Goats & Monkeys!

Near seven months now no lady had laid a glove on you. Not since teen years had anything like that deprivation occurred. How could it possibly have been endured earlier? How did the unpartnered young manage currently? A Canadian medico some months ago had suggested sexual union might need to be practised without kissing. Well, there had been some of that in March too. On Ni’s last visit up north we had managed pretty well like that. Luckily, the gals up there seemed to be missing more or less equally, it seemed. Here the fantasies flipped around in the usual way in the cycle of visions and memories, with the new goatee more and more featuring. The goatee had come of its own more or less, from the 4 ½ star on Macquarie Street quarantining, back when the government was picking up the tab. No change of clothes, showering or shaving through that fortnight. By the end of the term, voila! rather fetching Arabic under-chin goatee; not a little to do with the near decade among the Malays of course. Whatsapp video calls with the gals had drawn compliments, pleas indeed in a couple cases to keep the look and not return to the other. Useful at the desk too it turned out for a fellow in your line, stroking like in the manuals. How had deepest cogitation proceeded earlier was a question now. Twisting the strands, stroking, pulling, fluffing up and out—an abundance of options. Over the weeks later a hope had arisen of some dalliance ahead involving the thicket. Ni, or Rina perhaps; possibly even Era or Sugi featuring. Once she had returned from UAE maybe even Umairoh might be tempted. (Every indication in the messaging Umairoh had regretted her earlier resistance and was now ready to rock.) Fair chance one of that quartet—without hint or direction of course—in the rising fever would seek out the goatee and ruffle, caress, or even give one or two sharp tugs perhaps. Something, a strong kind of instinct, gave hope. It would be a sudden venture, like so much else that had been received in that region. Many of the gals’ fathers and brothers sported beards of one sort or another; husbands and earlier partners. There was fair chance; some kind of logic involved. In old Montenegro grandad Rade, Bab’s father, would say, Ne diraj mi brk! Touch not my moustache! The moustache was highest honour; mess with that there surely would be hell to pay. In the night when the children were asleep, when the wind blew over the thatch and the wolves howled, you wondered what liberties may have been granted the young wife, the former widow taken from grandad’s clan of Ivovic cousins around on the ridge. Beside the cold hearth in the love-making on the hay bundles.