My Clocking In System

"Right," Mara said eventually, into her own arms. Her voice had gone somewhere else entirely.

"Yeah."

"On a gym mat."

"Yeah."

"With my clothes on." She laughed, and it came out cracked and appalled and not entirely unhappy. "I’m twenty-four years old."

Danny took his hands off her back, slowly, and sat back on his heels, and there was absolutely nothing to be done about the state of him and he didn’t insult either of them by trying to hide it.

She rolled over and sat up, hair down, face pink to the hairline, and looked at him.

Her eyes went down.

Oh, sod off. Faint, outraged, delighted. That’s not a fair thing to do to a person before eight in the morning.

Then up to his face. She was still breathing hard.

"You didn’t," she said.

"No."

"You’re not going to."

"No."

"Not one word about it either, I suppose."

"No."

Mara looked at him for a long moment, and something in her face shifted from teasing into something a lot more dangerous, which was interest.

"You are," she said, "the most infuriating man I have ever met in my life."

She got up fast, grabbed her towel, and when she turned round the grin was back on but it wasn’t steady, it was doing a great deal of work.

"Pool," she said. "I’m going to the pool. That’s what I’m doing. Come or don’t, but don’t say anything kind to me, I’ll actually die."

The glass door swung shut behind her.

Danny knelt on the mat in an empty gym with a treadmill going and gave it a full minute before he could reasonably stand up.

The pool was worse.

He should have gone upstairs and he knew it walking down there and he went anyway, and sat on the edge with his feet in the water because sitting was the only option available to him, and watched Mara Doyle swim twenty lengths in a black racing costume with the whole of him still aching from the third floor.

The ache had settled into something low and heavy and genuinely miserable, a deep pull behind his balls that had started on the mat and had no intention of going anywhere.

There’s no dignified word for it and no fixing it in a public pool at ten to eight in the morning. He sat there with a towel across his lap like a man waiting for a bus in the rain and thought hard about drains and rateable values and extraction fans, and none of it did the slightest good.

She was showing off. Every turn at his end came a little slower than it needed to. Once she came up right in front of him and stood in the shallow end pushing her hair back with the water sheeting off her, the costume plastered to every inch, nipples up hard through it in the cold air, and held his eyes a second too long before she went under again.

He’s still there, she thought at the fourteenth length, and it went through her like something electrical. He’s sat up there in bits and he hasn’t gone anywhere.

"You’re not getting in," she called.

"I’ll sit this one out."

"Coward."

"Yeah," Danny said.

That got a real laugh out of her, surprised and loud off all that glass, and she went under to hide her face.

She came to the edge eventually, forearms folded on the wet tile, chin on her arms, looking up at him.

"You really won’t tell me anything, will you."

"Not much to tell."

"Liar." Softly, almost fondly. Her eyes moved over his face, unhurried. "There’s loads to tell. It’s coming off you. The whole building can feel it. I just can’t work out if it’s a good secret or a bad one." A pause. "Good one, I think. I hope. You’ve got a kind face under the mystery. It’s very inconvenient."

Say one true thing to me and I’ll leave you alone for a week.

He didn’t, and Danny understood, watching her wait for it, that holding still was the one thing guaranteed to make her worse.

Any other woman in this building would have read the last hour as a no and gone away. Mara had read it as a locked door and started looking for the key, and she’d just found out on a gym mat what the holding cost him, which meant she had a number for it now.

His phone went in the bag by the loungers.

He looked at it, and the world came back in through the glass, and when he looked round she was watching him with something knowing and slightly sad in her face, because she’d seen the whole thing happen from three feet away.

And there he goes.

"Go on," she said. "That’ll be your this-and-that."

Gethin. The corner unit, could he come today, the vendor wanted to move.

"I’ve got to go."

"Course you have." She pushed off backwards. "I’ve a lunch anyway. Half twelve, my father’s club, full of men called Rupert being important at each other. I’d rather drown."

"Don’t drown."

"Depends on the starter."

Halfway down the pool she stopped and trod water and looked back, and she wasn’t grinning.

"Danny. Next time you’re in this building and you decide to be somewhere else instead, just know that I noticed. That’s all. I notice everything, it’s my one skill." A beat. "And I’ll find out what you are. Whatever it is. I always do in the end."

Then she turned and went into a hard fast front crawl, not looking at him, entirely aware of him.

