Page 103 of Undefined Terms

‘Your sofa is a war crime,’ Celyn says, breath gone, but they’re already shoving their own jeans down their thighs, lifting against me to do it.

‘Bed’s right there.’

‘Too far.’

And it is. The bed’s three metres and three metres is another country tonight. Celyn pulls the t-shirt off without getting up, my t-shirt, the grey one, the spine and the shoulder blades in the low light, and we kick the rest off between us, jeans to the floor, the spring I keep meaning to fix digging up into one of us, neither of us caring which.

The sofa, then. Body I know. Hands that know where to go. No urgency, no motor, just the thing itself. The skin and the hands and the mouth and the rhythm that’s slow because it can be slow because there’s nowhere to be except here, on a settee too small for it, doing it anyway.

Celyn pushes me back into the corner of the sofa, the easy authority of every ordinary night since. Then they’re up, two steps to the bag by the door, because the bag’s nearer than the bed and these days everything we need lives in it. The cap, the foil, fished out one-handed. Back before I’ve gone cold.

Then Celyn climbs on. Knees either side of my hips, one foot braced on the floor for the room we haven’t got, the cold feet from the kitchen tile, the cushion springing under us. None of it needs thinking now, the easy choreography of two people who’ve learnt each other in the dark. Celyn rolls it down me, slicks me, one hand braced flat on my chest, and sinks down slow, taking me in inch by inch, and the sound they make is the Thursday sound, low, familiar, mine, the one I’ve earned night after night.

The heat closes over me to the root, the grip I know now, give and hold and the flutter at the rim, until Celyn’s sat full in my lap with all of me inside them.

‘You always do that.’ Celyn’s voice, wrecked-soft, the hips grinding a slow circle, working me deeper. ‘Make me do the work.’

‘You like it.’

‘Didn’t say I didn’t.’

Then Celyn rides me. Slow at first, then not, lifting almost off me and sinking back down, the angle they taught me months back, one hand braced on the back of the sofa for the leverage the seat won’t give, the old frame creaking under us, dragging the head of me along the front of them every time they drop. And their cock bobs with it, hard, jutting up off their stomach and slapping wet against the skin each time they sink, untouched, the wet stringing, until they get their own fist round it and jerk it on their rhythm, arse and fist in time. ‘There,’ they tell me, the hips snapping now. ‘Don’t you stop.’

‘Then take it,’ I tell them, rough, my hands gripping the hips to feel every drop. ‘All of it.’ First thing I’ve said all night, and it lands, the rhythm stuttering on it.

I don’t. Celyn comes on my cock, sat full on it, leant over me, their own cock kicking over their fist and the come going up me, my stomach, my chest, a hot stripe of it catching my chin, the arse clamping down on me so hard I can’t move through it, a low string of Welsh against my mouth. I don’t wipe it off. I tip their mouth down to mine and kiss them through it, my chin wet, the come smearing onto their lip, and they make a sound when the taste lands, their own, off me, and they don’t pull back. They lick it off my mouth. Take it back. The kiss goes slow and filthy, shared out between us, and that’s the thing that tips me, the giving it back to them, and I go. Up into the grip of them, deep, buried, while their pulse is still going round me. Order stopped mattering a long time ago. Breath, ceiling, weight. Celyn’s hand finds mine without thinking. Mine threads back.

After: the sofa, the dark, the telly still mumbling to itself. Celyn’s head on my chest, face turned up towards me. The glasses somewhere on the floor.

‘Your pasta verdict was generous, by the way.’ The voice sleepy. The post-sex drowsy. ‘I know it was shit.’

I laugh, the real one.

‘It wasn’t shit.’

‘The sauce was from a jar, Ron.’

‘Good jar.’

‘It was the sixty-pence one.’

‘Efficient.’

The grin against my chest, the foot that hooks around my ankle, the blanket dragged half off the back of the sofa.

Thursday.

Nothing happens on Thursday, the pasta was decent, the sex was good. The sofa’s got a spring. The tile is not subjective.

Thursday.

Celyn walks in and the bar goes sideways for a second. But the room, rearranges. The way a site rearranges when you walk in and one thing’s been moved.

The skirt, long, dark. Some fabric that moves when they move. Dr Martens, the heavy ones, the lace-ups, the boots that look like they belong on a scaffold not under a skirt. Lipstick, dark. Eyeliner, the thin line. And under the lipstick, under the eyeliner, the whole thing changes.

Stubble, two days, maybe three.

The nails, blue. Bright blue. The blue of something electrical. Live wire, fresh, no chips.