Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The door opens and Steph walks in.
Our table, Celyn typing, the glasses on, two mugs. The evening doing its thing until now.
She sees me, waves, comes over.
‘Ronan! Hi.’
Then she clocks Celyn, the stubble, the blouse, the glasses, and something stutters in her face.
Half a second.
The smile holds.
The eyes don’t know where to land, so they land back on me like that’s easier. Like I’m the part of the table she understands.
‘This is Celyn,’ I say.
I put the name down on the table. On purpose, the way you set a level on a surface and wait for it to read true.
Steph’s eyes go to Celyn. Half a second, the same half second as before. Then back to me. She doesn’t take the name. Sets it aside like a word in a language she’s decided not to learn.
‘Didn’t know you came here.’
‘Most nights.’
She pulls a chair from the next table without asking and sits angled at me, shoulder turned away from the laptop. Not rude exactly, worse than rude. Like Celyn’s just someone working nearby and she’s making sure the conversation knows it.
‘Quiz fell through,’ she says, before I’ve asked. ‘Thought I’d have one anyway. Saw your head through the window.’
Saw your head through the window. So not the door’s fault she’s here. Hers.
She laughs and fixes a strand of hair that didn’t need fixing.
Celyn’s hands still on the keyboard. Not typing now.
Steph talks about the site, the steel, the pour.
Fast at first, then slower when I answer, because she’s got me answering.
Her knee goes under the table. Not accidental.
Close enough that I have to move mine or not move mine and both options are a thing.
Gaz’s girlfriend’s knee. Gaz not in the room.
I move mine. Away. Look at Celyn while I do it, the glasses, the jaw, the stubble shadow. Can’t say it. Not to Steph, not out loud, not yet. But the leg’s already decided. The leg knew before I did.
She’s Gaz’s girlfriend. That’s the first wall, and the one I can put a hand on: you don’t, not to one of the lads. Simple.
The other wall I don’t say out loud. A year ago I’d have taken Steph, if she were free, because she’d have asked nothing of me.
And the knee does nothing. A woman’s knee on mine and it’s furniture.
Three feet off there’s a pencil between someone’s teeth and a pair of glasses, and that’s where all the air in the room went.
No pull. Not a flicker. Eyes for the one not even looking my way.
She doesn’t say hello to Celyn.
Not because she hasn’t noticed. Because she has.
‘You on your own?’ she asks.
I look at her.
The question sits there, stupid and bold, with Celyn’s mug beside mine and Celyn’s laptop open between us.
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ Another laugh. Smaller. ‘Sorry, I meant—’ She doesn’t finish it. The eyes flick to Celyn and away again, quick as a dropped tool. ‘There’s a table free by the window. Bit more room?’
There it is.
Not us needing room.
Her wanting me in a place where Celyn isn’t.
If it were Gaz in the next seat, she’d have said hello and sat down easy. If it were Ewan, she’d have asked about uni. It’s Celyn she can’t fit into the picture, so she tries to crop them out.
‘I’m alright here.’
‘Course. Yeah, no, course.’ She laughs at nothing.
She asks for my number. Her flatmate’s an architect, loves old buildings, would die for a tour of the restoration. It comes out in a rush, rehearsed on the walk over, glad of somewhere to put it. I give it because the question’s reasonable and reasonable questions get answers.
‘Brilliant.’ She touches my arm, quick, stands too fast, the chair scraping. ‘See you, yeah?’
She goes. No goodbye to Celyn. No hello either. Not because Celyn’s nothing to her. Because Celyn’s something she couldn’t place and didn’t have the nerve to try.
Celyn types. Steady. The glasses on the nose.
Walk home at ten. Celyn half a step ahead. The scarf trailing.
‘You alright?’
‘Yeah. Tired.’ A beat, the cold, the scarf. ‘She couldn’t look at me.’
‘I said your name,’ I say.
‘You did.’ Celyn doesn’t slow down. ‘Put it down careful. She stepped over it like a puddle.’
‘She was just awkward, I think. Not—’
‘Awkward still lands on me.’ Flat, the way they go flat when a thing’s true and old. ‘Happens a lot. Doesn’t get less shit.’
I haven’t got anything for that. I’d filed it under tired and it wasn’t. It was the woman who sat with her back to them and never said hello, and me half a street too slow to clock it.
Friday. Pub with the lads.
Gaz drove, his girlfriend’s Corsa, the one with the air freshener that smells like something that’s never been a fruit.
Me, Gaz, Dean, Jay. Thomas’s off, his kid’s got chickenpox, which means Thomas’s texting photos of calamine-covered toddler to the group chat every twenty minutes.
Jay keeps showing me the screen. I keep not looking.
The pub’s not our pub. Somewhere Gaz knows.
A Wetherspoon off Oxford Road, the kind where the carpet sticks and the quiz machine flashes and the pints are cheap enough that nobody orders anything else.
