Finding a Way Through1

Charlie worked on. He pretended not to have taken in the look of her as the woman and a bloke, that he took to be her man, approached him. The pitch he’d chosen did him well; people showed an interest in the carvings he had made and the piece he was now completing and etching the final detail into. It, along with two others, would be collected from him later in the day, if the weather held and the bidders for them showed up as they had said they would. The items were earners for him, all of them a means to get by through difficult times.

He looked up and met her wondering smile; had already taken in her light blue trainers with their lips motif printed on them; her slender legs encased in cropped jeans and a billowy V-neck blouse that hung Free but left him in no doubt what was underneath — ‘more than a handful’ his mates in the military used to say. Her neatly brushed out long auburn hair framed a narrow face, and on her lovely mouth a slick of red lipstick had been applied.

‘How do you carry it all back to you place?’ she asked in an only too cultured voice. ‘You’ve made so much…’

‘I’ve a gotta cart in the alleyway over there, missus,’ he drawled in his London accent and pointing behind her. He was in two minds whether to stand up and be polite…politer than usual. The woman turned to look in the direction he had pointed. ‘I use it to take stuff back to the hostel…’

‘Come along, Ava,’ her man asked, ‘or we’ll be late…’

‘Go on ahead, Tom…I want to see if there’s a walking stick I can use amongst this lot in display’ she said on turning away from him. ‘He’s impatient…hates me shopping…and talking.’

‘I don’t mind you shopping for what I’ve got here…’ he assured her, yet to make his mind up about her man. He looked the effeminate, even gay sort, or he liked it both methods. And Ava weas only too good not to look at.

Charlie soon stood by her shoulder and took the bundle of assorted walking sticks onto which he had carved a symbol. They all gleamed in the sunlight, the polish a final and smart trick. It brought out the grain.

‘Where do you get the materials?’ she asked, willing it seemed to chat.

‘I scavenge…walk out into the woods by the heath…look for straight windfalls of hardwoods if they’re about…they’re never perfect…they never are. The smaller pieces, down in that box are dog whistles…door stops…all get used.’

‘And it’s that which is so interesting…’ she replied looking down at the box that lay at their feet.

‘You got it missus…’

She had more than enough to hook him, but he couldn’t tell her that, of course. He kept from chuckling as Ava picked a stick with a round, polished end, circles carved underneath it and where he’d fixed a metal ring in case a strap was to be threaded onto it. A stick…the end shaped like as if to replicate a prick…to remind you of the guy who made it.

They heard her name called out as her man approached them once more.

‘We’re wondering what’s keeping you…Ava.’

Ava ignored him and reached for her purse, stowed in a clutch bag slung over her shoulder. ‘How much?’

‘Call it twenty…it’s a payback on the effort.’ He looked from her and at her man. ‘I’m glad it’s in your hands..’

Her eyes widened in surprise at his over-familiarity, and she looked away. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment, Tom! Just go…please!’

Ava turned back to him. ‘It’s…it sounds crazy, but I have a gardener’s lodging at the end of my garden…a brick outhouse with two rooms and washroom. It’s empty…unused…basic furniture you’d need and there’s a stove…all of it better than a hostel. It could be your own space…to live and work in.’

‘What are you sayin’ missus…tell me?’

‘You’re ex-military…right? I hear at all times how they’re not looking after men such as you. There’s somewhere to work…and to call home for a spell until you move on. I imagine you don’t stay in any one place for long…do you?’

‘Not so far…’ but that could change he soon took to thinking.

Jeez! Was the woman looking for some rough…and him staying at her place a way to get it? He watched her as Ava took a card from her bulging purse and, looking to see if she was being watched, shoved it into his rough, far from clean, hand.

‘Ring me…tell me if you want to look at the place? Tell me your name?’

‘Charlie…Charlie Chapman…and don’t go making the joke. I’ve heard it too many times…’

‘Charlie’s just fine for me.’

Stunned, he watched her walk away.

 

2

When they retraced their steps, along the pedestrianized High Street, Ava noted that Charlie was nowhere to be seen. She tried to quell a sense of disappointment, for the man may have been a ‘down and out’ by most people’s reckoning, but that was to ignore his undoubted skills in carving; creating something out of nothing. She knew enough about arts and crafts to find out the skill needed to recognise the potential in windfalls, in what lay on the forest floor. It required an artist’s eye.

