My Clocking In System

On the bed, face down, leggings still round her knees, and I did not do anything for a bit.

She has got the arse and the thighs of a woman who goes up and down 40 flights of stockroom stairs a day.

There is a freckle low on the left cheek of it that I found in August and have never mentioned. Her skin goes from freckled to not freckled about 4 inches below her waist and then it is just pale and warm and there is a crease where she has been sat on a carpet.

She pushed it up at me about 2 inches. If I said so she would deny it.

"You’re looking."

"I’m looking."

"Well, look faster."

Leggings off. Knees apart. My mouth on her cunt from behind, and she went into the pillow straight away, whole face, both hands.

She is wet before I am anywhere near her and she smells like she does after a bath, and the first thing I do every time is take a proper breath of her and let her hear me do it, because it makes her swear.

"God."

Eleven years of thin walls. Her mum’s flat, then the house share in Tooting, then this, and somebody the other side of the plaster in every one of them.

In a Travelodge 3 weeks ago I had her shouting.

Here she went silent before I had properly started.

So I did the slow thing.

Two fingers, flat, all the way up the length of her and back down, opening her a bit more on every pass, nowhere near her clit, and my tongue doing nothing that was any use to anybody.

"Danny."

"Mm."

"That’s cheating."

"It is."

"You know what that does." She was up on her elbows with her face out of the pillow and already pushing back onto my hand. "That’s, oh, you, ah. That’s not fair, that."

"Turn over."

She turned over.

Hair out of the pencil and all over the pillow. Freckles across her nose and down over her collarbones and stopping, and her chest gone blotchy and red the way it does, and her tits heavy and going to the sides the way they do when she is flat.

I filled both hands with them and took a nipple into my mouth and sucked it in slow until it stood up dark and stiff and she made a sound with her mouth shut.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"What you called them on Sunday."

"I’m not saying it, my boobs are..." and then I moved my thumb and her back came up off the bed. "Oh. Oh, that’s, right, that’s your fault."

"Say it."

"Tits. God. There. Happy?"

"Very."

"Danny."

"Mm."

"If she’s said no I’m still doing it." Her eyes were shut and she had a fist in the sheet. "I want you to have heard me say it now and not after."

"I’ve heard you."

"Right." She put a hand over her own face for a second and took it off again. "Right. Don’t stop."

Back down, and 2 fingers into her cunt, curled forward, pressing, and she dragged the pillow over her own face with her free hand.

I took it off her and threw it on the floor.

"Sarah," she said.

"Sarah can have a night off."

"Danny."

"Bite my shoulder. That’s what it’s for."

So she did, and I worked her like that, thumb on her clit, my other arm right under her back so she had nowhere to go, and she came up out of the quiet in stages. Into my shoulder. Then into the air. Then into nothing at all, at volume, in Battersea, on a Wednesday.

Then she reached down and took hold of my cock and stopped dead with her fist round the base.

She always looks at it.

"Don’t start."

"I’m not saying anything." Her hand moved up over the wet at the top and she watched my face and got exactly what she came for. "There. That."

"Jodie."

"I want it." Her knees were already up. "Now. And don’t do the slow thing, I’ve had the slow thing."

"Are we all right?"

"Coil. Since March, you know that." She had a hand round the back of my neck, pulling. "Stop being sensible at me."

I pushed into her in one and she put a heel in the back of my thigh and pulled.

The headboard found the wall almost straight away. Tap. Tap. Tap.

"Oh, that’s Sarah’s wall."

"It is."

"That is literally Sarah’s, ah, don’t stop."

I did not stop. The tapping got quicker and she gave up on it entirely somewhere in the middle, both hands round the back of my neck, saying my name in a voice that went up at the end of it, and I put a hand under her arse and lifted her into it and she went with her mouth open and no hand anywhere near it.

I went right after her with my face in her neck and her heels locked at the bottom of my back.

The flat went very quiet. Upstairs somebody ran a tap.

"Sarah heard that," Jodie said.

"She’ll have to get over it."

"I’ve got to live next to her. She does a face."

She laughed into my shoulder and then stopped laughing and stayed there, and I lay in a dark bedroom with her leg over mine and the oranges still in a bag in the hall.

Her phone went off on the windowsill in the front room.

Neither of us moved.

"That’ll be her," she said into my neck.

"Go and look at it."

"No."

"Jodie."

"In a bit. It’s the only 10 minutes I’ve had since Sunday where I don’t know yet, and I’m having them."

So we had them.

Danny lay in the dark in Battersea with a woman asleep on his arm, or not asleep, and the traffic going along Lavender Hill, and worked out that he had 2 days of not being found out left and neither of them was Saturday.

Then Jodie said his name.

"Danny."

"Thought you’d gone under."

"No."

"Go on."

"When you bought that shop." She had not moved at all. "Where did the deposit come from?"

He did not say anything.

"And before you answer me."

Jodie got her arm out from under the covers and put the lamp on, and the room came back, and she sat up against the headboard with the duvet round her and looked at him properly.

"I told you on Friday I’d never ask. I meant it Friday. I’ve gone 5 days and I’ve just asked you anyway, so you want to think about why."

"Go on then."

"Because on Friday it was your business." She had her arms round her knees. "And tomorrow morning I’m going in and asking Marie to cut me to 3 days off the back of a thing you told me on my own carpet. That’s 600 quid a month I’m putting down because you said get it in a message, and I don’t know where you learned it, and 6 weeks ago you were a man who’d have said go on, you’ll be fine."

"Jodie..."

"I’m not finished." Her voice was steady and her hands were not. "So it’s not me being nosy. It’s me about to stand in front of my manager on the strength of a man, and I’ve just worked out I couldn’t tell anybody one true thing about where his money’s from."

The tap upstairs went off.

"So I want the real one," Jodie said.