Playing with Fire

We started fucking not long after I joined the club. Circus Society met every week in the biggest room on campus – a converted gymnasium used mostly for exams and graduation ceremonies. On Monday nights Jay and Elisa would haul down two huge plastic tubs of circus toys from the storage room on the floor above and spread it out around the room, ready for club members to play.

There was a tightwire on a frame. A bunch of juggling equipment. Diablo. Clubs. Hoops and staffs. Even a unicycle. I was terrible at all of it, but that was what made it fun – forcing myself to learn something that didn’t come naturally to me, and that called on all the balance and timing and co-ordination that, as an English Lit student, I never otherwise used.

Jay was a long-haired hippy, vague and soft-spoken. People joked that he looked like Jesus. On first meeting he seemed entirely harmless. He never said a harsh word to me, but was surrounded always by a cloud of rumours. He could be mean, people said. Bad, people said. You didn’t want to be around him, people said, when things didn’t go his way.

Elisa was a hippy too. Probably. She wore her hair in dreadlocks and dressed in a wardrobe comprised entirely of brandless, ill-fitting clothes in various shades of black and grey. It was a statement, of sorts, she told me once. Her clothes didn’t speak for her. Only she spoke for her.

Except that she very rarely spoke. She was silent, in fact, unless something demanded a response from her. I always got the impression that she was too busy practicing to waste breath on words. She was good. It took her next to no time to learn something new, in a way that seemed almost magical to me.

The burns happened every few weeks, as and when they could be arranged. Lots of the circus people owned fire kit: staffs and poi and fans. But you weren’t allowed accelerants on campus, let alone actual fire. Every so often, then, we would trek across to the nature reserve on the other side of the lake, find a quiet clearing, and practise with fire.

If you’re careful, the danger from the flames is minimal. The problem with fire poi is not that they’re burning. It’s that they’re heavy: lumps of kevlar bolted to the end of chains. If you hit yourself in the face with one of them while trying to spin it, you’re be more likely to break your nose than burn your skin.

I was cautious. In fact, by the time I was confident enough to try spinning fire poi, Elisa and I had been fucking regularly for almost a month. It had begun frictionlessly a few weeks after I started coming to Circus Skills. When I stepped outside to smoke one evening she followed me, kissed me without saying a word in the shadow of the big old gymnasium. We fucked in an empty lecture theatre, our muffled groans echoing in the vast space, before returning to the main hall a few minutes apart, nobody any the wiser.

At the time I was young, and thus entirely unsure how to navigate the territory of fucking a woman who was, ostensibly, in a relationship with someone else. Elisa never mentioned it, and so I never mentioned it. Without exchanging a single word we both knew that it was to remain a close and serious secret.

Elisa was carnal in a way that was searingly exciting to me. While I fucked her she would plunge one hand between her legs and masturbate herself hard until she came with gritted teeth and a series of urgent, throaty moans. If I took her from behind she would guide one of my hands to her throat and press it there until I choked her, her body tightening around my cock as she ran short of air.

At once I was terrified of leaving bruises on her, and exhilarated by the newness of it. We would leave a noisy, busy room of people laughing and falling about and juggling, then fuck in intense, bitten-back silence in any secret corner of campus we could find. Returning to the gymnasium, we’d find that only minutes had passed, that everything was as we had left it, that nobody had noticed our absence. It was a headtrip that made me feel like I’d slipped into another world altogether.

We were careful, of course. Especially about how we interacted during Circus Society meetings. We wouldn’t stand too close. Wouldn’t talk to one another especially, but also wouldn’t ignore one another. We were, I suppose, cordial – and that seemed to be enough that Jay never asked any questions.

We only fucked once during a burn. It was at the end of March, winter only just having given way to spring. The cold was almost numbing in its intensity, and the fire was a welcome relief from it. There were more people than usual – new Circus Society recruits, and Jay was busy showing them how to handle the accelerant, how to hold the chains. A few of the older members were playing away from the group on the edge of the clearing.

Elisa had just finished practising with poi when she came to me, grinning. As she handed over the toys I caught the scent of her: her natural sweat overlaid with smoke. It hit me like a drug, and I felt my nostrils burning. Our eyes met. Her face and shoulders were sheened with sweat and her eyes were huge. She was on an adrenaline kick from the fire, and I could feel that sweet, sharp excitement spreading into me as if by osmosis.

Nobody noticed us ducking off into the trees, and we were hidden from view within seconds. We kept walking for a while, though, putting distance between us and the group. I would have kept walking until the little motes of fire behind us were entirely out of sight, but Elisa pulled me back once we were far enough away and kissed me and her breath smelled of smoke, and her hair smelled of fire, and then it was happening, and I didn’t think even for a moment about the possibility of being caught.

She dropped to her knees in the mulch and tore at my belt, freed my cock and worked it with one hand, into which she spat for lubrication. She jerked me hard, fast. She was often like that. When we fucked it was as much her fucking me as me fucking her. I breathed, concentrated on not coming then and there before I was inside her.

I had condoms. I always carried condoms in those days. She took it from me and deftly split the packet, rolling it onto my dick and then spitting into her hand to jack me again over the condom. I pushed her back into the leaves and yanked at her trousers. Got them off one of her legs and fell on her, inhaling the scent of her and licking between her legs. Even there she tasted of smoke, as though it was something in her skin, permeating her.

She guided me into her, and we fucked roughly against the forest floor. All I could smell was her, and she smelled like sweat and burning, like accelerant and danger and smoke. Her body was hot underneath mine, her skin almost too hot to touch. She was slicked with sweat. We slid easily against one another. There was smoke on her tongue. I buried my face in the crook of her neck and breathed in deep, and that made me come almost at once. She forced a hand down between her legs as I was coming and masturbated herself until she too stiffened, arched her back, groaned.

The whole thing had taken only minutes. No longer than that. We lay panting and dishevelled on the ground, our hot skins cooling and turning numb. Our breath came in little clouds as we disentangled ourselves and stood. Fixed our clothes.

“I’ll go back first,” she said. The first words that she had spoken to me that evening. “Leave a minute before you come. He won’t notice.”

I nodded. We kissed, clumsily, hurriedly. One last taste of her. And then she was off through the trees. I sat there in the dark, panting, head swimming from the suddenness of it all. I could see her shadow crossing the little firefly dots of flame way off in the forest.

I watched her go. Felt the first twinges of real, gut-wrenching doubt inside of me. Tasted kerosene on my tongue.