Caitlin

Author: caitlinkidd

  • Almost Caught At The Station

    The train was already twenty minutes late and I was still in my work clothes, vape in my bag, pint settling in my stomach, that particular after-hours itch sitting right under my skin. You know the one. The one that turns a normal Thursday into a terrible idea with nice lighting.

    He had been at the same table as the accounts lot. Dark shirt, loosened tie, the sort of mouth that looks like it knows what it is doing. We had been talking too close for colleagues of colleagues. His knee kept finding mine under the table and I let it. I am not mysterious about that. If I like the look of someone I do not do the coy little glance over the glass. I just look. He looked back. That was enough.

    Last orders happened. The group splintered. Someone mentioned the delays and everyone groaned like it was a personal insult. I said I was heading to the station anyway. He said he was on the same line. Of course he was. That is how these things start. Not with candles. With a shared misery and a bit of eye contact that has already gone past polite.

    We walked it. Smart casual, heels I should not have worn for the cobbles, him with his jacket over one arm like he thought that made him look relaxed. The air outside the pub had that damp London smell. I hit the vape once on the corner and he watched my mouth when I did it. I noticed. I always notice.

    The concourse was a mess. Boards flicking. Cancelled. Delayed. Delayed again. A crowd of people staring up like the screens might suddenly grow a conscience. I swore under my breath. He laughed. We ended up standing by the WHSmith with nothing to do except talk and not talk about what we were both thinking.

    He asked if I wanted another drink. I said if I had another drink I would miss the next one as well and then we would be here until midnight. He said midnight did not sound awful. I told him I had a flatshare and two nosy friends and a promotion I actually wanted, so midnight in a station bar was not the move. He smiled like he had heard the first half louder than the second.

    That is the problem with me. I can hear myself being sensible and still feel my pulse doing something stupid.

    The next update said forty minutes. Forty. People started sitting on the floor. A man near us was eating a meal deal like it was a protest. I checked my phone. Nothing useful. Just the group chat from the pub already turning into voice notes I was not going to open.

    He asked what I was doing this weekend. I said sleep, laundry, and trying not to think about work. He said that sounded tragic. I said he was welcome to have a more exciting life if he liked, I was twenty five and already tired in a specific office way. He leaned in a bit when I said twenty five, like the number needed inspecting. I let him. I smelled his cologne and the beer and the station and it should not have worked. It did.

    We drifted toward the toilets because that is what you do when you have been standing too long and you need a reason to move. The main ones had a queue. Of course they did. Delayed train plus Friday-eve energy and suddenly every woman in the southeast needs a wee at the same time. The accessible one was round the corner, quiet, the kind of door that looks like it has seen things and chosen not to comment.

    I do not know who suggested it. That is a lie. I know exactly how it happened. He nodded at the door. I looked at the queue. I looked at him. I thought about forty minutes on a cold platform with this in my chest and no privacy and my housemates asking questions later. Then I thought about his mouth again.

    I said we would be quick.

    He said yeah.

    That should have been the point where a better version of me walked back to the boards and waited like a person with a job and a brain. That version did not show up.

    The lock slid across with a sound that felt too loud. The light was that hard white that makes everyone look a bit unwell. Handrails. Baby change. A bin that had already given up. I put my bag on the baby change like it was a bedside table. He laughed at that and I told him not to start. Then he kissed me and I stopped caring about the bin.

    It was not gentle. I did not want gentle. My back hit the door and his hand went straight to my waist, then under the hem of my skirt like he had been thinking about it since the pub. He had. I had too. I bit his bottom lip and he made a noise that went straight through me. My blouse was still tucked in from work. That felt filthy in the best way. Smart on top, his fingers already finding the edge of my knickers like we were not standing in a public toilet under a speaker that kept apologising for the delay.

    I got his belt undone because I am not the girl who stands there waiting to be undressed like a present. I know what I am good at. I dropped a little, one knee on the floor that I am trying not to think about even now, and took him in my mouth before he could do the whole shall we talk about this thing. He swore. Quiet, but not quiet enough. I looked up at him on purpose. That is half the point. Let them watch. Let them know I am not faffing about.

    He was already hard. That helped. I used my hand and my mouth the way I like, unhurried even though the clock in my head was screaming forty minutes, thirty five, whatever it was now. The vape was still in my bag. I thought about that for one stupid second, about the mango and the pub and his knee under the table, and then I stopped thinking.

    He pulled me up by the elbow and kissed me again, messier, and pushed my knickers aside. Two fingers, then a third when I rocked onto him, and I had to put my own hand over my mouth because the acoustics in those rooms are a joke. Every sound slaps back at you. My heel slipped on the floor and I grabbed the handrail like I was about to file a complaint with the station. He laughed into my neck. I told him if he laughed again I was leaving. I did not leave.

    Skirt up around my hips. His trousers open. The whole thing had that rushed, greedy quality that makes you feel sixteen and twenty five at the same time. I was wet enough that it was almost embarrassing. Almost. I hooked one leg up and he pushed in and the first second was that sharp, perfect fill that makes your brain go blank. I breathed out against his shirt. He muttered something filthy. I told him to shut up and move.

    He did.

    It was good. That is the annoying part. If it had been bad I could have blamed the setting and gone home clean. It was good in that slightly wrong way, the kind where you can hear your own heartbeat and a tannoy in the distance talking about platforms and you are still rolling your hips because your body has already voted. My blouse had come untucked. His hand was under it, on my ribs, thumb brushing the underside of my bra. I thought, very clearly, I am going to come in a disabled toilet and then get on a train and sit next to a man eating crisps. That thought did not stop me. It made it worse. Better. Same thing.

    I was close. He was getting sloppy with it, which I like, that little loss of manners. I had one hand in his hair and the other braced on the wall and my mouth open against his jaw when it happened.

    A knock.

    Not a shy one. A proper knock, two sharp hits, the kind that means someone has already tried the handle.

    We froze like we had been unplugged.

    His eyes went wide. Mine did too. He was still inside me. That detail feels important. You do not get to pause a film at a dignified frame when you are mid-thrust in a station toilet with your skirt round your waist.

    Another knock. Then a voice, muffled, asking if anyone was in there.

    I do not know why I whispered. There was no reason to whisper. The damage was already done. I heard my own voice come out small and stupid and twelve years old.

    Occupied.

    Silence on the other side. Then a sigh. Then footsteps that did not go far enough away.

    He looked at me. I looked at the door. I could feel him still hard, which would have been funny if I could have found the joke. I could not. My face was hot. My heart was doing that ugly thud. All the sex left my body in one go and got replaced by the sudden, vivid image of a member of staff with a master key and a high vis.

    I mouthed get out.

    He did not need telling twice. We came apart in this graceless scramble, him tucking himself away, me yanking my knickers up so fast I nearly overbalanced. Skirt down. Blouse shoved back in, crooked. I caught sight of myself in the steel dispenser. Smudged mouth. Bright eyes. Hair that had been fine at the pub and now looked like I had been in a fight with a hand dryer. I grabbed my bag. He unlocked the door with fingers that were not as steady as he wanted them to be.

    We did not leave together. That was the one intelligent decision of the night.

    I waited three seconds, which felt like a year, then stepped out like I had only been washing my hands and considering my life. There was a woman by the wall with a suitcase and a face like she knew. Maybe she did. Maybe she did not. I did not check. I walked.

    He went the other way, toward the opposite end of the platform once we both filtered back out onto the concourse. I saw him again two minutes later because of course I did. Same platform. Same delayed service. Same electronic voice apologising like it had not just witnessed my downfall.

    We did not speak.

    We did not even do the little nod.

    He stood by the Costa. I stood by the pillar like the pillar was my husband. A family with a pushchair parked themselves between us and I have never been more grateful for a stranger’s child in my life. When the train finally crawled in I got on three carriages down from him. I know because I watched. I am not proud of that either.

    The carriage was packed. I sat opposite a girl eating a wrap and scrolling. My thighs were still warm. My knickers were a crime. I put my headphones in and played something loud enough to drown the thought of that knock. It did not work. I kept hearing my own voice. Occupied. Like I was hiding in a wardrobe at a sleepover.

    My vape was in my bag. I wanted it so badly I could have cried. You cannot vape on the train. I sat there with my hands in my lap like a person who had not just had a man’s fingers and then the rest of him in a toilet while the whole station waited for a signal.

    By the time I got home the flat was half lit and one of my housemates was on the sofa with Love Island on pause. She took one look at me and said you look like you have been running. I said delays. She said your blouse is done up wrong. I looked down. It was. Two buttons off. I laughed too loud and went to the kitchen and drank water like it might rewind the last hour.

    I told them a version later. Not the full one. The funny one. The one where I am still the smug girl who nearly got away with it. They screamed. They called me a liability. They were not wrong.

    Work the next morning was a special kind of punishment. Same smart casual. Same train line, thankfully a different hour. I kept waiting to see him on the concourse. I did not. I do not know if that made it better. I sat at my desk answering emails with the posture of someone who has never been on her knees on a station floor. My manager asked if I had a good night. I said it was fine. Fine is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

    Here is the thing I will not pretend. Part of me still thinks about the good bit. The door locked. His mouth. The way it felt when I stopped being a personal assistant on a delay and became just a girl who wanted it badly enough to be stupid. That part was hot. Proper hot. The kind I would do again if the universe handed me a better lock and a worse conscience.

    The rest of it lives in my body like a flinch. The knock. The whisper. The walk of not-quite-shame across a platform full of people who only wanted to go home. We never spoke after. No text. No accidental meeting by the barriers. Just two adults who shared a terrible idea and then boarded a train like it never happened.

    I still take that line. I still stand under those boards. Sometimes the accessible toilet door is open and I look at it like it might wink. It never does. I hit my vape outside and tell myself I have learned.

    I have not.

    I have just learned to check the handle twice.

     

  • Cramp Hit Mid Footjob

    I still walk with a tiny limp when I think about it too hard, which is mental because it was only a cramp. A cramp. Like I am fifty and I have just done a fun run. I am twenty five. I do Pilates when I remember. I vape more than I stretch. That last bit is probably the problem.

    It started like most of my better ideas. After work. Thursday. That dangerous night where you tell yourself you are only going for one and then you are three deep and your smart casual is suddenly doing a lot of heavy lifting. I had been in the office since half eight pretending to care about a calendar clash that was not my fault. By six I wanted noise and a drink and something that was not a spreadsheet. He was already at the bar when I got there. Work adjacent. Not my team, thank God. Tall enough. Clean enough. The sort of bloke who laughs at your jokes a beat too quick because he already knows where the night is going. I liked that. I like knowing.

    We did the usual. Pint. Then a double because I am not made of patience. He talked about a promotion he wanted. I talked about mine like I was not already mapping the pay jump in my head. I vaped outside between drinks because I am classy like that. He watched my mouth when I did it. I let him. I was in that mood where I feel slightly invincible and slightly bored at the same time. Dangerous combination. The one that makes me decide I am going to be impressive.

    We ended up back at mine because my flat is closer and I had already decided I was not getting an Uber to Zone whatever at gone ten on a school night. The girls were out. One at her sister’s. One on a date that I had already predicted would be mid. The place was ours. Shoes off. Telly on low for the noise. I chucked my blazer over the chair and felt that little click in my chest that says yes, this is happening, and I am going to be good at it.

    He kissed like he had been thinking about it since the second pint. Fine. Hungry. A bit clumsy with the buttons, which I do not mind because it makes me feel like I am the one running it. We made it to the sofa because the bedroom felt like effort and I was already in my head planning the bit I wanted to do. People assume I lead with my mouth. I do, often. I am not shy about that. But there is something about using my feet that makes me feel properly smug. It is a skill. It looks ridiculous if you do it badly. It looks filthy if you do it well. I do it well. I have had enough practice and enough feedback to know I am not imagining it.

    I told him to sit back. He did, grinning like he had won something. I peeled my tights off slower than I needed to because I like the look on their faces when they realise I am not joking. Work skirt still on, shoved up. Bare legs. Dark polish that was two days past needing a redo, not that he was going to be studying the pedicure. I warmed my feet first, which sounds clinical written down and feels filthy when you are actually doing it. Palms on his thighs. Then the soles. Slow. I watched him try to keep his face normal and fail.

