My Clocking In System

"Then say it properly," Mara said. "I’ve come a very long way up for it."

"Mara..."

"No." Her hand came up. "Don’t. I’ve changed my mind."

"You just asked me."

"I worked it out in the lift, about floor 30, and I’d rather not hear it out loud." She was already crossing the floor. Click. Click. Click. "So don’t. Not tonight. I’ll be a grown-up about it tomorrow."

She stopped a foot away and I could smell the coconut off her.

"One question and then I’m done talking."

"Go on."

"When those doors opened. Was that manners?"

"No."

"Then what."

Don’t answer that.

"Twelve days I’ve been thinking about you on that gym floor," I said. "Working yourself back onto me with your clothes still on. That’s what I think about. About twenty times a day, and it hasn’t stopped once."

Her breath went.

I watched it happen. Whatever she had ready went out of her head, and her chest moved, and she got half a word out and abandoned it.

"Right," she said.

"Mara..."

"Right."

She reached down without looking and put her bag against the wall.

"I’m 24, nobody’s talked me into anything, and I knew before I pressed the button." All one breath, like getting through a form. "So it’s mine. Say yes."

"Mara..."

"Danny. Yes or no. I’ve been stood in a corridor in these shoes."

"Yes," I said.

She got a fistful of my jumper and pulled, and I got a hand round the back of her neck, and then somewhere behind me and above us a door went.

We both stopped dead.

Not a big noise. The sort of noise a person makes trying not to make one, a door easing shut and a floorboard going after it, up on the mezzanine where the bedrooms are.

Mara’s eyes went past my shoulder and up.

"Danny," she said, in a completely different voice. "Is there somebody in this flat?"

"My mum."

"Your, "

"She stayed over. Bad news in the post yesterday. I brought her back here and she’s, " I could hear how it sounded coming out. "She’s in the second bedroom."

Mara stared at me.

Then she started laughing, silently, with a hand over her mouth, doubled forward against my chest, and it went on for a while.

"Oh, that’s marvellous," she said, into my jumper. "That is absolutely, that’s the funniest thing that’s ever, your mother is upstairs."

"Yeah."

"I met her. This morning. In the lobby. She told me to get a proper coat."

"I know."

"And she’s up there."

"She’s up there."

Mara stood back and pushed her hair off her face with both hands and stood there breathing and grinning at the ceiling.

"Right," she said. "Well. Not here, then."

And she picked her bag up off the floor, and held her hand out, and it took me about a second to understand what she was offering.

"39," Mara said. "Come on."

Her flat was directly underneath mine and it was nothing like it.

Same footprint, near enough, same glass, same city out there in the dark. But where mine is double height and empty, hers had a ceiling at a normal height and about four times the furniture, and none of the furniture was hers.

"It came like this," she said, dropping her keys in a bowl. "My brother bought it off a woman called Camilla. I’ve changed a lamp."

Grey sofa, enormous, that nobody had ever fallen asleep on. Two matching armchairs at an angle nobody sits at. A coffee table with a glass bowl on it that had nothing in it. Cushions that had been arranged by somebody who arranges cushions.

And on every surface, the actual her, laid over the top of it like a second flat inside the first. A jumper over the arm of one chair. Three pairs of shoes by the door in a heap.

A wet swimming costume on a radiator. Two mugs on the coffee table, both used, neither cleared. A phone charger going across the floor at an angle you’d trip on.

"Don’t look at any of it," she said.

"I’m looking at all of it."

"I’ve been in a mood for a fortnight and I’ve stopped tidying." She went through to the kitchen and I heard the fridge open. "Do you want a drink? I’ve got oat milk, three yoghurts and a bottle of my dad’s champagne that I’ve been saving since June for a reason I’ve never been able to name."

"I’m all right."

"Good," Mara said, "because I wasn’t going to open it," and shut the fridge, and came back through, and stopped in the doorway looking at me stood in the middle of her front room in my coat.

Neither of us said anything for a second.

"It’s different down here," she said.

"Yeah."

"You’ve gone all polite again."

"I’m not being polite."

"You are. You’ve got your coat on and you’re stood in the middle of the carpet like the gas man." She came across and took hold of the front of it with both hands and started walking backwards, pulling me with her. "Take it off."

