Page 144 of Undefined Terms

I look.

Celyn’s face, eyes. Grey-green, close. Stubble, chin. Mouth that wrote two hundred and forty-three pages.

‘The man steps inside,’ Celyn says.

I reach for the drawer. Condom, lube. The routine that’s muscle memory now, hands that know where things are in the dark.

I push inside. My cock, Celyn’s arse, the give I know now better than my own hands know steel.

The familiar give. Celyn’s breath. Caught, released, caught again. The reading rhythm. Page by page. Room by room.

The heat closes over me to the root, gripping then yielding then gripping, and I hold still in the give of it before I let myself move.

Celyn’s hands on my back. The nails. The chipped violet digging in. The pain that’s not pain. The heat underneath.

‘There,’ Celyn says. ‘Stay there.’

I stay, I don’t move, just inside, full. Inside someone who wrote you into a book.

Then I move. Slow. Celyn’s breath matching mine. The bed, the bodies, the air that’s not between us. Just the same space. My mouth finds the nipple, the one with the small white scar I’ve never asked about, and Celyn’s hand goes to Celyn’s own cock, working it on my rhythm.

I read them the way I read the book. A page at a time, no skipping, because with Celyn you skip a line and you miss the one that turns it. The catch of breath when I drag along the front of them is a sentence. The hand speeding on their own cock is the next one. I go where the body sends me, slower where it wants slow, and it’s the first thing I’ve ever done where being a careful reader is the whole of the job.

‘Tilt up,’ I say, and work the pillow under Celyn’s hips, and the next push drags the thick of me along the front of them. Not far in. Just the angle, the width of me against the place. Celyn’s whole body jolts under mine. ‘There. Don’t stop. There.’

Celyn comes first, the back arching. The legs tightening. It leaves them in a roll, up from where I’m seated into the thighs into the breath, the spill landing warm between us, on my stomach and their own, and they don’t hold it back, the one time they don’t. The pulse, the clench around my cock. The slick on my hand. Celyn’s mouth shapes something Welsh I won’t ask the meaning of, then a word from the book, one of the character’s, I think, but I can’t be sure. And the thing I keep, after, is that I did it. That I’m the one who made the writer lose the words.

I follow two strokes after, the come rolling up through me in slow heavy beats, contained by the latex yet felt all the way down to the heel. I come inside Celyn and the sound I make is nothing. Silence. The breath. The condom warm. I don’t pull out for a long time. The book on the floor where it fell, face-down, open on the page I was reading.

The bed, the sheets. Celyn’s head against me. The fingers tracing on my stomach. A word, maybe, a sentence, I can’t read it.

‘Loved,’ I say.

‘Hmm?’

‘You said loved. Not love. Present perfect.’ The fingers stop, then start again. ‘It started before now and it hasn’t stopped. Ewan tried to teach me that once. I finally listened.’

‘Ewan’s smart.’

‘Yeah.’

The fingers. The word on my stomach that I can’t read. The ceiling. The stain from the leak. The body next to mine, the body I read for hours on paper and then read again with my hands.

I wrote everyone I’ve ever loved into my book.

Loved, started before now, hasn’t stopped.

There was never a man to save.

I pick up the last page, the one I couldn’t turn before. I’ve never read out loud to Celyn, not once. It’s always been the other way, Celyn’s voice in the dark and me listening. I read it now, quiet, a builder’s mouth round someone else’s sentences.

Elin got out, onto the hill, the wind off the sea, and she made herself look back. Where the door had been there was no door. Just wall, old and smooth and dry, as if nothing had ever opened there. And from inside, through the stone, something was laughing. It might have been the man. It might have been the house. There was no longer any way to tell.

The house shifts.

Celyn goes still against me.

They texted me once, the first week, that they’d put me in the book and promoted me to structural engineer. A joke. The finished man hasn’t got a job. Hasn’t got a name. Hasn’t got one line that says what he is. They took it all back out and left him undefined. I know which version’s the true one.