Simone #2
Once together she gently touched his shoulder, and he tapped each of her cheeks with his own.
“Drink?” he asked. He made a quiet note that their time together had officially started.
“No,” Simone replied.
“Good.” Cillian took her hand, walked her out of the bar and upstairs to the room he’d booked.
Only minutes after crossing the threshold of the large room, Simone was naked, with her stomach on the bed, one side of her face pressed into the hotel’s pillow, and Cillian’s palm pressed flat on the small of her back as he thrust into her from behind.
Simone found pleasured groans climbing out from her stomach. She enjoyed the heaviness of Cillian and the roughness he entered her with. She liked the sound of the headboard against the wall and the dewy feel of sweat gliding down the curve of her back.
Simone left her body for a moment to enter her mind and wondered if she should be more vocal or make him earn it, but she decided there was no point in either.
Cillian was a performer, a large portion of his arousal accredited to the sound of his own pleasure.
Soon a guttural sound punctuated by gasps for breath left Cillian’s throat before he collapsed onto her.
He kissed the back of her shoulders, her neck, up to her ear before he rolled over to clean himself.
Simone lay there while the flood of warmth spread. She stretched and took a glance at the time.
Cillian would spend the next ten minutes trying to coax Simone into a conversation that veered on the personal.
Simone never misunderstood this as Cillian being nosy; she knew his type very well.
He was used to being the center of attention, which he did first by listening, learning, laughing, and then talking.
His trick to being memorable was by making the other person feel memorable.
Simone would feed him small pieces of disposable information to appease him: what book she was reading, the restaurants she knew in the area, etc.
, but would refuse to divulge anything like her plans for the weekend or what her day consisted of.
Then they would order light room service and have sex one more time before their two hours were up.
Sometimes Simone couldn’t remember what it was like to have one-off clients; she thrived with regulars because Simone thrived under routine and predictability.
For her, the measure of a good day was if everything had gone according to plan.
Every Tuesday morning (bank holidays had made Monday meetings too inconsistent) the teachers at Linwood Primary School gathered in the small staffroom to discuss the week’s objectives and goals for their classes and the school as a whole.
Before the weekend, everyone had been made aware that a new teacher would be joining, providing maternity cover for Ms. Cantin, who Simone had shared a classroom door with.
Whoever the replacement was bore heavy significance for Simone because of the after-school club arrangement she’d shared with Ms. Cantin, a Tyler-shaped agreement she hoped to continue.
Simone, one of the first to arrive at the staffroom, took a seat at the front and waited for Edwina to begin.
“All right, everyone. Settle down, please.” Headteacher Edwina Andoh was in her mid-forties and dressed in a fitted suit and delicate silver jewelry.
She addressed the room with an air that suggested she was popular in school.
She always stood before the great arched window, so that the sun could illuminate her outline.
She was firm but fair; the teachers respected her and the students called her “Ms. A.” Edwina was one of the main reasons Simone had wanted the job at Linwood because it meant Edwina would be the first Black female headteacher she’d worked for.
“As you can probably tell by now,” Edwina continued, “we have a new face joining us today. He’ll be teaching Ms. Cantin’s Year Six class while she’s on maternity leave.
” She gestured to someone at the back of the room, and Simone turned to the direction of applause as Edwina said, “Welcome Cillian O’Connor to Linwood Primary. ”
He smiled, nodding humbly at his new colleagues until he caught Simone’s eye and seemingly glitched.
Thankfully, Edwina continued her introduction and Simone quickly turned back around, rearranging her facial features from shock to indifference.
She worried she might be sick, but leaving the room while the staff meeting was still underway would only encourage anyone who might have noticed her and Cillian staring at one another.
As Edwina moved on to other topics, Simone’s vision began to blur, not from tears but confusion; she closed her eyes briefly but worried people would think her asleep and opened them again.
She could do nothing to silence her heartbeat and only hoped her neighbors couldn’t hear it.
In times like this, Simone relied on logic, and the fact was this: Cillian O’Connor, a client of hers, was now a teacher at the same school, and her options were to stay or quit.
