Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I’ve never been in a restaurant. Pubs, yeah, chippies, the Wetherspoons on the Old Kent Road where everything comes with chips and the menu’s got thirty pages and none of it’s food. But a restaurant, tablecloths, glasses that aren’t pint glasses, someone bringing bread you didn’t ask for, nah.
Celyn’s restaurant, small, twelve tables, maybe fourteen. The lighting warm, the kind that’s warm on purpose. The walls are dark, green, maybe, or navy, hard to tell. Plants on shelves, music I can’t place, something with a guitar and a voice that sounds like it’s singing in a room, not a studio.
I sit at the table by the window, the menu in front of me, words I don’t understand. Confit. Jus. Dauphinoise. I know what a potato is. Don’t need three syllables to get there.
The waiter comes, not Celyn, a bloke, big arms, beard, tattoo on the wrist. Asks if I want a drink. I order a pint. He looks at me like the pint doesn’t go with the tablecloth. Fair enough.
And then.
Celyn comes out of the kitchen door and the door swings shut behind them and they’re carrying two plates, one on each hand, the wrist turned, the balance perfect.
Black t-shirt. Apron tied at the waist, the strings wrapped twice because they’re long and Celyn’s narrow.
The hair up. Tied back, the knot messy, strands falling. The cheekbone.
Clean. Shaved. Smooth in a way I haven’t seen in, when was the last time. The jaw. The bone under the skin, no shadow, no scratch. The neck bare, the collarbone where the t-shirt dips. The mouth doing the professional thing, the smile that’s not the smile I know. The one for tables, for the room.
The hands, bare, no polish. No ring, the ring’s gone for the shift, hygiene, rules. The fingers on the plate edge. Steady. The small burns from here, the marks of oil and oven and service. Working hands, different work.
My eye keeps reaching for the colour. Red, orange, violet, any of them.
Something for the focus to land on. Nothing there.
Just the nails short and pink-clean and the small burn on the knuckle, and the absence is a sound in my head.
The colour’s been how I found those hands in a room for months.
Today it’s off and I’m still finding them. That does something to my ribs.
Celyn puts the plates down, table six, leans in, couple laughs. Celyn turns, walks back, apron, hips.
Under the t-shirt, at the waist, where the apron strings cross. The elastic. Visible for a second when they reach for the notepad. The stretch of fabric at the hip. Black, lace. The edge of something that doesn’t match the uniform.
I look at the menu. Confit. Right.
Two hours.
I’ve been sat at this table for two hours.
The pint’s been replaced by a second pint.
The bread’s gone. I ordered the chicken, the one without the French words, and it came and it sat on the plate and I ate some of it and I couldn’t tell you what it tasted like because I’ve been watching Celyn work.
How they move. Between tables, through the door, past the bar.
The rhythm. It’s a site rhythm, I know it because I’ve got one.
The confidence in the movement, knowing where everything is, the sidestep past the corner table.
The hand that pushes the kitchen door at the exact point where it swings widest. The turn that puts the plates down and picks up the empties in the same motion.
Competence, that’s the word. And watching it is.
Celyn carrying three plates on one arm, not the easy way.
The show-off way. The food hitting the table at the exact angle where the customer sees the plate face-first. The smile, the one for the room.
The voice, louder here, clearer, the Welsh in it pulled back because the customers don’t need the accent, they need the specials.
And the hands. The skin red from the soap. I’ve never seen Celyn’s hands naked like this. By the time I see them after a shift, the cream’s on. Damage hidden. Here I can see it. Plates. Heat. Hours.
The small burn on the knuckle that I want to put my mouth on later when the restaurant’s dark and the apron’s off and the hands are mine again.
A woman at table three. Older. Grey hair, nice coat, the sort who calls everyone darling. She touches Celyn’s arm. Just the forearm, just the fingers, how people touch waiters when they want attention. Nothing, it’s nothing.
My hand tightens on the glass.
The heat, low, in the gut, with teeth.
Celyn turns to the woman. Smiles, moves on, the touch is gone, two seconds, nothing.
I put the glass down. Wipe my palms on my jeans under the table.
Bollocks.
‘You’ve been here two hours.’
The restaurant’s closing, Celyn at my table, the apron untied, draped on the bench. The hair still up but looser, pieces falling. Shaved clean. The tiredness around the eyes that looks good on some people and Celyn is some people.
‘The food’s good.’
Celyn looks at my plate. The chicken, half-eaten, the potatoes moved around. The jus, whatever that is, congealed.
