My Clocking In System

The gym was on the third floor, all black machines and mirrors and a wall of glass over the river, and at half seven it was empty except for one man in head-to-toe technical kit pounding a treadmill going nowhere, the way the rich ran, like they were being chased by a number.

Danny came early because early meant alone, and alone meant nobody watched him get the machines wrong.

He was squinting at the little diagram on the side of the cable thing when the door opened behind him.

"You are joking."

He knew the voice before he turned round. Copper hair up out of the way, gold hoops in, the freckle at the corner of her mouth going as she talked, which she was already doing.

And the kit. Yoga pants painted on from ankle to waist and a cropped thing above them that had clearly been bought for the job it was currently failing to do.

She’d dressed with an argument in mind. She’d come up here to win it.

"Days," Mara said, dropping her towel on a bench without breaking stride. "I have been trying to catch you for days, I gave up, I actually gave up, I said to myself this morning, Mara, he’s a ghost, let it go, and then I come up here to run off the disappointment and here you are. On the cable machine. Doing it wrong."

"I’m not doing it wrong."

"The seat’s too low. You’ll do your back, and then who rescues me at the pool?"

She reached past him and dropped the pin two plates down. Clank. Danny kept his eyes on the diagram like a man reading a fire notice in a burning building, and got a lungful of coconut for his trouble.

"There. You’re welcome." She stepped back, head on one side. "Actually, you can make yourself useful. My hip’s been horrible since Tuesday and I can’t get into the stretch on my own."

"You’ve got a trainer."

Half a second of silence, and her face did something delighted.

He listened. It went through her warm and stupid. He remembers I’ve got a trainer. He remembers Tuesday. All that composed nothing he does with his face is a lie and I’ve got him.

"Fabian’s in Tenerife," she said, already lying down on the mat, taking her time about the arranging. "And you’re stood there doing nothing useful with your morning. Two minutes. You put your hands where I tell you and push."

She looked up at him from the floor with her chin up and the grin going, and there was no version of this where either of them didn’t know exactly what was being proposed. She was daring him to be the one who said it out loud.

He took about a second and a half over it, which was long enough for the whole argument. Say no. Say you’ve a solicitor at eleven, which is true. Get in the lift and be a man with a girlfriend in Battersea.

And under that: you want to.

Not the way she thought, or not only. Nobody in this building had touched him in three weeks.

He’d shaken Thomas’s hand once and had his temperature taken by Naomi’s eyes about nine times, and that was the whole of it, and here was somebody asking him to put his hands on her, and part of what answered had nothing to do with sex at all.

He’d think about that later and not enjoy it much.

He knelt down at her hip. "Two minutes."

"That’s the spirit."

She brought a knee up toward her chest and he put one hand on her shin and the other on her thigh and leaned in, and she let out a long breath through her teeth.

"Ohh. Yeah. There. God, harder, I’m not made of glass."

He pushed harder. Her leg folded up toward her shoulder, and his hands were full of warm muscle through fabric that was barely there, and the position had him leaning over her close enough to watch the little gold chain move at her throat when she swallowed.

His hands are enormous. She had her eyes shut, cataloguing it, helpless about it. That’s what nobody warns you about. You see a man’s hands across a pool and think, fine, hands. Then they’re on you and they go all the way round your thigh and your entire body files a report.

"Other side."

Other side, same again, and by the end of it her breathing had stopped being anything to do with her hip and neither of them said a word about that.

"Right. The good one."

She rolled onto her front in one movement, propped on her forearms, drew one knee up and out and folded it under her, stretched the other leg back, and let her hips settle down toward the mat. The pose put every line of her on display and she knew it and made no attempt whatsoever to pretend otherwise.

"Pigeon. You press down on the small of my back. Both hands. Lean your weight in."

"Mara."

"It won’t work otherwise, Danny."

Please just do it, she thought, appalled at herself and thinking it anyway. Please stop being so bloody polite at me.

