Talk Dirty To Me – Chapter 3 – He Uses It

I didn’t hear from him for four days.

Four days is not a long time. I know this. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with a job and a life and a best friend who needed a full debrief about the bar night that I was not going to give her, and four days passed the way four days passed – work, the desk, the managing of other people’s schedules and problems, the specific autopilot of a life that ran well because I kept it running.

I didn’t think about him.

That’s not true. I thought about him in the specific way you thought about something you’d decided not to think about, which was to say constantly and with effort. The hotel room. The ceiling. The voice saying tell me in the dark with the patience of a man who had all night.

The sound I hadn’t recognized as mine.

I thought about that most.

I was at my desk on the fourth morning when the text arrived. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket and finished the sentence I was typing before I looked at it, because I was not a woman who grabbed her phone mid-task, because I had decided this was nothing, because –

I’d like to see you again.

Six words. No punctuation except the period at the end, which was very Nicko – complete sentences, nothing wasted, nothing performed.

I put the phone face-down on the desk.

Picked it up.

Put it down again.

My colleague Janet, who sat three feet away and noticed everything, said nothing, which meant she’d seen the whole performance and was being polite about it.

I picked up the phone and typed: Okay.

Sent it before I could revise it into something more controlled.

His response came in two minutes: Tonight. Bar on Fountain, near you. Eight.

I stared at that.

He knew where I lived. Approximately. Near enough to know which bar was near me, which meant he’d thought about this, which meant the hotel room had not been nothing to him either, which was information I put in a drawer in my head and closed.

Fine, I typed back.

See you at eight, he sent.

No questions. No is that okay or does that work for you. Just the time, the place, the assumption that it was happening. I sat at my desk and thought about how much that should have annoyed me and noticed that it didn’t.

Ella called at lunch.

“Tell me everything,” she said, before I’d finished saying hello.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Robin.”

“Ella.”

“You went back for your bag and came home the next morning in the same dress. I’m your best friend. Tell me everything.”

I looked at my desk. The neat stack of files. The coffee going cold in the cup I’d forgotten about.

“His name is Nicko,” I said.

“And?”

“And nothing. It was one night.”

“Was it good?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

“Robin.” Her voice had shifted – less teasing, more real. “Was it good?”

“It was fine,” I said.

“You paused for three seconds before you said fine.”

“I was thinking.”

“You don’t pause for three seconds before you say things are fine. You pause for three seconds before you say things are extraordinary and then say fine anyway.”

I picked up the cold coffee. Put it down.

“It was fine, Ella. I’ll talk to you later.”

I hung up and stared at the wall and thought: extraordinary was not the word I would use. Extraordinary was too small. I didn’t have the right word yet.

I went back to work.

The bar on Fountain was smaller than the one from the first night – neighbourhood place, no exposed brick, no drinks with names. Just a bar that had been there long enough to stop trying to be anything other than what it was.

Nicko was already there when I arrived.

Of course he was.

He was at a corner table with two beers already on it and he looked up when I walked in the way he’d looked up at the other bar – like he’d known I was coming before I came through the door. He stood when I reached the table, which I hadn’t expected, and I felt that small thing land somewhere before I could decide not to let it.

“You’re early,” I said.

“You’re on time,” he said. “Sit down.”

I sat.

He sat.

We drank our beers and I waited for it to be strange – the morning-after awkwardness, the recalibration of two people who had been naked together and were now in public in their clothes. It didn’t come. He was exactly the same as he’d been in the hotel room in the parts between the sex – settled, unhurried, looking at me like I was specifically what he was here for.

“How was your day?” he asked.

I looked at him. “Really?”

“Really,” he said.

“Fine. Managed other people’s problems. You?”

“Good. Finished a custom job I’ve been working on for two weeks.” He drank his beer. “Took longer than it should have.”

“Why?”

“Client kept changing his mind.” A pause. “Some people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

He said it without looking at me. I felt it anyway.

“And when you show them?” I asked.

“They know,” he said. “Every time.”

I picked up my beer.

We talked for two hours.

Not about the hotel room – not directly, not explicitly. About the city, about work, about the specific exhaustion of managing things that weren’t yours to manage. He was different here than I’d expected – quieter than the hotel room, obviously, but not closed. He listened in the specific way that meant he was actually hearing what you said and filing it, not just waiting for his turn. He asked questions that proved he’d heard the previous answer.

He didn’t tell me much about himself. Not evasively – just economically. The car business, that he’d started it six years ago, that he liked working with his hands. That was it. I didn’t push. I noted that I didn’t push and chose not to examine why.

By the time we’d finished the second beer the bar had filled around us and the night had settled into itself and I was aware that we’d been here two hours and neither of us had mentioned leaving.

He looked at me.

“Walk you out?” he asked.

We walked.

The night was warm the way LA nights were warm – soft, slightly sweet, the city doing its slow exhale after the day. He walked beside me and didn’t take my hand and didn’t try to steer me anywhere and I noticed the absence of that and found it, inexplicably, more interesting than the presence of it would have been.

We reached my building.

I stopped.

He stopped.

We stood on the pavement and I thought: invite him up, Robin. And then I thought: don’t. And then I thought about the ceiling and the voice and the sound I hadn’t recognised and –

He kissed me.

One hand on my jaw. His mouth on mine – slow, unhurried, specific. Not asking where it was going. Just the kiss itself, complete, and then he pulled back and looked at me with those grey eyes in the dark.

“Go inside,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Go inside.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Not tonight.”

I stood on my own pavement being told to go inside by a man who had spent the previous night doing things to me that I was still thinking about and who was now, apparently, choosing not to.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“You already called me.”

“I’ll call you again.” He looked at me steadily. “Go inside, Robin.”

I looked at him for a long moment. The jaw, the grey eyes, the complete absence of any indication that he was anything other than certain.

“Fine,” I said.

I went inside.

I stood in my lobby and listened to the door close behind me and thought: what the fuck is this man doing.

I took the elevator up.

I stood in my apartment in the dark for a full minute before I turned the lights on.

Then I sat on the couch and stared at the wall and thought about a man who kissed me on my own pavement and told me to go inside and meant it, and I thought about the hotel room and the four days and I’d like to see you again and the two beers and the way he’d said some people don’t know what they want until you show it to them without looking at me.

I thought: I know what I want.

I thought: I have always known what I want.

I thought: why haven’t I ever said it.

My phone buzzed.

Sleep well, he’d sent.

I put the phone down.

Picked it up.

Put it down.

→ I slept badly and well simultaneously, which shouldn’t be possible and was.