Bk. 01: Wroclaw - Ch. 02

The Travel Journals of John Micheton

Book 1: Wroclaw Ch 2

Saturday

The municipal pool on a Saturday morning is chlorine and echo and the slap of older feet on wet tile. I went because the city had a pool and I still swim, and because Friday needed washing off in a way a hotel shower would not admit to. The jacket stayed in a locker that smelled of other people's rubber shoes. The water was the temperature municipal water always is -- not kind, not cruel, honest.

The lane was crowded with regulars. Men with the chests of former athletes and the bellies of the years after. Women who had been coming since a different government, caps faded, strokes that knew the length by heart. I took an edge and started to put Friday into the turns: the table, the landing, the three lines I had not answered. Control still looked intact if I did not look at it.

I saw her a long time before she saw me.

Cap. Goggles. The rest a line in the water. Aquiline -- that was the word that arrived, unhelpful and accurate. A streamline. Shoulders that had been taught, or had taught themselves by doing this enough. Slim. Adult. She moved as if the pool were a tool and not a Saturday. I had her body and the movement and nothing else. Hair colour withheld by the cap. Eyes behind glass. I counted. Ten lengths of watching before there was a wall that belonged to both of us at the same time.

She put a hand up and lifted the goggles onto the cap. Breath. The face still closed by water. She looked at me the way a regular looks at a length that has been occupied by a stranger.

"You are not from here," she said. English, because my mouth had already given me away on the inhale, or because she had decided. Lightly Polish. Not cute. "You are not a regular. I would know."

"I'm not."

She watched my stroke for another length because the wall was not a conversation. When we met again she said, "You have years. Not a coach. It shows. The turn is honest. The rest is habit." It was not unkind. It was a physiotherapist's eye, though I did not have that word yet. She pushed off. I followed because the lane was the lane.

We did not speak again in the water. The regulars talked over the ropes in the slow voices of people who have outlasted the morning. She swam as if her friends were still asleep from Friday and this slot were the one thing she kept. I swam as if I had not left a woman on a landing nine hours earlier. Chlorine in the sinuses. The clock on the wall a red digital that did not care.

Changing rooms were separate, as they are. I lost her in the tiles and the hairdryers and the smell of feet. I did not look for her. That would have been a different morning. I dressed in the shirt I did not mind losing and the jacket the day still wanted, and I went out toward coffee because municipal swimming ends in the need for something that is not water.

The café is on the way out of the complex, which is why it exists. Steam. Eggs. A glass case with cakes the regulars did not eat. She was there because it was her Saturday after the lengths -- a proper breakfast, or she would go home and cook, and she had not come to cook. Wet hair now. Light brown, darker for the water, down on the collar of a sweater that had seen this routine. Grey-green eyes. A still face. Twenty-one and finished with being anyone's school note. She had a tray. I had a tray. The old regulars were already in their chairs along the window, talking the talk of people who would be back next Saturday.

We bumped because the aisle is the aisle.

"You stayed," she said. Not a flutter. A fact she was willing to look at.

"I don't need to."

"I know." She sat anyway, and I sat because of her, which was the first decision of the daylight that was not the pool. First contact had been the wall. This was the second, public, a fork scraping a plate, someone's newspaper in Polish I could not keep. She ate. That was part of the routine: she had earned it in the water and she would not perform hunger. I watched the wet hair wick into the sweater and the eyes when she was not using them on me. Grey-green. Still.

She asked what I did. I said I used to price rooms and now I swam when a city let me. She asked how long I had. I said hours, nothing until later. I did not say the name later belonged to. She nodded as if hours were a respectable answer.

"Health science," she said, when I asked. "Last year. Physiotherapy. The pool is cheaper than a gym and I already know what a shoulder is doing." She drank the coffee black. "My friends are asleep. They do Friday properly. I do this."

Oliwia Baran. She gave the name the way you give a name over breakfast to a man you have already measured in the water. I gave her John, which was enough for a morning.

