by Nick Laird
Danny was feeling quite drunk now and Ellen’s eyes had taken on such an emulsive sheen that she must be too, but he ordered a bottle of Pinot Grigio anyway. It was on expenses. He wanted to ask Ellen about men, about relationships, to ensure that if something should happen between them it wouldn’t be under the shadow of some recent ex who was still hanging around or that she wasn’t in love with her best friend. Danny liked facts. Their food had still not arrived. After spending all day orbiting her he felt he had learned to recognize some of her physical habits: her tuts and her slightly round-shouldered walk, her slow blinks, her hard laugh, the dip of her eyes when she drank. When she spoke about something exciting her hands conducted their way through a symphony complex with feints and grace notes.
‘So how come you’re single?’ He realized immediately, of course, that he hadn’t phrased it appropriately. Ellen looked a little startled.
‘What does that mean? That’s just like saying What’s wrong with you? ’
‘Of course not. I just wondered why someone who looks like you, and is obviously as nice as you are, isn’t with somebody?’
‘Not everyone needs to be with people…and maybe I’m not that nice…I’ve been single for months. The last guy I was with got a bit too possessive. Even though he’d no right. He didn’t give me enough space.’
‘Women always say that.’
He watched Ellen twist a battered gold ring on her middle finger. It had a large rectangular garnet, gripped with four prongs, and Danny became conscious she’d been wearing it each time he’d seen her. It was simple and antiquely beautiful, and all of the gold rings and garnets that before had slipped unnoticed across his vision were suddenly revealed as chances missed and lost. This was the wonder of it, the re-apprehension of things. Although she might only have bought it last week, the ring seemed entirely a part of her. We fall for people’s things: they earn love by proximity. Danny had once met a girl at university who’d arrived uncluttered by objects, an ascetic, whose few items were almost all plain and gravely functional. In the end, unconsciously desperate for a place to settle his love, Danny had grown attached to an Indian buddha her flatmate had bought that sat on their bath, fatly storing his secret. Danny was a sentimentalist, thus random and quaintly democratic with his love.
Ellen was silent. Danny went on, ‘So what happened with him?’
‘Nothing. He’s still around.’
‘You mean around you or around about? Is he at work?’ Danny heard his own voice come out too quickly, too high and curious. He coughed a little.
‘Let’s talk about something else.’
He watched her with a level blue gaze and kept silent.
‘I’m not still with him, if that’s what that look’s for. We don’t see each other. Unless by accident.’
‘So he is at work.’
‘Please. Let’s leave this.’
‘Okay.’ Danny put his hands flat, palms down, on the white linen tablecloth.
‘It was a mistake. It was over six months ago.’
‘Over six months ago or over six months ago?’
‘I don’t get it.’ She had lifted a bread roll from the basket, and was holding it in mid-air, as if about to lob it at his head.
‘Well, I mean, was it over six months ago as in…it hasn’t really been working for the last six months but we’re still sleeping together and having a relationship? Or did it actually finish more than half a year ago?’
She looked stung.
‘What it’s got to do with you anyway?’
‘Nothing, of course.’ They sat silently. Ellen broke off a bit of bread roll and mournfully started to chew it. Danny unfolded his napkin and smoothed it onto his lap. He’d cocked all of this up.
‘I’m sorry. I just thought it was an ambiguous statement. I was trying to redraft it. I’m sorry. I don’t want to know if you don’t want to tell me.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. He was married and older…I was silly and younger. That’s it. It was finished, for good, more than six months ago.’
She gave a little shiver and rearranged her cutlery so none of it touched. Danny said, offering it up as an apology, ‘Well, I’ve just broken up with someone. It finished, for good, more than six hours ago.’
Ellen moved outside herself again.
‘Really?’
‘Well, about three days ago. She came round to collect her stuff on Thursday.’
‘Did you live together then?’
‘No, but you know all the things that get left over. Clothes and books and…’
‘The chattels.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Nothing really. I loved her very much. I was too young and…’
Ellen interrupted, factually, facetiously, ‘Men always say that.’
