Chapter 27 #2
I kiss the mouth. The stubble against my lips. Then the mouth, slow. The kind of slow that’s not technique. It’s the only speed I have right now because the book is in my body and the book was a whole night of a man standing on a threshold and I know what the threshold feels like.
Celyn’s hands on my chest. Resting. I can feel each finger, five points of pressure through the cotton.
‘Ron.’
‘I’m reading you,’ I say.
Don’t know where the sentence comes from. Don’t know what it means. My mouth said it, the body knows.
Celyn makes a sound, small. The sound that lives in the back of the throat. The one I know.
I pull the hoodie up. Over Celyn’s head.
Careful, the earring catches, I untangle it, the silver warm from the skin.
Underneath: the t-shirt, Celyn’s, the thin one, no bra today.
The chest flat, the nipples visible through the fabric, and I put my mouth there, on the cotton, on the warmth underneath, and Celyn’s back arches off the bed.
‘Slow,’ Celyn says.
‘Yeah.’
Slow. Page by page. The way the woman opened doors in the house, one room at a time.
T-shirt off. Celyn’s skin. Collarbone. I put my mouth on the dip above it. Hollow. Pulse underneath.
The joggers, I pull them down, Celyn lifts the hips. The movement easy, practiced, the thing we’ve done enough times that the mechanics don’t need words. Underneath: cotton boxers, grey, mine. Celyn wears my boxers now. The elastic loose on the narrow hips.
I press my mouth to the hip. The left one. Celyn’s hand finds my hair. The fingers. The chipped violet nails against my scalp.
I take the boxers off.
Celyn, naked on my bed, the body I know. The hips, the soft skin on the inside of the thigh.
‘Tell me,’ I say. Because I’m reading. Because earlier that night a man on a page put his hand on a doorframe and the wood was warm and I want to know what’s warm.
‘Everywhere,’ Celyn says. ‘Everywhere today.’
Everywhere, no off-limits. No ‘not there.’ The word opens the book.
The cock half-hard against the stomach. My hand goes there. Wraps around. Celyn inhales.
I go slow. My mouth on the ribs. The freckle I found in month three that nobody else knows about. On the inside of the left arm, at the crease of the elbow. I put my tongue on it. Celyn laughs, short one. Surprised one.
‘You always go there.’
‘It’s mine,’ I say. Don’t know why I say it. True though.
My hand on the cock. Slow. The grip Celyn taught me, my own now, no thinking left in it. I know this now, didn’t used to. Didn’t know what another person’s cock felt like in my hand and now I know what this one feels like and it’s not ‘another person’s cock.’ It’s Celyn’s.
Celyn’s hand reaches for me. Finds me through the joggers. Hard. The man touched the doorframe on page two hundred and Celyn made the small sound and now this. Celyn’s fingers trace the shape. The pressure. The heat of the palm through the cotton.
‘Off,’ Celyn says.
I take the joggers off. Boxers. Celyn pulls me down, the weight, my weight on top, the full press of skin on skin.
Cock against cock, slide, heat. Celyn’s legs wrap around my waist and the heels dig into my lower back and I grind, slow, slow, how the book was slow, and Celyn’s mouth is on my neck and the stubble is on my neck and the breath is on my neck and I’m,
‘Ron. Look at me.’
I look.
Celyn’s face, eyes. Grey-green, close. Stubble, chin. Mouth that wrote two hundred and forty-three pages.
‘The man steps inside,’ Celyn says.
I reach for the drawer. Condom, lube. The routine that’s muscle memory now, hands that know where things are in the dark.
I push inside. My cock, Celyn’s arse, the give I know now better than my own hands know steel.
The familiar give. Celyn’s breath. Caught, released, caught again. The reading rhythm. Page by page. Room by room.
The heat closes over me to the root, gripping then yielding then gripping, and I hold still in the give of it before I let myself move.
Celyn’s hands on my back. The nails. The chipped violet digging in. The pain that’s not pain. The heat underneath.
‘There,’ Celyn says. ‘Stay there.’
I stay, I don’t move, just inside, full. Inside someone who wrote you into a book.
Then I move. Slow. Celyn’s breath matching mine. The bed, the bodies, the air that’s not between us. Just the same space. My mouth finds the nipple, the one with the small white scar I’ve never asked about, and Celyn’s hand goes to Celyn’s own cock, working it on my rhythm.
I read them the way I read the book. A page at a time, no skipping, because with Celyn you skip a line and you miss the one that turns it.
The catch of breath when I drag along the front of them is a sentence.
