A Modicum of Excess is Good for the Soul

A Modicum of Excess is Good for the Soul

I study the rich, chocolate brownie in front of me. I hold her to the light, so that the weak, February sun catches her baked, pillowed top surface and the crumbly squareness of her sides. I am about to devour her in a small, shallow spurt of ecstasy that will turn to guilt as soon as she has disappeared from my sight and plumbed the depths of my urgent stomach.

I could have left her where I first saw her. But as soon as I saw her, I knew I had to have her. I was idly studying the packets of the cake aisle in the supermarket at the top of the lane, the first port of call of civilisation. And there she was, with her demure, Fair-trade label and her promises of goodness. Surely it cannot be detrimental to the body if you are doing something good for the soul. And here, in this pre-orgasmic moment, my new philosophy is born: A Modicum of Excess is Good for the Soul.

but as I take my first, hallowed bite of her, as I nibble at her dark, bewitching corners with my tongue wrapping around her angular frame greedily, searching for the taste that I know will soon come, I realise that the philosophy I am adopting as a new one has always been a part of my psyche. I have just honed it to an art form, made it my own, possessed it, rather than simply viewing it as an ambition from afar.

Excess, so long as it is controlled.

As I stepped off the pavement to walk towards her car, I had no idea what I was going to say. It was the first time that I would have her completely to myself, without the context of other people around us to support this, whatever it was. I suppose it was like letting go of the side in the swimming pool for the first time without water wings, unsure whether I was about to sink or swim, whether this somewhat-experiment on my part was going to float me, or whether I was about to drown, out of my depth and lost on the surface of a beachless ocean, drifting in my own insecurity.

Where was my boat, my surety?

Alcohol-fuelled party in a large group of girls. Two of them disappearing for a few minutes or so, two people who clicked on first meeting. There I had been, revealing myself to a total stranger for the first time in years, stepping outside my self-made circle of confidence. It’s so easy to gauge boys. So easy to see the effect of each little nuance of body movement and conversation. Things with the opposite sex are so obvious, so clumsy, so blatant.

Women are more subtle.

I have no idea how to read her. I am totally unsure of myself. It’s like the years I have accrued have been stripped away in the face of her, and I am reverted to being a teenager again, taking my first steps out into that expanse of sexuality. That minefield. Mine field. My field. I had thought that I had sussed out the boundaries, well, my boundaries. Barbed wire in all directions, with only a few holes and casualties, relics from my ex-relationship. Yes, he made a few more holes in me, too.

Right, deep breath, my territory, no longer the neutrality of the party. I have ventured upon hers, successfully, taking up my own space within her space, confident to have been invited to tread my muddy pawprints on her hallowed carpets. But this is something different. Launched into a world that I do not know or profess to have a map to read, I have relied on the hospitality of the stranger.

Now I’m on my own. I have opened myself up to this. I have turned back the wire from the fencepost and asked her to step over the earthworks into my home. Where I will be expected to entertain, amuse, stimulate, show, be naked in front of her in my own space. Have I presumed far too much? Is this too intimate? Am I ready yet?

Too late, the car door is opening, and before know it, I am in the car, sliding in beside her to direct her where to park, helping her find her way into the labyrinth that I inhabit, and I feel that my discomfort shows like a thousand shining tiny holes in my exterior. Can she read me, in the way that I cannot read her? She has had more practise. I feel like a specimen on a glass slide, squashed, primed and airless, caught in a small, flat liquid bubble, damp and waiting to be examined.

And now I have her, in my possession, after a fashion, for a whole weekend. She lolls in my armchair, filling my small space with her presence, so sure of herself it kills me just to watch her, for I am the same when faced with different company. She throws me completely.

‘Make my decisions for me,’ she commands. ‘I am yours for the weekend, do with me what you will.’

But even as she states it, I know that she won’t let me. She will grimace at my choice of music, until I change it, whittling down my CD collection to three pre-approved CDs, then again throwing the choice back to me. The illusion of choice. Is it better than the real thing? Clever, to not want to make decisions, to make somebody else choose for you, when, really, you are choosing for them. She’s good.

We go out to dinner, back out into my comfort zone. The gastro pub where I slaved all last summer, surrounded by people who know me and welcome me, out of my private space and into my public zone, the zone I commandeer most comfortably. But she looks just as at home, seems embarrassed that I pay, uncomfortable that I take control. I see now, the very beginnings of potential battle zones. Two controlling alpha females, with very different ideas of independence and self-identification. Me, meandering through my confused brain, trying to make sense of new possibilities, and she, safe in the knowledge that she has always known herself just that little bit better than anyone else ever will. She, who has had time to erect, strengthen, defend and protect those boundaries. My measly strands of barbed wire that she breaks so easily with her fluid fingers, and her, with her steel-clad brick walls of impenetrability.

Dinner is foreplay. Dinner is a slow, enjoyable affair, both of us sure in the knowledge that we can sit here and savour it before going back to mine and enjoying dessert of an entirely metaphorical nature. I known she will control it, command me, play me like a complicated instrument until I sing and quiver and tremble with the knowledge of strange, new music that will feel like coming home, to a home that is new and yet familiar. A room redecorated. A house occupied after a long vacancy.

Slow like honey, sweet like chocolate, hard like the crumbly edges of a brownie, rigid until made soft and slippery with saliva, nibbling, nibbling… Fast and breathless like a burst of speed down a summer road. running, running, reaching for the next step, calves pounding on tarmac, ankles screaming with the burn, feel the burn the burn of summer on my bare naked body… she prises apart the strands of wire, turns them back on themselves to make a proper space in the boundary fence, twisting the strands unto themselves until they hold, gripping like stiff fingers. She digs her way into my trenches, muddied and slippery, cold at first until the sun warms their wet surfaces and they squelch and embrace her as she burrows into them.

My legs are aching as I strain to reach her. She is standing at the end of the road, at first a speck in the distance by the railway bridge, growing nearer and nearer as I hammer towards her. My feet are hurting now, blistering on the heat of the baking road, its surface soft and dimpled, pillowed and pitted in places. The tar sticks to my soles, sticks to my soul, binding me closer and closer to the girl at the end of the road, hotter and hotter my body burns, faster and faster I pant my way towards her, my eyes blurring with sweat or tears, or both.

My heart is pumping, as if it has been lifted out through my burning, aching chest and held against both ears at once. My stomach is beating to the drum of my calves that thud against the road, threatening to break through my skin and show the world my bleached bones. The balls of my feet are stinging my eyes and the sweat is pooling at the base of my spine and the wires are binding their ways into my wrists and my chest is singing and my mouth is screaming and all I can feel are her fingers, reaching; I can see them as they approach.

Again and again and again, I reach the end of the road, slamming into her unmoving body, hard and hot against me, stopping the force of me and pushing me back, repeatedly, so I can slam again, and slam and slam.

She asks me if I’ve had enough. How do I tell her I think I’ve had enough, when I know that too much of this can never be truly enough?

She leaves me on the Sunday. The weekend over, she leaves me standing in the weak, February sunlight on the cold, tarmac road. She leaves me waving at her retreating rear window by the railway bridge, savouring the last sip of sweetness from her lips.

I suck the soft, dark edges of the chocolate brownie. I study her in the light, her pillowed top surface soft against my eyes. I explore the sweet, strong smoothness of the taste with my tongue, and I fill myself with her, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing her, mouthful by delicious, tantalising morsel.

A Modicum of Excess is Good for the Soul.

To hell with restraint! For all I care, my soul can burst.