“Do you promise to love, honour and obey, in sickness…?”
“I think I’ve shown you I can do the sickness bit…”
“True. What about the other bits?”
“Look, we’re only just married…” a smile. “Let me get used to it first…”
“Alright then, let’s have a look at the marital suite then, shall we?”
She placed both hands on the table and levered herself upright. The barmaid smiled at us as we hobbled out of the lounge and into the stairwell. I looked up. A lot of stairs. I took a deep breath and scooped mum up into my arms, her arm over my shoulder and her laceless shoe dangling off her foot. The first effort was not a success. The stairs were quite narrow.
“I think people were thinner in the Eighteenth Century.” She put both arms round my shoulders.
I let her down gently, then said, “Fine, in that case there’s nothing else for it.”
And with that, I bent down, grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her arm across my back and hoisted her over my shoulder, a fireman’s lift. She let out a shriek and then a laugh, or more of a cackle. Then she slapped me on the ass.
“Giddy-up…”
The door into the lounge was of ordinary glass, and as I started to carry her upstairs, the sound of muted laughter rose behind me. Did my ‘wife’ actually wave to her audience..?
Upstairs, I’d left the room unlocked, so I used my elbow to turn the handle, and then…
“Over the threshold…”
I whacked her one on the bum, staggered into the room and threw her onto the bed. She almost disappeared into the softness of it.
I threw myself down beside her.
We looked at one another and started laughing. Then…
“It’s been a strange day, unusual…” she whispered.
“The day’s not over yet…” I whispered back.
Why were we whispering? Because it was such an intimate moment, lying there, her nose almost touching mine…
“There’s more? They poisoned the wine..?”
Giggles… and as we laughed our noses touched. I rubbed my nose back and forth across hers a few times….
“Eskimo…”
“You cold?”
I heaved the eiderdown over us and we were enclosed in its cocoon…..
It was dark. I rubbed up to her nose again. Then my hand followed and my index finger traced the contour of her nose down towards her mouth, around her lips…then between her lips…and she was licking it while I was kissing her nose….then I added a couple more fingers and she was licking them too, taking them into her mouth… she had one hand under my T-shirt, fingers splayed circling my nipples…..then I replaced my fingers with my lips…and my tongue licked hers…and then each tongue was swirling around in the other’s mouth…my arms were around her, hers around me …we were trying to become one person…. we were blind using only our sense of touch….. a lot of fumbling ..some tearing…. A belt being yanked open…some buttons popping… a bra lifted up over those soft mountains… a skirt, down the legs, the unmistakable sound of a zip, a warm hand inside my pants ….then both her panties and my boxers were round our ankles…. We came up for air.
And dove back under again.