Short story · Long distance
Sophie and Ben see each other every other weekend and miss each other the rest of the time. Two parcels cross in the post, and a video call that starts with laughter ends up somewhere else entirely.
The parcel was in her letterbox on Wednesday, squashed between an electricity bill and a brochure for kitchen doors. Sophie picked it up with two fingers and read the sender’s name in the lift, and then she read it again, and then she stood in the hall with her coat on and the parcel in her hands and felt a tingle at the back of her neck.
She was thirty-two and an architect, and this particular week she was mostly a pair of eyes staring at a model of a swimming baths at a scale of one to two hundred. She had left home at half seven and got back at ten to nine, she had glue on her index finger and a pencil stub behind her ear that she’d forgotten was there. She sat down on the hall floor without taking her shoes off and opened the parcel.
Inside was a box, and in the box was something pink in silicone, shaped like an elongated egg with a long, curved tail. Underneath it lay a note, written in his angular handwriting, which he said came from writing patient notes for twelve years.
Lush 3. Charges with the magnetic cable. Saturday at nine? Only if you want to. I’ll ring you anyway otherwise. B x
She read the note three times. Then she rang him.
It rang five times before he answered, and he sounded out of breath, as if he’d just come through the door.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are you home?’
‘I’m sitting on the floor in the hall.’
‘Why are you sitting on the floor?’
‘Because someone has sent me a pink thing with a tail.’
The line went quiet. She heard him put something down, a bag perhaps, and she heard the fridge door he always opened first thing when he got in from a shift, as if the food might have changed while he was out.
‘It arrived,’ he said.
‘It arrived.’
‘And?’
She turned it over in her hand. It was smooth and a little heavier than she’d thought, and the tail didn’t just bend any old way; it was firmer than it looked.
‘Ben,’ she said. ‘I sent you a parcel on Monday.’
‘What sort of parcel?’
‘You’ll see. It should arrive tomorrow.’
‘Sophie.’ His voice had dropped. ‘What sort of parcel?’
‘Same idea,’ she said, and she started to laugh, and then he laughed too, that husky laugh he had when he was tired. They’d had the same thought, the same week, four hundred kilometres apart, without saying a word about it. It felt both silly and completely, completely right.
They had met two years ago on a station platform. The train had been three hours late and he had shared his flask, and she had explained why the station building they were standing in had been designed wrong, and he had listened as if it were the most interesting thing he had ever heard. Since then they had lived in separate cities and on the train in between. Every other weekend. Sometimes more often, when his rota allowed. Sometimes less, when her competition entries swallowed everything.
It wasn’t the longing itself that was hard, she had thought many times. It was that the longing had nowhere to go. You could talk on the phone. You could send pictures. But the body somehow got left outside.
‘Saturday at nine,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to decide now.’
‘I’ve already decided.’ She held the pink thing up to the hall light. ‘But if it feels silly, we stop. And if it feels weird, we talk about it. And if one of us starts laughing too much, then…’
‘Then we laugh,’ he said. ‘It’s fine to laugh.’
On Saturday at ten to nine she sat on the bed in her flat with the laptop on her knees and moved it for the seventh time. The angle was wrong. If she put it on the bedside table, only her chin showed. If she put it on the bed, you saw the ceiling light, which was ugly and which she had been meaning to replace for three years. In the end she propped it on a pile of books on a chair at the foot of the bed, and that would have to do.
She had showered. She had charged the toy on Thursday and charged it again today just in case. She had downloaded the app, Lovense Remote, paired the toy with her phone and then sent him an invitation, and she had stared at the green symbol showing they were connected to each other as if it were a love letter.
At nine o’clock on the dot, the call came.
He was sitting in his bed. His room was smaller than hers, with a lamp with a yellow shade that made everything warm, and he had a grey T-shirt on and his hair was damp. He had worked a day shift, seven till half three, and he had slept for an hour afterwards; she could tell from the crease the pillow had left on his cheek.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi.’
Then neither of them said anything at all for a long while. They just looked at each other. She had missed his face in a way she couldn’t explain. It was so easy to forget the details: that he had a tiny scar in one eyebrow, that he wrinkled his nose when he was nervous. He was wrinkling his nose now.