They drank much too much and bumped against each other getting into the deep-piled lift. Danny pressed the button for 12, his floor, but not 4, which was Ellen’s. She noticed and pressed it herself, not meeting his eyes. The lift glided up, smoothly, counterweighted somewhere else, and stopped on the fourth. The doors opened.
‘Well then, Mr Williams, thanks for a lovely dinner.’
It hadn’t really been lovely, just edgy and drunken and awkward.
‘My pleasure Miss Powell. My pleasure. If you fancy a nightcap do feel free to invite me in.’
‘I think I’ve had more than enough.’ She stepped out of the lift. Danny pouted a little, and tried for the face of a little boy lost in a supermarket. He was not past begging.
‘Well, if you change your mind…’
‘I’ll let you know.’ The doors were closing.
‘Room twelve hundred and one. One, two, zero, one.’
‘Okay…Goodnight then.’
The doors nipped shut. Just me again, Danny thought.
They’d arranged to have breakfast at eight and Danny had just ordered a wake-up call for half-seven when there was a knock at the door, but so lightly that he initially thought it must have been for the room across the hall. Then there it was again, two knocks, small song. He grinned enormously to himself, then settled his face and opened the door. It was Ellen with an opened jar of jellybeans, the ones that sat on top of the mini-bar and cost about ten pence a bean.
‘I thought you might want one, since I’d opened them.’
‘Thanks.’ Danny stood in the doorway, blocking it, and made his hands into a begging bowl in front of her, so that she could pour some in. She shook out a dozen or so of the sweets, shiny tiny embryos. Danny jiggled them into one hand and then made to close the door with the other. Ellen put her bare foot against it.
‘Is that it then?’
‘Unless you’ve any other confectionery.’
‘No.’ Ellen slumped her shoulders, mock-defeated. ‘I’ll just be on my way then.’
Danny caught her round the waist with his arm and hauled her into the room. Jellybeans were scattered across the floor. It seemed a bit much, and Danny let her go. They were awkward again. He looked at her feet, half-sunk in the grey carpet.
‘Do you want to stay?’
‘Have a sleepover?’ she asked, wide-eyed, all lashes.
‘Yeah. With a movie and jellybeans.’
‘Okay. But I get to sleep on this side.’ She walked over and sat down on the left of the bed.
‘Fair enough. Though that’s also my favourite side.’
They propped the pillows up against the headboard (Danny found two more in the wardrobe) and flicked through the channels. The fact they were both still fully clothed made Ellen’s feet seem even more brazenly naked. He had to make a move. His mouth tasted cigarette-coppery, though he’d only smoked three or four, and he was exhausted. When he lay down on his back at first he thought he was about to lose it–everything swam–but then his focus returned. Ellen was facing forwards, intently watching the television. It was a late-night dating show: some girl who was all teeth was insulting some guy who was all nose. Using t
he remote on his bedside table, Danny turned the TV off without warning. She looked over at him. He leant forward and half-twisted round towards her, as if waiting for her to adjust the pillows behind him, and she stared blankly into his eyes, not receptive, not aggressive. She smelt of cocoa butter.
‘Your eyes are the most beautiful blue.’ She said it like she was confirming someone else’s opinion.
‘Yours aren’t so bad either,’ Danny said, and she closed hers, granting permission. He leaned a little closer and could feel the breath from her nostrils tickle his own nose. As their lips were about to touch she opened her eyelids again, to check, presumably, that he hadn’t disappeared. Her lashes brushed against his cheekbone.
‘That’s a butterfly kiss.’ She’d pulled away.
‘What is?’
‘That was, when my eyelashes touched your face, that’s a butterfly kiss.’
She was nervous Danny thought. But she didn’t seem nervous.
‘It was very nice.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what’s this?’ He kissed her on the lips, gently, chastely. She was completely still. He could hear someone running a bath in the room next door.
‘That was an orthodox kiss.’
‘Really? Greek?’
‘I think Russian.’ She smirked.
