Page 101 of Undefined Terms

The half-smile, fragile.

‘Come here, Celyn.’

Celyn doesn’t move. For a second I think, wrong thing. Wrong words. Too many, too few, wrong shape. Then the laptop closes. Gets put on the floor. Celyn unfolds the legs and comes across the bed and settles against my side, the head in the space between my shoulder and my neck.

I put my arm around. The hand on the back. The t-shirt, my t-shirt, under my palm. The spine through the fabric. The heat.

Don’t know where I learnt this, the hand on the back. I’ve never done this. Dad never touched Mum like this. But the hand goes there and it knows the way.

‘It’s a good novel,’ I say.

‘You’ve heard four paragraphs.’

‘I’ve heard enough.’

‘You’re in love with me, Ron.’ Flat. Like stating a measurement. ‘You’re biased. You can’t see straight and you don’t read fiction and you work with concrete. You’re the last person who gets to tell me if the novel’s good.’

Celyn pulls away, barely. The head lifts off my neck and the weight goes and the gap comes back. The gap from before, the one I crossed when I said come here. Crossed and lost.

I sit there and take it because what am I going to say? Celyn’s right, about the concrete, about not reading fiction, about the rest.

‘That’s not fair.’

‘It is.’ The hand pulls through the hair. Tugs. ‘Everyone who loves me thinks I’m talented. Mum, Rhiannon, you. None of you are qualified. The one person who’s qualified just sent my chapter back covered in red and told me my protagonist is a mirror I’m too close to see.’

Silence, the street, a siren, far.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t have words for this: fists, paragraphs, the woman on the hill. Those aren’t arguments. They’re just my hands reacting. Celyn needs something my hands can’t give.

‘I can’t fix a door I can’t touch,’ I say. Quiet. Saying it, nothing more.

Eyes wet and cracking dry. The t-shirt too big, collarbone showing.

‘I know.’ Almost nothing. ‘I know you can’t.’

The weight comes back. Slower this time. Settling against me the way something settles when it’s tired of holding itself up.

My hand finds the back again. The warmth through the fabric.

Nothing’s fixed. The novel’s still broken and the door’s still shut and Celyn still thinks I’m too close to see straight. But the weight’s here, against me, that’s not nothing.

The sex is different tonight. Celyn doesn’t push, doesn’t pull, doesn’t guide: the body that’s always ahead of mine goes quiet and lets me carry it. I hold it. No reaching for the drawer tonight. Just skin, the length of us.

My hands on the hips, the t-shirt off slow, the skin I’ve learnt in the dark and the light. I move slow, slow enough to feel everything, the hip bones against my stomach, the ribs when I press close. The rhythm that isn’t about finishing. The one about staying.

Celyn’s hands in my hair. Holding still.

‘Ron.’ My name in the Welsh voice, the vowels gone round, the accent that surfaces when Celyn forgets to hide it. We come quiet, one then the other, the shudder going through both of us, the one starting in me and ending in them or the other way round, and I can’t tell and it doesn’t matter.

I don’t move after. Staying is the whole statement. And when I finally do, slow, there’s a flannel on the bedside and a bowl of water gone tepid beside it, Celyn set it up earlier, before I came over, and I clock it only now. Preparation. A small kindness written into the night before either of us said a word.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The bed, the dark. The ceiling, white, bare, the light fitting I keep meaning to fix.

Celyn against my side. The hair against my jaw. The breathing slowing. The body getting heavier. That settling before sleep.

I look at the ceiling. White, nothing on it, no stars, just the hairline cracks. Plaster and paint and the fitting with the bulb that flickers.