When the plates were only plates she asked where I went now, and whether I had to go. Innocent. Still. Not a hand on my sleeve. I said the hotel. I said I had the morning. I said later was later. She looked at that and elected it.

"All right," she said. "Then I will come for the morning."

We left the complex at ten, or near enough. Twenty minutes on foot through streets the jacket was still glad of, cloud sitting on the render, a Saturday that had not decided to brighten yet. She walked like a person who swam: the stride economical, the bag small. I watched the wet ends of the hair darken the sweater and did not watch her feet, which were in ordinary shoes that had done this walk before. Cobbles. A tram. The hotel when it came was the hotel I had already used.

The room still had Friday in it if you knew -- a towel I had not hung, the notebook in the safe, the condom in the drawer I had put there with another name on it in my head. I opened the door as if I had not. She looked at the bed the way I had looked at rooms I was selling: inventory first. Then she set the bag down and did not ask whose night this had been.

"I have to go at three," I said. The clock named in the room so it would be honoured. She nodded. She had felt a clock without knowing its name.

What we did was practical. Ordinary. No pretensions. She pulled the navy sweater over her head and dropped it on the chair as if the chair were a locker. The body under it was the body from the water without the glass: slim, a swimmer's shoulders that had taught themselves, small breasts, a flat belly still marked faintly by the elastic of whatever she had swum in. She did not pose. She watched me look and then she looked at the bed, inventory first, the same way she had at the door.

I put her on it. The coverlet was hotel-cold at the first touch of her back. I got my mouth on her while we still had the morning in us -- the hollow of the throat, the inside of a breast, the clean line down the sternum that the cap had not had an opinion about. She let me. A hand in my hair, not steering, just there. When I opened her thighs the smell of her was not chlorine. Chlorine was in the hair. The rest was a woman who had decided the morning and was already wet for it.

I licked her. Slow, because I knew how and because she was twenty-one and adult and I was not going to rush the first honest thing in the room. She was slick on the tongue, a clean salt, the small inner lips and the hood and the fact of the clit when I found it and stayed. She made a sound into the pillow that was only hers -- not a performance, not a courtesy. Her heel found the back of my shoulder and stayed there. I worked her with my mouth until the sound changed register, and then I put two fingers in her cunt and kept the mouth where it was, and she came like a fact: a shake, a held breath, the fingers of one hand opening on the sheet and closing again.

She pulled me up by the wrist. Accurate. She took my cock in her hand and looked at it the way she had looked at my turn in the water -- years, not a coach. She stroked me, thumb over the head, the slit already wet, and did not pretend it was a scene. I was hard enough that the courtesy was unnecessary. I reached to the drawer for the condom I had put there on Friday with another name on it in my head. She watched me tear the foil without making a story of it. I rolled the rubber down myself. She watched that too, the ring seating, the last smooth of the thumb, and then she drew me in by the hip.

I pushed into her cunt in one long press and felt her take it -- tight, eager, a little gasp that she did not turn into a word. Slim around me. Wet enough that the latex was only a fact, not a fight. I gave her a moment to have the stretch, because I am older and that is part of what the years are for, and then I fucked her the way the morning had asked to be used: even, deep, no theatre. Her legs came up. I got a hand under her ass and held the angle and watched her face, which stayed almost still even while her cunt pulled. Grey-green eyes on me and then not, on the ceiling, on the work.

She came again with me in her, smaller than the mouth had made it, a clenched yes she did not say. I followed because there was no reason not to. The rubber took what I gave it. I held myself in her through it and felt the pulse against the latex and then the ordinary slowing. When I pulled out the condom was a used thing, heavy at the end. I dealt with it as what it was.

We lay afterward like people who had used a morning honestly. Chlorine still in her hair when I put my face there. Her pulse in the throat under my mouth. Neither of us reached for a sentence that would have made it more than it was.

She did not ask to stay the night. I did not offer. Daylight. I told myself that was enough. Containable. Rinseable. Not the booking. I said it the way I used to say a room was clean when I had only walked through it.

