Sunday 11 May 2014

Story 28 - Waking Up in the Middle of the Night Story

It was a gradual feeling of realisation that I’d been moving around, changing positions for at least the past twenty, thirty minutes; though I couldn’t be sure. My damp half of the duvet was completely drenched in sweat; bladder aching with a dull and strangely comfortable pain; which funnily enough, I wasn’t so desperate to relieve at once.

Instead I lay there on the edge of cloud-cuckoo-land, trying to remember what the hell kind of world I’d only just been dreaming about a few moments before - swirling into and out of semi-consciousness, shapes and voices moved slowly away, barely out of grasp.

My girlfriend on the bed next to me was giving off heat like some kind of burning radiation device. My own personal living, breathing hot water bottle. The last thing I needed in the middle of summer in a place like this. And then, as the sweat continued to ooze from my pores I began to notice a familiar buzzing in the room. The high pitched wheezing noise of a mosquito we must have missed earlier on. Now there was no way of me getting back to sleep.

I picked up my Casio watch from the tiled floor beside me and pressed the light.

2:33.

This meant… not counting her reading, me reading and our usual goodnight, I’d been asleep for hardly an hour.

I moved on to my back, then again to the front, flattening my face against the pillow. Then I was pushing the palm of my right hand against the smooth floor, hoping for some of the coolness to filter through my body, allowing my bare foot to do the same and it helped a little; but not enough. I needed a cigarette. A glass of milk. A piss. I needed to get up, out of this bed, this room.

Sliding silently out from under the duvet, I grabbed a t-shirt, glanced briefly at the lump in the bed to check my girlfriend was still asleep, carefully opened the bedroom door and before I knew it was standing in front of the fridge in the kitchen searching for milk, water, some juice, a beer, something to quench my sudden thirst. All I could find however were the remains of my girlfriend’s unfinished vodka and lemonade; the tumbler carefully covered with cling-film, preventing, I supposed, the last few remaining bubbles from escaping so easily.

I ripped the film from the glass and downed the contents, looking around afterwards for anything else to drink, rechecking the fridge before settling for a cigarette and mildly painful piss in the bathroom.

I ran the tap, opened the window, flicked ash into the sink and outside intermittently … considered risking a couple of gulps of tap water before deciding not to and taking a few deep breaths of outside air instead.

I dragged on the end of my cigarette, wondering what to do next. I didn’t feel like going back to bed. Maybe a bit of TV for a while would go down well. Though without anything to quench my thirst … possibly I was gonna have to think about hydrating myself as a priority.

I flicked through the TV channels anyway, being careful to hit hard on the decrease volume button as soon as the screen lit up. News, a cooking programme, shopping channel, some girls playing pool in bikinis, another girl telling me about her likes and dislikes whilst suggestively playing with her bra-strap, baseball, more baseball, wrestling, yesterday’s basketball game, news … back to the girl telling me about her interests who was now down to just a bra and panties. I gazed at the monitor knowing exactly what was gonna happen next but waited anyway. This girl liked long walks on the beach, eating sushi and going to the spa. She had a tattoo of a purple rose on her thigh, long fake eyelashes, deep blue eyes, short thick dyed yellow hair and red underwear. She had the thumb of her left hand hooked around the top of her panties while the other hand was waving around in rhythm to her giggles as she let me in to knowing all about her secret love of swimming naked.

And there it was, straight to adverts just as her hands were moving up to behind her bra: Adverts with lots of other girls waiting for my call or text. So I switched off the TV, knowing that yet another girl would only be appearing after the break, all ready to tease me into reaching for my credit card which I had no desire or need to be getting myself into.

I returned to the bathroom to grab my cigarettes, pulled a pair of jeans off the back of the sofa; checked the pockets for money, finding a couple of decent notes inside. I took another look in the bedroom to see if my girlfriend was still asleep; which I guessed from the look of the lump that she was; but I whispered, “Just popping down the 7-11, be back in a while,” anyway.