Remnants

Warning: Silly inflation story. You know what to expect. Or if not, you should! No responsibility for loss of innocence or strange floaty sensations will be accepted!

Have you ever tasted helium?

Yeah, right; you can’t. It’s noble where you are base; so you believe as your reason tells you, when your senses betray you its nothingness. Tasteless, odourless, traceless; you let it slip your life by, trailing through your fingers. No more than you could hold the sky.

But helium is always real for me.

Sometimes just a peach-fuzziness on the edge of my tongue. I drink it with the sunlight; asphyxic joy captured by my lungs, edging with my voice with delight. It lingers in me like my apartness: filtered out from the normal, as the normal filters me out. And yet else-times it cloisters in deep wells, congealed like strange despair until I can hold it no more. Then it seeps through dreams with the tide of another sun, unguent and unbidden. Those times I wake at night, feeling it saturated through my skin. Tangible as sweat, piss. I just need to get it out of me.

That’s usually where someone else comes in. This time isn‘t really any exception.

So he’s standing in the middle of the building by the truck when I walk through the door; empty cylinders stacked to one side and the evidence of his recent complicity floating overhead. Obviously he looks shocked and guilty. Shocked because he didn’t think anyone would be sneaking up on him and guilty because he damn well is.

Younger than I expected though. I’d let you know that he was legal age, if it makes you feel better, and the next bit is going to be mostly consensual. But so what? He’s involved, and that’s that. He knew the risks, or should have done, before helping her with such a crazy dream.

Did I tell you about the building? It’s a strange fish; ironwork sides corrugated and capped by a round-vault; like a Nissan hut on stilts. I’d guess 30 foot high at the crest, holding maybe three-quarters of a roof through girded steel beams and clerestory windows with their fractured oil-stained glass. The surround is a broken waste of brick foundations and helpless rubble; a post-war half-clearance that makes the lonely building look sad that the Luftwaffe missed it. Incongruous with enigma, its utilitarian edifice betrays no function, no identity of its own, being defined only by the absent surround. In that absence, I find the invitation to fiction delicious; that it is a former dirigible shed; black-and-white and yesterday. Back when newsreels wound-up moustached men, sending them in jerky strides and narrow trousers across the screen. Behind them, black lines and broken celluloid would conspire to bind down some rearing, half-inflated thing within its lair.

Heh. Well, maybe it was. Around me things have a way of working out like that; halfway between mocking and blessing.

Take this guy, for instance. He’s probably thinking I‘ve come to come to collect the truck and the cylinders. Which is true. Then he’s certainly going to worry that I’m going to scream about all the gas him and his little tart have just stolen. Which is not true, but he might be wishing that I had. And most immediately, he’s probably wondering how he’s going to explain the 3 giant helium balloons he has tied down to a cinderblock nearby: ‘just out for a stroll, Ma‘am, a boy and a buoyant bevy of balloons for company; fine weather we’re having for our inflatable friends, ain’t it?’. Sure.

Shit, why did I think of him as a boy? Is that how they all appear to me now? It’s not like I can’t pass for twenty-two on a good day (when was that last?). I’ve only been doing this for…well… long enough to remember each time. I’ll admit with this one there’s that slight awkwardness of youth in him, the strength not yet fettered by an adults frame. A practical aspect as well to be sure; an attempt at grown-up seriousness as if to boast he’s seen college and knows how to find a g-spot. But there’s always this moment of frightened not-quite-innocence when I feel like I should tell them not to take sweets from strangers. Heh. Sweets from strangers. I remember what I said to Harry last week. Something else to feel guilty about.

But I won’t relent with myself, so I come out with the one thing that will probably just mess him about most.

“Nice balloons”. I say, unsmiling, riding my long vowel with sarcasm, “If rather big balloons“.

I guess they’re four-footers; don’t think they sell them local. Naïve, I think, with American colour; the tones are too pure for the muddy light of a northern September. But he blanches, as if the incongruity was an accusation in itself.