    “Christ,” he said, which is not poetry but I will take it.

    I got into it. That is the problem. When I am good at something I lean all the way in. I used the arch. The ball of my foot. A bit of pressure, then less, then more, the way you do when you actually give a toss about whether they enjoy it instead of just waving a limb about and hoping. He was hard fast, which I took as a personal compliment even though men are not complicated. I talked a bit. Not baby voice, I would rather die. Just filthy and pleased with myself. Told him he was easy. Told him I knew I was good. He swore and laughed and dropped his head back against the sofa like he had been personally attacked by competence.

    It was sexy. I am not going to pretend it was not. There is a particular quiet that happens when someone is trying not to finish too quick and you can feel it in their breathing. The telly was still muttering some property show in the background. My vape was on the coffee table. I remember thinking I would have one after, like a cigarette in an old film except mango and slightly tragic. I shifted my weight. Put more into the right foot because the angle was better. I was showing off. Properly showing off. The smug little engine in my chest was purring.

    Then my calf turned into concrete.

    It was not a twinge. It was not a warning. It was a full lock, vicious, like someone had reached into the muscle and twisted it with a wrench. My foot seized mid stroke. Toes clawed. The whole lower half of my leg went from useful to enemy in half a second. I shouted. Not a sexy shout. Not even a surprised little oh. A proper, ugly, I have been shot noise.

    He jerked like I had kicked him on purpose.

    “Alright, yeah, harder,” he said, breathless, still in it, still thinking I was performing.

    “It is not a bit,” I said, or I think I said, because my voice came out strangled. “It is not a fucking bit.”

    I tried to pull my foot back and the cramp doubled down, spiteful. My leg would not straighten and it would not bend. I was stuck in this stupid elegant pose that was no longer elegant, half on the sofa, skirt rucked, one foot still vaguely in the vicinity of his cock like the world’s worst magic trick. He sat there with his trousers open looking between my face and my leg as if the answer was going to appear in subtitles.

    “Cat?”

    “Kitchen,” I managed. “I need the kitchen.”

    I do not know why the kitchen. In my head there is tiles and cold water and a chance to swear properly. I tried to stand. Bad idea. The second I put weight through it the muscle screamed again. So I hopped. One foot. Skirt still up. No tights. Dignity in a pile by the coffee table with my vape. I hop-hobbled across the living room making a noise I will take to my grave, this mix of pain and fury and leftover horniness that had nowhere to go. He stood up with his dick out and his hands useless.

    “Do you need me to rub it?”

    “Do not touch me,” I snapped, then immediately, “no, wait, yes, just not like that, Jesus.”

    I made it to the kitchen doorway and grabbed the counter like it owed me money. The overhead light was far too bright. There I was, twenty five, personal assistant, maths degree, woman who can talk her way through a board pack, folded over the worktop with one leg hanging like a dead thing. He followed, still half hard, which would have been funny if I could have breathed. I told him to run the tap. Cold. I shoved my calf under it and the shock made me swear so loudly I am surprised the neighbours did not bang the wall.

    He hovered. “Is this a thing you do?”

    “What, cramp mid footjob? Yeah, mate. Signature move. Really gets them going.”

    He had the decency to look embarrassed then. I will give him that. I massaged the muscle with both thumbs, brutal, the way you do when you want it to surrender. It twitched and held and twitched again. Sweat on my back that had nothing to do with being sexy anymore. My foot was still pointed like a ballerina having a breakdown. I started laughing because if I did not laugh I was going to scream and the scream would have been worse. He started laughing too, carefully, like he was checking it was allowed.

    “I thought you were being kinky.”

    “I was being good,” I said. “There is a difference.”

    That set me off again. I was laughing so hard I had to put my forehead on the counter. The cold water ran over my skin and down into my shoe, which I was still wearing on the good foot because of course I was. Work shoe. Smart. A bit scuffed. Soaked now. The whole scene was so far from the version I had in my head that it circled back round to pornographic in a cursed way. Him in the kitchen with his trousers undone. Me treating my own leg like it had personally betrayed the evening. The kettle sitting there judging us.

    The cramp eased in ugly little stages. Not gone. Just less murderous. I could put the foot down if I did not ask much of it. I turned the tap off. Silence except the fridge hum and the telly still talking about open plan living like anyone in this flat could afford it. He passed me a tea towel. I wiped my calf and felt about twelve years old.

    “Do you want to sit?” he said.

    “I want a vape and I want to die in a tasteful way.”

    We went back to the sofa because standing there felt worse. I sat with the bad leg stretched out like I had been in a minor car park incident. He tucked himself away, which I respected. The mood had not survived the hop. It had got as far as the kitchen lino and expired. I hit the vape. Mango. The same one. I offered him it and he took it like we were now in a different kind of intimacy, the post disaster kind, which is honestly more binding than some orgasms I have had.

    “You are actually really good at that,” he said after a minute.

    “I know.”

    “Even with the screaming.”

    “Especially with the screaming. Adds texture.”

    He snorted. I let my head fall back. The smugness was bruised but it was still there, which is how I know I am going to be fine. I do not crumble. I cramp, apparently. I hop. I swear at my own body in the kitchen like it is a colleague who has missed a deadline. Then I sit there and accept the compliment because I earned it before the muscle mutinied.

    He asked if I wanted him to go. I nearly said yes out of pride, then thought about the empty flat and the leftover want sitting in my stomach with nowhere useful to be. I told him he could stay if he made himself useful and put the kettle on properly this time. He did. We drank tea like pensioners. My leg throbbed. I kept flexing my foot to check it still belonged to me. At one point I tried to explain the exact second it happened, the way the arch had been doing something clever and then the cleverness got hijacked by biology. He listened like it was a sports injury. I suppose it was.

    The front door went just after midnight. Housemate number two, date as mid as predicted. She took one look at us, me with my skirt still a mess and one shoe off, him looking like he had witnessed a crime, and she just went, “Do I want to know?”

    “Cramp,” I said.

    “Sure.”

    She went to her room. I heard her laugh through the wall. I will never live it down. I already know it is going into the group chat in some form. Not the explicit bit. The hopping. The kitchen. The fact I shouted like I was being murdered by my own calf during the one act I am genuinely, irritatingly good at.

    He left about one. Kissed my cheek like we had been through something, which we had. I locked the door, vaped on the balcony in my work skirt, and stared at the bins like they had answers. The muscle still jumped if I pointed my toes. I tried it once, experimentally, and swore at the night air.

    Would I do it again? The footjob, yes. Obviously. I am not retiring a skill because my body decided to be dramatic. The hopping, no. Next time I am stretching first, which is a sentence I cannot believe I have to write. I will do the boring circles with my ankle. I will drink water like a person who has heard of consequences. I will not get so carried away showing off that I forget I am made of meat and poor decisions.

    I can still see his face when I shouted. That hopeful little look, like I had just taken things up a notch. Poor bloke. He thought he was getting the filthy version of me. He got the version that has to sidestep to the sink and negotiate with a lump of muscle. Both are me. That is the annoying part. The confident one and the one swearing on one foot exist in the same body, often in the same hour.

    Anyway. Thursday is ruined as a concept now. I see a sofa and I think about arches and timing and the exact pitch of a shout that is not sexy. I went into work the next day walking like I had done a very ambitious spin class. Someone asked if I had started running. I said yes. I have started running from my own legs.

    If you take anything from this, stretch. Or do not attempt your party trick after three drinks and a full day in heels. Or do, and accept that you might end up in the kitchen with the tap running and your dignity somewhere near the remote. I keep telling myself it was hilarious, because it was. It was also hot right up until it was not. That is the split I live with. One minute I am excellent. The next minute I am a cartoon.

    My calf is fine now. Mostly. It twinges when I point my foot too far, which feels like a warning and a joke at the same time. I have not retired the skill. I have just added a warm up, like I am an athlete, which I am not. I am a PA from Essex who got too smug on a Thursday and paid for it in the most unglamorous way possible.

    Still good at it, though. That part stands. The cramp can fight me in the kitchen all it wants. I know what I can do.

  • Foundation Stained His White Pillow

    I have a rule about going home looking like I have given up. I will not do it. I sit at a desk all day booking trains and lying politely to people who think their diary is more important than everyone else’s, and the least I can do for myself is leave the office looking like I meant it. Full face. Hair that still has a shape. Smart casual that can survive a pint without collapsing into something tragic. I am not turning up at some bloke’s flat like I have been crying on the Central line.

    That is how the pillow died.

    I had been in back to back meetings that should have been emails, smiling at a man who cannot use a scanner, and by half five I was already thinking about a drink. Not a big night. Just enough to take the taste of other people’s incompetence out of my mouth. We went to the usual place near the office, the one with the sticky menus and the lighting that is almost flattering if you squint. He works in a different team. Tall enough. Clean enough. The sort of face you notice when you are bored and then notice again when he laughs at something you said on purpose.

    I had the vape in my bag and a second wind I did not entirely earn. He bought the first round. I bought the second because I like the look on their faces when you do that. We talked about nothing useful. Who is leaving. Who is sleeping with who. How the printers only jam when someone important is waiting. I was still in my work face the whole time. Foundation, concealer, the lot. I had done it in the toilets at lunch because the morning layer had started to look tired and I refuse to look tired in public. There is a difference between effort and desperation and I sit on the effort side, thank you.

    By the third drink it was obvious where the night was going. I like that part. The bit where you both know and nobody has to make a speech about it. He lived twenty minutes away in a new build that smelled of paint and ambition. I told my housemates I would not be back. One of them sent a thumbs up. The other sent a knife emoji. That is love, that is.

    His flat was nicer than I expected. Not rich nice. Just the kind of nice that comes from living alone and buying things in matching colours. White sofa. White kitchen. White bedding that looked like it had never met a real person. I should have clocked the bedding then. White pillows are a threat. They are a test you did not agree to sit. I clocked it and I ignored it because I was already thinking about getting his shirt off and I am not a woman who gets derailed by interior design when there is a mouth involved.

    We did not bother with the tour. Kitchen, hallway, bedroom. I like a man who does not narrate his own flat. He kissed me against the door like he had been waiting for permission and I gave it by biting his bottom lip a bit harder than polite. He made that little sound men make when they realise you are not going to be shy about it. Good. I hate shy. Shy wastes time.

    Clothes came off in the usual stupid order. My blazer on the chair. His belt somewhere near the skirting. I kept the makeup on because I had not come this far to look mid under a cheap ceiling light. There is a version of me that washes her face first like a responsible adult. That version does not get laid as much. I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled him in by the waistband and he looked down at me like he could not believe his luck, which is exactly the expression I am aiming for.

    I am good with my mouth. I know that. I am not going to pretend I stumbled into it. I like the control of it, the way you can take a man who has been talking all night and reduce him to breath and swearing. He put a hand in my hair and I let him, then I took it off again when he got greedy. He said my name wrong the first time, like he had it in his notes and still fumbled it. I laughed with him still in my mouth and that did something unholy to him. He pulled me up after that, kissed me like he was trying to taste himself, and we fell back onto those white sheets that were about to have a very bad evening.

    He was decent. Not the best I have had. Not the worst. Hands a bit eager, rhythm a bit proud of itself, the usual. I got on top because I like the view and I like deciding the pace. Makeup still perfect, or so I thought. You do not feel foundation moving when you are busy. You feel heat and skin and the stupid satisfaction of being wanted. I came first, which I always take as a personal win, and he followed not long after with his face in my neck like he had run a race. We lay there breathing like idiots. I reached for the vape on the bedside table, had a pull, blew it away from him this time because I am capable of learning. He laughed. I laughed. The room smelled like mango and sex and that new paint.

    I should have got up. I should have gone to the bathroom, done the whole responsible wipe and rinse, taken the face off like a person who understands consequences. I did not. I was warm. I was smug. I was the right kind of tired. He pulled the duvet up and I tucked into his shoulder and told myself five minutes. Five minutes is how disasters start. I fell asleep in a full face on a white pillow like an amateur.

    Morning arrived in that grey way new builds have, all thin curtains and the hum of someone else’s boiler. For a second it was nice. His arm heavy across my waist. My mouth dry. That smug little afterglow you get when the night did what it said it would. Then I turned my head.