Late lunch was ordinary and not a date. A room two streets off with paper napkins and soup that was better than it needed to be. She ate again. I watched her wrists. She asked nothing about later. I gave nothing. The afternoon had begun to lift the cloud the way a mood lifts, which I did not say, because the lift belonged to six o'clock and not to her.

We went back because three was still ahead and the clock in the bed had been named. Clothes off faster. No inventory this time. She was wet again before I had my mouth on her; I put two fingers through it to be sure and she pushed down on the hand as if the hand were a length she already knew. I got another condom from the same drawer. She rolled this one -- quick, competent, a student who had decided not to be taught. The rubber seated. She turned onto her hands and the slim back was all the afternoon needed.

The second time was quicker. Frenetic. High intensity with nothing named on it -- no last length, no weather. Surface only. I held her hips and went in to the root and the room narrowed to the wet sound of my cock in her cunt and the fact of the latex and the digital clock I could see over her shoulder if I wanted and did not. She hooked a heel behind me when I pulled her back onto her side and used it. Her voice stayed in her throat. A small bitten-off sound each time I went deep. Over fast.

I felt myself cool from the inside before I had pulled out. The come was already a decision the body had finished making; the rest of me had started putting the morning away. She felt it. The grip in her went polite. She did not ask why. I spent what was left into the rubber and held her hip until the shaking in my thigh stopped being interesting.

She dressed first. The sweater, the ordinary shoes, the hair almost dry and showing its colour in the courtyard light. Grey-green eyes looking at me once, still, as if she had understood the clock without being told its name. She left from the room at three. I heard the lift take her. I stood in the doorway of a morning I had used and was already putting away.

The buffer began. Three hours to be clean enough for the night I had flown for. The condom was lighter by two. She had the morning, and the way I went cold in it, and the lift. That was all I had given her to take.

I stripped the bed after three. Not from shame. From sequence. The condom in the drawer was the one I had put there on Friday with her name on it in my head. Oliwia had used two from it. I had not given Oliwia a name to compete with. I showered until the municipal chlorine was only an idea. The notebook went in the safe. Daria's three lines were still sitting unread, which was a decision I intended to keep until the night had been spent as booked.

Eighteen hundred hours is a clean number. Content girls who sell the night know that lateness is a review. She was on time.

The lobby made her smaller than the stills. That was the first private thing, before any other. Nine months of a face I knew in two dimensions, and then the lift doors, and the third. The camera liked a harder line at her mouth. In the flesh the line had not been drawn. She had come as weather, not as a thumbnail: a coat that belonged to October, hair that had not been arranged for a second take, shoes she could walk in. She kissed my cheek the way a woman kisses a man she is having dinner with, which is what we were doing, and what we were not. I watched her look at me -- not at the lens's idea of me, at the man who had paid the invoices -- and I saw that she did not mind the original.

"You look like the hotel," she said. Her English was good. Lightly Polish. Not cute. "I mean you look like you belong at the desk. Not in trouble."

"I used to prepare contracts for the sale and purchase of hotels," I said. "I don't stay in them as a profession."

"Tonight you do." She glanced at the lift, then away from it. "Not yet. I ate on camera three times this week. I want a table that does not know me."

She took me two streets off the square, to a room with paper napkins and a waitress who did not look at our hands. We ate like people who had not paid for one another. She put her phone face down without being asked. I put mine on the cloth beside it. The heart from Thursday was under the glass, and Daria under that, and nine months of clips under that, and none of it was going to be opened while Lena was cutting her meat.

She asked almost nothing about London. She asked how long I had. I said Monday afternoon, which was still true. She nodded as if she were taking note of it, not bargaining with it. Off-record, with her, began at the table. No lens. No talk of the site. She let a piece of bread soak in the sauce and ate it with her fingers and did not apologise, and I understood that this was the girl the stills had been advertising and had not quite contained.

Walking back I kept a space between us that the street could read as ordinary. In the lift she stood close enough that I could smell clean skin and whatever she used that was not trying to be remembered. Not Shalimar. Something quieter. The corridor carpet swallowed our steps. I opened the room as if I had not already used it once today.

