Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The bed, the dark. The ceiling, white, bare, the light fitting I keep meaning to fix.
Celyn against my side. The hair against my jaw. The breathing slowing. The body getting heavier. That settling before sleep.
I look at the ceiling. White, nothing on it, no stars, just the hairline cracks. Plaster and paint and the fitting with the bulb that flickers.
It could have stars. Celyn would know where they go, would say that’s not where Orion goes and I’d say who’s Orion.
The breathing changes, heavier. Celyn’s gone. Sleep.
Don’t move.
The ceiling. The plan I’m making for a flat that isn’t mine for a person who isn’t, who is,
The weight, the hair.
Thursday.
Nothing happens on Thursday. That’s the point of Thursday: the day nobody planned and nothing’s expected.
I get back from the site at quarter past six, the usual: mud on the boots, dust in the hair, the polo stuck to the back, November air. The dark comes at four now and the walk from the bus stop is streetlights and breath and the key in the lock.
Celyn’s on the sofa.
Today: my grey t-shirt, too big on them, the neck pulled down to the collarbone. Shaved this morning, jaw smooth.
The laptop open, the writing face.
Celyn looks up.
‘There’s pasta. I actually cooked. Don’t die of shock.’
The boots come off, jacket on the hook. Garlic and oregano hanging in the air, or basil maybe, one of the ones that comes in a jar either way.
The pasta is decent, I say so. Celyn takes it like I’ve awarded a Michelin star. The face, the chin up, the eyebrows, the mock-seriousness. ‘I’d like to thank the Academy. And Tesco. Mostly Tesco.’
We eat at the counter because the table’s got the laptop and two books and a mug with a pen in it and a cardigan draped over the back of the chair.
I don’t mind. Tried to mind. Can’t.
‘How was the site?’
‘Steel.’
‘The full report.’
‘Poured the footings on C block. Rain at two. Stopped at three. Poured again.’
‘Gripping.’
‘You asked.’
The grin, the glasses. The pasta that’s actually decent.
The sofa, the telly. Something, a show, a thing with people in a house arguing about a kitchen.
Celyn’s opinion on the tile work is detailed and wrong.
I tell Celyn it’s wrong. Celyn tells me tile is subjective.
I tell Celyn tile is not subjective and subway tile is lazy and anyone who puts subway tile in a kitchen should be, Celyn kisses me to shut me up about subway tile.
My hand on the knee. The jeans. The knee through the jeans. The shape of it. Muscle memory.
Celyn’s hand on my thigh. The climb, slow. The fingers walking up the denim. Unhurried, just. There.
‘Come here.’
Celyn doesn’t answer. Shifts. The weight. The body turns, the knee comes up, the sofa’s too narrow for this but we do it anyway because the bed’s three metres away and three metres is too far. I set my mug down on the side table without looking, the base clipping the lamp.
My hands on the hips. T-shirt, my t-shirt, rides up. Skin. My palm on the stomach. Smooth, warm. Jeans open. Zip. Under the jeans. Cotton. Simple. Elastic. My hand over the fabric and Celyn’s breath catches.
‘Your sofa is a war crime,’ Celyn says, breath gone, but they’re already shoving their own jeans down their thighs, lifting against me to do it.
‘Bed’s right there.’
‘Too far.’
And it is. The bed’s three metres and three metres is another country tonight.
Celyn pulls the t-shirt off without getting up, my t-shirt, the grey one, the spine and the shoulder blades in the low light, and we kick the rest off between us, jeans to the floor, the spring I keep meaning to fix digging up into one of us, neither of us caring which.
The sofa, then. Body I know. Hands that know where to go. No urgency, no motor, just the thing itself. The skin and the hands and the mouth and the rhythm that’s slow because it can be slow because there’s nowhere to be except here, on a settee too small for it, doing it anyway.
Celyn pushes me back into the corner of the sofa, the easy authority of every ordinary night since.
Then they’re up, two steps to the bag by the door, because the bag’s nearer than the bed and these days everything we need lives in it.
The cap, the foil, fished out one-handed. Back before I’ve gone cold.
Then Celyn climbs on. Knees either side of my hips, one foot braced on the floor for the room we haven’t got, the cold feet from the kitchen tile, the cushion springing under us.
None of it needs thinking now, the easy choreography of two people who’ve learnt each other in the dark.
Celyn rolls it down me, slicks me, one hand braced flat on my chest, and sinks down slow, taking me in inch by inch, and the sound they make is the Thursday sound, low, familiar, mine, the one I’ve earned night after night.
The heat closes over me to the root, the grip I know now, give and hold and the flutter at the rim, until Celyn’s sat full in my lap with all of me inside them.