“Umm, yeah.” Hardly the best opening, but he‘s nervous. “Listen, I don’t know, I didn’t mean to…. What happened is., like, mmm… y’see Kat had it all worked out and I couldn’t persuade her otherwise. I didn‘t want her to get hurt…”

My regard is sideways; careful not to give too much. I want to see how much he knows of himself, of what he wanted in this.

“I didn’t think anyone would mind. And I thought it would be fun. We just wanted to…. I guess I let myself go along….maybe I shouldn’t. Pretty stupid, huh?” His confession peters out. He doesn’t ask if I saw what happened, because he still can’t believe he did.

“Why did you come back?”. This is what I need to know.

He shuffles his weight between feet; how does unwanted ballast find the ground? “There were some left over. Kat had about thirty but I just thought, well, there might be enough too… just….I was curious how it worked… Shit, that sounds stupid. I don’t know why I thought…. Listen, I’m really sorry, maybe I can pay for the helium we used…”

“Hey. Shhhhh. It’s OK. Katie mentioned that she might be bringing a friend”. So she used thirty of those things!? Greedy girl; she’ll be lucky if she ever comes down. Phuh. Not my problem.

“Huh? You know Kat?” The false familiarity is disarming. “I mean, like, she never said and I assumed that she just….. like, this is cool with you, right?”

“Yes, of course its cool with me. You don’t think she just found them here, do you? Anyway, it was John, wasn‘t it….? I‘m Lucy.”.

“But she…oh…umm, no, sorry, I’m Sam. Sam Hepworth. Live opposite just across the meads; mates with Kat from college. Heh. I’m sorry; Like I didn’t think anyone else was involved. It was just the sort of thing she would keep secret, if you know her.”

He shakes his head; hoping that he had been the only confident. “I can’t believe she did it. Pretty crazy, huh?”

“She‘s a pretty wild sort of dreamer. Left you behind though, huh?”

“Yeah…. Just me and the remainder of the balloons… and I thought….not enough but….”

“I know how it feels, hon. Honest”. I smile wanly. The insinuated understanding that edges on sympathy. The ’oh-lets-be-grown-up-about-this’. Don’t think on the strange as it walks over to you, squeezes your shoulder. Don’t feel its claws under the skin till it has you.

“Hey. I’m glad you’re about, at least. Would you give me a hand to get these things back onto the truck. Come on, don’t just stand there.” I give him a little honesty with this. As he said, just him and the remnants. Things that need to be tidied up.

I slide my hand down his arm to take him by the elbow, feeling his hesitation stiffen in every sinew. I tug once, breaking his embarrassed inertia; drawing him in my forceful wake. Time to remove the evidence.

We handle the cylinders like corpses, racking them lengthways with their gauges mostly mute. Mote-lit dust below us makes the air almost solid as its echoes from the concrete; torpor-thick with spent helium. No longer noble, just inert. I see how he shifts wordless beneath them; sending his dreams away as they came. He masks his despair at being left behind with a stoic reluctance; the autarky of rejection. And in that moment of pity there is a goodness without grace, a necessity without sufficiency. I can see why she chose him. I can see why she left him behind.

The last few cylinders are live. I can feel the helium sticking to my fingers. Damn, I really have to do this now. Our eyes meet, once, he looks away. I want to let him know that all that remains is important; that the dregs hold their own flavour, bitter and strong and pure. That I won’t neglect him the way she did.

If he knew what was happening he’d run now.

I slip down from the tailgate too make my way across to where the three balloons still stand to attention. Then my hands are twisting sinuously with the cord; good strong cord that binds; drawing its buoyant captive down hand-over hand until I can submerge it with a half-lean. The red latex bubble concaves helplessly under me: but these days the sense of lift, however slight, makes me shiver. Wait for it. I fold my arms on top, taking a deliberate casualness to look over to him. I see how he exhales harshly; the effort spending itself in perspiration beneath sandy-dusked hair. He has these piercing-blue eyes; as if he had once kissed the sky and it left her mark upon him. Well, perhaps it will.

