Last night’s red dress

You wake up in an unfamiliar bedroom an early morning in March. Your head hurts a little and you can remember going home with someone last night. Your mouth tastes like red wine and too many cigarettes. You feel the cool sheet covering your body and your legs find someone else’s to your left. You lay still until the need to pee is unbearable. Somewhere on the floor you find your dress and put it on.   

Last night the red dress you are wearing looked stunning. You wore your black high heels and dark make-up. In the bathroom you try to wash the worst off, but without the right products, there is not much luck getting rid of your expensive eye-liner. Going back to the bedroom you’ve cleared your head. The bedroom is decorated carefully, not like your own messy room. The walls are white and empty, the bed dressed with white sheets, and on the desk there is a white computer.

Later when leaving the house you realise you have no idea where you are. You didn’t really think about things like that in the taxi last night. You look around to see if you recognise any street names. You don’t. You can smell the ocean somewhere, but you cannot see it. You badly need a coffee and decide to find a place where you can get one.

Standing in the coffee shop waiting you feel out of place. Last night’s red dress is a story in cheap polyester trying very hard to look exclusive. It has buttons down the front and it took you five minutes of fumbling this morning to make them all up. One of the buttons is missing, last night it cannot have been easy getting naked. At least the dress didn’t actually break. A snapped strap would be a bigger problem than a missing button. You had been thinking of replacing the obviously plastic buttons with something more discreetly plastic.

The coffee place looks nice and you try to be invisible to the Sunday breakfast eaters. They can all tell that you’re wearing the same clothes you went out in last night. Your high heels are in your hand rather than on your feet. From the coffee place you make your way down towards the beach on light feet, keeping to the shaded part of the ground.

Waiting at the bus stop with sunglasses you bought at the Chemist’s you look for your bus pass. Together with the little paper card you find a phone number, signed Alex. You remember the smile that met you when you walked back into that room. A smile of someone genuinely happy you hadn't already left. She looked divine in the morning sunlight. Smooth and touchable.

When the bus comes, you’re still distracted by the memory of kissing the tattoo she had on her shoulder, and miss the bus. Your feet slowly bring you closer to the house you woke up in. You should go home to study, but your heart aches when you think about not seeing this woman again.

She is sitting outside on the porch when you open the gate. ‘I was waiting for you’, she says. You have a shower and borrow a t-shirt and shorts from her. You use her shampoo and for the rest of the day you smell like her.