Chapter 70: Nervous
I looked up.
Eyes shut. Chest going. She’d bitten her bottom lip white.
"Mara."
"Don’t stop, I want..."
"You’re breaking my wrist."
"Am I?" Her eyes came open. She let go. "Sorry."
"Stop apologising. What’s going on."
"Nothing’s going on."
"Mara."
And she looked at me, on a sofa in a flat full of another woman’s furniture, with her hair everywhere and nothing on, and something went across her face that had nothing to do with any of it.
"You’ll laugh."
"I won’t laugh."
"Everyone laughs. Or they don’t believe it, which is worse." A hand over her eyes. "I’ve not done this."
I went very still.
"Done what."
"This. The whole thing. I’ve done everything up to it and never actually." From behind her hand. "And I know how that sounds given how I’ve carried on with you since October."
Oh.
Right. Everything’s different. Every single thing is different now.
"I’m 24 and I’m not shy and I’m not a nun, I’ve had boyfriends, there was just always a reason not to." She took the hand off her eyes and told the ceiling instead. "And then it had been a while. And then it was long enough to be a thing. And then it was a thing I couldn’t tell anybody. And now I’m on Camilla’s sofa with nothing on telling a man I’ve met four times."
Forty seconds ago you had your hand on her and you had no idea.
"Right," I said.
"Don’t be weird."
"I’m not being weird."
"You’ve gone weird. Your face has gone weird."
"My face hasn’t gone, " I stopped. "Why me?"
That got her. She looked at me properly.
"Because you didn’t."
"Didn’t what."
"On the gym floor." Her chin came up, on a sofa, with nothing on. "You could have. I’d have let you. I was more or less begging you to, and you knelt there with your hands where I put them and took nothing, and then said nothing about it for twelve days." Her voice went in the middle. "Do you know how few men do that?"
I hadn’t got anything for that.
"So don’t be weird. And don’t go careful either or I’ll go right off it."
"I’m going to go a bit careful."
"Danny, "
"Not careful. Slow." I put my hand flat on her stomach and felt her breathe under it. "There’s a difference and you’ll know it in a minute."
Her bedroom was down a short corridor with a picture on the wall that had come with the flat.
The bed was made. That was the thing I noticed and didn’t say. Everything else in that flat was chaos and the bed was made, properly, that morning, by a woman who had not known how the evening was going to go and had made it anyway.
She put a lamp on, and then turned it off again, and then put it back on and moved it so it was pointing at the wall.
"Sorry. I’m faffing."
"You’re allowed to faff."
"I’m not usually a faffer."
She sat down on the edge of her own bed and looked up at me, and I stood in front of her and pulled my jumper off over my head, and she went red again and did not look away once.
"Sorry," she said. "I’m staring."
"Stare."
"No, I know, it’s just, " She was properly looking now, and I let her. "I’ve seen them. Obviously. I’m not, I’ve had my hand on, "
"Mara."
"It’s just different when it’s actually, " She stopped. Started again. "That’s quite a lot, isn’t it."
I laughed.
"Don’t laugh at me."
"I’m not."
"You are." She reached out and stopped an inch short and looked up, checking, which she’d done all night and which was going to be the end of me. "Can I?"
"You can do what you like."
She wrapped her hand round my cock and I made a noise I had no vote in.
"Oh." She was watching her own hand like it belonged to somebody else. "It’s warm. I don’t know why I didn’t expect it to be warm."
"Mara, "
"And it moves." Completely absorbed. "Sorry. I’m being an idiot. I’m going to be an idiot for the whole of this, I’m warning you now."
"You’re not being an idiot."
"I’m 24 and I’ve just said and it moves out loud in my own bedroom."
"Mara."
"What."
"If you keep doing that with your hand this is going to be very short and neither of us will enjoy it."
She let go like she’d been burned, and laughed, and then I got her on her back on that made bed and she stopped laughing.
I took my time. All of it.
Her mouth first. Her jaw. That place under her ear that made her go quiet, and halfway down her neck I found out that if I stayed anywhere long enough she’d start making a sound at the back of her throat and her hands would go hunting for something to hold.
