Wet and Dry Laundry. {fiction}
{source}
I had certainly registered the dripping shirt in Pride and Prejudice. Then I discovered the splendor of Kristen Stewart. That gave me a role model I was desperate to emulate.
I wanted to be her depth encounter and her in one. I had registered the image of Darcy, and appreciated his appeal objectively. And I find some shirts sexy. But it was Kristen who really threw me in at the deep end.
Then I came across Shannon A Thompson’s Seconds Before Sunrise: I had to change the persons of her memorable quote, to say “My hands fell to her hips, and my fingers dug through her rain-drenched clothes.”
I was getting frazzled and irritable, having had a succession of missed dates. I needed someone to summon me, chase me, winkle me out of my timidity. Messalina’s face and eyes riveted my gaze.
Love needs to prove itself super-resilient in the face of the pandemic. We exchanged portrait photos online.
“So you’re equipped with Zoom, darling. So let’s introduce ourselves in style; we’ll do a two-way webcam strip-dance video.”
I hesitated and blushed; my color illuminated her countenance in response: “You’re a bit shy, aren’t you? Now, I can see behind your interface; you can’t hide your feelings, and you no longer need to. You’ve had a suppressed desire to do this for years, now all the submerged can come up to the service. I sense an inspiring body, be slow, and heat up my desires.”
It was such a floodgate to be given this instruction after so many past years of negative taboos. All similar body language I had previously encountered was an interface for rejection. I felt so good about my body, on the screen and in her eyes.
The webcam was a relatively new piece of equipment for me. It took me a long time to know exactly where to position it and angle it, and how to fix the lighting, trying all the positions for the reading lamp. I had long fantasized about being a still or cine photographer. Then, as I swayed back and forth, I saw myself as if an image in my lover’s eyes. At last I was her feast of torso and thighs.
She answered my gesture by revealing her discreetly tanned form in her white lingerie. I was awestruck — the firmness of her shoulders, breasts, waist and thighs. We writhed in unison.
“Look, lady, you’re rather overwhelming, so magnetic. I can only be one of your iron filings. You must have a massive entourage, countless others.”
“But I’ve decided to focus on you. You, at last, after seemingly endless searching, are the mystical combination to unlock the fortress of my being. I give you my drawbridge. I love the polarities of experience — I embrace the creature-comforted indoors and the wild outdoors. I relish wind and water, heat and cold. I want to be your disrobing goddess, a microcosm of the strata of the earth, from icecaps to inner fires.
You will come and see me.”
The green traffic light after a seeming eternity of red ones!
For the intervening days, my head was awhirl. I scoured the net for images of goddesses, hoping to find some that resembled her. Asteria came pretty close; I definitely felt space-rocketed towards the ionosphere.
Her house was strange — triangular, surrounded by a circular fence and a lawn. When I got in there, I found it a multi-medic paradise — fashion house, photography studio, recording studio. My instinct told me that the building had a capacious basement. I made a wonderful quantum leap from my extreme reaction to her image to her three-dimensional flesh — beautiful, vibrant, both kinetic and statuesque.
She was slim, firm and beautifully aquiline, about 5’10”, matching my height.
Her walls were plastered with photographs of her, black-and-white and colored, from every angle degree on the protractor.
“Darling, I’m a fashion queen and the empress of seduction. I have a fashion museum, containing garments from many centuries. As I relish them, I project myself into time travel, back and forth, also cyclic. I think you’re a bit of a period-hopper too.”
Was she telling the transcendental truth, or was she a consummate liar? It no longer seemed to matter. Under differing lights, she could look as hot as a furnace or as cold as a statue. There was something about her that radiated eternal life.
“I want to be pleasured, by going through all the permutations. There are times I want to besmirch or drench my garments, but only as a passing phase. I like them to be of resilient material, be laundered back to pristine life.
I can now see an endless array of pictures of the most powerful women in the world, real and imagined. I have the strength to blur that boundary.”
The wind and water were chilly, but our passions were white-hot. In our imaginations, we made thermals and steaming geysers.
“This is the first ritual, where you shall be my observer, my adorer, looking at me as if your eyes were mine.” She waved her arms.
“Aphrodite, prepare to meet thy doom!” she cried. The wind and her body together elevated the swirl of her robes as she rushed ahead from the shore. She stood neck-deep. Her robes swirled in concert with the seaweed. As she emerged, the wind took the mantle from the water. The free movement now felt that it was in a tight embrace. My hands, my body felt at one with those soaking garments.
“Keep your clothes on, but take mine off.”
There was an exquisite tension as I struggled with the water-fortified knots. The garments put up a resilient resistance to my eager hands, to reveal the luminosity of the goddess, the final offering to all goddesses.
She changed into her hiking outfit, and we began our homeward trek. Energy percolated through our quasi-exhaustion. Our footsteps padded the moonlight.
The revelation had been so hypnotic that even as I carried the burden of sodden garments, I got a delicious tingle — sensations of my hands on her garments, sensations of the lovely body inside them. The transportation was a postlude and a prelude.
“We shall enact the double trinity, the outer one in the form of our trysts. And for the inner parallel one, consider the laundering as a trinity of magic circles. Now, do your Nick Kamen bit to prepare to put my garments into the washing machine. Then go and change into another outfit, to do the same when you put them in the spin dryer. Then a third change as you prepare for the ironing, something you can take off.”
First she had seen me in natural moonlight, but had not demanded the full revelation of my body; now her eyes would relish me in warn, subdued electric lighting. I swayed in my Calvin Kleins. For the spin dryer, I wore a crisp pinstripe executive suit. For the third, I wore my beach outfit — a very loose-fitting top, boxer shorts and trunks underneath.
