An Unbooked Sunday

I arrived at Gethin’s on Sunday with a change of clothes and a bag of oranges. The clothes were an honest declaration. The oranges required explanation.

“I passed a shop,” I said.

He took one look at the bag and laughed. “It’s difficult, isn’t it?”

“I wanted an orange. You may have one if your behaviour merits it.”

“Come in. I’ll do my best.”

He kissed me in the doorway, one hand on the strap at my shoulder. I let the bag slide down my arm until he caught it, then kissed him properly. We had seen each other on Thursday and Friday. Saturday had seemed unnecessarily long.

Inside, his coat was on a kitchen chair and the blue plate from the market was on the table with a heel of bread on it. No elaborate lunch had been prepared. I liked this until I realised how hungry I was.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

“Not enough.”

“Eggs?”

“Many.”

He put a pan on. I sat down, taking the coat from the chair and hanging it on the back. This was somebody else’s ordinary untidiness. I could move one thing to sit without beginning a campaign.

“You’re sure you aren’t needed tonight?” I asked.

“I’m not on the rota. I told them I wouldn’t be there.”

“Did they ask why?”

“Yes. I said I had plans with you.”

I peeled an orange in one long strip and tried to appear less pleased than I was.

“What plans?”

“I didn’t issue an agenda.”

“Reckless.”

He turned from the cooker, smiling. “Extremely.”

We ate eggs and toast at nearly noon. I gave him half my orange because I liked sharing it, not because he had done anything to qualify. Juice ran over his knuckles. He caught it with the tea towel, and I laughed at the expression with which he regarded the stain.

“I was going to use that for the plates.”

“You own another.”

“I was hoping to remain a man who owns a clean one.”

I got up and found a cloth. He accepted it without making my small usefulness mean I had failed to enjoy myself.

We took a walk afterwards because the afternoon was bright. In the park the benches were damp on one side and dry on the other. We sat at the dry end of the same bench, closer than its condition required.

He asked about my evening with Fenna. I told him I had agreed to bring a division of the Friday work to the committee and would keep one welcome shift a month. I did not tell him what she had said about having more time without him.

“Do you want to leave the committee?” he asked.

“I think so. I haven’t said it to them yet.”

“Because of Friday?”

“Partly. Because I’m already planning how to make them choose what I want so I can stop doing it.”

He looked at me. I could see him resisting a smile.

“You can laugh.”

“I recognise the method.”

“Do you miss being in charge when you’re not there?”

“Sometimes I turn up anyway. To see how it’s going. Then I see something going differently and interfere.”

“So we could be at either hall tonight, improving the evening.”

“We could.”

I put my head against his shoulder. “That sounds exhausting.”

His cheek rested against my hair. We sat while a dog tried to carry a branch through a space too narrow for it. Its owner waited, wisely withholding advice. Eventually the dog changed its angle and ran ahead in triumph.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I hadn’t said anything.”

“You were about to be relevant.”

He laughed into my hair. I lifted my head to kiss him and found him already turning towards me.

· · ·Scene break

At his flat he went to put on the kettle. I caught his hand before he reached the kitchen.

“Tea later.”

He looked at me, then at the bag I had left by the door. The look made warmth spread beneath my collar.

“Come here, then,” he said.

I went into his arms. There was no need to make the greeting tentative now, no need to disguise the way I had been waiting for the door to close. I slid my hand beneath his open cardigan and felt him draw breath when my palm settled against the thin cotton of his shirt.

He kissed me deeply, then more slowly when I held his face. I liked the roughness of his jaw beneath my fingers and the slight catch in his breathing when I lingered at the corner of his mouth. I could hear how much he wanted me. It freed something in me to hear it without having to guess.

“I thought about you yesterday,” I told him.

“I hoped you might.”

“I had things to do. You were distracting.”

“From here?”

“Very accomplished of you.”

His smile pressed against my cheek. He kissed the place below my ear, and my next joke became an unsteady breath.

“Like that?”

“Yes. Like that.”

He stayed there for a moment, his mouth warm against my skin, one hand firm at my back. I let my head tip towards him. The hall, the programme box, the conversations I still needed to have all existed somewhere outside the circle of his arms. I did not have to settle them before I could want this.

I took his cardigan by its edges and eased it off his shoulders. It caught on one elbow. He laughed, freed himself and dropped it onto a chair.

