by Michael O'Mahony
(08/03/05)

The night I met Aria, I was trying to kill myself. Nothing as crude and quick as a rope around the neck or a gun to the head. More the consistent and deliberate performance of actions that would, at some point in the future, result in a sudden absence of life. Actions like drinking whiskey from Monday to Sunday, midday to midnight. Like staggering out of the pub on the cusp of every new day and riding my motorbike through the deserted streets just as fast as I could. Like entrusting my fragile body to the care of co-ordination so bad that it usually took me multiple attempts just to get the key in the bike's ignition. Like never wearing a helmet.

It was a no-glamour, no-note suicide. That is, other than the note from my boss two months earlier.

"Cut loose," I told my fiancé, two weeks before she followed suit.

Disaster has its own inertia. Redundancy had knocked me from my accustomed orbit, and I was floating away from all the things that inhabited Planet Routine. I got out of the house. I rented a room above a shop. I signed on. I bought the bike. I stopped answering the phone.

I was dead for twelve hours of every twenty-four, asleep for a further eight. The remaining four were spent tempting fate on the bike. I never tried to ride myself into a wall or off a bridge or anything like that. I just twisted the throttle as hard as I could and never wore a helmet.

The night I met Aria, all I wanted was my GSXR-1000. All I wanted as I entered the car park was to feel the bike's power beneath me as I coaxed it delicately down to ground level before twisting the throttle and aiming it straight down the middle of the road. All I'd wanted was 100 miles an hour in first gear, 0 -- 60 in 2.8 seconds. All I'd wanted was to be adrift, floating in space, just one more piece of flotsam amongst the post-millennial wreckage, waiting for the impact.

But gravity had other ideas. Gravity was Aria in a deserted car park, half-naked and handcuffed to a lamppost, her mouth covered by a strip of duct tape.

"Mmph," she said.

My mouth hung open. I was thinking alcoholic hallucination, dream, hen party gone wrong, my birthday. I was thinking: Jesus Christ.

"Mmph," she repeated, with a little more urgency.

"I got that part," I said, trying not to stare and failing miserably. Not every day you fall in lust and find the object of that lust bound and gagged, blouse hanging open and red lace panties promoting modesty as much as they preserved it. I went to her and raised my hand, mindful of the way she flinched, of the way her blouse reacted to the movement, briefly revealing just a little more of one large, round breast. My knuckles brushed her cheek as I pinched one corner of the duct tape between forefinger and thumb and carefully peeled it away.

"Fuck," she gasped, and then: "There's an explanation for this, I promise."

Up close, she had grey-blue eyes and clear, clean skin and dirty blonde hair. "I'm listening," I said.

"Think you could get me out of this first?"

"Not unless you can climb that lamppost or wait for me to go home and get a hacksaw," I replied. "Those aren't joke handcuffs."

She pursed and pouted her damaged lips, her tongue snaking out to leave a glistening salve of saliva over flesh that was swollen and reddened. I wondered how she'd taste.

"Shit," she said.

"So?"

"So what?"

"So, what is this?" I asked, indicating her current predicament with a sweep of my arm, struggling to stop my eyes dropping to the open blouse, the lacy panties. "Some kind of joke? Voyeuristic boyfriend?"

"Ex-boyfriend, actually. And it's a long story."

"Doesn't look like either of us is going anywhere."

"Fuck," she said. "How long would it take you to get home and back?"

She shrugged and the blouse shifted again. My eyes dropped. When they came back to hers, I knew I'd been caught.

"Half an hour, give or take."

I swallowed. My hands were shaking. Part of it was the hair, the eyes, the swollen lips. Part of it was the 1950s pin-up body, her blouse playing peek-a-boo with every light breeze, her panties a sheer red scream that I couldn't quite see. Part of it was the way her mouth shaped curses as though they were promises. Most of it was how she held my eyes and didn't blush.

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

She shrugged and my gaze flickered downward like a Pavlovian response.

"I don't know," she said. It was hard to tell if it was a smile or a grimace that curved her lips. "He drugged me. I've been conscious maybe half an hour. My arms say I've been here longer."

"He drugged you?"

She sighed, looked down at herself. "Something in my drink. I don't know what."

"What did you do?"

"I cheated on him. He found out."

"And this is your punishment."

"There's more to it than that."

"I'm still listening."

