Page 170 of Undefined Terms

‘Read me something,’ I said.

Celyn pulled back. ‘What.’

‘Something you wrote. I want to hear it.’

The manuscript sat in its stack by the sofa, the one Celyn had printed for the final pass, the one that had lived there for two months. Pages curling at the corners. Coffee ring on the top sheet. Celyn leaned, one hand still in my hair, pulled a page off the top. Read it. The voice cracking on a sentence.

My hand went under the dress. Celyn kept reading. The breath caught mid-clause, came back. The writing-desk voice and the sex voice using the same mouth.

‘Don’t stop,’ I said.

Celyn didn’t. Read through the zip at the back coming down. Through the red bra I’d never seen. Through my belt coming loose with one hand while the other held the page. The pages on the floor then, because Celyn’s hand went to my jeans instead of the stack.

Lube in the drawer by the sofa. We’d put it there months ago. I reached without looking. Click. The cold. The hand warming it. Celyn kept the page up in the other hand, kept reading, the voice going rougher in the middle of a sentence and I didn’t know if that was the prose or the breath.

‘Without?’ I said. Against the mouth. ‘Today?’

Celyn pulled back a fraction. Looked at me. The eyeliner ruined. The mouth ruined. The eyes clear.

‘Today.’ A breath. ‘Yeah. Today.’

Then Celyn dropped the page.

‘Fuck the novel.’

‘No. Keep reading. That’s the whole⁠—’

‘It sold, Ron.’

I laughed. Against the mouth. Celyn shifted on my lap, straddled, the dress riding up, my hand finding the lube where it lived now, slicking my cock, the fingers between Celyn’s cheeks first, two, slow, Celyn’s breath catching against my shoulder. Then the cock lining up, Celyn’s hand guiding it, and Celyn sank.

Slow. All the way down. The heat. The tight. Different tight, no latex between. The slow heat of skin on skin where there used to be a layer, every time, months of every time, and now nothing. The dress bunched at the waist, my hands on the ribs, Celyn’s fingers at the nape of my neck. The pages on the floor, one stuck to the sweat on a shin.

The bare heat of them round me, every pulse and ridge of it, nothing between, and I gritted my teeth at the rawness of it.

We stayed there a second, both of us, the not-moving. Nothing between us, I put my forehead on theirs. We breathed.

‘Christ,’ I said.

‘I know.’

Celyn moved. Slow, then not. My hands on the hips. Celyn riding me, the breath catching on a word that might have been Welsh, might have been the character’s name, might have been neither. My hand found Celyn’s cock between us, hard against my stomach, and worked it on the rhythm.

Celyn rode me in the lamplight with the dress shoved up round their waist and the whole novel that nearly didn’t sell scattered across my floor, every drop taking me deeper and dragging the front of them on the way up, the cock hard between us and slapping my stomach, leaking onto the bunched black of the dress. I knew the rhythm without being told now, knew it like I knew the set of a slab. The sofa creaked, the flat held, and outside London did its thing and in here, sat on my cock with the mascara down one cheek, was the rest of my life.

‘Don’t stop,’ Celyn said. ‘Ron. Don’t.’

I didn’t stop.

When Celyn came it was quiet. A shake through the hips. The forehead on mine. The come hot between us, on the dress, on my chest, my hand still moving until Celyn caught my wrist and held it still, twitching. Quiet from Celyn is the loudest thing, and it was mine, I made it, and I’ll always want to be the one who makes it.

Then me. The fact of the bareness, the heat I could feel was mine going into Celyn, no membrane, the body decided for me, surge after surge, and I came inside Celyn with the word home going off somewhere behind my eyes that I couldn’t explain and wasn’t going to. My hand at the base of Celyn’s spine. The other on the nape. Some of it leaking out around me when Celyn shifted later, hot on my thigh. Celyn looked at me with the eyeliner ruined and said:

‘There. Now it’s real.’

Afterwards the manuscript was everywhere. Page twelve stuck to my arm. Celyn peeled it off, looked at it, laughed the wet half-laugh.

The book comes out in March. There’s a cover. Celyn showed me, dark, the outline of a house. The title in white: The Threshold. My hand on the cover. Celyn’s name at the bottom. I ran my thumb over it.