My Clocking In System

Chapter 41: Unspoken Truths

Wednesday evening she got home from the shift and put the kettle on, and that was as far as she got.

Because the kitchen was full of him.

That was the thing nobody warned you about. You let a man into your flat for one weekend and he got into the furniture.

There was the wobbly table, and there was the chair he’d sat in on Sunday morning with the chipped J mug in front of him and his chest bare and the morning grey on him.

There was the cooker clock he’d stared at and lied to her about with his face. And through the open door, in the front room, there was the rug in front of the sewing table.

Where he’d gone down on his knees on Saturday night, in front of the machine, in front of the dress, and put his mouth on her until her legs stopped being legs.

The kettle came up to the boil. Click. She didn’t move.

She stood at the counter with her hands flat on the worktop and let the room do what it was doing to her.

The ache low in her stomach that had been coming and going all week, every time she sat down wrong, every time the waistband of her jeans pressed where the ache lived.

Three days and she could still feel him. That was the outrageous part. Still feel where he’d been, bare and deep, the stretch of him, the weight of him over her, her own voice in her own bedroom saying things she went pink about at the till.

I want to feel it again, every drop.

She’d said that. Out loud. Meant it.

I can feel it. So deep.

Said that too.

She left the kettle boiled and unpoured and walked into the bedroom, because that was where the memory lived, and lay down on her own bed on top of the duvet, still in her work clothes, and gave up the fight she hadn’t really been fighting.

Her hand went under the waistband. She was already wet. She’d been some version of wet since roughly Saturday.

She built it slow, the way he’d built it. That was what her body kept going back to. Not the hard parts, though God knew the hard parts held up. The slow.

Him on his knees like she was something you knelt for. Him inside her Sunday morning, barely moving, forehead on hers, hi, like being that deep in her was a place you could live.

The shower, her legs going, his arm taking all of her weight, being carried, actually carried, and the way she’d blushed like a girl.

I’ve got you.

He’d said that right as she came, and her fingers were doing what his had done, and her hips were rocking up into her own hand, and the bruise on her neck he’d put there was three days old and fading yellow and she pressed her free thumb against it, just to feel it answer.

And that was when the other thing arrived. It didn’t wait for a polite moment. It came in mid-stroke, cold, clear-eyed, riding right alongside the wanting.

The coat. The watch. The tap of the phone.

Nobody came into a few quid and moved like that.

She was three fingers deep in the memory of a man who was lying to her.

She kept going anyway.

That was the truth of Wednesday night, and she’d own it: the wanting didn’t wait for her to solve him.

The wanting had eleven years of back pay owing and the suspicion could get in the queue.

She came with her face turned into the pillow that still faintly smelled of him, his name half-said, her whole body pulling tight around the memory of don’t you dare pull out, and it went through her in long slow waves, and for a minute afterward she just lay there, hand still, heart going.

She should have stopped there. Any sensible woman stops there.

But her hand hadn’t moved, and she was still swollen and slick and stupidly sensitive, and the second one came looking for her before she’d decided anything about it. Slower. Quieter. Nothing to do with Sunday morning at all.

This one was the shower.

Her legs going out from under her and his arm taking every bit of her weight like she weighed nothing.

I don’t get carried. You are this morning. Being held up, wet and laughing and pink to the ears, by a man who could have had her against that tile and chose to just stand there and kiss her instead.

That was the one that did it the second time. Not being fucked. Being carried.

She came again with two fingers barely moving and her free hand pressed flat over her own mouth, and it was smaller and deeper and it left her lying in the dark on top of her own duvet in her work clothes with her eyes stinging, which was not something she was going to be examining tonight, thank you.

Both things fully true at once.

She loved him. She’d worked that out somewhere in the middle, the way you notice a thing that’s been in the room a while.

And he was hiding something the size of a life.

She lay in the dark until her breathing came back, and then she said it to the ceiling, dry as anything, because if she didn’t make it a joke it was going to be something else.

"You absolute," she said. And didn’t finish it. As usual.

She got up. Straightened her clothes like the room had opinions. And on her way out she stopped, the way she’d stopped every night this week, at the back of the door.

The Carter piece hung there.

The good one. The one she was proudest of. She’d thought about bringing it to show him.

She’d stopped, and she knew exactly why now, standing there with her legs still unsteady from him at three days’ distance: showing him her realest thing was what you did with a man who’d shown you his. And Danny, for all the warmth, for all the never again, had not shown her his.

What aren’t you telling me, Danny Flynn?

She was going to find out. Not by asking. Not by going through his phone like some seaside-postcard wife. In her own time, the long way, the way Jodie Carter did everything.

She hung the dress back up, unshown, for now.