Nowhere to Put Him

1. Prologue — Glasses in the Dark

The chain finds its slot with a small, private sound, metal seating into metal the way her glasses seat on the bridge of her nose: habitual, exact, not to be argued with. She does not switch on the hall light. What little streetglow survives the curtain lies along the runner in a dull stripe, enough to silver the black fall of her hair and the open hanging of the robe.

He is already sitting up. She has not knocked. She never knocks when the chain is on; knocking belongs to daylight, to parcels, to the version of her that packs lunches and asks about socks. This version stands in his doorway with the robe parted and the red frames still on her face, as if sight itself were a thing she refused to surrender. The robe has slipped her shoulders. The weight of her breasts takes the light first—pale, veined faintly at the undersides, nipples drawn tight in the cool of the landing—and then the soft plane of her belly, the dark thatch she does not tidy for anyone, the long bare stretch of thigh. A shine is already on her skin. Not bathwater. She has been thinking about this room before she walked to it.

“Look,” she says, and it is not permission. It is an order that keeps her on the correct side of what they are doing.

He looks. She watches him look. That is the first theft she allows herself: the heat of being wanted by the one person in the house who still stands when she enters, and the shame that comes with it, thick as the smell of her lotion in the narrow room. She crosses the threshold. The floorboard by the bed gives its familiar complaint. Her glasses slip a fraction; she pushes them up with two fingers and leaves them there, lenses catching a scrap of light so he cannot hide in the blur of her.

She does not lie down. She stands between his knees and takes his jaw in her hand, thumb on the hinge, and puts his mouth to her breast as if seating a cup in a saucer. Warm. Wet. The pull of him goes through her like a swallowed sound. Her nipple beads against his tongue; milk does not come, only the slick of his saliva and the faint salt of her skin, and she holds him there until her breath snags and the robe falls off one arm entirely. The other breast hangs heavy, neglected, a cool weight she remedies by guiding his hand up to it, closing his fingers until the pressure is hers.

“Slower.”

He slows. She feels the obedience in the shape of his mouth and despises how much she likes it. Her free hand finds the nape of his neck, the short hair there, and keeps him. Audible now: the wet seal of lips, the small involuntary noise he makes against her, the pipes ticking in the wall like a third person who has not been invited. She is wet between her thighs already, a distinct, unarguable slip when she shifts her stance. She does not explain it. She takes his other hand and draws it there, through the dark hair, into the heat, and lets his fingers learn the fact of her without letting them stay long enough to be kind.

When his breath changes—when the wanting in him starts to climb toward a word—she eases his mouth away. A string of saliva hangs a moment between his lower lip and her nipple, then breaks on the slope of her breast and runs. She watches it travel. Shame and appetite share the same track on her skin.

She could take him into the bed. She can feel how readily his body would give her that: the hard line of him under the blanket, the way his hips have already lifted a fraction, helpless. She does not give him the bed. She pushes his shoulders back until he is sitting against the wall and climbs only as far as his lap, robe a wreck around her elbows, glasses still on, and lets the hot, slick notch of her rest against his cock without taking him in. The contact is obscene in its smallness. Her wet paints him. She rocks once, twice, a mean, precise friction that makes her eyelids lower behind the frames, and when he tries to lift into her she sets her palm on his mouth.

Not yet. Not her name. Not anything the house would have to keep.

His breath burns her hand. She rocks again, shameless, the heavy swing of her breasts close to his face, the smell of her rising between them—skin, soap from an earlier hour, the mineral tang of how ready she is. A trickle finds the inside of her thigh and cools there. She could come like this if she were cruel enough to herself. She almost is. The pulse gathers low, greedy, her hips losing their discipline for three strokes that betray how long she stood in her own room talking herself out of this doorway.

She stops.

The withdrawal is worse than the touching. Air on wet skin. His mouth under her palm still open. She climbs off him with the ungraceful care of a woman whose hip will complain in the morning and pulls the robe closed only enough to make a lie of modesty. The shine on her breast has not dried. Neither has the mess she left on him.

“Stay where you are,” she says, and the voice is the one she uses for the chain, for the books, for the last bus.

She turns. The landing swallows the black of her hair. Behind her, in the room she did not come from by the shortest path, the hook on the wall is empty. The missing weight of the frame travels with her down the dark, unanswered, as specific as the taste of her he is still wearing on his mouth.

1. Chapter 1 — Until He Found His Feet

He came with one bag and a way of standing that already asked permission. She showed him the back room as she would have shown a meter reader the cupboard: window, radiator that knocked, spare key on the chest. Shoes off in the hall. The last bus was the last bus. She did not offer a speech about family. Family, in her mouth, had a habit of arriving late and leaving boxes.

The bag sat on the made bed like a guest who had not yet decided to unpack. She had washed the sheets that morning. They still held the clean, slightly scorched smell of the airer. He thanked her too quickly. She heard the boy in it and the man trying not to be one, and she turned toward the stairs before her face could do anything unearned.

In the kitchen she cooked as if hunger were a problem that could be solved by volume. Potatoes breaking their skins. Meat that had been meant for two stretched toward the idea of three, then settled, stubbornly, on two plates that were not equal. She gave him the larger without comment. The house made its evening noises around them: the fridge shuddering, a tap that had dripped since the funeral, the pipes thinking about heat. He ate like someone who had been living on other people’s sofas. She watched the movement of his throat and looked away at the exact moment looking would have become a fact.

“Your father will collect those,” she said, meaning the cartons stacked against the dining-room wall, already gathering the fine grey of a house that was older than both of them. “Until he does, they live in the attic.”

He nodded. He had his mother’s mouth when he was trying not to argue. She had never liked that mouth on her son. On this face it did something else, something she refused to name over gravy.

After, she washed; he dried, clumsy with her cloths, too large in her kitchen. When she passed behind him to put the salt back, her breast—heavy, ordinary, contained in the day’s bra—brushed his arm. Neither of them stepped aside in time. Cotton, warmth, the brief give of her. She said, “Excuse me,” in the voice she used for strangers on the pavement, and the cloth in his hand went still.

The photograph on her dresser was visible from the landing if her door stood even a little open. She had not shut it. Habit. The dead man looked out from a summer that no longer existed, shirt sleeves rolled, a garden unfinished behind him. Alex paused there with the tea towel still in his fist. She came up with the extra blanket she had decided he would need when the nights sharpened, and found him looking.

“He doesn’t bite,” she said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you didn’t mean.” She went past him into the back room and spread the blanket herself, smoothing it with the same hard care she gave to envelopes and bills. The bed looked suddenly like a mouth. She set the spare key on the chest ...