Free Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1 by Sonia Paige

into me slowly at first. Took his time. I kept my eyes shut. I didn’t want to know what I was doing. There was only one man in the world I wanted to make love with, and he was a thousand miles away. I felt this guy probing and his tight body pressing on top of me but I couldn’t picture his face. I wondered what would happen if someone came along the beach.’
    â€˜Fucking in broad daylight,’ says Mandy, ‘That’s always the best.’
    Gradually he started to wind like a spring. I could feel his muscles tense. His hands were pinning down my long hair on the sand on either side of my head. So I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. I lay still. He pushed like he was trying to reach through me to something he’d lost long ago. I couldn’t even hear his breathing.
    â€˜He never lost his cool,’ I tell them, ‘right up to the moment of truth when he let his juices fly. With a final flourish. As he rolled off, I stirred and caught a glimpse of gingery hairs under his arm. It was only then I realized there had not been one kiss.’
    â€˜They don’t get it, do they?’ says Mandy.
    â€˜They just think of themselves,’ says Debs.
    â€˜When I opened my eyes fully I noticed Sigurd’s rucksack bulging with food outside his tent. I wondered when he had got back and what he had seen. I felt uncomfortable. I put my bikini top back on and went to swim in the sea.’
    â€˜But was it good, babe?’ asks Mandy.
    â€˜I don’t know what that means. You could say he was good at it. But I didn’t come. I never came with him. Not all the times he rolled onto me in the sand or in the tent at night after I moved down there. It was as if there was a wall inside me, and I was watching from the other side.’
    Waiting for the one I would never see again. As if my body wasn’t mine any more. Joris never asked me if I came. He was polite and careful not to hurt me. He even laughed sometimes when we were all three high on the hash tea, but he never kissed me and he never looked me in the eye. Maybe he had his own reasons for being blank. Perhaps he had his own memories. I never asked him. His English wasn’t that good anyway.
    â€˜So you shacked up with him?’ says Debs.
    I shrug. ‘I had nothing better to do. I moved out of my rented room and brought my few possessions down to share his tent. Summer dress, shorts, and most of the rest was books, all tucked at the far end next to the sleeping bag, in the wicker basket I had brought from Athens.
    â€˜â€œYou come to Greece for a picnic?” Joris asked me once with his slow smile.
    â€˜Sometimes they talked about their travels. Joris had been at university and dropped out. They knew each other from their home town of Nijmegen. Sigurd worked there as a car mechanic. They had set off together, ten months before.
    â€˜I asked them why they left. Joris replied “In Nijmegen, everything is the same. Every day is the same. Work, house, family. No. No. That is not for me.” He looked up at the sky. “ Ik wil vrijheid . Want free.”
    â€˜They had worked here and there as they travelled, and saved a bit of money. They had brought the dope with them from Turkey, the stash was kept in a plastic bag inside the bottom of Sigurd’s sleeping bag. Sigurd, the younger one, spoke even less than Joris. He had even less English. But sometimes when he was stoned he made practical jokes. Like putting the billy can on his head and pretending to be a policeman finding us on the beach. That was because they had a dictatorship, a junta of colonels, in Greece at that time. They sometimes cut tourists’ hair by force, so it was a joke with an edge. Sigurd liked to find different ways to get into the sea, like rolling down the beach, running backwards, hopping on one leg. Sometimes he blew the campfire smoke into my face with a childlike smile.
    â€˜We were all so brown we couldn’t