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.
The parcel was propped against the door when Laura got home, soggy at the corners and with her name written in capitals by someone who had clearly been in a hurry. The neighbour across the landing, a retired sea captain who greeted everyone with the same friendly suspicion, opened his door at the exact moment she bent down to pick it up.
‘A lot of rain tonight,’ he said.
‘Loads,’ she said, holding the box to her chest as though it contained something fragile. Which, in a way, it did.
Inside the flat it still smelt faintly of paint. She had lived there for seven weeks, ever since she and Chris had finally said out loud what they had both known for a year: that nine years can come to an end without anyone having done anything wrong. He had got the sofa. She had got the coffee machine and the big fig tree, which neither of them had ever really liked but neither wanted to leave behind. Now it stood by the window, dropping a leaf a week, pointedly, like a lodger who hadn’t approved the move.
She put the parcel on the kitchen worktop, hung up her wet coat and put the kettle on. Looked at the parcel. Sat down. Looked again.
It was Jess who had decided it, of course. Three weeks earlier, over two far-too-large bowls of noodles, Jess had leant across the table and asked, with her usual lack of warning: ‘When did you last have an orgasm nobody else planned?’
Laura had opened her mouth to answer and discovered she needed to think about it. Jess had seen that. Jess saw everything; she was a midwife and had, as she put it herself, seen more of people than people had.
‘Exactly,’ she had said, wiping her chopsticks on her napkin. ‘I’ll send you a link.’
The link went to a Womanizer Premium 2 in a wine-red colour that Jess described as ‘grown-up but not boring, just like you’. Laura had read reviews three evenings in a row, carefully, as if she were buying a dishwasher, and finally clicked buy one night at half past twelve with her heart pounding as though someone were standing behind her watching.
Now she slit the tape with the bread knife. Inside was a discreet box, and in the box, there it was: smaller than she’d expected, soft and cool in her hand, wine red with a slim gold-coloured strip along the top. It looked like something you might keep in your handbag next to your lipstick. It didn’t look, she thought, like something that was going to change anything at all.
The box also held a spare stimulation head. She unfolded the quick-start guide. Two sizes, S and M, so you could choose the fit. She laughed out loud, alone in the kitchen. Nine years with a man who had never asked, and now a little wine-red gadget was asking what size she was.
She plugged in the magnetic charging cable and watched the little light come on. Four hours of run time, it said. She did the maths and concluded that this was longer than her last relationship had managed to stay awake on an ordinary Saturday night, and then she felt a bit ashamed for finding it funny, and then she stopped feeling ashamed.
Her tea went cold while she read about fourteen intensity levels, about autopilot programmes and about something called Smart Silence. Outside, the rain beat against the window in waves, as if someone were standing out there throwing it by the bucketful.
She waited until nine o’clock, because it felt more decent, and laughed at herself for thinking along those lines at all. Decent in front of whom? The fig tree?
She had a long, hot shower. In the steamed-up mirror she saw herself in outline: the shoulders that always sat too high after a day at the drawing board, the little scar on her knee from a skiing accident ten years ago, the hips Chris had once called ‘substantial’ and thought was a compliment. Thirty-four years old, a landscape architect, newly single, and she hadn’t looked at her own body like this in a very long time. Not to judge it. Just to see it.
She pulled on the old, far-too-big T-shirt she always slept in. Stood in the bedroom doorway. Pulled it off again and threw it on the chair.
On the bedside table she lit a candle, the kind Chris had never wanted in the bedroom because the smoke alarm was sensitive and he was more so. The flame flickered and then settled. The street lamp outside shone through the wet window and painted running patterns on the ceiling, little rivers that divided and met again.
Next to the candle stood a bottle of pjur Aqua. ‘And buy a water-based lube that works with toys,’ Jess had said. ‘You’ll thank me later.’ Laura had bought it and put it there the day before yesterday, like a prop for a play she wasn’t sure she dared perform.
She lay down on the clean sheets. Cool against her back, warm in the room. The rain sounded like distant applause.
At first she didn’t touch the toy at all. She let her hands go where they liked, slowly, over her stomach and up to her breasts, as if greeting someone she hadn’t seen for a long time. Her nipples tightened under her fingertips. She breathed out, more deeply than she had all day, and felt something in her loosen, a knot she hadn’t even known she was carrying.
Then she picked it up. Pressed the button. A little light came on. Nothing happened.
She pressed again. The light was on. Still nothing.
‘No,’ she said out loud to the ceiling. ‘Don’t tell me you’re broken. Not tonight.’
Then she remembered. Smart Silence. It only started once it was against the skin. She had read that in the kitchen an hour ago and forgotten it the second she got nervous, which was so typical of her that she giggled.
She dripped a little lube onto the soft opening at the tip, spread the rest with two fingers where it needed to be, and felt how cool it was before her own warmth took over. Then she lowered it, carefully, until the silicone closed around her clitoris.
It woke up.
It wasn’t vibration, not the way she’d expected. It was a kind of pulsing suction, rhythmic and light, as if someone without a body were breathing against her. On the first level it was almost nothing, a tickle, a question. She laughed again, but the laugh was shorter this time and ended in an intake of breath.
She pressed plus.
Two. Three. Something was pulling at her now, not on the surface but further in, as if the pulse had found a path back through her. She felt herself swell under the soft silicone, felt herself getting properly wet, warm and slick, and felt her hips lift a centimetre off the mattress of their own accord.