    The pillow looked like a crime scene.

    Not a cute smudge. Not a little transfer you can laugh off. It was a full Jackson Pollock of beige and bronzer and whatever I had used under my eyes to look awake at 8am the day before. There was a perfect side-of-face print, like I had been outlined in foundation and then left as evidence. A streak of lip near the corner. A ghost of my cheekbone. It was obscene. It was also, and I hate this, quite impressive. I had really gone for it. Hours of work, transferred in one unconscious slump onto a pillow that had probably cost more than my weekly food shop.

    He was already awake. Of course he was. Lying there looking at the ceiling like a man doing maths in his head. I waited for the joke. Nothing. He did not say you look rough. He did not say Christ what happened to my bedding. He just breathed. That silence is worse than a comment. A comment you can bat back. Silence sits there and makes you fill it.

    I sat up and felt the rest of my face crack in that special morning way makeup has when it has been to war. I caught myself in the wardrobe mirror and laughed out loud. I looked like I had been in a fight with a cosmetics counter and lost. Hair flat on one side. Mouth a bit swollen. Pillow murder behind me. He glanced over then. Still nothing. Just that polite, slightly stunned look men get when they do not know if they are allowed to be annoyed.

    “I will buy you a new one,” I said.

    It came out too fast. Too PA. Too I can fix this with a purchase order. He shook his head.

    “Don’t bother.”

    Do not bother. Two words. Soft. Final. The kind of thing you say when you have already decided the night was fun and the morning is a separate country. I hated how much that got under my skin. I can take being messy. I can take being filthy. I struggle with being treated like an inconvenience you are too polite to name.

    I got dressed in last night’s clothes and did that walk of almost-shame that is not quite shame because I still felt good in my body. Kitchen light was brutal. I drank his water from the tap like I lived there. He made coffee and did not offer me any in a way that was almost funny. I stood in his white kitchen with my ruined face and thought about the promotion emails waiting on my phone and the fact that I had left a biological sample of my entire contour on his bedding.

    In the Uber home I caught my reflection in the black window and started laughing so hard the driver looked at me twice. I texted the group chat a photo of my face and the words pillow homicide. One housemate replied with a invoice template. The other asked if he was fit enough for the damage. He was fit enough. That was never the problem. The problem was I knew, even then, that I was going to replace the pillow.

    I went to John Lewis on my lunch the next day like a woman paying penance. Stood in bedding like I had any business having opinions about tog ratings. White, obviously. Better than his, which is petty and I stand by it. I could have gone cheap. I did not. Secretly I like money and I like the idea of leaving something nicer than I found. Also I could not stop seeing that print. My own face, stamped there, smug even in sleep.

    I had it sent to his work reception under my name because I am not turning up at his door with a pillow under my arm like a breakup. He messaged later. Just a photo of it on the bed and a thumbs up. No thank you. No joke. No invitation back. Fine. I did not buy it for a second night. I bought it because I made a mess and I do not like leaving messes I can afford to clean.

    Would I do it again. Yes. Not the pillow bit. The rest of it. The drinks, the door, the mouth, the lazy fall onto someone else’s sheets while I still looked like I had a job to be at in the morning. I like sex. I like being good at it. I like falling asleep wanted. I also like my face done. Those things were always going to collide. I just thought I would get away with it longer than I did.

    If you take anything from this, take the obvious. Take the makeup off or accept that your face is going to live on his linen forever. White pillows are not romantic. They are a trap for women who refuse to look mid. I am still that woman. I will still leave the office looking like I tried. I will still go home with someone if the night tilts that way. I will just pack a wipe. Maybe two. And if I forget, which I will, I will buy the nicer pillow and pretend it was manners.

    It was manners. It was also pride. I stained the thing. I replaced the thing. I still think about the way he said don’t bother, like the night had already been priced and paid. Maybe it had. I got what I wanted. He got a story and better bedding. Everybody walks away slightly ahead, except the original pillow, which never stood a chance.

  • He Stopped For A Vape

    It started the way a lot of my bad decisions start, which is to say a Thursday after work when somebody suggested one more and I said yeah go on then like I had never met myself.

    We were in that pub near the office that pretends it is not an office pub. Sticky tables, warm wine, a playlist that thinks it is cooler than the room. He was from another floor. Fit enough. Clean shirt. That look men get when they have been watching you all week and finally clock that you have noticed. I had. I am not shy. I finished my drink, let him buy the next one, and by half eight we were already doing that thing where the conversation is just an excuse to stand closer.

    I vaped outside with him between rounds. Mango. His was some ice mint nonsense that makes your tongue feel like a freezer aisle. We laughed about it. I remember thinking he was easy. Not in a tragic way. Just easy. No big speech. No “what are we doing.” The kind of night where you already know you are going home with someone and the only real question is whose kettle you will be ignoring in the morning.

    His place was closer. Fine by me. My flat has two other people in it and I have done the walk of not-quite-shame past a housemate eating cereal too many times. His was a one-bed that smelled like clean laundry and a candle he definitely bought because somebody once told him to. Shoes off. Lights low. He kissed like he had been waiting to all day, which I like, because I had been waiting too.

    Clothes came off the way they do when you are both a bit pissed and both pretending you are not in a rush. Shirt, trousers, that stupid belt men wear like it is doing a job. I pushed him back onto the bed and he made that little sound men make when they realise you are not going to sit there waiting to be directed. Good. I hate being directed.

    I was in a mood for showing off. Not going to lie about that. When I know I am good at something I want the other person to know it as well. He was already hard when I got my mouth on him, which helps, and I took my time on purpose. Slow first. Wet. Looking up because I like watching their faces go stupid. He put a hand in my hair and I let him, then I took more of him and he swore under his breath in that grateful way that always makes me feel a bit smug.

    It was good. Proper good. The kind of good where you stop thinking about work and the inbox and the fact you have a nine o’clock tomorrow. I settled in. Found a rhythm. Used my hand where my mouth needed a second. He was making those low noises that tell you to keep going and I was thinking, yeah, this is why I came back here, this is exactly the point of a Thursday.

    Then he tapped my shoulder.

    Not a stroke. Not a “yes like that.” A tap. Two fingers. The exact tap a builder gives you when the kettle has boiled and he is clocking off for five minutes.

    I froze with him still in my mouth.

    “Two seconds babe.”

    I pulled off and looked up at him like he had just asked me to file an expense report.

    He was already reaching for the bedside table. Not a condom. Not water. The vape. His little silver one, sitting there next to his watch like it had been invited.

    I sat back on my heels, mouth still open, lipstick probably somewhere near my chin, and watched this man spark up in the middle of getting his dick sucked.

    He hit it. Held it. Blew a pale cloud straight at the ceiling like he was in a beer garden and not naked from the waist down with me kneeling between his legs.

    The romance was deceased. Instantly. I felt it leave the room, put its coat on, and get in an Uber without me.

    “You what?” I said.

    He looked faintly proud of himself, which made it worse. “Needed a hit. Carry on in a sec.”

    Carry on. In a sec. As if I was a podcast he had paused.

    I laughed. I could not help it. It came out too loud and a bit unhinged. Because I vape. I vape all the time. I had vaped with him two hours earlier. I am not a nun. But there is a difference between sharing one outside a pub and tapping someone on the shoulder mid-blowjob like you are on a building site and the tea van has arrived.

    “Are you actually serious?”

    He shrugged, still holding it. “Takes the edge off.”

    Takes the edge off what? You were getting head. What edge?

    I stayed there for a second because my brain needed to catch up with my dignity. My knees were starting to hurt. My mouth was wet. He was still hard, which felt rude, and the room smelled like mint ice and sex and whatever cheap candle he had lit to make himself look like a grown up.

    “I was in the middle of something,” I said.

    “I know. You are really good.” He said it the way you compliment a sandwich. Nice. Fine. Next.

    I stood up. Not dramatically. Just up. Because if I stayed on my knees I was going to either finish him out of spite or bite him, and I was not in the mood to explain a dental situation to anyone.

    He looked confused, which I found fascinating. “You alright?”

    “Am I alright? You just clocked off.”

    “It was two seconds.”

    It was not two seconds. It was the principle. It was the tap. It was “babe” said like I was a temporary contractor.

    I found my knickers. Then my top. He sat there on the bed with his vape and his dick out, looking like a man who could not understand why the meeting had been cancelled.

    “Cat, come here.”

    “No.”

    “I am done. Look.” He even held the vape up as evidence, as if that helped.

    I should have left then. That would have been clean. Instead I stood there half dressed and did what I always do, which is talk when I am annoyed.

    “You do realise I was actually trying,” I said. “Like, putting in a shift. And you tapped me. Like I was in the way of your little mint break.”

    He laughed, which was the wrong move. “You vape more than I do.”

    “Not while I have someone in my mouth, mate.”

    That landed. He had the good sense to look a bit sorry. Only a bit.

    “Alright. Fair. Come back to bed.”

    I looked at him. He was still attractive, which was irritating. The night had been easy right up until it became a health and safety briefing. Part of me, the part that had come out for exactly this, wanted to get back on the bed and pretend the tap never happened. The other part of me, the smug part, the part that knows I am good at this and does not like being paused, wanted him to sit in the consequence.

    I sat on the edge of the mattress instead of getting back between his legs. Compromise. I am generous like that.

    “You can have two minutes,” I said. “Then you put that thing down and you do not touch it again unless the building is on fire.”

    He grinned like he had won. He had not won. I had just decided I was still horny and he was still there.

    He had his two minutes. I checked my phone like I was waiting for a tradesman. He hit the vape once more, smaller this time, guilty about it now, and put it face down on the table as if that made it invisible.

    When I went back to him I was less sweet about it. I told him to lie back and not speak. He did. I took him in my mouth again and this time I was doing it because I wanted to finish what I started, not because I was impressed. He kept his hands in the sheets, which was wise. Every time I thought about the tap I went a bit rougher, and he made a noise that suggested he understood the assignment even if he did not understand the offence.

    It got good again, I will give him that. Bodies are stupid. You can be properly offended and still wet. I climbed on him after a while because my knees had had enough and because I wanted to look him in the face while I took what I came for. He held my hips. I set the pace. No shoulder taps. No little breaks. When he reached sideways once I actually slapped his hand, not hard, just enough to say do not even think about it.

    “Jesus, Cat.”

    “You had your break.”

    He came with his mouth open and both hands on me, which I decided counted as an apology. I did not come, not properly, because the mood had a dent in it that even a decent fuck could not fully hammer out. Close. Not the same. I sat on him for a second after, catching my breath, hair in my face, feeling that mix of satisfied and slightly robbed.

    Then he reached for the vape again.

    I got off him so fast the mattress bounced.

    “You are joking.”

    “What? We are done.”

    “We are not even wiped down.”

    He had the grace to freeze with it halfway to his mouth. I took it out of his hand and put it on the windowsill. Not thrown. I am not unhinged. Just relocated.

    “You can have it back when I have my shoes on.”

    He laughed into the pillow. “You are so dramatic.”

    “I am so right.”

    I used his bathroom. Washed my face. Looked at myself in the mirror and had a private cackle because the whole thing was so stupid I could already hear myself telling it. The tap. Two seconds babe. The ceiling cloud. Me on my knees with my mouth open like I was waiting for further instruction from management.

    When I came back he had pulled his boxers on and was looking at me like he wanted me to stay. I did not. Thursday has a Friday attached to it and I like my own bed when the joke has already peaked.

    At the door he tried to kiss me and I let him, because I am not cruel, and because he did fuck me after the incident, which is more than some of them manage. He smelled like mint and my perfume.

    “Text me,” he said.

    “Maybe.”

    “I will leave it in the other room next time.”

    Next time. Bless him.

    In the Uber home I vaped the second the door shut. Of course I did. That is the bit I cannot tell without looking like a hypocrite, so I tell it anyway. Mango out the window, city sliding past, lipstick ruined, thighs still a bit shaky. The driver did not look at me. Good man.

    I got in and one of my housemates was on the sofa with a bowl of pasta.

    “Good night?” she said.

    I dropped my bag. “He stopped for a vape.”

    She blinked. “During?”

    “During.”

    She put the fork down. “No.”

