Dripping in the Dust
by alexis_ravenabout 2 hours ago
•long read•intense intensityThe kitchen tap had a drip I'd been meaning to fix for three months, which was ironic, given that the entire reason I'd bought this mausoleum of a house was because I was supposedly good with my hands. Two years of renovating an old lady's 1980s dream—sunken lounge, too many mirrors, a jacuzzi bathroom I'd ripped out on principle—and the one room I'd finished properly was the kitchen. Grey stone, black taps, a fridge that could survive a nuclear winter. Everything else was dust sheets and good intentions.
I was standing in that kitchen, tea going cold, when my phone buzzed on the counter.
*I will be there in 10 minutes. Absolutely dripping and want you to do filthy things to me.*
I read it twice. Then I put the phone down, picked it up, and read it a third time, because apparently forty-three years old and a decade and a half in Formula One hadn't taught me how to handle a sentence like that from Becky.
Week four. Four weeks since the whole stupid, glorious dam had broken, and I still hadn't got used to it. Thirteen years I'd known you. Thirteen years of being Uncle Luke to your daughter, of Sunday roasts at yours, of Tom—your husband, my best friend, my head of aero—handing me a beer and telling me I needed to find a woman of my own. And I'd nod and say something dry about how the only thing that had ever loved me back was my car, and you'd laugh from across the room with that smile that did criminal things to me, and I'd go home to my dusty house and think about you in ways a man shouldn't think about his best mate's wife.
I'd fallen for you in 2012, at the end-of-season party. You'd worn a green dress and spent the whole evening taking the piss out of my height, asking if the team had to custom-build my office chair, whether I had to duck through doorways on planes. Tom had apologised for you and I'd told him, honestly, not to bother, because no one had taken the piss out of me that well in my life. That was it. Done. Fifteen years of friendship built on top of a feeling I'd never let show.
And then, a month ago, everything changed.
It hadn't been one moment. It had been a slow, cruel accumulation, and I want you to know I fought it, because I adored Tom, I still adore Tom, and I'm not a man who takes things that belong to his friends.
But you didn't make it easy.
---
There was the barbecue in July. Tom's fortieth-ish excuse for one, the whole garage crew there. I'd been put on burger duty because at six foot seven I was apparently the only one who could see when the fat was catching. You'd come out in denim shorts and a white top and I'd done the decent thing, which was look at the sausages. Then you'd come stand next to me, hip against the railing, and said, "Luke, you're burning the left side," and I'd looked down at you and you'd looked up at me with a smile that was about twenty percent innocent, and I'd felt something in my chest downshift.
"Thanks. You want to take over?"
"Absolutely not. I just like watching a big man struggle."
"Everyone's a critic." I'd flipped the burgers. "Your husband's a lucky man."
"Yeah," you'd said, and there'd been a pause just long enough to be a problem. "He is."
You'd gone back inside and I'd stood there with a spatula and a heartbeat I could hear.
Then there was the weekend Tom was in Bahrain and you texted me about a leaking washing machine, of all things, and I came over like a mate, like a plumber, like an idiot. You'd made me coffee. We'd sat in your kitchen and talked for three hours about nothing—your job, my car, whether my house would ever be finished—and at some point your foot had brushed mine under the table and neither of us moved it. We both pretended not to notice. I drove home doing a hundred and ten on the motorway and it didn't help.
And then the third thing. The unforgivable, wonderful third thing. Your daughter's birthday party in September—a bouncy castle in the garden, a dozen screaming kids, me being Uncle Luke, being good, being safe. And you'd cornered me by the shed to ask if I could look at the fence, and I'd said yes, and you'd said, "You're a good man, Luke, you know that?" and put your hand flat on my chest, and left it there one second too long.
I'd looked at your hand. Then at you.
"Becky," I'd said, and it came out like a warning, mostly to myself.
"Sorry," you'd said. Not meaning it. Your eyes saying you weren't sorry at all.
Nothing happened that day. I fixed the fence and went home and lay on a leather sofa in a house full of dust and didn't sleep.
The following Tuesday you turned up at my house with a flask of soup, because, you claimed, I looked like a man who didn't eat properly. We ate it in the finished kitchen, sitting on stools, and when we were done you'd said, "I need to tell you something and then I need you to tell me if I've ruined everything."
I'd braced. "Go on."
"I think about you. Not in a friendly way. In a way that's been driving me mental for about a year, and I'm telling you because Tom asked me last week if I was okay and I nearly cried into the lasagna, and I can't—Luke, I can't keep pretending."
