Chapter 8 Show Two, and After #2
The corridor smelled of new carpet. His name was on the door on a strip of gaffer, hand-written, because Slate do not print them at this tier and never have.
He got the door shut and his back against it and that was as far as any plan went.
“I want to say something first,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“No, it’s not—” He was laughing again. “It’s not a speech. It’s one sentence and then I’m done.”
“Go on, then.”
“I’ve wanted to do this since you stood on that stage in Glasgow and would not let me get away with mine’s grand,” he said. “Which is two days. That’s the sentence. That’s the whole sentence.”
“That’s a good sentence.”
“Thank you. I’ve been working on it.” And he kissed her properly this time, with both hands, one at her jaw and one flat and warm at the small of her back, and she got up on her toes for it because he is five foot eleven and she is five foot two and the geometry of it is a thing you simply have to solve.
He was very good at it, which surprised her, and then did not, because of course he was — he is the most attentive man alive, and kissing is ninety per cent paying attention.
He read every single thing she did. When she made a sound at the back of her throat he found out what had caused it and did it again.
When she went for the buttons that were left on the mesh shirt he stood still and let her, both hands off her, watching her face, and being watched by Yusuf Warsame turned out to be an entirely different experience from being the one person in a building of eight thousand that nobody looks at, which she has never once minded.
“Take the towel off,” she said, “you look ridiculous,” and he took the towel off and threw it at a chair and missed, and that was the last funny thing for a while.
He got her back against the door and stayed there a long time, and she let him, and the strip light over the mirror buzzed the whole way through it.
Her hands spread across his stomach under the open shirt.
His went round her and down and learned the shape of her through her clothes, unhurried, like a man with forty minutes who had decided to spend them, palms open on her ass and then higher, thumbs brushing the undersides of her tits through the fabric.
She had his belt undone before a single thing of hers had come off, which she noticed at the time, and filed, and did nothing about; her fingers worked the zip and found his cock already hard, and she closed her hand round it once, quick, before he shifted and the angle changed.
He stopped. He put his forehead against hers.
“What do you want,” Yusuf said. “Tell me. I’m good at this bit.”
“You haven’t told me once tonight what anybody else needs,” she said. “Not since the rack. Do you know that? Four things and then a question. That’s a record for you.”
He laughed at the ceiling, delighted, and did not notice a thing, and got the hem of her top in both hands instead.
“Arms,” he said, and she put her arms up, and he took his time over what he found, palms sliding up under the bra to cup her tits, thumbs circling her nipples until they tightened, and all of it she spent watching him watch her, because he kept looking up at her face to check, every time.
He worked his way lower and she went up onto the fold-out counter along the wall, which was never built to take a person and took her anyway.
He wanted to get down on his knees. She got a hand in the wet mesh at his shoulder and brought him back up instead, because a man on his knees is a man asking you a question for however long it lasts, and she was not going to be asked anything twice in one night.
He came back up without a word about it.
Something moved behind his eyes when he did, and went again.
His hand found the wet between her legs through the fabric and pressed there once, openly pleased, and she shifted her hips into it without meaning to.
There was a zip, and the wrong pocket first, and a small graceless interval with his bag on the floor, and then his trousers round his ankles, and hers dealt with in two impatient handfuls and left hanging off one foot, and his hands under her thighs, and the counter was exactly the wrong height and then, once he had shifted her forward, exactly the right one.
Her legs went round him. He fucked into her pussy in one steady thrust, and her mouth went by his ear, and she said yes when there was a question, and there was a question.
Somebody tried the handle.
They both went absolutely still. A voice out in the corridor said a name that was not either of theirs, twice, and then a set of footsteps went away over the new carpet, and Yusuf’s shoulders started shaking and he had to put his face in her neck to laugh silently, and he did not stop what he was doing while he did it, and neither of them let go of anything.
“Shona,” he said, a while later, into her hair, wrecked. “Tell me what you want. Anything. I’ll do it, I’m so—tell me.”
“Your voice sounded like you tonight,” she said. “Not the big one. The one you use at four in the afternoon.”
It was true. It was one of the truest things she has ever said to anybody, and it was about him, and he took it the way he takes everything, which is straight into the middle of the chest, and it undid something in him and he stopped being careful; his cock drove deeper, harder, the rhythm shifting from careful to urgent.
A phone went off on the floor in the trousers round his ankles — Mags’s ringtone, which every person on that tour knows on sight — and rang out, and started again, and Shona laughed so hard she nearly lost the counter, and he held her on it with both hands and carried on regardless, and it was, without any competition, the funniest thing that had happened to her in a year.
She got there with his hand on her clit and his mouth at the side of her neck and her eyes open, watching him, because his face at that moment was the best thing in the room and she was not going to miss it. She gave him that too. She did not shut her eyes once.
He followed, shortly after, with his hands hard at her hips, saying her name — just her name, the whole of it, the way he had said it in the first hour, before any of this — and then he stood there holding her up with his forehead on her collarbone for as long as it took to breathe.
“Okay,” he said, to her sternum. “That’s the best I’ve felt in about three years, and I’d like that on the record.”
“There isn’t a record.”
“There’s a record,” Yusuf said.
Afterwards he sat down on the floor with his back against the counter and his shirt still on and pulled her down onto his lap, and they dealt with the logistics, which are never in anybody’s song, and he found half a packet of wipes in the bag with the condoms in it and was extremely practical about it in a way that made her laugh again.
The phone had stopped. The load-out was going on through the wall — the long rumble of a case on a ramp, a man shouting a number — and somewhere out there Fielding’s lot were getting the truck away early, and she should have been at her desk a long time ago.
“I’m going to have to go and be a monitor engineer,” she said.
“In a minute.” He had his chin on the top of her head. Her hair had come down out of the grips on one side and she could feel him not mentioning it. “Can I say a thing.”
“You keep saying things.”
“You’ve not told me one thing about you,” Yusuf said, “in two days,” and her whole body went still against him, from the shoulders down, the way you go still when the room drops out from under a mix and you have not yet worked out which channel did it.
“And I’m not asking. I’m just saying I noticed. That’s all that is.”
There was a long moment where she could have.
The strip light buzzed. There were four dead bulbs round the mirror out of eleven and she counted them, because counting is a thing you can do instead.
“Your car’s the late one,” she said. “You told Mags.”
“I told Mags.”
“Then you’ve got till half twelve.”
And Yusuf Warsame laughed, and kissed the side of her head, and let it go, because he is the most generous man in any room, and what generosity looks like from the inside is never once making anybody hold still.
She went back out to the desk with her hair pinned up wrong and her mouth entirely gone and a hand-written strip of gaffer with his name on it going past her shoulder as the door shut, and she knew exactly what she had just done, because she had done it at four o’clock in the afternoon to a man with a bass on his shoulder, and again at half past eight in the dark where nobody could see.
It had been the best hour of her week.
It was the same defect. She had simply performed it with her clothes off.