He put both hands flat on the bare warm skin above her waistband and leaned his weight forward and down, which put him directly behind her, over her, hips two inches from hers.

He’d been half hard since she came through the door. The arithmetic of the position finished the job in about four seconds, his cock going from something he was managing to something with no answer to it at all, straining up against the front of his shorts with nowhere to go.

She felt it. Just a brush, the hard length of him through two thin bits of fabric against the top of her ass, and Mara went absolutely still underneath his hands.

Oh.

Oh my God.

Her nipples went hard enough to hurt. Lower down, somewhere she was going to lose the argument with, her pussy clenched around nothing and she felt herself go wet all at once, properly, soaking through into leggings that had never been designed to keep a secret.

The treadmill pounded on at the far end of the room. A barge went past behind the glass. Nobody else in the gym, nobody due till eight.

Neither of them moved.

He didn’t step back and apologise. She didn’t shift away or laugh it off. They stayed exactly as they were, his hands on the small of her back and his hips against hers, both of them knowing precisely what was pressed against her and precisely that the other one knew it.

She’d built the whole situation, and he’d walked into it with his eyes open, and now the not-moving was something they were doing together.

"Danny." Into her arms. Not a warning, not a complaint.

"I know."

"Don’t move your hands."

"I’m not moving my hands."

He pressed down slow, and the press pushed her hips into the mat, and the mat had no give in it, and the seam of the leggings dragged hard across her clit.

"Mmh." She got it into her forearms and it came out anyway. "Ah. God."

Do not make that noise again, Mara Doyle.

She made it again on the next press. Quieter, more like a breath with a break in the middle, and this time her hips came up to meet his weight on the way down.

That was the first one. She could have called it an accident.

The second one wasn’t.

She rolled her hips back and up into him, small, slow, unmistakable, and dragged herself along the length of his cock through his shorts, and the sound she made came out of somewhere underneath her ribs.

"Ahh."

Danny’s hands tightened on her back before he could stop them.

"Mara."

"I know." Wrecked already. "I know. Don’t stop me."

He didn’t stop her. He could have. She was under his hands and he had all the leverage in the world and one word would have ended it, and instead he knelt there and let her, and she felt the permission land and went at it in earnest.

She ground back against him properly then, working herself along him in a slow filthy rhythm, forehead down on her own forearms, her ass pushing up into every press of his hands, and every pass dragged the seam of the leggings over her clit and the hard ridge of him along the wet of her through the fabric.

"Ah. Ah. Oh God. Mm. Mmh."

"Christ," Danny said, and it came out of him ruined.

"Don’t." She was breathing in pieces. "Don’t say anything. Don’t move. Just, keep your hands, keep, ah, oh God, oh God, "

Her thighs started going.

He could feel it under his palms, the shake coming up through her back, the whole tight athletic length of her winding up.

Her nipples were dragging against the mat through the crop top and her hips had lost any pretence of rhythm and were just chasing it now, grinding hard and fast and shameless against the front of his shorts.

"I’m going to," she got out. "Danny. I’m going to. Oh God, I’m actually going to... "

"I know."

"Don’t move."

"I’m not moving."

She came on the next roll of her hips.

Her back arched hard under his hands and her forehead went down into her arms and she bit into her own forearm and it didn’t hold, none of it held, and the noise came out of her long and broken and loud in that empty room, over the sound of a treadmill and a river barge and nothing else at all.

"Ahh! Ah, God, ah, "

He felt the whole thing go through her. The clench, the shudder, the way her hips jerked twice against him and stalled, the shake running down both thighs into the mat. It went on.

She rode it out against him with her mouth open on her own arm and one hand fisted in the edge of the mat, and Danny knelt behind her with his hands flat on her back and his cock aching like a bruise and did not move an inch.

Then it let her go and she sagged forward onto her forearms, breathing like she’d been dragged out of the deep end.

Nobody said anything for a while.