The kitchen had gone very quiet. The tap dripped. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I really needed to fix that washer.
"Thirteen years," I'd said finally. "You've got no idea how long."
"How long what?"
"How long I've—" I'd stopped. Started again. "Since the 2012 party. Green dress. You called me a lamppost."
You'd stared. Then you'd laughed, one hand over your mouth, and said, "You absolute idiot. All this time?"
"All this time."
You'd crossed the kitchen and kissed me, and I'd kissed you back, and the guilt and the want collided somewhere in my ribs and the want won, and that was the beginning of the mess we're both still in.
---
Which brings me back to now. The text. Ten minutes.
I looked around the kitchen, then laughed at myself for it. It wasn't like I was going to hoover. The dust was part of the house's charm, allegedly. I put my tea in the sink, went to the fridge, and stood there like a man rehearsing a speech, which, in a sense, I was.
Nine minutes later, your car pulled onto the gravel. You got out in jeans and a black jumper, hair down, sunglasses pushed up on your head, and you had the walk of a woman on a mission. I opened the door before you knocked.
You smiled up at me. That smile. The one that had been getting me into trouble since before I knew it was trouble.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi yourself. Nice of you to text. Very romantic. Really swept me off my feet."
"You want romance, I'll buy you a card from the petrol station." You stepped past me into the hall, and I closed the door, and you turned around in the middle of my dusty entrance hall with its half-plastered walls and said, "Now. I have been in traffic for twenty minutes thinking about you, and I warned you what state I'd be in, so unless you've got a good reason for me to wait—"
I didn't have a good reason. I had zero good reasons. I'd used them all up over thirteen years.
I reached for you and pulled you against me, and you came up on your toes like you always did, and I put one hand at your jaw and kissed you properly, the kind of kiss that had been weeks in the making even after weeks of having you. You made a small sound into my mouth, your hands fisting in my shirt, and then, without breaking the kiss, I slid my other hand down the front of your jeans.
You were soaked. Genuinely, indecently soaked through your underwear, hot against my fingers.
"Fuck," I said against your lips. "You weren't joking."
"No," you breathed, rolling your hips into my hand. "I don't joke about how much you turn me on, Luke. Ever. That's the one subject I'm completely serious about."
"That's a shame. I'd love to hear your take on the new floor in here."
"Later." You reached down and popped the button of your jeans yourself, an impatient little tug that undid the zip too, giving my hand room. "I drove here with my thighs clenched. Show some respect."
I did. Two fingers, sliding under the fabric, finding you slick and swollen and ready, and you gasped and gripped my forearm with both hands as I worked you slowly, dragging through your wetness, circling, teasing, while I watched your face do the thing I was addicted to—the thing where your cheekiness melts and you go soft and open and desperate.
"Kitchen," you managed. "I want to see the nice kitchen while you do that."
So I walked you backwards down the hall with my hand down your jeans, kissing your neck, and you laughed breathlessly the whole way, and we ended up against the new stone island in the brand new kitchen with your jeans around your thighs and my fingers inside you and thirteen years of restraint lying dead on the floor.
"Luke," you said, forehead against my chest. "Luke, I need—"
"I know what you need."
"Do you?"
"Course. I've had thirteen years to learn it." I curled my fingers and you moaned, loud in the empty house. "I've had thirteen years of imagining it, anyway. Turns out I'm a fast learner."
"Show me," you said. "Everything you imagined. I want to hear all of it."
I pulled my hand free—your hips chasing me, a small noise of protest—and sucked my fingers clean while you watched with wide eyes. Then I lifted you onto the island. The cold stone made you yelp.
"Right," I said. "Confession time. You first."
---
You pulled your jumper over your head, no bra underneath, and I lost my train of thought for a full three seconds, which you noticed, and filed away for later ammunition.
"Fine. Confession." You leaned back on your hands, jeans still tangled at your knees, gorgeous and shameless. "You know what I think about? I think about sitting on that sofa out there—the leather one—and you kneeling on the floor in front of me. Nobody's ever made me come like you do with your mouth, and I think about it at work. In the car. In the bath. I think about you holding my legs open and not letting me close them."
"That's it? That's the confession?" I stepped between your knees. "That's Tuesday for us."
"I'm not finished." Your cheeks had gone pink. "I think about the beads."
We'd used them once, a week ago, my one concession to being a man who'd clearly spent too many years alone with a credit card and an internet connection. Your eyes dropped to my mouth.
