9
I’M WORRIED HE’LL pull away immediately, or swear, or cringe, or extract himself with a grimace. And then what? I could try and turn it into a joke. What’s the punchline? ‘Hahaha, look at me, I have hit rock bottom.’ Or, maybe, ‘Sorry, it was a dare!’ A dare from whom? We are in our thirties. Well, not in . I object to the ‘in’ part. I am only thirty. I haven’t tipped over into in yet. I am still on the precipice of my thirties.
I’ll tell him it was habit. A man’s face that close to me, I just leaned in. An impulse. I could appeal to his ego, say it was his Hollywood allure. Or it was the sexy bra’s fault, it gave me false confidence. No. I’ll say it is Joel’s fault. That’s the one. My ultimate defence for everything this weekend. Look what Joel has done to me. I have lost my ability to behave in a normal way.
All of this flashes through my head as we kiss. Or, okay, as I kiss him. Mac remains still, accepting the kiss, not resisting but not responding, exactly, or responding very softly, very carefully, not taking it any further. A pity kiss to follow a pity hug. God. You sad woman.
I pull back and look at him. The whole thing is suddenly absurd. What am I doing?
But then Mac brings his hands down to rest on my waist, and he gives me a look, and I don’t quite know what it means, but it’s definitely not a pity look. Then he leans down and kisses me back.
He kisses me roughly, hungrily, walking me backwards to the wall, and pressing me against it. He smells so good, he kisses so well, his body fits so perfectly against mine. I am suddenly breathless. Forget screaming, crying, drinking, throwing myself to the ground, sobbing, running cold water over my wrists, going for a walk, breathing in like I’m smelling a flower. This is what I wanted, this is exactly what I need. To be ravished by a man I will probably never see again after this weekend against the wall in a restaurant I will definitely never enter again. I have maybe never wanted anything more in my life.
I push my hands into his hair. He has one hand gently on my cheek, and I make a sound, a kind of groaning moan, a pleasure moan, a sound I don’t think I have ever made before, a sound that surely should be reserved for activities well beyond kissing. But, my god, this man is very good at kissing. And touching. And pressing into me. But! We are in a public hallway .
My horny unstable mind says, go right now and have sex with him in the toilets. And once the idea forms, the better it seems. I haven’t had sex with anyone since Joel. This has been weighing on me. I had been reading a book about women who became nuns later in life, who took vows of celibacy, lived in total isolation, communing with the land and thinking, yes, this all makes perfect sense. I will close my physical self off from men, and open my inner self, my true womanhood, to the earth. But now, in this moment, kissing Mac in a hallway, I’m reconsidering that path. Maybe the earth can wait.
Mac kisses my neck. Then he lifts his head and says into my ear, ‘We should stop. Someone might see us.’
I suspect he knows this will have the opposite effect. There’s a reason he does voiceover. He has the kind of voice that does half the work in any situation. More than half. Especially this kind of situation.
‘Let’s go into the bathroom,’ I say.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
We keep kissing, and Mac guides me through the door of the bathroom, and then he lifts me onto the bench (this man has been trained in these moves, I swear), and I lean back against the mirror, eyes closed, my legs wrapped around him. I have never been so in the moment like this. My skin feels like it’s on fire. Mac knows what he’s doing. I open my eyes briefly, looking over his shoulder as he kisses my neck.
At a bay of urinals.
Urinals that don’t look in the least bit clean. And there is wet toilet paper sticking to the floor, and the door to a cubicle swinging half-open so I can see a toilet too.
What am I doing ?
It’s like a bucket of cold water has been thrown over me.
Also, I hadn’t realised we were in the men’s bathroom.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Oh god.’
Mac pauses, lifts his head.
‘That didn’t sound like a good oh god .’
‘It wasn’t!’
He steps back and I jump off the bench, adjusting my top.
‘We’re in the men’s bathroom!’
‘I know.’
‘Why?’
‘Did I hallucinate you saying let’s go into the bathroom?’
‘I meant the women’s bathroom. Obviously.’
‘I can’t go into the women’s bathroom.’
‘There are urinals in here.’
‘They’re just urinals, they’re not’—he glances behind him—‘Okay, yeah, they’re not great.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m just. I’m losing my mind, clearly.’
He takes a deep breath, steps back and puts his hands in his pockets, watching me.
‘Me too. This was a mistake,’ he says. ‘I got carried away. I’m sorry.’
‘No, not a mistake, it’s not you, you’re great—it’s that, I mean, I was about to have sex in a men’s bathroom . I need help. I need a tetanus shot.’
‘We weren’t about to have sex.’
‘We weren’t?’
‘We were?’
‘I felt like we were.’
‘We’re still fully clothed in a semi-public space and I don’t have any condoms, for a start.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ I am not going to tell him that I have an IUD and was in such a state I would have just jammed the door shut and gone with it condomless and caught who knows how many diseases. From him and, more likely, the bench beside the sink where bacteria are multiplying in little water puddles.
‘We were going to do something though,’ he says. As if I need reassurance. Which I appreciate. My face must have been showing my disappointment.
‘What were we going to do?’ I ask. ‘From your perspective?’ I can feel hysterical laughter rising in me, and I try to tamp it down.
‘I was going to…’ He pauses, clears his throat. ‘I was going to make sure you had a good time.’ The way he says it, looking into my eyes, shuts off my urge to laugh and makes me suddenly think I’m being a priss, and fuck the urinals because I want the good time he’s offering.
The door to the bathroom swings open then and Luke’s father walks in.
‘Oh,’ he says. His eyes are glassy and drunk. ‘Am I?’ He looks around in confusion. ‘Where am I?’
‘You’re in the right place. Sorry, I walked into the wrong bathroom!’ I say, smiling and hurrying towards the door. I am acutely aware my bra strap is showing, and my hair is everywhere and my face is flushed, but, luckily, Luke’s father is the kind of man always preoccupied with his thoughts and not especially interested in anyone else.
Mac follows me out, and we slide into our seats, and Luke’s mother dings her fork against her champagne glass, and Luke tells his mum no speeches, and she says she just wants to say one little thing, and he says, ‘At least wait until Dad is back from the toilet,’ and Hayley makes a ‘help me’ face and everything is back to normal. Except my skin is tingling and my heart is racing and I keep thinking about Mac’s mouth on me, and, best of all, I’m not thinking about Joel at all anymore.