My eyes opened to the feeling of someone else’s presence. Someone was in the room.
Yes, I hadn’t imagined it, I heard footsteps. I turned my head and saw a tall girl heading toward the couch against the opposite wall. More precisely, what I saw was a bare backside belonging to a very tall girl, close to two meters. The backside was tanned, shaped like a peach, and jiggled softly with each step. I stared at it, unable to look away, until the girl reached the couch and curled up there like a cat — soft and silent. Catching her eye, I realized the girl was naked, completely naked, and that staring was a bad idea. I blushed and dropped my gaze to my own fingernails.
About a minute later, it dawned on me that I was lying there just as naked as the day I was born. Scanning the floor with my eyes and suppressing a wave of disgust at the sight of my greasy jeans, stinking socks, and none-too-fresh t-shirt and underwear scattered here and there, I decided against getting dressed. I rolled onto my stomach and thought: «I’ll rinse my clothes out in the tub in a bit. They’ll dry on the partition, and everything’ll be fine.»
I glanced sideways at the girl. She smiled at the corner of her mouth.
«Awkward,» I sighed, and changed my mind. «I’ll wash up once she looks away.»
Why hide it. I was embarrassed by my scrawny body, made of angles, knobs and hollows. A ready-made model for Picasso the cubist. I was raised on potatoes and bread, since the family of an engineer at a Ural research institute got meat and butter on ration coupons, and of all the delicacies there were tomatoes, strawberries and raspberries from six sotkas of garden and vegetable plot. So I grew up skinny and ungainly. But the girl was beautiful. Tall, something around a hundred and ninety centimeters, and – I swear on my mother! – a dashing share of those centimeters went into legs, slender, straight, as if turned by the Lord Himself. Studying them, I understood the friend who used to say: «I can forgive a girl anything – an ugly face, no breasts, a rotten character and being a bitch, so long as she has good legs.»
This one had Gorgeous Legs, capital G, capital L. As for the backside, I’ve already mentioned it — a flawless creation. I’m no expert on waistlines, but there wasn’t a spare gram of fat there either. Her chest seemed small at first — two little bumps. But looking closer, I saw a firm, decisive shape to them.
Her face, I couldn’t say it was the peak of beauty. Gorgeous and refined, and at the same time simple and approachable. What was it about her? The round gray eyes, slightly puffy at the upper lids, looking at the world cheerfully and kindly? Or the nose, starting from the bridge like a classic Roman nose, straight all the way down to the tip, which stuck out just slightly, making its owner look either like a snub-nosed Roman or a straight-nosed aristocrat? Maybe it was the childishly full lips, fiery red, looking ready to break into a wide smile at any second? Or maybe the girl was saved by the shape of her prominent cheekbones, giving her face a round look, somewhere between a cat and a Tatar at once?
I don’t know.
One thing I could say for certain – a beauty. On top of the above, the girl had light brown hair, which she often brushed back, and small hands and feet, out of proportion with her height. Her shoe size was no more than a thirty-five. And the most important thing of all – the skin of her body was smooth, flawless and tanned to a degree the eyes could not believe. That kind of color you see only in the glossy brochures of five-star hotels. Only there, against the backdrop of desperately blue pools, do bronze-bodied models in bikinis parade, handing out smiles of «Welcome!», their skin tinted by a sorcerer of a retoucher, calling and beckoning, beckoning and calling.
I stroked her body with a delighted gaze, slid over its curves and toppled to the edge of infatuation. My head spun with oxytocin. Down below, at the crossing of the limbs, everything clenched in anticipation of happiness.
— W-what’s your name? — I asked, stammering slightly, trying to put out the fire in my chest.
The girl gave me an indifferent glance, got up off the couch, and, with a switch that appeared from who knows where, drew a line across the carpet, splitting the room into two halves. Then she tossed the switch aside and wagged her index finger back and forth: don’t cross!
The excitement that had been building toward something more faded away to nothing.
«Strange railroad tie,» I thought, and stood up. «We’ll manage without you somehow. What’s for breakfast?»
Grass again – vegetables, fruit, berries and a little bread. Fortified with carbohydrates, which were beginning to pall, I glanced at the girl, patted my stomach and sighed: – Well, then.
Thought about it, and added: — Good enough!