Simone had joined less than a year ago and, having been a teacher’s assistant in many schools prior, Linwood was by far her favorite.
She did not want to quit. But how could she stay if Cillian also worked here?
The vulnerability and lack of control she’d worked so hard to suppress were back.
The tension seeping into her shoulders told Simone to be on her guard—that her two worlds were once again threatening to collide.
The evening of Dominic’s revelation had set something she couldn’t yet see in motion.
Now with Cillian’s arrival, Simone felt her once-firm grasp on this part of her world growing slick with the perspiration of her secrets.
Simone didn’t have a chance to speak to Cillian all morning despite their classrooms sharing a door.
It wasn’t until lunchtime playground duty, as they stood beside each other with their eyes forward and the children out of earshot, that they finally had the chance to speak.
Teachers have perfected the art of having heated conversations go undetected.
While the children they supervised skipped and ran past them, Simone and Cillian looked only to be exchanging pleasantries. The real conversation went as followed:
“Cillian, what are you doing here?”
He turned to look at Simone and she briefly saw that he was also still shocked by today’s turn of events. “Simone, I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Don’t look at me,” she said calmly. “Face forward so the other teachers don’t catch on.”
Cillian obeyed before quietly adding, “Quite the actress.”
Simone unlocked her jaw. “You failed to ever mention that you were a teacher.”
“Again, I could say the same to you,” he said. “Also, you didn’t ask; not to mention whenever I did volunteer an ounce of personal information, you’d shut me down and say, ‘We’re on a need-to-know basis.’” He leaned toward Simone. “Look what we could have avoided.”
Simone silently fumed because, technically, Cillian was right. Her refusal to divulge anything to do with her personal life had somehow led to this. “We were on a need-to-know basis,” she said. “Obviously, the last time was our last time.”
Cillian turned to her again and Simone sighed without looking in his direction. Why, she wondered, was pretending so difficult for some people? (Although the inverse of that might be, why was lying so easy for Simone?)
“Why do we have to stop seeing each other?” Cillian asked. “Don’t you think this makes things so much more exciting?”
“Maybe for you,” she replied. “For me, it makes things very complicated. I want to keep working here, my students need me, so cutting all communication outside of working hours is our best move forward.”
“ Outside of working hours?” Cillian repeated, a grin in his voice. “Well, it’s only my first day, but I have passed a number of supply closets.”
Simone almost smiled. Almost . “My work-life balance is only successful because I set boundaries. This is nonnegotiable.”
Cillian did not respond. At first Simone took that as a form of acceptance, until she saw the reason for his silence walking toward them.
Martha appeared, to hand only Cillian a mug of coffee. “Thank you so much,” he said.
Martha smiled sweetly. “You’re welcome, dear.” Then without a single glance at Simone, she walked straight back into the school building.
Simone couldn’t help but scoff aloud.
“What?” Cillian asked, innocently. “She asked if she could bring me one because of the cold.” He took a grateful sip. “Says I remind her of her son.”
“Her son isn’t Irish.”
“Who says it has anything to do with my fantastic accent?”
“Who said your accent was fantastic?”
Cillian smiled and shook his head. “Then it could be anything. The gorgeous eyes, the height, the full head of hair.”
“The ego,” Simone added. “The desire to be catered for.”
Cillian scrunched up his nose in such a way that, if he were to shrink to three feet tall, Simone wouldn’t be able to differentiate between him and the children.
“No need to add the Oedipal lens,” he said. “I know Martha’s type and it’s all harmless—where I’m concerned, of course. She’s not your biggest fan but she’s not a fan of any of the younger women. Loves the male staff, though.”
Simone was surprised by Cillian’s astute assessment, considering he’d been here only a matter of hours, an assessment it had taken Simone months to reach.
“Colleen’s nicer on her own,” Cillian continued, “but clearly Martha is in charge.”
That was also true. When Simone had first started at Linwood, Martha and Colleen had reminded her of the typical school bully and the bully’s best friend, who secretly had a heart of gold but not enough backbone to show it.
“I wouldn’t know,” Simone finally said. “I try not to gossip about my colleagues.”
“Why not?” He paused. “They gossip about you.”