on the bed, unembarrassed in her nakedness, watching me. Both of us smiling, complicit in unspoken communion.

Chatting briefly, meanings unimportant but the sound of voices serving to return us to normal humanity. She with faltering English. Just back from holiday with her children in Budapest. Her son, fifteen. Her daughter, thirteen. They live with her parents, she sees them one week a month, budget airlines. You earn more money in London.

Kissing her goodbye at the door, her arm holding me for an extra moment, enough to communicate reluctance to let me go. The London weather blustery outside, but almost unnoticed by me, still cocooned in Jenny’s glow.

Thinking, what exactly is her magic? Her sexual presence sufficient to smooth away my normal contours, dissolve my barriers, float thoughts and words away, as if in reversion to an ancient animal state. Textures and curves and hollows and smells and tastes, suddenly the centre and meaning of the universe.

Behind it all, a sense of specialness, as if I’m the only man she wants or needs, and she’s my only woman, and that at some deep level we both know it.

This with a woman who’ll see six or eight other men today. I wonder if they’ll feel the same. I wonder if Jenny will be the same with them. Maybe. But I don’t think so, I’m not the same with her as with other women, why shouldn’t she make distinctions too?

If I were naked now with another woman, well, we might also have a specialness, probably less intense, less, well, special. That would be between her and me. Nothing to do with Jenny.

But this is mere cerebration, exactly the thing dispelled by Jenny’s animal physicality, and to hell with it.

Walking toward Paddington, Jenny’s presence still burning fiercely inside. That twenty minutes, sufficient unto itself, absolute celebration of life and living.