One floor below the top, Mara let herself in, shut the door, and leaned back against it.

She stood there dripping onto her own hallway floor and put both hands over her face.

"God," she said. "God."

The flat was quiet the way it always was.

Her brother had bought it furnished off a woman called Camilla and Mara had changed almost nothing, so she lived inside a stranger’s taste: a grey sofa nobody had ever fallen asleep on, a bowl on the coffee table with nothing in it, a kitchen where she made coffee and toast and nothing else.

Twenty-four with a view of the Thames and a fridge holding oat milk, three yoghurts and a bottle of her father’s champagne she was saving for a reason she’d never once identified.

There was nobody to tell.

Under normal circumstances this was a phone call. This was ninety minutes with Soph, both of them shrieking, and then what did he do, and then what did YOU do.

But Soph was in Dubai and asleep, and the last time Mara had mentioned a man Soph had said oh Mar, not another project, in that voice, and Mara had laughed and agreed and never mentioned one again.

So she stood in her own hallway with water running down the backs of her legs and had the entire conversation with nobody.

She’d planned it, that was the part she’d have to sit with. Lain awake half of Thursday night picking the leggings and the crop top, rehearsed the line about Fabian in the shower like a woman preparing a presentation, gone up there to make Danny Flynn crack.

He hadn’t cracked. She had. Comprehensively, on a rubber mat, in her own building, at twenty to eight in the morning.

She peeled the wet things off in the hall and left them where they fell, which she never did, and stood in the shower with her forehead on the tile for four minutes.

It didn’t help.

She came out with her hair still soaking, walked into the bedroom without bothering about a towel, lay down on top of the covers and gave up entirely.

"Fine," she told the ceiling. "Fine."

Her hand went down between her legs and she was still drenched, still swollen, and the first slow drag of her own fingers through it pulled a noise out of her that she didn’t recognise.

"Ah."

She started with two fingers either side of her clit, slow circles, hips already lifting to meet her own hand. Her free hand went up to her tit and she took the nipple between her fingers and pulled, and her back came up off the bed.

"Mm. Mmh. Oh God."

She had the hand over her mouth out of habit and then took it away, because there was nobody in this flat, there was never anybody in this flat, and for once that was going to be useful.

Two fingers into herself, deep, curling forward, the heel of her hand grinding down on her clit with every push, and her hips working up into it, and her mouth open at the ceiling.

"Ah. Ah. Yes."

And what she used, in the end, was not the version she’d been running all week. Not the one where he’d dragged the leggings down and put his cock in her right there on the mat with the treadmill going and taken exactly what he wanted, though that version existed and would be getting an airing eventually.

She used the real one.

His hands flat on the small of her back. The weight of him. The hard length of his cock through his shorts and her grinding back onto it and coming apart under his hands while he knelt there and let her and did not take one single thing for himself.

Don’t move.

I’m not moving.

A man who could have had her, easily, in an empty room where nobody would ever have known, and didn’t, and shook with it, and said nothing afterwards.

"Ah, God, Danny, ah, ah, "

She fucked herself hard through it, three fingers now, wet to the wrist, the heel of her hand mashed against her clit, and came a second time in an hour with her heels dug into the duvet and her back off the bed and a noise coming out of her that filled the whole empty flat and went on considerably longer than she’d have believed possible.

Then it let her go and she flopped back and lay there with her heart going and her hand still between her legs, twenty-four years old and comprehensively out of her depth.

"Right," she said to nobody, breathing hard. "That’s. Mm. That’s not ideal."

She laughed at herself. It came out wrecked.

Nine days ago she’d wanted to know who lived in flat forty because it annoyed her not to know, and that had been true, and she could have said it out loud to anybody.

Lying there in the wet patch her own hair had made, she was too honest with herself to run that line for more than about a minute.

She wanted the man. His hands back on her, his mouth open, one true sentence out of him, in whatever order they came.

And she couldn’t have any of it, because he was a locked door with a grey dash where his name should be.

"Right," she said again, differently, and sat up.

Half twelve she had to sit in her father’s club being charming at men called Rupert. Before that there was her brother, who’d owned thirty-nine before her, and who’d bought it through the same agency that had handled the crown of the building.

Somebody, somewhere, had signed something.

She got up, put on a dressing gown, and went to find her phone.