    “Tapped my shoulder and everything. Two seconds babe. Like I was holding him up at the self checkout.”

    She screamed into a cushion. I made tea. I told it again with the voices. By the time I got to the part where I confiscated the vape she was crying.

    I have thought about it since, usually when I am on my own balcony with mine in my hand, which is most evenings. The sex was fine. He was fine. The night was going to be a story either way. What I cannot get over is the confidence. The complete lack of panic. Some men would rather die than interrupt a woman when she is making them feel like that. This one treated it like a scheduled break in a shift.

    Would I go back? Maybe. I am not going to pretend I am above a second round when the first one already ended with me on top of him. But the vape stays in another room. I will say it when I walk in. I will point at the windowsill. I will be smug about it.

    And if his hand even twitches towards that bedside table I am putting my clothes on. I do not care how good his mouth is after. There is a time and a place. Outside a pub. After. In the morning when you are both being disgusting and honest.

    Not when I have just got going.

    Not with a tap on the shoulder.

    Not with two seconds babe.

    I still laugh when I think about my face. Mouth open. Knees sore. Him blowing mint at the ceiling like he had all the time in the world. If that is not the death of a moment I do not know what is.

    Anyway. I finished my tea. I charged my own vape. I went to bed smelling like him and mango and the kind of irritation that turns into a good story by Saturday.

    If you take one thing from this, take it from a girl who will happily get on her knees after three after-work drinks: do not pause the person who is doing you a favour. Finish first. Smoke later. It is not complicated.

    He texted in the morning. A little flame emoji and “still thinking about it.”

    I sent back a photo of my vape on the kitchen counter and nothing else.

    He can sit with that.

  • Cheap Bed Frame Gave Out

    I should have clocked the bed the second we walked in. It was one of those flatpack numbers you assemble half pissed on a Sunday with an Allen key and a prayer. Pale wood. Wobbly if you so much as sat on the edge to put socks on. I had been meaning to tighten the slats for weeks. Had not. Obviously. Because I am a grown woman with a job and a vape and a very specific set of priorities, and furniture maintenance is not one of them.

    He was from after work. Not office after work, the proper kind. Drinks in that sticky place near the station where the wine is warm and the lighting is doing everyone a favour. He was tall enough, clean enough, laughed at the right bits, and looked at me like he already knew how the night ended. I like that. Saves time. I finished my drink, told my work lot I was getting an Uber, and we were in the back of a Corolla before the second round landed.

    The flat was quiet when we got in. One housemate out. The other one, Sophie, had her door shut and some true crime thing murmuring through the wall. I put a finger to my lips like we were in a film. He grinned. I dumped my bag, kicked off the heels, and went straight for his mouth in the hallway because I had been thinking about it since he put his hand on my lower back at the bar.

    We did not make it to niceties. Jacket off. Shirt half undone. I had him against the fridge for a minute, hand in his hair, that smug little heat already sitting in my chest like I had won something. Then I pulled him down the hall by his belt and we fell onto my bed in a heap that should have been a warning.

    It bounced. Not in a sexy way. In a cheap way.

    I ignored it.

    I always ignore it.

    He was a good kisser, I will give him that. Hands sure, not grabby, the sort who waits half a second to see what you want and then gives you more of it. I got his jeans open and he made that low sound men make when they realise you are not messing about. I like that sound. I like being the reason for it. I got my mouth on him just long enough to make a point, just long enough that he swore under his breath and reached for me like he had lost the plot a bit. Then I pushed him back, climbed on, and sat there for a second looking down at him like the bed was a throne and I had paid for it in cash.

    I felt like a goddess. I am not even being cute about it. Lights from the street coming through the cheap blinds, my hair in my face, him looking up at me like I had invented the concept. That is a dangerous feeling for me. I get cocky. I get rhythm. I start performing for an audience that is not even there.

    I rolled my hips slow at first, the showy version, the one I know looks good. He grabbed my waist. I took his hands off and put them on my thighs instead because I wanted to be the one driving. Pride again. Always pride. I picked it up. Found the angle. That particular grind that makes my head tip back whether I want it to or not. He swore again. I smiled with my eyes closed like I was doing him a favour, which, to be fair, I was.

    The bed complained.

    A little creak. Then a longer one. The sort of noise that sounds like a question.

    I did not stop.

    Of course I did not stop.

    I leaned forward, hands on his chest, and gave it the sort of bounce you only do when you are showing off. Skin slapping. Breath going ragged. That tight, greedy feeling building where I wanted to be loud and knew I should not because Sophie was ten feet away with headphones that never actually work. I bit my lip. He thrust up to meet me. The slats made a sound like someone snapping a breadstick.

    Still going.

    I am not joking. There is a version of me that would have paused, laughed, said hold on a sec. That version did not turn up. The version that did turn up was already halfway to coming and had decided the furniture could cope. I rode him harder. Properly. The unladylike kind. Hair in my mouth, one hand on the headboard that was only headboard in the technical sense, the other one braced on his shoulder. He was saying my name like it was an instruction. I was right there. That sweet, stupid, arrogant peak where your brain leaves the building and your body just clocks in for overtime.

    Then the universe filed a complaint.

    It was not a gentle give. It was a full structural resignation. One second I was on him, hips rolling, feeling like I could charge admission. Next second the slats surrendered as a group. The mattress dropped through the frame like it had been waiting years for the opportunity. We went with it. All of us. Me, him, the duvet, a pillow, and whatever dignity I had left.

    The sound was obscene. Not sexy obscene. DIY fail obscene. Wood cracking, metal feet skittering, the mattress hitting the floor with a thud that went through the whole flat. My knee banged the frame. His head missed the wall by an inch. I landed on him in a heap that knocked the air out of both of us and made my teeth click.

    Silence.

    Then Sophie, through the wall, proper pissed off:

    “CAT. I SWEAR TO GOD.”

    A bang. Not a polite knock. A fist on plaster.

    I was still on top of him. Still, technically, in him. The mattress was now a pit. The frame was a crime scene around us. One slat had popped up like it wanted a word. He looked at me with this stunned little laugh already forming and I did the worst possible thing I could have done.

    I started moving again.

    Not even smoothly. Just this stubborn, stubborn roll of my hips like if I pretended hard enough the last five seconds had not happened. Pride is a disease and I have a chronic case. He made a noise that was half groan half are you serious. I put a hand over his mouth. Not sexy. Survival. Sophie banged again.

    “I CAN HEAR THE WOOD, CAT. I CAN HEAR THE ACTUAL WOOD.”

    I hissed at him to shut up, which was rich coming from me, and tried to find the rhythm on a mattress that was now sitting in a wooden grave. It was not the same. Nothing about a collapsed Ikea bed is erotic once you have time to think. My knee was in a gap. His shoulder was on a broken slat. Every movement made the frame give another sad little crack, like it was dying in instalments.

    He started laughing.

    That did me in more than the fall.

    Once he laughed, I laughed, and then I was laughing so hard I had to climb off him or risk a tragedy of a different kind. I sat back on the wreckage in my bra and nothing else, hair everywhere, trying to breathe, and the whole thing looked like we had been burgled by sex. He had a red mark on his chest from my hand. I had a bruise coming up on my shin. The headboard was at a slant that felt personal.

    Sophie opened her door.

    I know because I heard the handle. Then I heard her stop in the hallway, clock the state of my room through the gap I had not fully shut, and make this sound of a woman who pays half the council tax and has reached her limit.

    “You have got to be kidding me.”

    “It is fine,” I called, which was a lie so bold I almost respected myself for it.

    “The bed is on the floor, Cat.”

    “I know where the bed is, thanks.”

    He had the duvet pulled up to his waist like that was going to help. I reached for my vape on the bedside table, except the bedside table had also shifted in the collapse and the vape was on the carpet next to a screw. I picked it up anyway. Priority management. That is what PAs are good at.

    Sophie did not come in. Mercy. She just said, very clearly, that if I woke her up again she was putting my name on the group chat under “reasons we need a deposit,” and then her door shut hard enough to make the lightshade swing.

    We sat there.

    Him, naked, in a hole where a bed used to be.

    Me, vaping, trying to look like a person who had this under control.

    “You all right?” he said.

    “I am great,” I said. “Never better. This is exactly how I pictured Thursday.”

    He laughed again, softer. Looked at the wreckage. Looked at me. There was still that heat in the room, the unfinished kind, the kind that makes you do something stupid twice. I could feel it. He could feel it. I shifted on the mattress and the frame gave one last pathetic tick, like a clock giving up.

    I thought about it. I am not going to pretend I did not. Pride does not clock out just because the furniture has. I even put a hand on his stomach, that lazy confident thing I do when I want to start again without having to ask. He raised his eyebrows. I glanced at the wall. Sophie’s show had gone back on, louder, a pointed volume increase if I ever heard one.

    “If that thing makes one more sound,” I whispered, “she will actually kill me.”

    “We could move,” he said.

    “Where? The sofa? Emma will be back in an hour. The kitchen floor? I eat breakfast there.”

    He snorted. I liked him for that. A lesser man would have got weird, or sulked, or tried to make it tender and ruined the joke. He just lay in the wreckage like we had survived a small car crash and were waiting for the breakdown service.

    I climbed off the mattress properly this time, found his shirt, threw it at him, and stood there in my underwear taking in the damage like I was about to write a strongly worded review. Two slats snapped clean. One of the side rails had come away from the corner bracket. The whole thing had the energy of a student house in week three of term.

    “How much was that bed?” he asked.

    “Sixty quid in the sale. I assembled it myself.”

    “Yeah,” he said. “I can tell.”

    Rude. Accurate. I flicked his arm with the shirt.

    We did not finish. That is the tragic part, if you ask the version of me who had been thirty seconds from making a noise Sophie would have reported to the landlord. The fall, the wall bang, the laughing, it all knocked the filthy momentum out of the room and left this giddy, ridiculous aftermath instead. I pulled on his shirt because it was closer than mine. He pulled on his jeans without the underwear, which I found unnecessarily optimistic. We sat on the edge of the collapsed mattress like two people at a bus stop that had been hit by a lorry.

    I told him about the time the shower rail came off in my hands. He told me about a sofa that ate a remote and never gave it back. We were doing that thing where you pretend the night has become wholesome now, even though I could still feel him on my skin and he kept looking at my legs like the meeting had only been postponed.

    Sophie stomped to the bathroom with the energy of a woman fetching water in a drought. She did not look in. She did flush like it was a political statement.

    When she was gone I put my head in my hands and laughed until my stomach hurt.

    Because of course it was my bed. Of course it happened when I was on top, showing off, doing the goddess bit. Of course I tried to keep going. Of course the housemate heard the wood. There is no version of my life where I have a sturdy oak four poster and a quiet landing. I have a sixty quid frame, thin walls, and a personality that does not know when to stop.

    He ended up leaving around one. Not in a bad way. In a this mattress is now a pit and your flatmate wants me dead way. I walked him to the door in his shirt and my underwear, kissed him against the same fridge, and told him to text when he got in. He did. He sent a photo of a bruise on his shoulder and the words you owe me a bed. I sent back a middle finger emoji and then, because I am like this, a photo of the wreckage from above, captioned structural review pending.

    I slept on the mattress on the floor. Obviously. I was not dragging it onto Sophie’s goodwill at that hour. The slats stuck up around me like a broken fence. I vaped out the window, watched some rubbish on my phone with one earphone in, and every time I shifted the frame gave a little tick, like it was reminding me who won.

    Morning was worse. Emma came back from her night out, stood in my doorway with a breakfast wrap, and just said, “Jesus Christ.” Sophie, over coffee, told me I was buying a new bed before the weekend and I was putting felt pads on whatever I bought next. I said fine. I said I would get a sturdier one. I said I had learned my lesson.

    I have not learned my lesson.

    I spent Friday lunch looking at bed frames on my phone under the desk like I was planning a crime. I added two to the basket. Then I added a tool kit I will not use correctly. Then I thought about him looking up at me right before the world dropped out, that stupid arrogant heat in my chest, and I smiled at my spreadsheet like a menace.

    The new one is coming Tuesday. Metal this time. Reinforced slats. Weight rating I actually read. Sophie has already told me that if she hears so much as a squeak she is moving out and taking the kettle.

    She can take the kettle.

