Nipples, Bastards and Broken Things [FF]

I had about four hours to kill at JFK, and they had really dragged. I sat on an un-ergonomic metal chair and read fifty pages of Knausgård, until my tailbone and the upper flesh of my arse started to ache and I had to get up and walk around for a while. I read a display which told me that Terminal 8 is the largest passenger terminal at the airport. ‘To have an idea,’ the sign said, ‘is twice the size of Madison Square Garden, in NYC.’ The missing words and the weird diction made me screw my face up, my tired brain rereading it four or five times. Bland marketing spiel by Google Translate.

I went to the bathroom to pee, and only realised once I got there that I had already done so twenty minutes earlier. I sat in the harshly-lit stall with my pants down and thumbed through messages on my phone, again telling myself that I would reply to my agent tomorrow, deleting the latest obscene message from my ex-boyfriend Ash without really reading it, just dimly acknowledging that he wanted to do things which, if he knew how close my vagina was to a cold and plasticky airport toilet seat, he would reconsider.

I ate some weird day-glo snacks, and the high-fructose corn syrup buzz carried me to the gate for my flight for London, even though I was an hour too early. It was dark—or darkening—outside, but I didn’t have much sense of what time of day it was. Too many hours in the air, too many time zones crossed, and five or six of each still left before me. By the time I arrived at home it would probably be Christmas.

‘Hello again.’

There was only one other person at the gate, and she took out her earphones as she saw me coming.

‘Remember me?’

I did remember her. She had been on the flight from Los Angeles, and the two of us had shared an eye-roll of womanly solidarity. I had had an aisle seat, and she had been haplessly crushed into a window by a splayed and boorish man. She had tried, gently, to wake him with an elbow five or six times as he melted slowly into the space which was hers by rights, her body cringing reflexively away from him, until eventually she enunciated in clear and righteous Valleyspeak that ‘if you don’t let me past, like, right now, I’m going to piss on you.’ Later, I had helped her to get her bag down, after the same guy almost brained her with his carry-on suitcase.

‘Of course. I didn’t think you’d be going to London.’

‘Why not?’ she said, looking amused.

I shrugged.

‘I’m starting my Master’s at Imperial,’ she said, and then, when I nodded slowly, ‘I’m Angie.’

I thought this sounded like an oddly middle-aged name for someone like her, but perhaps it didn’t sound that way in California.

‘Charley,’ I said.

‘Cute,’ she said. She was wearing the kind of travelling outfit that’s so conspicuously sloppy that it’s a guaranteed sign of a wealthy person. She wore yoga pants and Nikes with a bare and pale strip of ankle in between, an oversized hoodie (in a shade of pink which said ‘go on, I dare you to call this outfit tomboyish’) and a Clippers cap. She looked about nineteen, but she must have been a few years older than this—clearly she was younger than me, either way. I tried to decide whether her parents worked in the film industry or the tech industry.

‘So what were you doing in LA?’ she said.

Not much, in truth, except whining about the heat.

‘Someone wants to adapt some stories I wrote. Not sure if it’s going to go anywhere, though,’ I told her.

‘You’re a writer?’

‘Mmhmm.’

‘Neat.’

Angie took off her hat, and self-consciously fluffed her pixie cut with her fingers until it was jagged and spiky. The haircut suited her face perfectly; it made her features look soft and delicate, and her green eyes look enormous and sad. I hadn’t noticed them properly while she was wearing the cap, and pretty soon she put it back on again, as though she couldn’t really make up her mind. She probably got a lot of unwelcome attention when she wasn’t hiding her face from view, but I wondered if perhaps she wanted to make an exception with me.

‘So did you get laid out there at least?’ she said, confirming my suspicious, boldly unsubtle, as though it was a given that British writers fly to California to get laid all the time. I blushed a little bit and shook my head.

‘You married?’ Angie said.

I smiled indulgently, and held up my ringless left hand.

—

Weirdly, we found once we boarded the flight that the seating arrangement was the same as it had been before—Angie had the aisle seat, I had the window, and in between us was an ominous empty seat which we both pessimistically waited to be filled with someone unpleasant. It turned out to be a mercifully narrow middle-aged woman in a pantsuit. I stood up to let her pass me, but Angie jumped in to speak to her before she could sit down.

‘Ma’am’, she said, sweetly, ‘would you mind switching seats with my friend? She gets a little nervous on flights.’

The woman turned back to look at me as I stood in the aisle. I gave what I thought looked like a sad little nod. Clearly making a split-second judgement of me as a nervous-looking person, she smiled sympathetically.

‘Go ahead, sweetheart,’ she said, and I took the middle seat next to Angie.

‘You can hold my hand, if you like,’ Angie said in a stage-whisper. I rolled my eyes at her.

—

I decided not to ham it up and feign any panic as the plane took off; the woman sitting to my right seemed not to notice anything untoward, though, closing her eyes and crossing her hands in her lap soon afterward, with that apparent frequent-flyers’s knack for calm semi-sleep without disturbance, snoring or wayward saliva.