She looked at the bed the way I used to look at a suite I was selling: inventory first, appetite second. Then she set her bag on the chair, not the nightstand, and took out no camera. That was the contract. I had paid for the night. She had agreed the night would not become content. I put the phone in the drawer with the notebook and shut it. The condom stayed where I had laid it, early, under the bible the hotel still pretended people opened.

"Through the night," she said, testing the phrase she had written. "Yes?"

"Yes."

She came out of her coat without a performance. Camel wool, mid-thigh, buttons that had not cost what the stills cost. Under it the Saturday I had only had as a plate: blush-pink satin knotted at the throat, a keyhole I could have put a thumb through, grey washed denim cut raw at the hem, the pale pink bow slippers she could walk in. Slim. Fair. The long light-brown hair worn down and not arranged for a second take. The body under the work and also not: warmer, a little less drawn, a mole at the edge of the ribs the stills had cropped for line.

She let me look. She did not pose. I took the knot at her throat and the satin came away in two pieces that were really one, and then the denim, and then the slippers, which I set on the carpet the way a man who looks at shoes sets a shoe. What she had on underneath was not a set. Sky-blue cotton bra. Light-pink cotton panties. Ordinary. Unmatched. Off-record she still undressed without the clip's theatre. When I touched her she made a sound that did not belong on a timeline, small and unhelpful to an algorithm, and I filed that too. The practised girl was in her, and so was the one who had done most of her practising alone.

We were not in a hurry. Saturday had been built for this. I put my mouth on her throat and on the inside of her wrist and on the place at the edge of her ribs where the camera never bothered. The chemist scent was only at the wrist; the rest was soap and skin. I unhooked the blue bra and her breasts were the breasts from the work, modest, the nipples already tight, and I took one in my mouth and felt her hand find the back of my head and stay, not performing the grip. I went to my knees on the hotel carpet and drew the pink cotton down her legs and put my mouth on her cunt before she had finished stepping out of them.

She was already wet. Not camera-wet. The real thing, a clean slick on the inner thigh, the taste of a woman who had walked two streets and sat through a dinner and thought about this room the whole way. I opened her with my thumbs and licked, slow, the way I had wanted to for nine months of watching a stand-in do the job my mouth was built for. She made a sound she would not have left on a clip. Polish, under the breath, close. I stayed at her clit until her hips lost the stillness, then I pushed my tongue into her and felt her hand tighten in my hair for the first time as if she had forgotten there was no lens to find.

She undressed me with the same lack of theatre. Shirt. Belt. The rest. When she took me in her hand she was simply accurate. She had held the stand-in often enough that the map was already in her fingers: the vein along the underside, the exact pressure under the head, the stroke she used when she was showing a man on the other side of a screen what she would do if he were there. The difference was that I answered. I thickened in her palm. A bead at the slit which she spread with her thumb and then tasted, as if she were checking a colour against a memory.

Then she went to her knees.

I had seen this. That was the trouble, and the point. For months she had made videos of herself doing this to a pale dildo -- the size I had asked for, held the way I had asked. In the videos she looked up into the camera and pretended the thing in her throat was me. She said my name around it. I watched her swallow nothing and call it mine.

When she asked, I had shown her the real thing -- my hand, my cock, the finish -- so she would know what she was pretending. She had rated it for free, once, at the start, before I ever paid her. That was the first time she had seen me. This was the first time I had been in her mouth.

For nine months we had been fucking each other by proxy and calling it patronage. She had acted it and filmed it. I had watched it. The camera sat where my eyes sat now -- low, close, the wet work filling the frame on purpose, made for a man in another city to use his hand to. She sucked the stand-in as if it could come. She fucked herself on it as if it had a name. She said the name. Mine. I came to a girl who was not in the room and she came to a man who was not in hers, and we sent each other the proof, and that had been the week, again and again, until the week was nine months old and I got on a plane.

Tonight it ran the other way, and it was better. No camera. No silicone borrowing my heat. My cock, flesh, the blood in it. She took the head first, the way she had in the early videos -- lips sealing, a slow wet pull, tongue working the underside as if she were still showing a camera the work. Then more, the way she had once she trusted it.

