Wild Honey
By DF Lewis
Wild honey was said to grow over the flanks of those hills. At first, he thought it was a joke more suitable for April Fool's Day than Christmas Eve.
The snow, having spent itself, it seemed, he decided to leave the hotel and make a foray, with lunchbox and binoculars, into the higher reaches of the hills. But the question remained, would he take Lucy? She had been obstrepreous for the last few days: understandable, he supposed, in this period leading up to the festive season.
He took breakfast in his own room, as he didn't want to face her quite yet; the food, itself, was one of the main reasons this particular hotel was chosen and he lingered over the curly toast which he dipped liberally into the golden curds of wild honey. His belly still worked upon the coddled eggs interleaved with rashers that had already gone down. The leaf infusions lodged at the back of his nose as well as coating his insides with a sunny morning sheen.
Eventually, he walked to the window and saw that the sun, having been in the sky for at least two hours, was indeed brightly echoed by the snow it was slowly melting. The hills looked so inviting that he jabbed his legs up and down in boyish rehearsal.
Ah, there was Lucy, loitering by the outside swimming pool, looking desultorily into the water. There would no doubt still be the thinnest veneer of night ice. She'd probably not bothered with breakfast and was kicking her heels till he came down.
He had known her since she was a mite. She was one of those girls who never really grew up, but he had watched her body actually becoming bigger, the hips widening, the bosom pushing out - he laughed, she was still at the age when she would self-consciously look down at her chest from time to time, to see if it was still getting bigger or maybe to ascertain that her incomprehensible T-shirt was not rucking up.
At first, he had been treated like a father, for after all the difference in their ages indicated that this would have been the easiest one-to-one relationship into which to slip. And, indeed, he considered her a daughter, even though he had no recollection of her babyhood. To be a REAL father, one needed to have dealt out smacks and changed the nappies: that certainly would have given some natural bond. Not having got his hands dirty, as it were, he felt a fraud...
He then went to disrupt the bathroom (the state of which would later cause the hotel chambermaid to shake her head), pulled on his cricket slacks without thought and, later, without remembering. That's life, he supposed, events and processes which just went by without touching the sides.
He needed an abrupt urination which, in cricket slacks, was a precarious business.
Lucy was by now lounging within one of the huge easy chairs that the hotel had seen fit to scatter around the foyer. Her legs were stretched out, skirt hitched to the upper thighs in an unladylike fashion, but he admired, without really being seen to be looking, their shapely but slender length. She was flirting with everybody who happened to be passing, just by means of her sulky pose, he thought. Her hair had been let out since last night's dinner, for then he had enjoyed the severe, but sophisticated, way she had carved a head of hair worthy of a Fine Art museum; the butterflies that decorated it seemed to give off smoky breath, that was indeed the fine wisps that the clips had not succeeded in holding back. Now, her hair, newly shampooed, would smell of herb complexes and was undulating down upon her shoulders with a fullness through which he yearned to run his fingers.
"Lucy, I'm going for a walk this morning. Will you be OK on your own?"
She nodded, got up immediately, snatched her straw boater from another chair and walked into the hotel gardens, without a word. He followed, because he had to go that way to reach an annexe of the hotel where he could order his lunchbox. He looked up into the sky; the sun was still shining, true, but there were some ominous looking clouds already mustering along the hilltops. He shivered, for there was a cruel edge to the light wind, despite the sun. Perhaps he should not undertake such an ambitious walk after all.
Lucy was flopped out in a deckchair, the boater over her face, as if she were sunbathing in hot climes further south. She had fastened her fur buskin, which he could not recall seeing her put on in the first place, for in the hotel foyer she was only dressed in T-shirt and skirt.
"Lucy, are you really OK?"
She raised the boater and buzzed loudly, a cross between a hiss and a hum. It was as if she wanted to speak, but the words would not come. The sound was almost like a drill; she evidently wanted to irritate him; unaccountably, after all the good things he had heaped upon her ... including this holiday itself.
He lowered himself into a nearby deckchair (tentatively, since he suffered lower back pain). He buzzed back. If that were the game she was at, two could play just as easily as one. If any of the other hotel guests had passed by, they would have wondered.
