My Clocking In System

The city of London spread out beneath him, a fractured grid of amber streetlights and the slow, crawling red veins of evening traffic. Forty floors up in Vauxhall, the world was completely silent.

The sheer glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows held the cold back, and the flat itself was an exercise in sterile luxury: stark white walls, brushed steel, and the endless, uninterrupted expanse of the dark marble kitchen island.

He was three-quarters through his dinner when his phone rang.

Bzzzt. Bzzzt.

It wasn’t a text. Her name lit up the screen in bright white letters against the dark background. The harsh, mechanical buzzing spun the device in a slow, jarring circle against the flawless marble.

The sound echoed in the cavernous kitchen. He set his chopsticks down across the rim of the plastic container, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before swiping to answer.

"Hello?"

"Right, I’m not typing, my hands are wet." The voice on the other end was breathless, threaded with a familiar, crackling energy. There was a hollow, echoing acoustic to her end of the line.

Clack. A dull, metallic knock came through the speaker as her heel hit the tap. "I’ve had the absolute worst fucking day of my working life and I want to hear a voice that isn’t Steve’s. Off you go."

Danny leaned his hip against the counter, the cold stone pressing through his jeans. He looked out at the blinking red light of a construction crane swinging over the Thames. "What the fuck has Steve done now?"

"Stood over me while I was knelt on the floor with a box cutter, undoing forty boxes Nadia put through wrong, and had the nerve to say ’these things happen.’"

Her tone was venomous, the exhausted frustration of eight hours under fluorescent strip lighting. He could picture her perfectly: hair pulled up with whatever pen had been closest, stray strands sticking to her forehead, a smudge of warehouse dust across her nose.

"What did you say?" he asked, keeping his voice level, acting as a calm counterweight to her spinning out.

"’Yes, Steve.’" A pause, filled by the faint slosh of water lapping against the tub. "And then I went in the stockroom and told a rail of gilets what a raging prick he actually is."

"Loud?"

"Whispered. Eyes shut. Like a tragic woman in a film."

He laughed, a genuine, chest-deep sound, his mouth still half-full of noodles. The sound of his own laughter surprised him. The flat was usually too big, too quiet for it.

"What are you eating?" she asked, the sharp edge of her fury smoothing out.

"How do you know I’m eating?"

"You go quiet in a specific way, Danny, I’ve clocked it. What is it?"

He looked down at the plastic container. The smell of lemongrass, charred pork, and sharp fish sauce was the only thing giving the pristine kitchen any life. "Bun cha."

"Course it is."

Splash.

A heavy slosh of water, and then her voice came back closer, the hollow echo dampening as she moved the phone from one wet hand to the other, pressing it tight against her ear.

"I had a cheese toastie stood up at half two. Right. Next week you’re taking me somewhere with tablecloths."

"Saturday."

"Don’t just say Saturday."

"Saturday, tablecloths, you pick. I’ll book it tomorrow."

She didn’t answer for a bit.

Through the receiver, he could hear the faint, muffled hum of a television coming through her wall, and further out, the heavy thump of a car door shutting on her street.

Sounds of a life lived closer to the ground, a million miles away from the silent glass box he was standing in.

"You’re very easy to be around," she said, her voice dropping, the banter stripped away. "Do you know that?"

"Jodie."

"Ignore me, I’m in a bath and I’ve gone soft."

"I’m not ignoring you."

"No, well." Her voice dropped another notch, thick and hesitant.

"Fuck. I’ve been in here twenty minutes thinking about you stood in my kitchen on Sunday in your socks, making that horrendous cup of tea. That’s the thought. That’s it. Nothing filthy. Just you, in socks, doing something ordinary."

Danny pushed the chopsticks away completely. The sprawling city lights outside lost their focus as his mind snapped violently backward to Sunday morning. The cramped space of her kitchen, the peeling linoleum, the gray morning light filtering through the blinds.

"Eleven years I had you filed under things that didn’t happen," she said, her vulnerability cutting right through the space between them. "And now you’re a man who makes bad tea in my kitchen and I don’t know what the hell to do with myself."

That’s her saying it. Neither of us is going to use the word. That was it.

"I think about it as well," he said, his voice dropping an octave, pressing closer to the microphone.

"Every damn day. Your kitchen. That table with the wobble on it."

He remembered how the cheap veneer had shifted under his weight, the way she had looked at him over her mismatched mug, eyes guarded but burning with something they had spent over a decade pretending wasn’t there.

Nothing came back. He pulled the phone away, the harsh white light illuminating his face, checking if the call dropped. It hadn’t.

"Right," she said, her voice changing. The wistful softness was gone, replaced by heavy friction in her throat. "Well. Shit. Now I’ve gone hot and it’s got nothing to do with the bath."

"Jodie."

"Hang on."

Rustle. The shift of fabric, a towel on a rack, and a soft clack as she put the phone down on the tiled windowsill.

Ding. His phone buzzed against his palm. A notification slid down the screen.

He pulled the phone away and opened it.

The image was taken from above. Her knees were pulled up out of the bathwater. The lighting was terrible, but the steam drifted across the lens, softening the edges of the room.

The water line sat just beneath her breasts, pushing them up.

They were wet, the skin shining fiercely under the overhead light. Heavy and pale, dusted with faint brown freckles.

Her nipples were rock hard, pebbled, and dark pink against the biting cold air, a single bead of water clinging to the edge of one, threatening to drop.

Her face occupied the top corner. Her chin was tipped down, dark hair damp and clinging to her collarbone, looking straight up into the lens with a devastating, lopsided half-smile.

He stared at the screen, breath halting in his chest. His cock gave a heavy, involuntary twitch against his zipper.

He brought the phone back to his ear.

"Got it?" she murmured.

"Yeah." His throat was bone dry.

"Third attempt. In the first two I looked like I was reporting a leak."

"Jodie."

"What?"

"Do you know what you look like?"

"Tell me."

"You look like the reason I couldn’t concentrate on a fucking thing for eleven years."

She made a small, hitching noise a sharp intake of breath snagging in her throat. It was a surrender.

"Danny."

"Where’s your hand?"

Two seconds of dead air. Slap. Slosh. The rhythmic lapping of bathwater against porcelain.

"Where do you think?"

"Say it."

"On my clit," she said, her breath fracturing. "Where it’s been for ten minutes doing absolutely nothing, because it’s mine, and my hands are freezing, and it’s just not the same."

He closed his eyes.

The physical ache of wanting her, of knowing exactly where her wet fingers were, hit him so hard his hand tightened on the marble counter until his knuckles turned white.

His cock was throbbing now, a thick, demanding weight trapped in his jeans.

"Get out the bath," he ordered, his voice dropping into a register that left no room for argument.

"What?"

"Water’s gone cold, you’re shivering, and I can hear you touching yourself." He pushed the container of bun cha away, the plastic scraping loudly against the stone. "Get out, get in bed, ring me back."

A battle of wills conveyed entirely through static and heavy breathing.

"Right," she said quietly, the defiance draining out of her, replaced by electric obedience. "Yeah. Hang on."

Click.

Danny stood forty floors up, hand flat on the freezing marble, jaw locked tight. She’s actually doing it.