Off Duty

Marco had seen me on dates, after dates, before dates, and once after a date so bad I went into his bar at half past ten and ordered chips.

The first time I saw him anywhere else, he was in a basement in Leith with both hands above his head, shouting the chorus of a song he claimed not to know. I nearly walked past him.

I recognised his face immediately. Marco had been serving me drinks for years. I knew the dark hair going silver at the temples, the heavy eyebrows, the small pale scar beside his chin and the expression he wore when somebody asked for a cocktail involving smoke at eleven forty-five on a Saturday night. What took a second was seeing him without the black shirt, bar apron, cloth over one shoulder or the practised lean that let him hear a customer without making it look intimate. He was wearing old jeans and a faded black T-shirt with a cracked white logo across the chest. His sleeves had ridden up because his arms were raised. He was singing badly and happily. There was a dark patch of sweat between his shoulder blades.

I stopped three people away from him. He saw me on the next song, opened his mouth and then laughed when I raised one hand. He pointed at me and then at the stage, as if I might have mistaken the purpose of the room. The band were loud enough that conversation was pointless.

I had gone alone. I often did. I liked live music more than I liked arranging three weeks of diaries to prove I had friends. The venue was crowded with adults old enough to know the words and young enough, in some cases, to believe jumping on the spot improved them. I had found a place near the left wall where I could see without having somebody's hair in my mouth.

Marco worked his way towards me when the song ended.

"You never said you liked them," he shouted.

"You never asked."

"You talk plenty."

"Behind your bar. Different jurisdiction."

He frowned because he hadn't heard me. I leaned close to his ear and repeated, "Different jurisdiction." His cheek brushed mine when he turned his head. I noticed the contact more than it deserved, and the next song started before I could decide what to do with that.

Marco didn't dance so much as move enough to prove he wasn't standing still. He had decent rhythm and no apparent interest in what anybody looked like doing it. I was better, which I considered fair because I had paid for classes in my life and he had spent his working years trapped behind fixed furniture.

The room warmed as the set went on. My hair stuck slightly at the nape of my neck. I had worn straight dark jeans, ankle boots and a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled twice. By the sixth song the shirt was damp between my breasts and the thought of the walk home in cold air had become attractive. Marco disappeared. I assumed he'd gone for a drink.

He came back with two bottles of water, passed me one and twisted the cap off his with his T-shirt pulled briefly away from his belly. I noticed the strip of skin above his waistband and looked twice.

"Thanks," I said.

He nodded and drank half the bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned back to the stage. He hadn't given me any particular look to work with. I looked at him anyway.

Marco was forty-eight. I knew that because he'd complained about his birthday in the bar the previous winter and because I had bought him a whisky he said was too expensive and drank half of it myself. He was a little under six feet, broad through the chest and thicker at the waist than he had been when I'd first known him. There was grey hair on his forearms. His hands were square and usually clean despite the bar work, although that night there was a black smudge near one thumb from something I couldn't identify.

I had never thought much about what Marco did when nobody wanted serving. The band slowed down for one song. People around us settled. Somebody moved past and nudged me sideways. Marco put a hand at the back of my waist to stop me colliding with him. His palm stayed there after there was no practical reason for it. I turned my head.

He was watching the stage. I could have moved and didn't. His hand lay warm and flat through the cotton, easy enough for me to step away from. A minute later his thumb shifted once against my back. I felt the small movement between my legs and stood a little closer.

Marco had seen me arrive with men whose surnames I had forgotten and women I had liked enough to see twice. He had seen Helen drunk, Jamie loud, Aisha furious about somebody else's academic paper and me in most of the ordinary states between clinic and bed.

He knew I took white wine too cold and whisky without ice. He knew I disliked sweet cocktails. He knew that if I ordered sparkling water after ten it generally meant I had work in the morning or had already made a decision I was trying not to make worse. He did not know what I sounded like when I came. The thought arrived fully formed. I turned towards him.

His hand dropped from my back at once. I wasn't sure whether I was disappointed or relieved. The set ended twenty minutes later.

Outside, the cold hit the sweat under my shirt and raised gooseflesh along my arms. People spilled onto the pavement in clumps, talking too loudly because their ears hadn't caught up with the change in volume. Marco stood beside me with his jacket over one shoulder and looked as if somebody had turned him down from maximum brightness.

"You were singing," I said.

"No."

"I saw you."

"Must have been somebody else."

"With your face?"

