Page 18 of Second Person

‘Here’s yours.’ I get his belt undone, unhurried, my thumbs finding the give in the leather he’s worn into it. ‘I’ve had you in every room that’s mine. I want you in the one that’s yours.’

He goes still the way he goes still when he’s decided to stop arguing with something he wants this badly, and his hand finds the back of my head, not pushing, resting, a question with its palm open. I answer it with my mouth. I get his cock out of his shorts and it’s already thick, already lifting, and I take the head of it first, just that, tongue working the foreskin back off it slow, the taste of salt and skin and a whole day’s graft on him, and I feel the groan go through his stomach before it gets anywhere near his throat.

I set the pace, because that’s the arrangement, the one we built in words at my kitchen table months ago, and I use it now the way you use any tool you’ve earned: no asking twice. I take him deeper, wet, breathing through my nose on the down-stroke until my eyes water, my fist working the base of him in time with my mouth so nothing goes to waste, and when his hips try to move I press my forearm flat across them and hold him to the wall, and he lets me, he always lets me, that’s the whole of what this is. He’s thick enough that my jaw aches by the second minute, a good ache, the kind I chose, and I keep going anyway, tongue flat along the underside on every pass, feeling him twitch harder each time I do it. Somewhere past the corrugated metal the gate rattles on its chain, a crew one wrong turn away from seeing exactly this, and neither of us stops. The risk sits under everything like a live wire.

‘Celyn.’ Just my name, wrecked, a warning and a plea folded into the two syllables, and I take the warning as an instruction. I go down to the root, hollow my cheeks, drag back up with the flat of my tongue hard under the head where I’ve learned it takes his legs out from under him, and do it again, faster now, until his thighs start shaking under my hands, and his hand fists in my hair, not guiding, just holding on, and he comes down my throat in three long pulses with his free palm slapping flat against the cabin wall and a sound punched clean out of him that the empty yard swallows whole. I swallow around him until he’s done, until the shaking in his legs stops being about the edge and starts being about the drop on the other side of it.

I stay there a second longer than I need to, feeling him twitch and soften against my tongue, and when I finally sit back on my heels and look up, he’s got both hands braced on the wall like the wall’s the only thing holding the evening up, chest heaving, eyes wrecked and fond and a little bit stunned, the way he looks at me sometimes like he still can’t quite believe I chose the site over every other room available to me.

He hauls me up by the hand, doesn’t let go once I’m standing, and for a minute we just stand there in the gold light with the gate rattling and his heart, finally, not steady at all.

I’d thought about the geography of it more than I let him see, kneeling on that hardstanding. Every time before had been my ground: my flat, my bed, my rules read out at my table, because control was how I kept the floor under a thing that could otherwise drop me. The site was his, the one place in the world where he’s unarguably the authority and I’m the visitor in borrowed boots. Going down on my knees there wasn’t a loss of the steering. It was the steering used on purpose to hand him something: not the act, the location.

He felt it. He didn’t have the words, he never does, but he felt the size of the thing, because I’d shown him the rules weren’t a fence around me. They were a door I hold the key to, and I could open it, on my terms, on his ground, and the opening was worth more than the fence ever kept safe.

Later, at the flat, he’s shaved rough for two days running and I like the drag of it on my jaw when he kisses me at the door, the particular masc scruff-and-flannel version of him that never gets written about because it’s not dramatic enough for anyone but me to notice, and I sit on his counter the way I always do, legs swinging, and think about the dress I could have worn tonight and didn’t, the eyeliner I could have done and didn’t, the whole performance I could have put on and chose, instead, to leave at home.

It was never the dress. I’ve known that since the bar, since the first night he looked at me the same both ways and hated himself a little for how easy it turned out to be. But there’s a difference between knowing a thing and living inside it long enough to stop needing to prove it, and tonight, stubbled and plain and completely unremarkable to anyone who might have looked, I lived inside it. Nobody needed telling. I didn’t need telling either, not any more.

He takes me to the pub with the crew one Friday, which he does the way he does everything that matters, by not making it a thing: lads are out, if you fancy it. Seven words, no weight on them, and I hear the weight anyway, because I’ve learned his tone the way he’s learned my rules. It’s the first time I’ll be his in a room that’s fully his, off the site, drink in hand, no hard hat to explain me.

I go stubble-masc. Not a test, not a point, just who I am on a Friday when the wanting-to-be-seen and the wanting-to-be-left-alone turn up in the same body, and some nights the honest colour is no colour at all. A flat cap of Rhi’s I’ve half-nicked, a plain shirt, the semicolon behind my ear if anyone looks, and nobody looks, and that’s the whole of it.

Gaz buys me a pint before I’ve got my coat off and calls me ‘the writer’ like it’s a trade the same as his, no quote marks round it. A lad called Deano wants to know, genuinely, whether you can make a living at books, and I tell him the truth, not really, not yet, and he nods like that tracks with everything he knows about honest work. Somebody’s girlfriend asks what it’s about and I give her the house and the walls, and she says it sounds sad and lovely, right on both counts and no idea she’s just described me. Ron sits with his arm along the back of my chair, not around me, along the chair, which is its own dialect, and drinks slow, and lets the night have me without once steering it.