"You keep stopping."
"I’m not stopping."
"You keep slowing down."
"Yeah."
"Why."
"Because you’ve got about a thousand nerve endings you’ve never met and I’d rather you met them one at a time."
"Oh." Her head went back on the pillow. "Right. Yes. Fine."
Her tits took ten minutes and I’d do it again tomorrow. Mouth on one, hand on the other, swapping when she started squirming, and by the end of it she couldn’t hold a sentence together and both nipples had gone hard enough that she flinched every time I came back to one.
"Mm. Mmh. Danny, I need, I don’t know what I need."
"I know."
"Don’t be smug, I can’t, "
I got the knickers off her.
She lifted her hips for me and then went completely still when they were gone.
And I looked at her.
Christ.
Copper between her legs, darker than her hair. Everything under it pink and swollen and shining wet, her lips already open with it, all of it soaked from the sofa and the dress and however long she’d been sat up here on 39 thinking about it.
Nobody had ever been near it. Twenty-four years old.
She’d gone red to the collarbones and she was letting me look and it was costing her.
"You’ve gone quiet again," she told the ceiling.
"Yeah."
"Bad quiet?"
"Mara. Look at me."
She looked.
"There’s nothing bad about one single part of this."
She nodded. Once. Tight.
"Now open your legs."
"God."
She opened her legs.
I went slow. Flat of my tongue, hardly any pressure, nothing clever, because everything I know I learned off a woman who tells me exactly what she wants and Mara hadn’t got the words yet.
So I read her instead. Which is the one thing I’m any good at.
Quiet when I was too soft. Loud when I found it. Thighs up round my ears when I stayed put, falling away when I moved off. Inside a minute I knew more about her than she did.
And she was loud.
Jodie bites the pillow. Eleven years of thin walls and her mum in the next room and she does the whole thing behind her teeth.
Mara had never had to learn any of that. Corner flat, nobody either side, and the only person above her was forty floors of my empty living room and my mother asleep at the far end of it, and Mara Doyle let the entire thing go straight up into that ceiling.
"Ah! Ah! Oh my God. Oh my God, Danny, "
Her hips came up chasing my mouth and I put a forearm across her stomach and held her down, and she made a completely different noise about that.
"Ahh, " and then, breaking, "why is that, why is being held down, "
I put two fingers into her, slow.
So tight it stopped me.
Careful. Slow. Careful.
I curled them up and found that soft ridge and pressed, and Mara came off the bed.
"AH! What’s that. What is that."
"That’s yours."
"Don’t stop doing it. Don’t stop doing it."
I didn’t stop doing it. Mouth on her clit, two fingers working her, my arm across her stomach holding her exactly where I wanted her.
"Something’s happening." Her hand fisted in my hair. "Danny, something’s actually, I don’t, "
"Let it."
"I can’t, it’s too, ah, it’s too much..."
"Mara."
"What."
"Let it."
She came about four seconds later and there was no controlling any part of it. Both hands in my hair, thighs locked round my head, her whole back off the bed, and a noise out of her that I felt in my own chest and that went on and on and on. She rode the entire length of it out on my mouth with no idea what to do with her hips and no interest whatsoever in being quiet.
When it let her go she dropped flat with both arms over her face.
"Oh."
I came up the bed and lay on my side.
She was breathing like she’d done twenty lengths.
"That’s what that is," she said from under her arms.
"Yeah."
"I’ve done that to myself four hundred times and it was not, " She took her arms off her face and her eyes were wet. "Well. That’s every night of the last two years ruined retrospectively. Thanks."
I laughed and she hit me weakly on the shoulder, and then rolled onto her side and put her hand flat on my chest.
"Now the other thing," she said.
She was nervous. She’d deny it under oath. It was in the hand on my chest, which had gone cold, and in the fact she’d started talking too much.
"Right. So how do we, is there a, do I get on, "
"Mara."
"I’ve watched a considerable amount of, I mean I know mechanically, obviously, "
"Mara."
"What."