We stood in the street and we kissed for a long time. After that we just stood holding on to each other. I didn’t want to let her go. I didn’t want to not be holding her, I didn’t want to deal with what we were doing or what would happen next. I felt hollow and weak. Eventually Sharon started to shiver with the cold and I released her and watched her run back into Fred’s for her coat which she had left on the back of a chair.
Later, in her flat, we made love, gently at first because of my ribs, but then with a fervour which brooked no mitigation for pain or injury. Sharon was so familiar to me but her body was so strange; I found it odd that the woman I knew should have this great store of sexuality, a physicality which was as much herself as the Sharon I had known had been. Her full breasts, her nipples, her belly, her sex, the flushed look on her face when I entered her. This was not a woman I had known, not a woman I had even suspected. It was as though, when I helped her undo the buttons of her blouse, I hadn’t expected to find anything underneath. What I did find was exhilarating, a nakedness so complete I was winded by it, a fist clenching desperate fingers round my heart.
I hadn’t thought about anything, not even in the taxi over to West London during which we had sat, hands tight together, not speaking a word. Neither of us had said what was going to happen or spoken about the future. Sharon had led me up to her flat and then into her bedroom where we’d kissed for a long time before Sharon pulled away, her face solemn, her hands going to the bottom of my T-shirt which we pulled over my head. My ribs were bandaged and Sharon carefully undid them and then kissed the bruising there and held her cheek against it. When we were both naked we just sat looking at each other, the slightest sad smile on her lips, my bones light but my stomach heavy. I felt like I was about to throw up. Sharon moved under her duvet and I joined her beneath it, merging into the warmth and a smell which was so familiar but richer than I had ever experienced it. We held on to each other and Sharon drew me inside her almost immediately, her hand cold on my cock, her sex full and so wet I moved straight into her. We made love slowly, hardly moving, unwilling to surrender our skin to even the shortest moment of not touching. We came with our mouths locked together, Sharon’s teeth biting into my lower lip.
We had both been completely silent, and now we lay together, Sharon clinging to the side of my torso which wasn’t bruised, both my arms around her neck and shoulders. We still didn’t speak, and there were still no thoughts in my head. There was just the smell of her and the feeling of her body next to me. Time was a closed warm space, a static world, a pressure cooker of sensation and emotion. It didn’t have an outside to it; nowhere it had come from, nowhere it was going to.
We made love again and this time it was wild and uncontrolled as we let our emotions unleash themselves. I bit into her beautiful skin, making marks which would stay on her, and she did the same to me. The pain I felt seemed part of a greater, more powerful sensation, a tunnel of feelings which I’d never known I needed but I needed more than anything. We didn’t speak to each other, not like we had spoken in my flat, or over dinner or in a bar. But there were words. Embarrassing words, sex words not love words. We tore at each other and pulled the other back close, we moved into different positions, our hands never satisfied, clawing, prying, our mouths moving constantly in an effort at completeness. I wanted to touch all of her with all of me, I wanted to have her in every possible position all at the same time, to turn her inside out and fuck her that way too. I wanted to do something which could never be undone, something which could never be just explained away, causing a slight blushing or a looking to the side. Something close to terrifying. I held on to her and scoured her body with my three-day beard. I felt her nails in my back, her teeth in my bottom lip, more, harder, my cheek, my stomach. I couldn’t tell where my body ended and Sharon’s began. It was stunning and uncontrollable and I never wanted it to end.
But it did end. We lay together, exhausted, feeding madly on air, our tears running down each other’s faces. I moved on to my back and we lay side by side, Sharon’s hand covering mine. Almost immediately I was asleep, but it was a sleep in which I was cut off from though aware of the room I was in and the body I was lying next to. My body just went somewhere, to a place of rest and perfect calm, where it lay detached from me in an ambient limbo. It felt like bathing in an enchanted pool. And then I floated back to a more connected sort of consciousness, a greater presence in the room, with Sharon there lying on her back with her eyes closed, her breasts rising and falling in a steady motion.
The duvet had long since fallen on to the floor and Sharon was naked. I could not accept or fully believe the actual fact of that. I looked at her body and found myself feeling guilty about doing so, as though I shouldn’t be looking at her. I desperately wanted to touch her breasts, to hold them and run my hands down over her belly and entwine my fingers into the golden triangle of her pubic hair. But I was scared to, I was afraid of being so familiar. I didn’t know why, given what we had just done, but the feeling would not go away. With her eyes closed I felt like a voyeur, seeing something I shouldn’t, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes from running all over her, boring into the places they had never had access to before. It was exhilarating. Had I always wanted to do this? I was suddenly aware of my own nakedness. I was naked. I was lying in a bed, naked, next to Sharon.
Sharon’s eyelids pulled open and fluttered slowly like a moth’s first wings. When she saw me watching her, her face creased into a smile which caused tears to well behind my eyes. I felt so good. So good. I looked into her eyes but couldn’t stop my eyes darting back to her body. She saw this and we laughed together and she did it too, very obviously looking at me, checking me out. Beneath her gaze I began to grow hard again, but I wanted to be calm for a while. I used a fingernail to push some damp strands of hair from her cheek and moved closer to her. I ran my fingertips over her face and she closed her eyes and smiled. I stroked the side of her neck and then her shoulders. The feeling of her skin was tattooed on my fingers. I ran my hand over her left breast and then the right.
When my thumb began to play with Sharon’s right nipple she moved away a little and, bringing her left hand up to her breast she covered it. She looked uncertain. Sharon’s right nipple had an extra curve to it, a half moon added beneath the aureole. The half moon was raised from the skin and was just the same texture but separate from the rest of the nipple. It was as though someone had double stamped the nipple on to her, and the second time had been slightly out of kilter with the first. I was surprised that she had moved away from me.