    I am getting the bed that can take a proper riding without filing for bankruptcy. And if it dies anyway, I will still try to keep going. That is the problem with me. I do not stop because something collapses. I stop when I have decided I am done, or when a housemate is hammering the wall loud enough to raise the dead.

    Until then I am on the floor, on a mattress in a wooden grave, texting a bloke I nearly crushed, and feeling, against all available evidence, like I still had a good night.

    Pride is a disease.

    I have it bad.

    And I am not taking anything for it.

  • Sneezed Straight Onto His Lap

    I still think about the sound more than the mess. That is the bit that lives rent free. Not even the splash. The actual noise. Like a goose getting kicked down a stairwell.

    Hayfever had been taking the piss out of me all week. Eyes itching on the Central line. Nose doing that little pre-sneeze twitch every time someone walked past with a bouquet or a dusty coat. I had taken a tablet at lunch and told myself I was fine. I was not fine. I was a loaded gun with mascara on.

    We had been circling each other since the Thursday drinks. He worked two floors up, something with numbers that was not quite as good as my numbers, which I enjoyed more than I should. Tall. Clean shirt. The sort of mouth that looks like it has been waiting for an excuse. I had a pint. Then another. Then I did that thing I do where I decide the night is already decided and everyone else is just catching up.

    His place was closer. Flatshare, same as mine, except his housemates were out and mine would have been sat on the sofa with Love Island and a bag of extra mature, offering commentary I did not need. We kissed in the hallway like people who have already agreed on the ending. Jacket off. Vape in the dish by the door because I am not an animal. Shoes kicked under the radiator. I was already pleased with myself and we had not even made it to the bed.

    His room smelled like clean sheets and a candle that was trying too hard to be sandalwood. Window cracked. That was the mistake. London spring air is not air. It is pollen with a travelcard. I should have clocked it. I did clock it. I just thought I was better than biology.

    We got on the bed and it was good in that first twenty minutes way. Hands, mouth, the usual competence. I like being good at this. I know I am good at this. There is a particular satisfaction in watching a man who spends all day pretending he is busy forget how to form a sentence because you decided to get on your knees. I like that bit. I like the shift in the room. I like knowing I put it there.

    So I did.

    Belt. Zip. That little pause where you both pretend this is still casual. It was not casual. I was already committed. I had my hair twisted out of the way and my knees on his rug and I was doing the thing properly, not the lazy half-hearted version some girls do when they want a medal for showing up. Tongue, pace, the occasional look up because I am not above a bit of theatre. He made that sound men make when they have underestimated you. I felt smug enough to bottle.

    Then my nose started.

    Not a cute sniffle. The deep one. The one that sits behind your face and rings a bell. I ignored it. Of course I ignored it. I have ignored worse. I have given head with a stitch, with a cramp, with a housemate walking past the door humming. A tickle is nothing. I breathed through my mouth and carried on like a professional.

    It got worse.

    You know that moment where your whole head fills and you think if I just swallow or freeze or think about spreadsheets it will pass. I thought about the Q2 report. I thought about my promotion. I thought about the fact I had a smear of lipstick on his thigh and I was still winning. None of it helped.

    The sneeze announced itself like a bus.

    There is no elegant way to sneeze when you are on your knees with a dick in your mouth. There is especially no elegant way to do it when you have been holding it for forty seconds like a martyr. It came out of me at full volume, no warning, no ladylike little achoo. Just a violent, wet, full-body explosion that I could not aim, could not stop, and definitely could not pretend was anything else.

    It went everywhere.

    I mean everywhere. His lap. His stomach. The base of him. A bit on my own hand which felt like a personal insult. For a second the room went completely silent except for the tail end of the sneeze still rattling in my sinuses. I could feel it on my lip. I could see it on him. There was a string of it catching the lamplight in a way that should be illegal.

    I looked up.

    He looked down.

    There is a particular expression a man gets when the night has taken a left turn and his brain has not caught up with his cock. That was the face. Shock. A bit of horror. A bit of something that was not horror at all, which I will come back to because it still winds me up.

    And then my mouth, traitor that it is, said, “Bless me.”

    Like a child. Like I had just sneezed on a packed District line and an old woman had given me a look. Not “sorry.” Not “fuck.” Not even a laugh. Bless me. I heard it leave my face and wanted to climb into the wardrobe.

    He blinked.

    I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, which did nothing except spread the evidence. “I am so sorry,” I said, except it came out as a laugh I could not swallow. Once I started I could not stop. Not a cute giggle. The ugly one. The one where your shoulders go and you make a noise like a kettle.

    He started laughing too, thank God, because if he had gone quiet I would have put my shoes on and walked into traffic. “Are you alright?” he said, which is the most English sentence in the world to say while someone has just sneezed on your erection.

    “Hayfever,” I said, as if that explained the Jackson Pollock on his thighs. “Tablet wore off. Your window. I should have… yeah no. That was grim.”

    I sat back on my heels. My knees were imprinted with the rug. My pride was somewhere near the skirting board. I reached for the box of tissues on his bedside like it was a fire extinguisher. He watched me mop at him with the sort of tenderness usually reserved for spillages in Waitrose.

    “You do not have to,” he said.

    “I do,” I said. “I absolutely do.”

    Here is the bit that still makes me cackle in the Tesco queue. He was still hard. Through the sneeze. Through the blessing. Through me wiping his lap like I was on a shift. Still going. Still interested. Still looking at me like the night had not, in fact, ended in a biohazard.

    Men are simple. I say that with love and a bit of despair. You can cough a lung onto them and as long as you do not say their mum’s name they will find a way to keep the plot.

    “We can stop,” I said, because I have manners even when I have ruined a moment.

    “Do you want to stop?” he said.

    I thought about it. Properly thought about it. My nose was still buzzing. My eyes were watering. I looked like I had been maced. There was a used tissue in my fist that I did not want to examine. And underneath all that I was still turned on, which is a character flaw I have stopped apologising for.

    “Give me two minutes,” I said. “And close the window.”

    He closed the window. I went to his bathroom and washed my face like I was preparing for surgery. Looked in the mirror. Mascara doing a runner. Hair a state. The smugness had left the building and been replaced by something closer to hysteria. I vaped out of the bathroom window because I needed a reset and also because I am who I am. Mango. The universe has a sense of humour.

    When I came back he was sitting up against the headboard trying to look normal. He did not look normal. He looked like a man who had been sneezed on and decided to be a gentleman about it.

    “Come here,” he said.

    I did. Not straight back to my knees. I am not a machine. We kissed and I was careful with my face in case another one was brewing. Nothing came. The tablet, the closed window, the sheer force of embarrassment had scared the pollen into retirement. His hands were on my waist. Mine were in his hair. The laugh was still sitting between us like a third person.

    Then I went back down.

    I will not pretend I was as polished the second time. There was a self-consciousness now. A little check every few seconds in case my sinuses had another opinion. But I am good at this, and being good at something is how I claw dignity back from the wreckage. He lasted longer than I expected, or maybe it just felt longer because I was narrating the whole thing in my head like a crime reconstruction.

    When he finished I stayed where I was for a second, then sat up and said, “If you tell anyone I said bless me I will deny it until I die.”

    “I would not dare,” he said.

    He dared. Of course he dared. Not in a nasty way. In the way men do when they have a story and a pint and no sense of self-preservation. I found out the following Tuesday because a girl from his floor gave me a look in the kitchen that was fifty percent pity and fifty percent impressed.

    The walk home that night was its own comedy. I got an Uber. The driver had the window down. I nearly asked him to shut it and then remembered I have no authority over other people’s pollen. Sat in the back with my coat zipped up like a suspect. Texted my housemate: do not ask. She asked immediately. I typed the whole thing out, deleted it, typed it again, sent it, and put my phone face down.

    She was on the sofa when I got in. Pause button already hovering.

    “Tell me.”

    I told her. All of it. The window. The tablet. The noise. Bless me. The fact he still came. She screamed into a cushion. Proper screamed. Then she said, “That is the most you thing I have ever heard,” which I chose to take as a compliment.

    Sleep was a joke. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the look on his face. Not disgusted. That would have been easier. It was the slightly stunned, slightly fond look of a man who has just discovered you are a disaster and decided that is fine. I hate that look. I also chased it.

    Next morning I did my makeup like I was going to court. Smart casual. Blazer. The armour. I vaped on the balcony until my lungs filed a complaint, then went to work prepared to never make eye contact with the second floor again.

    He messaged at 11.42.

    You alive?

    I stared at it longer than a grown woman should stare at two words. Then I wrote: barely. my nose has retired.

    He sent a laughing emoji and then: still thinking about bless me.

    I put the phone in the drawer. Took it out. Put it back. I am twenty-five. I have a degree. I can do mental arithmetic in a meeting. And some bloke from two floors up had reduced me to a woman hiding her mobile from herself.

    We did not have a big conversation about it. That is not how these things go when you both have jobs and housemates and a shared kitchen at work that smells of burnt toast. We just… kept going. Not every night. Not a relationship. Something in the middle that I refuse to name because naming it makes it needy and I am not doing that.

    The second time at his, the window stayed shut. I took two tablets. I still felt my nose twitch once and I froze like a meerkat. He noticed.

    “You alright?”

    “If I sneeze on you again I am leaving the country.”

    He grinned. “I will risk it.”

    That grin. That is the problem. That is why I went back. Not because the first night was smooth. It was a car crash with good lighting. I went back because he laughed at the right time and did not make me feel small for being a human body with hayfever and a filthy streak.

    I told the other housemate a week later because secrets in a three-bed last about as long as a packet of biscuits. She said, “At least you did not cry.” I said, “Give me time.” We put Love Island on and I pretended I was watching it.

    Work became a minefield in the funniest way. Every time someone sneezed in a meeting I had to bite the inside of my cheek. A bloke from finance did a massive one in the Monday briefing and I had to look at my notepad until the urge to cackle passed. My manager asked if I was coming down with something. I said allergies. Which was true. Just not the whole truth.

    Would I change it?

    I think about that on the train sometimes, forehead on the glass, city smearing past. The dignified version of the night is boring. We go back. We have competent, quiet sex. I get an Uber. Nobody says bless me. Nobody has a story. I hate that version. It is tidy and it is dead.

    The real version is me on his rug with mascara everywhere, a tissue in my fist, laughing so hard I nearly set another one off. It is him still hard like the plot had not changed. It is my housemate screaming into a pillow. It is a Tuesday look from a girl two floors up. It is a text I should not have smiled at.

    I am not going to pretend I came out of it looking cool. I did not. I looked like a woman who lost a fight with spring. But I also looked like a woman who got back on her knees after wiping a sneeze off a man and still made him finish, which, if we are being honest, is the sort of stubbornness I respect in myself.

    Hayfever season will come round again. It always does. I have already bought better tablets. I have already decided that if I am going to anyone’s flat between March and June the window stays shut and the candle can do one.

    And if it happens again, I will not say bless me.

    I will say sorry.

    Then I will probably say bless me anyway.

    Some habits are deeper than pride.

  • Tesco Meal Deal Struck Back

    I should have known. That is the whole article, really. I should have known the second I clocked the sandwich looking a bit too shiny under those Tesco lights and still thought, yeah no, I will be fine.

    It was late. Proper late for a Wednesday. I had been at work since half eight, answering emails like my life depended on it because the promotion thing is sitting there in the back of my head every hour of the day. By seven I was starving and smug in that dangerous way where you start making decisions with your stomach and your knickers at the same time. He messaged. Come over. I have wine. I have a flat that is not currently hosting two other girls and a vape cloud the size of Essex. I said give me forty minutes.

    Forty minutes is how long it takes to convince yourself a meal deal is a personality.

    I went into Tesco like I had a plan. I did not have a plan. I had a rumbling gut and a man waiting in his boxers, probably, and the kind of confidence that only shows up when you have already decided you are getting laid. Ham and cheese looked sad. The chicken one looked like it had been through something. I picked the meal deal anyway because I am twenty five and I still treat that little yellow sticker like it is a treat from the government. Sandwich. Crisps. A drink that was far too fizzy for a girl about to be on her back. I ate half of it walking to the station and the rest on the train, picking bits out of my teeth in the window like a lady.

