Aphrodite and Ioannis by Judy Mitchell

He woke more than an hour before the alarm’s shrill call but did not move, counting the pulses of green light from the pharmacy sign downstairs as they washed over his sallow skin. Ten more flashes and he eased himself silently out of bed.

She stirred, arched her back and pushed her full, blue-veined breasts into the space he had left. The movement caused the duvet to slip to the floor, filling the gap between their single bed and the cot. As he moved towards the door to the kitchen, he turned to look at her. Dark, short hair spiked the pillow and the lumpen shape of her thighs covered all the mattress. From the cot there was a gentle suckling noise heralding an imminent wail for food.

In the green gasps of light, he found his uniform: trousers, shirt and waistcoat and the previous day’s underwear. Clean pants and socks were still hanging outside on the plastic line stretched across the tiny balcony, wet and limp between bibs and baby clothes. Rushing his feet into dull shoes, he failed to notice that his sock cuff was trapped in the leg of his trousers.

The apartment door closed silently behind him and he slid his thin legs and narrow hips around the pram stored at the top of the stairs where, only four months before, he had propped his racing bike against the peeling paintwork. The bike had sold for far less than he had asked. His wedding ring had also gone last week but it was the loss of the bike he felt keenly. The excitement of race routes, distances, times, the companionship - gone.

The path to the promenade was deserted except for a group of feral cats, their scabby bodies hunched over the contents of a spilled dustbin, jaws crunching treats discovered amongst the cans and wrappers. As he turned towards the hotel, they looked sideways at him, not pausing the grinding motion of their teeth as they eagerly swallowed the stinking banquet. In the half light, he looked out to sea and to the waves gently rolling on to the sand and the breakwaters. The beach was empty.

That’s when he saw it. More than two hundred metres away, a trail of spume lifted high into the sky. A tall curtain of water topped by foam seemed to spiral and whorl then fall back into the sea. He stopped, trying to make sense of a force that could lift the water to such a height and hold it there. A ship? A submarine? Some huge animal rising from the deep? But then he realised it was a woman, her slender thighs lifting upward, shoulders rising above the wall of water, her naked body moving towards him.

Her face was framed by tresses of blonde hair. Soft, blue eyes stared longingly at him and her rosebud lips moved as she deliciously shaped his name.

         ‘Ioannis, Ioannis.’

She turned her head to the side to allow her hair to whip around her face and then it fell to her perfect breasts, bare, firm mounds of cream flesh with the pinkest nipples.

Her body moved gracefully through the water; her arms open wide. He knew he could not resist the urge to rush towards her for the love, passion and pleasure she promised.

Within seconds, it was over. The curtain of water fell to a circle of boiling foam obscuring the two figures before calm returned and the empty waves resumed their rhythmical roll and furl onto the Cypriot shore.