Twelve #3
‘Alright?’ Further in, his voice gone rough at the edges.
‘Yeah.’ And I am. That’s the part that still catches me some nights: a body can be off-limits in one specific postcode and wide open everywhere else, and the wanting doesn’t need the whole map unlocked to be real.
I get a hand down between us, working him through the fabric, and he groans into my collarbone, and I keep moving against him, thigh and hip and the rough drag of the joggers, and the whole thing builds the ordinary way until I’m the one gone tight and shaking, forehead against his, coming with a sound I don’t try to keep quiet, entirely off the weight of him and the friction, nothing further south getting a vote in it.
He follows a minute after, my hand still working him through the cotton, his whole frame going still and then very much not.
Afterwards he doesn’t go near the joggers.
That’s the part worth the ink, and it isn’t that he was gentle, he’s always gentle: it’s that a line I drew at a waistband at nine o’clock in a bad hour was still exactly where I’d left it at midnight.
Untested. Not nudged, not brushed by an idle hand in the loose minute after, when the hard part’s done and the map goes out of most men’s heads altogether.
He gets a towel for my stomach and comes nowhere near the border, and then he lies down, and the border stays a border, which is the entire difference between a rule a man agrees to and a rule a man keeps.
‘Tomorrow’ll be different,’ I say, into the dark, because it usually is.
‘Same deal either way.’ He settles the arm over me, heavy, sure. ‘Good system.’
He got that phrase off me at a kitchen table with a mug in his hands and a table between us because I’d wanted furniture that meant business, and in three years I have never once heard him spend it on anything else.
The department asks me back in October, a term into the deal being real, to read ten minutes at the end-of-year showcase for the new cohort — proof it happens, the email says, which is the kind of sentence a university sends when it wants to borrow somebody’s good news for its own prospectus.
I say yes because Marged asks me to, not because Pritchard does, though his name’s on the invite too, under hers, a courtesy title neither of us examines out loud.
The room’s the same one. Same plastic chairs that don’t fit anybody’s knees, same fire extinguisher in the corridor I used to stand next to with my hands not steady.
I read the page with the cupboards, the one I always read, and a whole new intake of strangers holds its breath the way my own cohort once did, and I think, reading it, how strange it is that the trick still works even now I know exactly how I built it.
I still have the email. I don’t keep much — I clear a phone the way I clear a draft — but that one has moved machine to machine for years, the way you keep a chipped tile because it was in the house when you got there.
It came three weeks before the showcase, at twenty past eight in the morning, and it opened the way all of his opened.
Beynon.
Just the surname. No hello, no comma, no dash: a full stop, a line break, and then the note, the way you’d read a name off a register and wait to see whether the body attached to it answered.
I used to tell people that was the one thing Pritchard got right, and I half meant it, because the surname stepped clean over the he and the she he never once troubled himself to learn.
It took me years to work out I’d been crediting a man for the courtesy of not being bothered.
You can talk yourself into anything when you need the door.
Then the chapter back, red pen through the margins. Then the sentence.
The protagonist’s indecision reads as the writer’s indecision.
He’d underlined writer’s. Not indecision. Writer’s.
After that, two paragraphs about how the main character doesn’t know what she wants, and how a reader will only follow a woman who has decided, and a closing line about the showcase being three weeks off and the need to bring something with a spine in it.
I read it standing at a counter and then sat down on the floor with my back against the cupboard, which is where I read anything that costs me, and Ron came in and made tea and did not ask, and I told him anyway, flat, out loud, and listened to my own voice doing it.