The recognition went through me harder than the wet. Same mouth. Same pace she used when she was performing a man who was not in the room. Except I was in the room. I could feel the inside of her cheek. I could feel the little halt she always made before she went deeper, which I had thought was acting and was, it turned out, just her. She made a wet sound her phone microphone had never quite got right. Spit on her chin. Her eyes open, not for a lens, for me.

She took me into her throat and the halt became a choice. I felt the squeeze, the reflex she had trained on silicone and was now spending on skin, and I made a sound I had not made at a screen. She pulled off, a string of saliva from her lower lip to the head of my cock, breathed, and went back down without looking up for a mark. I put my hand in her hair and did not push. I watched the act I had already paid to watch, and the difference was temperature, and weight, and the fact that when she pulled off to breathe it was my wet on her lip and not water from a sink between takes.

She sucked me as if she knew the footage. She did. She had made it. The practised rhythm and then a break in it -- a real stumble, a tooth, a correction -- that no edit would have left. I felt myself getting too close and told her so, because the order we had agreed was not this. She slowed and kept me there, shallow, spit-slick, her hand twisting the wet shaft she was not swallowing, until the edge went back where it belonged.

"That's you," she said, quietly, as if I might have missed it. Then she took me back down and finished the thought with her mouth.

When she stopped it was because we had agreed the order. Mouth first. Then the rest. She sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the side of her hand, not as content, as a woman who had been working and was not done.

"The condom," she said.

I opened the drawer and passed her the condom I had put there before she existed in the room. She took it from me. She tore the foil with her thumbnail, the small competent sound of it in the hotel quiet, and slipped the rubber out into her palm. Soft. She brought the cap to the head of my cock -- the same head her mouth had just left -- and gave me a quick tug, enough to keep me, enough that I felt how close the next minute was.

She set the ring. She began to roll it down.

Then she paused.

Not a speech. No look up. She did not want a face from me. She was not asking. She was doing a sum in her own head with my cock in her hand, mid-shaft, the latex not yet home, the raw of me an inch from being covered. I could not hear the sum. I could feel the weight of it. Nine months of a stand-in. One night on the card. The days I still had in the city if she crossed, and the thing she had never done for the camera, which I knew because I had bought everything else. Whether to give me more than the booking. Whether to give it now, or to keep it for a week she had not yet been promised.

The hesitation sat there long enough to count.

She did not ask. She did not take it off.

She rolled it the rest of the way down and smoothed the last of it with her thumb, neat, as agreed. Not yet. Hope, not permission. I filed the skipped beat for a morning I did not yet have.

Then I was inside her and the night became the thing I had flown for. She lay back on the stripped bed and opened her legs with none of the video's arrangement. Pink cotton already on the floor. No phone braced between her knees. No grey afternoon off a courtyard I had never stood in. I settled between her thighs and put the head of the condom at her cunt and felt her lift to take it.

She was wet enough that the rubber was only a fact, not a wall. I pushed and the first inch went and then the rest, a long slide into a heat the dildo had only been describing. She made a sound against my ear that was not content and not kindness.

I knew the shot. Not all of them. This one. The one she had made in her own bed on a grey afternoon, phone braced low between her own thighs so that whoever opened it would be looking from exactly here. Pale stand-in held in her right hand. Two fingers of the left showing the work, spreading herself so the lens would not miss the taking. A lamp left on in daylight. The cheap headboard. She had looked past the camera, not at it, and said, to the empty room, as if a door had just closed behind someone: you're here. Then she put the thing in herself in one slow push and her mouth had opened the way it was opening now.

The stand-in had slipped. Mid-way. She was too wet for the silicone and it came out of her with a sound the microphone got perfectly, and she had laughed -- a real laugh, unhelpful to the take -- and said wait, and put it back with those two fingers, and gone on, and hooked her heel behind nothing, behind air, behind the idea of my hip. I had watched that laugh in a kitchen in London with my cock in my fist and come when she got the angle back and told the empty room I was in her, how hard I was, how good it felt.