‘God,’ Sharon said. She blushed, trying to pass it off. I was looking at her but she broke my gaze. ‘I forgot about that.’
Sharon’s voice was now the one I was used to hearing but it sounded strange, wrong; it didn’t seem to belong here, where we were now.
‘It doesn’t matter;’ I said.
‘It’s like an extra nipple. Not a whole one but kind of.’ Now Sharon sounded self-conscious, either because she was nervous about what she was saying, or because she was finding it odd to be talking at all. ‘I’ve had it since I was a child.’
‘I like it.’
She shook her head.
‘You don’t have to say that.’
‘I know. I like it. It’s magical. It makes you … unique.’ I smiled and moved closer. I didn’t want to talk.
‘It makes me self-conscious.’ Sharon looked away for a second. ‘It’s why I don’t go topless at the beach; people can’t help looking at it.’
‘That’s not what they’re looking at.’
‘Ha. It is though. It’s why I didn’t that time when we went away. I could tell Lisa thought I was being square.’ She meant the time Luke, Sharon, myself and the girl I was kind of seeing at the time had gone to Crete for a week.
’I thought it was because of me.’
Sharon reddened a little more.
‘Maybe that too,’ she said.
I moved closer to Sharon and gently pulled her hand away. She didn’t want to let me. I moved even closer until my face was right next to her breast. I stroked her nipple again and kissed it. Slowly I ran the tip of my finger all round it and kissed it again, tugging softly at it with my teeth.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, and I meant it. It was fascinating. It felt good in my mouth. Sharon didn’t answer. ‘I’m not saying it to make you feel better. You don’t believe me anyway, I can tell. But I mean it.’
‘I should have told you though,’ she said. ‘I have done in the past. But I didn’t think.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t think.’
‘It must have been a bit of a surprise though.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t.’
‘Billy …’
‘It wasn’t a surprise, Sharon. I mean it. I…’ I moved up the bed and looked into her face. The next words came out of my mouth without me thinking about them. I immediately wished I hadn’t said what I did but if I hadn’t it would have only been putting off the inevitable.
‘I knew about it,’ I said. ‘I mean it wasn’t a surprise. And I like it, I do.’
Pain moved swiftly over Sharon’s face like the shadow of a hawk. She smiled seriously at me and kissed me, running her thumb along my eyebrow, but something in the air seemed to change. The room grew suddenly colder. I tried to find a word to say but there wasn’t one.
I wanted to tell Sharon that Luke hadn’t told me about it in a bad way, a guys’ way, he had just mentioned it once. I wanted to reassure her of that. I think she would have known it though. She wasn’t upset that he’d told me, I was sure she didn’t begrudge the things which Luke had spoken to me about. Including her. It was just the lurch in the stomach as time jerked back into gear. The space was broken. It was Luke. It was the fact of him.
Sharon bent over and retrieved the duvet and I helped her pull it over us. She turned her bedside lamp off. We lay together and kissed occasionally and tried to smooth away the thoughts that were rising back up to the surface of both of our minds. We both knew what they were. We lay there in the semi-dark and I pretended to be asleep but my eyes were open, staring blankly at the long, cream-coloured curtains covering the Georgian windows. I wasn’t tired any more. My body, though without proper sleep or food for days, and carrying the signs of a beating, felt heavy and good, but my mind nagged at me to turn to it, to consider the living knot of thoughts which twisted inside.
I pushed the thoughts aside but I couldn’t sleep. Sharon’s head was resting on my chest and I tried not to move but she could tell I wasn’t relaxed and her eyes opened to mine. Even though I could barely make out her face I could read there everything Sharon might have wanted to say to me. I looked into her darkened eyes for a second or two and then sat up a fraction.
I couldn’t stay there. Sharon lifted her head and I moved from beneath her and pushed myself up from the bed. I slid over to the edge and stood up, immediately crouching down to my trousers, my sweatshirt and the rest of my clothes. I sat down again and dressed slowly with my back to Sharon, balling up the bandage and stuffing it into the back pocket of my jeans. When I was finished I turned back to her.
Sharon looked at me for a while without speaking. Then:
‘Must you?’
I nodded. Sharon’s face was unreadable as she turned slightly and nodded back, looking down at the duvet.
‘I understand,’ she said. I tried to smile. ‘It’s weird for me too.’
‘I know it is.’
I left a second and then I leant over to kiss the top of her forehead. I’d meant a gentle kiss, but she took hold of my head and pressed her lips hard against me, surprising me with the frankness of her passion. It was a message, a clear statement. It was scary and I could feel an edge of hardness in her kiss which set a corresponding one up within me. I pressed my lips back against her before breaking off. I stood up again from the bed and looked down at her. She started to get up but I told her not to worry. I knew my way.
‘There’s some money in my purse,’ Sharon said. ‘On the table in the living room.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I walked into the living room and found the purse. I borrowed some money from it and called a cab. It didn’t come for twenty minutes, during which time I sat in the living room on the edge of the sofa, staring at the carpet. When the door buzzer sounded I looked up at the entry phone and then at the closed bedroom door. I could almost feel Sharon’s body, fitting into mine, her wrist resting on my hip bone. I thought about ignoring the cab and going back in there but suddenly the idea of being with Sharon, there, in her bed, filled me with an incomprehension which was something close to horror. Kissing her. Fucking her. Her sucking me, my tongue moving down between her legs. It was too much, it was way too much. I stood up, pulled the front door open, and walked into the hallway.