Pillow

I've got to be honest with you.

I’d fancied this bloke since I was fifteen years old. We always had a sort of on-off, will they won’t they thing, but we never actually, I mean he was always seeing someone or I had a boyfriend or whatever. He was beautiful. Rugby lad, thighs like, I don’t know, rods of bloody iron. You know how things get connected with other things, right, like joined in your mind? Well, when I’d moved down and been here about half a year, there was a big poster for the Six Nations I could see from my little kitchen window, some Irish lad with the most, just, absolutely heavenly thighs. And obviously I’d look out at that, and you know, with my cup of tea and my wistful – don’t laugh – wistful look and sigh and think of Danny. I know I always talk about connections and that annoys you, but I just think I was here in north London working for shit pay and everything is sort of simultaneously glamorous and trashy, and home is so different, isn’t it? Especially when you’re from the north. And so I just think that, like, he represented that for me, this fight inside myself to admit that I wasn’t happy here and all the people I had maybe, on occasion, I don’t know, turned my nose up at, maybe they weren’t quite so bad. Maybe I missed them. I mean, didn’t you want to get out, when you were eighteen? Sorry, I forgot about your perfect life in the coolest city in the world, the only happy teenager in history. I did, I did want to get out. And I thought I was so smart with my John Updike paperbacks on the tube and fuck-me pencil skirts and getting free cocaine from these, well, wankers. I mean, what you gunna do?

But it was Christmas that it happened. I’d gone home and he was, he was actually seeing my best friend at the time. Well, childhood best friend. Lingering resentment, different paths, blah blah blah. You know the score. At the time we were still talking and I obviously get spectacularly drunk and I think, honestly I think I was wearing a fedora or something, with a feather. I stole it from some boy in the pub. Anyway, I get horrendously drunk and I’m making a fool of myself and playing the fancy girl who lives in the big city, going on some half-formed lecture about Paul Gilroy, something like that. He’s there, of course, because he’s with her, with Claire. And I’m kinda looking at him by not looking at him, if you know what I mean. The whole time, keeping him in the corner of my eye, feeling his presence, hoping he’s impressed by whatever nonsense I’m spouting. So we have this night out and we pile back to hers and I’m on the sofa and I pass out.

Then, this is what I’m trying to tell you, I wake up and it’s really early and I’ve got this, ahem, nice feeling, um, downstairs. I look and he’s – Danny – is there between my legs. My legs on his shoulders, basically. Uh huh. Licking me out. You’ve got to understand that I thought, I honestly, well at least to begin with, thought I was dreaming. He realises I’m awake and he takes his finger and sticks it inside me – flowing like the Ganges, by the way – and brings it up to his lips and says shhh. Then he sucks it, and carries on. Eye contact the whole time. My God. It was so, good. I don’t have the words to tell you how good it was. Like, well, you get the idea. Man knew how to use his tongue. I came four times. Afterwards, he just gets up and walks back to Claire’s bedroom, and I thought, I know this is silly, but I just thought he knew. He knew that I’d been thinking about him, that he’d played this important part of me coming to terms with who I was, my identity as a young woman, all that. Even if he didn’t, on the surface, well there’s just different ways of knowing and I believe to this day that he knew.

To just get up like that! The generosity of the man. You’ve got to understand, at this point, I was willing to do anything. On my knees for this man. And he walks off. Didn’t so much as see his cock. I guess what I’m saying, is that this for me was a profound erotic experience, because it brought together so many levels of my psychology and my physical desire and somehow, on a bloody settee at five in the morning, it healed me a bit. I carry things like that with me, all the time. I think most people do. Little secrets, not written down, barely even spoken. It’s not like I tell people, not at home. He’s still with Claire, actually, I think. But I have it, a tiny piece of magic that he gave me, and I know that when I settle down as I inevitably will, when it’s all KitchenAids and interest rates and a guy I can actually trust, I’ll still have it. Fuck, I’ll probably be fantasising about it when I conceive my first child. It’s that, I don’t know, powerful.

Should we get out of bed? Make a cup of tea? What? No, you’ve had your chance. You think I’d be telling you all that if I thought we might still work out? I gave you three attempts, which is two more than other men get, only because you’re so sweet and a good listener. But if you can’t get hard you can’t get hard. We’re just physically incompatible. It’s fine, it happens. I’m a little insulted but I’ll get over it. What? Come on, don’t be so sensitive.

Ah, if only Danny were here.