She took off her T-shirt in front of the bedroom mirror. The brassiere, which he had bought her only two weeks ago, was now too tight. On removing it, she winced at the red weal that the strap had made. Her breasts were fine, just what she'd hoped they be when she dreamed of having them as a small girl: still pert but with sufficient pear-shape to give the angle of hang which she supposed most men would admire. They were lightly aureoled without too many of those sickly goosepimples, and she stared to see if the "elves' thumbs" would come out harder.
On lowering her skirt, she decided she didn't like the briefs he had bought her, either. They showed a dark stain of pubic hair at the crotch, which she felt was unseemly. She lowered them and ran her fingers through the brushfire and, then, turned to view the outcrop of buttocks, round and pushy, which had given her figure-hugging evening dress (which she DID like, even though HE had bought it) just the right turn-on.
She walked, naked, to the window and saw her benefactor ambling away towards the distant hills, his lunchbox and binoculars hanging from his shoulder. He was off to discover whether the wild honey was legend or not. The sun, more like honey itself now, was already threatening to play fast and loose with some clouds scuttling like beetles across their version of late morning.
Ah, there was the knock on the door she was expecting. That young man who had exchanged glances with her last night from another dinner-table... He knew, she knew, the meaning, without words. The assignation was arranged without even a further glance. Now he would see her with her hair down, she thought, as she released the catch.
She hummed with delight at the thought of this late breakfast. And tomorrow ... would be Christmas Day.
The mountain slopes themselves became positively less steep the higher he went into the rarefied air. The sun had sunk low, close on two o'clock, behind vast rearing neighbouring slopes, but he was convinced he could see the vague outline of the burning orb through their translucent rocks. He put it down to an aging imagination.
Lucy was for the first time that day far from his thoughts. As a boy, he mused, he had actually wanted to be a girl himself and now, to all intents and purposes, he yearned to undergo menstruation. With no emotion other than the involuntary act of wincing, he noticed that the stain on his slacks was not red but golden...
Lucy laid back on the bed in her room. Her visitor had long since departed, for dusk was closing in from the surrounding hills, and he had only stayed with her for lunch. Not only lunch had they fed upon: he had made her feel so damned innocent with his talk of "at the fountain of love" and suchlike. But he was innocent, too.
She yearned for the return of her guardian from the hills: they were indeed hills when he had set out soon after breakfast, but now, doubtless, the encroaching night made them look steeper, wilder. Would he be home for the evening meal? She anticipated the pleasure of slipping into her new dress and being escorted into the huge dining area as the ordained centre of everybody's attention.
The dress itself she had put on a hanger in front of the wardrobe mirror, each pleat with its independent colour. The bodice, without its breast-filling, was tantamount to obscene in the way it rucked flabbily. The bows and tucks appeared clumsily positioned without the swing of the body to set off each against another.
She continued to wear nudity, after the departure of the visitor, as a wilful penance. The night chill permeated the window, and the icy tatting of pins-and-needles spiralled down from chirpy breasts to curling feet.
They found him after six days, search parties merely finding other search parties for the first five. The lunchbox was missing, but he was still clasping the binoculars. Yellow slime stretched in strands between his limbs like cheesy treacle being scooped from pizza pan to mouth.
"He was muttering about sweet angels when they found him," said the maitre d'hotel to Lucy, as he escorted her to the departing carriage.
"His head was always in the clouds," she thought, but did not say. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted her erstwhile lunchtime visitor lolling in the hotel pool, the strange golden light making him appear to be a fleshy spider self-correcting its limbs in unclarified brine. He did not even wave goodbye to her.
Her benefactor, who now seemed more like an old man than a father figure, already ensconced at the back of the carriage, had the wherewithal to smile as she got in: slowly, rhythmically, he circled his hand in the window as the horses pulled away. As the shrinking hills closed ranks behind them, he stiffened his back for the journey, his eyes flashing with the passing of sun-mingled trees.
She gently kissed his cheek like a stingless bee and said "SSSSSSorry".
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