One Night Stand

Warning: short inflation fiction follows. And if you visit London, be very careful about chatting up 20-something raven-haired girls with thin features and wild eyes in nightclubs...

Lucy steps naked out of the bathroom, trailing a white towel, steam and floral scents. The water drips from her, toning half-formed footsteps on the lighting grey carpet. Only the soles of my feet touching today, she thinks. I'm barely a part of this world.

She stands before the patio doors of this studio flat and looks out beyond the small wrought iron balcony. From the fifth floor, the street outside is a crimson-brick canyon of post-industrial living. Its steep walls are dulled beneath a city skyline washed in predawn light. She sighs and cracks one door open to let the shower mist fade.

"You've got a leaky tap on the sink. Might want to get it looked at," she mentions, matter-of-fact. She raised the towel she brought with her, rolling it rub her hair dry.

She holds herself posed at the foot of the bed, not looking up. Her skin is peach pink with the heat, mottled by an archipelago of brown moles on her shoulder and a white band where the towel pressed about her. Flushed by the contrast of temperatures, her nipples perk with memory.

"Listen," she says, "I wanted to say, about last night..."

She trails off, screwing up her face and tawny eyes as she lowers the thin white cloth. Her hair cascades in its wake, lank-damp and city black; tangled as she feels. The last year has been complex enough, after leaving home, London and the streets, before finding a place with Sharon and thinking that she had her feet under her again. Now she is reminded once more of her difference without the understanding of it.

"It's just that I don't usually do this. Go home with just anyone. I mean, I'm usually careful. What happened...was an accident."

She moves over to the side where the diminutive flat gives way to a small kitchenette. Flicking the kettle on, she rummages under the formica for a mug and tea. She waits for it to boil, feeling the cool air of the bedroom edge against her skin. Perhaps it is that rather than the illicit excitement of being naked in a strangers kitchen that thrills her. Part of her wants to reach out against the air and just push, just to show she can. She doesn't need to hide her secret here and the guilty joy burbles through her like pebbles in a stream,

The water is boiling and burbling and bubbling she is here and lost and making tea. Get a grip, Luce, she thinks to herself caused enough trouble by being inattentive. She takes the drink and moves back over to the bed again, setting herself on the crumpled blue duvet. The clay mug is warm on her naked thighs, trembling memory of the evening before.

"It was fun though." She smiles, glancing up. "You're fun"

And secretly cute. His dark hair was casually tussle, thick and lustrous. And those blue eyes. She remembered first being attracted by the sideway inquisitiveness of his eyes, roman nose and delicate jaw line. His body had been lithe rather than muscular, and she had to restrain her hand from reaching out to stroke its new strangeness; smooth and glistened like a glitter ball. Perhaps if she hadn't been so drunk and lost control things would be different, but the club had been a heaving maelstrom of bodies in a tide of sound. Sharon had suggested it to cheer her up and she'd surprised herself; one drink following the other into the whirling bliss. Then their dancing, almost accidental. The secret heat and excitement and drawing closer by fingertips was a wordless rightness. Oh, he made her smile too; at least, she thought he did. Her laughter was real, not bitter it seemed, and freer than it had been for a long time. She might have been half comatose on the taxi back. But was there a difference between consent and wanting yourself be taken advantage of?

"Look, neither of us were really sober last night were we? It was my fault, I should have....well...sometimes when I'm not paying attention and I get this weird little tingling and these sort of things just...happen, you know? I'm not completely in control here."

She didn't tell him it seemed to get stronger year by year. Six months ago she'd started to smell helium for the first time. Helium for fuck's sake, it was supposed to be a completely inert gas and now she could taste it leaking out of balloons. Could someone explain that to her please?

"You know I've got to go" she said blankly, feeling the need to explain. "You'll have too many questions, but you just need to know you'll be OK. Give it another couple of hours and you'll probably start to...."

She gestures compressively with her hands, lamely. "Well...it doesn't last forever. Most times anyway."

A slight breeze perturbs the room from the open window; something rustles and drifts, scarping oh-so-lightly on plaster. A star fished shadow falls across the sheets. Almost distractedly, Lucy lifts one hand and there is a soft "boing" as she bats him away.

"Oh, and I'm afraid that will go down too". She draws a raised eyebrow between the revelation of his tubular thighs, naughtily. "Bet you've never had it go up like that before. It was sweet of you to use a condom though; girls appreciate that sort of thing you know. Though to be honest I'm not sure it did much good. Latex isn't much protection from me; I'm kinda in my element there."

