Chapter 25 #2
Celyn comes, I feel it. The body going rigid, the thrust that stops being rhythm and becomes force, the grip on my cock tightening, the groan against my neck.
Buried there. The vibration through the bone.
And even like this, on my back and full of them, I know it was me, my body, that took them over, and the knowing is its own heat.
Celyn keeps moving through it, hand still on my cock, the rhythm uneven now, instinct, and the wire fires again somewhere I can’t track. My cock between us, hard and dripping and the hand working it on the same uneven beat.
‘Come on, Ron.’
Celyn’s voice in my ear. Wrecked.
‘Come for me. Now.’
And I, it’s not the angle or the hand or the sound.
It’s the weight. The full weight of Celyn on me and inside me and around me.
It breaks out of me, hot, striping my stomach and Celyn’s both, everything the days apart packed into it pouring loose at once.
Streaks of it. The part of me that clenched when the fingers left clenches again, harder, around Celyn still inside, the body holding what’s there because the body’s decided it doesn’t want it gone.
My mouth on Celyn’s neck. The taste of skin. The salt of sweat. No words.
What’s left is the body doing what the body does when the body finally,
When the body finally comes home.
We don’t move, the weight, the wet. The breathing. Mine fast, Celyn’s slower, the two rates finding each other, evening out.
Celyn pulls out, the condom, the tie.
My legs, shaking. Like after a long pour when the body’s been braced for hours and finally lets go. I look at the ceiling. The cracks, no stars.
Celyn rolls onto the side. Facing me. The hand on my chest, light, fingertips, the heartbeat underneath. Checking.
‘Ron.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Stop staring at my ceiling like it owes you money.’
I laugh. The sound I only make here.
Celyn smiles. Full. The rare one. Four, five times I’ve seen it. The eyes.
‘The novel’s unstuck,’ Celyn says. After a minute. Or five.
‘Yeah?’
‘The man. He’s stuck on the threshold, can’t decide, the way I’ve been stuck on the whole book.’ Celyn stops. Starts again. ‘So he stops trying. He sits down. He stops holding himself apart, and the house takes him in. And the book comes unstuck the second he does.’
‘You told me that,’ Celyn says. ‘Months back. “Has he tried just sitting down and not trying.” And I laughed because it was obvious. And simple. And the thing I couldn’t see because I was too inside it.’
‘We smell,’ I say.
‘Profoundly.’ Celyn doesn’t move. ‘I’ve got lube in my hair.’
‘How.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Are you going to ask what’s on your stomach.’
I look down. I’m not going to ask.
Shower. The water goes hot. Celyn’s shampoo, not mine; I use it anyway.
Celyn strips the bed while I’m drying off and I take the other end. The clean set from the shelf, the grey ones. We make it without discussing who does what.
Celyn gets back in. Sits against the headboard, hair wet, my t-shirt.
‘Can I read it?’
‘Later. When you haven’t just fucked me. Your judgment’s compromised.’
‘You fucked me.’
‘Mutual fucking. Joint enterprise. The point stands.’
I laugh again.
The palm flat. The heartbeat underneath it, slow now, the right speed.
I lie in Celyn’s bed in Celyn’s flat on Oldham Street above a charity shop in Manchester and my body’s full of something that isn’t concrete and isn’t a word.
The light on the post-its. The mug with the chip. The door that opened.
The sound I make here. The sound that’s real.
Sunday’s the call where nothing happens, the check-in, the weather, the ‘you eating properly?’ and the ‘yes Mum’ and the thing about next door’s extension and the thing about Ewan and the ‘right love, I’ll let you go’ and the phone goes dark and I’ve said nothing. Said everything that’s not the thing.
Thursday. Because Sunday I’ll lose my nerve. Sunday the pattern will take over, the rhythm, the script, the kettle she puts on halfway through, the telly she turns down but not off. Sunday’s too easy to hide in.
I’ve been rehearsing since the walk home from the site. Five minutes from the gate to the flat and every step was a word. Mum. I’m seeing someone. Left foot. Right foot. Their name is Celyn. Turn at the barber’s. They’re a writer. Past the bins. They use ‘they.’ Key in the lock.
