Page 51 of Undefined Terms

Celyn looks at me for a long time. One eye. Pillow crease on the cheek. Stubble. Then the face opens. Not the half-smile. Underneath. I haven’t. I can’t.

‘Good,’ Celyn says. Turns back into the pillow.

Good. Just: good.

The laptop comes out. Celyn sits up, crosses the legs, the sheet across the lap, the screen bright. Starts typing, keys fast, then stopping, then fast. Face in the light, stubble, concentration.

I lie back, watch the ceiling, watch Celyn. Lips moving slightly. Reading back. The profile in the blue-white glow. The red lace somewhere on the floor, a fact, not a question.

Wonder if Celyn’s writing this. The lace. The room. Me.

The key’s under the mat downstairs. Neither of us has mentioned it.

Wonder how long that lasts.

CHAPTER TEN

The chair’s wrong. Too small, the plastic kind, stackable, the kind that makes your knees higher than your hips so you can’t sit without feeling like the furniture’s rejecting you. The room’s wrong too: low ceiling, strip lights, rows of these plastic chairs facing a lectern with a microphone that nobody needs because the room’s the size of my bedroom. Posters on the walls: book covers, events, a thing about a visiting author I’ve never heard of. There’s wine on a table by the door, white and warm, in plastic cups. I’ve got one. It’s shite.

Thirty-odd people, students, mostly. The kind who look like they chose their clothes on purpose: layered, scarves, canvas bags with logos I don’t recognise. A few older ones, tutors, maybe. Glasses, cardigans, the posture of people who sit for a living.

I’m in my jeans. The good ones, not the site ones, but still jeans. The jacket Ewan said made me look like a bouncer. Boots clean, at least. My hands are clean, and that took ten minutes and a nailbrush and three goes at the line under the thumbnail that never fully shifts.

I’m sat in the back row because the back row is the only row I’ve ever sat in for anything. School, college, the one term before I left. The safety brief on the first day of every site. Back row, exit visible.

A girl next to me is reading a programme. I haven’t got a programme; didn’t know there were programmes. She glances at me, glances at the boots, goes back to the programme.

I drink the wine. It’s warm and thin and tastes like something that happened to a grape by accident.

Celyn comes out.

The dress, black, stops above the knee. Tights, dark, the ones with the sheen. Shoes, low heel, clicking on the floor. The hair’s down, washed, curled at the ends. Earrings, the silver ones, the long ones that move when the head turns. And the face.

The face.

Full makeup. The eyeliner, thick, the wings sharp at the corners. The lashes dark, longer than I’ve seen. The lips are dark red, the colour of, postbox. That’s the only word, postbox red. The cheekbones shimmer. The nails. Bright orange, like a hi-vis, like the vests on site.

And no stubble, smooth. Clean jaw. The skin on the chin pale and bare and the neck long without the shadow and the Adam’s apple clear and moving when Celyn swallows before speaking.

My hands on my knees. The plastic cup bending where I’m gripping it.

Two days ago I had my mouth on three days of stubble and the red lace and the body under me was all weight and angles and sound. And now. Celyn’s walking to the lectern and the dress moves when the hips move and the calves in the tights and the shoes clicking and I.

I want this the same.

The same. The exact same heat in my stomach, the exact same. I told Celyn that two nights ago with my hand on the spine and Celyn said good and now I’m watching the proof of it walk to a lectern in heels.

I don’t have a box for this. Stopped looking for one.

Celyn looks across the room before opening the page. The eyes go front row, middle, back, scanning, not lingering. They find me, half a second. The face does nothing. But the breath out is visible from where I’m sitting, the shoulders dropping by a millimetre. Then the page.

Celyn reads.

The voice is different. This is the public one, bigger. The mic’s not on but the voice doesn’t need it.

The scene: the kitchen. Elin goes downstairs and there are more cupboards than there were last night, a whole new run of them along the wall where the window used to be, and when she opens one it is full of jars with no labels and the things in the jars turn, slowly, to face the light. The mug she put down last night is where she left it. The kitchen is longer than it was. She counts three doors out of it now, and last week there was one.

Celyn reads the part where Elin reaches for the mug. The hand goes the wrong way first, muscle memory of yesterday’s kitchen, and corrects. The mug is warm. It should be stone cold. It’s warm the way a mug is warm when someone has just had their hands round it, and there is no one else in the house, and there has never been anyone else in the house.