The Lost Art of Seduction

As I put on my sexiest playlist, she loomed in the doorway. A smell had crept behind her on the walk back from the toilet as she began gently rocking on the door. She was trying to look seductive, but I knew she was attempting to waft the stench away. She was wearing an ill-fitting red bra with a yellow possible curry stain on the left cup, and a pair of frilly knickers which were almost transparent, but the gaping tear in the front left nothing to the imagination. I stared at her with flared nostrils.

---

We'd met just two hours before. Her straight blonde hair, button nose and bright green eyes had hooked me from the dance floor. She was stunning, and would spark the ultimate jealousy among my pack of friends. I prowled, and her dance gradually turned into a drunken wobble before her legs gave way in slow motion. As she lay there, sprawled amongst sticky shoes and congealed cider, I stepped forward to offer my hand. Our eyes met as she stood up straight; she was a little taller than me, but most of that extra height was created by the heels which made her walk like a newly born zebra.

I asked if she was alright, but she couldn't hear me. The music in the club was like being thumped in the head by pillows. I could barely hear myself think, but what I could hear was that her self-esteem was now probably low enough to get her back to mine.

I repeated myself, a little closer. She nodded and gave me a thumbs up. We bobbed our heads and looked elsewhere for a moment.

'Do you want a drink?' I asked.

She still couldn't hear me.

'Drink?'

She stared at me with glazed eyes, so I made the universal hand signal for 'drink?' and she nodded.

One of her heels gave way on the walk to the bar, but she was quick enough to grab my arm. Her dress had lifted up and exposed her arse to the club. I could have alerted her, but that would have been embarrassing. I decided to let her discover for herself and have a good laugh about it later.

'Are you having a good night?' I asked.

She pointed at her other ear so I repeated myself. She pointed at both ears and shrugged so I shrugged as well to show that we had a connection. The barman came to me and pointed; I asked for a whiskey coke before pointing to her. She shouted something at the barman and he wandered off to prepare our drinks.

'What do you do?' I asked.

I was met with another blank expression.

'What's your job?'

She said something that sounded like 'leaky systems'. I asked her to repeat it, but this time it sounded like 'titchy sister'. I didn't want to ask for a third time, so I nodded in an impressed manner.

'You?' she pointed.

'I work in Pizza Express.'

She nodded in exactly the same way.

Our drinks arrived and the barman asked for seven pounds. I knew that my whiskey coke was only three, so she must have ripped me off. I hoped that her drink had enough alcohol in it for her to buy the next round.

An hour and several more fragmented conversations later, I asked if she wanted to leave. She couldn't hear me again, so I typed on my phone 'Come back to mine?' She took the phone off me, typed for a second and returned it. It said 'U havbe wirk i rhe mor i g'. I took that as a yes.

I'd left all of my friends behind, but I was hungry and she was hot, so they would understand. We picked up a subway sandwich on the walk home: I went for a modest turkey and ham; she went for the meatball marinara, with extra cheese and onions.

---

Stumbling towards my bed in the half lit room, she stubbed her toe on my bedside cabinet, but grabbed her glass of wine and tried to disguise it as a sexy dance. She dribbled a little of the red down her chin and onto my carpet, before wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and exhaling gruffly. After placing the glass back on the bedside table, she pinned down my shoulders and lay on top of me, head-butting me and positioning her knee between my legs. I stared up and saw the orange meatball stains in the corners of her mouth, I noticed how the dim light shimmered off her thin blonde moustache. She kissed me with a waft of onion and far too much tongue, like kissing a dog that'd had its hair straightened and its face shaved. After seconds of slobbering, she moved her knee into a difficult position. The dull ache from down below caused the top half of my body to spasm, and our foreheads collided.

She sat up, scrunching her face and rubbing between her eyes, giving me time to readjust my goods. When she had pushed past the headache, she blinked violently before staring and grinning. She moved back to kiss me, slotting her knee back into the same position. I decided to take control, to protect junior, and rolled myself on top with only minor ball to knee contact. As the weight of my torso sunk on top of hers, a low toot emerged from towards the bottom of the bed. I stopped kissing.

'What was that noise?' I said.

'Must've been the bed,' she said.

