The last box said KITCHEN and it wasn’t the kitchen, it was the bathroom stuff. By one in the morning that felt like a personal insult.
We ate takeaway out of the containers because the plates were in a box, sitting on the living room floor with our backs against the wall, because the couch was in the hallway and the couch wasn’t going to happen tonight. My shoulders had started aching around four and had settled into something permanent by eight. Alex had a smear of something on her forearm and had stopped noticing it around hour nine.
“Six years of stuff,” she said, “and it all fits in one room if you take the sofa out.”
“It doesn’t fit in one room.”
“It fits in one room emotionally.”
We had lived four doors apart for three years. Four doors and one shared wall, and in that time I had learned the shape of her day from noise. The kettle at seven. The front door at eight. The bath at eleven. The Sunday phone call to her mother, taken on the landing, because the reception in her flat was bad and the landing was better and she never knew I could hear both halves.
I knew when she’d had a bad week because she put music on.
I never told her I could hear the music. That was most of it, really. Three years of being able to hear each other and pretending the walls were thicker than they were.
“Can I ask you something,” she said, after the second pass of the bottle.
“You can ask.”
“Why didn’t we do this before? The flat. Any of it.”
I could have said something clever. I have a long history of saying something clever at exactly the wrong moment and calling it protection.
“I think I was waiting to be sure you wanted the same thing I did,” I said. “And I couldn’t ask, because if I asked and the answer was no, I’d have had to keep living next to you.”
“That is the most annoying answer you have ever given me.”
“It’s the true one.”
She took the bottle out of my hand, set it down on the floorboards, and said, “I’m going to try something, and if I’ve got it wrong, we’re blaming the wine.”
“Okay.”
“Say it properly.”
“Try it.”
She got it wrong the first time. So did I. We came in at the same angle. My tooth caught her lip. We both pulled back laughing. She said “hang on,” put her hand along my jaw, and did it again properly.
The second one wasn’t like the version I’d imagined on the other side of that wall. It was slightly too wet and she tasted like cheap red and I got a bit of her hair in my mouth and didn’t care about any of it. I put my hand in the back of her hair and she made a small noise and pressed closer, and then we were properly on the floor with the takeaway somewhere and her knee in my thigh.
“Bed’s a mattress,” she said, against my mouth.
“Bed’s a mattress.”
We got up. My knees cracked, which is a thing I have never forgiven myself for, and she laughed at me, and we went through to the bedroom, which had a mattress, four boxes, and a lamp with no shade.
That was the whole flat. It smelled like fresh paint and cardboard and the cold coming off the window, because there were no curtains yet and the streetlight was doing all the lighting there was.
She got my shirt up over my head and stopped with her hands flat on my ribs.
“Tell me if—”
“I’ll tell you.”
I have a scar that runs down the middle of me from sternum to below my navel, and two more under my chest that are the kind you either know about or you don’t. A lot of people do a thing where they don’t look. Alex looked. She looked long enough that I had to say something, and what came out was, “It’s a lot of scars,” which wasn’t what I meant and wasn’t even true.
“There’s three,” she said. “Look at you.”
Then she put her mouth on the top one, and on the one under my ribs, and on the ones under my chest, one and then the other, and I lay there on a mattress on the floor of an unfurnished flat and let her, which was harder than it sounds.
By the time she worked her way back up I had one hand fisted in the duvet from the old place and the other flat on the wall, and my hips had stopped being something I was in charge of.
“Okay?” she said.
“If you stop to ask me that again I’ll—”
“You’ll what.”
“I don’t know. Something. Don’t stop.”
She got two fingers into me with her mouth on my neck and I felt the stretch of it and then the third, and my back came up off the mattress and my heel found the wall and stayed there. Her thumb found me and didn’t move, just stayed, and she fucked me with her fingers at the speed she wanted rather than the one my hips were asking for.
“You’re so wet,” she said, into my ear, as if it had ever been in doubt.
“That’s your fault.”
“Mm.” She did something with her wrist. “Say it again.”
“My fault. It’s my fault. Don’t stop.”
I came like that with her name in my mouth and my heel against the wall and the streetlight doing nothing at all, and it went on long enough that I had to push her wrist away, and then I put it straight back, and she laughed against my throat.
Then I got her onto her back and got her jeans down over her hips and off, and she was already wet before I touched her, which she told me afterwards she had been since the floor.
I got a hand under her hip and pulled her to the edge of the mattress and put my mouth on her. She had one hand in my hair and the other flat on the wall above my head, and she was saying something that wasn’t words, and I got two fingers into her while my mouth was still on her clit, and she came almost immediately, which she was embarrassed about for about four seconds and then wasn’t.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. God.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Give me a minute.”
“I’ll give you a minute.”
I kissed the inside of her thigh while she got her breath back. Then I put my mouth back on her. “Come for me,” I said against her thigh, and I did not give her a minute at all. She came the second time with her heel off the edge of the mattress, back arching off it, a sound I had never heard through the wall in three years and had spent a certain amount of time imagining.
Afterward we lay on the mattress with the streetlight on the ceiling and the boxes around us, and I could feel her heartbeat through her back.
“Your knee was in my thigh for twenty minutes,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“Just so we’re clear. That’s the first thing. If we’re keeping a record.”
“There’s a record?”
“There’s a record.”
My chest ached. My jaw was sore from the scars and the rest of it. My thighs were sticky and cooling in a flat with no heating on. There was a mark on my collarbone she’d put there, which my shirt wouldn’t cover tomorrow and which I wasn’t going to cover. The lamp with no shade was still on. Neither of us got up to turn it off.
At some point she reached over with her foot and got it, which was the most competent thing anybody had done in that flat all day.
In the morning the box in the corner would still say KITCHEN. It would still not be the kitchen. There would still be no kettle.
That was tomorrow. Tonight there was a mattress on the floor and her breathing going slow and the light on the ceiling, and I wasn’t going to be the one who said anything first about any of it.
