My Clocking In System

Chapter 40: Unresolved Doubts

The hot water came down. She tipped her face into it. And she did think about him, in an orderly, investigative fashion, for roughly eleven seconds.

His hands. That was where the file fell apart, every time.

The catch. Her whole weight going down toward the tiles and then his arm, one arm, taking all of it like it was nothing, and the wet warm wall of his chest, and the thing she had been circling for nine days now and could not put down.

The full thick length of his cock against her thigh through his swim shorts. Hard. Instant. Unmistakable.

And him going still.

That was the bit.

That was the bit that did it, every single time, and she was honest enough with herself, standing there with the water running down between her tits, to admit it. Not the hardness.

Men were hard. Men had been pressing themselves against Mara Doyle since she was sixteen and it had never once been interesting.

It was the stillness.

The way he’d held her, and held himself, and gone deliberately, carefully motionless, a specific distance from a thing they’d both felt coming. Wanting her that much and choosing, with visible effort, not to take a thing.

She had never been wanted with control before. She had no idea what to do about it. Her body had several ideas.

"It’s research," she said, out loud, to the tiles.

The tiles didn’t believe her either.

She gave up on the shower. Turned it off, wrapped herself in nothing, walked wet through her own flat and lay down on the bed with her hair soaking the pillow, and stopped pretending.

Her hand went down over her stomach and between her legs and she was wet in the way that had nothing to do with the shower; her pussy was slick and swollen and nine days overdue, and the first slow circle of her own fingers on her clit pulled a sound out of her she was glad the walls were too expensive to share.

"Mmh."

She’d done this before.

That was the truly humiliating part, the part she’d have denied under oath.

That first night after the pool, in the dark, hand between her legs and the pillow bitten quiet so the neighbours wouldn’t hear, coming on the memory of a man she’d met once. And the morning after. And she’d told herself that was the end of it.

Nine days.

She did it properly this time. No pillow. No quiet.

She let herself build it, slow circles, her back arching off the bed, her free hand at her own tit, rolling the nipple the way she imagined his fingers would, bigger than hers, rougher than hers.

She built the whole thing out of the four seconds she actually had. His arm. His chest. His cock hard against her thigh and his jaw tight with the effort of not moving.

In the version behind her eyes he didn’t hold still. In the version behind her eyes he turned her at the pool edge and there was nothing careful about him at all.

She came fast and hard, hips lifting off the bed, his name nowhere in her mouth because she refused, she absolutely refused, and it arrived anyway at the very end, silent, shaped in her breath.

Danny-from-forty.

She lay there after, wet hair, wrecked breathing, staring at her own ceiling with her hand still between her thighs, and felt the decision she’d made in the lift harden into something with edges.

She was going to find out who lived in forty. That was still true.

But lying there with her heart going and his name in her breath, she made herself admit what the investigation was actually for. It had stopped being a puzzle somewhere around the second time she’d come with his memory doing the work.

She wasn’t trying to solve him.

She was trying to find him.

South of the river, in a Uniqlo two streets back from the high street, another one was smiling at a card reader for no reason she’d admit to.

Jodie was happy, which was the problem.

She noticed it on the Wednesday, standing at the till with nothing to do, the security tags going beep as she idly ran one past the reader, catching herself smiling at it for no reason.

Danny Flynn.

In her bed on Sunday and her head all week.

She’d spent eleven years with him filed under things that didn’t happen and now he was a text at lunchtime and a weight in the bed and a man who’d stood in her tiny kitchen in her stolen jumper and she was, there was no other word for it, happy.

And she didn’t trust it.

Not him, exactly.

Or, yes, him, but not the way you’d think. She trusted that he wanted her.

You couldn’t fake the way he’d looked at her across that café table, or the way he’d said never again on her doorstep like a vow he was signing in blood. That was real. She’d stake the shop on that being real.

It was everything else.

The coat.

The watch she’d clocked and said nothing about.

The way he’d paid for two coffees and a refill with a tap of his phone and not even a flicker, when the Danny she’d known would’ve counted it out and been forty pence short.

A few quid, he’d said. Come into a few quid. And she’d let it go, because she’d decided to let it go, because the alternative was ruining the best thing to walk into her life in a decade over a coat.

But she was not stupid. She had never once been stupid.

Nobody came into a few quid and moved like Danny had started moving. A few quid was a holiday and a new telly.

A few quid was not whatever this was, the ease of him now, the way the money-fear had just gone out of him from what she remembered 11 years ago, the fear she’d watched sit on people her whole life on that estate, the thing that never left you, and it had left him, and things that go in a just like that don’t go for a few quid.