I shrugged and continued kissing. As her tongue explored in and around my mouth, a strange smell consumed us. It was like someone had cooked a bad broccoli omelette and passed it through a pig. I moved my body again to try and dissipate the smell to avoid embarrassment.

Clenched between her clammy thighs, I slid myself up her torso, feeling the tingle of her belly hair against mine. The friction of our skin made a squeaking sound, like a clown making a balloon horse, before her armpit clasped around my bicep, trapping air and forcing out a crisp raspberry. I could feel the electricity in our bodies, sparking and quivering. At least, I think that’s what it was. She stopped acting turned on. I readjusted my body, placing more pressure on her lower abdomen. She let out a guttural grunt, leapt up and rushed out of the room.

Splashing noises and groans echoed down the hallway from the bathroom, so I rolled to the end of the bed and turned up the music. It swirled around the room, setting a romantic atmosphere, until she walked back in. The atmosphere stared at us from the corner, looked at its watch, and showed itself out. I asked if she was ok. She didn't reply, but instead lay down next to me, placing her right ear on my chest. Her sweaty temple glued itself to my nipple.

‘I just,’ she sighed, ‘have a tingly feeling.’ She rubbed just below her half-inny half-outy belly button.

I smiled and moved her hair aside with my forefinger.

‘I feel it too,’ I said. ‘We have a special connection.’

‘How long have you had it?’

‘Since I first laid eyes on you,’ I said, lying through my drunken teeth.

She stared. I heard cogs whirring in her brain cell.

'I don’t mean like that!’ She slapped my stomach playfully.

‘What do you mean then?’

‘I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome,’ she laughed.
My nostrils flared again.

'Do you have any more booze?' she asked, running her bony finger down my torso, completely brushing over the last thing that had left her mouth.

I considered it for a second, remembering that I had a bottle of very cheap wine that someone had left in my kitchen after a small party months before. I skipped down the hallway. The bottle sat on the windowsill, covered in dust. I brushed it off with a tea towel and returned to the room to find her reclining on my bed, applying a scarlet lipstick which made her look pale and ill.

The cork made a squelching sound as it crawled from the bottle. I picked up the glass she had already been downing wine from, but she snatched the bottle from my hand and guzzled.

As the bottle emptied, her demeanour deteriorated further. The wet kissed slowed down and her breath gained an alcoholic kick, making her mouth smell like a poorly devised kitchen cleaning product. With only a third of the wine left, her hand followed the same path as my blood and she began to unclip my belt. The one hand was struggling, so the second followed for back-up. As a duo, they couldn't work the mechanism, so the kissing stopped and she fiddled with her tongue poking out. I watched her struggle before intervening. I whipped the belt off in a fluid motion that nearly slapped her in the eye, and began shimmying my jeans down. She sat back, biting her lip in red hot anticipation until her body squirmed in a fluid motion and she let out a toxic burp. Her eyes suddenly widened with concern; one hand rubbed her tummy while the other gripped her mouth. I watched her with my jeans around my ankles, and my baggy boxers probably giving her a clear preview of the boys. In a mechanical motion, she stood up and ran to the bathroom. I didn't move, assuming that she would want to continue the moment where she had left it.

Two minutes later, she reappeared looking like she'd been dragged through a hedge backwards. She asked for some water, so I pulled up my jeans and carefully zipped up my flies.

I stumbled back down the hallway holding two pints of squash, splashing it all over my feet. Turning back into my room I saw her on the bed, spread out, legs and arms wide, her modesty not contained in the slightest. She was asleep, but I was not yet content with how the night had finished and slammed down the glasses on my desk. She stirred; I took this shallow sleep as an invitation to be woken, and jumped on the empty part of the bed causing her to bounce an inch or so into the air. She grunted and rolled over, looking at me with separately blinking eyes.

'Sleepy head,' I murmured.

'Your bed's so comfy,' she said with a lump in her throat.

'Your drink's on the desk,' I said.

There was no reply.

'Just over there,' I continued.

There was still no reply.

'Do you want me to take you home?' I hinted. The two things in the world that I didn't want in my bed were vomit and a girl who wasn't going to put out.

She groaned in a way that could have been interpreted as a 'no', but I didn't interpret it that way.

'It's nice to be in your own bed if you feel ill or hungover,' I said.