    It sat in me. I felt it sit. That heavy, polite little weight right under the ribs. I told myself it was just food. Food does that. You eat, you digest, you go and have sex like a functioning adult. I even had a vape on the walk from his station and told myself I felt mint.

    His flat was nicer than I expected. Not posh. Just clean in that way that makes you think, oh he might actually rinse a mug. Shoes off. Wine poured. Music on low enough that you could still hear yourself think and I do not like that, generally, but I let it happen. He kissed me in the kitchen like he had been waiting all day and I kissed him back like I had not just committed a crime against my own intestines.

    I will give him this. He was good with his hands. Not frantic. Not that awful stabby thing some of them do like they are looking for a light switch. He got my shirt off without making it a performance and when he put his mouth on my neck I made that noise I only make when I am actually into it. We barely made it to the bedroom. My skirt ended up on the chair. His jeans ended up in a heap that said he had not planned this as carefully as he wanted me to think. I was already wet and a bit too pleased with myself, which is usually when the universe starts writing notes.

    I like being on top. I know that about myself. I like the control and I like watching their face when they realise I am not just going to lie there looking pretty. I pushed him back on the bed and climbed on and for a few minutes it was exactly what I had come for. His hands on my hips. That thick slide of him inside me. Me rolling my hips like I had somewhere to be and all night to get there. I was talking a bit. I do that. Nothing poetic. Just filthy little bits, half laughing, telling him harder when I wanted it and slower when I wanted him to feel it. He swore under his breath and I felt that smug heat in my chest like, yes, Cat, you still have it.

    Then my stomach spoke.

    Not a cute gurgle. Not the little polite bubble you can pretend is the radiator. This was a long, low, traitorous roll from somewhere south of my belly button, the kind of sound that has a beginning, a middle and a punchline. It happened while I was mid-grind, while he was looking up at me like I was doing something impressive. The noise filled the room. It was not sexy. It was not even human in a useful way. It was a meal deal announcing itself.

    I froze. He froze. For one awful second neither of us pretended it had not happened.

    I laughed. Of course I laughed. That is what I do when I want the floor to swallow me. I said something like, ignore that, and tried to keep moving because I am arrogant enough to believe I can out-sex a sandwich. I lasted maybe ten more seconds. Another noise came, sharper this time, and with it a cramp that made my whole face change. That was it. The mood did not die. The mood was assassinated in its sleep.

    I got off him so fast I nearly kneed him in the chest. I said bathroom, now, sorry, and I was already walking like a woman who knew the next thirty seconds would decide her entire reputation. His hallway felt longer than it had any right to be. I found the door, locked it, sat down and accepted my fate.

    Twenty minutes.

    I am not proud of what happened in that bathroom. I am also not going to dress it up. The meal deal had been waiting. The fizzy drink had been waiting. The train sandwich that should have stayed in the fridge had been waiting. They all arrived at once, like they had planned it in a group chat. I sat there with my knickers round one ankle, forehead on my knees, listening to my own body betray every sexy thing I had done in the last half hour. At one point I thought, this is it, this is how I die, on a stranger’s toilet, still wearing mascara, while a hard man in the next room wonders if he should put trousers on.

    He knocked once. Soft.

    You alright?

    I said fine, which was a lie so bold I almost respected myself for it. Then I said give me a minute, which became five, which became the kind of silence that makes a man start boiling a kettle because he does not know what else to do with his hands.

    I could hear him out there. Cupboard. Tap. The little clink of a mug. That is when the shame properly landed. Not the bathroom part. The tea part. A man making you tea because your stomach has declared war is a specific kind of intimacy I did not ask for. I wanted him to be a bit of a dick. I wanted him to sigh and check his phone. Instead he was being kind and that made it worse. Kindness when you are half naked and detonating is unbearable.

    I cleaned myself up like I was prepping for a job interview. Washed my hands twice. Checked my face in the mirror and saw a girl who had been so sure of herself an hour ago and now looked like she had seen God and he was wearing a Tesco uniform. I pulled my skirt back into place. I found my vape in my bag because of course I had brought my bag into the bathroom, like a woman preparing for exile. One hit. Mango. It did not help. It just made me taste fruit on top of humiliation.

    When I opened the door he was in a t-shirt and boxers with two mugs on the side. Tea. Actual tea. Not wine. Not a joke. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has been through a mild natural disaster.

    I said, so.

    He said, food poisoning or just Tesco?

    I could have kissed him for that. Or left. I did neither. I sat on the edge of his bed like a guest who had overstayed and wrapped both hands round the mug. The tea was too hot. I drank it anyway. We did not talk about the sex. We talked about meal deals like they were a shared enemy. He said he once ate a prawn one on a night bus and saw things. I said I had a maths degree and still could not calculate risk when I was horny and hungry at the same time. He laughed. I laughed. It was almost nice, which made me want to scream into a cushion.

    I did not get back on him. There are limits. Even I have them. The body had spoken and the body had been extremely clear. He offered to call me an Uber and I said yes before he could offer the sofa. I wanted my own bed. I wanted my housemates’ terrible telly and the safety of a bathroom I pay rent for. I wanted to not be the girl who turned a decent shag into a digestive event.

    On the way down the stairs I caught myself in the hallway mirror. Hair a bit wrecked. Lipstick gone. That smug look I usually wear had been replaced by something smaller. I still looked fit. That was the insult of it. I looked like a woman who should have been leaving with her legs a bit shaky for the right reasons.

    The Uber driver did not speak. Thank God. I vaped out the window and texted the group chat one line.

    Do not, under any circumstances, fuck on a meal deal.

    One of them replied immediately. Details.

    I said later.

    I did not say later because I am shy. I said later because I needed to sit in the back of that car and replay the noise in my head until it became funny instead of fatal. It is funny now. It was not funny when I was clenched on his toilet whispering please to my own insides. It is funny in the way all my worst nights become funny once I have had a shower and a bit of distance and a story I can tell with my eyebrows up.

    I got home and both housemates were on the sofa. They took one look at me and one of them said, that is not a just-been-fucked face. That is a crime-has-occurred face.

    I told them. Not every wet detail. Enough. The sandwich. The ride. The sound. The tea. They screamed. Proper screamed. I sat there eating toast like a nun and swore I would never buy another meal deal after six again.

    I bought one the next day at lunch. Of course I did. I am not a changed woman. I am just a woman who now does a quiet little risk assessment before she takes her knickers off.

    He texted in the morning. Hope your stomach’s alright. No pressure. Last night was still fit until it wasn’t.

    I stared at that for a long time. It was a good message. Decent. The kind of message that almost makes you consider a second attempt, in daylight, after porridge, after your body has signed a peace treaty. I replied with a laughing face and thanks for the tea and left it there. I have a promotion to think about. I have a flat to keep. I have a reputation in my own head as someone who is good at this, and I need a week before I test that theory again.

    Here is what I know. I can talk a man into bed. I can get on top and make it look easy. I can be filthy and funny and leave him a bit stunned. What I cannot do is outrun a Tesco chicken sandwich that has been plotting since 8pm.

    If you are going to someone’s flat late, eat something boring. Eat toast. Eat nothing. Do not put three questionable items in a paper bag and call it dinner and then expect your pelvic floor to behave like a professional. Your gut does not care that you are confident. Your gut does not care that you have a good arse and a filthy mouth. Your gut has a schedule and it will ruin you on it.

    I still think about him sometimes when I walk past that Tesco. Not in a romantic way. In a haunted way. The wine. The bed. The ten minutes where I was actually excellent. Then that noise, like a trombone under the duvet.

    Never again.

    Until the next time I am starving, horny and convinced I am invincible. Which, being honest, is probably Thursday.

  • Counted Seconds On The Condom

    I have a maths degree. That should be useful. It is. Just not when you are standing there with your knickers round one ankle and a man looking at you like you have grown a second head.

    Thursday. After work. The sort of night that starts with one pint and a lie. I said I was only staying for one because I had emails. I did not have emails. I had a vape, a decent bra, and the particular restlessness that turns up when the office has been dull and my brain wants something warmer than a spreadsheet.

    He was at the bar near the station. Not a colleague. Thank God. I have a promotion I actually want and I am not stupid enough to mix that with the other thing I am good at. He was just a man I had been messaging, the usual back and forth, a bit of cheek, a photo that did not look like a passport reject. In person he was better. Tall enough. Clean shirt. Hands that looked like they knew what they were doing. He bought the second round without making a speech about it, which I respect. I can talk. I do not need a man narrating the pint.

    We stayed longer than I planned. I always do. Pub got louder. I got happier. That baseline mood of mine, the one that sits on a bit of smug and a bit of heat, started doing what it does. I leaned in when he spoke. He noticed. Of course he noticed. I am not subtle when I have decided I like the look of someone. I vaped outside once, came back smelling like mango and cold air, and he laughed at the cloud like it was charming. It is charming. I make it charming.

    By nine I had already done the maths that actually matters. Time to last train. Time to his place. Likelihood of my flatmates being in and making it weird. His won. He lived alone, ten minutes in an Uber, no clown memorabilia as far as the conversation had revealed, which I do check now because I have standards and also trauma. We split the fare. I am not paying a man’s whole night just because I plan to sit on him.

    His flat was fine. Not impressive. Not grim. The sort of place a bloke keeps tidy enough because he has had people back before and learned. Jacket on the chair. Telly on standby. Kitchen that had seen a meal deal and survived. I clocked the exits out of habit and then stopped clocking anything useful, because he kissed me in the hallway and it was good. Proper good. Not teeth. Not wet in the wrong way. Just that slow confidence that makes my brain go quiet for once.

    Clothes came off like we both had somewhere to be and nowhere else we wanted to be. I like that part. I am good at that part. Smart casual hits the floor and suddenly I am not the girl who spent eight hours being polite on email. I am Cat, who knows what she wants and does not pretend otherwise. He got my shirt. I got his belt. We made it to the bedroom without taking a lamp with us, which I count as competence.

    He was hard. I was wet. The usual honest facts. I had him on the edge of the bed and I was already thinking about putting my mouth on him because I like being good at things and I like the look men get when they realise I am not guessing. He stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, smiling, and reached for the drawer.

    Fair. Sensible. I like sensible. I am a personal assistant. I live in calendars and dates and other people’s mistakes. A condom is the least romantic object in the world and still the most attractive one when you have a brain.

    He handed me the packet. That was the first little warning, though I did not know it yet. Some men rip it open like they are in a film. He handed it over like he wanted me to approve the paperwork. I should have found that sweet. I did, for half a second.

    Then I looked at it.

    The wrapper was not new-new. Not ancient either. Just that slightly tired look foil gets when it has lived in a wallet or a drawer through more than one season. I turned it over. Expiry date printed in that tiny unhelpful font they use when they do not want you doing exactly what I was about to do.

    I stood there naked. He sat there naked. The heating was on too high. My hair was a state. His hand was still on my hip like the night had not changed temperature.

    And my degree woke up.

    I am not joking. It was like someone flicked a switch behind my eyes. All the heat in my stomach took a seat and the numbers walked in. Day. Month. Year. Current date. How dating actually works when a packet says end of a month. Whether they mean the last day or the first. How long foil really lasts if it has been somewhere warm. I could feel myself doing it. I could not stop myself doing it.

    He noticed the pause.

    “You all right?”

    “Yeah,” I said, which was a lie so bald I nearly laughed. “Just checking.”

    Checking. Like I was about to sign off a delivery.

    I held it closer to the lamp. Squinted. The numbers were worn. Of course they were. Of course the one night I am actually in the mood, properly in the mood, the print looks like it has been through a wash. I tilted it. I am twenty five years old with my tits out in a stranger’s flat doing forensic accounting on rubber.

    “Is this one expired,” I said, “or am I thick?”

    He made a sound that was not sex. More like a man watching a car stall.

    “What?”

    “The date.” I tapped the foil with a nail. “I cannot tell if that is a three or an eight and it matters.”

    It did matter. I know it mattered. I also know that saying it out loud while he was sitting there with his cock cooling in the air was not the move. I said it anyway. I have a mouth and a habit of using it.

    He took it off me, looked, frowned, looked again. Two naked adults passing a condom back and forth like it was a utility bill. The sex left the room. I felt it go. It shut the door politely on the way out.