Her new walking stick tapped the paviors, rhythmically, as Tom walked beside her. She was relieved that Tom had not been present during her brief exchanges with Charlie, for the decision to suggest that he ‘lodged,’ in an outbuilding that was gonna waste, was for her alone to take; informed by what she could figure out about Charlie Chapman.

She took it that he lived by his wits to survive. She had read and heard, often enough, that a return to civvy-street was for some a step too far after the ordered existence that was the military. His sandy brown hair was still cut short; his eyes stared out from a lean, unshaven, face and possessed a world-weary stillness She was almost as tall as Charlie; had noted this as they had stood talking, but he was sharper in his movements, perhaps spurred on by being able to chat to her, even to flirt in his sharply accented voice.

It had all been a wonderful contrast to what she listened to from Tom, and those she had lunched with. There was a world of accents and dialects all around her, yet she rarely got to converse with the possessors of them. The work on display had made her stop and talk to him, a man dressed in tended khaki work trousers and a long- sleeved T with what she took to be some camouflage pattern, the sleeves pushed up over strong forearms. She had seen the muscles flex as he worked on another walking stick before she had interrupted him.

‘Your woodsman has gone, darling…’

‘Yes Tom, so he has…’

‘Don’t sound so disappointed…waifs and strays…down and outs…they’re two a penny these days…even around here.’

‘Not that you know much about them, darling,’ she replied icily.

‘True…they’re really not my type. Heathen and unwashed they are…’

‘Most of them…but not the man we saw.’

‘You have been paying attention. You’re not weakening, are you?’

An arrangement had been reached some time ago with Tom. He retained ownership of their London flat that he could do with what he pleased and with whomsoever took his eye. The details she did not wish to know, only that he be discreet as she would be about their marital arrangements.

Theirs would be an only too modern approach to marriage. Tom knew that, without a pre-nup agreement, he would be a heavy loser if they ever divorced.

He had his distractions; she wondered it time that she again had her ‘experiences’ once more; call them ‘dalliances,’ as a close friend had smiled in her only too understanding methods.

‘No one gets hurt so why not play? I wish I could have the chance…’ she had been told. There were two of her friends whose husbands were still in the military. Perhaps she could consult them, and their men pulled a few strings to find the story about Charlie Chapman.

The offer of a place of his own was but the bait she had cast out. Enquiries would reveal if the risk was greater than the rewards that she sought. The rest would then be up to her. The first step was for him to call her and say when he would come round to see the small building, its sloping roof set against the rearmost boundary wall of her garden.

The house was built in Surrey Sandstone and looked mellow under its slated roof; the garden at the back sloping and stepped by means of three retaining walls. The top most was a foundation for the gardener’s lodge. The previous owner’s housekeeper had lived there. Now, she and Tom maintained the building, but it had remained empty.

She had wondered of another use as she met Charlie’s look upon her and she heard his flirty banter and wondered, ‘why not?’ Life was for living, and she wanted to be taken out of the only too ordered and mundane methods of it and with Tom.

Charlie need only refuse and that would be te end of her wayward hopes of having a man living on the premises and on call when she needed him.

What better, and in time, to be serviced by a live-in lover? There would be no need for social niceties to be followed, just the acceptance, by each of them, that him being there had a dual function; he to work and she to play with him when the urge arose.

In short: ‘service me when I want you…the place is Free. When I say go, you go.’

 

3

Charlie sauntered through the dappled shade of the woodland, his eyes scanning the leaf strewn ground. He carried a hessian sack over one shoulder, the unequal lengths of timber that he had found making it harder to carry. Re-distributing the load, as she’d learnt in the infantry, did little to change things.

‘May as well call it done,’ he muttered, shrugging off the sack and reaching for a drinks flask.

He studied the card that Ava had given to him, two days ago. A classy woman, not an old biddy but a tasty bit of crack, had come onto him. He wasn’t so spoiled for choice that he could let an opportunity pass him by, but the terms might be too high to pay. He valued his independence, and gonna live in her garden, in an outhouse sounded good, but what were the strings?

