We left the scooter chained up outside the restaurant and walked, and neither of us said anything about what we were doing, and both of us walked quite fast.
Four minutes.
Low white building set back off the road behind a car park with 9 spaces and a bay for a van.
The automatic doors went off too early and let the cold in behind us. Shhhk.
Strip lights. A rack of leaflets for things to do in London that nobody staying there was ever going to do.
The lad on the desk was about 20 and had a textbook open next to the keyboard, and he did not look delighted to see two people come in at 20 to 12 with no bags.
"All right. Just the one night?"
"Just the one night."
He typed. Jodie stood next to me with her hands in her coat pockets, looking at the leaflet rack like it was the most interesting thing in South London.
"Fifty-nine pound."
"That’s fine."
"Breakfast’s not included, it’s 8 quid extra, it’s till half 9." Still typing. "I’d not bother, honestly."
"No?"
"It’s a buffet." He said it like a diagnosis. "Name?"
"Flynn."
"Car reg?"
"Haven’t got one."
"You’ve not got a car?"
"I’ve got a scooter."
He looked up for the first time.
"Where’s that?"
"Down the road outside the Portuguese."
"Yeah, don’t leave it there." Chunk chunk, went the card printer. "Bring it up in the morning, there’s cameras."
He slid two cards over in a little paper wallet with the room number on it in biro.
"Two-oh-eight. Lift’s round the corner, it’s slow, stairs are quicker."
We took the stairs.
She had me into the wall of the stairwell before the first landing, both hands in my coat, kissing me properly with her whole weight on me and the fire door banging shut somewhere below.
"You’ve been very quiet since the restaurant."
"So have you."
"I’m concentrating."
"On what?"
"Getting up these stairs."
The corridor had that carpet they all have, a vending machine humming down the far end, and a trolley of towels parked outside 214 with a hoover on top of it.
The card didn’t work. Beep. Red.
Again. Beep. Red.
"Give it here."
"I’m doing it."
"You’re doing it wrong, it’s upside down." She took it off me, turned it over, and had the green in about a second. Bip. "There."
"That was luck."
"That was reading the little picture on the card, Danny."
The room was smaller than my bathroom.
I stood in the doorway and did the sum without meaning to and then hated myself for it.
A bed. A chair nobody would ever sit in. A kettle on a tray with 4 UHT pots and 2 sachets. A telly bolted to the wall on an arm, and a window with the car park under it.
Jodie went straight past me, dropped her bag, shrugged her coat off and went backwards onto the bed with her arms out.
"Oh. That’s better than mine."
"Is it?"
"Mine’s got a spring gone. I keep meaning to say." She lifted her head. "Shut the door then."
I shut the door.
And in the two seconds after it clicked, the telly came on through the wall behind the headboard.
Not loud. Clear, though. Somebody watching something with talking in it, then a laugh track, then the talking again.
Jodie sat up.
"Oh, you’re joking."
"It’s fine."
"It is not fine." She was listening with her whole face. "You can hear the words, Danny."
I sat on the end of the bed and listened, and you could. Not all of them. Enough.
And I watched it happen to her. Four seconds, from a woman lying flat with her arms out to a woman sat upright with her ankles crossed.
"Right," she said. "Well."
"Jodie."
"Mm."
"Come here."
"Hang on, I’m just..." She was doing something to her hair that did not need doing. "There’s someone there. Right there. His head’s about 3 foot from my head."
"I know."
"That’s a person."
"It’s a person watching a repeat at midnight in a Travelodge," I said. "He’s not listening out for us."
"You don’t know that."
"Come here."
She came and sat next to me, and I lifted her hair off the side of her neck and put my mouth just under her ear where she goes quiet.
She made a sound and caught it about a quarter of the way out.
She’d done that in Bernadette’s 3 hours before and I’d put it down to the cinema.
It’s not the cinema.
It’s her. It’s been her the whole time. Eleven years of paper walls and a mum through one of them, and she’s built a system out of it, and I’ve never seen the outside of it, because there’s nobody either side at hers and she still does it.
I found the zip at the back of what she’d made and stopped with my hand on it.
"Can I?"
"You’d better."
"You made it. I don’t want to..."
"Danny, if you fold that dress I will actually leave."
I did not fold the dress.
I took it off her shoulders and down, and she stood out of it and caught it before it reached the floor and hung it over the back of the chair nobody would ever sit in. Carefully. Then turned round.
Black underwear that didn’t match, because she hadn’t planned this, and I liked it better than I’d have liked the matching kind.
She stood there in the light off the car park and let me look at her.