    “I think it is fine,” he said.

    “You think.”

    “It looks fine.”

    “Looks fine is not a date.” I heard myself. I hated myself. I kept going. “If that is March it is grand. If that is May we are in a different conversation. And I am not being funny but I am not doing mental gymnastics with my actual body on the line because you keep emergency supplies next to old chargers.”

    He laughed, a bit helpless. “You are really doing maths right now.”

    “I have a degree,” I said, as if that helped. As if that has ever helped a woman mid-hookup. “I can do this. I am doing this. I just need the year to stop looking like a smudge.”

    Silence. The sexy kind of silence is heavy and useful. This one was fluorescent. I could hear his fridge in the kitchen. I could hear my own pulse and it was not doing anything useful anymore. I was still holding the packet. He was still looking at me. I became extremely aware of being naked in a way I usually enjoy and suddenly did not.

    I did the sum anyway.

    Current month. Printed month. Year either this one or last, depending on whether the worn number was generous. I counted on my fingers at one point. I actually counted on my fingers. Twenty five, good job, decent at communication, standing in a stranger’s bedroom using Year One methods on contraception. If my old lecturer could have seen it he would have wept, then asked why I was unemployed from the thing I trained for.

    “It is in date,” I said at last. “Just. Like, only just. The sort of just that makes you think about the factory and the warehouse and how long it sat in Superdrug under a bad light.”

    “Right.”

    “Which is still in date.”

    “Yeah.”

    “So we can use it.”

    “We can.”

    Neither of us moved.

    That is the worst bit. Not the talking. The bit after the talking when the body should pick the conversation back up and instead everyone is thinking about latex shelf life. He was not fully hard anymore. I was not exactly a river. I could have salvaged it. I know I could. Mouth, hands, a bit of filth in his ear. I am not shy and I am not easily put off. I like sex. I like being good at it. I like the way it shuts my head up. That is the honest part I do not put on a CV. It makes me feel held. It makes the day smaller.

    But there is a moment where the spell breaks and you can feel yourself standing outside the scene, watching. I was watching. I was also still holding the condom like a receipt.

    “Do you want to…” he started.

    “Yeah,” I said. Then I did not. I sat on the edge of the bed instead, packet in my lap, and let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I have ruined it, have I not?”

    He was decent about it. I will give him that. Some men get sulky when their evening develops an audit. He just rubbed his face and said it was all right, which is what people say when it is not all right but they are trying not to be a dick. I appreciated the effort. I still wanted a hole in the floor.

    We put clothes on in the wrong order. Shirt before dignity. I found my knickers half under the bed and had a brief, violent conversation with myself about whether I should still offer to get him off so the night was not a total waste. I nearly did. I like finishing things. Then I pictured saying “shall I just use my mouth then” in the same voice I had used to query a printed date, and the cringe was so physical I put my coat on instead.

    We talked for ten minutes like people who had just shared a mildly upsetting PowerPoint. Work. Trains. Whether the pub on the corner does food after ten. I vaped out of his window because I needed something in my hands that was not a contraceptive. Mango again. The room smelled like a corner shop and missed opportunity.

    I ordered the Uber before it could get tender. Tender would have been worse. Tender would have meant sitting on his sofa pretending we might do this again when we both knew the story of the night was already the story of the night. He walked me down. Kissed my cheek. Called me funny. I am funny. I am also the woman who turned a sure thing into a word problem.

    In the car I opened Notes like I was going to write a to-do list for work and instead wrote “buy own condoms, check dates in daylight, never say am I thick while naked again.” Then I deleted it because I am not actually going to become a better person. I am going to do the same thing in a different postcode and hope the foil is clearer.

    Back at the flat my housemates were on the sofa with the telly on. One of them took one look at my face and said, “That bad?”

    “I did maths,” I said.

    “On a date?”

    “On a condom.”

    They screamed. The good scream. The one that means I will never live it down and also I am among my people. I made tea. I told it properly, including the finger counting, including the silence, including the fact that I still finished the sum correctly and felt a stupid little spark of pride about that. I did. I got it right. Expired or not, I got it right. My brain, traitor that it is, wanted a gold star.

    I lay in bed later with music on low because that is what I do when the day has been too much and sex did not get to do its job. I thought about his mouth in the hallway and how good it had been before I decided to become a quality control inspector. I thought about the look on his face when I said the date might be an eight. I thought about texting him something filthy to reset the tone and then I did not, because some nights need to stay a story.

    Would I see him again? Maybe. If he can handle a woman who talks too much and thinks in numbers at the worst possible time, he can handle me. If he cannot, there are other Thursdays. I am not short on want. I am just occasionally cursed with competence.

    The moral is not “do not check the date.” Check the date. Always check the date. Check it in the shop like a person with a future. Put a box in your bag. Be the organised one. I am the organised one at work. I can be the organised one with latex.

    The other moral, the real one, is that a maths degree will wait in the dark for you. It will let you be hot and sure and halfway to exactly what you wanted. Then it will tap you on the shoulder, point at a smudged number, and ask you to show your working.

    I showed my working.

    I got it right.

    I still went home hungry.

  • Let One Go Mid-Kiss

    I clocked him before I even sat down. That is the truth of it. After-work drinks, Thursday, that slack hour where everyone pretends they are only staying for one and then nobody leaves. Smart-casual coat on, the black one that makes me look like I have my life together, hair doing what it wanted, vape in the bag. I had been in the office since half eight pretending to care about a calendar invite. By six I wanted a pint, a bit of attention, and if the night went my way, something more useful than either.

    He was at the end of the bar with two lads from the other floor. Josh. Dark hair, that slightly too-pleased-with-himself smile I recognise because I wear one myself. Not my usual type on paper. On paper I like them a bit rougher, a bit quicker to get to the point. But he had good hands. I noticed the hands first. Then the way he looked at me like he already knew I was going to let him.

    I am not shy about that part. I like sex. I am good at it. I do not do the whole coy dance unless it serves me. So when he bought the next round and found a reason to stand in my space, I let him. Close enough I could smell his aftershave and the lager on him. Close enough that when I laughed at something dumb one of his mates said, I did it into his shoulder on purpose.

    Three pints. Then a double. Then the nachos someone in our group insisted on, which in hindsight was the first crime of the evening. Cheese, jalapeños, that sour cream that sits in your stomach like a dare. I ate them because I was hungry and because I was performing being easy and fun, which I am, and because I had already decided I wanted his mouth on me later. Not in a romantic way. In a I-have-had-a-long-week-and-I-want-to-feel-someone way.

    We talked about nothing. Work. Trains. How the office coffee tastes like punishment. He was well spoken enough, a bit pleased with his own jokes. I matched him. I can do that. Degree on the wall at home I never look at, PA by day, and I know how to sound like I belong in a conversation without giving away that I am already picturing him with his jeans round his thighs.

    By nine the group had thinned. My lot were talking about last orders and taxis. His mates were getting loud. Josh looked at me like the question had already been asked. I looked back like the answer was obvious.

    Outside was cold in that early autumn way that makes you pull your coat tighter and pretend you are not bothered. The pub door kept slapping open behind us. Buses on the main road, that wet hiss of brakes, a group of girls screaming at each other in a loving way down the pavement. I lit the vape. Mango. He made a face and I told him to get over it. He laughed. I liked that he laughed.

    We stood under the awning like we had planned it. I was feeling cute. That is the dangerous bit. When I feel cute I get cocky. Coat collar up, a bit of lip left, that warm buzz in my stomach that was half the drink and half the knowledge that I could have him in a cab in ten minutes if I wanted. I did want. I was already thinking about the flat, whether both housemates would be in, whether we would even make it past the sofa. I was thinking about his mouth. I was thinking about putting his hand where I wanted it. I was thinking, very specifically, about how good it would feel to stop performing for one night and just get off.

    He said something about sharing an Uber. I said something about seeing how the next five minutes went. Then he stepped in.

    First kiss outside a pub should be simple. It is a public, stupid, slightly messy thing and I like it for that. No candles. No speech. Just cold air and someone deciding they have waited long enough. He was a good kisser, I will give him that. Soft at first, then surer, hand on my waist over the coat, the kind of kiss that tells you he has thought about it for the last hour. I kissed him back properly. Not polite. I do not do polite when I have already made my mind up. I had one hand on his jacket and the vape still in the other because I am not a person who puts things down when I should.

    And then my body committed a hate crime.

    It was not a little polite escape. It was not something you could blame on a chair or a passing lorry if you really committed to the lie. It was loud. Unmissable. A proper, round, traitorous sound that arrived in the middle of his mouth on mine like it had been waiting all night for its cue. The nachos. The pint. The second pint. My stomach had been muttering for twenty minutes and I had told it to behave, which is not how stomachs work, especially not mine after a week of desk lunches and vape and not enough actual food.

    I felt it leave me. I heard it. Worse, I felt him hear it, because he went still in that awful way people do when their brain has to file a new piece of information mid-kiss.

    I said pardon.

    Like my nan. Like I had bumped someone in Iceland. Little lift of the chin, quick, automatic, the word out of my mouth before I could swallow it back. Pardon. In a smart-casual coat, with his hand still on my waist, mango vape in my fist, having just tried to start a night that was supposed to end with his face between my legs.

    He did not laugh. Not immediately. His eyes flicked past me to the road as if salvation might be coming on two decks. A bus heaved past at the exact wrong useful moment, that big diesel shove of noise, and he seized on it like a man grabbing a life ring.

    Bus, he said.

    Yeah, I said.

    We both looked at the bus like it had personally saved the evening. It had not. The bus had done nothing except exist. The sound had come from me. We both knew. I knew that he knew. He knew that I knew that he knew. There is a special kind of silence that arrives after that. It is not the sexy kind. It is the kind where your pulse is still up from the kiss and your pride is on the pavement.

    I laughed. Of course I laughed. What else was I going to do, faint? I am not built for shrinking. I made it a joke before he could decide it was disgusting. I said something about the nachos filing a complaint. He smiled with his mouth and not quite with his eyes. The hand on my waist loosened. Not gone. Just less sure.

    We stood there. Coat. Cold. The pub door banging again. Someone inside shouted for a taxi. I took a pull on the vape because if I was going to be mortified I was at least going to be occupied. He rubbed the back of his neck. That little tell men do when they are recalculating the night.

    I still wanted him. That is the pathetic, honest bit. The kiss had been good. My body had not got the memo that the mood was dead. I was still warm from it, still thinking about taking him home, still aware of how close his hip was to mine. Embarrassment and being turned on are not opposites for me. They just make a stupid cocktail. I could have recovered it. I am good at recovering things. A filthy comment, a tug on his jacket, walk him towards the rank and make the sound belong to a funnier version of the night.

    I did not. I said pardon again, quieter, which made it worse, and then I looked at my phone like a coward.

    He filled the air. Nice of him, really. Asked if I wanted another drink. I said I should get back. He said fair. We did that little shuffle people do when the script has ripped. He kissed my cheek. Not my mouth. The cheek is where a night goes to die. I let him. I smelt his aftershave again and hated my own guts.

    The walk to the stop was short and long at the same time. He talked about the office. I talked about the office. Two people who had just had their tongues in each other’s mouths now discussing printers. A bus that was not the guilty bus arrived. I got on it. He did not. Through the window I watched him put his hands in his pockets and look at the pub like he might go back in and pretend I had not happened.

    I sat downstairs because upstairs felt like too much commitment. Vape in my coat. Headphones in, not playing anything. My face was hot. Not cute hot. The other one. I kept hearing it. The timing. The pardon. My nan would have been proud of the manners and horrified by the rest.

    The flat was lit and messy in the usual way. One housemate on the sofa with some police thing on the telly, the other in the kitchen eating cereal like it was a personality. I dropped my bag. I took my coat off like it had betrayed me too.

    Do not, I said, before either of them spoke.

    Which of course meant I was going to tell them. I lasted as long as it took to put the kettle on. Then it came out in one run, no dignity, standing there in the kitchen with my work top still on. The pub. The kiss. The noise. The pardon. The bus that did not do it.

    They screamed. Proper screamed. The cereal one had to put the bowl down. The sofa one paused the programme and demanded the sound effect, which I refused to give because I still have standards, just not many. I laughed until my stomach hurt, which felt rude given what my stomach had already done. I called him fit. I called myself a liability. I said I had been this close to bringing him back and ruining the sofa as well as the pavement.

