Beyonce: The Waiting Game

I hate waiting for boys to text back. If ever there were a way to drive me to the very depths of despair and then to the heights of insanity, it would be this. I try everything to divert my mind from the obvious—he’s not going to text back, or if he does it’s to give bad news.

I pace the kitchen, turning Tracy Chapman up on the stereo, sliding barefoot on the smooth wooden floor. Feels like palms against my soles, just for a second. I unsheathe bananas, just to imagine, and eat them ritualistically, as if tasting him.

I scramble eggs furiously, beating back my doubts as I work on my wrist action. Serve with ham, granary loaf, Harrod’s breakfast tea. I close the curtains and turn the heating up. After I finish my food I pour a glass of champagne, splash with pulpy orange, to treat myself, and contemplate running a bath.

I nibble on something every hour, feeling my insides growling empty.

It helps to have distractions at times like these. An old flame, an old friend, an old fuck. The Three Musketeers of the waiting game. I text them all, and see if I can either flirt, laugh or get laid.

Today the flame is in London, burning quietly and too far away to get me hot. The old friend has boyfriend troubles of his own, so can’t offer his humorous sidekickery tonight. The old fuck, though, is reliable. He always is. His reliability is the only thing that prevents him being boyfriend material. Who wants a boyfriend you can predict?

He turns up at the cinema, blonde, young, but willing to suck you off at a bus-stop or in a nightclub toilet for half a pill. Qualities I admire in a man. I tote a bag bursting with half the off-licence spirits shelf, and we pick the emptiest, deadest film—the latest showing.

It’s almost too easy, but we sit at the back, and for a long time no one else enters the theatre. Then one more person enters: probably a member of staff just finished his shift, wanting to catch the only film he’s not yet seen twenty times already. He sits near the middle, back to us. Setting a challenge.

Within minutes my jeans are round my thighs, and blondie has his hands on my knees, his mouth round the beak of my cock, sliding it quickly to the back of his throat. Ten minutes in and I pin him to the floor on the back row, heaving inside him, and we come among popcorn and beer cans. The thrill of getting caught brings us to it faster than we planned, and we shift in the dark, sliding on clothes and getting kernels in uncomfortable nooks and crannies.

We return to our seats and watch the rest of the film. It’s surprisingly good.

We bid farewell to each other at the front of the cinema, and we make our own way home in the dark.

The next morning I wake to a text message from the boy: of course he wants to meet up again. How am I fixed for Friday? I think about it. I think about the old flame returning on his train in the downpour. Maybe I’m not that interested, after all.