Now she was in a low-cut, shimmering evening gown. Her hands felt under my top and squeezed my waist, then wafted up the top, to float gently down. Her hands caressed my torso. “Hmm! You’ve been working on your presentability, in unconscious anticipation of getting together with me.”
Her hands reached inside the waistband of my shorts. “Ooh! I’ve got to unwrap this delicious parcel!” She stretched them a bit, then pulled them down.
I love being in trunks; they provide such elation and suspense. Seeing myself in the mirror with them, I imagine I see myself with my adorer’s eyes. Her eyebeams ratified my yearnings. “You’re lovely, Hollywood, prepare to meet thy doom! Now you have qualified to divest me.”
The delicate evening dress responded to my deftest touch, made the suggestion of a ruffled carpet on the floor. She stepped over it to face me. She was wearing a glamorous Hollywood one-piece, black, matching my trunks.
She beamed with delight: “Stranger on the shore! I had to time this revelation properly. The first time, I just needed to observe you, to give free rein to my imagination. Now I shall relish you, as you have relished me, are relishing me and will again.”
She turned down the lighting for our final revelation, as the cinema must be darkened. Together we echoed the reverberations of nature we had experienced on our excursion.
“Come back to me in three days’ time,” she said, “and we shall consummate the Holy Trinity, the triple tryst. Then we shall face the world, fully sanctified.”
After an abundance of insomnia and bated breath, I duly kept the appointed rendezvous, timing myself to the crucial second with my mobile phone. Her sighting transcended awesome expectations; she was arrayed down to the finest detail, in her first outfit, freshly laundered and fragrant, and carried a holdall with a smart casual change.
I wore my beach outfit — the third tryst to parallel the third stage of the laundering — also a holdall with a smart casual change. We each had one hand free to hold as we sauntered to the strand of destiny.
The breeze was slightly warmer than its predecessor, with the hint of a supplementary caress. We found the same stretch of shore. Her eyes feasted on my swaying form. “Ooh darling! John Bromfield! Johnny Weissmuller! Daniel Craig, prepare to meet thy doom!”
We had gone through the slow motion routine; now was the time for the past, the moment of urgency. This time she ripped off my top and my shorts with a flick of the wrist. Hands on my hips, she beamed. “Oh, your pulsing body! Now, gird your strength, be a real muscleman and throw me in the water. Give me the baptism of love, you are my Holy Spirit! Through your flesh my soul will be purified.”
Here, the blend of the sensual and spiritual, she chanted: “One great wave after another of irresistible longing rolled over me, just to look into the face of my beloved master… I just let my heart go out in deep desire till I lay with alert yet restful anticipation, listening for the blessed voice that I knew so well to say, ‘Come.’ … I have never been the same person since, for there was reflected into my very being such an overwhelming love for souls that I did not know what to do with it.”
I realized that the sublime, divine waters must suffuse all our garments, bodies and souls. Had she once flirted with holiness? If so, now was its complete vindication… and negation.
My muscles seemed to have had a transfusion from the elements. I took her by the waist, then, when we were waist high, I cast her into the swirl, embracing her tightly as I did so. Her left hand held my head, her right my waist; the embrace was enriched by tidal immersion.
The thrusts of the waves echoed and nurtured our metabolisms — for me, the tactile relish of my whole body and my mounting erection, and for her, her panting desire, her toned frame, her abdomen, her aching groin. The water thrust against us, and in doing so, honed our physical resilience. As is generating steam, our flesh and water pulsated. Our kisses went underwater and came up for air — held lips, held breath.
I dragged her back to the shore, where our towels were spread. She reached for my trunks. Their drenched resistance gave me extra tension. As I peeled off her layers, it felt a bit like washing delicate fabrics.
Breezes, lapping eddies and choruses of seabirds counterpointed our delicious consummation. We shook the sand off the towels, dried ourselves and changed. As we returned, I had two holdalls to carry. My elation made them practically weightless.
All had been carefully programmed, we had agreed to part as we reached her home.
She beamed at me. “You have matriculated, you can face any of the world’s challenges now. Do send me messages and tell me how you’re getting on. As for me, I feel reassured, my yearnings concretized. Yes, someone hurt me very badly; I got me to a nunnery, and out again. At last I fulfilled my quest for the alternative font. We made the perfect eternal triangle, and I generally do my own laundry.”
On reflection, I can see that she wanted to extrapolate the good bits from the Bible, and shake them free of the patriarchal priesthood. But had she broken two oppressive powers — that of the male, individual and collective, and that of authoritarian matriarchies, including nuns, to find her true self — with me!
“Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.” ~ John 7:38-39
The sacred waterfall of holy baptism will drench your outer form, and penetrate the depths of your inner thirst. That blessed inundation will generate the mighty tide of your soul which will spread to quench the longings of the parched ones. You’re not just filled once, but you’re re-filled every day as you read the Word and as you ask Him for more love.
The more of His Love you receive from Him, the more your heart will be so filled to running over that you cannot contain it. And then, as you overflow on others, you cause them to grow and blossom like flowers as they are filled with His Love.
You’ll never be the same again after being filled with God’s love power!
She made me feel like a god. I am sure I made her feel like a goddess.
***
David Russell is a resident of London, UK, and a writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. He is also a visual artist and singer-songwriter, active in visual art for several decades. David studied life-drawing at Addison Institute, and works in oil, pastel, watercolor, pencil, collage. He has many tracks on You Tube, under ‘Dave Russell’. David is the editor of online magazine Poetry Express Newsletter, produced by Survivors Poetry and Music. His work has appeared in the Outside In Exhibition, and in many magazines.
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