My hands slid up the outside of her smooth thighs, under the white cotton dress spotted with delicate bunches of three cherries. For the thousandth time that year my mind slipped into fantasy. My life had been just that, fantasy only, devoid of action, that now when faced with the slightest possibility of real action I would be incapacitated by tremors and a pounding heart. Schoolboy symptoms at 34. A thousand times I had fantasised demanding action, laying down the law, setting the record straight. What was this relationship? Was it a relationship or a ship flying a flag of convenience, a rent and commitment free fool.
Of course I never said anything, except the barest few stammered murmurs in a dark room as she fell asleep. They were the strongest outpourings I had made, and they amounted to squat over the last five years. If I was ever to have children, to participate in that most common of opiates, family, I would have to act quickly. To start a new relationship would take time, and if I wasn't to have a partner a decade younger than myself then I would have to determine this very year what S' real intentions were. Though I suspected that she knew her intentions about as much as I knew mine, or hers. We were similar in that sense, fatalistic, without goals or targets, drifting on the opiated sea from shore to shore, never touching the rudder for fear of transgressing some unspoken anarchistic law of life we had never really adopted, more fallen into over the years. A choice made through making no choices. Which was still really a choice when you looked at it.
Now I grew into the age of supposed responsibility and my younger rejections chafed against my biological urgings. Who would win? Well, with a continued acceptance of the no-choice path, and to stay with S, undoubtedly biology would lose. Hence its increased efforts to rouse me from my slumber. Perhaps even my attempts to cast off opiate addiction in the last year had grown from these biological beginnings. Who knows. I had put up with the crap of gabo for many many years and suddenly it bothered me? No, there was some deeper explanation at work. Biology sounded about right.