CHAPTER 9: Outside

It was his idea.

She was on the sofa on a Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled and the particular restlessness that came from having nowhere to be and too much to think about, and he came out of his room in a jacket and looked at her and said come on like it was already decided.

“Where?” she said.

“Out.”

She looked up from her book. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s enough of one.” He picked up his keys. “You’ve been in this apartment for two weeks. You need air.”

“I get air.”

“Walking to the kitchen doesn’t count.” She looked at him for a moment. He looked back, patient and certain, jacket on, keys in hand, already decided. She had learned by now that this particular version of him — calm, immovable, quietly certain — was not something she was going to talk her way around.

She put her book down.

“Give me ten minutes,” she said.

“You’ve got five,” he said, and she threw a cushion at him on the way to the bedroom.

He took her to an arcade in Shoreditch.

She stood outside it for a moment and looked at the sign — neon lights, the sound of machines bleeding through the door, a queue of twenty-somethings waiting to get in on a Saturday afternoon — and then looked at him.

“An arcade,” she said.

“An arcade,” he confirmed.

“You brought me to an arcade.”

“I brought you somewhere you’ve never been.” He held the door open. “That was the requirement.” She walked in.

It was loud and bright and smelled like popcorn and something electrical and she immediately felt slightly overwhelmed and then, within about ninety seconds, completely at home. There was something about the noise that worked — it filled up all the space in her head that she usually kept very carefully managed and left her with nothing to do but be where she was.

She found a racing game in the corner and sat down.

Damien stood behind her with his arms folded and watched her figure out the controls. She came last in the first race. Second in the second. First in the third.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m a fast learner,” she said.

“Clearly.”

He sat down at the machine beside her and she beat him twice before he got his first win and the look on his face when he finally crossed the line first was so genuinely delighted that she laughed — the real laugh, the loud one, the one she had forgotten lived in her — and he turned and looked at her like that laugh was the most interesting thing he had seen all day.

“What?” she said, still smiling.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just — nothing.” He turned back to the screen but she saw the corner of his mouth pull up and she felt it somewhere behind her sternum and told herself it was the sugar from the Coke she had been drinking.

It was not the sugar.

They stayed for two hours.

She won more than he did overall, which she was gracious about — meaning she mentioned it four times in the first hour and then let it go. He was better at the shooting games, which she found irritating until she beat him at one of those too and then she found it very satisfying indeed.

At some point they ended up side by side at a two-player machine, shoulders touching, and neither of them moved apart. She was aware of him the whole time — the warmth of his arm against hers, the way he laughed quietly at his own bad plays, the ease of him in a way she had only seen in the apartment before, private and unperformative. Out here in the world he was the same. He did not have a public version and a private version. He was just himself, everywhere, all the time.

She found that quietly extraordinary.

At seven he said hungry? and she said yes and they got food from a place down the street — small, loud, mismatched furniture, the kind of restaurant that does not take reservations and has three things on the menu and all three are perfect. They sat across from each other at a table by the window and ate and talked and she told him about a client she was working with — not the details, just the shape of it, the particular kind of stuck that some people find themselves in — and he listened properly and asked a question that was more perceptive than she expected and she looked at him across the table and felt something shift.

Not new. The thing that had been shifting for weeks. Just — further along than it had been this morning.

She looked at her food.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said, meaning the same thing he had meant earlier.

He smiled. Ate his food. Let it be.

The cinema was his idea too.

They walked past it on the way back — independent, small, the kind of place with a handwritten board outside — and he slowed down and she slowed down without meaning to and they both looked at the listing for the nine o’clock showing without speaking.

“We could,” he said.

“It starts in twenty minutes,” she said.

“So.”

She looked at him. He looked at the board.

“I don’t even know what it is,” she said.

“Does it matter?”

She thought about it. About the evening — the arcade and the food and the table by the window and the way he had listened and the question that was too perceptive and the shift that had gone further than it was this morning.

“No,” she said. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

They were the only two people in their row.

The film was something European, subtitled, the kind of thing she might have chosen herself on a different evening — quiet and slow and beautifully lit. She was watching it properly for the first twenty minutes, genuinely absorbed, and then his hand found hers in the dark and she stopped watching it properly.

Not because of the hand. The hand was simple — warm, easy, his fingers through hers like it was something they had been doing for years. It was what came after.

She closed the last bit of distance.

What followed was not something she would have predicted from herself in a cinema on a Saturday night and she found she did not care even slightly. Their kiss started slow and deep, growing hotter and more urgent within seconds. Damien’s hand slid under her shirt, cupping her breast and teasing her nipple until she was biting back a moan. She reached down and palmed the hard length of him through his jeans, stroking him until he was breathing raggedly against her mouth.

He quietly unzipped his jeans. Olivia shifted in her seat, pulling her skirt up and her underwear to the side. She straddled his lap in the dark, facing him, the film’s subtitles flickering across their skin. She sank down onto him slowly, taking every thick inch until he was buried deep inside her. The feeling of him stretching her made her gasp softly.

Damien gripped her hips, guiding her as she began to ride him. They moved together in a slow, controlled rhythm at first, trying to stay quiet. The risk of being caught only made it more intense. Soon her movements grew faster, more desperate. He thrust up to meet her, one hand on her ass, the other tangled in her hair as he kissed her to muffle their moans.

Olivia came first, clenching hard around him, her face buried in his neck to stay silent. Damien followed moments later, gripping her tightly as he spilled deep inside her with a low, barely contained groan.

They stayed like that for a long moment, breathing each other in, before she carefully climbed off him and they both adjusted their clothes.

At some point someone a few rows back coughed and she pulled back slightly and looked at him and he was looking at her with those dark eyes and that quiet expression and she felt the full weight of the evening all at once — the arcade and the food and the cinema and the hand and this — all of it adding up to something she did not have a clinical term for.

She did not need one.

She turned back to the screen.

His hand found hers again in the dark.

She let it stay there for the rest of the film.

They walked home at midnight through streets that were still going — London never fully stopping, always someone somewhere with somewhere to be. He walked close enough that their arms touched.

She did not move away.

At the building he held the door and she went in and they took the lift up in silence that was full without being heavy, the kind of quiet that comes after a day that has done what a day was supposed to do.

On their floor she stopped outside her own door out of habit — the first time in weeks she had done that — and looked at it for a moment.

Then she looked at him.

He was watching her with that patient expression, keys in his hand, not saying anything, not making it into a decision she had not already made.

She left her door where it was. She followed him into his apartment and the door clicked shut behind them and the city hummed on outside and that was the end of their first day out in the world together — quiet and ordinary and one of the best days she had had in longer than she could remember.

She did not manage that thought.

She just let it be true.

End of chapter 9