"Do many people come here?" she asked, looking around. "Whose bike is that?"

"Mine, and no. Only other people I've ever seen here are a bunch of kids. They come to smoke a little weed and chat a little shit."

"This late?"

"This late. A gang of guys," I said, seeing it behind my eyes.

The girl digested this information. "What's your name?"

"Matt."

"You a nice guy, Matt?"

"Nice enough," I said.

"Yeah? What are you thinking?"

I was thinking that was a crazy question for the girl to ask, things being as they were. I was thinking that she was maybe the most beautiful thing I'd ever laid eyes on. I was thinking how easy it would be to pull the blouse off her shoulders and the panties down around her thighs.

"That this is an unusual situation, and that you're lucky you got me instead of someone less...less moral."

Those grey-blue eyes pleading. "You gonna help me out?"

"I'm thinking. Tell me about the boyfriend."

"Ex-boyfriend," she said.

"Tell me about him."

"Name of Chris," she said. "We've been together...five months. He was...God, this sounds awful...he was terrible in bed, you know? Not such a bad guy, until tonight anyway, but terrible in bed. He'd just get on top and pound away until he was done. What are you doing?"

"Exploring your options," I replied, though the reality was my eyes exploring the curves of her hips as the breeze flicked playfully at the hem of her blouse. "Go on."

"I tried to be a Dear Deidre girlfriend, I really did. I told him what my problem was, tried to get him to do something that would solve it. I tried everything. I'd dress up and drag out the foreplay, make him come and then get him hard again before we even got to the sex. I'd tell him what I wanted and what I liked. I even gave him fucking directions, you know?"

"So what happened?"

"Nothing. Not a fucking thing. He'd get on top and pound away, same as always."

"So how come you didn't just finish with him? You weren't happy, right?"

"Matt?"

"Yeah?"

"You don't find these strange questions to be asking me?"

"If you'd rather I asked you your cup size, we can do that."

Silence. Then: "I liked him. The only thing missing was the sex."

"So you cheated."

"I'm not some whore."

"But you cheated."

"At a party. It just happened. It was a guy I'd been with before. I just needed somebody to touch me the right way. Christ, I got sick of my own hand."

I ran my hand over the chains that held her wrists together. "Hey, you're talking to a guy who broke up with his fiancé a couple of months ago. And these aren't coming off without power tools, whatever your name is."

"Aria."

"What?"

"Aria. Like in opera. A song sung by one person."

"That's pretty," I said. Aria had turned her head to look at me, and I was staring down past her face, addressing a naked breast capped with a large, swollen nipple, its tip standing straight and erect.

"So this guy," she continued, knowing full well what I was looking at, "he knew Chris, though I didn't know he did. They got into a guy conversation about girls they'd nailed and hey presto, instant cheating harpy."

"He confronted you?" I imagined throwing my arm over her shoulder, claiming that breast, its weight and warmth beneath my fingers.

"Nope. He had a drink with me, and as I was finishing that first glass of wine and starting to feel a little dizzy, he told me exactly what he thought of me and that he was going to teach me a lesson. Last thing I remember, I was lying on the couch and he was undoing my skirt. I woke up here."

"Hence ex-boyfriend."

"Right. You have a plan yet?"

"I'd have to leave you. Maybe I should call the fire brigade or something."

"Great. Fifteen guys staring at my tits."

"Instead of just one."

This time it was definitely a smile. "But you're trying hard," she said.

I walked back around the lamppost so that I was facing her. "I'll never understand how anyone could undress you and handcuff you and then just walk away."

"He was pretty pissed off."

"That's not what I meant."

"You..."

"Listen. If I brought the bike over here and you stood on it, you'd probably be able to lift that chain over the top of the lamppost. Then you could come home with me and I could saw through the cuffs."

"Best offer I've had all night," Aria said.

And there was something in her eyes or in her tone or maybe both that told me if I touched her again she would not flinch. And when I reached out and pushed one side of her blouse off her shoulder and laid my hand on the soft glory of her breast, she gave no sign that it was anything other than what she wanted. I ran my thumb over the dimpled flesh of her nipple and gently squeezed its tip. She breathed out through her nose and let her eyes fall briefly closed.