The sentence changes every time. Mum, I’ve met someone.
Too casual. Mum, there’s something I need to tell you.
Too heavy. Too much like Ewan’s, and the echo of that sentence in the kitchen with Dad still in the room is not the echo I want.
Mum, I’m with someone. Close. But ‘with’ could mean anything.
Friends, mates. The word that doesn’t say what the hands do and the mouth does and the body does.
Mum, I’m seeing someone, their name is Celyn.
That’s the one. Direct. The site voice. Give the information, don’t decorate it.
I’m sat on the bed, my bed, flat. Celyn’s at the restaurant. Thursday’s the late shift, the one that finishes at eleven. Celyn kissed me on the way out this morning.
Taste of tea and toast and the lip tint that leaves a mark I don’t wipe off until I get to site.
Phone. Screen. Mum’s name.
My thumb on the call button. I look at it. The nail, short, clean, the line of dust underneath that never fully shifts. The same thumb that measures steel and holds a plumb line and can’t press a green button on a phone screen.
I put the phone down. Pick it up, put it down.
The flat, the sounds of the flat without Celyn: the fridge humming, the pipe behind the wall that gurgles at eight every night, the neighbours’ telly through the ceiling.
My flat. The one I signed twelve months for because the body walked to the letting agent on Tib Street and the hand clicked twelve and the brain didn’t register.
Twelve months, just about up. The landlord asked in December. I said yes to twelve more. We weren’t talking in December, Celyn and I. The I in that sentence wasn’t singular. The I was two people and Celyn’s mug and a shampoo and a hoodie on a chair.
I pick the phone up.
I press call.
Three rings, four, the telly, the volume going down.
‘Ron? Everything alright?’
Because it’s Thursday. Because Thursday means something’s wrong or something’s different and Mum knows the difference between the two before I’ve opened my mouth.
‘Yeah. Everything’s yeah. Good.’
‘You sure? You sound tired.’
‘I’m fine, Mum. Just wanted to hear your voice.’
The sentence. The one I’ve been building.
I don’t need a word for what I am. But I need to say a name.
To the woman who raised me and Ewan in a three-bed in Lewisham with a husband who stopped talking.
She held that family together with sellotape and Sunday roasts and a voice that never once said ‘choose.’
She deserves the name.
‘Mum. I’m seeing someone.’
Silence. Half a second. The kettle, I can hear it, she’s in the kitchen. She put the kettle on before she picked up. She always does.
‘Oh that’s lovely.’ Warm, on instinct, before the questions. ‘What’s his name?’
His. Not her. She watched one son bring home a man, and she’s clocked the shape of the second one too. She’s gone straight to the door marked the same as Ewan’s: a boyfriend, a Laurence. The one I could walk through and she’d never have to learn a thing.
‘Their name’s Celyn.’
The kettle clicks off. The click and then the silence that isn’t silence because the telly’s still on low and there’s traffic outside and the Hendersons’ dog.
‘Celyn.’ She turns it over. ‘Welsh?’
‘Means holly. And it’s they, Mum. Celyn goes by they.’
‘They.’ She takes it across, Lewisham to Manchester, slower than the rest, because it’s new and she’s fifty-four and nobody handed her a leaflet.
She’s got the file for Ewan, the gay son, the partner, the Sunday roast with two men at the table.
She hasn’t got this one. But she takes it.
The vowel lands right by the second go. The word I couldn’t get up for months, and she’s learning it in real time, with the kettle going.
Silence, longer this time, the processing silence. It’s the they she’s turning over now.
The kettle, a cup. The sound of water being poured.
‘Right.’ The processing word. Mum’s ‘right’, the one that buys time. ‘And what do they do, this Celyn?’
‘They write. Novels.’
‘Novels? What kind?’
‘Horror.’
‘Horror!’ The voice lifts, not alarm. Surprise. She expected an accountant. ‘Like your films? The ones you watched when you were twelve and couldn’t sleep for a week?’
‘Yeah, Mum. Like those.’