”Here, I want to show you something”, I announce, brightly. And he comes, all puzzlement, allure and half steps. I smile, he smiles. Just the right moment; I lean back. Unbidden, the scarlet balloon surges up between us, catching him on the very tip of his nose with a rubbery thwop, ascending like floating jelly.

“Ooops, sorry“, I giggle, with that teasing edge of laughter to betray me. “Where did I catch you?”. The sky-bound string demarcates the line between us, daring me to break it. Before he answers I take the half-stride towards him, my nose nuzzling up beneath the soft stubble of his chin, lashes working their long lure against him. His breath is held with the moment edging upwards, out of control.

“I need… need to keep tighter hold of these things”. The void between our bodies foams with possibility. I feel my hands brush against his, seeking…what? I loop the string about his wrists; once, twice; three times the charm entangled.

“Tight hold indeed”. The hairs prickle under his lip; broken and salt-sweet as we suckle. I spin out the moment; letting his eyes fade with mine. Through night-in-day, our clasped hands draw down together, a prayer against the weakness of flesh, forgotten. The touch is iridescence on the curve of my hips. I sense him respond in turn, shifting; the still-indrawn breath tense through his body. Likewise, within me, I feel the secret bubbles percolating throughout; boiling from suspension. I want to do this with him.

Our lips brush, conjoin. The long still moment. Inwardly, I say the word. Outwardly, I exhale.

For a long moment my breath is flying, fluting between his lips. A thin whistle. I feel the press of his masculine resistance as I push against it; firm like latex brought to the test. I hold the pressure, pushing him to the edge of nature, then beyond.

In the first instant he does not comprehend. His eyes are open, surprise falling from them. The feeling too alien for knowledge, my kiss too sugared to pick out the new flavour.

I have the second breath; drawn and spent faster than he can react (the first three are the charm). Gas and gain; the pressure elicits stretch, expending itself into new volume. This time I feel something. I think he feels it too; his hands are pushed forward between us as I clasp them with my own. He tries to jerk back, to push me away, but I hold him with both arms locked about his back. Maybe not stronger than him, but stronger than he reckoned. For the critical moment his hands are entangled by the balloon-string wrapped about them, whilst mine entangle only with his belt (already taut) and pull myself onto him.

Third breath. No subtlety this time; just a dreadful haste. I follow him as he recoils, sealing our lips. I blow, and he balloons.

The first sign is his cheeks bulging comically as he tries to deny the flood (it’s no use, it doesn‘t work like that). But then the lines of his body curve in imitation, his neck thickening, then his chest barrelling like a weightlifter (but what weight is there to lift?). My tongue chases the gases within, tasting his lush firmness. The strange air flexes his shoulders, elbows; reflexes suborned to the billowing pressure within. I feel the tremble as his hands finally break the string; but now they are slow, clumsy-thick. His legs kick, once, before straddling out. The angular aspects of his body smoothes into curved anonymity; clothing drawn tight like a second skin.

I draw back, my hands on knees, breathing heavily and regarding him with hooded eyes. He looks like a starfish, stranded on land. Dry breaths gulp air, disbelieving; clenched hands seeking the real.

“It’s….OK” I tell him. “This is just because…I can’t leave people behind in these affairs. Don’t fight it. Me. Don’t fight me. It will be easier for us both.”

Damn it, he tries anyway; a pathetic waddle. Where does he think he is going like that? I overtake him before he’s gone two steps, pulling him down, back. He paws at me weakly, but his stiffened limbs are treacherous with pressure, drawn taut against his will. We topple against the grey floor. I feel its unyielding ridges and imperfections as we roll at crazy angles.

Then I am straddling him, letting my weight tell. He’ll be glad of it soon enough. Splay of hands either side of his head, with my loosed hair draped about us, letting him know he is mine. He gives a startled little “Bmm-ph”, but I hush him with a kiss.

This time it’s faster; the whistle deepening swiftly to a resonant hiss. Oval eyes form between the buttons of his shirt as they edge apart. His chest peers out, wisps of hair drawn across its smoothness, aglow with a strange translucency as I lean over him. I feel his roundness pressing up beneath me, my thighs momentarily concaving into the softness it offers. Then his expansion firms, forcing my legs aside, like I’m riding a beach ball in the pool, my knees hanging free to each side.

