Page 9 of Second Person

‘All the way.’

The headboard hit the wall and he put a hand up flat to stop it doing it again, which is the single most him thing that has ever happened to me with a man inside me, and I laughed, and he laughed, and we did the rest of it badly and with too much lube and his knee slipping off the mattress, and I would not trade it. I got my own fist round myself between us, knuckles knocking his stomach on the upstroke, and came like that with a word in Welsh coming out of me twice that I did not choose and did not translate for him for another eleven months.

He went about four seconds after and came apart in a way I hadn’t costed for. And afterwards, with his face in my neck, there was water on my skin that hadn’t come from me, and he didn’t know it was happening. I did the only correct thing available, which was nothing: a thumb on his cheekbone where it had dried, no comment, no question, no conversation demanded of a man in that state.

That was the first one. Nerve, negotiation, and a man crying without noticing, on a Tuesday.

The second was three days later and a different animal, because a second time isn’t about nerve, it’s evidence. A first you can explain away as a good night, or a man being polite in the dark to somebody he’ll have revised his opinion of by Thursday, and I’ve had firsts that were flukes and firsts I paid for on the fourth date when the revision came in.

So I did it again, at mine again, because everything in that first year happened on my ground, and I did it differently on purpose. On his back, and the drawer open by my own hand, and no discussion this time about foil or bottle, just the click and about nine seconds of practical, which is what a rule looks like once it’s stopped being a conversation and turned into a habit. Then I got up over him and took him at my own speed, which was slower than he’d have chosen and a good deal slower than I’d have chosen three days earlier, when I was still in a hurry to have the thing finished and therefore survived.

I put his hands on the headboard and left them there. He left them there. I sat down on him all the way and stopped, and made us both stay in it, and watched him lose the ability to arrange his own face.

And he looked at me the entire time. That’s the whole of it. That’s what the second time was for.

There was a man I gave three months to who never once needed my face, and I called it a preference at the time. Ron had my face six inches off his the whole way, the jaw with the shadow on it and the eyeliner gone to hell and the rest of me in plain view under a lamp I had deliberately not turned off, and he looked, and kept looking, and when I put my own hand on myself and finished across his stomach he was still looking, and what was on his face wasn’t effort and wasn’t tolerance.

He wasn’t reading me. He’d already read me. He was only checking the page hadn’t changed.

I lay on his chest afterwards doing sums I’d have denied doing: twice, both times mine to start, no face either time, no narration, no small print. And that was where the table came from. Not because anything had gone wrong, but because for the first time in about six years I had somebody in front of me who might actually build to a spec, and it seemed a criminal waste not to issue one.

We don’t touch that night, not in the way the last two times have. He stays anyway, on top of the covers, in his clothes, which I notice and don’t remark on, because I understand exactly what it is: not distance, the opposite of distance. A man giving a new set of instructions the widest possible berth on the very first night he’s been handed them, treating caution like a form of respect rather than an insult to what I’ve just told him I can hold.

I lie next to him in a room lit only by the streetlight through the curtain, and I watch him fall asleep before I do, which never happens, and there’s something in the specific stillness of him, arms folded, jeans still on, the boots never even unlaced, that undoes something in me I hadn’t planned on having undone tonight.

I get up once he’s properly under, careful with the mattress, and I go to the desk and open the laptop, the light of it too bright in the dark room, and I write the line before I can talk myself out of how plain it is: he sleeps like an apology. Not for anything he’s done. For the version of care that doesn’t yet trust itself not to overstep, so it makes itself smaller than it has to be, folds its own arms in, keeps its boots on, just in case leaving fast is ever asked of it.

Nobody’s ever done that with the rules. The men before him heard them as a negotiating position, an opening bid to be haggled down over subsequent nights, or as a challenge, a locked door that made the room behind it more interesting. He heard them as a specification and built to it, first time, without being asked twice, and the building to it looks, tonight, like a big man keeping his boots on so he’s ready to be gone the second I’d rather he was.

He’s got it slightly wrong, is the thing, and I love him for the exact shape of the error. I don’t need him ready to leave. I need him to believe he’s allowed to stay, which is a harder thing to build and takes longer and can’t be done in one night. But you don’t correct a man who’s got the direction of his care right and only the scale off. You let him keep his boots on tonight. You take them off him yourself, some later night, once he’s learned the room won’t collapse if he settles his whole weight into it. That’s not a conversation. That’s months. I’ve got months. For the first time in my life I want the slow version of something.

I don’t show him that line. Not that night, not for a long while after. Some sentences you have to earn the right to hand over, and I’ve only just met the man who’s going to earn it. I close the laptop, quiet, and get back into a bed that’s narrower than it needs to be for two people and exactly wide enough anyway, and I lie there listening to him breathe, apologising for nothing, and I think: I could stay in this sentence a long time.

I do.

The mirror gives me back the wrong person on a Tuesday, because it’s always a Tuesday, nothing changed about the face, same jaw, same everything, and the day tilts before I’ve even got the kettle on.

I text Ron at eight. Can’t tonight, restaurant’s short-staffed, sorry. It isn’t true. Nobody at the restaurant knows I exist today. I send it anyway because it’s smaller than the true sentence, and smaller is all I’ve got the budget for this morning.

He doesn’t ring. He doesn’t turn up on the strength of a hunch, doesn’t do the thing men before him did, the checking-in that’s really a checking-up, the are you okay that wants to be told yes so it can stop worrying about itself. What comes instead, an hour later, is five words. No bother. Door’s open Thurs. No question mark. Nothing to answer.

I put the phone face down on the counter and don’t cry, because crying takes a self to be doing the crying, and mine’s gone AWOL for the day, off somewhere it doesn’t have to answer to anyone.

I don’t leave the flat. I sit with the mirror covered — a tea towel over the bathroom one, deliberate, the first useful thing I’ve done since I woke up — and I get the box down, the one with the rules in it, not literally, there’s no box, but I go through them anyway, in my head, the way you’d check a system you built precisely for days you couldn’t trust the reading off your own face. The zones. The retired words. The flat fact that nothing about me is a favour anyone’s granting me. I don’t feel any of it today. I keep it anyway. Dignity’s a procedure, not a mood, and today’s the whole reason I ever wrote the procedure down.

By four I’ve eaten nothing and answered nobody and the flat’s gone the particular grey a room goes when the person in it has stopped bothering to open the curtains properly. I text Ron one line, the smallest true thing I can afford: Bad day. Not the restaurant. Come round if you still want to.

Course I want to, comes back inside a minute, and then, a beat later, because he’s learned by now that a fact lands better than a feeling: Bringing chips. You don’t have to talk.

He doesn’t say I look beautiful when I open the door. That’s the first thing I clock, the absence of it, because every man before him would have led with a compliment shaped like a correction, something that meant you look fine, stop making a thing of it, and Ron just stands there on the landing with a chip shop bag going see-through with grease and looks at me the way he looks at a wall he’s about to work on: taking the whole of it in before he decides where to put his hands.

‘Alright,’ he says. Not a question. A landing.

‘Not really.’

‘Aye.’ He comes in, toes his boots off by the door because he’s learned that too, without being told twice, and puts the chips on the table like they’re the most ordinary thing in the world, which tonight they need to be. ‘Same rules as yesterday?’

I think about that longer than the question probably needs. ‘Not all of them.’