Page 31 of Undefined Terms

‘Glamorous.’

Celyn reads. A scene, two people in a room. The character touches a wall and the wall is warm and the warmth goes through her hand and up her arm and into her chest and the wall shifts and she shifts with it and she doesn’t pull away.

The voice, low. The Welsh pulling the words. The room’s dark except the laptop and Celyn’s voice and.

Celyn closes the laptop. Puts it on the floor. Looks at me.

‘Stay,’ Celyn says. ‘Just sleep. If you want.’

‘Yeah.’

‘No pressure. No. Anything. Just the bed and the tea.’

I put the mug down. Celyn puts the mug down. We lie back. The bed’s narrow, elbows touching, hips close. The ceiling bare above us. A horror writer with a black lace bra on a chair and grey boxers and a voice that reads walls like bodies.

Celyn’s head moves, finds my side. The weight of it, light, warm. The breath, slow, evening out. There, flat, still. Celyn’s breathing deepens. Slows. Sleeps.

I lie there.

The arm goes numb at half one. The shoulder aches. The tea’s gone cold on the floor. The room’s gone full dark now, just the streetlight. Celyn’s body is warm against my side, the breathing steady, the hand on my chest rising and falling with my own breath. I don’t move. I stay perfectly still because moving would break something, and I’m not breaking it.

I stay.

The alarm on my phone’s set for half five. When it goes I slide out, slow. Celyn shifts, mumbles, doesn’t wake. The face on the pillow, the eyeliner smudged to nothing, the mouth slightly open.

I bend. Press my mouth to Celyn’s temple. Quick, light. I’ve never kissed anyone’s temple. Didn’t know it was something I’d do.

The stairs are narrow and they creak and I’m trying to do it without making noise because Celyn’s sleeping and I don’t want. I don’t want to wake them.

The room’s still warm. I put my jacket on. The pockets still have the smell of the bar, not the beer smell, the other thing, the Celyn smell that’s on everything now. The collar. The sleeve where Celyn’s head was at some point during the night when I wasn’t thinking about anything, just, was.

Outside. The cold hits different than it did last week. Last week cold was just cold. The bed was warm, the person was warm.

The streets are empty at this hour. The bar’s dark, the corner table waiting like a museum exhibit. Five hundred metres to site, thinking about what just happened and whether it shows. Whether people will look at me and know.

The thing is, the hands are the same. The body is the same. The site doesn’t know what they did for five hours instead of sleeping. The concrete doesn’t care, it just wants the pour. So I’ll give it the pour.

The rest of me won’t be there. The rest of me is in a room full of books and a sleeping person.

Two weeks in and I dream about Celyn.

All of it. All the versions at once, stubble, smooth face, the flower shirt, the black jeans. The green hoodie with the sleeves past the hands. The bare arms from the restaurant. The lace bra on the chair, the grey boxers. The violet nails, the blue nails, the red nails, all of it, like the body keeps changing under my hands and I can’t keep up.

Fingers on my stomach, cold, the ring pressing. The nails, red, no, violet, no, nothing, bare, the small burns on the knuckles. The fingers go down, below the stomach. Below. No belt because we’re somewhere that doesn’t have belts, not my flat, not Celyn’s room, somewhere else.

The mouth on my throat. The stubble, the scratch, the drag, and then the stubble’s gone and the jaw is smooth and the lips are softer and there’s lipstick, I can taste it, something waxy, warm, and the mouth moves down my chest and the hair falls across my skin and it’s long and loose and it smells like the garden-tea.

Celyn says something, in Welsh, I don’t understand it. The sound goes through me like the vibrator goes through wet concrete. Shaking the air out, settling what’s underneath.

The hands again, on me. The grip. Firm, the ring cold, the angle right. Like Celyn knows. Like this body came with instructions I never got.

I come in the dream. The body arches and the dark goes white and the sound is mine, loud, ugly, not the kind I’d make if I had a choice, and I wake up.

The sheets are wet. My stomach, my hand.

I strip the sheets, put them in the machine. Stand in the kitchen with my boxers on and the kettle boiling and the clock saying 4:11.

Too early for the site. Too late to go back to sleep. Too much, lying there with the images still in my head.