There was no reply again.

'And imagine how embarrassing it would be if you woke up here having been sick!'

Silence.

'With that in mind, shall I take you home?'

She took in a sharp breath and rolled over on top of me, barely opening her eyes, but managing to knock the wind out of me. We started kissing again, albeit rather lifelessly. There was still potential for the night, I thought. The kissing gradually got weaker until she was doing little more than breathing oniony red wine breath down my throat. I heard a tiny snore, so I pushed her onto her back, a movement which she took with the resistance of a poorly made ragdoll.

The night was over. Any atmosphere that had been left had vanished, and my libido already had its nightcap on. I had no choice but to let her stay. I rolled her onto one side to give myself maximum bed space and climbed in. My head hit the pillow like a sledgehammer and the gentle rocking of my brain lulled me into a deep sleep.

---

I awoke just after nine. My head felt like my brain had been removed and replaced it with scrunched up tin foil and angry badgers. There was a welcome absence of blonde girl next to me so I stretched myself as much as I could until my fingers and toes had every corner of the bed covered. The room smelt like musty potato as the previous night unfolded in my head like a film on fast-forward. I thought of the girl, wondered where she'd gone and what would have happened if she hadn't passed out.

There was no immediate sign of her in the flat. I nudged open the door of the bathroom, and upon seeing an empty room, closed the door to contain the smell. The kitchen was as messy as ever, but with a half eaten bowl of cereal on the table, which had not been there before. She must have got up early and left: I cringed at the walk of shame that she must have endured. I didn't have her name, number or anything. I pondered at what could have been, and then remembered that I had one packet of beef noodles left and squealed in excitement.

---

Supermarkets are horrific places to be on a Sunday, let alone if you're hungover. I asked a tiny grumpy lady where the bedding section was and she pointed. The bright, fluorescent lights reflected off every surface around me and seared my retinas. As I looked up and down the shelves, a voice called out to me. I twirled on the spot to see Emily, a friend of a friend who I once had a thing for.

'I heard about your escapades last night,' she said.

'From who?'

'Chantelle,' Emily said.

I stared.

'The... girl you took home?'

Aha! I know her name now. That's a start.

'What did she say?' I thought that maybe I could get another, less drunken shot.

'Oh,' Emily said. 'She... had fun.'

'What does that mean?'

Emily swallowed and continued to stare.

'What did she say?'

She sighed.

'She said that your flat was gross, and that you snored and farted in your sleep.'

My brain bleeped and told me that it would need to reboot before this revelation could be comprehended. Emily watched my face glaze over before taking her leave and patting me on the shoulder as she walked away. Consciousness returned to my brain and I looked back up at the shelves of bed sheets.

I'll get black this time. Black doesn't stain as easily.

---

Two days later, I received a friendly email from an ex-girlfriend. She was doing well in her high-flying job and had started seeing someone new. It had been three years since we'd been together, but I was still jealous. I missed what I had had with her.

Over the rest of the week, all five boxsets of Battlestar Galactica flew through my DVD player and I consumed at least triple my weight in various pastries. I wasn't depressed; I just needed time to assess my life. Maybe Chantelle had been the kick I'd needed; maybe, at the age of twenty-six, I needed to stop picking up random women, and think about settling down; maybe my life needed 'the one' to give me some maturity and pursue the journalism career I'd always wanted.

Friday rolled around and my friends texted, asking if I wanted to go out. I told them I didn't feel like it, but eventually gave into peer pressure. A couple of pints over some chummy lad conversations cheered me up.

We arrived at the club at eleven. I wasn't drunk, but I could feel the alcohol flirting with me. Shots were consumed before a bout of ludicrous dancing. Three of our group of five branched off with ladies, and my final friend kept nearly getting into fights. I retreated to the bar to keep a clear head.

Remember what's important, I told myself. You want to be more mature. You're above this childishness.

At the bar, I was shoved from the side. I turned to see the back of a dark haired girl, stumbling and laughing. She turned around with her hands up in front of her large breasts.

'Sorry, lovey,' she said, before raising an eyebrow and touching my chest.

I hesitated for a second before my arms crept around her and gave her sides a squeeze. A lecherous smile grew on my face. Maybe she's the one, I told myself.