She might want to pull on his length but why ask him to live so darn close? Was he to be on call, seein’ as her man looked a poofter and dressed as one and paid a bit too much attention to detail. He’d had a skin full of that in the infantry and tours in shitholes you were lucky to get out of alive, Afghanistan being one example.

Still, he’d won a few hearts and minds making carved objects, and it helped him clear the storms in his head when out there and even when got back home, east of London way…in Colchester Barracks. He’d done his spell, going on twenty years and had money put by.

But he left that untouched and had chosen to chance it, to live by his wits and travel about, some. It meant you didn’t hook up with those you might want to bang, or for long, and it certainly hadn’t brought him into speaking to the likes of Ava.

He yanked her card out of his sport wallet, a lightweight piece of kit that suited him just fine. ‘Ava Johnson-Clarke’ he read, along with a mobile and house number. He even knew where her place was, up there on the hill and overlooking the town in the valley and with the railway line running past in a deep cutting, so you’d never know it was there.

He checked the signal on his battered mobile and soon punched in the number. He even went so far as to save it.

Women’s laughter could be heard as she answered.

‘Hello, it’s the man who carves sticks…’

‘Charlie, the artist in wood…’ he hears her laugh, ‘hang on a moment could you?’

‘Sure…’ he sits down on the leaf-strewn ground and decides to do some sit ups. He rushes through twenty before she’s again to be heard. ‘Yeah, I’m still here. Is the guest lodge still available?’

‘To the right person, yes…’

‘You’d better check me out again when I come over to see the place you told me about…’

‘I’ve already done that, Charlie…’ she confessed, almost sounding apologetic. ‘You find out why I had to do that, don’t you?’

‘Sure, you cannot be too careful who you get mixed up with…’

Yes, but I’ll take my chances if you will. The place needs someone living there…’

‘And how about you…with me living there?’

‘Direct aren’t you?’ she laughed nervily. He imagines how she looks when she does that. There wasn’t a chance to go for her, in these methods, with her man about. ‘Is this afternoon too soon?’

‘Well,’ he says, intent on playing her. He really does wonder what a class woman is doing setting things up in her chosen methods.

‘Tomorrow afternoon’s okay too,’ she prompts.

‘I’m on the common…could call by on my way back…say an hour or two…’

‘Make it three o’clock…two hours away?’

‘Fine…I won’t dress up.’

‘Just be here as you say you will. Tom’s up in town and I’d like to settle things between us before he gets back.’

‘He knows, does he, about your plan?’

‘No, but he’ll be told. We find out each other.’ It was all she was gonna tell him, evidently

‘I wish I understood what that will mean…exactly, Ava.’

‘You will, Charlie…you will.’ 

4

He often saw her at a first-floor window gazing out over the garden, glad that it was not his job to mow the strips of grass that ran along each terrace, a mass of flowers and their vibrant colours planted at the bases of the retaining walls. The path leading up to his place, as he now wondered of it, a straight line that ended at a short flight stairs, the slabs cracked but still level. On the terrace, far below his vantage point, he had seen; rattan chairs and a two seat settees set about a glass toped rattan table. It was all a suntrap, little or no shade offered to him as he worked.

She seemed to at all times be in a rush and had spoken to him in snatched conversations. Ava had yet to see what he had made of his pitch. He’d at all times travelled light, kept what clothes he had clean, and he’d even chosen to shave each morning so that she didn’t think him any more of a tramp than he reckoned was her comment of him.

The fact remained that he felt the gnaw of hunger for the woman. It had yet to be eased ad he’d read the signs in her too and just as it had been when she had stopped to talk in the street almost a week ago. Her eyes told the story, but Ava was in control of the time and the place.

But he’d help her and worked on a new piece as he sat on wooden stool that he’d found in a corner of his main room of his lodgings. He cleared up after him and would have to ask how to dispose of the offcuts and shavings. A whetstone lay at his feet as he worked, the blades of his implements regularly sharpened. What he learned on keeping a bayonet sharp would never leave him and was now used on his craft tools.

What was in his mind, from those military times, was something else but that Ava woman might help him through with that; just as he might have an answer to what played out in her life. He’d not seen her man about in the days since he had arrived and settled in only too quickly.