‘I’m really nervous,’ she said.
‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Me too.’
She laughed, and something in her chest came loose.
‘So yours arrived?’
He reached out of shot and held it up. It was black and roughly the size of a flask, with an opening at one end and two small buttons on top. Satisfyer Men Vibration+. She had stood in front of the screen for a long time before choosing it; she had read about fourteen different programmes and a whisper mode and an app, and she had thought about his walls, which were so thin he could hear his neighbour sneeze.
‘It’s got a whisper mode,’ she said.
‘I saw.’ He gave a crooked smile. ‘I’m taking that as a comment on my neighbour.’
‘I’m taking it as consideration.’
He put it to one side, within reach. She saw that he had set out a bottle of lube on the bedside table, water-based, and it touched her in a silly way that he had done his homework.
‘Do you want to start?’ he asked. ‘We can just talk, too. We’ve done that before, and it was good.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to start.’
She leant back against the pillows. She was wearing a vest top and a pair of soft trousers and suddenly felt ridiculous; she had thought about putting on something nicer but then thought that this was her, it was her he wanted to see. She pushed her trousers and knickers down under the duvet, out of sight, and took the pink toy from the bedside table.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I just need to… Close your eyes.’
‘Close my eyes? The whole point is that I…’
‘Close your eyes for ten seconds, Ben.’
He closed his eyes. She poured a little lube on it and slid it in, and it went in more easily than she’d expected, and the tail stayed on the outside, firm and curved, and the egg sat inside against a spot that made her go completely still for a moment. She pulled the duvet back up.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘You can look.’
He opened his eyes. He looked at her, at the duvet, at her face, which she knew was red.
‘Is it in?’
‘It’s in.’
‘How does it feel?’
‘Like nothing. Like having a…’ She searched for the words. ‘Like having a secret.’
He looked down at his phone. She saw his thumb move, and then it came, a light hum deep inside her, and she jumped so that the laptop on the chair wobbled and the picture swung round and all he could see was the ceiling, the ugly ceiling light, and she laughed so much she had to clutch her stomach.
‘Sophie?’ she heard his voice. ‘Sophie, all I can see is your lamp!’
‘It’s ugly,’ she said between laughs. ‘I know it’s ugly.’
‘Was that too much? I put it on the lowest.’
‘It wasn’t too much.’ She straightened the laptop. ‘It was just… surprising. It’s inside me and you’re there. It’s the most unreal thing that’s ever happened to me.’
He looked at her, and he wasn’t laughing any more, but he was smiling with his whole face.
‘Tell me if you want me to stop,’ he said.
‘I’ll tell you. Do it again.’
He did it again.
This time she was ready, or thought she was. The hum came low and steady, and she lay completely still and felt it. There was something about not being the one controlling it. She didn’t know when it would change; she could only watch his face and guess. He had the phone in one hand and was looking at her, not at the screen, and she saw his thumb move almost imperceptibly, and a second later she felt it inside her. Up. A little more. His thumb in another city, his pulse in her body.
‘Tell me,’ he said quietly.
‘It’s…’ She closed her eyes. ‘It’s like when you lie behind me. And just keep your hand there. And don’t move it.’
He breathed out. She heard it clearly through the speaker, a long exhale, and when she opened her eyes she saw that his other hand had slipped down under his own duvet.
‘Ben,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Get yours out.’
He looked at her. He wasn’t wrinkling his nose any more. He reached for the black toy and the lube, and said, in a slightly wobbly voice, that now it was her turn to close her eyes, and she said no. She said she wanted to watch. He gave a small, slightly embarrassed laugh, and then he pushed the duvet aside.
She had seen him naked hundreds of times but never like this, through a screen, alone in his room under the yellow lamp, his eyes fixed on her. He was hard. He poured lube into the opening of the toy and lowered it over himself, slowly, and she watched his jaw tighten.
‘Press the button,’ she said. ‘The top one.’
He pressed. She heard a low buzzing through the speaker and he drew a breath through his teeth.
‘Which programme is it?’
‘One, I think.’
‘There are fourteen,’ she said. ‘I want you to go to five.’
He looked at her. Then he pressed, four times, and she counted silently with him, and at five the sound changed to a pulsing and he tipped his head back against the wall.
