Kerry Says

Her cotton skirt, thin and rain soaked, slapped wetly against her thighs as she walked. The feeling was both uncomfortable and enjoyable. An accurate definition of sensuality, hers anyway, she thought before determining the side of the road was not the most appropriate place to be thinking such things.

There was something of the amateur-erotic about her present state though. Her T-shirt transparent now and looking like she had poured it on, her hair blown free of its braid, the water streaked mascara and high colour on her cheeks.

“I might as well be soaping up the car with my chest,” she muttered knowing that as she was currently a walking dream for would-be rapists and their defense lawyers, she wouldn’t be hitching a ride back into town.

Turning her back on her traitorous Honda she aimed for home trying to remember which side of the street you were supposed to walk on to best avoid being mowed down by a driver. Not that there was much traffic on the road that night…. or ever in that place. Still she knew that once you’re luck has crested things can go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye. And no matter how terrible her night had been so far, dead was worse than wet and wheel-less.

She had to admit that having now been out long enough to be drenched to just this side of waterlogged, her mood was actually improving.

Having surrenderd to a soaking you realize it's not all that bad. It’s not often that your whole body gets to feel something. The real frustration with wet weather, she argued to herself, is the constant battle to stay dry. To defend all limbs and packages and pant legs simultaneously is futile and destined to make you feel a failure. Letting the fat droplets hit her square in the face, she felt invigorated, scrubbed clean. Baptized.

Baptized?

Why was it that whenever her thoughts turned to the sensual, religion was only a thoughtbeat behind?

Thoughtbeat!

She marveled at what a perfectly descriptive word thoughtbeat was and wondered how it could be that it wasn’t even a word at all. How could people explain this mental phenomenon without it? How had she?

Then she swore.

She swore because she had walked into the street sign at the corner of her block. Then she swore again because that kind of thing was always happening to her.

She swore one final time as she realized was already home. That meant she had spent the last three miles and forty minutes lost in her own head and had no recollection of the journey. That kind of thing was always happening too.

She checked herself over determined there was no damage and headed up the drive, the car and the reason she’d been driving it forgotten as she turned her thoughts to large soft towels and larger glasses of wine.