Here’s what I clock, three pints in, and spend the rest of the summer living inside instead of proving: nobody in that pub is deciding what I am. Not deciding to accept it, either, which is its own quiet tax, the I’m fine with it that still puts a person the far side of a line. They’ve skipped the line. I’m the writer, I’m Ron’s, I’m the one who got the round in on my shout, and the maths that used to run under every room I walked into — where are the exits, which face is safe, what will being seen cost me tonight — just doesn’t start up. Sitting stubbled and plain and unremarkable under Gaz’s terrible jokes, I stop having that as a fact and start living in it, which turns out to be a different postcode altogether.

He comes in near the end of a Friday service, no warning, no can I, just his head round the door the way you’d check a site’s clear before you walk it, and Bev clocks him before I do, because Bev clocks everything, arms folded at the pass like she’s deciding whether a delivery’s worth signing for.

‘Yours?’ she says, not quiet enough.

‘Sort of.’

‘Big.’ She says it the way she’d assess a fridge somebody wants moved up two flights. ‘Tell him to sit in the corner, out the way, and not to touch anything.’

He sits in the corner, out the way, and doesn’t touch anything. I clock him doing it, the specific stillness of a man who’s decided this room isn’t his to rearrange, hands flat on the table like he’s checking it’s load-bearing, and something in me does a small private thing at the sight of him folding himself down to fit a space that was never built for someone his size.

I let myself have exactly four seconds of looking, which is all a Friday service affords anybody. The forearms first, always the forearms, the ones the sleeves are rolled over whether he means them to be or not, and then the hands: broad, working hands, a scar he’s never explained running pale across the back of the left one. The line of his throat when he tips his head back against the wall, working a knot out of it from a day of looking up at things. The sheer, unreasonable size of him folded into a chair built for someone half his width, knees too high for the table, and I think, not for the first time, that there is a very specific kind of stupid I go for men like this, all that quiet weight, the low voice that never has to reach for volume because a room simply arranges itself around it. I’ve built a whole religion out of men who look like they could lift a fridge and would rather not discuss it. I catch myself at it and look away before Bev catches me at it instead.

I don’t have time to make it a moment. That’s the gift of a Friday service: there isn’t room in it for feelings to get comfortable. Table nine wants the bill split four ways and can’t agree on how. Table six sent the risotto back for being ‘a bit wet,’ which it isn’t, it’s risotto, and I take it back to Marceau anyway because arguing with a customer costs more than a free side does. Somebody’s dropped a tray of glasses in the back and I’m the one who gets there first with the dustpan because getting there first is faster than explaining whose job it technically is.

I catch him watching, once, mid-sprint between the pass and table three, four plates up both arms the way Bev taught me on week one, and he isn’t cataloguing, deciding, the way the men before him used to. He’s watching a trade he respects and doesn’t have — the way I watched him check a coupler with the flat of his thumb, months ago, before either of us had a name for the other.

‘He’s good,’ I hear Bev tell him, on her way past with a stack of dirty plates, not stopping, not asking if he wanted the information. ‘Best front of house I’ve had in six years. You know that, do you.’

‘Reckon I’m starting to.’

There’s a moment near eleven when Dev, on his first month, freezes solid mid-order, a table of eight stacked up and looking at him like he’s personally ruined their evening, and I get there before it becomes a thing anyone remembers tomorrow: take the pad out of his hand, apologise to the table with the specific warm nonsense that isn’t quite a lie, get the order in, hand the pad back to Dev with a look that says breathe, you’re grand, and I’m gone again before the table’s even clocked the handover happened.

I don’t think about Ron doing any of this. That’s not how a shift works; there isn’t a corner of my head free for an audience while I’m running one. It’s only after, wiping down table nine with my feet gone past aching into something else entirely, that I look up and find him still in his corner, and the look on his face isn’t the one I’d braced for without knowing I’d braced for it — not fondness dressed up as patience, not a man waiting politely for the good part to start. It’s the look he gets on site when a wall’s come in true. Respect with the sentiment filed off it.

Bev cashes me out at midnight, counts the float with the specific unbothered speed of someone who’s done it eleven thousand times, and on her way past Ron’s table she stops, looks him over once more, top to bottom, the way she looked him over on the way in.

‘You treating her right?’

‘They,’ Ron says, not looking up from the knife. Bev doesn’t argue it, just files it, the way she files everything. ‘Trying to.’

‘Mm.’ She considers this a legitimate answer, apparently, because she doesn’t press it. Reaches instead into the block by the pass and pulls out the good knife, the one nobody but her and, on a good week, me, is allowed to touch, and hands it handle-first to Ron, who takes it the way you’d take something you understand is a verdict and not a gift.