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.»
No point hiding it. I was self-conscious about my scrawny body, all angles, knobby bones, and hollows. A ready-made model for a Picasso cubist portrait. I’d been raised on potatoes and bread, since an engineer’s family at a Ural research institute got meat and butter on ration coupons, and the only delicacies going were tomatoes and strawberries from a six-hundred-square-meter garden plot. So I’d grown up skinny and gangly. But the girl was gorgeous. Tall, maybe even a bit too tall, something like a hundred and ninety centimeters, but — I swear on my mother! — a good chunk of those centimeters went into legs, slender, straight, as if turned on a lathe by the Lord Himself. Studying them, I finally understood a buddy of mine who used to say: «I can forgive a girl anything — an ugly face, no chest, a rotten temper, being a total bitch, as long as she’s got 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 everything else, the girl had light brown hair, which she kept brushing back to keep it out of her face, and small hands and feet, out of proportion with her height. Her shoe size couldn’t have been more than a thirty-five. And the most important thing of all — her skin was smooth, flawless, and tanned to a degree that was hard to believe. That kind of color you only ever see in the glossy brochures of five-star hotels. Only there, against the backdrop of impossibly blue swimming pools, do bronze-skinned models in bikinis parade around, offering up smiles of «Welcome!», their skin, touched up by some sorcerer of a retoucher, calling out and beckoning, beckoning and calling out.
I ran an admiring gaze over her body, slid over its curves, and tipped right over the edge into infatuation. My head spun with oxytocin. Down below, where my limbs met, 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. Fueled up on carbohydrates, which were starting to grow tiresome, I glanced at the girl, patted my stomach, and sighed: — Well, then.
Thought about it, and added: — Good enough!