The first button pops just over his navel; its escape smothered between our bodies. Then a second, and a third tickles against me. The pale fabric parts about his expanding shoulders with a soft ripping. He thrashes, dryly against the artificial stone, finding no purchase. With a last effort his fingers half-clench against my side; otiose and graspless. But my breath is the hidden pressure that masters him. Biceps bulge uselessly in a parody of strength, bound outwards as the gas seeks each corner of his body. Below, I can just see his legs stiffen and angle, ill-fitted chinos now bunched up about his butt and crotch as it fights an invisible seamstress.

The hissing fades above the trilling of his heartbeat, outracing my own. For a long moment, I nuzzle against him, the last of my exhalation stirring the air aside his neck. Here the scent of his maleness is mingled with something alike latex, fear, curiosity. Some secret tension in us both mirrors excitement. I find myself trembling unbidden at its reflection. Soon.

I wonder how long it will last this time. To be honest. I can’t hold onto many relationships. I have difficulty holding a good partner down.

I stand up, awkwardly dismounting to send his body slowly gyrating on some unseen pivot. Panting, with my hands on knees, I regard his rigid form. Spread-eagled in the an unseen grip of gas he resembles a discarded doll, neglected by some careless girl long flown. A draught of memory stirs the floor between us, compelling him to rock sorrowfully. Lonesome and longing; his gaze passes mine, reaching above for the girl who left him. But of course. The balloons are still overhead. Perhaps he guesses what‘s coming. That he might be with her, again. Maybe.

He tries to say something. His mouth opens and closes like a goldfish. Swallowed words and gas bind him to our secret.

“Shhhhh”. I tell him, crouching by his side to hold the confidence with a touch. His eyes try to follow me, though his head remains rooted, pulled down into his body. My fingertips track the curve of his torso, feeling his skin tautened to an elastic sheen, resilient but yielding yet. I pluck his belt open, then reach down loose his shoes. One-two unbuckle my-shoe, three-four, blow me up more…. His trousers are a little harder; they squeak and cling with static fervour, snaggle at assuming bulges. But I’m gentle around the top. Honest. This is a kindness really.

Reduced to just boxers, tented boxers, I think he whimpers a little (or was it a moan of anticipation?). I like to rationalise it for him, but it’s easy to be misunderstood in our situation. But I want him to understand me.

“I want to thank you, properly” I tell him, hooking both thumbs impishly at my waist, “for being kind to Katie. I know it’s not easy, being left behind like this. No one should be.”

Crossed arms pull my tank-top over my head, drawing hair in an upwards waterfall. Splashed around my shoulders, it feels good. Clean colour. Like breathing for the first time today; a last honest exhalation between lies. The tension leaves me now; the decision made. I am as a snake shedding its skin; functional and needy as one, becoming someone else. A someone whose denim-buttons flicks wide, so gravity and girlish wriggles can begin sliding them down. I’m not embarrassed to say that underneath my knickers are blush-pink, edged with moisture. I think he sees it.

“I want to share some of her dream with you”. I pull their cotton binding aside and straddle him.

The first touch is cold electric; a shiver caught across cooling skin, smoothed by pneumatic hands. Then the flush of warmth and contact draws out the red-veined heat; the indrawn breath and pulse of life. My fingers glide across the expanse of his chest, massaging strokes along the firmness of his shoulder blades. Eased down to lie upon him, my nipples brush against his tautness, to perk and firm in sympathy. Part of me is stroke-pushing down, down, grinding hips seeking some known mystery. Letting my secret moisture touch….

Within him, the thin hissing resumes, but this time holds a thin keening edge; bringing some new element cruel in its levity. This time the inflation is steady, relentless, irresistible to us both. I let my thighs spread, rebounding from his springy sides with toes that scrape on concrete, ballet-dancing. A teasing circumspection; I approach the truth of him sideways. Yet always compassing about his point, feeling native bounciness give way to that insistent pressure that forces my legs akimbo.