Tonight there was no slip. She did not need the two fingers. I was the weight the silicone had been guessing at, and I stayed where it had fallen out. The cheap headboard was a different cheap headboard. The lamp was a hotel lamp. Her heel found me instead of the air, exactly as it had found the idea of me, and landed. I felt the flutter the clip had not been able to keep -- the live one, inside, around me -- and she did not say you're here. She said my name, against my ear, as if the door had in fact closed.

Tight. Not the tightness of a scene. The tightness of a woman who had practised with toys and was still new to a man. She knew the angles and not always the weight. I gave her the weight and let her find the angle she had found that afternoon with her own hand. Her hands on my back, then on my ass, pulling, the way she had pulled the silicone when she wanted the shot to look deeper. It was deeper. I could feel the end of her. I could feel the little flutter when I stayed there. She hooked the heel again, a correction, the same correction, and this time there was a hip for it.

We found a pace that was not a timeline. I fucked her in long strokes so she would have the whole of it, then shorter when her breath told me to, the wet sound of the rubber working in her, her breasts moving the small honest amount they moved. I put a hand under her ass and tilted her and her mouth opened on a Polish I did not need translated. I got my thumb on her clit, the same clit I had had in my mouth twenty minutes earlier, and she shook her head once -- not no, too much -- and then nodded, and I stayed.

When she came she did it on a breath against my ear, a clenched run of words and then no words, her cunt pulling at the latex in a rhythm she could not have performed because she was not watching herself. I held through it. I watched her face do the private thing the stills had never been allowed. Then I let myself follow, because there was nowhere else to put the nine months. I came in the rubber with my mouth on her shoulder and her heel still at my back, and the pulse of it went on longer than I had given a screen.

After, I dealt with what was left of the condom as what it was. She lay on her side and watched the ceiling as if it might offer a second take. The room was hotel-quiet. Somebody laughed in the corridor and went away.

I came back to the bed. She had not covered herself. The mole at the ribs. The unmatched cotton on the carpet. My come cooling in a knot of latex in the bin. She reached across the sheet and put two fingers on my mouth, not to stop it, only to have it.

"That was you," she said again, as if the first time, on her knees, had been a draft.

"Yes."

"I can still feel it. Even with that on." Her English went smaller when she was close. "It is different. The videos do not have the weight."

"I know."

She moved her fingers from my mouth to the inside of my wrist, the same place she would kiss in the morning, though neither of us had the morning yet. "Don't go to the drawer. Not for the phone. Not for another one."

"I'm not."

"Good." A small breath that was almost a laugh. "I liked your mouth. I liked you looking at my face. I don't want to be looked at like a plate."

"You're not."

"Stay here." She drew my hip toward hers with the heel of her hand. No pause this time. No sum. She did not ask if I had another condom and she did not insist I find one. She opened her legs in the ordinary way a woman opens them for a man she has decided to keep in the room, and I settled between them because that was the only sentence left in the night.

Missionary. The second pass. Bare. The head of my cock found the mouth of her cunt -- the same cunt the rubber had just been in, slicker now, open, a little swollen from the first -- and I pushed and there was nothing in the way. Heat. The wet cling of her. Skin on skin. She made a sound I had not heard on any clip, a broken yes she did not turn into a performance, and her hands came up my back and stayed.

"John." My name, not the screen's. "Slow. I want to feel you."

I gave her slow. Long strokes so she would have the whole of me, the drag of it, the way her cunt held the shaft and then the head and then asked for the shaft again. I put my mouth on her mouth and she kissed like a person kissing, not like a person showing a kiss. Her breasts against my chest. The chemist scent gone; only skin. When I went deep she breathed out against my teeth and said, "There. Stay there a second. Please."

I stayed. I could feel the end of her around me, the small involuntary pull, the pulse. No latex to blunt it. I told her she felt like the reason I had changed nothing yet and would change everything in the morning if she asked. She did not make me explain. She said, "I know. I have you."