‘And this?’ He leant forward and placed one hand on her cheek, tilting her face up to his, and then moved closer, as if to kiss her again, but at the last moment rubbed his nose against hers.
‘I believe that one’s the famous Eskimo kiss,’ she whispered. Her breath was wine and jellybeans.
‘Bang on,’ Danny whispered back. Their noses were still touching.
‘Well what about this?’
He kissed the side of her throat and she moved her head back slightly, giving the faintest sigh, so he ran his tongue along her neck and, thumbing back the collar of her black shirt, tenderly bit the top of her shoulder. His legs were starting to cramp.
‘I think that’s nameless at the minute. I think you just made it up.’
‘Possibly.’ Danny’s tone was abstracted. He moved his hand down to the hollow of her waist and held it. It was hard and much smaller than he’d thought. He briefly considered whether he could enclose it in both hands but moved his fingers back up to her neck, brushing them against her left breast. He felt a stirring in his cock, its yawn and its stretch.
‘Hold on,’ Ellen said, and was up on her feet. She turned the lights off and yanked open the curtains, converting the room to a grey doughy world, moonless, and miles above the hellfire of the street’s sulphurous lights.
‘That’s better.’
Danny lay down on his back and Ellen curled around him. He felt her breasts on his chest and her thigh against his. He turned over so they were facing each other, with their heads on the same pillow, and kissed her, full on the mouth. She smiled an enormous, shameless grin so he winked and kissed her again, edging his tongue in between her lips until it touched hers rising to meet it. Danny felt his cock pressing against his thigh, strapped in by his boxer shorts. He reached down and adjusted it, then undid a button of Ellen’s shirt. She was wearing a black lace bra. He licked the dark cleft formed by her breasts and brushed the strap from her shoulder.
‘You are incredibly beautiful.’
‘Thank you.’ Her voice was equally abstracted now, fading quickly into the physical. Danny kissed the small soft button of her nipple until it hardened and then gently took as much of her left breast in his mouth as he could. They were solid, pure creations of flesh, not those filmy breasts that are intangibly soft, that slip from under the touch.
‘Shall we take off our clothes and get into bed?’
‘Okay.’ Ellen’s eyes were facing the window and catching the only available light. They looked huge, and vaguely troubled.
‘We don’t have to, you know. I just thought…we have these lovely clean sheets…’
‘And you thought we should dirty them?’
‘No, not that. But clean sheets on the skin. It’s a hard one to beat. I need to nip to the loo.’
When Danny came out of the bathroom she was in bed, sitting up, with the covers pulled comically up to her nose. Her clothes were tidily folded on the chair by the window.
‘Hello,’ Danny said. He was wearing his grey Calvin Klein boxers, and had rearranged his cock again so it was held down against his right thigh. A penny of wetness darkened the crotch and he felt awkward, exposed in the bare light of the bathroom. He turned it off.
‘Hello.’ Ellen brought the covers down to her shoulders.
‘You are fucking gorgeous.’ The swearword sounded wrong, ungracious and almost angry. He tried again, ‘I think you’re the most gorgeous girl that I’ve seen.’
‘Hmpf…’
‘Hmpf?’ He had reached his side of the bed but the sheets were tucked in under the mattress. He tugged at them awkwardly.
‘You can manage it.’
‘I can.’
They were in bed, they were kissing. She kissed the raised bump of his cheek and black eye. He kept touching her face like a man feigning blindness. Then he couldn’t stop licking and sucking her breasts. The sensation of holding her waist and kissing them became an imperative, an animal pressure, and the singularity of his ardour seemed to cause her to tense up. She set her fingertips gently on his cheek and pushed his head up to her lips. The sheets came off the bed. Danny felt as if he was grazing on her. She was lying on her back, and he was above her. He moved down the bed, kissing her breasts and mahogany stomach and the hair of her mound. He wet his lips and kissed again, pushing his tongue further down.
‘What are you doing?’ Ellen asked suddenly, in a calm but loaded voice. Danny looked up the length of her. Her breasts lying lazy and full, her eyes on him.