And not aside only, but thrust strangely upwards. Beneath me, he rises, not quite naturally. A bulging strength forms, rigid and unbidden between bloated limbs. His head falls back behind his swelling chest, now resembling some monstrous pool raft. His eyes alone are visible over the smoothed cusp of his nipples. Cast up, imploring, to the girl who rides him, masters him, makes him hers.

My toes pirouette in dust-tracks, leaving the floor, leaf-weight now barely indenting the hardness of his inflated belly. His limbs likewise lose focus; now bulged and receding comically, a hazed definition above the elbow as they are drawn into the expanding sphere of his body. How big? Four foot? Five? I can’t tell. My senses are drugged with exhilaration at the expanding boyish bubble of gas between my legs. Its hollowness seems to echo in the deep lush that runs through my arcing body like a river, finding its course, shaping me to his flows.

“Think of it as helium” I whisper. “My moisture. Pure, pure, helium. Like in a balloon. It‘s my gift to you”.

I think he likes it. His pulse is thick with fear and excitement, his masculinity mixing with my secret scent, volatile and buoyant. I sip it like a philtre; a wild catalyst that precipitates the helium from within me; refining the pure from base elements, the sky from the ground. I am greedy with heat and need to swallow him. Each draught brings a delicious drunkenness that slows my motions. Each movement and rocking impulse pulls from some hidden intuition of bone and blood. The pulse of gas rolls throughout, suddenly reactive; I can feel it fizzing on the end of my tongue, in each feminine fold.

The pink opacity of his body is overwhelming. I instinctively shift my balance as he rotates backwards, 3 stumpy legs now seeking the sky. I feel like a ridiculous rodeo rider bucking her steed (balloon-wrangling!), my weight barely restraining him. His head, now invisible, rests somewhere beyond the inflating expanse of his tummy. Kiss the ground goodbye whilst you’re down there hon. I‘ll deal with things up here.

His male presence is swollen and bobbing free atop his rounded form. The expanded hollowness feels so firm and right beneath my perking bum. Nestling, wanting, needing. My pressure down meets a growing pressure up, and I know what I have stirred in him will take me too. So softly we ache for each other.

Then I feel it filling me, deeply penetrating, an air-anchor. I rotate about the length, strange tides now buoying us both. As if it were possible, the gas-growl grows deeper; slow and sensuous and irresistable. I draw him up, plucking aside, within and against the secret cusp of being. Anointing with the trace of intimate moisture. A soft moan pitches its way through us, an ethereal companion to arousal. He’s still trying to speak; vowels occluded by arousal. But words are only breath, and I have the gift there.

“S‘ok” I gasp-whisper. “S’ok…. just a little taste… it’s like honey…. helium…. sweeter… lighter-than… air….”

It occurs to me in a thin moment of clarity this may be the first time a woman has held him like this. I hope the experience doesn‘t put him off.

The shadow of his inflated body shifts against the ground, almost translucent. His lift becomes more and more noticeable; defining us upwards. We start to turn, the slightest breeze now a cradle. My body locks into sympathetic twitches with my feet astride him; the moment of buoyancy the moment of thrall. Softly, gently as a bubble, we rise up, into the air.

“Fuh…fuck……floa….floating….fuh..”. Neither of us are making much sense. Don’t look so smug, you wouldn’t either in this position.

The tightness of his inflated body magnifies each flexing motion, each stroke of our intimacy. He’s so big, gone from boy to buoyant. The heated forge of my thighs rebounds from the bulbous up-ness of his loins as it hammers against me. An unyielding emptiness yet infinitely full, matching the need that yawns within me.

I am riding him like a errant balloon. Higher. Lighter. The walls of the shed falling about us. Five foot. Then ten. The arch of iron beams frames the palest blue where the roof surrenders to the sky.