    They asked if I texted.

    I had. Of course I had. I am not fifteen. I sent something light on the bus, the sort of message that pretends you are both in on the joke so he does not get to hold it over you. He replied with a laughing emoji and a yeah that bus was mental. I stared at that sentence for a long time. Then I put the phone face down and ate toast I did not want.

    Later, in bed, it was worse in a different way. Quiet flat, telly off, just me and the replay. I thought about the kiss more than the sound, which says a lot about my priorities. His mouth. The hand on my waist. The plan I had for him that never got out of the starting blocks. I was still wound up. Annoyed at my own body for choosing violence. Annoyed at him for going to the cheek. Annoyed at myself for saying pardon like I was queuing in a post office.

    I did not sleep quickly. I put music on low. I thought about texting someone else, which I nearly did, because I am not above solving one humiliation with a better night. I did not, in the end. Even I know when to leave a scene alone.

    Friday in the office I saw him by the lifts. He did that nod people do when they would like the ground to help. I did the same nod back, smug as I could make it, like I had meant the whole thing as performance art. I went to my desk and answered emails like a person with a future. I thought about the promotion. I thought about money. I thought about how I would tell this story again, tighter, funnier, with me as the one who survived it.

    Because I did. That is the point. It was mortifying. It was loud. It killed a kiss that was actually going somewhere I wanted it to go. I still replay the pardon and want to walk into the sea. But I also know I looked good in that coat. I know he had been into it until my stomach filed for divorce. I know that if the same night happened again I would still eat the nachos, still stand too close, still let him kiss me outside a pub on a Thursday.

    I would just skip the second pint.

    Maybe.

    He texted a week later. Casual. Drink sometime. I left it on read long enough to feel like myself again, then said I was stacked with work, which was half true. I was stacked with not wanting to stand on that same bit of pavement and hear a bus that was not the problem. He said no worries. That was that.

    The girls still bring it up. Of course they do. Any time someone so much as mentions nachos. Any time I put that coat on. Any time I say I am popping out after work and might be late back. I tell them to shut up and I laugh anyway, because it is funny, and because if I do not laugh I have to sit with the other feeling, the one where I was about to get exactly what I wanted and my own body shouted over it.

    So yes. First kiss. Outside the pub. Cute coat. His mouth. Then me, announcing myself to the whole street like a brass band. I said pardon. He blamed the bus. It was not the bus.

    And if you are eating nachos before you try to pull someone, learn from me. Or do not. I am going to do it again at some point. I know I am. I just hope the next time my stomach waits until we are somewhere with a door.

  • Boss Sat In Next Room

    I should have gone home. That is the whole article, really. I should have got on the last train like a person with a job she actually wants to keep, vaped on the platform, eaten a supermarket wrap over the sink and gone to bed smelling like Prosecco and printer paper. Instead I stayed for one more, then one more after that, then decided a Travelodge two streets from the venue counted as a grown up decision.

    The work do was the usual mess. Too warm, too loud, someone from accounts crying in the toilets about a man who was also in the room eating cocktail sausages. I was in the smart casual thing I always wear when I want to look like I tried without looking like I tried too hard. Blazer. Nice top. The sort of shoes you regret at eleven and defend at midnight. I had been good most of the night as well, which is how I always get myself in trouble. Good meaning I talked about the promotion like I was already halfway in the chair. Good meaning I laughed at Helen’s jokes. Helen is my manager. Helen has a laugh that could strip wallpaper. Helen also booked herself a room because she lives in Kent and refuses to do the late train on principle.

    I knew that. That is the bit that makes me want to walk into traffic.

    The bloke was Tom from the Manchester office. In town for two days, leaving in the morning, the exact type of situation I tell myself is clean. Tall enough. Nice hands. The sort of northern accent that makes ordinary sentences sound like he has already decided you are coming upstairs. We had been circling since the speeches. He bought a round I did not need. I let him. I vaped outside with two girls from reception and told them I was going home. I was not going home.

    By the time the bar started putting chairs up I had already done the maths. Train missed. Uber surge looking filthy. Hotel next door with the company rate still sitting in my inbox from when I booked Helen’s room three weeks ago like the helpful little PA I am. I booked a second one on my phone in the queue for the cloakroom. I told myself it was practical. It was not practical. It was me being horny and smug and a bit drunk and very sure I could keep my voice down.

    The room was fine. Beige. Thin carpet. A kettle that had seen things. Tom kissed me against the door before I had even put the keycard in the slot properly and I laughed into his mouth because I always laugh when I already know I am going to be filthy. He tasted like lager and those mints people suck when they think they are being considerate. I dumped my bag on the chair, kicked the shoes off, and had my hand in his jeans before the light was fully on.

    I am not shy about it. Never have been. If I want something I tend to just get on with it, and I wanted him on the bed with his shirt half off and my mouth on him before he could start doing that polite checking-in voice men do when they are not sure if you are actually like this. I am actually like this. I got on my knees on that cheap carpet and took him out and I was good at it, which I know, and I did not pretend otherwise. He swore under his breath and put his hand in my hair and I looked up at him because I like watching a man realise he is not running the room anymore.

    That should have been the point where I thought about the walls.

    I did not think about the walls.

    The headboard started tapping when he pulled me up and bent me over the end of the bed. Not dramatic. Just that cheap hotel knock, knock, knock against whatever was on the other side. I heard it. I heard it and I decided it was someone else’s problem. I was wet and impatient and he was saying my name like he had only just learned it, which he had. Cat. Then louder. Then I started talking back because I do that when I get close and I cannot help it. Filthy stuff. Ordinary stuff. The sort of sentences you do not want attached to your Outlook calendar. I told him harder. I told him not to stop. I made that noise I make when it is actually good and not just polite good. He got a hand between my legs and I came first with my face in the duvet, swearing into the polyester like it had personally wronged me.

    We should have stopped for water. We should have laughed and gone quiet and remembered we both had to be in the same building as other people in a few hours. Instead I rolled him onto his back and sat on him and I was not quiet then either. The bed complained. I did not. I put my hands on his chest and rode him like I had something to prove, because I always do, and I said things I would not say in a meeting even if you paid me. Explicit. Specific. The sort of running commentary that sounds hot when you are in it and sounds like a court transcript when you replay it sober.

    There was a thump next door at one point. I thought it was pipes. I thought it was a suitcase. I thought a lot of convenient things.

    Tom lasted longer than I expected, which I would normally put in the plus column. He flipped me again, got my leg up, and the headboard really went for it. Knock knock knock, proper little drum solo against the wall. I laughed. I actually laughed, breathless and smug, and said something like they can file a complaint in the morning. He laughed too. Then he came with this broken sound and collapsed on me and we lay there in the dark breathing like we had done cardio.

    I vaped out of the window after, because of course I did. Night air. Mango. The street still wet from earlier. Tom was on his back talking rubbish about trains and how he hates London. I made agreeable noises and already knew I would not see him again in any way that mattered. That was fine. That was the point.

    I slept in my makeup. I always do when I have been an idiot.

    Morning came in that grey hotel way where the curtains never quite close. My mouth was dry. My head was doing that polite throb. Tom was already in the shower talking to himself. I checked my phone and had three emails I should have answered last night and a calendar alert for breakfast that Helen had put in the shared invite weeks ago. Complimentary breakfast. Same hotel. Same dining room. I sat on the edge of the bed in last night’s top and felt the first little drop of dread, like rain through a ceiling you have been ignoring.

    I told myself she would have gone home. I told myself Kent women of a certain management level do not stay in Travelodges next to the work do. I told myself a lot of things while putting on yesterday’s knickers and trying to make my hair look like I had planned this.

    The dining room was already busy. That smell of hotel eggs and cheap coffee. People from last night in slightly softer clothes, doing that morning after voice. I saw Tom first, which was awkward enough. He lifted his eyebrows like we were in on a joke. I gave him the smallest smile and went for the coffee machine because I needed something to do with my hands.

    Then I saw Helen.

    She was at a table by the window with a poached egg and the face of a woman who had not slept. Not tired exactly. Aware. She had her glasses on. She had a notebook open like she might start a performance review in the baked beans. Our eyes met and I knew. I knew the way you know when you have sent an email to the wrong person. There was no confusion on her face. No polite blankness. She had heard me. She had heard the headboard and the swearing and the bit where I told Tom exactly what to do with his mouth. She had heard me come. More than once, if we are being honest, which I am trying to be.

    I walked over because not walking over would have been worse. My voice came out normal for about four seconds.

    Morning. Sleep alright?

    Helen looked at me over the glasses.

    I slept, she said. Eventually.

    That eventually did more damage than if she had just sworn at me.

    I sat because my legs asked me to. Tom had the good sense to stay at the buffet poking sausages like they held classified information. Helen poured tea with the calm of someone who has raised teenagers. I asked about the last train. She asked if my room had been comfortable. I said yes. She said the walls in these places are a disgrace. Then she took a sip and added, almost kindly, that she hoped I had a glass of water.

    I wanted the floor to open. I wanted to be back in the flat with my housemates and the telly on and no career. I wanted my mum, which is a rotten thought to have over hotel tomatoes when you are twenty five and supposed to be chasing a promotion.

    We ate. Or she ate. I moved food. Someone from reception waved and I waved back like a hostage. Helen talked about the morning’s debrief as if my sex life had not been the late show on the other side of her headboard. She mentioned the promotion pack. She mentioned that she needed me sharp next week. She did not smile when she said sharp. I said of course. I sounded like I was presenting a passport.

    When the waitress came I asked for the bill in a whisper. I do not know why I whispered. The room was full of talking. It just happened. My voice went small and guilty, like I had been caught stealing biscuits. Helen heard it anyway. She signed for her room on the company card and I signed for mine on mine, because I was not putting last night on expenses even in my head. Tom appeared with a backpack and a look that said he would like to die in Manchester. He said nice to meet you properly to Helen. Helen said she believed they had already been introduced last night, in a manner of speaking.

    I could have left the country.

    Outside I vaped so hard my throat hurt. Tom tried to do a goodbye that involved a hug. I let him, because I am not actually cruel, and then I told him to have a good journey in the same voice I use for couriers. He got in a taxi. I stood on the pavement in last night’s blazer feeling like my skin was on inside out.

    The fallout did not arrive as one big explosion. It arrived in pieces. Helen put me on the note taking for the next three meetings even though that is not my job anymore. She did not mention the hotel. She did not need to. Every time she said Cat in that even tone I heard myself on the other side of the wall saying it much louder for a completely different reason. I started wearing quieter shoes. I started leaving work dos at ten. I started checking hotel wall thickness like a woman inspecting a crime scene.

    Tom texted once. Good night, sorry about breakfast. I sent back a thumbs up like a coward and muted the thread.

    My housemates got the edited version first. Then they got the real one, because I cannot keep anything in when I have had a drink and a vape on the balcony. They screamed. One of them fell off the sofa. The other one said I should put it in a risk assessment. I laughed until I felt sick, then I went quiet, then I laughed again because what else are you meant to do when you have moaned your way through a thin wall into your manager’s ear and then asked her for the bill like a child in a library.

    I still want the promotion. That is the stupidest part. I am good at the job. I can run a diary and a crisis and a room full of men who think they are being charming. I can also, it turns out, be loud enough to brief the woman who decides my pay rise.

    Would I say I regret the sex? Not really. It was good. I came. He was decent. I liked being wanted after a night of nodding at speeches. I regret the venue. I regret the wall. I regret every filthy sentence that left my mouth as if the Travelodge had been soundproofed by God himself.

    Mostly I regret thinking I am smoother than I am.

    If you need me I will be at my desk, speaking at a normal volume, drinking tea like a person who has learned a lesson. I have not fully learned it. I know myself. But I have learned this much. Next time I do something that stupid I am checking who is booked either side of me, and I am keeping my mouth busy in ways that do not carry.

    And if Helen ever brings it up properly, I am going to look her in the eye and ask if the headboard kept her up, because there is no point pretending now. She already knows I am not as polished as the calendar makes me look. She has heard the evidence. I just have to survive the next appraisal without whispering.