"I think about you eating me out with them in," you said, quieter now, more honest. "Both holes full, your tongue on my clit, and just when I'm coming—just at the very moment—I think about you pulling them out of me really slowly while I scream."
"Jesus, Becky."
"Your turn."
I put my hands on your thighs and spread them a little wider, and told you the truth. "I think about your mouth somewhere nobody's ever put it. I think about you behind me—rimming me, tongue in my arse, your hand reaching round and stroking my cock at the same time. I think about how you'd look doing it. I think about it more than is medically advisable."
Your jaw dropped. Then the cheeky grin arrived. "Luke. That's filthy."
"You asked."
"I did, and now I'm even wetter, which I didn't think was physically possible." You hopped down off the island, stepped out of your jeans and knickers entirely, and stood naked from the waist down in my brand new kitchen, and said, "One more. I think about us taking each other at the same time. Sixty-nine. You on your back, me on top, both of us so hungry we can't pace ourselves. I've never wanted anything in my mouth as badly as I want your cock right now."
"Right," I said. "Sofa."
---
The leather sofa was cold and you made me sit on it first, then climbed over me, and I'll be honest, I nearly ended things before we started just from the sight of you lowering yourself onto my face, your thighs either side of my head, your hands braced on the back of the sofa. I'd dreamed this exact geometry for years and reality was better, because reality was wet and warm and making sounds above me.
I ate you like a starving man. Slow at first—long strokes of my tongue, teasing around your clit while you swore at me and pushed down, trying to get more. I gripped your hips and held you where I wanted you, which earned me a "you bastard" that came out as a moan. When I finally sealed my mouth over your clit and sucked, your whole body shuddered.
"Get the beads," you gasped. "Please. Luke. Please."
I keep them in the drawer of the side table now, which tells you everything about the state of my interior design priorities. I reached, slicked them, and worked them into you one at a time while you rode my face, and by the third one you were babbling, and by the fifth you were gripping the sofa back so hard your knuckles were white.
"Come on," I murmured against you. "Come for me. I'm going to pull them out when you do, exactly like your filthy little fantasy, and you're going to come so hard you see God."
You did. I felt it build—your thighs trembling against my ears, your breath going ragged—and just as you tipped over, I drew the beads out in one long, slow pull while sucking your clit, and you screamed loud enough to worry the neighbours I don't have, your whole body locking and shaking above me, drenching my chin.
You slid down my body afterwards, boneless, and knelt between my legs, and looked up at me with your hair wrecked and your smile wrecked and said, "My turn. Lie down. You're about to find out what hungry means."
I lay back on the sofa and you straddled me in reverse, and the moment your mouth took me in, I understood the fantasy completely, because I had your pussy above my face and I pulled you down and we took each other at the same time and it was chaos, it was greedy, it was teeth and tongue and suction and the two of us moaning into each other with no rhythm and no patience and no interest in either. You were incredible—taking me deep, working me with your hand and your mouth together, humming around me like I was the best thing you'd ever tasted. I fucked you with my tongue and my fingers and you were still sensitive from coming and you shuddered on top of me every few seconds, which made you redouble your efforts out of what I can only assume was spite.
I came first. Couldn't have stopped it—warned you, and you didn't pull off, you swallowed and kept going, gentle now, milking the last of it while I shook under you, and the sheer indecency of it finished me off entirely.
---
Afterwards, you lay along my body on the narrow sofa, which was not designed for a man my size plus company, my arm dead underneath you, your hair in my mouth, and neither of us moved to fix any of it.
"So," you said eventually, tracing a line through the dust on my coffee table. "House's coming on."
"Thanks. I've had help."
"You've had a distraction."
"Best one I've ever had." I kissed the top of your head. "Becky."
"Mm."
"Eventually we're going to have to figure out what we're doing. Properly. Because I adore Tom, and I'm not being glib about that."
You went quiet for a moment. Then you propped your chin on my chest and looked at me.
"I know. Me too. I've been thinking about it all week, actually. And I've decided something."
"Go on."
"You need to finish the bedroom. This sofa is ridiculous for a man your size. And I refuse to keep having an affair on furniture that squeaks."
I laughed, properly laughed, the kind I hadn't done in years before you. "That's your plan? Interior design?"
"It's a start. We'll work out the rest. One room at a time." You grinned that criminal smile. "I'm very patient, Luke. Look how long I waited for you."
