Flash Fiction

Crowd Control
It is that time in the in-between, just after sex and right before they turn to their favorite sleeping positions and fall into blissful rest. She twirls a finger in his chest hair, circling the gray ones, and tosses her leg over his thigh and lets out a contented sigh into the crook of his still sweaty neck.
There was nothing left to say, verbally. Just the pleasure of their warm, naked bodies intertwined.
How do these things start, really?
There was some yelling, a couple of “fuck you’s” launched in gravelly, drink-soaked voices. Then a scuffle.
Then a scrum.
He looks at her and makes a pained face, fish-like, by pulling his lips across his teeth.
She smiles. Then touches the pads of her fingers to her lips as the protest grows.
The sounds of a body hitting the pavement, warm and solid, the crescendo of an angry crowd, separates their embrace.
Elbows on the sleigh bed, they peek through wood blinds. The angles are all wrong, as they turn this way and that to see.
Her breaths come and go in excited gulps; he watches her breasts rise and fall in the candlelight, the curve of her hip in silhouette.
She looks at him, eyes pleading.
He grabs for cords, slides open the blinds, exposes the street below. A melee unfolds before them.
“Holy shit,” she says.
The crowd is angry and swarms around police cars with lights flashing but no sirens. Men in torn shirts and baggy pants try to push themselves away from capture, women in party dresses and pleading tears, mascara running down their faces, frantic to explain away their dates’ indiscretions with hands gestures while still clutching tiny pocketbooks.
Police, their black uniforms dark holes in the orange glow of sodium arc lights, rush to beat back the screeching crowd. Two young men, their boxers hovering half off their asses, squirm and holler against steel handcuffs, black-clad knees pressed into their lower backs.
“They’re close to losing control,” he says, chin resting on his palms, elbows resting on the leather sleigh bed.
“Ohhh, look at her, what a pretty dress,” she says, both hands on the sleigh bed, her chin sunk into the coffee-colored leather.
Like a school of fish, the crowd breaks and reforms around police. More officers show up. It’s a numbers thing. The mob loses steam.
“Hey, look,” she says.
There, three floors below, a woman in a white dress with a maroon sash looks up at them, scans their faces through tears as they watch the skirmish. She stands in front of a Ford, it’s anti-theft system active and bleating.
He watches as she puts a forearm across her chest, straightens up on her knees and with her right hand, waves.
The woman waves back.
She drops to the bed, cupping her breasts in her hands and laughs.
He drops the blinds and joins her.
There’s a moment of quiet, until her eyebrows twitch and she tilts her head.
Her lithe body is quick. She throws a leg over his chest, slides forward, rakes her nails from his nipples to his throat.
“OK, mister, you’re under arrest,” she says, playfully grabs his wrists together above his head. “No funny business, and no one gets hurt.”
He feels her warmth against his chest, her weight.
He nods in the affirmative, mute.
She tilts her chin up, tips her head. She squints, purses her full lips.
And lowers them to his, hungrily.