The Kitchen Light

Delilah put the onions on the kitchen table and kissed Ash before he could ask where she kept the knives.

He set down his bag carefully. That small effort, made while her hands were already inside the open edges of his coat, pleased her so much she smiled against his mouth.

“There are tomatoes in there,” he said.

“In a tin.”

“I was trying to be responsible.”

“You’ve done it. You can stop now.”

He drew her closer. The hallway had been cold; here the heat was coming on beneath the window, making the room smell faintly of warm dust and the basil she had failed to keep alive. His hand settled between her shoulders. She felt the quiet pressure of it through her jumper, then the way he loosened his hold when she moved. She moved nearer.

For days she had been admitting what she wanted in portions she could explain afterwards. A walk. A kiss. Another evening. Alone with him in her own kitchen, she found she was tired of accounting for the size of her appetite. She kissed him slowly enough to feel him cease being careful about everything except her.

When they parted he looked past her at the cooker.

“We haven’t turned anything on,” she said.

“I was checking.”

“Very wise.”

She took his coat and hung it beside hers. There was something startling about the two of them on the hooks, his hem below the familiar blue wool. She left them there without straightening them.

Ash washed his hands and accepted a chopping board. Delilah showed him the cupboard trick: the drawer closed with her hip, the door opened, two plates emerged without either piece of furniture falling off. He watched with the grave attention she had seen him give an unsupported claim.

“You may admire it,” she said. “You may not improve it tonight.”

“I was admiring you.”

She turned, plates in her hands. He was not smiling to make the answer smaller. It took her a moment to put them down.

They cooked with the radio low. Ash cut the onions more finely than she would have; she let him. He asked how she wanted the aubergine and accepted not raw as sufficient direction. While it softened in the pan, she found a jar of smoked paprika behind three unopened packets of cumin.

“I keep thinking I need cumin,” she said.

“Do you?”

“Apparently I need the idea of a well-stocked cupboard.”

He took the jar from her and loosened its lid. “That should last you.”

The ordinary jokes made room for a different nervousness. He knew where she lived now. He had seen the pile of post she had moved from one chair to another instead of opening, the plant, the tea she had bought before their first café evening. It stood on the shelf above him. She watched him notice it and choose to look at her instead.

“Yes,” she said. “That tea.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“I can tell.”

He rested one hand on the counter. “Are you sorry you told me?”

“No. I’m sorry about the evening. I like knowing you know I wanted it.”

His face softened. She had once thought the calm was the whole of him. She preferred this: wanting made visible, with no useful task to hide behind.

“I still have the mints,” he said.

“How many?”

“Enough to make another invitation worthwhile.”

She laughed and stirred the pan before it caught. They managed dinner. It was better than her ambitions for it, and the bread found work collecting the last of the sauce. Ash sat in the chair she usually used because she had put his plate there; Delilah sat opposite and discovered she liked seeing her kitchen from another place.

For a while they talked about books. He asked which bookmark was winning. She brought the book from the bedroom to show him and found, to her embarrassment, that two marked pages she had only meant to reread. The third was a dry-cleaning receipt.

“It may not have voting rights,” Ash said.

“It’s been here longest.”

He opened the book at the receipt and read a paragraph to himself. “Is this good?”

“I don’t know yet. I keep putting it down.”

“You could dislike it.”

Delilah looked at the substantial distance between the receipt and the final page. “I could.”

She put it on the shelf instead of taking it back to the bedroom. A small surrender. Nobody’s money depended on whether she reached the ending. She had spent too long making even her leisure something to be completed before she deserved the next thing.

They washed up together because neither wanted to sit alone while the other did it. His forearm touched hers as he passed a plate. She caught his wrist before he could take another.

“Leave those.”

He put down the towel. She dried her own hands slowly, feeling the way he watched her. There was time now, and no reason to fill all of it with words.

In the sitting room she switched on the lamp beside the sofa. Ash sat where she indicated, then smiled when she sat close enough that there was no point in the rest of the cushions. She took his hand and rested it at her waist.

“This is what I meant by staying,” she said.

“Good.”

The relief in that single word made her brave. She kissed the side of his neck, just above the badly mended collar. His breath caught. She had wanted to know what happened when his composure failed; she liked being the person he allowed to see it.