"Thirteen years to wait for a woman who texts me filth and criticises my sofa. Worth it," I said. "Now get up. I'm cooking you dinner in the finished kitchen, and you're going to tell me all your other confessions."
"There are loads," you said, standing up naked in my dusty lounge like you owned it.
"I know," I said. "I'm counting on it."
I was standing in that kitchen, tea going cold, when my phone buzzed on the counter.
*I will be there in 10 minutes. Absolutely dripping and want you to do filthy things to me.*
I read it twice. Then I put the phone down, picked it up, and read it a third time, because apparently forty-three years old and a decade and a half in Formula One hadn't taught me how to handle a sentence like that from Becky.
Week four. Four weeks since the whole stupid, glorious dam had broken, and I still hadn't got used to it. Thirteen years I'd known you. Thirteen years of being Uncle Luke to your daughter, of Sunday roasts at yours, of Tom—your husband, my best friend, my head of aero—handing me a beer and telling me I needed to find a woman of my own. And I'd nod and say something dry about how the only thing that had ever loved me back was my car, and you'd laugh from across the room with that smile that did criminal things to me, and I'd go home to my dusty house and think about you in ways a man shouldn't think about his best mate's wife.
I'd fallen for you in 2012, at the end-of-season party. You'd worn a green dress and spent the whole evening taking the piss out of my height, asking if the team had to custom-build my office chair, whether I had to duck through doorways on planes. Tom had apologised for you and I'd told him, honestly, not to bother, because no one had taken the piss out of me that well in my life. That was it. Done. Fifteen years of friendship built on top of a feeling I'd never let show.
And then, a month ago, everything changed.
It hadn't been one moment. It had been a slow, cruel accumulation, and I want you to know I fought it, because I adored Tom, I still adore Tom, and I'm not a man who takes things that belong to his friends.
But you didn't make it easy.
---
There was the barbecue in July. Tom's fortieth-ish excuse for one, the whole garage crew there. I'd been put on burger duty because at six foot seven I was apparently the only one who could see when the fat was catching. You'd come out in denim shorts and a white top and I'd done the decent thing, which was look at the sausages. Then you'd come stand next to me, hip against the railing, and said, "Luke, you're burning the left side," and I'd looked down at you and you'd looked up at me with a smile that was about twenty percent innocent, and I'd felt something in my chest downshift.
"Thanks. You want to take over?"
"Absolutely not. I just like watching a big man struggle."
"Everyone's a critic." I'd flipped the burgers. "Your husband's a lucky man."
"Yeah," you'd said, and there'd been a pause just long enough to be a problem. "He is."
You'd gone back inside and I'd stood there with a spatula and a heartbeat I could hear.
Then there was the weekend Tom was in Bahrain and you texted me about a leaking washing machine, of all things, and I came over like a mate, like a plumber, like an idiot. You'd made me coffee. We'd sat in your kitchen and talked for three hours about nothing—your job, my car, whether my house would ever be finished—and at some point your foot had brushed mine under the table and neither of us moved it. We both pretended not to notice. I drove home doing a hundred and ten on the motorway and it didn't help.
And then the third thing. The unforgivable, wonderful third thing. Your daughter's birthday party in September—a bouncy castle in the garden, a dozen screaming kids, me being Uncle Luke, being good, being safe. And you'd cornered me by the shed to ask if I could look at the fence, and I'd said yes, and you'd said, "You're a good man, Luke, you know that?" and put your hand flat on my chest, and left it there one second too long.
I'd looked at your hand. Then at you.
"Becky," I'd said, and it came out like a warning, mostly to myself.
"Sorry," you'd said. Not meaning it. Your eyes saying you weren't sorry at all.
Nothing happened that day. I fixed the fence and went home and lay on a leather sofa in a house full of dust and didn't sleep.
The following Tuesday you turned up at my house with a flask of soup, because, you claimed, I looked like a man who didn't eat properly. We ate it in the finished kitchen, sitting on stools, and when we were done you'd said, "I need to tell you something and then I need you to tell me if I've ruined everything."
I'd braced. "Go on."
"I think about you. Not in a friendly way. In a way that's been driving me mental for about a year, and I'm telling you because Tom asked me last week if I was okay and I nearly cried into the lasagna, and I can't—Luke, I can't keep pretending."
The kitchen had gone very quiet. The tap dripped. I remember thinking, absurdly, that I really needed to fix that washer.
"Thirteen years," I'd said finally. "You've got no idea how long."
"How long what?"
