Clothbound

.......... you were your bed. Now you are naked in a village yard.

Dirt first. Warm on top, cooler when your toes sink, and you are standing in it with nothing on while late sun comes from the left across a low fence and a cottage with one open shutter.

Your hair hangs to your chest — thick brown, straighter at the crown, turning to curl where it sticks to skin — and you rake it out of your mouth with the back of a wrist. The beard comes with the motion, fist-length and patchy, some blonde in the brown, and the moustache sits up at the corners the way it always has. You cover yourself with the other hand for a second and then drop it, because the yard looks empty and holding on does not make trousers appear.

You remember a gaming late and night and even later bed and then a drop.... You do not remember a bag. You do not remember clothes. The air is still warm enough that you are not shaking, but the sweat on your neck is already going cool.

The cottage is small, plaster gone grey, a door on a latch and a wash line strung from the corner post to a nail in the well-wall. The line is close. You walk to it because standing in the open with your cock out feels worse than standing nearer to someone else's laundry.

Everything on the line is a woman's, and everything on it has been worn.

Two work dresses, dark, faded at the seams, cut for a chest that would fill a hand and a waist narrower than yours. A white shift with the underarms stained yellow. Drawers, soft, the waistband stretched. A band meant to sit under a dress, still holding the shape of breasts when you pinch it. Stockings hooked by the toes — one pair dry, one pair damp at the feet, and the damp pair smells like skin when you lean in. No shirt for a man. No coat. No unused fold.

You take the nearest dress off the peg because your private want something to cover them more than they want an awkward explanation. Sun-warm on the outside, still a little wet under the arms, and when you hold it up the hem hits mid-calf on you. The bodice looks too small until you pull at it and feel the give. Stretchy work cloth, made for a woman with a sizeable chest and a slim middle, and still wide enough in that give that a tall thin man could fight his way in. It smells like soap and sweat and the body that took it off.

You keep it. You put your face in the inside of the bodice once, not meaning to, and then you take it away again because that is a stupid thing to do in a yard that is not yours.

A sound comes from the nearby well. Cloth, and a woman's breath through her teeth, and the small knock of skin on stone.

You walk with the dress in both hands, and the first thing you see is not a face.

An ass is pushed through a hole in the well-wall at the height of your hip, bare, pale where the sun hits it, marked pink where the stone rim has been rubbing. The cunt under it is right there, open to the yard, and already moist, shiny at the lips like she has been posted long enough for the air to find her. Her legs stand in the dirt on your side, feet planted, shift hiked and bunched into the hole around her waist so the fabric does not cover what the wall is for.

You stop close enough to smell her. Hands come through two iron rings set left and right of the hole, wrists tied off, not cutting, not loose, fingers curled against the stone the way you hold a ledge. The hole itself is worn smooth on the bottom edge. Next to it, at the same height, a second hole sits empty, rope hanging off the rings. A post by your shoulder has a cheap cream stripe on it, already dirty at the bottom.

She cannot see you from this side. The rest of her is through the thickness of the wall, on the well-walk, and when she shifts the ass in the hole lifts a fraction and the wet catches the sun again.

"If that is a person and not a goat," she says, voice coming through the stone and then over the collar, tired.. ordinary, "walk around. I can hear you breathing on my wash-yard and I cannot see a damn thing except dirt."

You go around because standing behind a posted woman with her dress in your fists feels worse than letting her look. The well-walk is a packed strip between the collar and the back of the same wall. Her head and chest come out the other face of the stone: dark-blonde hair coming out of a knot, weather in her face, a chest that matches the band on the line, slim under it, the shift slipped on that side so one breast sits against the rim. Sun on her arms. She looks at you the way you look at a dog that walked into the kitchen.

Then she looks at the dress.

"That is my wash," she says. "Put it back."

You stop. The empty hole is behind the wall now, on the yard side you just left.

"I don't have anything," you say, and your voice goes quiet the way it does when you are caught.

She looks at the hair and the beard and then at what you are not covering.

"I can see that. Men who come to this wall usually keep their trousers on until they get to the hole." Her shoulders roll against the stone, and the breast on the rim moves with them. "If you are going to use me, go back to the yard and use me. If you are going to steal the dress, at least do it where I can watch you fight the sleeves. My shoulders are done, and I am not spending the rest of the light talking to a pair of feet."

The rope creaks when she pulls on the rings. The dress is still in your hands. It still smells like her.