efforts at courtship

Her skin smells of the coal tar soap she buys in incredible bulk from special suppliers in case of emergency. She slathers herself in it, foamy and rich. Her cunt smells like barbecue beef Hula Hoops and lingers through washes on his hands for hours. Her fingers are very long and double jointed and they grip him like an instrument. Her face is narrow and pale and dusted lightly in freckles and curls wonderfully in smile. Her face is immense too, almost geological, and fiercely etched beyond her tender years. She grows from her trousers as though from the earth. She laughs in a silent tremor behind her hands and oddly her eyes sadden as she does so. She assured him that she routinely wanted what she couldn't or didn't have, a point he took as truth and confession both and of immediate sexual pertinence to their own relations. Clothed her torso looks squat though he presumes it to be the tailoring of her garments or the way she chooses to wear them. Her accent is of the northern quarters, a fact he notices only during the daylight hours; drunk in clubs, bars, whatever, it rises above such pointless distinction. When she held him goodbye the day they first spoke she was very warm against him and the feelings were ones he recalled. He embedded an invitation with profound subtlety into the body of a paragraph of an email. When she made no reference to it he tortured himself for a fortnight or longer over the fact that she might not have seen it, that its subtlety was simply too profound, but he dared not mention it again in case she had. Everything petered away quickly to nothing.