Gravity brought my other hand to those beautiful breasts. I claimed them, kneaded them, reveled in the way they yielded beneath my desperate fingers. Aria let her head fall back against the lamppost, let her body draw me in, insist that I strip her blouse from her shoulders, that I fall to my knees before her, hands following the curve of her waist and then grabbing at the elastic of her panties where it rested on her hips, drawing them down around her thighs and knees and ankles, exposing the pale, naked skin of her crotch. I kissed her there and she sighed, lifting her left leg over my right shoulder, spreading herself for my probing tongue, letting me inhale and taste her.

"You're a nice guy, right?" she murmured.

She was slick and hot beneath my flattened tongue, the soft, untidy configuration of her labia meeting at the swollen bud of her clit, marking a path to her arousal I followed like a convert to some new cause, lapping obediently at her pliant flesh until her moans filled the stillness and her thigh muscles twitched against me.

"Cheating harpy," she said, and chased her words with a giggle that became a sigh as she hooked her other leg over my other shoulder, pressed her cunt to my mouth, straddled my face and rode my caresses until she stiffened and cried out, arching her back and pulling at the cuffs so that the chain scraped against the lamppost.

Her feet found the floor again, and I pushed myself up onto unsteady legs, wiping my mouth with my sleeve. Aria's eyes, as disconcerting as ever, found mine. She opened her mouth and then closed it again.

"I'll get the bike," I said.

Silence as I wheeled it over, as I helped her back into her panties with an embarrassed grin, as I buttoned her blouse. I pulled the bike up onto its stand and held it as she braced herself against the lamppost and climbed awkwardly up onto the seat, stretching until her hands were clear of the sodium light and she jumped down before she could fall, laughing when her feet landed on mine, her face so close that I could smell the wine she'd been drinking.

"Still a little out there," she said, blinking rapidly.

"Of course," I both thought and said at the same time.

"I..."

"You must be freezing. Let's get you home."

It was the slowest I'd ridden in months, aware as I was of Aria's bare skin and my own rapidly dwindling state of inebriation. Though I could feel her body against my back, my lust had receded into disappointment. Our chemistry, it seemed, was the kind that came from a bottle and bad luck.

Maybe that was what fed the sense I had that the longer we were together, the more we became strangers. By the time I'd let her into my flat and cleared a space for her on the sofa, it had been at least twenty minutes since we'd last exchanged words. Still, she smiled when I returned with the hacksaw, holding her hands up with the chain pulled taut between them.

"Never thought I'd find myself half-naked in some hacksaw-wielding stranger's flat," she said.

"It's definitely been a night of firsts," I said, concentrating on sawing through the chain without hurting her.

She raised her eyebrows and said nothing, turning her gaze on the crumbs of metal that were patterning the floor between her feet, watching as though hypnotised until the serrated blade of the hacksaw finally bit through the last millimetre of chain and freed her.

"I guess I'll have to track down Chris to get rid of these," she said, jiggling the metal bracelets.

"I guess. I don't like my chances of not hurting you trying to saw through them."

She nodded, smiled a little. "I'd better get going," she said.

"I can give you a ride."

"I know somebody that lives near here. I can walk, honestly."

I looked down at her bare legs, at her underwear. "Like that?"

"There's no one around and it's just a couple of streets away. Really, you've done enough for me."

"Aria, I..."

"I've got to get going, Matt. Thanks for everything. You really are a nice guy."

Aria kissed me on the cheek and practically ran out the door.

"And you're a cheating harpy," I said, as it swung closed behind her.

I slept badly that night, and awoke with the taste and scent of her sex in the back of my throat like a hangover. Even in the pub, shooting pool and filling the hole in my stomach with cheap whiskey, I kept thinking of her sex outlined in red lace, her breasts pushing her blouse open, her tongue wetting her lips. The drunker I got, the more lucid these images became, until I could almost hear her sighs and feel her weight on my shoulders.

I stepped into the car park. Behind me were the pub and the whiskey and the deserted midnight streets. Ahead of me was another night in suburban nowhere, another chance to accelerate into three figures and beg the sun to clip my wings. Ahead of me was a sound like a chain rattling against metal.

I stopped.

Ahead of me was gravity, was Aria in a deserted car park, that spectacular body barely contained by a tight black miniskirt and a push-up bra. This time she was on her knees, wrists and ankles secured to the lamppost. She smiled at me with lips painted fire engine red.

"You're never gonna believe this," she said.

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