31 #2
The very first ray of watery sun comes out just as she leaves the house, looks at the row of Seagate cottages.
They look a mess, but they aren’t: they’re her mess.
Done to her spreadsheet, to her timetable, they had stopped Wee Jim banging stuff with a hammer and got him and his mate, the diver, to work on the pipes, installed long ago and never used.
It’s kind of amazing: outside are three toilets, ready to be connected, under swaths of plastic.
There’ll be a boiler too, shiny and new.
Everything going in in order, just how it should be, beautiful inexpensive pieces of kit, chosen by her, with Dwight’s input.
The houses are going to be lovely. One day.
Assuming they don’t get immediately sold off by some dodgy scheme of Tris’s.
Or even, she concedes reluctantly, if they do.
Dwight is leaning over the garden gate, with his stupid hat on, not waving, or talking. No toothpick. No Wee Jim. Just Dwight, standing in the frame, watching her pass by.
‘Morning, ma’am,’ he says, and picks the hat up again.
‘Dwight,’ she says, still embarrassed about the day before.
‘Well, thanks for introducing me to those city folks,’ he says, surprisingly. ‘Tris is going to look after all of this for me. The money, the deeds, everything.’
Her heart sinks. She’s so conflicted. Is it a good thing?
She thinks of herself, unable to find anywhere to rent; Johnson and Lish’s daughter, about to have a baby and living in a converted shed in the grounds of their own house.
The closed-down restaurants in this town.
The way life is getting harder. Everything she’s noticed since she got back.
But then again, look at Dwight getting his chance.
There’s only so long he can live on the rigs; a drilling hole costs the bodies of its men, everyone knows that.
‘I’m not sure . . . I mean, you don’t have to do this.’
‘But I’ll have enough to buy a new car,’ says Dwight. ‘And more houses, then I can do it again, and grow it all. And look how good we are. As a team. We can do it together. With the money from Tris . . . we could go and get more, it’ll be great.’
‘But . . . what if it goes out of the village and nobody has a place to live?’
Dwight raises up his hands.
‘I have had nothing,’ he says. ‘Oh, yeah, it was okay for you, going off to the big city. You forgot about those of us who were left behind. Come back sniffing like there’s cow pats everywhere, making judgements about the rest of us.’
‘I do not do that!’
He looks at her with an ‘oh, come on!’ face, and she feels more furious than ever.
‘Anyway we’re not talking about me!’
‘Yes, we are! You and those guys and everyone like you who think it’s fine to come when it suits you!
Who never thinks that the rest of us are here, trying to get by, leading decent lives but feeling like we have to feed off crumbs from the big table.
’ He breaks off and turns round. ‘And you’ll be off again soon enough out of this dive, and forget you had a sudden crisis of conscience when you’re back with all your posh friends at New Town dinner tables and you remember it’s the government that didn’t build enough hooses, not me. ’
They are both breathing heavily and Essie can feel her cheeks go very pink.
‘You don’t know how I think,’ she says.
Suddenly he is standing in front of her. She has not realised, until now, that although he is not tall, they are exactly the same height, and face to face she is level with every inch of him; his body is as tight and strong as she had always thought, now punishingly close.
‘What do you think?’ he says, gruffly, and she realises that, for the first time in so, so long, she isn’t thinking of anything at all; her entire mind has gone blank, and she is confused and excited and overwhelmed, and before she knows anything at all he is kissing her, hard and fiercely, completely out of the blue, in broad daylight.
*
After a moment she breaks away and steps back. It has been a very surprising morning.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Dwight, not sounding remotely sorry at all. ‘I apologise. I should have asked.’
Essie just stares at him, furious at her betraying, racing heart.
Then she moves closer to him, and she does not just let him; she welcomes him, pushes herself against him, and what she had dreamed of, if she had let herself realise it, or given in to it, she finally has: his tight chest, his narrowed, bright blue eyes, the long hair.
The toothpick is gone. It’s just him. He smells of fresh sweat and leather, and suddenly, like a roaring train, Essie forgets everything: the problems, her life, her boyfriend; everything is completely gone.
There is nothing in her at all except an intense animal yearning, a strength of extraordinary desire she has never felt before, that feels both overwhelming and completely inevitable.
They have staggered inside: a ray of sun hits them through the empty window frame that faces out towards the sea. His tanned skin looks beautiful and Essie finds she is desperately pressing herself up against him, ferocious as he kisses her, hard.
He is tugging up her T-shirt now, pressed against the wall, and before she knows it he has his hand under her arse and is grinding her hard against the stiff fly of his jeans, and oh, my God, it has never occurred to Essie before that to be exactly the same height as someone has extraordinary benefits, even as she finds herself desperately rubbing against him.
‘You wanna?’ he snarls into her ear like an animal, and she nods, furiously, absolutely: yes. ‘It’s not too dirty?’
