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“Oh, so I’m selfish and a doormat.”
Adam laughed. “Of course not. It’s just there’s no sense innotseeing Marius just because he’d also like to see you.”
“You seem to have forgotten we’re not wholly rational creatures.”
“You’re a whollygoodcreature.”
“Not…” I stumbled slightly over the repetition ofwholly. Thewhbecame a huff. Theoa great pit in the middle. “Wholly good,” I finished. “I can bequitebad.”
“And you fancy being bad now?” Adam’s breath was warm and mint-sharp against my cheek as he drew me more tightly to him. “Late to see your ex bad?”
“It’s not like Marius will care.”
“Never mind him. What do you want, Edwin?”
I shivered in his arms, knowing how strong they were, how sweetly they could hold me down. “I w-want to be bad.”
Adam tipped me onto my back on the bed he’d carefully made that morning. He was smiling as he came down on top of me, but his eyes were dark with the promise of roughness and tenderness, and everything in between. I pushed up against him, just to feel him push back. He made it so easy. So easy to be vulnerable and to welcome vulnerable making things. To demand them even. Or beg for them, in words that danced like dandelion seeds upon my lips, released to Adam as they had been released to no one. Even myself.
Truthfully, what we did next was not so very bad. Oh, it made me writhe and gasp and blush—shed some needy tears at the height of it—but it only felt good. More than that, it felt like ours, the moments of our pleasure spun gold upon the morning sunshine. As bright as the distant birdsong. As endless as the blue, blue skies of burgeoning summer.
One of the things I had grown to love about being with Adam was the easy way he inhabited silence. Especially because my own relationship with it was so complicated. It had felt like my inevitable lot. But also, my defence against scorn, impatience or dismissal. Sometimes, I had loved all my lonely places. Long walks through meadows and along riverbanks; Oxford’s golden corners where the tourists did not know their steps could take them; the hush, asheavy as dust, that found me at the bench while I worked. After Marius left, the silence had become a haunting. A wraith I carried with me even to loud places, like clubs and bars, where I had hoped to bury it, along with my broken heart, in the bodies of strangers. And now, with Adam, it was something else again. Something that was not always silence—touched as it was by footsteps in another room or the soft bubble of the kettle boiling. But even when it was, it still felt expansive. An horizon rather than a cage.
Sometimes we listened to music or audiobooks in the car—Adam did so much driving for work, he always had something on the go—but mostly we didn’t. There was a quality to time like this, time where there was nothing to do except share a space, time that could be co-opted to no other purpose, that couldn’t be found elsewhere. I cherished it so much that I almost thought I preferred travelling to arriving. Then again, travelling with Marius had always been terrifying. He hated planning, loved to improvise, didn’t want to have to think about anything except going…doing…being. While I scurried after him, the boring one, the timorous one, the one who was holding him back with my worries about plug socket adaptors, and where we would stay, and how we would get back. We had been in Greece—Marius had been obsessed with shipwrecks at the time and wanted to see Zakynthos—when Eyjafjallajökull had sent its ash clouds billowing over Europe. It had taken us four days to make it home, bundling onto buses and chasing after ferries, and Marius had never been happier. And neither had I, as Shropshire unfurled its greens all around us, and the sunlight picked out the gold in the red-brown hair that curled over Adam’s bare forearms.
“S-so,” I said, for no other reason than I felt like it.
Adam’s eyes flicked briefly to mine, his mouth about two twitches from a smile. “So?”
“You’ve got a hundred prisoners—”
“How?”
“Because you’re a prison warden, I assume.”
“Or I’m about to be very, very arrested.”
“Regardless of the circumstances in which you acquired them, you’ve got a hundred prisoners. And you’ve numbered them one to a hundred.”
“Organised of me. If a bit dehumanising.”
“Then”—my voice wavered, mirth catching it unawares, like a kiss from a lover—“you take their numbers and put them at random inside boxes that arealsonumbered one to a hundred.”
“Edwin, this is very strange of me.”
“I think you’ll f-find it’s highlylogicalof you.”
“Good point,” said Adam, with an air of implausibly profound solemnity. “What do I do next?”
“You allow each prisoner to go into the room separately. They can open f-fifty boxes. If every prisoner manages to find their own number, everybody gets to go free.”
“I also seem to have a poor grasp of the judicial system.”
“Otherwise, they all get executed.”
“I definitely have a poor grasp of the judicial system.”
I poked him in the elbow, this somehow becoming a caress—from the French, obviously,caresse, luxuriant curves ofaandr, and then that slow slide into sibilants, like my hands down the slopeof his flanks when he was inside me. “As you’ve probably already worked out, the odds do not favour the prisoners.”