"Common face."

"Terrible voice."

He put on his jacket. "That part might have been me." We started walking without discussing it. My route home and his overlapped for the first ten minutes. I knew that much from years of bar-closing conversations, although I didn't know exactly where he lived. The city had that wet-black look Edinburgh gets after rain, pavements shining under streetlights, gutters still running. My ears rang faintly. Marco walked with his hands in his jacket pockets.

"Do you go to gigs often?" I asked.

"When I can."

"And never mention it."

"You don't tell me everything you do."

"I tell you far too much."

"You tell me things while I'm working."

There was no criticism in it. Just a distinction. We crossed at the lights. A taxi went through the puddle at the kerb quickly enough to make me jump back. Marco caught my elbow.

"Christ."

"I'm fine."

"I know."

He let go. We walked another half street. I said, "Were you going to kiss me in there?" Marco kept looking ahead.

"Thought about it."

I waited. That was apparently the whole answer.

"And?"

"Too loud."

I laughed. "That's your objection?" He glanced at me. "One of them."

"What's the other?"

"You come into my bar."

That shut me up for perhaps four seconds.

"I can stop."

"Don't."

"Very good chips."

"They're frozen."

"You ruin everything."

At the next corner our routes separated. Marco stopped. I stopped too. There was no romantic view. A delivery van was parked half on the pavement. Somewhere behind us somebody was trying to book a taxi by shouting at their phone. My feet hurt slightly and I needed the loo. Marco looked at me.

"Goodnight, Kate."

I stepped closer and kissed him. I meant to find out what the kiss felt like and instead found myself with a fistful of his jacket while his hand moved from my shoulder to the side of my neck. His mouth was warmer than the night air and tasted faintly of water and beer from earlier. He kissed back immediately and with enough force that I had to reset my footing on the wet pavement.

A couple passed us. I barely noticed. Marco pulled back first.

"Right," he said.

I was still holding his jacket.

"Right what?"

"Nothing."

He kissed me again. This time I felt his body against mine. He was hard enough that I noticed through both our clothes, not so hard that it seemed absurdly instantaneous. My nipples tightened under my bra. I put my hand under his jacket and felt the heat of his back through the T-shirt. He made a low sound against my mouth. When we stopped, I was breathing harder than two pavement kisses justified.

My house was six minutes away. I said, "Do you want to come home with me?"

"Yes."

We walked. Neither of us tried to improve on the answer. Inside my hall, Marco took off his jacket and automatically looked for somewhere sensible to put it.

"Hook," I said.

He used the hook. I kicked off my boots.

"Shoes," I said.

He looked down at his trainers.

"House rule?"

"Carpet rule."

He took them off. For a few seconds we stood in socks like people who had arrived for a perfectly respectable dinner. Then Marco put both hands around my face and kissed me again. I backed into the wall hard enough to knock one framed print crooked.

"Bugger."

Marco looked at it.

"Leave it."

"I didn't touch it."

"You were involved."

"That's not how walls work."

I kissed him to stop the conversation. His beard was short enough not to scratch at first and rough enough that I knew it would later. One hand moved down my side and over my arse. I pulled his T-shirt out of his jeans and slid both palms under it.

His back was warm and damp from the gig. He had more hair across his lower back than I'd expected. My fingers travelled up his spine and he shivered once.

"Cold?"

"No."

"Good."

He unbuttoned my shirt badly, missing one and having to go back. I laughed into his mouth.

"Do you want to do it?"

"No."

"Then stop laughing."

I didn't. He got the shirt open and pushed it off my shoulders. I was wearing a plain dark-red bra. Nothing selected for effect. Marco looked at my breasts for a second, then at my face.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"You keep saying that."

"Because you keep asking."

He kissed the top of one breast above the cup. I stopped asking. We moved into the sitting room because it was nearest. Marco sat on the edge of the sofa and pulled me between his knees. His hands slid under the back of my bra without opening it, palms flat against my skin. I bent to kiss him. His face was level with my chest.

He kissed the hollow between my breasts, then the edge of the bra. When his mouth closed over one nipple through the fabric I felt the wet heat immediately.

"Off," I said.

Marco opened the clasp. My bra dropped onto his thigh. He looked at my tits without pretending not to. I liked that.

At fifty-five they were full, lower than they had been at thirty-five and responsive enough that a mouth on one nipple could still pull a line of sensation straight into my cunt. Marco put his lips around the left one and sucked. His hand cupped the other breast, thumb passing once over the nipple before his mouth changed sides. I held his head, fingers in the short hair above his ears.

