Chapter One - Sunglasses

It was winter when she bought that year’s pair of sunglasses. They were baby-blue rimmed and angular; bought from a stall on the pier of the English Riviera.

The winter sun was strong. The tide was high. Lorrie Binding was on her own and alone, wearing her latest pair of sunglasses.

A man in a tracksuit ran past her and sighed. He wasn’t tired. His sigh was for Lorrie.

Lorrie stood by the handrails of the pier and looked outwards away from land.

The man took off his tracksuit, only an arm’s length away from Lorrie, but nobody tested this distance to see.

The sun was strong, but sure, it was cold; it was true winter.

Underneath his tracksuit the man wore white shorts and a white tee shirt.

In sprints he ran to the end of the pier and back to where his tracksuit, a gaudy shade of green, lay heaped on the decked floor.

Lorrie took looks that were long like the sea; the frames of her sunglasses framing coastal beauty.

The man continued to sigh for Lorrie, and each sigh was audible on each return sprint to the spot where he’d undressed.

On the beat of each sigh Lorrie would lean further forwards, further against the handrail, closer towards the sea. It was rhythmic.

The man had potently erect nipples, but did not feel the cold. What he felt was lust for a girl who flirted herself towards the seabed like it was saying, ‘Welcome home’

With her body now held vertically towards the sky, Lorrie did make a handstand on the rail where hands should not make such daring moves.

It was then that the moment came when the seventeenth audible sigh of the sprinting man did provoke Lorrie to faint, and on to the decking she crumpled, her long brown hair striped in sections against the green of the man’s tracksuit, like humbug sweets.

Lorrie’s sunglasses fell still, through the air, their lenses clouded.

They were caught by the grip of a man dressed in little, a man dressed in white.

His name was Frank, he’d always wanted to meet an attractive girl in such curious circumstances, and as he placed Lorrie’s sunglasses rightfully back onto her little nose, he let her sleep a while, because he could feel her pulse, and it was strong, and maybe when she awoke, he’d be her hero.