"How long I've—" I'd stopped. Started again. "Since the 2012 party. Green dress. You called me a lamppost."
You'd stared. Then you'd laughed, one hand over your mouth, and said, "You absolute idiot. All this time?"
"All this time."
You'd crossed the kitchen and kissed me, and I'd kissed you back, and the guilt and the want collided somewhere in my ribs and the want won, and that was the beginning of the mess we're both still in.
---
Which brings me back to now. The text. Ten minutes.
I looked around the kitchen, then laughed at myself for it. It wasn't like I was going to hoover. The dust was part of the house's charm, allegedly. I put my tea in the sink, went to the fridge, and stood there like a man rehearsing a speech, which, in a sense, I was.
Nine minutes later, your car pulled onto the gravel. You got out in jeans and a black jumper, hair down, sunglasses pushed up on your head, and you had the walk of a woman on a mission. I opened the door before you knocked.
You smiled up at me. That smile. The one that had been getting me into trouble since before I knew it was trouble.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi yourself. Nice of you to text. Very romantic. Really swept me off my feet."
"You want romance, I'll buy you a card from the petrol station." You stepped past me into the hall, and I closed the door, and you turned around in the middle of my dusty entrance hall with its half-plastered walls and said, "Now. I have been in traffic for twenty minutes thinking about you, and I warned you what state I'd be in, so unless you've got a good reason for me to wait—"
I didn't have a good reason. I had zero good reasons. I'd used them all up over thirteen years.
I reached for you and pulled you against me, and you came up on your toes like you always did, and I put one hand at your jaw and kissed you properly, the kind of kiss that had been weeks in the making even after weeks of having you. You made a small sound into my mouth, your hands fisting in my shirt, and then, without breaking the kiss, I slid my other hand down the front of your jeans.
You were soaked. Genuinely, indecently soaked through your underwear, hot against my fingers.
"Fuck," I said against your lips. "You weren't joking."
"No," you breathed, rolling your hips into my hand. "I don't joke about how much you turn me on, Luke. Ever. That's the one subject I'm completely serious about."
"That's a shame. I'd love to hear your take on the new floor in here."
"Later." You reached down and popped the button of your jeans yourself, an impatient little tug that undid the zip too, giving my hand room. "I drove here with my thighs clenched. Show some respect."
I did. Two fingers, sliding under the fabric, finding you slick and swollen and ready, and you gasped and gripped my forearm with both hands as I worked you slowly, dragging through your wetness, circling, teasing, while I watched your face do the thing I was addicted to—the thing where your cheekiness melts and you go soft and open and desperate.
"Kitchen," you managed. "I want to see the nice kitchen while you do that."
So I walked you backwards down the hall with my hand down your jeans, kissing your neck, and you laughed breathlessly the whole way, and we ended up against the new stone island in the brand new kitchen with your jeans around your thighs and my fingers inside you and thirteen years of restraint lying dead on the floor.
"Luke," you said, forehead against my chest. "Luke, I need—"
"I know what you need."
"Do you?"
"Course. I've had thirteen years to learn it." I curled my fingers and you moaned, loud in the empty house. "I've had thirteen years of imagining it, anyway. Turns out I'm a fast learner."
"Show me," you said. "Everything you imagined. I want to hear all of it."
I pulled my hand free—your hips chasing me, a small noise of protest—and sucked my fingers clean while you watched with wide eyes. Then I lifted you onto the island. The cold stone made you yelp.
"Right," I said. "Confession time. You first."
---
You pulled your jumper over your head, no bra underneath, and I lost my train of thought for a full three seconds, which you noticed, and filed away for later ammunition.
"Fine. Confession." You leaned back on your hands, jeans still tangled at your knees, gorgeous and shameless. "You know what I think about? I think about sitting on that sofa out there—the leather one—and you kneeling on the floor in front of me. Nobody's ever made me come like you do with your mouth, and I think about it at work. In the car. In the bath. I think about you holding my legs open and not letting me close them."
"That's it? That's the confession?" I stepped between your knees. "That's Tuesday for us."
"I'm not finished." Your cheeks had gone pink. "I think about the beads."
We'd used them once, a week ago, my one concession to being a man who'd clearly spent too many years alone with a credit card and an internet connection. Your eyes dropped to my mouth.
"I think about you eating me out with them in," you said, quieter now, more honest. "Both holes full, your tongue on my clit, and just when I'm coming—just at the very moment—I think about you pulling them out of me really slowly while I scream."
"Jesus, Becky."
