I did it. We’ve done it.

I woke up late this morning, when I heard Red moving around in the bathroom. I still had all my clothes on, and my face felt tight, as if it had shrunken in the night, my bones straining to be out. I could hear the high-pitched hollow back-and-forth of a toothbrush and went in to stand next to him and do the same. We looked at each other as if we’d had an argument. And when he’d gargled and spat, he said, ‘I take you back to bed now’. He picked me up and folded me in two, so my bottom hung down between his two arms, and carried me through and dumped me onto the bed. He made a gesture with his hand out flat, his palm pushing towards me, his face stern. Stay there.

He put a CD on, one that I’ve played for him before, a band called Insides. The music is sparse and electronic, short bursts of notes repeat like birdsong. The drums pull my heartbeat towards them. The singer’s voice is rich, breathy. I closed my eyes to wait for the first few words she sings. “Thanks for waiting. I’ll start now.” I know the insides of these songs — I have heard them over and over, paying attention to the different layers, different melodies, different beats. The way I know photographs. And I felt Red’s lips on the tip of my nose, then moving across my cheek in a string of tiny kisses, and down to my earlobe, which he took gently in his mouth and sucked. I suddenly wanted him inside me. I kept my eyes shut. And all of a sudden we were pushing against each other hard, the whole lengths of us; there was an urgency, a violence. Red stopped, and when I opened my eyes, he’d pushed his arms out straight and was looking at me. He said, ‘It is OK today? You are ready?’ and I nodded, grabbing him by his T-shirt and pulling him back towards me.

It hurt. It’s been a long time since anyone has been that far inside me. It got easier towards the end, but I was glad it was quick. I liked afterwards best, when he caught his breath and I watched his face above me, his eyes still screwed shut. And then he opened his eyes and looked straight into me and cocked his head onto one side. He smiled at me with his eyes, kissed me on the lips, gently, and lay down on top of me. I loved the weight of him, crushing the breath out of me, squashing me. I wanted to keep him there forever, joined to me, quiet, spent.

We ate toast in bed, from plates balanced on the duvet. He was still naked and I’d put a T-shirt on, shy. The things we needed to say were still hanging above us, like a balloon full of water, but that was OK. And when we’d eaten, I reached out for him again, ran my fingers up his thighs, nuzzled my head into his neck, feeling the heat of him against me, spreading inside me, melting me. And we made love again (made love… had sex… fucked… nothing sounds right) and this time was better; he was slower, paid more attention to me — I got what I needed. Something shifted inside me, low creaking shudders, deep ice on a lake. He said to me afterwards that now it had happened, I was more beautiful than I had been before, and that he wanted to paint me right away. He joked about me getting my clothes on and hurrying to his studio. He said my face had ‘become new’.

He had to go to a sitting but he was worried about me again and said he wouldn’t leave me until I called Zoë or Abbie and asked someone round to keep me company. He said he’d be back later to stay the night. I called Zoë, and he took the phone from me when I was speaking to her and said to her that I was feeling down and that she had to look after me. He waited until she got here and spoke to her out in the corridor. I was in the bath and could hear their low murmuring. I was reluctant to wash so much of Red away. I felt a little better afterwards. Like the end of the flu when you get out of bed and eat something, feeling shaky, thinking about going out into the world again. I wondered if Zoë would guess what had happened with Red. They always make a joke of it on TV — people always get caught out by their colleagues the morning after. But she didn’t notice, so I had to tell her — we giggled about it all afternoon, talking about sex, sometimes embarrassing ourselves at the intimate things we were telling each other. Then Red came back and Zoë left, and we still didn’t talk about what had happened. We stayed up late and watched an old film. One part of me enjoyed watching the film with Red. Another part of me watched this part and knew it wasn’t the whole story. Waited. Bided its time.

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