‘You’ve read the manual,’ he said with his eyes closed.
‘I’m an architect,’ she said. ‘I always read the manual.’
He laughed, a laugh that turned into a moan, and at the same moment, perhaps without thinking, he slid his thumb upwards on his phone, and what happened inside her made her grab the sheet. The tail lay against her on the outside and the egg pressed from within, and when he turned it up it went through her like an electric current.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Was that too…’
‘No. Keep it. Keep it there.’
Now they stopped talking so much. There were only the sounds. His breathing through the speaker, the faint buzzing of his toy, her own voice, which she heard coming out of her and didn’t try to hold back, because there were no thin walls here, there was only him. She pushed the duvet away completely. She wanted him to see. She wanted him to see her hips moving against nothing, against him, and she could tell from his face that he saw it, and that doubled it.
He turned the intensity down. She protested, a sound without words, and he said, his voice thick, that he wanted it to last, that he wanted it to go on for a long time. She understood. He let it fall and rise, fall and rise, and every time it rose it went a little higher than before, and every time it fell the emptiness afterwards felt like something in its own right.
She laid her hand on her stomach and then lower, and held it against the tail, pressed it closer, and she looked into the camera, into his eyes, even though it was only a lens, even though he was four hundred kilometres away.
‘Change programme,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Change to nine.’
He pressed, and she wasn’t counting any more, and she watched him switch, heard the buzzing change character to something denser and deeper, and he said her name in a way she had never heard him say it.
‘Sophie, I’m close.’
‘Not yet.’ She heard her own voice, unrecognisable. ‘Wait for me. Up. Please. All the way.’
He pushed his thumb all the way up.
It was like falling upwards. She came with her back arched, one hand in the sheet and the other over her mouth, even though there was no need, and it didn’t stop, it just went on in one long, shuddering wave that ran through her from where the egg lay out to her fingertips, and through it all she heard him, his breathing breaking, his voice, and when she could see again she saw him lying with his head against the wall and his eyes closed, perfectly still.
He turned it down to nothing. She felt the silence inside her as an emptiness and an echo at the same time.
They lay like that for a long while without saying anything. She pulled the duvet up again, carefully drew out the toy and laid it on a towel. He had switched his off and put it on the bedside table and pulled a blanket over himself, and he looked at her through the screen with heavy eyelids.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi,’ she said, and then they both laughed again, though this was a different laugh, low and tired and full of something.
‘Was it weird?’ he asked.
She thought about it. It mattered to answer honestly.
‘It was weird for five minutes,’ she said. ‘After that it was just you.’
He nodded. She saw that his eyes were shining and she said nothing about it.
‘I’m off on Friday,’ he said after a while. ‘I’ll get the quarter past six train.’
‘You’ll be here at half ten.’
‘I know.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll be bringing a phone. And you’ll be wearing it at dinner with your colleagues on Saturday.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘Who said I’m wearing it at dinner?’
‘No one,’ he said. ‘It was a question.’
She looked at him, the yellow lamp, the crease from the pillow on his cheek that had almost gone now, the hand resting on the blanket next to the phone.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The answer’s yes.’
Before they hung up they washed their toys with lukewarm water and soap, each in their own bathroom, and they kept the call going the whole time, phones propped against their soap dishes, and talked about nothing. About his patient who had sung an entire opera that morning. About the swimming baths and how the roof was still wrong. About how the quarter past six train was usually on time, mostly, but not always, and how she would bring a flask to the platform if it was late.
It was nearly midnight when they hung up. She lay in bed for a long time looking at the ceiling light. It was ugly. She thought she would replace it before he came.
Short story · Couples
Kate and Tom have been together for fourteen years and still find it easier to laugh in bed than almost anyone they know. Tonight they’re opening the parcel they bought together three weeks ago.
Short story · Couples
Lucy and James have been together for nine years and know almost everything about each other. Almost. A dinner in a foreign city, a little magnet under her dress and a word that means stop.
Short story · Solo
Nine years ended without anyone doing anything wrong. Now Laura has a flat that smells of paint, a sulking fig tree and a parcel waiting on the kitchen worktop while the rain lashes the window.