The hand speeding on their own cock is the next one.
I go where the body sends me, slower where it wants slow, and it’s the first thing I’ve ever done where being a careful reader is the whole of the job.
‘Tilt up,’ I say, and work the pillow under Celyn’s hips, and the next push drags the thick of me along the front of them. Not far in. Just the angle, the width of me against the place. Celyn’s whole body jolts under mine. ‘There. Don’t stop. There.’
Celyn comes first, the back arching. The legs tightening.
It leaves them in a roll, up from where I’m seated into the thighs into the breath, the spill landing warm between us, on my stomach and their own, and they don’t hold it back, the one time they don’t.
The pulse, the clench around my cock. The slick on my hand.
Celyn’s mouth shapes something Welsh I won’t ask the meaning of, then a word from the book, one of the character’s, I think, but I can’t be sure.
And the thing I keep, after, is that I did it.
That I’m the one who made the writer lose the words.
I follow two strokes after, the come rolling up through me in slow heavy beats, contained by the latex yet felt all the way down to the heel.
I come inside Celyn and the sound I make is nothing.
Silence. The breath. The condom warm. I don’t pull out for a long time.
The book on the floor where it fell, face-down, open on the page I was reading.
The bed, the sheets. Celyn’s head against me. The fingers tracing on my stomach. A word, maybe, a sentence, I can’t read it.
‘Loved,’ I say.
‘Hmm?’
‘You said loved. Not love. Present perfect.’ The fingers stop, then start again. ‘It started before now and it hasn’t stopped. Ewan tried to teach me that once. I finally listened.’
‘Ewan’s smart.’
‘Yeah.’
The fingers. The word on my stomach that I can’t read. The ceiling. The stain from the leak. The body next to mine, the body I read for hours on paper and then read again with my hands.
I wrote everyone I’ve ever loved into my book.
Loved, started before now, hasn’t stopped.
There was never a man to save.
I pick up the last page, the one I couldn’t turn before. I’ve never read out loud to Celyn, not once. It’s always been the other way, Celyn’s voice in the dark and me listening. I read it now, quiet, a builder’s mouth round someone else’s sentences.
Elin got out, onto the hill, the wind off the sea, and she made herself look back.
Where the door had been there was no door.
Just wall, old and smooth and dry, as if nothing had ever opened there.
And from inside, through the stone, something was laughing.
It might have been the man. It might have been the house. There was no longer any way to tell.
The house shifts.
Celyn goes still against me.
They texted me once, the first week, that they’d put me in the book and promoted me to structural engineer. A joke. The finished man hasn’t got a job. Hasn’t got a name. Hasn’t got one line that says what he is. They took it all back out and left him undefined. I know which version’s the true one.
I put the page down. ‘That’s the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read,’ I say.
‘I’m not being kind. I’ve seen every horror going, the nasty ones, the ones that keep you off the landing light for a week.
None of them got near it.’ Celyn’s watching my face.
From a man who reads a road sign like homework, sat up in bed with two hundred and forty-three pages he went through in a night, telling the person who wrote them they frightened the life out of him. Celyn hears what it is.
‘You never let me off the hook,’ I say. ‘The whole way through I couldn’t tell which one was the monster.
The house, or the man, or whether there’s a difference.
Both undefined.’ Celyn’s hand finds mine.
‘He doesn’t fit anywhere out there. In there nobody makes him be one thing.
He loves the worst place in the world because it’s the only one that ever let him be nothing with edges.
’ The flat holds around us, the leak stain, the warm weight, the pages on the floor.
‘Two things you can’t name, holding each other up in the dark.
It’s the closest thing to a home the book gives anyone. ’
Mum calls on a Saturday. Eleven in the morning. I’m at the flat, the kettle on, Celyn asleep in the bed with the duvet pulled up to the ears and one foot sticking out the end because the foot runs hot. Always the left one, don’t know why.
Mum’s name on the screen. The photo, the paper hat.
Saturday’s not her day, Sunday is, Saturday means nothing.
‘Ron.’
The voice, the tight one. The one she used two years ago.
‘What’s happened.’
The full stop on it. Already reading the answer off my face.
‘Your dad was here last night. For the football. I had it on. He came round with the cans, him and Terry from next door, and they watched the match.’ She stops.
The breath. The reset. ‘He asked about you. How you’re doing.
And I said you’re good, you’re happy, you’re, I said you’ve got someone, Ron.
I didn’t mean to say it like, I said “they’re coming for dinner soon” and he didn’t say anything. ’
They.