California Dreaming

      Senta Holland

      The blood-red skirt was spread out all around me. Silk cooled my shoulder blades. I felt like the angel of lust with wings of vermilion.

      Or maybe it was just the music he was playing …

      My legs were bound safely to the bed.

      My arms tethered wide so I could fly.

      Lust streamed up from my ankles, all the length of my legs. My thighs trembled. My vulva lips stood big and round.

      My hips ached with fire.

      Just the slightest touch with the tip of his finger on my clitoris …

      ‘Senta,’ said the stranger, ‘you are beautiful.’

      I breathed a deep sigh into the delicate veil on my face.

       You Said That All the Men You Knew

      The sun takes its time to set over the Pacific. Particularly when viewed from Nepenthe, the fabled new-age restaurant high on the promontory in the middle of the Big Sur. Up there, where you can see rows and rows of rugged cliffs running north to Monterey and south to Don’t-Even-Want-To-Know-Where, time stretches both ways, too.

      Or maybe it’s just the legacy of five decades of well-heeled Californian weekend hippies.

      Four of them had driven me up that afternoon in the beat-up maintenance truck from Esalen Retreat Center further south, where we were all working the grounds and kitchen by day in order to finance exploring our spirituality at night. They were lovely boys, really. Maybe some other time …

      Right now, I was waiting for someone very different.

      ‘Be careful,’ the guys said, ‘he’s a stranger.’ And drove off.

      Yes, yes, I thought. And you were strangers too, three weeks ago.

      Ever since I had announced my plans to travel around the world by myself, back in London, many months back, disapproving voices popped up everywhere, warning me about the perils of strangers.

      And those were the people who thought I was just travelling.

      I can’t imagine what they would have said if they knew that the main purpose of this journey was to find love. Lovers. Lovers all over the globe.

      Sometimes, when the voices insisted, I got fed up enough to present them with the statistics. ‘The most dangerous man you will ever meet is the man you live with’, I said. They didn’t hear me.

      By the time I was waiting on the terrace at Nepenthe, suffused with vermilion shadows from the huge sun spilling its light all the way from Japan, I had had quite a bit of experience with strangers.

      And with lovers, too.

       Stairway to Heaven

      I didn’t know who was going to come up the steep Nepenthe stairs, hopefully not breathing too heavily. All I knew was his name, Simon, and his love of music, and of the New Yorker magazine. And some other shared interests, of course.

      The first time I got to the cliff of the Big Sur, the very first day, I ran through the scent of the pine trees towards the soft moist ocean, and I saw two huge grey whales.

      They surfaced just as I got there, ascending from the blue waters in a long elegant arc that looked absolutely effortless but must have challenged all their enormous muscle strength.

      Then they submerged again, in perfect sync, without so much as a splash. Power and control.

      Was this what I expected from Simon as I was waiting in my four-inch heels (slipped on surreptitiously for good luck after the boys in the van left)? Was I waiting for the Tall Dark Stranger that every fortune teller had promised me?

      Mobile reception is very bad in the Big Sur. So all I could do was watch the gathering shadows. And the door.

      I had become quite good at recognising who my suitor was when he entered the place of our rendezvous. I always tried to be there first, and this time I had positioned myself carefully, on the terrace, just outside the big glass doors to the well-lit restaurant inside. I could see him before he could see me.

      As always, the stranger looked different from any way I could have imagined him.

      Simon – I was sure it was him – was neither dark nor particularly tall. He was slim and slight, with a stylishly trimmed beard and somewhat thinning hair up top.

      Good thing I was sitting down with my four-inch heels.

      He looked around, quickly, almost as if he was an animal of prey rather than the big bad predator his online name had suggested, and when he didn’t immediately see anyone who matched my description and (somewhat partial) picture, he seemed to shrink a little. I saw a familiar expression on his face. ‘Life has stood me up again.’

       Hello, Ruby in the Dust

      Then I moved, uncrossed my legs, flicked my hand languorously through my long hair, showing him just the shadow of my outline against the darkening sky.

      It worked. His peripheral vision turned him into a hunter again.

      He crossed to the glass doors and stood on the threshold. His eyes found mine.

      But then he looked around again, not sure. Could this woman really be the one from the site?

      I liked that.

      Softly, I called his name. ‘Simon …’

      He looked back at me. Surprise, recognition, adjustment of expectations and then a secret delight that muscled itself all across his face in a big wide smile. Yes, this woman was real, yes, this woman wasn’t a freak and you know what, on even a first look, he felt he’d hit the jackpot.

      I’d seen that kind of smile before, on the face of a stranger, here in California. To me, surprising. Men didn’t smile at me like that in London. Was the woman he saw really me? Every time I saw that smile, I smiled back.

      I crossed my legs to bring my beautiful heels into view. Just as the outside lights went on.

      Soft lights, of course, no pollution. If you scrunched up your eyes, you could just see the outlines of the hills. It must be getting cold