Chapter 184 About a Flat IV

At 9 o’clock that night, at Pembury, with the window up and the bus going past under it and the new kettle cooling on the side, Danny sat on the end of the mattress with the phone in his hand. Jodie sat beside him with her shoulder against his, the way he’d said she would on the river wall.

He typed.

Confirm.

[ Confirmed. ] [ The location is issued at 09:30 on the day. ]

Jodie read it twice.

"Right," she said. "That’s done, then." She got up, walked to the window and back, and sat down again. "I’ve texted Marie I’m not in tomorrow. She says I owe her a Saturday. I don’t care. My phone’s charging and so’s the spare, and your mum’s page is in my bag with a pen clipped to it, and your helmet’s by the door. And I’ve not finished.

"Priya. You ring Priya at 8 and tell her it’s 10 till 2, and she does what she did last time, only at half past 2. Police, then Lorraine. And Hale’s going back to that house on Monday. If he goes in the morning, he’s in Kensington knocking on an empty door while you’re somewhere else, and that’s what they want, isn’t it? So you text him the address at 9:31 the second you’ve got it. He’s a policeman. Let him come and stand on the pavement with me."

He thought about it.

She’s right again. If they want me alone, the cheapest thing I’ve got is a policeman who already knows the name.

"Hale gets the address at 9:31, same as you. Priya gets the times at 8." He laid the phone on the floorboards, screen down. "And at 2 I sign your page, and at 5 past I ring my mum in the sluice."

Jodie looked at the face-down phone, and then at him.

"I’m still angry," she said. "I’m angry at all of it, and I don’t know where to put it."

"Come here. Lie down with me."

She lay down facing him on the mattress, on her side, with her head on the pillow, still in the green dress, and he lay down facing her an inch away. The window was open and the cold came across both of them. A bus went by below and threw a slab of light over the ceiling and took it away again.

"I want to watch you," he said. "The whole time. And I want you to watch me."

I put my hand on her knee and moved it up under the hem of the dress, slowly, up the inside of her thigh, and she let me, and kept her eyes open on mine. She’d nothing on under it. She’d sat at my mother’s Formica all afternoon eating dumplings with nothing on under it.

"You were like this at my mum’s," I said.

"I was like this on the river wall yesterday and all." She bit her lip. "You never noticed."

I found her with my fingers. She was wet already, warm and slippery, and when I ran 2 fingers up through her and over her clit she breathed in sharp through her nose. Her eyes went half shut and then opened again, on purpose, on me.

"Eyes on me," I said. "You promised."

"I never promised. You told me."

Her hand came down between us and got my jeans open, button and zip, and pushed inside, and wrapped round my cock. I was hard in her hand before she’d squeezed once. She stroked me slow, the way I was stroking her, matching me, root to tip and back, watching my face to see what each stroke did to it.

We lay like that with our foreheads nearly touching, our hands moving on each other, and talked. Low. Stupid things.

"You’re shaking," she said.

"I took 2 screws out of that window yesterday morning, and I’m regretting it."

"Liar." She ran her thumb over the head of my cock where it was wet, and I jerked in her hand, and she smiled close up, pleased with herself. "That’s me doing that."

I pulled the front of the dress down off one shoulder, and her tit came out into the cold, and her nipple went tight straight away. I put my mouth on it and sucked, and she gasped my name, and her hand on my cock went faster and lost its rhythm and found it again.

"Up here," she said. "You wanted to watch. So watch."

I looked up at her with my mouth on her. She’d gone red down the throat and into the neckline of the dress. Her hair was across the pillow and stuck to her cheek. I pushed 2 fingers up inside her pussy and curled them, and pressed my thumb on her clit and held it there, and her mouth opened and nothing came out of it.

"There," she managed. "Danny. There. Don’t move it. Don’t..."

So I left my thumb on her and let my fingers do the work, slow, and watched her come apart an inch from my face. Her eyes stayed open nearly to the end. Then they shut and her whole body went tight against me, and her cunt clenched round my fingers in hard grabbing squeezes, and she pushed her forehead into mine and moaned into my open mouth, low and long, with her nails in my shoulder.

Her hand had stopped on my cock. She got it going again before she’d finished shaking.

"Your turn," she said, breathless. "Eyes open. I want to see it."

She hooked her leg over my hip, and I got my hand round under her and took a handful of her arse, and she pulled me in by the cock and fitted me to her, and I slid into her side on, face to face, all the way, with her leg still over me. We barely moved. It was all small rocking pushes, her calf hooked over my hip to keep me in, our mouths open on each other’s and not kissing.

"Fuck, Jodie. I’m not going to last."

"Then don’t. Eyes open."

Her pupils had gone huge and black in the light off the street. She reached down between us and cupped my balls in her palm and squeezed, gently, and I came inside her with my eyes open on hers, shuddering, her hand still on me, and she held my jaw with her other hand and watched me the whole way through it.

Afterwards we lay there still joined, side on, with the cold coming over us from the window and neither of us bothering to pull the duvet up.

She put her mouth against my neck.

"It’s not gone," she said. "The angry."

"Keep it. Bring it on the Vespa at half 9 and stand on that pavement with it, where I can see you."

She bit my collarbone hard enough to leave her teeth in it, and pulled the duvet over both of us at last.

At 10 to midnight Danny got up for a glass of water. 2 litres, he thought, and nearly laughed.

He stood at the window in his boxers drinking it, with the cold on his chest. Jodie was asleep behind him on her front with the green dress rucked up round her waist and one arm hanging off the mattress.

The street below was empty and wet. The Turkish shop had its shutter down and the fridge light still on inside.

There was a car parked across the road under the lamp. A long black car with its engine running, the exhaust going up white into the cold, and the light on inside it.

There was a woman in the back seat, with dark hair cut level with her jawline and a grey coat, and her face turned up to the top flat at the end, his window, as if she’d known which one it was before she ever got there.

Danny’s hand found the sill. The glass knocked the blue cup the nurse’s lad had left behind, and he caught it before it went.

In the back of the car, under the little yellow light, the woman lifted her hand to him and laid it flat against the glass.