Blood Is Dirt by Robert Wilson

Heike?’
    â€˜Ach, nothing.’
    â€˜You haven’t liked me much since Bagado called the other morning.’
    She didn’t say anything but fell back on to her pillow and looked at the ceiling again through half-closed eyes.
    â€˜Can’t stand being in the same room as me?’ I asked.
    She shrugged, which meant she knew what was bothering her and I did too, but how to get it out. She stuck the heels of her palms into her eyes.
    â€˜I was glad you went away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘Then I wasn’t glad. Then I was again. It’s been like that. Moody. It was good having Selina around. She pulled me out of myself.’
    â€˜How do you feel about me now?’ I asked. ‘Am I on the couch?’
    â€˜Not with her next door,’ she said, taking her hands away from her face. She propped herself up on an elbow and smiled with some resignation in there. She looked me up and down with other things starting to work inside her head. It excited me. She saw it and sighed from down around the back of her knees at what she recognized in herself.
    She threw back the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed, her legs apart, the dark triangle visible, and pulled the towel off my waist. She gripped my buttocks and pulled me to her and kissed my belly, her breasts nudging at the painful hardness of my erection, her nipples hard and cool around my loins. I stroked her head and bent down to kiss her. She turned her back on me, crawled to the wall and leaned a forearm up against it. She stretched the other hand behind her, took hold of me and guided me into her. I kissed her madly over her shoulder, our lips never quite touching, the column of tendon in her neck frequently between my teeth. I smoothed a hand down her belly to her thighs, to our moist, tense connection. We moved rhythmically, her face up against the cool wall, the sweat pouring down my chest, rivulets running down her arched spine. My hands were full of her breasts. I clamped my mouth on to the roll of muscle at her shoulder and desperately tried to thrust harder, and further in, so that I could become a part of her.
    At the last moment, Heike already trembling in my hands like a frightened bird, a feeling shivered over me. We were being watched. It was so strong that I turned on shuddering thighs to see the door open, the light from the street painting the edges of things in the living room and something, someone. Then an ecstatic light burned fast and wide in my head with the brightness of magnesium and I collapsed against the wall which was slick with sweat gone cold and clammy.
    We parted and slid down to the pillows, Heike feverish now with her hands up to her mouth. I pulled the sheet over her. Where our bodies touched were like spot welds. I could hear Heike’s clotted breath from her overwrought throat. She turned into the wall. I stroked her back and she started as if my fingers were live. Her shoulders shook with each breath and then smoothed out. She slept.
    I got up and glanced around the living room. I checked the front door. Selina’s bedroom door was shut. I padded back to bed, lay down and watched the ceiling recede. Emptiness grew in my stomach as the moment of union seeped out of my mind. In the absence of something new we’d always fallen back on the old way of communicating.
    The line had been crossed twice. Forwards but then, as usual, backwards. Now I was out in the cold again, which even the hot African night, jammed into the room, couldn’t warm.

Chapter 9
    Cotonou. Tuesday 20th February.
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    I woke up as stiff and sore as a wind-dried duck. Heike’s space was empty. I was lying diagonally across the bed. She was in a T-shirt and knickers looking out of the window, her hair wet, staring at the overcast day.
    â€˜It’s six thirty,’ she said. ‘I’m late.’
    â€˜Did it rain?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜I didn’t ask you last night... what was all that