Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Three days waiting. Three days of not.
Celyn looks up.
Different tonight. Black jeans, tight at the ankle.
A dark t-shirt, short sleeves, the arms bare, the muscle there the carrying-plates-for-six-hours kind, lean and visible in the bar light.
One day of stubble, light, a shadow more than a texture.
Eyeliner, a thin line, exact. Enough to make the grey darker, wider. That thing. First.
The nails are blue. Bright blue, the kind on the signs at the site, the safety-information blue. Chipped at the edges, three days old, maybe four. The colour’s still loud.
And the smell, from a metre away, the fruity one, sweet, warm. Doesn’t go with the stubble. Doesn’t go with the arms. Goes with Celyn.
‘Three days,’ Celyn says.
‘Yeah.’
‘I scared you.’
‘No.’
Yes.
Celyn closes the laptop. Slides it into the bag. Picks up the mug, puts it down, looks at me.
‘Sit down, Ronan.’
I sit.
We don’t talk about it. I listen. Celyn talks about the cat, the ginger one from the photo, a neighbourhood stray that’s adopted the windowsill and judges everyone who passes.
‘He’s got a face like a building inspector.’
‘You don’t know what a building inspector looks like.’
‘I imagine they look disapproving. From a height.’
I laugh, and it surprises me. Three days without laughing.
Celyn talks about a customer at the restaurant who sent back a risotto four times. ‘Fourth time she said it was too risotto-ish. I said that’s because it’s a risotto.’ The Welsh vowels stretch, the timing perfect. Celyn’s funny without trying, just is.
I drink my pint, order a second. Celyn drinks tea. The nails wrap around the mug, the chipped edges catch the light, the fingers move, and I’m watching. I know I’m watching, and three days haven’t changed anything. Three days have made it worse.
‘You’re doing the thing,’ Celyn says.
‘What thing.’
‘The looking thing. You do it when you think I can’t see.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do. You look at my hands. Then my mouth. Then away. Then back to my hands. It’s a circuit.’ The mug tilts. ‘I quite like it.’
Celyn drinks, the tea hitting the ceramic. Three days of watching. Three days of coming back to this table like it’s the only place that makes sense anymore.
The site is the site. Here is Celyn, with the mouth-lift that’s edging towards the full smile today.
‘You could just ask,’ Celyn says. Still not looking up from the mug. ‘If you want to look. I don’t mind.’
‘Not the same.’
‘Why not.’
I don’t have an answer. The looking is different when you don’t ask for permission. The looking is private.
‘You’re thinking something,’ Celyn says. Now the eyes come up. The line of the liner under them. The grey and the green mixed together in the bar light. ‘What.’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re a shit liar. Your whole face moves when you try. The cheekbone does this thing.’
My hand goes to my face. Stupid. I put it down.
‘I’m thinking,’ I say, ‘about what the difference is.’
‘Between.’
‘The person at the table with the dress. And the person at the table in the hoodie. If it’s the same person how come.’
I stop, this is stupid. This is the thing you don’t ask.
‘How come you wanted to kiss me in the dress and got scared when you wanted to kiss me in the hoodie,’ Celyn says, and the bar noise is around us but the space is between us.
‘Yeah.’
Celyn puts the mug down. Leans forward just enough.
‘Because I was still me,’ Celyn says. ‘And you were trying to make the wanting change when the clothes did.’
‘But it didn’t.’
I look at the mug. At the table. At Celyn’s hand around the handle, the chipped nails, the ring.
‘No,’ I say.
‘You wanted me both times.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You just didn’t know what that meant.’
‘No.’
Celyn’s eyes stay on mine.
‘It doesn’t have to mean anything neat.’
The bar noise comes back slowly. Glasses, chairs, someone laughing too loud near the door.
‘It just means you wanted me.’
The bar tilts a bit. Or the chair does, or time does.
‘Still think I’m just a girl?’ Celyn says.
‘No.’
‘Still think I’m just a bloke?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ The half-smile comes back. The full smile’s still waiting. ‘Then we’re starting to get somewhere.’
Outside. The rain’s the Manchester kind, not quite rain, not quite mist. Makes everything shiny without getting you properly wet. The street’s dark and the puddles catch the light from the bar sign and my feet are on the pavement and I don’t turn right towards the flat.
I turn left, towards Celyn.
Celyn walks, I walk beside. Half a metre away, the gap you’d leave with a mate. But I’m walking toward Celyn.
We don’t talk. The Converse and my boots on the wet pavement. The sound of the city winding down. A taxi, a group of girls laughing, a siren somewhere far.
Celyn turns into a side street. Narrower. Darker. The streetlight at the end throws orange across the bricks.