Pretty quickly, I realised that Angie’s intervention wasn’t without its downsides. The little TV screen in the back of the seat in front of me didn’t work, and I poked and prodded disconsolately at it until I gave up as the plane levelled off and the cabin lights dimmed around me. I didn’t want to turn on the harsh reading light over my head for fear of waking the kindly woman next to me, and I resigned myself to six hours of restless boredom, which turned out to be a premature judgement.

Next to me, Angie seemed to have retreated into her own little in-flight privacy bubble, having kicked off her shoes, folded her legs underneath her and thrown a blanket over herself, and she was now browsing with impunity through her own, working entertainment choices. I wasn’t sure what I had expected from her, but she seemed now to be in her own little world. The bluish night-time half-light of the cabin around me gave her features a sultry and jagged look, and I found myself wondering what her petite body looked like under her blanket and her shapeless outfit. I sighed and closed my eyes and pondered the question alone for a while.

Then Angie tapped on my shoulder.

‘Yours isn’t working, right?’ she said, pointing at the screen in front of me. ‘You want to share?’

She was whispering—any audible chatter in the seats surrounding us had died quickly away—and she held out an earphone to me, while she indicated her own tiny TV screen. The opening credits of an episode of *Game of Thrones* were showing, and I winced.

Angie looked scandalised.

‘You don’t like dragons and titties?’

For some reason the way she said it made me laugh.

‘I like titties,’ I said, with the inherent self-consciousness of someone who knows very well how stupid the word ‘titties’ sounds in a British accent.

‘Titties,’ Angie said, sombrely, mimicking me. I cringed with an embarrassment that was only slightly feigned. I should have just said tits.

‘I’ll give it a go,’ I said.

I took one of Angie’s earphones. She raised the armrest between us, and I shuffled a bit closer.

‘C’mon,’ she said, chidingly, and I moved closer still. Angie threw half of her blanket over me. She had taken off her Clippers cap again, stuffing it roughly into the seat pocket, and I saw that she was wearing tiny stud earrings, made of something pinkish like rose quartz. She had used some kind of fruity shampoo or hair product, and she smelled strongly of Skittles.

*Game of Thrones* did not thrill me. Gruff, handsome and cold-looking northerners complained a lot about the weather, which was all basically the same as when I was at university in Leeds. A buxom prostitute lifted up her dress to show someone her ginger pubic hair.

‘She looks like you,’ Angie said.

‘She fucking doesn’t,’ I told her, although I suppose our auburn waves weren’t so different.

Angie snickered, and then she squeezed my thigh. I bit my lip and looked away from the screen, at her. Her eyes widened, and she raised her eyebrows a little, as though giving me an ‘is this okay?’ look. I smiled and gave her a ghost of a nod, and then turned back to the screen. Angie went on stroking my leg, not making all that much contact, just running her fingers over the loose and thin pants I was wearing, in a delicate arc which moved either inward or higher, but not both at once.

We both made a valiant effort to appear interested in the show—it wasn’t as though anyone could see us unless they looked closely at the area covered by the blanket, but the cabin crew occasionally made their rounds—but I was much more interested in the warmth of Angie’s body. After a little while, she hooked her right leg over my left, and I let my hand fall into her lap, touching her thigh as she had touched mine. I started to close my eyes; the physical sensations of her were much more pleasant than the visual ones on the screen, where a man had just beheaded a horse.

Eventually the ending credits of the episode started, and we had each remained tentative, strangely affectionate in our movements for two people who had only just met. Angie’s leg was slender, not too heavy on top of mine, but with a comforting weight to it, and her skin felt warm through the dark and stretchy fabric. Still looking straight ahead of her, at the screen which had now turned dark, Angie took my wrist and guided my hand upward and between her legs. As my fingers met the warm, damp seam of her pants, she shifted her hand to the back of them, pressing my hand into her cunt.

I could feel everything so clearly. Aside from the fabric seam which ran between her legs, and which felt as though it was settled perfectly atop her slit, it was almost like she wore nothing at all. The mound of her pubic bone was prominent, nestled in my palm; the lips of her pussy were soft and pliable under my fingers, and I could feel exactly where she had hair and where she didn’t. I put a bit of weight into the bases of my fingers, and she closed her eyes and sighed.

There was something so enticing about the mix of sensations. On one hand, I could feel her hot, soft flesh in clear relief against my hand; on the other, her baggy hoodie, and the blanket now covering her legs and much of her torso too, hid the shapes of her body from me. And yet, greedily, my other senses all staked their claims to her. I breathed in her sweet and fruity smell, and I wished I could taste her skin and the moisture that was starting to leak through the fabric of her pants. I pushed my nose into the meeting of her shoulder and her neck, and she wriggled as my mouth tickled the soft skin near her ear.