Dark blonde hair down and wrecked from the helmet. Freckles going over her shoulders and the tops of her tits and thinning out where the sun’s never had a go at her. Strong through the thighs from 9 hours a day on a shop floor and a stomach that goes flat when she stretches and doesn’t when she doesn’t.
The marks on her hips where the elastic had been sat all night.
"Stop looking at me like that."
"No."
"Danny."
"Eleven years," I said. "Give us a minute."
"You had a minute in October."
"I’m having another one."
She put her chin up and let me have it, and her ears went red, and she did not cover anything up.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about her. She’ll go scarlet from the collarbone and stand there anyway.
Then she came and pulled my jumper up over my head, and she was the one who stopped this time.
She put her palm flat on my chest and left it there. Slid it down over my stomach and left it there as well, and she was not smiling any more.
"You’ve changed shape."
"Have I?"
"Since October." Her hand kept going and stopped at my belt. "You have. You’re all." She gave up on the word and undid the buckle instead. Clink.
I was hard before her hand was anywhere near me, and she found that out about 2 seconds later and made a noise in the back of her throat like she’d won an argument.
"Oh, hello."
She got my jeans open and her hand round my cock properly, skin on skin, and then she did the thing she does, which is stop and look at it.
She did that the first Sunday. Sat back on her heels with her fist round me telling me she’d forgotten how big I was in the daylight, and she has done it every single time since, and I have never once told her what it does to me.
"I don’t know why you’re always so surprised."
"I’m not surprised." Her thumb dragged slow over the top of me. "I’m appreciating. There’s a difference, Danny, and if you’d been paying attention on Sunday morning you’d know it."
"You’ve had that since the stairs."
"I’ve had that since the cinema," I said. "You did that to me at half 8 and then you sat and ate potatoes for an hour."
"I know exactly what I did." She had her hand round my cock now, over the top of everything, moving slow. "I sat there thinking about it the whole time. I told you I was wet in the restaurant and you went and ordered pudding."
"You didn’t have pudding."
"I had that little glass of whatever it was, and I sat there with my knickers stuck to me listening to you talk about a scaffold board."
The bed was loud.
We found that out together, and she froze with both hands on my jeans.
"Oh my God."
"It’s a bed."
"It’s not a bed, it’s a drum." She pressed on it with one hand. Crrrk. A long metal creak with a tick on the end of it. "Listen to that. Listen. No. No, we can’t."
"Jodie."
"He’ll hear the bed."
"Let him hear the bed."
"That’s easy for you to say, you’ve not got to..." She stopped. "Right. Fine. Whatever. Get the rest of that off."
So we started, and she went silent.
Properly silent. Behind her teeth, the way she does it. Breath going hard down her nose, jaw locked, every sound caught somewhere in her throat and killed on the way out.
And I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted to get one out of her.
I put her onto her back and took the bra off her, and she came up off that loud bed to help me and then flattened out under me with both arms above her head, which she has never once done anywhere else.
Her tits in the light off the car park. Pale, and heavy where they fell to the sides, and the freckles going over the tops of them and thinning where the sun has never been.
Eleven years I’d wanted them, and I’d had them a handful of times now, and I still went at her like a man who’d been told he had 4 minutes.
I put my mouth on one nipple and sucked, slow, and worked the other one between my thumb and finger until both of them were stiff and dark and she was arching off the mattress.
Her hand went straight over her own mouth.
I took it off her, put it back up by her head, and held it there.
"No."
"Danny..."
"No. Not tonight."
"There’s a man..."
"There’s a man watching telly and he’s going to have a lovely evening either way." I had her wrist pinned to the pillow. "You’re not putting your hand over your mouth in a room I’ve paid for."
"Fifty-nine pound," she said. "You’ve not paid for much."
"Fifty-nine pound and I want my money’s worth."
She laughed, and I closed my teeth on her nipple in the middle of it, and the laugh went into something else halfway through and got all the way out before she could stop it.
She looked at me like I’d cheated.
"That doesn’t count."
"It counted."
"It was a laugh."
"It was not a laugh."
I stayed on her tits a long time after that, because I could, and because every time I moved from one to the other she made a small strangled noise in her chest and then killed it, and because by the end of it she had both hands fisted in the pillow above her head and had stopped trying to take them down.
"Danny."
"Mm."
"You’re a bastard."
"Say that louder."
"No."
"Say it louder."
"Get your mouth back on me and I’ll think about it." Her chest was going. "Eleven years you’ve wanted my boobs and you’ve had them 5 times and you still go at them like somebody’s about to take them off you."
"That’s about right, yeah."
"It’s not a complaint."
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