Seven
Summer holds. Scaffolding down, and the walls stand on their own.
The site’s a foreign country I’ve been granted a visa for, hi-vis and a hard hat that swims on me, boots two sizes too big borrowed from the portacabin because mine would fail whatever inspection this place runs on rubber soles.
Sally shows me the roof line on the old warehouse they’re folding into the new build, the two of them talking trusses and load paths in a language I only half catch, and I watch her watch him the way you watch a colleague who respects someone properly: no performance in it, just two people who trust the same maths.
I like her for it. I like, more than I expected to, watching him in a register that has nothing to do with me: competent, unhurried, the version of him that existed for years before I ever clocked his face across a bar.
Gaz calls something up from the scaffold below, a joke I don’t fully hear, and the whole crew’s attention flickers my way, assessing, and I feel it land and pass, the specific weightlessness of being clocked and accepted in under a second by men who’ve decided, collectively, without a meeting, that I’m allowed to be here.
Nobody makes a thing of the dress I’ve got on under the hi-vis.
Nobody makes a thing of anything. It’s the least remarkable I’ve ever felt walking into a room full of strangers, and I don’t tell him that, not yet, because I haven’t worked out how to say it without making it sound bigger than the small, ordinary miracle it actually is.
I write the tour that night, obviously, because I write everything, but I don’t write it as it happened.
I write the shape of it instead: a woman walking through a building that’s still becoming itself, watching a man who knows exactly where every load goes, and not being frightened by any of it for the first time in the whole manuscript.
My editor, when I eventually have one, is going to ask what changed in the middle of the book, and I already know the honest answer and I’m never going to give it to her: I went up some scaffolding in borrowed boots and stopped being afraid of buildings the same week I stopped being afraid of him.
The crew clears out by four, off to wherever crews go when the light’s still good and the week’s nearly done, and the site goes quiet in the specific way a loud place goes quiet, the silence still shaped like the noise that was in it an hour ago.
He does the last walk-round, checking what needs checking, and I trail him because I’m not ready to leave yet, because something about watching him work has put a low, steady charge through me that four hours hasn’t burned off.
He locks the gate on the compound from the inside, out of habit, and turns round and finds me already close, closer than the site rules would strictly allow, and there’s a half-second where I watch him clock the distance and decide, deliberately, not to step back.
‘You’re not meant to still be here,’ he says.
‘Neither are you, technically. You clocked off an hour ago.’
‘I’m always here.’
‘I know.’ I get a hand flat on his chest, feel the heart going, steadier than mine, always steadier than mine, and that’s half of what I want tonight: to be the thing that finally makes it not steady. ‘That’s the problem.’
He doesn’t ask what the problem is. He’s learned, by now, that some of my sentences are doors and some are just the sound a door makes when you lean on it, and he waits to see which this one is.
I steer him back against the cabin wall, behind it, out of the sightline of the gate, the corrugated metal cool through his shirt when my hand presses flat there, and I go down onto my knees on the hardstanding in front of him with the evening light doing something gold and stupid to the whole yard, and I look up and say, ‘Here.’
‘Here’s mad.’
‘Here’s yours.’ I get his belt undone, unhurried, my thumbs finding the give in the leather he’s worn into it. ‘I’ve had you in every room that’s mine. I want you in the one that’s yours.’
He goes still the way he goes still when he’s decided to stop arguing with something he wants this badly, and his hand finds the back of my head, not pushing, resting, a question with its palm open.
I answer it with my mouth. I get his cock out of his shorts and it’s already thick, already lifting, and I take the head of it first, just that, tongue working the foreskin back off it slow, the taste of salt and skin and a whole day’s graft on him, and I feel the groan go through his stomach before it gets anywhere near his throat.
I set the pace, because that’s the arrangement, the one we built in words at my kitchen table months ago, and I use it now the way you use any tool you’ve earned: no asking twice.
