Cocoa

I think about him when I roll tobacco cigarettes.

He was the person who taught me how to roll good trumpet joints.

He thinks I led him astray and into a world of debauchery and base and people who melt all over you and then slide away leaving you wondering if it meant as much as it did last week.

But he was just as slippery.

The first time I met him was in a local pub. I had been on a blind date from a newspaper classified advertisement promising a surfer with shaggy dreadlocks and a love of music.

His hair was unwashed and knotty and he was boring.

Fortunately I’d had good sense to organise a back up plan with a call from a friend to suggest my grandmother was ill and sick and I needed to leave immediately.

I grabbed my handbag and tossed my mobile phone back into it as I mumbled apologies about it being nice and sorry to cut it short but I had to leave.

I ran to the nearest pub on the corner and met my saviours.

Soon after, they disappeared and were replaced by an old friend who had no living grandparents.

I remember seeing him standing at the back of the beer garden. His hair was long and slightly golden. The colour of beach sand.

I watched him for a while and swam through his beautiful dark brown chocolate eyes. I wiped myself and dried the droplets of longing and tried to drown it all in a few drinks. The crowd was growing and the band began to play and every now and then I’d see those eyes and that smile and the chocolate would get all sweet again.

I licked my fingers and the edges of my mouth and tasted desire.

I walked up to him and said, “has anyone ever told you that you are absolutely beautiful?”

He seemed shocked and flattered and slightly overwhelmed and his mouth fell open a little bit and I saw tiny droplets of chocolate escaping from the sides of his mouth too.

We chatted for a while and made tentative plans to catch up the next night to go and see a mutually favourable band that was playing in a nearby town.

Call me.

I scrawled my number on his hand with a borrowed pen from behind the bar.

I left.

As I walked out onto the street I heard footprints running on the concrete behind me. I’ll never forget that sound because it was the sound of truth.

“Don’t run after her you pussy!” A male voice called after him.

He kept running toward me.

“Hey!” he was breathless. “You can’t just say something like that and then just leave me standing here!”

I felt a little smug. I was the cat that lured the mouse. With chocolate.

We stopped and talked and kissed and forgot about the world around us and melted in more chocolate, right there on the footpath, whilst I felt proud of him for running and allowing his feet to slap on the concrete with urgency. He seemed real in my arms and in my mouth as my tongue tasted the chocolate on his tongue.

The next night, we didn’t go and see the band as arranged but he visited my house and we lay about for four days and nights listening to music, smoking joints, drinking bourbon, eating pizza and each other.

Soon began a perfect relationship but because I was the girl with the chip on her shoulder made of everything except chocolate and he was the sweetest thing ever, I pushed him away and decided we would be better at being friends. Friends who were sweet, though without chocolate.

We shared a house in the future. We shared friends, drugs, alcohol, dreams, tears, sexual chemistry and promises. We shared laughter and loss. We shared time and space. We ate chocolate, though never together again and eventually we melted and slipped away from each other.

I miss him.

He was a good friend and although I have my own chocolate now, I miss the pieces of him that were sweetest to me. The real and honest guy that he was. The one with his own ingredients, his own parts that made him the person that he was. Before it got all mixed up and became something different.

© ari

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Tags:

ari, boys, chocolate, friendship and girls