Florence

Roger could hardly take his eyes off Florence when he accidentally saw her on this palm-fringed beach. Wearing a low-cut dress made of translucent blue silk, she revealed her astonishing beauty as she bent low, leaning dangerously forward with one hand stretching in an attempt to seize something creamy among the ferny weeds. However, he watched all this across the lagoon, partially hiding himself behind a thick trunk, remembering well how many times she had rejected his court with a scornful curl of her scarlet lips.

After much unavailing effort, Florence looked up with a sigh, her fair brow momentarily clouded at the furtive figure of Roger metres away. Thereafter she took a thoughtful breath, then reopened her eyes with renewed composure. The young man was a bit stunned when she beckoned him over, but this uneasy feeling was in no time displaced by the thought of helping this beaming young lady.

Florence pointed into the water, asking if Roger could get back her rose garland which was just now blown into the pool, and he most willingly agreed. He tore out a palm stem and poked it about in the peacock blue water, where schools of tiny, glittering fish flickered hither and thither, pushing the garland across the tangled weeds until she could make a swift and accurate snatch of it.

Roger’s heart sank slightly when he heard Florence saying nothing more than the customary with a half-smile, but his spirits rose again on recalling her repeatedly pushing aside his proffered hand and spurning him on previous occasions. In fact, it had been so much the better this time. He boldly sat down on the white sandy beach next to her and, observing no signs of protestation, even stole a close look at her voluptuous beauty from the corner of his eye. What he saw unsettled him though, for Florence, instead of radiating with joy on the regain of her creamy roses in full blossom, was sitting sullen in silence, her lowered eyes filled with troubled sadness.

He looked at her face, searching for signs to tell him how best to start a conversation, before he mentally rehearsed the first sentence to ensure that it contained no offensiveness. The tentative query received sentimental response, however, as her face puckered up as if to cry. “My parents have arranged a marriage for me. But Ralph, that burly guy, was so uncouth that I would prefer to die!” Instantly Roger’s mind was in the disquiet she had desired to stir it into. Determined to placate his dreamed lover at all costs, he spoke with a new effort at consolation, “It’s OK, at least I am still here. It will be my great honour to offer you any help.” He even stretched his arm to smooth her wind-tousled hair, but blinked no sooner than he had realised that.

Nevertheless Florence dissolved into tears this time. “I am sorry to have treated you so badly before. Please forgive me.” To Roger, this passionate request did not have to be answered. He stared at her tender beauty and tearful honesty, which was accentuated by the circles of smirched mascara around her eyes, wondering whether the width and heaviness of his shoulder, the mildness about his mouth and eyes that claimed the ultimate kind-heartedness had finally touched a responsive chord in her being, tiding over the long-existing chasm of hierarchy set between them.

In front of them were shades of blue and green. The tide was running so that long streaks of foam tailed away from the reef. A light breeze crept over the polished yet crystalline water beneath the haze of heat, sending the palm fronds whispering, so that blurs of sunlight slid over their bodies like winged little creatures. Roger gently brought her tearful head upon his shoulder, while she lay comfortably against him, felt loved. He, with a quickening emotion on feeling her warm breathing and heaving, wanted to say he had been admiring her long since, if not some inherent meekness had set a constriction in his throat.

And so the silent couple sat there until the sun in the west became a drop of burning gold that slid nearer and nearer the sill of the world. His face lit redly from beneath, Roger all at once was aware of the evening as the end of light and warmth. Tenderly Florence questioned if she could spent the next night with him at her seaside villa, which he was more than willing to pay a visit to. His face shone with the excitement in the recollection of this dreamlike afternoon, mingled with almost a sense of unreality, while she turned away and let out a sly and provocative smile, virtually relieved.

Roger was in a state of euphoria throughout the next day, his whole being flooded with a sense of exaltation. He pondered over the rare experience, every detail about Florence magnified by his growing absorption into one of great interest, imbued with a sacrosanct quality, was to be thought about and lovingly turned over in mind a hundred times. When he finally stepped into their rendezvous venue by the end of that endless day, in the subdued light was Florence reclining on a silken couch in a pose that revealed to the best advantage her soft beauties. Spellbound, Roger lost himself at her cryptic smile and lascivious wink, yet he felt completely at ease, with the single-mindedness to slake his first ever lust by stealing a kiss on her tremulous, half-opened lips.

Florence watched the young man slip off his specked shirt, sit on the bed beside her, when she heard the door of the villa creaking open. Her timing would not have been better. She screamed, with dramatised passion and hidden satisfaction. A gross shape loomed at the doorway, the intensity of its gaze causing Roger to look back sharply. He flinched in astonishment at the sight of a rugged man with grotesque bloodshot eyes and wildly unkempt hair, bearing all the aspects of a brutal burglar which had almost scared his girlfriend to death. The rising tide of insecurity culminated in a snarl and a blow at the intruder’s mouth, bowling that unprotected man over. Wiping away the trickles of blood flowing down his face, the stalwart man snatched to upright position, the roaring tumult in his brain threatened to burst through the veins throbbing dangerously on his temples. To him, this topless young man would be nobody other than an ill-willed invader who had burst into their house to take advantage of his fair wife-to-be. Her piercing scream had already disclosed everything.

Charged with the resentments over the shattering of hope for a tender night, Ralph and Roger, still strangers to each other, engaged in a fierce combat. Their adulation of that vamp had already proscribed the existence of any other male, let alone a malefactor. Their unflinching gazes met, their hostile narrowing of eyes coincided, and a commotion with thumps and bumps ensued, leaving Florence curling up on her bed through the din, outwardly shouting, inwardly laughing. She watched coldly as her creamy rose garland lying on the floor was stained red, the crushed blossoms exuding not fragrance but odour of blood.