Boredom

They were standing in the bushes, near the Teatralny Bridge. Under the bridge, to be precise. His friends were waiting above, but they waited patiently, knowing it would take a while.

They were now stuck in the mud, amid scattered bottles and broken branches. From a distance, they could hear the drawn-out cries of two drunks arguing over vodka. "So close, yet so far," he thought. The fact that he was a student and had money for alcohol seemed to him the only thing that distinguished him at that moment from the possessors of those clearly audible, drunken voices. His drunken debasement had reached the same depths that those gentlemen had reached that evening.

Only the company was slightly different.

The delicate aroma of a warm, early autumn night, just before the start of another academic year, couldn't penetrate the stifling scent of her perfume, which, like her body, sparsely shaped and rich in experience, pressed against him, pinning him against the cold wall of the grim reality at the foot of the bridge.

"What do you want…?" she said to him in a voice resolute beyond her years, a tone of animalistic directness contrasting with the still girlish timbre of her voice.

She was exceedingly intoxicated, and her large, once incredibly captivating eyes were half-closed, weighed down by the weight of drunken eyelids. Her movements seemed automatic; her hand on his face, the other on his back, performed movements repeated many times before, defined like the steps of a previously studied dance. Her pelvis, invariably pressed against his crotch, moved to the rhythm of an inaudible music, defined only by the melodic wail of choristers arguing over a bottle somewhere on the balcony. The next act of this Dionysian opera was to be played without lights or music; the empty bottle decorations allowed for better focus on the indistinct figures, the intoxicated singers, writhing in a nearly motionless dance, to the rhythm of their rapid breathing.

"Basically, nothing..." he groaned, the words flowing from his mouth in a beer-like torrent, drowning out all the difficult sounds along the way. He felt his lips form with difficulty, his voice unnaturally high. Nothing here was natural, he thought. His thoughts clashed, flying through his mind at breakneck speed, yet in utter chaos. He had had enough of this tedious licking of her neck. He took her chin in his hand, the chin in a gesture far less delicate than he had planned, yet the precision of his movements left much to be desired. He kissed her hard on the lips, pushing his tongue into hers – she responded in kind. With his left hand, still partially buried in her tight jeans, popular on Bema Street, he began searching in his jacket pocket for what seemed at that moment the most necessary, even desirable, item. His fingers immediately found a small, square, plastic package, within which he could feel another object, a circular shape escaping from beneath his fingers.

Wrong pocket, he thought with difficulty, reaching for the other one. The eighteen-year-old's body hanging over him irritated him more than it excited him now.

"You don't have to search so hard, Kitten... I have mine," he said in the tone of a girl telling her parents she'd gotten an A in school.

He smiled, escaping his lips from her slippery lips.

"But I prefer Marlboros."

He took advantage of her moment of drunken incomprehension to slip a cigarette into his mouth. The click of the lighter and the flash that followed it momentarily shattered the pseudo-intimacy of the moment. The wailing of the men a few dozen meters away also ceased.

In the light of the flame, which had blinded them both at first, he saw her face again. She wasn't beautiful, but she was certainly interesting. So... innocent, deceptively innocent. He imagined her walking to school on Monday, backpack on her shoulder, pipe in hand. Charming.

Her eyes, for a moment, held nothing. A look of incomprehension came after a moment, only to transform, after a few more seconds, into a sweet, incomprehensibly feminine smile on that girlish face. She licked his lips, the smoke dancing around her cigarette stinging her eyes, but she didn't show it. He wasn't bothered either. Every sign of her resolve, a determination worthy of a nobler cause, made her increasingly indifferent to him. He felt he'd already won her over. When he started dancing with her, he hadn't tried too hard either. Initially, she'd been scanning the room for a more tempting morsel, he was aware of that. But when she couldn't find a bald neck around her, she enthusiastically surrendered her full attention to him. Smiles, dancing, a nervous atmosphere of conquest rising from their sweaty bodies, right up to the ceiling, illuminated by the flickering lights. Then more beers, and they left the bar together. The four of them left, her friend taking her friend. The girl desperately wanted to go to the bathroom, and since she couldn't find one, she eagerly offered to relieve herself in the park near the bridge. She was only afraid some pervert would catch her there, so she insisted he go with her. The theatrical scene of her insistence and his feigned resistance brought him almost artistic satisfaction. So let's go, he thought, agreeing, maybe you'll collect your Oscar.