‘It’s not dirty enough,’ she says, looking straight at him, not giving herself time to think, and in an instant, with some expertise, he has pulled down her skirt and has taken a large, calloused hand and slipped it inside her knickers.
She nearly shrieks. Suddenly it feels as if the wall cannot hold her up.
He increases the pressure a little, watching her face intently to see how she responds and what she likes. She likes it all.
‘Oh, God,’ she says, leaning over, as if she’s going to fall. He holds her up and she is absolutely streaming and cannot wait even a second longer.
‘Put it . . . ’
‘What?’
‘Put it . . . I want it . . . ’
She can barely articulate it.
‘Yeah?’
‘Please . . . please . . . ’
‘Well, I hate to see a lady beg,’ says Dwight lazily, as if he’s not fussed one way or another. Unbuttoning his jeans, though, which have been uncomfortably containing his massive bulge, tells another story completely.
Without thinking, Essie drops to her knees, taking him, and herself, by surprise at her desperation to stuff him in between her lips.
She looks up at him, opening her mouth wide, and it is all he can do not to grab the back of her head and ram himself straight in, but he doesn’t, even if she looks as if she might welcome it.
Instead he pumps several times, but holds himself back, and gradually moves an aching, desperate Essie back up again until she’s braced against the wall.
The lack of a height difference between them means she is at exactly at the right level as slowly, carefully, he takes his large cock, rubbing it up and down slowly across her sodden opening, and she finds she is making the most ridiculous noises, pushing herself forward, desperate for him to take her.
They are both panting as he waits several terribly, agonisingly long moments, and then, with a grunting noise, finally pushes right up, deep inside her, endlessly and relentlessly, pushing her and pummelling her, hard and ferocious.
Essie is loving it, vociferously so; she puts her hands on his buttocks and drives him hard into her, screaming for it harder, and for more of it, which he willingly gives, until she finds herself collapsing forward on to him like a rag doll, as he pins her to the wall and keeps on driving into her without mercy.
Afterwards, they sink to the floor. Essie raw, horrified and delighted all at once.
Dwight is clearly falling asleep. Essie glances at him. Ridiculously, even though she is exhausted, she can’t help herself: she genuinely wants him again. Right away. This time, on all fours. While she gets filthy.
After sex with Connor she usually felt a slightly odd sense of relief. This isn’t the same thing at all. This is not even in the same ballpark.
Oh, my God. She had thought things were complicated before. She leaps up. Dwight stirs. She wants to grab his bicep and Christ, those hands of his, and God . . .
‘I have to go,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘I . . . I promised I’d speak to Lowell about looking after the puppies,’ she stammers.
‘They’ll be alright,’ he says. Then, more seriously, ‘Come back here, you.’
‘Wee Jim will be back.’
Dwight looks at her, his sleepy eyes half shut, in a way she finds very difficult to resist.
‘If only you lived nearby.’ He grins.
‘In my mum’s house. ’
‘Nothing wrong with living at your maw’s,’ says Dwight, and Essie wants to hit the side of her head. Oh, lord. He lives with his mum. So does she. And she has a boyfriend. And she and Dwight are meant to be working together. Oh, God. This is just awful.
She pulls her T-shirt back on, in a frenzy now to leave before she has to think too much about what she’s just done. And how much she wants to do it again.
‘So, your friends . . . ’ he says. He seems infuriatingly unconcerned about Connor. Which reminds her that of course, in the scheme of things, it’s not actually Dwight’s problem. He pulls himself up to sit against the wall and suddenly she wants to sit on him. She quashes the thought.
‘Yeah,’ she says, shamefully remembering her outburst. So much of it, truly, comes from jealousy. That he was chosen and she wasn’t.
‘I mean, it’s going to be alright, aye?’
She shrugs. ‘It’s your money.’
‘But if I give him the money and the deeds . . . He makes money for folk?’
‘He does,’ says Essie. Everyone, it seems, except for her.
Dwight looks at her squarely. ‘Wanna do that again?’
She does. More than anything. Anything in the world.
Her life is an unbelievable mess, and this is only going to make it worse.
Her life is an unbelievable mess, but for a very, very short time just past, it felt as if it made sense.
Wee Jim and the plumber can be heard approaching the door and having a loud argument about doughnuts. The spell breaks; Dwight leaps up and pulls back on his jeans at lightning speed – practically professional, thinks Essie briefly – and she turns.
‘Just dropping the latest project deadlines,’ she says loudly as the men come in. ‘Oh, no, I forgot them . . . ’
They grunt at her. ‘Jam or fudge?’
Dwight looks her straight in the eye.
‘Honey,’ he says.
She finds herself looking straight back at him.
‘Cream,’ she says. Then leaves before she can make things even worse.