He turned to meet her. His kiss was more searching now, still giving her room to answer, and she answered by drawing him toward her until her back met the cushion. One of her earrings caught in his collar. She said, “Wait,” and he stopped so completely that she laughed.

“The earring. I appear to have attached myself.”

“I wasn’t going to complain.”

“You would when I stood up.”

He held still while she freed the small hook. She removed both earrings and put them on the lamp table. When she looked back he was smiling, his hair disturbed where her fingers had been. She wanted this man in her room with that expression more fiercely than she had wanted any polished version of an evening.

“Come back,” she said.

He did. She let her eyes close beneath his kiss, then opened them because she wanted to watch him discover how little composure she had left. His thumb moved along her jaw. She could feel the warmth of his palm at her waist and the firmer warmth of his body beside hers. Neither sensation was a promise she had to fulfil. That knowledge let her want more.

“I’d like you to spend the night,” she said. “In my bed.”

Ash brushed a strand of hair away from her mouth. “I’d like that too.”

“Not because it got late.”

“It isn’t late.”

She looked at the clock and laughed. He kissed her while she was still smiling. The answer had been plain enough; she let herself believe it.

She led him through the short hallway with their fingers linked. In the bedroom the curtains had not been drawn. Across the street a lit window framed somebody watering a plant. Delilah closed the curtains and turned back. Ash was waiting beside the bed, and the tenderness of finding him there nearly made her retreat into a joke.

Instead she went to him and began undoing the buttons of his shirt. He watched her hands, then her face, as though both were worth his whole attention. She felt his answering touch at the edge of her jumper and raised her arms to help him lift it away.

“Cold?” he asked when she shivered.

“No.” She pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “Not cold.”

He understood her then. She heard it in the way he said her name, without a question or a sentence waiting behind it. She could have lived for some time on the pleasure of that sound.

They left the lamp on. When she pulled him down beside her, the bed shifted under their unfamiliar shared weight and they laughed again, more quietly. His mouth found the place beneath her ear that made her fingers tighten at his back. He paused there, learning the answer she gave, and she turned her face into his hair because she could not keep looking at him and remain as composed as she had imagined herself being.

“Slower,” she murmured.

He slowed. The difference reached her at once: room to breathe, to move toward him instead of feeling overtaken by her own wanting. She stroked his cheek until he looked up.

“There,” she said. “Stay with me like that.”

His eyes held hers. “I’m here.”

She had received more eloquent assurances in her life. None had been so easy to test. His weight settled where she welcomed it; his attention stayed with the movement of her hands, the quiet words she found when she needed them. She could ask. He could answer. Wanting him did not make her disappear from what happened next.

As the night deepened, she stopped trying to observe herself being brave. There was his warm skin beneath her cheek, her own laughter arriving at an unexpected moment, his breath unsteady when she brought him close. She let pleasure be pleasure, without drafting the version she would tell herself in the morning. Later, when the room was quiet again, she lay with her hand open over his heart and listened until its hurried beat became ordinary.

“You haven’t said anything for a while,” he murmured.

“I know. I thought you might enjoy it.”

His laugh moved beneath her palm. “I was enjoying you being here.”

“It’s my bed.”

“Then I’ve phrased that badly.”

She lifted her head and kissed him. His face was unguarded in the lamplight, the lines beside his eyes deeper when he smiled. There was nothing she wanted to inspect in it. She wanted to remember.

After a while she got up for water. In the kitchen the plates stood drying beside the pan they had abandoned. His coat still hung over hers. She filled two glasses and found she was smiling at objects again, ridiculous with relief that happiness had not required a more impressive room.

When she came back, Ash had turned down the lamp rather than turning it off. He took the glass and made space for her. She settled with her back against his chest, his arm resting around her only after she drew it there.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I have no useful plan for you.”

“Excellent.”

“There may be toast.”

“That’s quite a useful plan.”

She touched the back of his hand with her mouth. He held her a little closer, and she let the room become dark when she was ready.

In the morning they would still have separate work and separate things they could not tell each other. Tonight neither had mistaken a bed for access. Delilah fell asleep with nothing being asked of her except the space she had already, gladly made.