Everything she did seemed pretentious to him, even the fact that she agreed to go out with him disrespected her in his eyes. He had almost as little respect for her as for himself. It was all an act, devoid of a trace of fascination, a shallow drama with poor dialogue and mismatched actors. He wanted to have fun with her, he didn't know what form it would take yet, she agreed for lack of better prospects, and it would be sad not to get laid on a Saturday night.

- You're teasing me... - she said in a melodic voice, even more melodic under the influence of alcohol.

The situation was amusing him more and more. He'd come to terms with its artificiality and allowed himself to indulge in the fun. After all, that's what they were here for. He could pretend to be a man of principle, but he'd come across as a smug, spoiled brat. And precisely because he was, he refused to show it.

In one deft movement, she unbuttoned his pants. His erection still left much to be desired when she slipped her smooth, petite hand into his underwear, but he wasn't about to worry. She looked like someone who had already passed the stage of high schoolers shaking with excitement in elementary school.

Yet there was an emptiness to it all, one that his current existential-alcoholic rebellion couldn't bear.

Slowly, he moved the glowing tip of his cigarette toward her hand, touching it to her delicate skin.

Not cruelty, not even corruption, but utter boredom was etched on his face now. He exhaled his boredom along with the smoke, only to recapture it with another evening out at the pub. Another couple of beers and decadent exhaustion. Pure form, zero substance.

He observed the girl's reaction with calm and indifference. A high, slightly shrill "fuck" escaped her sweet lips, replaced by a soft moan as she yanked her hand from his pants and began massaging the burned area.

Along with her hand, she also yanked out the part of his body that, for a moment, had still been begging to be hidden. With a lazy movement, he restored his pants and their contents to their previous state, never taking his eyes off this interesting, yet unbearably artificial, creature clutching her aching arm.

He was just about to vomit when he heard her laugh. It took her very little time to recover from the burn.

"You're sharp!" she exclaimed, her voice now more like hers. "No one's ever smoked a pipe on me before, but in this state, it's actually a pleasant feeling..."

He was surprised, the nausea receding into the background. For the first time this evening, he'd been treated to a revelation, perhaps not the truth, perhaps at least a half-truth or a quarter-truth, but there was something authentic in her statement, in her voice, something that restored his fondness for this girl, who he despised as much as he did.

"You could do it again, but how will I look so burned, giving my boyfriend a blowjob?" she said, her tone as if she were recounting Sunday dinner at her grandmother's.

He felt he'd now received what he'd expected. Disgustingly honest hypocrisy, a pure dose of cynicism, which this time didn't come from him. The truth, in fact, about her, about him, about a situation he'd thought only he was aware of.

She approached him again, smiling a little differently this time.

- You're a real bastard, that's a different story...

She pressed her lips to his again and, this time, pushed her other hand down his pants, this time much more forcefully than the first time, without even unzipping.

This time, he surrendered without hesitation to the pleasure flowing from the presence of someone just like him, just as spoiled. Perhaps not yet as bored, but she was younger than him – everything was still ahead of her.

"So, what do you want?" she whispered even more passionately, even more aroused by the unusual turn of events and her own shameless honesty.

This time, a fiery smile appeared on his face. This girl suddenly seemed somehow closer to him, approaching with the same detachment from what she was now taking such an active part in.

"I promise not to burn you anymore, and in return, show me how you give your man a blowjob."

She laughed loudly, now completely naturally.

"You might be disappointed," she said, laughing merrily, not so passionately anymore, but sincerely and even friendly. "I'll do it like I do to the guys I meet on Saturday nights."

The walls of the bridge echoed with their shared laughter, which lasted for several long, pleasant seconds. Then he kissed her gently on the lips, not passionately, but tenderly.

"You're sweet," she said, settling comfortably on her bare knees on the cool earth.