He stayed occupied with my breasts until I stopped wondering what he thought of them. My jeans became intolerable quickly. I opened them and pushed them down with my knickers. Marco leaned back to let me step out, then reached for me again. His hands settled on my hips. He kissed my belly, then lower. I spread my feet slightly. His mouth found me standing.

The first touch of his tongue made my knees soften. I put one hand on his shoulder.

"Wait."

He stopped. I moved one leg over the arm of the sofa and sat partly on the edge, partly against the cushion, giving both of us a better angle.

"There."

Marco knelt between my legs. He started again. There was nothing hurried about him once he was down there. His tongue moved through the wetness I already had, then over my clit in broad, slow strokes. I had expected competence. A man who spent his life noticing what people needed before they asked had given me that impression. What I hadn't expected was patience.

He stayed with the same movement long enough for me to stop wondering what he would do next. My thighs relaxed around his shoulders. He changed pressure, not rhythm.

"Yes," I said.

He did it again. I tipped my head back against the sofa and closed my eyes. The gig was still inside my body, not as music now but as a faint residual pulse. My ears rang. My skin smelled of other people's heat, cold night air and Marco's mouth. His hands held the outside of my thighs without forcing them wider. When I lifted my hips he followed. When I settled, he eased off.

I got close enough that my breathing changed, then the feeling levelled rather than breaking. Marco did not immediately attack the problem. He kissed the inside of my thigh.

"Still good?"

"Very."

He went back to my cunt. A minute later I pulled gently at his shoulder.

"Come up."

He stood. His knees cracked. We both heard it. Marco looked offended by his own body.

"Forty-eight," I said.

"Piss off."

I laughed and reached for his belt. He was thick through the waist, with a soft belly under the T-shirt and a line of dark hair disappearing into his jeans. I liked him more naked in pieces than I had expected. There was no reveal, no change of character, just more of the same man. I opened his jeans and pulled them down with his underwear.

His cock was hard, darker at the head, a little thicker than average and curving slightly upward. I wrapped my hand around it once. Marco's breath came out through his nose.

"Sensitive?"

"Enough."

I knelt on the rug.

"Kate."

"What?"

He looked down at me.

"Nothing."

"I'm beginning to hate that word."

Then I put him in my mouth. He stopped talking. I took the head first, tongue underneath, then more of him as my mouth adjusted. His hand rested against the back of the sofa rather than on my head. I used one hand at the base, matching my grip to the movement of my mouth.

Marco made very little noise. A long breath. Once, a quiet "fuck" when I changed angle. His thighs tightened under my palms. I looked up. His eyes were closed. That pleased me more than eye contact would have. I kept going until my jaw began to complain. When I pulled back, a thread of saliva stretched briefly from my lower lip to the head of his cock. Marco opened his eyes.

"Bedroom?" he asked.

"Upstairs."

"I know."

"You've never been upstairs."

"You point when you complain about the bathroom plumbing."

I stared at him.

"You really do listen."

"Occupational hazard."

We left our clothes in a trail that would have embarrassed me if I hadn't been too turned on to care. His jeans stayed in the sitting room. My shirt was still in the hall. He lost one sock on the stairs and didn't notice. In the bedroom, Marco stood naked beside the bed and looked briefly uncertain for the first time that night. Not morally uncertain. Logistically. I knew the feeling.

I lay back and pulled him down with me. We kissed. His chest hair dragged against my nipples. His weight came partly over me, then he shifted onto one elbow when I made a small noise.

"Too much?"

"No. Your elbow."

"Where?"

"My hair."

He moved it and his hand travelled down my stomach. Two fingers slid between my labia and found my clit wet from his mouth. He touched me lightly at first, then firmer when I moved into it. I opened my legs. Marco watched my face for a few seconds, then stopped watching and kissed my breast. His mouth closed over my nipple while his fingers kept moving between my legs.

The combination hit differently from his tongue downstairs. His hand could keep a more exact pressure while his mouth changed between sucking, licking and the rougher scrape of his beard against the underside of my breast. I held the back of his neck.

"Don't stop that."

He didn't. His fingers moved in a small, steady circle over my clit. His other hand slipped under my arse and drew me closer. At the same time he sucked my nipple harder, then eased when I pulled a sharp breath.

"Again," I said.

