My Clocking In System

The lift down took 11 seconds and Mara spent all of them working out what state her flat was in.

Mugs on the table. 2. Both used.

Costume on the radiator.

Shoes by the door. 4 pairs? 5?

Oh God, did I make the bed.

She had made the bed. At 8 that morning, out of a superstition she’d have denied under torture, before the lobby and the old woman and any of it.

You knew. Some bit of you knew before you did.

Her own front door felt like somebody else’s. She dropped the keys in the bowl and heard him stop behind her and did not turn round, because she knew exactly what he was looking at.

Camilla’s grey sofa that nobody had ever fallen asleep on. Camilla’s armchairs at an angle nobody sits at. Camilla’s glass bowl with nothing in it and nothing ever in it.

And on top of all of it, her. Jumper on a chair arm. The wet costume on the radiator from doing lengths that morning in an empty pool like a mug. A charger across the carpet at exactly the angle you’d trip on.

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

Why did you say that. Why does it matter what he thinks of Camilla’s sofa.

Because his flat had a staircase in it and hers had somebody else’s cushions, and for the first time since October she was the one with less.

She opened the fridge for something to do with her hands and stood looking at oat milk and three yoghurts and her father’s champagne.

You cannot offer him a yoghurt, Mara.

When she turned round he was stood in the middle of her front room in his coat like the gas man, and something about that undid her completely, and she went and got hold of it with both hands and walked backwards.

The kiss went nothing like the version she’d been running for 12 days.

In the version she was very good at it. In the actual one she got 2 seconds in and her nerve went, because she’d started something and had no idea what came next, and she waited to find out if he’d take over.

He didn’t. He slowed it right down to nothing instead, one hand round the back of her neck, and she made a noise into his mouth she’d be thinking about for a fortnight.

Then his hand went down her spine where the dress was open, and lower, and stopped.

Don’t you dare stop.

She said it out loud, and he put his hand on her arse and pulled her up onto her toes with it, and every thought she had about Camilla’s furniture went out of her head at once.

Taking the dress off was the bravest thing she did all night and she did it in 4 seconds so she couldn’t change her mind.

Then stood there and understood, immediately and completely, that she’d made a terrible mistake.

Oh no.

Why is this the bit. Why is THIS the bit.

She’d been naked in front of people. Changing rooms. A beach in Corfu. She’d walked the length of that pool in a costume chosen specifically to be looked at and enjoyed every second of it.

This was not that.

This was standing still in her own front room with her heart going while a man she’d known 4 weeks looked at her and said nothing, and she felt every single inch of herself at once, the whole weight of her tits and the width of her hips and the soft bit under her navel she’d been aware of since she was 15.

Her arm came up halfway across herself before she caught it and put it back down.

"The lighting in here is horrendous," she said, and it was perfectly good lighting.

He said don’t.

Then he looked at her for a long time and did not say a word, and she went scarlet from her chest to her hairline and stood there and let him, and somewhere in the middle of it the fear turned into something else entirely and she felt it go down through her stomach and settle low and warm.

He’s not saying anything.

He’s just looking. Nobody’s ever just looked.

She had a plan for the other thing. The plan was: don’t tell him. Get through it. He’d never know, or he’d work it out afterwards and by then it would be done.

The plan survived until he got his hand between her legs on Camilla’s sofa.

She was so wet through the silk that his fingers slid on it, and when he pressed on her clit through the fabric she felt it go all the way up into her stomach, a pull, like something turning over, and her whole body jerked without consulting her about it first.

What was that.

She grabbed his wrist. Held it. Not to move it away.

He said her name and she said don’t stop and he said you’re breaking my wrist, and she looked at her own hand and let go and apologised, and he told her to stop apologising and asked what was going on.

Twice.

Tell him.

No.

Tell him, because if you don’t and it goes wrong you’ll have to explain it in the middle, and that is a hundred times worse.

So she said it, with a hand over her eyes so she wouldn’t have to watch his face, and then lay there in the dark behind her own palm and waited for the laugh.

It didn’t come.

He said why me, which was not on the list of anything she’d prepared for, and she took her hand off her eyes and told him the truth, which was the gym floor, and that he’d had every chance and taken nothing.

Her bedroom is down a short corridor past a print that came with the flat.

She faffed with the lamp. On, off, on again, turned so it pointed at the wall rather than the bed, and knew she was doing it and did it anyway because her hands wanted a job.

Then she sat on the edge of a bed she’d made at 8 that morning, and he pulled his jumper off over his head, and she stopped breathing properly.

She’d seen his chest at the pool. She’d had her hands on his back through a t-shirt on a gym mat. None of that had prepared her for him stood in her bedroom in the lamplight taking his belt off, the sound the buckle made, the noise of his jeans going down.

And then his cock was just there. In front of her, at eye level, because she was sat on the edge of the bed and he wasn’t.

Oh.

Mara Doyle had seen exactly 2 of these in her life. Both in a dark room at a party when she was 19, both for about 4 seconds, and neither of them anything like this.

She stared. She knew she was staring and she did not stop.

Bigger than she’d budgeted for. That came first, with a small cold shot of panic behind it, because it was one thing in the abstract and quite another 18 inches from her face and shortly going inside her.

Thick through the middle.

Standing up against his stomach rather than out, curving slightly, and it moved when he breathed, which she had not known about and which was the single most extraordinary detail of the entire evening.

The skin of it looked softer than any other part of him. A vein running up the underside. The head darker than the rest and shining faintly where something had already gathered at the tip.

Why does it look warm. Why am I thinking about whether it’s warm.

"Sorry," she said. "I’m staring."

"Stare."

"No, I know, it’s just, " She could not get her eyes off it. "I’ve seen them. Obviously. I’m not, I’ve had my hand on one, "

"Mara."

"It’s just different when it’s actually, " She stopped. Started again. "That’s quite a lot, isn’t it."

He laughed and she wanted to die.

"Don’t laugh at me."

"I’m not."

"You are."

She put her hand out and stopped an inch short and looked up at him, because the checking was automatic by then.

"Can I?"

"You can do what you like."

She wrapped her hand round his cock.

Oh.

Warm.

Properly warm, warmer than his stomach, warmer than anything else on him. Heavier than she’d expected, so her wrist adjusted for it without asking her first.

Hard all the way through and soft over the top at the same time, which made no sense whatsoever and which she thought about for weeks afterwards.

He made a noise above her head that she felt in her back teeth.

I did that.

I put my hand on him and he made that noise.

She moved her hand once, experimentally, and watched his jaw go, and felt something enormous and unfamiliar arrive in her chest at the same moment as something extremely familiar arrived considerably lower down and made her shift on the edge of the bed.

"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."

"Mara."

"Sorry. Sorry. I’m being an idiot. I’m going to be an idiot for the whole of this, I’m warning you now."

"If you keep doing that with your hand this’ll be very short and neither of us will enjoy it."

She let go like she’d been burned, and laughed, and then he got her on her back on that made bed and she stopped laughing.

What he did next took about 10 minutes and she had no framework for any of it.

Her mouth first, then her jaw, then a place under her ear that made her go completely silent and that nobody had ever found. Down her throat. Her collarbone.