That guy’s absences told its own story.

♥

Ava looked at her watch, so large on her slender wrist. There was time to go and speak to Charlie and spend a little longer with him and see where that took them.

It was gonna be a warm day, the sun already picking out the terraces at the top of her walled garden and Charlie was to be seen at work; stripped to the waist and in some cargo shorts. She imagined that he was barefoot. Everything that she again imagined sharing with him had her press her fingers to her belly. She knew that her juices would so easily flow, as they did when she worked her own body with her fingers when she lay in her empty bed and tweaked her tits. At such times she thought on how it would again feel like to have a man take her out of a lustful desire for her and not as a duty that such times inevitably took when Tom was in her bed.

Tom still had his moments with her, needed their perfunctory ruts just to get by. But real tempestuous and exhausting Sex, a bond with a lover, had not been know of for two years or more.

She wondered of all this as he closed the door to the small conservatory that looked out on the terrace and took slow steps up to Charlie’s vantage point.

‘Am I disturbing you in your work?’ she called out to him as she finished the climb, a little out of breath.

‘Not so much that I’m goin’ to mind…’ he answered and stood up. ‘You look as if you’re going out again…’

‘You notice that?’ She wore a cami dress, in blue and white stripes; the straps tied in a bow at each shoulder; the bodice tight against her perfectly rounded breasts. The skirt was layered, frilled and swirly. She carried her sandals in one hind as the other brushed away strands of her hair.

Charlie followed her every move, felt his prick twitch. Jeez, he wanted the woman…here and now, in a no-frills fuck. The rest would follow at some other time.

‘It easy to do…and it also makes me wonder when we’ll have a chance to talk…of us to be together some more. I reckon it’s the reason for me being here, Ava…’

He had closed the space between them. Charlie now reached out to touch the skin of her throat. Ava did not flinch on meeting this pass on her and he met this classy woman’s answering look.

‘You’ve settled in, I see…’ She had moved to the entrance door of his place, looked from him to what he had made of his quarters.

He had followed her, his bulk pressed against her and provoking Ava to step inside. Not a thing was out of place.

‘I’ve not settled what I feel…what I felt when I first met you. It’s gotten to be a issue for me…Ava, you know?’

‘It’s become that way for me too, Charlie,’ she answered on a haughty look his way.

He stood behind her and Ava clamped his hands as Charlie embraced her and slowly moved his hands to her belly and pressed into the fabric. She raised her face and felt his lips on her throat; clamped his hands to her body before she raised one to her breasts. She turned her face to see the lustful fire in his eyes before meeting a slow deepening kiss.

‘Charlie!’ His hands had drawn up the skirt of her dress before questing fingers pressed on the fabric of her panties. She met again that look; could scarcely believe what she was saying. ‘Yes…I’m wet…and I want you to do somethin about that!’

Their mouths crashed against the other’s as his fingers slipped under the waist band of her knicks before Charlie fingered her, felt Ava squirm to meet these questing touches. She did not stop him as he pushed her knicks down her shivering thighs, his caress of hands and lips following before she stepped out of them.

She stood motionless and held the skirt of her dress up to her waist; felt his tongue search and probe and to lap at her wet folds as his hands kneaded her hips and kept her to him..

‘I want to fuck the lady of the house….’ He smiled, a lewd look of his eyes upon her naked belly and his fingers sliding over her slit before his tongue slicked over her Pussy‘s lips and pressed between them, his strong hands holding her to his face.

‘She wants that too!’ she gasped, dismayed by the man’s wild claims. ‘Take me…I won’t change my mind!’

‘We’ve gone way beyond that…lady,’ he kissed before standing up, the tug of her hands urgent.

Charlie slowly pushed her back on the narrow, unforgiving bed that he slept in. He dropped to his knees again, between her legs. He offers kisses to her thighs, a firm push on them persuading Ava to allow him space to kneel between them; to bend over her and to kiss the tumble of her breasts through the silky fabric of her dress; to tease and tug on her nipples as his fingers found her. He moves so that he licked up and down her pink folds, darted his tongue into her as he coaxed Ava to allow his fingers to touch and press another place, a forbidden place.