Stops.
Turns.
Looks at me. From below, ten centimetres below, maybe more. The stubble, the eyeliner. The smell, that sweet thing, close now, in the wet air.
I don’t decide.
I’ve never decided anything about Celyn. The body has. The body decided three days ago and the body decides now.
My hands go to Celyn’s waist.
Too much. I pull too hard and my nose bumps Celyn’s, and then the mouth finds the mouth, and it scratches.
My chin, the skin around my lips. The drag of it, coarse, sharp, nothing like smooth skin, nothing like anything I’ve kissed before.
The scratch sends something down my spine I don’t have a word for.
The scratch says: Celyn. The whole of them. And the body says: more.
I kiss harder. Celyn’s hands come up, on my chest, on my jacket, the fingers gripping the lapel and pulling. The sound Celyn makes, low, brief, surprised. Settles below my stomach and doesn’t leave.
We pull apart, breathe, the orange light. The rain on my face. Celyn’s face, the eyes half-closed, lips open, the eyeliner smudged at one corner.
‘You didn’t need three days for that,’ Celyn says.
The voice is light. The hand on my lapel hasn’t loosened. Knuckles white. Held through the kiss and the speaking and holding still.
The lip balm. Celyn’s lip balm, not lipstick, something clear, something that tastes like, I lick my lip. Taste of someone else’s mouth.
I kiss Celyn again, better. The hands know where to go now, waist, the curve of the back, the nape where the hair starts. Celyn’s hair in my fist. Holding it. Celyn’s fingers on the front of my jacket, then inside the jacket. The cold of the ring against my collarbone through the cotton.
‘Come home with me,’ Celyn says. Against my mouth.
‘Yeah.’
‘Or I come to yours. I don’t care which door. I just don’t want this to stop on a street.’
My flat’s closer. Five minutes. My feet know the way and my hands don’t leave Celyn’s waist and we walk like that, stupid, joined, bumping hips, down Tib Street in the rain.
The door.
Dark.
I reach for the light. Celyn’s hand catches mine at the switch, holds it.
‘Leave it.’ A beat. Breath on my jaw. ‘You alright with this, Ronan? The actual answer.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Say it proper.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then listen for me.’ Celyn takes my hand in the dark and lays it flat on their own chest, holds it there a second, the heart going under my palm.
‘If I move your hand, you let me move it. There’s places that aren’t mine, and words I don’t want on my body.
I’ll keep you off them. You won’t put a foot wrong if you let me steer. ’
‘Tell me the words.’
‘Later. Tonight you just use your hands.’ The mouth at my jaw. ‘And you ask. Like you did. That’s the whole of it.’
Celyn’s hands push the jacket off my shoulders. It hits the floor. Then my shirt, pulling it up, and lips press my neck, the pulse, the teeth on the tendon of my neck.
Wall, my back, my own flat.
Celyn’s body against mine. Narrower, pressed flat against me, the heat through the jeans.
I don’t think.
My hands move.
The t-shirt. I pull it up and Celyn lifts the arms and the t-shirt comes off and in the dark there’s skin, the chest, the ribs, the stomach. The collarbones. The chain at the throat. The smell, everywhere. Sweet and close and underneath the sweet is warm skin.
I put my hand on Celyn’s body. Flat, the ribs, the heartbeat under my palm, fast. It starts to drift and Celyn’s catches it, moves it an inch, sets it where they want it.
I follow. Their rule, like they said. My hand on Celyn and the heartbeat quick under my fingers and kissing me again and the stubble scratching and my hips pressed to the wall and Celyn’s hips pressed to mine and through the jeans, through both jeans, Celyn against me. Hard. Both of us. The same.
My hand moves. Down. Stops at the button of Celyn’s jeans. The knuckle against the heat through the denim.
‘Yeah?’ I say. Against the mouth.
Breath. Close.
‘Yeah.’
The button, the zip, careful, then the hand inside. I know the rhythm, the grip, the pressure. The difference is that this time it’s not mine and the sounds, the sounds are different.
I knew what I’d find. And still, the half-second my hand closes round them, something in me recalibrates, the way your hand reaches already shaped for a tool that isn’t there any more.
Then the gap shuts. It was never about what’s in their pants.
It’s them. Would’ve been them whatever my hand found.
Celyn’s cock in my fist. Heavier than the angle of my own, the skin loose and shifting over the hard of it, the foreskin still half over the head, wet already at the slit. I do what I know. The full length, slow, my thumb dragging the wet down to ease the pull.
‘Slower.’ Celyn’s voice against my jaw, already wrecked. ‘I’m not, fuck. Not in a hurry.’