‘I’m going down on you.’ Danny kissed her belly button lightly. It was like an eyelid, tightly shut.
‘Don’t do that…Why are you doing that?’
‘I want to.’ She was silent.
‘Just for one minute. If you don’t like it, I’ll stop.’
‘I feel a bit naked or something.’
Danny pulled the covers back up off the ground and over them. In his little tent he moved her legs apart and knelt in between them. Stroking her stomach with the tip of one finger, he leant down to kiss between her legs. She was already wet. He began to kiss the tiny part of her, and to work his tongue around it in wider and smaller circles. Eventually he took it all in his mouth and began to suck it. He pushed both his hands down under her smooth round ass. The sheet was coming off them again and he could hear her breathing. He lifted her up, into his mouth, her thighs pressing against his shoulders, and started, gently, to rock back and forwards. She pulled a pillow over her face. He worked his middle finger in until it touched the soft knot of her ass. Immediately she squirmed up off him.
‘Oi, don’t do that.’
‘Sorry, sorry.’ He readjusted and went back to kissing between her legs but Ellen gave a different kind of sigh. A pissed-off you’ve-spoilt-the-moment sigh. ‘Sorry,’ he said, lamely, again.
‘Just come here.’
Danny moved up the bed on all fours. He felt he was prowling suddenly, some big cat. He arched his back and purred. Ellen laughed.
‘Come here.’ She pulled him down to her. ‘Your face stinks of me.’
‘I know. It’s lovely.’
‘I’m not kissing you.’ She licked the side of his neck and Danny realized his cock was pressing into her groove. Ellen felt it. Danny pushed very slightly, experimentally.
‘Gentle.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Stop saying sorry.’
‘Je suis désolée.’
‘Go slowly.’
They were both breathing rawly and she made little whimpers when he pushed too hard. He had to place his hands under her shoulders to stop her sliding up from under him.
‘Am I hurting you?’
‘A little. Slow down a b
it.’
I can’t go any slower, Danny was thinking, but said, ‘Do you want me to stop?’
‘Have you got a condom?’
‘Yes, somewhere. Shit, hold on.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Danny jumped up and walked into the bathroom. He turned on the light over the mirror and pulled out the packet of condoms in his washbag. He grabbed one and returned to the bedroom, ripping open its blue foil cover. Ellen was watching him, grinning.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘No, you’re right. Stupid of me.’
He kneeled on the bed beside her and put it on. She pulled him back down to her and said, ‘Now, where were we?’
‘Here. I think we were just here.’
‘Are you all in?’
‘Nearly.’
Danny tried to hold on. Their eyes kept meeting and making a channel between them, a rushing of something like wonder. Her almond gaze. There was nothing left to protect or defend. Danny tried to hold on. He moved his right hand from under her shoulder to her breast and cupped it, kissing the nipple. He had suddenly misjudged it, whimpered, and came. She dragged a nail up his spine and he shivered, rested on his elbows and grinned at her. She grinned back. Danny couldn’t remember smiling as much in bed before.
‘You’re lovely,’ he said, and kissed her nose.
‘No, you’re lovely,’ she said, and lifted one hand to smooth down her hair.
Danny was lying behind her, one arm under her waist, his hand cupping her breast, and the other wrapped round her stomach. Her breathing was shallow: she wasn’t asleep. He was half dreaming, a voice in his head idiotically repeating my blackamoor, my paramour over and over when Ellen suddenly spoke.
‘It was Adam Vyse.’
There was a pause before Danny pulled back into himself.
‘Who was Adam Vyse?’
‘The guy I was seeing.’
Silence. Danny dragged his arm out from under her and slid across the bed. She turned over, onto her back.
‘You have got to be fucking kidding me.’
There was more silence. It settled on the room like snow. The bed was Antarctica, white and vast and desperately cold. Danny lay motionless. Then the ludicrous sounds of lovemaking, from next door, or above them perhaps, started up. A headboard mockingly banged on a wall.