Page 91 of Undefined Terms

‘I was hungry.’

‘Ron. You’ve been staring at me carrying plates for two hours and you ate four pieces of bread.’

Nothing to say to that. The bread was good.

Celyn leans back in the chair. The restaurant’s empty now, the last table left ten minutes ago, the kitchen sounds have changed from cooking to cleaning, someone’s mopping near the bar. The candle on our table’s almost out, the wax pooled on the plate.

‘You know you can just text me at work,’ Celyn says. ‘You don’t have to sit in my restaurant for two hours pretending to eat.’

‘I wasn’t pretending.’

‘Ron. The chicken’s cold. The potatoes haven’t moved since they arrived. You ate bread and drank two pints and watched me carry plates. That’s not eating. That’s. Surveillance. You saw the lace, then.’ Not a question. The half-smile, wider now, the tired one with something underneath it. ‘Black. I didn’t put it on for you, you weren’t meant to be here. But the second I clocked you’d parked yourself in my section for the night, going quietly out of your mind? The glimpse was for you. Reaching for the notepad, the apron riding up, right in your eyeline. You think that was an accident.’ Celyn leans across the cold chicken, the voice down so the bloke with the mop can’t hear. ‘I like you like this. Wound up. Useless to me in the best way. Come home and you can take it off me with your teeth.’

I look at the plate. The chicken, the cold jus. The potatoes arranged exactly where the kitchen put them.

‘The woman,’ I say. Didn’t plan to. The words just. Out.

‘What woman.’

‘Table three. The grey hair.’

Celyn’s eyebrows lift, then the grin.

‘Are you jealous of a sixty-year-old woman?’

‘No.’

‘That’s quite sweet, actually.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Come home,’ Celyn says.

I leave money on the table. Too much, don’t care, Celyn doesn’t argue.

The flat. The door.

The hands don’t wait. I don’t decide to push Celyn against the wall. The wall, the back against it. My hands on the hips where the apron was, the mouth on the mouth and the taste of the restaurant, service, heat, the last coffee of the shift.

‘Ron.’

My name in the mouth that was smiling at tables all night.

I pull the t-shirt up and off and underneath is the lace I clocked from across the room three hours ago and couldn’t stop clocking. The bralette and the thong, both, thin and warm from the shift. Black lace on a flat hard chest, stubble above it, the cock pushing at the front of the thong, and the whole of it, the lace and the body underneath, undoes me the way it’s undone me all night.

I get a hand over the cock through the lace, the heat of it, the wet patch already starting at the top, and Celyn’s hips push into my palm and the sound goes into my mouth. I’ve wanted to wreck them since the first table.

Then Celyn pulls back, looks at me, the eyes black, and turns. Goes down onto the bed on their own, no hand from me, all fours, the back dipping, the arse up and bare, the black lace thong just a string lost between the cheeks. A choice. A presenting. The thing that’s been wound in me since the first plate goes loud.

‘Give it to me hard.’ Celyn says it before I’ve even. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all shift. Don’t be careful with me tonight.’

The lube, the cap, my hands not steady. I hook a finger in the string of the thong and pull it off the hole, the rest of it left on them. Two fingers straight in, slick, no patience in me tonight for the one-at-a-time, and Celyn takes them with a hiss and shoves back onto my hand, greedy. The lube smears the black lace dark where the string sits in the crease, the thong gone slick and ruined on a hard arse, and I love it, filthy and pretty at once.

I go for a third. Celyn’s hand snaps back and catches my wrist.

‘No.’ Wrecked, certain. ‘No third. I want to feel it. Just you. Now. Don’t make me wait.’

So I don’t. The foil, the roll, and I push in with them barely open, and it’s slower for it, the rim fighting me the whole way, tighter than I’ve ever had them, gripping the head and not wanting to give and then giving an inch at a time, and the grunt I make I don’t know. Every table they touched that wasn’t mine, the woman’s hand on their arm, the two hours, all of it goes into the slow force of myself into them until I’m seated to the root and they’re stretched raw around me.