I don’t like it. The lights are too bright.
The music’s too loud. But the lads picked it and the lads are the lads and Friday is Friday.
Dean gets the first round. Two Stellas, a Guinness for himself, a Diet Coke for Gaz because he’s driving and won’t shut up about it. I take the Stella. Cold. Fine.
The talk is work, always starts with work.
The Block C pour went well, set clean, no cracks, the inspection on Monday’s a formality.
Dave’s happy. Dave being happy means less Dave.
More getting on with it. How I like it. Jay talks about the new apprentice, seventeen, scared of heights, stands at the edge of the second-level scaffold and goes white.
We all went white once. Nobody says that.
‘Seriously though,’ Gaz says. Leaning back. Third Diet Coke. The Corsa keys spinning on his finger. ‘You seeing someone?’
The table shifts, not physically, the atmosphere tighter. Jay looks up from his phone, Dean holds the Guinness slightly differently. The question that everyone’s been thinking and nobody’s asked.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Sort of.’
‘Sort of.’ Gaz grins. ‘What’s that mean then? Shagging but you’ve not DTR’d or whatever?’
‘What’s DTR’d?’
‘Defined the relationship, it’s a thing, Steph says it. Off TikTok. Doesn’t matter. Point is I don’t care.’
‘It’s not a thing.’
‘It is a thing, it’s massively a thing, but fine, whatever.’
I drink the Stella, ‘Yeah, I’m seeing someone.’
‘What’s her name?’
The question. The space in the air. The word her sits in the middle of the table. The foam settling in Dean’s Guinness.
‘Celyn.’
‘Celyn. Welsh, innit.’ Gaz nods. ‘Nice one. How’d you meet?’
‘Bar. Near the flat.’
‘The one you go to every night like a seventy-year-old?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘What’s she do?’
The pronoun again. She. The word that makes a picture in Gaz’s head. A girl at a table, a girl in a bar.
‘Writes. Novels.’
‘Novels?’ Jay looks up. The first interest he’s shown all evening. ‘What kind?’
‘Horror.’
‘Horror?’ Jay’s eyebrows go up. ‘Fucking hell. Your bird writes horror? That’s well dark.’
Bird. Her, she, bird, and the one I’m not saying is sat in my throat like a block.
‘Yeah.’
‘Fit and scary. Dream combo, mate.’ Jay goes back to his phone.
Dean drinks his Guinness. Doesn’t need to say anything.
‘Bring her round, yeah? Steph keeps going on about doing a couples thing. Italian or summit. She won’t shut up about it.’
I drink, the Stella. Jay’s thumb hasn’t stopped moving on the screen. Dean finishes the Guinness. Gaz talks about Steph and Italian or Thai and I nod and drink and the evening moves on.
On the drive home Gaz plays the radio too loud and sings along, nineties, and I sit in the back with Dean who doesn’t sing and doesn’t talk and the silence between us is the Dean silence.
The Corsa smells like fake fruit. The streets pass, Manchester through the window: the lights, the cranes, the sky that’s never fully dark because the city won’t let it be.
The flat, half eleven. The key in the lock, it sticks, the old one, the original. The door opens, the heat comes out, the hall light’s on, and there’s shoes by the door, not mine. The trainers, Celyn’s, the Converse with the frayed laces.
The flat smells like garlic, cooked proper. Not beans on toast.
Celyn’s on the bed, laptop closed, scrolling the phone.
The lamp on, the warm one, the one I never use because the overhead’s brighter but Celyn says the overhead makes the flat look like a police interview.
A t-shirt that might be mine, the grey one, the Primark three-pack, too big on Celyn’s frame.
‘There’s pasta,’ Celyn says. Eyes on the phone. ‘On the hob. Made too much.’
‘Cheers.’
I eat, the pasta’s good. Garlic, chilli flakes, something green.
Spinach? The bowl’s one of my two bowls.
The fork’s one of my two forks. Eating at the counter, the flat warm and the lamp making the walls soft and Celyn on the bed doing the phone thing.
Someone made me pasta in my flat with the key I gave them.
The one-sided toaster. The crack in the ceiling.
‘You eat like someone’s about to take it off you.’ The phone’s down now. Celyn watching over the top of it.
‘Site lunch is a sandwich at half eleven. You learn to be quick.’
‘Quick.’ The slow half-smile, the one already three moves ahead. ‘Pity. What I had in mind wasn’t.’ Celyn stretches out on the bed, deliberate, the grey t-shirt riding up, a strip of stomach, the dark line below the navel.
I put the bowl down half-eaten and cross the room.
A knee on the mattress, and Celyn’s already at my belt, the joggers kicked off in one go, nothing under them, just skin and the half-hard weight of them swinging free as they straddle my thigh.
My flies, my cock out, and Celyn’s hand round both of us at once, the two of us pressed together in their fist, hot, the heads dragging slick against each other.