I take him deeper, wet, breathing through my nose on the down-stroke until my eyes water, my fist working the base of him in time with my mouth so nothing goes to waste, and when his hips try to move I press my forearm flat across them and hold him to the wall, and he lets me, he always lets me, that’s the whole of what this is.
He’s thick enough that my jaw aches by the second minute, a good ache, the kind I chose, and I keep going anyway, tongue flat along the underside on every pass, feeling him twitch harder each time I do it.
Somewhere past the corrugated metal the gate rattles on its chain, a crew one wrong turn away from seeing exactly this, and neither of us stops.
The risk sits under everything like a live wire.
‘Celyn.’ Just my name, wrecked, a warning and a plea folded into the two syllables, and I take the warning as an instruction.
I go down to the root, hollow my cheeks, drag back up with the flat of my tongue hard under the head where I’ve learned it takes his legs out from under him, and do it again, faster now, until his thighs start shaking under my hands, and his hand fists in my hair, not guiding, just holding on, and he comes down my throat in three long pulses with his free palm slapping flat against the cabin wall and a sound punched clean out of him that the empty yard swallows whole.
I swallow around him until he’s done, until the shaking in his legs stops being about the edge and starts being about the drop on the other side of it.
I stay there a second longer than I need to, feeling him twitch and soften against my tongue, and when I finally sit back on my heels and look up, he’s got both hands braced on the wall like the wall’s the only thing holding the evening up, chest heaving, eyes wrecked and fond and a little bit stunned, the way he looks at me sometimes like he still can’t quite believe I chose the site over every other room available to me.
He hauls me up by the hand, doesn’t let go once I’m standing, and for a minute we just stand there in the gold light with the gate rattling and his heart, finally, not steady at all.
I’d thought about the geography of it more than I let him see, kneeling on that hardstanding.
Every time before had been my ground: my flat, my bed, my rules read out at my table, because control was how I kept the floor under a thing that could otherwise drop me.
The site was his, the one place in the world where he’s unarguably the authority and I’m the visitor in borrowed boots.
Going down on my knees there wasn’t a loss of the steering.
It was the steering used on purpose to hand him something: not the act, the location.
He felt it. He didn’t have the words, he never does, but he felt the size of the thing, because I’d shown him the rules weren’t a fence around me. They were a door I hold the key to, and I could open it, on my terms, on his ground, and the opening was worth more than the fence ever kept safe.
Later, at the flat, he’s shaved rough for two days running and I like the drag of it on my jaw when he kisses me at the door, the particular masc scruff-and-flannel version of him that never gets written about because it’s not dramatic enough for anyone but me to notice, and I sit on his counter the way I always do, legs swinging, and think about the dress I could have worn tonight and didn’t, the eyeliner I could have done and didn’t, the whole performance I could have put on and chose, instead, to leave at home.
It was never the dress. I’ve known that since the bar, since the first night he looked at me the same both ways and hated himself a little for how easy it turned out to be.
But there’s a difference between knowing a thing and living inside it long enough to stop needing to prove it, and tonight, stubbled and plain and completely unremarkable to anyone who might have looked, I lived inside it.
Nobody needed telling. I didn’t need telling either, not any more.
He takes me to the pub with the crew one Friday, which he does the way he does everything that matters, by not making it a thing: lads are out, if you fancy it.
Seven words, no weight on them, and I hear the weight anyway, because I’ve learned his tone the way he’s learned my rules.
It’s the first time I’ll be his in a room that’s fully his, off the site, drink in hand, no hard hat to explain me.
I go stubble-masc. Not a test, not a point, just who I am on a Friday when the wanting-to-be-seen and the wanting-to-be-left-alone turn up in the same body, and some nights the honest colour is no colour at all.
A flat cap of Rhi’s I’ve half-nicked, a plain shirt, the semicolon behind my ear if anyone looks, and nobody looks, and that’s the whole of it.