June
Freya had given me the key to the room on the night of the poetry reading. You had already detached yourself from my side to go to the bar and order a whiskey for you and a margarita for me.
Once she'd finished flirting with the cocktail waiter, she laughed at my protests about using the room rent free, and about inviting a random stranger to share it with me.
'Every summer I gift the room to an artist or a writer, it's really no big deal. And you, my love, need tribe around you.' She looked over at you at the bar, and said, 'And he, is most definitely tribe.'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
Her eyes sparkled as she said, 'He's a Dom, he has Sir written all over him.'
My eyes popped as I said, 'How do you know?'
I followed her eyes and watched you at the bar, as you managed to get immediately served in a sea of waiting people, without even raising your hand.
'Oh, I know,' she laughed. 'Lilah, I have to leave now. Stephen is coming to pick me up. We're going out dancing.' Stephen was her fifty-year-old boyfriend, back then. She's met someone new now.
Do you remember Mac, how when you came back with the drinks, the air temperature had suddenly changed? The atmosphere was charged, and there was an electrical spark as you passed me my drink and our fingers touched, as I told you that Freya had given me the key.
'If you want, I can get one cut for you,' I said.
You smiled, that easy smile, and said, 'I'd adore that.'
I thought my knees might buckle from the way you looked at me.
So, there I was, the following day, in Freya's room. Which was about to become, The Room. It was a huge space, bathed in sunlight from the massive window at one end of the room. With blonde wooden floor-boards, an easel, blank walls, with nails already hammered into them and a large mahogany desk set under the window that overlooked the ocean.
At the other end of the room from the window was an enormous wrought iron bed, with crisp white sheets covered in black polka dots.
On one of the side walls was a kitchen counter with a little stove and a sink set into it. Cute pots and pans hung on hooks, and a spice rack filled with all manner of colours, was hanging from the wall.
And, of course there was that brown leather chair. The one that would become your favourite place to sit and drink whiskey, and watch me crawl, on all fours, to you.
I could feel the ghosts of all the artists and writers from all the summers before that had resided there. I wondered were they jealous of my time in the sun, or happy that I was getting a chance to live a poets life - if only for the Summer.
That first morning, I pottered around the kitchen area, searching out the coffee and French press, and wandering if you'd actually turn up. Then I sat at the writing desk and stared out of the window at the ocean. I was just far enough from the city for no one to know me. Close enough to get back there by motorbike in a twenty-minutes.
You came driving down the track in that old pick-up truck of yours. Your canvases and paints in the back, as I watched from the window, my heart hammering inside my pussy.
Three minutes later, you burst through the open door of the room with a huge grin, dropped your canvases and paints to the floor, and said, 'Miss Lilah, you are a sight for sore eyes.' As you closed the space between us and kissed me like a long-lost lover. Those were the words you used, a long-lost lover. You really were such a romantic.
That kiss didn't feel like a kiss from a stranger. It felt like a jagged piece of glass, fitting into my jagged pieces, and fusing together, making them smooth. It tasted like creativity, and art, and freedom.
After the kiss we both laughed. Delighted with ourselves. I think there was even mention of how we were the new Frida and Diego.
Do you remember that day Mac? That was the first day you painted me, as I sat at my typewriter, in my faded sundress, the colour of honey, and you told me that my eyes were the same deep green the ocean turns to the day after a storm. It was the first painting to go up on the wall. You said it was mine. I can't believe you took it with you.
But to really tell the story, we need to go back to the beginning. Back to April...