The coat went on the floor by that grey sofa and neither of us ever picked it up.

She kissed me like somebody who’d thought about it a great deal and hadn’t done it much. Certain at the start, both hands twisted in my jumper, up on her toes, and then about two seconds in she went hesitant and I felt her wait to see what I’d do with it.

She’s checking.

So I slowed it right down to nothing, and got a hand round the back of her neck under all that hair, and she made a sound into my mouth and came up into it, and after that she stopped checking.

Coconut. In November. Same as the pool. Same as it had been on my own skin after I caught her.

One floor up my mother’s asleep in a spare room.

Four days to Saturday.

It didn’t go anywhere. That’s the thing nobody tells you about it. It sat in my chest the entire time like a stone in a coat pocket, and I kissed Mara Doyle anyway with all of it going on behind my ribs.

You know exactly what you’re doing.

Her hands came out of my jumper and went round my neck and she pressed the whole length of herself against me, and I stopped being able to think in sentences.

Because Jodie’s compact. Nine hours a day on her feet and it shows. Strong through the legs, a flat middle, tits that sit high and fit in my hands.

Mara arrived all at once.

Her chest against mine through silk that was doing nothing at all, heavy and warm, spilling either side of where we pressed together. Her waist going in under my hands and then her hips going out again, and my hands running out of woman before they ran out of hips.

I got a hand down the back of the dress where it was open to the base of her spine, bare skin all the way, and lower.

Then stopped.

"Don’t you dare," she said into my mouth.

So I put my hand on her arse.

A whole handful of it, heavy and full, and pulled her in hard against me.

"Oh." Her forehead dropped onto my shoulder. "Oh God. Do that again."

Both hands. Pulled her up onto her toes with it.

"Ah! That’s what I wanted at the pool. That’s what I’ve been, "

"I know."

"You do not know."

"Mara, I nearly went in the water."

She laughed, wrecked, and took my face in both hands.

The dress came off in the middle of her own front room with the whole of London out there through the glass.

She did it herself. Reached back, did something at the neck, and it went off her shoulders and down and pooled at her heels.

And then went scarlet.

That’s the bit that got me. Not the dress. What came after it. Mara Doyle, who had walked into that lift like she owned the building, stood in front of me in nothing but a pair of knickers and went red from her chest to her hairline and got one arm halfway across herself before she stopped it.

"Don’t..." I said.

"I’m not."

"You are."

"I’m not." She put the arm down deliberately, at her side. "The lighting in here is horrendous, that’s all. Camilla’s lighting."

It was perfectly good lighting.

She’s shy.

She’s stood there like that and she’s actually shy about it.

I looked at her properly.

Copper down past her shoulders. Gold hoops. The freckle at the corner of her mouth going because she was breathing hard.

Her tits first, because there was no looking anywhere else. Full and heavy and pale, hanging with their own weight, nipples up hard and dark pink in the cold.

Nothing like Jodie’s. Twice Jodie’s, if I’m being blunt, and where Jodie’s belong to a woman who never once thinks about them, Mara’s were the whole argument of her.

The waist. The hips going out. Those thighs.

"You’ve gone quiet," she said.

"Yeah."

"Good quiet or..."

"Mara."

"What..."

"Come here."

We got as far as the grey sofa nobody had ever fallen asleep on.

She went down on her back on it and I came over her and got my mouth on her tit, and the noise she made went straight up into that ceiling.

"Ahh!"

She’s loud.

She’s never had to be quiet in her life.

I sucked her nipple properly, no rush at all, and both hands went into my hair and her back came up off the cushions.

"Oh God. Oh God, that’s, nobody’s ever..."

She stopped herself.

I didn’t clock it. I was busy.

I did the other one and used the edge of my teeth at the end of it, and her thighs came up either side of me and her hips started going.

I put a hand between her legs over the silk.

Soaked. Not damp. Soaked straight through it, the fabric gone warm and see-through, and she jerked when I touched her.

"Ah! Sorry, that’s..."

"Don’t say sorry."

"It’s a lot. God. It’s a lot."

How long’s she been like this?

Since the lift? Since she put the dress on?

I circled her through the fabric, slow, and she made a sound and grabbed my wrist.

And held it there. Hard. Not moving it away.