‘You haven’t touched the food.’
‘I ate the bread.’
The half-smile, the one that opens a crack and closes. They sit down opposite me, fold the apron, put it on the table.
‘I saw you come in,’ Celyn says. ‘First five minutes. Thought. Right, he’s going to sit there all night, isn’t he.’
‘I was hungry.’
‘Ron. You’ve been staring at me carrying plates for two hours and you ate four pieces of bread.’
Nothing to say to that. The bread was good.
Celyn leans back in the chair. The restaurant’s empty now, the last table left ten minutes ago, the kitchen sounds have changed from cooking to cleaning, someone’s mopping near the bar. The candle on our table’s almost out, the wax pooled on the plate.
‘You know you can just text me at work,’ Celyn says. ‘You don’t have to sit in my restaurant for two hours pretending to eat.’
‘I wasn’t pretending.’
‘Ron. The chicken’s cold. The potatoes haven’t moved since they arrived.
You ate bread and drank two pints and watched me carry plates.
That’s not eating. That’s. Surveillance.
You saw the lace, then.’ Not a question.
The half-smile, wider now, the tired one with something underneath it.
‘Black. I didn’t put it on for you, you weren’t meant to be here.
But the second I clocked you’d parked yourself in my section for the night, going quietly out of your mind?
The glimpse was for you. Reaching for the notepad, the apron riding up, right in your eyeline.
You think that was an accident.’ Celyn leans across the cold chicken, the voice down so the bloke with the mop can’t hear.
‘I like you like this. Wound up. Useless to me in the best way. Come home and you can take it off me with your teeth.’
I look at the plate. The chicken, the cold jus. The potatoes arranged exactly where the kitchen put them.
‘The woman,’ I say. Didn’t plan to. The words just. Out.
‘What woman.’
‘Table three. The grey hair.’
Celyn’s eyebrows lift, then the grin.
‘Are you jealous of a sixty-year-old woman?’
‘No.’
‘That’s quite sweet, actually.’
‘Piss off.’
‘Come home,’ Celyn says.
I leave money on the table. Too much, don’t care, Celyn doesn’t argue.
The flat. The door.
The hands don’t wait. I don’t decide to push Celyn against the wall. The wall, the back against it. My hands on the hips where the apron was, the mouth on the mouth and the taste of the restaurant, service, heat, the last coffee of the shift.
‘Ron.’
My name in the mouth that was smiling at tables all night.
I pull the t-shirt up and off and underneath is the lace I clocked from across the room three hours ago and couldn’t stop clocking.
The bralette and the thong, both, thin and warm from the shift.
Black lace on a flat hard chest, stubble above it, the cock pushing at the front of the thong, and the whole of it, the lace and the body underneath, undoes me the way it’s undone me all night.
I get a hand over the cock through the lace, the heat of it, the wet patch already starting at the top, and Celyn’s hips push into my palm and the sound goes into my mouth. I’ve wanted to wreck them since the first table.
Then Celyn pulls back, looks at me, the eyes black, and turns.
Goes down onto the bed on their own, no hand from me, all fours, the back dipping, the arse up and bare, the black lace thong just a string lost between the cheeks.
A choice. A presenting. The thing that’s been wound in me since the first plate goes loud.
‘Give it to me hard.’ Celyn says it before I’ve even. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all shift. Don’t be careful with me tonight.’
The lube, the cap, my hands not steady. I hook a finger in the string of the thong and pull it off the hole, the rest of it left on them.
Two fingers straight in, slick, no patience in me tonight for the one-at-a-time, and Celyn takes them with a hiss and shoves back onto my hand, greedy.
The lube smears the black lace dark where the string sits in the crease, the thong gone slick and ruined on a hard arse, and I love it, filthy and pretty at once.
I go for a third. Celyn’s hand snaps back and catches my wrist.
‘No.’ Wrecked, certain. ‘No third. I want to feel it. Just you. Now. Don’t make me wait.’
So I don’t. The foil, the roll, and I push in with them barely open, and it’s slower for it, the rim fighting me the whole way, tighter than I’ve ever had them, gripping the head and not wanting to give and then giving an inch at a time, and the grunt I make I don’t know.
Every table they touched that wasn’t mine, the woman’s hand on their arm, the two hours, all of it goes into the slow force of myself into them until I’m seated to the root and they’re stretched raw around me.
‘Fuck. Yeah.’ Celyn’s voice into the pillow. ‘Now. Don’t stop.’