(012)
She had only planned to stay for one drink, but that was 10 hours ago. The sun had gone down and come up since then. The music had long ended but the energy of the festival was still rippling through the streets via the people finding their way home. Chloe had bumped into Liam in the packed square a few hours before – mashed together and mashed together, belting out Africa by Toto along with the thousands of last ones standing. She didn’t know a lot about him, she’d met him a few times at parties and had always got a good vibe. He was pleasant enough, funny, and he had good hair. They’d both lost their friend groups in the swirl of people squeezing past each other, so they formed a new team, with just the two of them.
When the final song had ended, they had fought their way out, hand in hand through the crowd, ducking off from the street and following the river to escape the epicentre.
“-also in this podcast I was listening to,” Liam had been talking pretty consistently during their walk, which was almost an accomplishment with at least a full pack of chewing gum in his mouth, “they were saying that aboriginals considered us to have three brains.” He turns his head towards her and she catches his eye and smiles at him, half lidded.
He points at his head, “your logical brain, which they call…uh, nandu-something – and they use the same word for a fishing net that’s all tangled up or whatever-” Chloe watches his lips as he talks, feeling a tingling warmth resonating from her belly, “and they say it’s like the brain they use least – or a tool you use to analyse stuff on the way out, because it’s too complicated to use all the time.” He brings his hand down to his chest and she loops her arm through his, making him laugh. She laughs too, shoving him gently with her elbow.
“Your heart,” he continues, seemingly oblivious to the twinkle in her eye when she looks at him, “which is the first filter, for like, emotions and that-” he swallows, an innocuous act, but something about it makes her skin tingle, “but the main brain is your gut.”
Chloe traces shapes across his upper arm, revelling in the twinges of anticipation in her fingertips, feeling her heartbeat thudding and her mouth salivating. She places her head against his shoulder, but only for a moment as their irregular walking rhythm makes it difficult, bumping her head up and down in a slightly undignified way.
“They say that almost every decision begins with the gut,” Liam barrels on, “and now scientists have found that we actually have a separate nervous system in our gut that is larger than our central nervous system, so it proves-” Chloe stops walking and pulls him towards her, standing up on her tiptoes and kissing him softly, feeling his reaction switching from surprise, to understanding, to enthusiasm. His hands entangle themselves in her hair and against her cheeks. Their tongues toy playfully with one another, and by some miracle the chewing gum stays out of the way. She puts one arm around his waist, pulling back to look at him. He blinks a couple of times and she sees eyes that finally reflect her own, bright and twinkling. She inhales the moment in a long drawn in breath.
“So,” the hint of a grin is forming at the corners of her mouth, her hand teasing its way down his body, “what does your gut tell you now?”
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