‘I wish I could see you,’ I said.

Angie moved away from me a little, and I was disappointed, and wondered if I had said something wrong. Then she lifted herself up in her seat and looked down the aisle, then turned to look at the lights above the bulkhead a few rows in front of us. I saw her note the unlit bathroom sign, then she looked back at me and smiled a blueish smile in the darkness.

With wide eyes, I shook my head at her.

‘I really don’t think—’

‘Not that,’ she whispered. ‘Just wait a second.’

With all the precise lightness of her little gymnast’s body, Angie got to her feet, then shuffled past the woman to my left, who was still sitting perfectly upright and stationary, her head firm against the headrest, her eyes closed. I watched, confused, as she closed and locked the bathroom door behind her.

I shuffled across into the window seat and pulled up the shade. Outside, the almost-perpetual transatlantic dusk was practically the same colour as the light inside the cabin; cloud hung in the air in a perfectly flat blanket, way below us. I craned my neck as though there was anything else to sea, taking in the great expanse of open space in all directions. Way over toward the horizon I saw another plane, its lights flashing, moving like a prop on a string through the sky.

‘You took my seat!’

Angie had returned to the middle seat next to me, her whisper sharp and fake-scandalised. I was about to ask what she had been doing, but she took her phone out of the big pouch-pocket of her hoodie and pressed it into my hand.

‘Here,’ she said.

I took it, confused, and pressed the power button. The screen was filled immediately with a nearly-nude body. Frantically turning down the brightness, I realised that I recognised some things in the picture, like the pink hoodie which was gathered in one hand and lifted up to the top of the frame, or the yoga pants which had been pushed down to the mid-thigh. The rest of it was newer to me: the narrow and even strip of hair which disappeared between the thighs, the sharp peaks of gymnast’s hips and the back-to-back parentheses of the waist, the small, round, impossibly firm breasts, the pink and pale nipples, the jewelled bars which Angie wore through each of them, tipped with a stone which looked to be the same colour as those she wore in her ears.

‘Fucking hell,’ I said, almost back to normal volume. Angie mimed a ‘shh’ and held her finger over my lips. I looked from the picture in my hand to her now-clothed body.

‘You want to make out a little?’ she said. I dropped her phone back in her lap, slipped two fingers to the back of her neck and pulled her to me. She didn’t kiss quite like anyone else would, or quite like I had known anyone else to, anyway; in a strangely adolescent way, she kissed mostly with her tongue, and I realised that she probably didn’t want to attract attention with any lip-smacking noises. She tasted minty. It felt a little strange at first, but I gradually settled into it. I began to enjoy it even more when Angie paused to replace the blanket over us, nestled her body into mine and put her hand between my legs. I drew my feet up to rest against the back of the seat in front, and Angie tucked her hand inside the waistband of my trousers.

‘Holy fuck,’ she whispered, ‘you’re wet.’

It took enormous focus to stifle myself as Angie touched me. Our limbs were all tangled under the blanket, and I made a series of grabs for various parts of her body, but the angles were all wrong and I couldn’t touch the places I wanted to touch, even more so now that I had seen what they looked like.

‘Just relax,’ Angie said. ‘Let me.’

I did as she suggested, and averted my face toward the window. Angie carefully kept her movements hidden by the folds in the blanket and the angles of my legs. The rows around us were filled with the deep breathing of people sleeping or trying to, and my rattling breaths were swallowed into theirs, mostly buried under the gentle ear-filling hum of the engines. I was left to worry only about the occasional slick sounds that came from between my legs, as Angie’s fingers slid easily over my pussy, and to wonder how the hell I would keep quiet when, inevitably, I came.

—

We branched into different lines at passport control, then reconvened on the other side, walking together under the ‘nothing to declare’ banner and emerging into the terminal and the half-light of London’s miserable attempt at a sunrise. Smiling partners hugged and kissed their sweaty, tousled returnees around us while we stood, a little awkwardly, in the Arrivals concourse.

‘Do you wanna share an Uber?’ Angie asked. ‘It’s on me.’

I smiled. Rich kids.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m just a few stops on the Tube. Probably out of your way.’

She nodded, a little disappointed.

‘Okay. Well…call me or something?’

‘I will,’ I told her. I would. ‘Thanks for a lovely flight.’

Angie stood on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. It was a funny gesture; she was barely even shorter than me, especially with the thick soles of her Nikes.

‘Bye.’

I walked toward the Tube escalators while Angie stood there with the crowds milling around her, taking out her phone to order her ride.

‘Hey, Charley!’ she called, as I was stepping onto the escalator. I turned around. ‘You owe me a nude!’

I laughed, appalled, broadly enough that Angie would see my shocked expression from where she stood. I’m sure she could also see me blushing scarlet as the escalator carried me downward and out of her sight.

A couple of steps above me, a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit caught my eye and winked.

Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/i45zjq/nipples_bastards_and_broken_things_ff