She changed the angle to see what was happening, lost contact, and the toy went silent in her hand at once. ‘Oh, seriously,’ she muttered, and put it back, and it woke again, obedient as a dog. She soon got the trick of it: keep it still, let it do the work, stop trying to perform.
Four. Five. She grabbed the sheet with her free hand.
This was where, she thought with the last clear part of her brain that was still thinking, she usually started making lists. Buy milk. Reply to the email from the council. Check whether Chris had booked his car in for its MOT. But the lists didn’t come. There was no room for them. There was only the pulse and the warmth and the sound of the rain and her own breathing, which was getting quicker and louder and no longer sounded like hers.
Six.
She came so fast it was almost rude. It started as a pull below her navel, a tightening that built and built until it couldn’t hold any longer, and then it fell, in long waves that ran out into her thighs and up into her stomach and out into the fingers gripping the sheet. She heard herself make a sound she had never heard before, low and open and utterly unembarrassed.
Then she lay completely still, the toy silent on her stomach, panting at the ceiling.
‘Four minutes,’ she said to no one. ‘Four. Minutes.’
She thought of the sea captain across the landing and hoped the walls were as thick as the estate agent had promised. Then she thought they could be or not be, as they pleased. She had paid for this flat and this evening, and both were hers.
It was curiosity that made her reach for it again. Fourteen steps, and she had got to six. She had always been the one who read the whole instruction manual, who went through every single room in the museum, who couldn’t leave a book at page two hundred.
She swapped to the smaller head, the S, mostly to see if it made any difference. It did. It fitted more closely, more precisely, like a finger that knew exactly where to be. She lay on her side with one knee drawn up and the pillow between her thighs, the way she had lain when she was alone in quite different ways, in quite different years.
This time she tried the autopilot. She pressed the button and surrendered herself to something that had no opinions about her. It was a strangely liberating thought. The toy knew nothing about MOTs or her ex or the fact that she’d forgotten to water the fig tree. It just shifted, calmly and unpredictably, between light and heavier, between question and answer, and every time she thought she’d worked out the pattern, it changed its mind.
She let it go on for a long time. She let it take her almost all the way up and then ebb away again, like the tide. She touched her breasts, drew her thumb over a nipple until it hardened, then let her hand slide down over her hip bone and in between her thighs, where she was so wet it astonished her. She slid two fingers inside herself and curled them, slowly, towards herself, and the pulse outside and the fingers inside met somewhere in the middle.
‘There,’ she whispered. ‘No. There.’
It was the most honest conversation about sex she’d had in years, and she was having it with herself.
In the end she took back control. Switched off the autopilot, pushed the levels up one at a time and counted them in her head, the way you count stairs in the dark. Seven. Eight. Her legs were trembling. Nine.
The second orgasm wasn’t like the first. The first had been a surprise; this one was a decision. It rolled in slowly and stayed, ebbed and came back and ebbed again, and she let it go on, let her hips move against the toy and against her hand, let the sound come out of her without muffling it. When it finally let her go she was lying on her back again, glistening with sweat, her hair plastered to her forehead and a smile she couldn’t get rid of.
The candle had burnt halfway down. The rain went on as before, stubborn and utterly uninterested in what had just happened.
At midnight she stood in the bathroom in her dressing gown, rinsing the toy under the tap. It could be submerged in water, the guide had said, and the lube came away under the lukewarm stream without her having to scrub. She dried it with a clean towel, carried it back to the bedroom and plugged it in to charge again. The little light began to blink, calmly and steadily.
Then she got hungry. Not a little hungry, but the kind of hunger you feel in your whole body, like after a long swim. She toasted two slices of bread, spread them with far too much butter and a little honey, and ate them standing at the worktop next to the empty box. The fig tree watched her from the window. She could have sworn it looked less sulky than it had that morning.
Her phone was on the worktop. She hesitated for a second, then typed:
‘Fourteen steps. I got to nine.’
The reply came within a minute, even though it was midnight and Jess was on an early shift.
‘I KNEW IT.’ Then three little flame emojis. Then: ‘All the way next time.’
Laura smiled and typed: ‘Next time I’m not in a hurry.’
She put the phone face down, went over to the window and opened it a crack. The air that streamed in was cold and smelt of wet tarmac and leaves and something green she couldn’t place. Down in the street someone cycled past with a bin bag over their head as a rain hood. Further off, windows glowed in other buildings, other kitchens, other people who were perhaps also awake without anyone else knowing.
She thought about Chris, and it didn’t hurt. She thought that for nine years she had waited for someone else to find their way to her, as if her desire were an address only he had the key to. And in the end all it had taken was a rainy Tuesday, a wine-red thing in a discreet box and the courage to be curious about herself.
It wasn’t the toy, she thought. Or rather, it wasn’t only the toy. It was that she had asked herself what she wanted and then actually listened to the answer.
She closed the window, blew out the candle and crawled under the duvet. In the dark the charging light blinked on the bedside table, small and stubborn, like a lighthouse somewhere far out. She fell asleep before she had time to think about tomorrow, and for the first time in a very long time she had no list at all.
Short story · Solo
For twenty years Mark has looked after everything and everyone except himself. Then he moves into a one-bedroom flat with bare walls – and finds a parcel he doesn’t quite know what to do with.
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.