She places the tea down on the bedside table and rummages under the bed for her knickers. The cotton feels like silk against the tenderness of her skin, the hidden snugness where he moved, gasped, expanding. She remembers.

She remembered the look on his face as the small packets burst, swelling and rising from besides the bed. The way his eyes widened at the dreamlike drift of the transparent bubbles as they arced across his back. His hands had slackened on her shoulders for a moment rising as if to catch them, when the deeper more intimate hiss had sounded. She might have stopped things then, but the desire to squeeze down, to push as he pumped, was not to be denied. Then his hands were moving lazily, buoyed by invisible strings whilst his chest swelled. Her hands slid easily over a smoothing skin, her nails puckering its sudden elasticity. The smell of latex was sweet and spreading through the will of her touch.

The flux of gas had come between them as he started making noises like she couldn't tell what. His gyrations grew frantic as he tried to spend himself within her secret tightness. But her silence reproached him; eyelids weighted as she clenched about him, submerging his masculinity in her feminine buoyancy. Her face pressed against the sibilant roar of his chest, drawn like an inhaling ocean. It was a balloon, a beachball clung with sweat-and-cologne. His startled features were arcing away around its curves, the crags and musculature smoothed away by the inflating rush. His violet nipples were islands in a widening sea whilst his limbs drew squat and taut.

She became aware of his unnatural up-ness; less and less was he burrowing her and more and more was she restraining him. Then his legs were expanding, a pneumatic forge between her loins as she fought to hold his slippery body. Part of her denied herself, this pleasure, but she was too far gone. Her words were soundless, demonic and angelic, as they coupled, his weight receding as her hips rose lifting, launching. For a moment his presence was a swollen anchor as he became unmoored in the air. His cock was tugging up and up within her secret garden as he rode her. Then he was sliding up and out...spinning and rising whilst she lay damp and exhausted. He bounced twice against the ceiling, a look of astonished terror on his half-buried face. Sprawled beneath him, she was trapped in a mush of scents and sex, whilst the secret helium held him aloft. With one hand she had reached upwards, trying plaintively to explain. But he seemed beyond her grasp now, the escaped balloon of a moment's careless levity.

"Oh, shit." She remembers saying, "I'm….really, really, sorry." And falling back asleep.

She smiles again, knowingly. As if sensing her reverie he half turns, straining against the pressure that holds his limbs captive. A faint sound pitches from his lips.

"Hush now. You sound like a chipmunk with laryngitis". Lucy admonishes, raising a finger to her lips. "Just relax and try to enjoy it. And for God's sake don't go outside until you're well and truly heavy again."

She moves smartly, pulling her dress and jacket on, tisking only at the smudge that wasn't there yesterday. Her bag is underneath the hook on the door where she failed to hang it last night and her heels are there too. She wobble unsteadily onto them as she reaches the door.

Something makes her pause at the threshold, to look back at the pink weather-balloon above the bed. The strangeness of it is terrifying and ridiculous in its reality. Swollen larger than life, his body seems almost translucent against the window light. She thinks (hopes?) his features are slowly emerging from the buoyant cocoon, relinquished by the diffusing gas. Maybe he would be back on terra firma in a couple of hours. She wasn't going to hang around and find out.

"I guess this is goodbye....",

The phone rings suddenly. Lucy freezes, her knuckles white on the doorknob. The mechanical voice on the answer phone holds the same warmth and easy charm as at the club. She feels guilty again. Then a woman speaks. She doesn't say much, but she says enough. Lucy's eyes widen. She mouths disbelief at the floating form

"You....you....two-timing bastard" she whispers.

She moves back in, silently. Pushing the patio doors apart, her face mirrors the clouded sky beyond. Through the grill of the balcony she can see street and silence. The grey cobbles below are mute to her intentions. If only he had that far to fall he'd be lucky. It will be a bit of a squeeze, but oh, he really asked for this.

Jumping back onto the bed with sullen energy, she reaches up and grabs him by a foot. Its podgy digits bulge with displaced pressure. Sensing her purpose, he lets off a startled high pitched "eep" as his buoyant body reverberates helpless off the ceiling. For a moment she struggles to find the grasp to hold him. But her other hand closes on the swollen girth of his cock and then she is ballasting his gaseous bulk downwards. Even so, the lift makes her feather-stride to the doorframe, his globular body distending through its press. Towing her erstwhile suitor like a balloon, Lucy draws him out to the balcony and freedom.

Naked and pale below the endless nothing, he twists futilely in her grip, trying to deny the price of buoyancy. The sweetness and terror of her sex. But his azure eyes are sky-bound as she kisses him goodbye, and lets go.