We made love. That is the honest word, even if her site would never have used it. I fucked her as if the booking had stepped out of the room and left two people who had waited nine months in separate rooms, with a toy and a camera between them, and had finally run out of substitutes. Her legs came up around my waist. I got a hand under her ass and kept the angle she had asked for. Sweat at her hairline. Her mouth on my shoulder, then on my mouth again. "Don't stop talking," she said, very quietly, "or I will start thinking."

"I'm here." I said her name. I said she was wet for me and not for a lens. I said I could feel how she opened when I came back in. I said this was the thing the clips had been promising and had not been able to keep. She answered in the close Polish first, then in English so I would have it: "Yes. Like that. You. Only you. Not the other thing."

When she came it was slower than the first time, a long unclenching, her cunt pulling at my bare cock in a rhythm she could not have edited. She kept her eyes on me through it. I held. I watched her face do the private thing the stills had never been allowed. Then she nodded, once, the smallest permission, and I let the week go into her.

I came in her cunt. Heat, the kick of it. Nine months of coming onto a screen, or into my own hand, or into the idea of a girl who said my name around a toy -- and then this. The real thing. My come going into her and staying. She felt it. I felt her feel it. Her hands tightened on my back and she said, "Yes. Inside. Stay."

I stayed. I pulsed and she took it and I pulsed again and the room narrowed to that. When I was finished I did not pull out. We lay joined, missionary still, her heel hooked at the back of my thigh, my mouth on her temple, her breath going even against my neck.

A thin wet at the place where we were still one animal. I slipped later, not by decision, and felt myself leave her and felt what I had left behind follow, a warm run on the sheet and on the inside of her thigh. She put her hand there, not to hide it. To know it was there.

Then the laugh. The same shape as the one in the grey afternoon, when the stand-in had come out of her and the microphone had got it perfectly. Smaller. Against my neck. Unhelpful to any take. She did not say wait. She did not put anything back. She kept her hand in the wet and let the laugh finish and go, and the clip went with it.

"That is you too," she said.

I kissed the fingers. I did not reach for a cloth. The night could have that stain. She could have it.

"Monday," she said.

"Afternoon."

She held her hand up over the sheet and counted on her fingers, frowning, the way a child counts who does not trust the answer. Thumb, then the next, then a pause.

"Monday morning you go to the airport. No." She shook her head at her own hand. "Afternoon. You said afternoon. So Saturday night. Sunday. Sunday night. Monday morning is still here. Then the plane." She had mixed them. She frowned at the mix as if the week had insulted her. "Two hours twenty. That is nothing. You could--" She stopped. The arithmetic had run ahead of what the booking allowed.

"I fly Monday afternoon," I said, and heard how thin it sounded now that her fingers were still in the air.

She lowered the hand and found mine and did not take it. She took the one finger she wanted and held that, loosely, as if she might need the rest of the hand for something else. Within a minute her breathing had gone even. She slept like a person who had been kept, not only used. I lay on my back with her mouth still printed on the week -- the real mouth, not the one I had owned on a screen -- and with the bare fact of having come in her still cooling on the sheet, and looked at Wednesday, which was not a flight I had.

I wanted more of this. Not more of a booking. More of the real thing after months of fake. Three nights of a mouth that had learned me on a toy and was done with the lesson. Three nights of a cunt that had taken the stand-in on camera and had just taken me without one. I could already feel myself changing a flight I had not yet opened. I could already feel myself paying her again for days she had not yet asked me to buy. What she had not given me was the rest of the hand, and the thing she had never done on camera. I did not ask her what the rest of the sum had been.

The phone stayed in the drawer. The old man's silence was in the same city and could wait. I did not sleep at once. I did not need to. I had Saturday. I had her finger around mine, not her hand. I had been inside her without anything in the way. I had nine months of watching her fuck a silicon thing that was standing in for me, and I had the night that reversed it. Control still looked intact. I knew what I had flown for. I did not yet know that the body would take the sequel back in the afternoon, and that I would try to buy the same night from a different mouth.

***