My Clocking In System

Chapter 29: Cold

"Hold onto me."

She did.

I got an arm under her and took her weight clean off her own feet, held her up against me with her face tucked into my neck while the water ran over both of us.

She was laughing and blushing and falling apart in my arms all at once, and I’d never in my life felt anything like being the reason for it.

"You’re carrying me," she said into my throat. Quiet. Amazed.

"I’m carrying you."

"I don’t get carried. I’m not a girl who gets carried."

"You are this morning."

She went quiet.

Her arms tightened round my neck. And I felt it happen. Felt her give up the last of the bold front she’d held onto since the café. Felt Jodie Carter just let herself be held up by me in the steam. Legs gone. Cheeks pink. Falling.

"Don’t put me down yet," she said. Small.

"I wasn’t going to."

I kissed the top of her wet head and held her there, the two of us swaying a little under the water. Slow. Going nowhere.

Down the corridor, muffled through the wall and the running water, the phone buzzed against the bedside table.

Once. Neither of us so much as turned toward it. She had her fingers curling at the back of my neck and her legs gone and her face hidden against my throat, and the phone could buzz itself flat for all either of us cared.

After a minute she lifted her face, took the soap off the shelf and, still half held up in my arms, started washing my hair. Fingers in my scalp. Warm water running off both of us. I closed my eyes and let her have me.

Nobody had touched me like this in years. Not careful. Not just to touch.

"You’re ruining my hot water bill," she said softly.

"I’ll pay it."

"You will not." She flicked water at my face. "I’m a working woman, Danny Flynn. I pay my own bills."

"Noted."

"You absolute," she said, the way she said it about half a dozen things, and didn’t finish.

The hot water gave up a minute later. No warning. A wave of cold hit the back of my neck and both of us at once.

"Jesus!"

"Fuck!"

Same cold as a hundred Pembury mornings. Those had been lonelier.

I got her out of it and onto the bath mat, an arm round her the whole way because her legs still hadn’t reported back for duty. One towel between us. Both of us laughing.

"Pembury all over again," I said.

"What?"

"My old boiler used to go like that. Five years of dressing fast with your breath showing."

"Don’t be soft, Danny Flynn. You grew up on this. Boiler like that’s just Tuesday."

"I know what a cold boiler is."

"Could’ve fooled me, the face you just pulled."

She made to wander out of the bathroom on legs that still weren’t sure about her, and I caught the towel back off her before she could and turned her to face me.

"I’ve got you. Stand still."

"I can dry myself, Danny."

"You can barely stand up, by your own account. Let me."

She let me. That was the theme of the whole morning. Jodie Carter letting me.

I dried her slow. Started at her shoulders. Down her arms.

The towel over the slope of her tits, and I took my time there, the way I’d taken my time everywhere this morning, drying them through the towel and then, when the towel had done its job, going over them again with my bare hands.

Just because. Her nipples were stiff again by the time I’d finished and we both clocked it and neither of us said anything.

Down her stomach. The flat athletic plane of it. I went down on my knees in front of her, the way I’d been on my knees twice already since last night, and dried her legs.

The long strong muscle of her thighs, the body of a woman who was on her feet all day and clearly did something hard with herself besides bend over a sewing machine. Athletic.

Lean where it counted, soft where it counted, and I’d had all of it and still couldn’t get used to it. I dried the backs of her knees. I gave the curve of her ass a rub through the towel and then a squeeze with a hand that had nothing to do with drying her.

"Danny."

"Mm."

"You are supposed to be drying me."

"I’m thorough."

I looked up the length of her from the floor. Wet hair. Pink still in her cheeks. The bruise on her neck I’d put there. Her tits.

The whole athletic naked length of her standing there in her own grey morning light, letting me look at her. And I had the same thought I’d had three times since last night and still couldn’t make myself believe.

That this was real. That she was here. That I got to look at her like this. Eleven years and I’d never once let myself picture her properly, because picturing her had hurt too much to be worth it. The real thing was better than anything I’d been too much of a coward to imagine.

"You’re staring," she said.

"I know."

"Why?"

"Because you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I spent eleven years too scared to find out."

The pink went all the way up. The bold girl, lost for something to say for once. She looked away. Looked back.

"Get up off the floor, you soft article."

I got up. But I didn’t let her get to the drawer. I got there first.

I pulled it open. Her underwear drawer.

A tangle of the practical and the not. I pushed the plain stuff aside and went looking, and she stood there with the towel loose round her shoulders and let me, arms folded, the half-smile fighting its way back onto her face.

"Oh. We’re choosing now, are we?"

"We’re choosing."

I found a set near the bottom. Deep green. The same green as the dress she wouldn’t let me look at. Lace at the edges. The kind of thing a woman buys for herself and not for anyone else, the kind of thing that meant she had a whole private idea of herself nobody got to see.

"That’s," she started.

"This."

"You’ve got an eye, Danny Flynn. I’ll give you that."

I helped her into it.

Knelt down again and held the knickers for her to step into, one hand under her arm to keep her upright while her legs did their best to betray her, and drew them slow up the long line of her legs.

Did up the bra at her back, my hands clumsy on the clasp, her laughing at me over her shoulder. Then I turned her round to look.

And my heart did a thing it had no business doing at half seven in the morning with a sore head and a phone full of trouble in the next room. It skipped.

Properly skipped, the way it used to when I was seventeen and she walked past me in a corridor and ruined my whole afternoon. Jodie Carter in green lace. Wet hair.

Bruised neck. Arms half-shy across herself. Athletic and soft and sexy and real, in the middle of her own small bedroom, mine for the morning.

"Stop it," she said, going pink all over again, reading my whole face off it.

"Can’t."

"You’re ridiculous."

"Probably."

She pulled something simple on over the top of it. Cotton. The green lace disappeared under it, the secret of it now a thing between the two of us, the same as the dress.

I found my missing sock in the leg of my own trousers and pulled the rest of my clothes on around her in the small space without it being a thing.

That was the bit, more than any of the rest of it, that hit me hardest. Not the shower. Not the green lace. This. The two of us dressing in the same small room, her bra-drawer open and the towel on the floor, neither of us minding, like I was already part of the furniture of her mornings.

I caught her hip as I went past to grab my jumper and gave it a squeeze. She caught my hand without looking and held it there a second against her side before letting it drop.

I pulled on my trousers, found my jumper, left my chest bare for the moment, and walked barefoot into her kitchen. The lino was cold.

She padded in a minute later in a faded dressing gown too big for her, wet hair tied up in a messy knot with a pencil through it I hadn’t seen her pick up. The work-knot. Eleven years and three weeks ago that knot would have walked away from me.