After You

‘I’m fine, Sam.’

‘You don’t see what I see. I want you to be safe.’

I tried to smile, but my knees were trembling, my palms slippery on the iron rail. I made to step past him and staggered slightly.

‘You okay?’

I nodded. He took my arm and half lifted, half helped me climb clumsily into my flat. I slumped down on the carpet by the window, waiting to feel normal again. I hadn’t slept properly for days and felt half dead, as if the fury and adrenalin that had sustained me had all leached away.

Sam climbed in and closed the window behind him, eyeing the broken lock on the top of the sash. The hall was dark, the thrumming of the rain muffled on the roof. As I watched, he rummaged around in his pocket until, among other detritus, he picked out a small nail. He took the screwdriver and used the handle to knock the nail in at an angle to stop anyone opening it from outside. Then he walked heavily over to where I was sitting, and held out a hand.

‘Benefits of being a part-time housebuilder. There’s always a nail somewhere. ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘If you sit there you’ll never get up.’

His hair was flattened from the rain, his skin glistening in the hall light, as I let him pull me to my feet. I winced, and he saw.

‘Hip?’

I nodded.

He sighed. ‘I wish you’d talk to me.’ The skin beneath his eyes was mauve with exhaustion. There were two long scratches on the back of his left hand. I wondered what had happened the previous night. He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard running water. When he came back he was holding two pills and a cup. ‘I shouldn’t really be giving you these. But they’ll give you a pain-free night.’

I took them gratefully. He watched me as I swallowed them.

‘Do you ever follow rules?’

‘When I think they’re sensible.’ He took the cup from me. ‘So are we good, Louisa Clark?’

I nodded.

He let out a long breath. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

Afterwards, I wasn’t sure what made me do it. My hand reached out and took his. I felt his fingers close slowly around mine. ‘Don’t go. It’s late. And motorbikes are dangerous.’

I took the screwdriver from his other hand, and let it fall onto the carpet. He looked at me for the longest time, then slid a hand over his face. ‘I don’t think I’m good for much just now.’

‘Then I promise not to use you for sexual gratification.’ I kept my eyes on his. ‘This time.’

His smile was slow to come, but when it did, everything fell away from me, as if I had been carrying a weight I hadn’t known.

You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.

He stepped over the screwdriver, and I led him silently towards my bedroom.

I lay in the dark in my little flat, my leg slung over the bulk of a sleeping man, his arm pinning me pleasurably beneath it, and gazed at his face.

– Fatal cardiac arrest, motorbike accident, suicidal teenager and a gang-related stabbing on the Peabody Estate. Some shifts are just a bit …

– Sssh. It’s okay. Sleep.

He had barely managed to get his uniform off. He had stripped to his T-shirt and shorts, kissed me, then closed his eyes and collapsed into a dead slumber. I had wondered whether I should cook him something, or tidy the flat so that when he woke I might look like someone who actually had a handle on life. But instead I undressed to my underwear and slid in next to him. For these few moments I just wanted to be beside him, my bare skin against his T-shirt, my breath mingling with his. I lay listening to his breathing, marvelling at how someone could be so still. I studied the slight bump on the bridge of his nose, the variation in the shade of the bristles that shadowed his chin, the slight curl at the end of his dark, dark eyelashes. I ran through conversations we had had, putting them through a new filter, one that pitched him as a single man, an affectionate uncle, and I wanted to laugh with the idiocy of it all, and cringe at my mistake.

I touched his face twice, lightly, breathing in the scent of his skin, the faint tang of antibacterial soap, the primal sexual hint of male sweat, and the second time I did so I felt his hand tighten reflexively on my waist. I shifted onto my back and gazed out at the streetlights, feeling, for once, that I was not an alien in this city. And finally, I found myself drifting …

His eyes open on mine. A moment later he realizes where he is.

‘Hey.’

A lurch into waking. The peculiar dreamlike state that suffuses the small hours. He is in my bed. His leg against mine. A smile, creeping across my face. ‘Hey yourself.’

‘What time is it?’

I swivel to catch the digital readout of my alarm. ‘A quarter to five.’ Time settles into order, the world, reluctantly, into something that makes sense. Outside, the sodium-lit dark of the street. The minicabs and night buses rumble past. Up here it is just him and me in the night and the warm bed and the sound of his breathing.

‘I can’t even remember getting here.’ He looks off to the side, his face faintly lit by the streetlights, frowning. I watch as memories of the previous day land softly, a silent, mental Oh. Right.

His head turns. His mouth, inches from mine. His breath, warm and sweet. ‘I missed you, Louisa Clark.’

I want to tell him then. I want to tell him that I don’t know what I feel. I want him but I’m frightened to want him. I don’t want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else’s, to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control.

His eyes are on my face, reading me. ‘Stop thinking,’ he says.

He pulls me to him, and I relax. This man spends each day out here, on the bridge between life and death. He understands. ‘You think too much.’

His hand slides down the side of my face. I turn towards him, an involuntary reflex, and put my lips against his palm. ‘Just live?’ I whisper.

He nods, and then he kisses me, long and slow and sweet, until my body arches and I am just need and want and longing.

His voice is low in my ear. My name, pulling me in. He makes it sound like something precious.

The next three days were a blurred mass of stolen nights and brief meetings. I missed Idealization Week in the Moving On Circle because he turned up at the flat just as I was leaving and we somehow ended up an urgent mess of arms and legs, waiting for my egg-timer to go off so that he could dress and race to pick Jake up on time. Twice he was waiting for me when I returned from my shift, and with his lips on my neck, his big hands on my hips, the indignities of the Shamrock and Clover were, if not forgotten, swept aside along with last night’s empties.