My Clocking In System

Chapter 18: My Hero

It happened fast.

One second she was mid-sentence, mid-gesture, the next her arms were windmilling and she was going down hard toward the tiled edge, and Danny moved without thinking.

The old courier reflex. He caught her.

He got an arm round her back and she grabbed his shoulders and for a second they were locked together, her whole weight against him, wet and warm and barely covered.

Her tits crushed against his bare chest, soft and full and there, her nipples hard against his skin.

His hand splayed across her bare back. His other arm was crushed between them in a place that was about half an inch from being the kind of place that ended a man’s nice quiet life in this building.

His dick went fully hard. Instant. Pressing against her thigh. There was no hiding it in wet swim shorts.

He felt exactly how close it was.

So did she.

They both went very still.

He felt them register one at a time.

Her ribs against his ribs.

Her nipples pressed through the wet costume against his bare chest.

Her thigh against him.

Her breath caught on his throat.

She shifted her weight a fraction and the wet of her slid a quarter-inch against him before her feet took her properly. Her breath caught a second time, differently, and she went still in a new way.

Then she looked.

Her eyes dropped between them, a quick glance, to confirm what her thigh had already told her.

Heat climbed the back of Danny’s neck. He was twenty-eight, he was in public, and he was hard against a woman he barely knew. He wanted the tiles to open up.

Don’t look down. Look at her face. Her face.

"Right," he managed. He could hear his own breath in his throat. "Okay. I’m..."

"Yeah." Her voice had dropped a little.

"I’m going to put you back on your feet."

"Yeah, that. That would be."

"My hand is..."

"Yeah."

"Nowhere it shouldn’t be..."

"Sure."

"For both our sakes..."

Mara looked up at him, an inch away.

The shock had cleared and something more amused had taken its place, amused at his panic more than anything. Her eyes flicked down for just a second, deliberate this time, and back up.

She laughed. A bright sound, delighted, ringing off all that glass.

The old man in the navy cap had stopped swimming to watch. The woman in the sunglasses had lowered her Financial Times. The towel attendant had developed a fascinated interest in a perfectly folded stack to her left.

Mara had her feet under her.

She didn’t step back.

He didn’t loosen his grip.

The pool ticked through its own small mechanical noises around them and neither of them moved for one whole beat longer than they should have.

He could have let her go. She could have stepped away. Neither of them did, and they both knew the other one had noticed.

It was the attendant clearing her throat that finally broke it.

"My hero," Mara said, getting her feet back under her properly, in no hurry at all to step out of his arms.

"Saved my life and my dignity. Well. My life, mainly."

She finally stepped back.

Her hand stayed flat on his shoulder for one beat longer than it needed to before it dropped. Her eyes did the small flick down again as she moved away, slower this time, and back up to his face with a grin she didn’t try to hide.

She wrung water out of her hair.

"That was..."

She started laughing again. She was leaving the sentence somewhere.

"Sorry. That was a lot of nothing happening at once."

"Yeah."

She touched her own collarbone with two fingers, the way she did before she said something she knew was going to be cutting.

"You’ve gone a colour."

"I have not..."

"You absolutely have. Look at you. Christ." She backed toward the loungers, pointing at him, grinning.

"Right. Pool. Tomorrow. You owe me a rescue and I owe you a coffee for not letting me crack my head open in front of Mr Pemberton."

She waved at the old man, who harrumphed and resumed his lengths.

"Same time. Bring that face." She paused, half-turned. "Go on. Be mysterious somewhere else now, you’ve, "

She didn’t finish. She backed away laughing and her bare heel hit the slick patch of water she’d left coming out of the pool for the second time in five minutes.

She caught herself. Just.

She pointed at him, accusing.

"Stop it."

"I haven’t done anything."

"You absolutely have. I’m walking perfectly fine until you. Christ."

She walked the rest of the way watching her feet, grinning, and pulled an oversized cream linen shirt over her head from the back of the lounger.

It came down past her hips, making her costume disappear and somehow making her both more and less dressed at the same time. She picked up her towel.

She bent to whisper something at Mr Pemberton on her way past, one hand on his shoulder, and the old man’s stern face cracked into a smile he had to bury back under the navy cap. Whatever she’d said, he liked it. He’d probably been waiting for it all morning.

At the changing room door she looked back over her shoulder. Just to check he was still standing there.

He was.

She grinned, satisfied with the data, and pushed through.

The door took a long second to shut behind her and in that second Danny heard her phone go and her voice answering it from the other side, in a different register entirely, lower and bored and posh in a way her pool voice hadn’t been.

"Yes. I know, I know, I’m coming. Yes, mother."

Then the door clicked shut and the pool was quiet again.

Danny stood at the shallow end with his towel and the smell of coconut still in the air where she’d been.

On the other side of the changing room door, Mara took the phone from her ear and stared at it for a second like it had betrayed her by ringing now.

She got the linen shirt off, the wet costume peeled down, a quick rinse, dry clothes on, all of it on autopilot. Her body was still down at the shallow end with her thigh against him.

She’d felt it. The whole hard length of it pressed against her leg, and she’d looked like an idiot, and he’d gone the colour of a postbox, and she’d had to laugh or do something far worse.

In the corridor, she stopped at the residents’ lift.

The slow one that served the lower floors. His went straight up to forty and the building had been clear about which lifts were for which floors the day her brother had handed her the keys.

She pressed the button. She waited.

She tried to think about anything else.

It was no good.

She could still smell the chlorine and the warm skin of him. She shifted her weight and felt it again, low and unmistakable, the slow ache she’d been ignoring since the pool.

Her cheeks went hot.

"Get a grip, Mara," she told the lift mirror.

The lift mirror did not look convinced. She put two fingers to her collarbone, caught herself doing it, and dropped her hand.

The doors opened on her floor and she walked to her own door with the press of him still on her leg. She let herself in. She leaned back against the shut door for a moment with her eyes closed.

Tomorrow. Same time. She’d said it herself.

She was already counting the hours, and that was the worst part of it.

Danny was halfway to the lift before he realised he was grinning like an idiot and hard as a rock and both of those things were going to be a problem if anyone else got in.

In the lift, alone, he looked down at himself.

There were two damp patches on his chest where she’d pressed against him. Small, costume-shaped, already drying in the warm air. He could still feel where they had been. The press of her ribs. The press above the ribs.

He almost laughed.

His dick was straining against the wet shorts like it was trying to escape. This building. This building.

A girl like that one floor below him, apparently with a standing appointment now, and a body that had just been pressed against his with nothing between them but wet fabric.

Two days ago, I was sleeping in that box. Two days.

He shook his head at his reflection in the lift mirror. Coconut on his own skin where she’d been. He could smell it on himself now.

He was going to need a cold shower. Or several.

Up in forty, he took the steam room first. Heat hissed up out of the floor and he sat alone and sweated out eleven years.

Then the shower.

The head was the size of a dinner plate. The water stayed hot as long as he wanted it, which was still, three days in, the most luxurious thing he owned. At his apartment, the shower had been ten minutes on a good day.

He let it run for twenty.

The not-having to think about it. That’s the thing.

That’s the thing nobody who’d always had it knew about.

He had breakfast sent up. Eggs, bacon, proper coffee, carried in under a silver cover that lifted with a soft clink by a man who called him sir and meant it.

He ate it at the glass with the whole of London at his feet, and he did not think about the price of it once, and that, the not-thinking, was the richest thing of all.

This was the life, he supposed.

He wasn’t quite ready to say it out loud.

But he was done feeling like a burglar in it.