"Your turn."
I put my hands on your thighs and spread them a little wider, and told you the truth. "I think about your mouth somewhere nobody's ever put it. I think about you behind me—rimming me, tongue in my arse, your hand reaching round and stroking my cock at the same time. I think about how you'd look doing it. I think about it more than is medically advisable."
Your jaw dropped. Then the cheeky grin arrived. "Luke. That's filthy."
"You asked."
"I did, and now I'm even wetter, which I didn't think was physically possible." You hopped down off the island, stepped out of your jeans and knickers entirely, and stood naked from the waist down in my brand new kitchen, and said, "One more. I think about us taking each other at the same time. Sixty-nine. You on your back, me on top, both of us so hungry we can't pace ourselves. I've never wanted anything in my mouth as badly as I want your cock right now."
"Right," I said. "Sofa."
---
The leather sofa was cold and you made me sit on it first, then climbed over me, and I'll be honest, I nearly ended things before we started just from the sight of you lowering yourself onto my face, your thighs either side of my head, your hands braced on the back of the sofa. I'd dreamed this exact geometry for years and reality was better, because reality was wet and warm and making sounds above me.
I ate you like a starving man. Slow at first—long strokes of my tongue, teasing around your clit while you swore at me and pushed down, trying to get more. I gripped your hips and held you where I wanted you, which earned me a "you bastard" that came out as a moan. When I finally sealed my mouth over your clit and sucked, your whole body shuddered.
"Get the beads," you gasped. "Please. Luke. Please."
I keep them in the drawer of the side table now, which tells you everything about the state of my interior design priorities. I reached, slicked them, and worked them into you one at a time while you rode my face, and by the third one you were babbling, and by the fifth you were gripping the sofa back so hard your knuckles were white.
"Come on," I murmured against you. "Come for me. I'm going to pull them out when you do, exactly like your filthy little fantasy, and you're going to come so hard you see God."
You did. I felt it build—your thighs trembling against my ears, your breath going ragged—and just as you tipped over, I drew the beads out in one long, slow pull while sucking your clit, and you screamed loud enough to worry the neighbours I don't have, your whole body locking and shaking above me, drenching my chin.
You slid down my body afterwards, boneless, and knelt between my legs, and looked up at me with your hair wrecked and your smile wrecked and said, "My turn. Lie down. You're about to find out what hungry means."
I lay back on the sofa and you straddled me in reverse, and the moment your mouth took me in, I understood the fantasy completely, because I had your pussy above my face and I pulled you down and we took each other at the same time and it was chaos, it was greedy, it was teeth and tongue and suction and the two of us moaning into each other with no rhythm and no patience and no interest in either. You were incredible—taking me deep, working me with your hand and your mouth together, humming around me like I was the best thing you'd ever tasted. I fucked you with my tongue and my fingers and you were still sensitive from coming and you shuddered on top of me every few seconds, which made you redouble your efforts out of what I can only assume was spite.
I came first. Couldn't have stopped it—warned you, and you didn't pull off, you swallowed and kept going, gentle now, milking the last of it while I shook under you, and the sheer indecency of it finished me off entirely.
---
Afterwards, you lay along my body on the narrow sofa, which was not designed for a man my size plus company, my arm dead underneath you, your hair in my mouth, and neither of us moved to fix any of it.
"So," you said eventually, tracing a line through the dust on my coffee table. "House's coming on."
"Thanks. I've had help."
"You've had a distraction."
"Best one I've ever had." I kissed the top of your head. "Becky."
"Mm."
"Eventually we're going to have to figure out what we're doing. Properly. Because I adore Tom, and I'm not being glib about that."
You went quiet for a moment. Then you propped your chin on my chest and looked at me.
"I know. Me too. I've been thinking about it all week, actually. And I've decided something."
"Go on."
"You need to finish the bedroom. This sofa is ridiculous for a man your size. And I refuse to keep having an affair on furniture that squeaks."
I laughed, properly laughed, the kind I hadn't done in years before you. "That's your plan? Interior design?"
"It's a start. We'll work out the rest. One room at a time." You grinned that criminal smile. "I'm very patient, Luke. Look how long I waited for you."
"Thirteen years to wait for a woman who texts me filth and criticises my sofa. Worth it," I said. "Now get up. I'm cooking you dinner in the finished kitchen, and you're going to tell me all your other confessions."
"There are loads," you said, standing up naked in my dusty lounge like you owned it.
"I know," I said. "I'm counting on it."