I slow. Celyn’s hand covers mine, shows me, the grip a notch tighter under the head, a twist at the top. I copy it. Get it wrong. Get it right.
‘There. That. Keep that.’
The foreskin drags back full now, the head dark and slick, and I work it the way Celyn showed me, the way I’d want it, my own knowledge turned sideways onto a body with the same hardware that uses it different.
Celyn’s head goes back. The neck, long, the chain catching the light from the window. The fingers gripping my shirt, pulling, twisting. The face, the eyeliner smudged. The jaw with the shadow of stubble, lids shut, and the expression is a person coming apart under my hand. Because of my hand. Me.
Celyn comes over my fist, hot, the cock jerking against my grip, the come slicking my fingers. The sound is lower than a moan, punched out and held. The grip on my shirt goes tight, then gone.
My hand, wet, warm. Celyn’s body against me, breathing, the forehead on my shoulder.
Their breath still ragged on my neck, not steady yet.
Then Celyn moves, down. The knees hit the floor, my floor, the carpet from the flat, the carpet I walk on in my boots.
Celyn looks up. The face, the eyeliner, the eyes still unfocused from a minute ago.
The buckle, the button. I watch from above and I can’t breathe and I can’t look away and the hands are careful and steady and mine are shaking against the wall.
The mouth, Celyn’s mouth, opens. Takes me in. Not the graze I half expect, the whole wet heat of it sliding down, the tongue flat and dragging under the head, the lips tight past the ridge, and my hand slaps the wall.
‘Christ. Celyn.’
A hum round me, pleased. Celyn pulls back slow to the head, tongues the slit, goes down again, deeper, the throat there for a second then gone.
One hand splayed on my hip, holding me to the wall so I can’t push up into it.
The other hand lower, cupping my balls, rolling them, then back, finding the place behind, the soft ridge under the sac, pressing, a slow firm circle that lights something up the inside of me.
‘There, no, fuck.’
The fingers pinch, just there, and the feeling forks, sharp and bright, and drags the whole thing up faster than I can stop it.
‘I’m going to, I can’t, I’m.’
Celyn doesn’t pull off. The mouth goes tight, the hand presses, and I come, fast, embarrassing, ten seconds maybe and less, down Celyn’s throat with my fist against the plaster and a sound that isn’t a word.
Celyn takes it, swallows, keeps me in through the kick of it until I’m too much and slides off slow.
Celyn looks up, the smudge, the eyes, and says:
‘That’s the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.’
I get us up off the floor, onto the bed. Find their t-shirt where it landed and pass it over without thinking, because the floor’s cold and the shaking’s gone to the after-kind. Celyn watches me do it.
‘You listened,’ they say. Not flat now. ‘I told you to steer and you let me. People don’t, mostly. You did.’
‘You said it was the whole of it.’
‘It is.’ The mouth, the smudge. ‘Turns out it really is.’
Celyn left an hour ago. Kissed me at the door, slow, different from the street. No urgency, something else. I don’t know the word.
‘Tomorrow,’ Celyn said. ‘The bar. Normal.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Unless you want another three days.’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ The mouth. Then gone. The sound of trainers on the stairs. The door.
I’m in the bed, can’t sleep, the image won’t leave, Celyn’s face. The light from the window on that face. The sound. The one second where lips touched me and the body said: that’s it. Can’t hold it. Now.
I’ve never come that fast. One graze and the body threw everything away like it had been waiting for exactly this.
The jeans are in the laundry basket, the shirt’s on the floor, the jacket’s still by the door where Celyn pushed it off.
I lie there in the dark. The nail on the wall.
I want to go back. Right now. I want to walk to wherever Celyn is and put my hands on that waist and do it again. Better, slower, learn the sounds, learn the body. Find out what makes that expression happen. The head back, the throat, the grip on my shirt.
Tomorrow is too far, I’ll be there.
The body knows before the brain catches up. Skin remembers. Hands remember.
The alarm goes at six. I’m already awake, been awake since five, or four, or whenever the streetlight stopped being the only thing in the room and the grey started coming through the blinds. Doesn’t matter, the body’s up, the body’s been up.
I shower. The water hits my face and my hands and the backs of my knees and the skin feels all of it. Switched on. Everything louder than it was yesterday.
Yesterday.
I put my forehead on the tiles. Close my eyes.
The image is right there. Hasn’t moved. Celyn’s face looking up from the floor of my flat with the stubble and the smudged eyeliner and the blue nails wiping the cheek and the mouth saying that’s the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.
The sound, the small one, the one from when I had my hand on, from when Celyn came.
I turn the water cold. Hold it. Count to twenty. Get out.