“Your turn to leave something lying about,” I said.

“I’m trying to be hospitable.”

I kissed him before he could improve the answer.

In the bedroom the afternoon light fell across a crooked corner of the blanket. I stopped beside the bed and pulled him towards me. He came readily, his forehead resting against mine as I opened the buttons of my own blouse. His hands stayed at my waist until I laid one against my bare back and drew nearer.

For a moment neither of us moved. Being wanted had become familiar; being able to show how much I wanted him still felt daring. I let him see it.

“I don’t want to hurry,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I want less.”

“I heard you.”

He sat and drew me down beside him. We kissed until the light had moved across the blanket and I had stopped noticing it. His mouth travelled along my shoulder, unhurried, and I closed my eyes, then opened them again because I wanted to see his face when he looked up.

He was smiling, a little dazed.

“What?” I asked.

“You keep looking as if you’re about to tell me something.”

“I am. Then you do that, and I forget.”

“Shall I stop?”

“No. I’ll tell you afterwards.”

He kissed me again, and I pulled him closer. There were pauses, changes of mind about the pillows, a draught I wanted shut out before I could stop thinking about it. He closed the window and came back to me. I made room, my hand waiting for his.

We found a pace together. When I needed a moment I said so, and he lay close without demanding that the pause end. When he drew me nearer later, I went willingly, feeling the small shiver that passed through him at my answering touch. His pleasure in being held made me braver about my own. I could ask for tenderness without hiding the force of my wanting; I could give him both.

The private part of the afternoon belonged to us.

Afterwards he lay with his face turned towards mine, one arm beneath the pillow. The room had cooled. I drew the blanket over his shoulder before pulling it up over my own.

“What were you going to tell me?” he asked.

I could remember now. That did not make saying it easier.

“I’ve fallen in love with you.”

He went very still. I watched his eyes, refusing the temptation to add a joke that would give him somewhere easier to look.

“Not because of the apology,” I said. “Or tonight, or any one thing you’ve got right. I love being here with you when we haven’t rehearsed what to say.”

He reached for my hand under the blanket and held it against his chest.

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve been wondering how to tell you without sounding as if I wanted credit for Wednesday.”

“That would have been a terrible speech.”

“I know. I kept not making it.”

I laughed, and then my eyes filled for a reason I did not wish to investigate immediately. He kissed the wet place beside one eye and stopped to look at me again.

“I want to keep doing this,” he said. “The days, as well.”

“So do I.”

He did not promise never to disappoint me. I did not need him to turn this into a set of assurances we could not possibly honour. His thumb moved across the back of my hand, and he looked as though he would have been content to go on looking at me until evening.

After a while my stomach made a noise that deserved neither affection nor ceremony.

“The days include feeding you,” he said.

“You see the difficulty.”

He kissed me once more before getting up.

· · ·Scene break

We made supper from what was in his refrigerator, which required a change of plan when the potatoes turned out to be an onion in a paper bag. I put on my own soft trousers from the overnight bag and one of his shirts because he offered it and I liked the way he looked at me wearing it.

At the kitchen table he reached for his phone when it lit. The Sunday music volunteer wanted to know where a recording was saved. Gethin typed the folder name, then put the phone on the counter.

“Will they find it?” I asked.

“Probably. There’s another track if they don’t.”

We ate. He told me about the bus route he’d loved as a boy, then about the very adult pleasure of discovering that he preferred planning shifts to driving them. The story wasn’t a confession or an explanation of a fault. It was something I hadn’t known, offered because we had time.

I told him I hated the smell of certain glossy inks but loved lifting a finished stack and feeling all its edges agree. He asked whether I ever made things for myself.

“Not often.”

“Would you like to?”

“Yes. I think I would.”

We washed up and watched a programme neither of us followed closely. At half past ten he asked if I was staying for breakfast.

“The bag was intended to suggest it.”

“I thought I’d ask you yourself.”

I remembered the fundraiser, the word that had reached me when the dance still seemed an unlikely pleasure. I turned off the television.

“Yes. And come to mine on Wednesday. For the night, if you want. Bring whatever you need. You don’t have to bring something for me.”

He took my hand.

“I’d like that.”

In the morning I ate toast from the blue plate. It did not match his mug. I found I liked that very much.