‘You always do that.’ Celyn’s voice, wrecked-soft, the hips grinding a slow circle, working me deeper. ‘Make me do the work.’
‘You like it.’
‘Didn’t say I didn’t.’
Then Celyn rides me. Slow at first, then not, lifting almost off me and sinking back down, the angle they taught me months back, one hand braced on the back of the sofa for the leverage the seat won’t give, the old frame creaking under us, dragging the head of me along the front of them every time they drop.
And their cock bobs with it, hard, jutting up off their stomach and slapping wet against the skin each time they sink, untouched, the wet stringing, until they get their own fist round it and jerk it on their rhythm, arse and fist in time.
‘There,’ they tell me, the hips snapping now. ‘Don’t you stop.’
‘Then take it,’ I tell them, rough, my hands gripping the hips to feel every drop. ‘All of it.’ First thing I’ve said all night, and it lands, the rhythm stuttering on it.
I don’t. Celyn comes on my cock, sat full on it, leant over me, their own cock kicking over their fist and the come going up me, my stomach, my chest, a hot stripe of it catching my chin, the arse clamping down on me so hard I can’t move through it, a low string of Welsh against my mouth.
I don’t wipe it off. I tip their mouth down to mine and kiss them through it, my chin wet, the come smearing onto their lip, and they make a sound when the taste lands, their own, off me, and they don’t pull back.
They lick it off my mouth. Take it back.
The kiss goes slow and filthy, shared out between us, and that’s the thing that tips me, the giving it back to them, and I go.
Up into the grip of them, deep, buried, while their pulse is still going round me.
Order stopped mattering a long time ago.
Breath, ceiling, weight. Celyn’s hand finds mine without thinking. Mine threads back.
After: the sofa, the dark, the telly still mumbling to itself. Celyn’s head on my chest, face turned up towards me. The glasses somewhere on the floor.
‘Your pasta verdict was generous, by the way.’ The voice sleepy. The post-sex drowsy. ‘I know it was shit.’
I laugh, the real one.
‘It wasn’t shit.’
‘The sauce was from a jar, Ron.’
‘Good jar.’
‘It was the sixty-pence one.’
‘Efficient.’
The grin against my chest, the foot that hooks around my ankle, the blanket dragged half off the back of the sofa.
Thursday.
Nothing happens on Thursday, the pasta was decent, the sex was good. The sofa’s got a spring. The tile is not subjective.
Thursday.
Celyn walks in and the bar goes sideways for a second. But the room, rearranges. The way a site rearranges when you walk in and one thing’s been moved.
The skirt, long, dark. Some fabric that moves when they move. Dr Martens, the heavy ones, the lace-ups, the boots that look like they belong on a scaffold not under a skirt. Lipstick, dark. Eyeliner, the thin line. And under the lipstick, under the eyeliner, the whole thing changes.
Stubble, two days, maybe three.
The nails, blue. Bright blue. The blue of something electrical. Live wire, fresh, no chips.
Recognition. Same as the first day at the bar.
Celyn sits, the laptop out. The bag on the floor. The skirt settles around the boots and it shouldn’t work, none of it should work, the stubble and the lipstick and the boots and the skirt, and it works. It all bloody works.
‘You’re staring.’
‘Nah.’
‘You are. I can feel it from here.’
‘Looking out the window.’
‘The window’s behind you.’
Right. The window’s behind me. My body’s been turned towards the door for. Dunno how long. Since before Celyn came in. Like the body knew. Sorted itself towards the entrance and waited.
‘The blue’s good,’ I say. Nod at the nails.
Celyn looks at the hand. The fingers spread. The blue against the dark fabric of the skirt. ‘Electric blue. It was on sale.’
‘Suits you.’
Lipstick. The door opens a crack and shuts.
‘Cheers, Ron.’
The hand comes across the table. The blue nail catches the light. Thumb along my jaw, once. Light, quick. The stubble on my chin against the thumb, the stubble on Celyn’s chin under my eye. Mirror.
‘You alright?’ Quiet.
‘No.’
Celyn laughs, the short one that’s all breath. The hand goes back to the laptop. ‘Good.’
I drink the pint. Watch the window I’m not watching. The stubble catches the bar light and the lipstick catches it differently, and the heavy boot just sits there under all that fabric.
Celyn reads me an article from the phone.
A writer who built a house out of her own novels.
‘She pulped them. Made papier-maché. The walls are literally her own words.’ The Welsh thicker when Celyn’s excited, the vowels stretching.
The lipstick shifts when the mouth moves, the shadow following the cheekbone, and I’m watching the mouth make words and the shadow is wearing two days of beard and the pint’s still half-full and I haven’t touched it.
Same bloody thing as the first night in this bar when I didn’t know what I was looking at.