God, he’s so light; I can’t resist him; my body shivers with the blossoming pleasure, the exclamation catching in my throat. My head arcs back, a world narrowing about me, to a point of him that drives up and through my being. A pivot through which the pendulum of my life swings; coloured clouds above more real than those beyond. Gasps and shivers encompass my being as we rise through them, their latex caress clinging as I flush and writhe. I think I scream a little. It really is quite bonk-a-licious.

And, we’re still rising, I’m still being boy-ballooned. Twenty foot. Towards the ceiling. Should try to avoid the broken section ’cos…..Mmmm…after-trembles…chasing themselves over me, breaking concentration. Not-going-to-concentrate, much less steer-but-maybe-if-I-just-push…

….Oh wow….oh yeah, pushing was definitely good. Naughty tingles; you just won’t let go of me, will you?

Oh god. Phew. That was good. I cradle forward, reverberating against his inflated bulk, dark hair flicked in tracks of perspiration across my floaty fuckbuddy. I can feel him still strained within me, driven wild by my blossom yet constrained by the same strange gas that makes him rise. I suddenly feel guilty for not sharing it with him. Some part of me yet holds him clenched, sealing the burgeoning pressure within him through the afterglow of my wriggling orgasm. Unthinking, I giggle madly.

“No popping now…..at least, not too soon” A breathless promise. “Maybe later, if you’re good.”

I crouch, one hand lifted upwards to ward the approaching ceiling. Drawn close, it is a jumble of corrugated iron sheeting and glass, green-veined with age. We nestle gently against it, feeling the forgotten metal warmed by the noon sun mixed with our own shining. To one side the sky looms through an irregular hole, perhaps 10 foot across. And barely 3 foot away. Too big. Too close. I should have been more careful. Delicious as Sam is, he’s buoyant with all the intensity of innocence and it’s not like I’ve got a lot of ballast at the moment…

“Don’t try to move hon.“ I whisper, wiggling my hand like a wafting leaf even though he can’t see it. “You could break another window and I’d have to let you float right up through the hole and goodness knows if you’d ever come down.”

Of course; I don’t know how he manages to do it. Perhaps strange desperation, trying to get away from the pitiless sky. Perhaps the wind eddies and twists on the lip of this inverted abyss. Perhaps the gas, now treacherous, seeks the perihelion of its being. Perhaps part of me wants it too.

He rocks backwards, and of course a second later, forward again with the inevitability of a balloon jerked on a string. Not helping. Typical bloke. To hold balance is effortless, (I have done this before, in case you can’t tell), but the roof escapes my grip. In a long heartbeat we bounce down, linger suspended, and drift up again.

Boooiiiing. His legs, rising behind me, settle against the crimson-rust of an iron arch. His ballooned body dully reverberating, skids sideways in an air suddenly turbulent, or playful. Helplessly mounted upon him, I feel his buoyancy pressing me up against the glass. For a long, heart-stopping moment we teeter near the yawning gap. Wobble. Hold. The sun beats on my naked spine through the thin glass, as if scrutinising this strange sight under a microscope. I let myself breathe. OK. We can do this. Just push us back, towards the centre. I envy the balloons still below us. Their tethers. Why didn’t I think of that? Was this what I wanted?

I feel the glass shift above me. Whoops.

The musty plane creaks from its lodgings; falls. My drawn breath clutches at it; gravity wrests it away from my anticipation. Sun-spent mirror, you plunge and splash like verdant diamonds, tears.

And up we go. A girl just can’t help it, y‘know.

For half a moment I have a choice; of dismounting onto a steel beam of the roof. But I realise I won’t let him go; it would be leaving myself behind. So no choice at all, really.

The light cuts us in half as we lift through the gap; globe and shadow, balloon and babe. The cool breeze wisps about my toes, the sun arced hot across my naked shoulders. The unreal air; the mundane ground. I am caught between extremities that leave me feeling poised and alive, a dynamic held in tension. Sprung astride a guy-who-is-a-bubble and rising higher and higher, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps it is.

I need to understand that. Remnants, like discarded balloons, tangle together, hold, rise.

I admit it feels good but damn. How am I going to get out of this?