Our Third Date

It was my third date with Nuala, the new girl the apartment above mine. The table was set. I poured the wine. She raised the blinds to the top of the window casing. An opaque sky hung low, coated by a penetrable gouache and suddenly backlit by the hidden sun that filled the kitchen in a lemony light.

When she returned to the table the light caught her profile, washed her slender arms with its glow. She had removed her neck scarf while standing behind me at the kitchen sink, talking quietly, trickling water over her hands. Now she sat almost primly in her familiar summer dress of marigold yellow, her hands folded on the table. She watched me take an olive to my mouth, and when I looked up I saw she had done the same.

She smiled.

Nuala gave the impression of seldom distorting her emotions--what I had found on our first date returned weeks later on our second date, if not exact, then certainly recognizable. But whatever she was, she was wistful, and this expression stayed in her eyes and trumped all else. Though I had been disarmed by her loneliness, today she seemed, if not free from that, then certainly social enough that her eyes were candid with a previously unseen twinkle.

The tea kettle whistled her from the table. I looked over my shoulder as Nuala prepared the tea tray. Her open sandals, her summer dress that hung from her slightly tanned shoulders now aglow in a strap of sunlight that brightened the yellow marigolds appliquéd on her dress. She swiveled her hips to the music, a new track on the cd, and as if on cue, removed her foot from a sandal and slid it up and down several times against her slender leg. She continued to sway to the music, her hips languidly responding to the lush, sensual samba sounds. Nuala wore no slip beneath her dress. As she stood in the lemony glow of sunlight, legs apart, her skin shimmering in this yellowed hue, I looked though her clothes to see that she wore nothing underneath save a string bikini panty that revealed only her small waist, the slope of her hips. Her long legs appeared basted with the thinnest trace of umber.

A hushed rain sent drops against the window. The tiny sparrows and finches perched on lightly slaked ledges unbothered by the attenuated drizzle. I watched the birds, though my thoughts were of Nuala, a poised caryatid bathed in sunlight. Her lithe body offered to my imagination, and we were in a place where every small sensual movement knew no boundaries, an Eden where all things became possible. Aided by the glorious sunlight, I saw through her clothes again,saw how her sex had thrillingly moved from her body to enter my very being.

Our fingers touched across the table. Our eyes locked on one another’s.

Love. This is how it begins On our third date.

- THE END -