He did. My body tightened in stages: thighs first, then belly, then the involuntary lift of my hips against his hand. Marco stayed with the same rhythm even when my breathing changed.

The orgasm began as a deep contraction low in my pelvis and spread outward. I pressed my face into his shoulder and swore into his skin. My legs closed partly around his wrist. He kept his fingers where they were but stopped moving them until the strongest pulse passed.

"Move," I said.

He moved again, softer. A second smaller wave went through me and made my nipple jerk against his mouth. Then I pushed his hand away because the touch had gone from excellent to unbearable in less than a second. Marco rolled onto his back. I lay beside him breathing hard.

"All right?" he asked.

"Don't be smug."

"Wasn't."

He genuinely wasn't. I put my hand on his chest. His heart was going quickly. His cock was still hard against his stomach. I ran my fingers down and held him again.

"You didn't come downstairs."

"No."

"Were you close?"

"Not really."

I looked at him. Marco shrugged one shoulder against the pillow.

"I take a while. Usually."

"How long is a while?"

"Depends."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

He reached up and pushed a strand of my hair off my face.

"Don't make it a job."

There was no defensiveness in his voice. More like a man telling me where the glasses went.

"I wasn't planning a rota."

"Good."

I kissed him. When I moved beneath him, my body was still sensitive from coming. He kissed me while I guided him towards me. The first pressure at my cunt was good until it wasn't. I stopped him with a hand on his hip.

"Wait."

Marco went still immediately. I reached for the lubricant. At fifty-five, desire and lubrication were no longer guaranteed to arrive together. Some nights my body did both; some nights it needed help. That night I was still turned on and not slick enough for what we were trying to do.

I squeezed lubricant onto my fingers, spread it over myself and then over him. Marco watched my hand, not my face.

"Better?" he asked.

"Let's find out."

He entered me slowly. The difference was immediate. I exhaled and pulled him closer with one leg. For a while we stayed face to face, his movements measured while the extra lubrication did what I needed it to do. The slight burn disappeared. I kissed him and he moved deeper.

That angle was pleasant without being quite right. I shifted my hips. Marco paused.

"What?"

"Nothing wrong. Turn me over."

He raised his eyebrows.

"You heard me."

He moved back and I rolled onto my front, then up onto my knees. The mattress dipped under us. Marco put one hand on my hip and entered me from behind. The difference was immediate.

"There," I said.

His hand tightened slightly. I lowered onto my forearms. My breasts hung away from my chest and moved with each thrust. The room was cool on the sweat between them. Marco's thighs met the backs of mine in a steady rhythm. He did not start fast.

The slower pace suited me. I was still tender and open from the orgasm, and the deeper angle gave me enough sensation without needing speed. His cock moved inside me with a slow drag that became fuller when I tipped my pelvis down. Marco noticed. His palm slid from my hip to the small of my back.

"Like that?"

"Yes. Keep it there."

He did. For several minutes the rhythm barely changed. I could hear the mattress, his breathing and the occasional wet sound when he moved deeper. My arms began to tire, so I shifted onto my hands. Marco slowed while I moved. I looked back at him.

His hair was damp at the temples. His mouth was open slightly and his brow had drawn tight with effort. I had never seen that face across the bar. I rocked back to meet him and his eyes closed.

"That?" I asked.

"Yes."

So I did it again. We found a rhythm that belonged to both of us. He moved forward as I moved back, not perfectly, sometimes one of us half a beat late. The small mismatch kept knocking the rhythm loose and finding it again. My cunt was slick now, lubricant and arousal mixed. Marco's hand travelled around my hip and between my legs. His fingers brushed my clit once. I flinched.

"Too much."

His hand moved away and settled on my thigh instead. The pressure inside me kept building without turning into another orgasm, and I let it stay there rather than trying to push it somewhere else. My body felt heavy and used in the best possible way, every thrust distinct enough to register without demanding a destination. Marco changed pace slightly, quicker for perhaps thirty seconds, then slowed again. His breathing roughened. I looked back.

"Closer?"

"A bit."

"Only a bit?"

"You asked."

I laughed, then lost the laugh when he drove forward harder once.

"That was good."

He repeated it occasionally, a heavier thrust inside the slower rhythm. I liked the variation. My fingers gripped the duvet. Minutes passed. I stopped knowing how many. Marco remained hard. His body kept working. I could feel the effort in the change of his breathing and the firmer hold at my hips, but he wasn't chasing an ending. Once he stopped entirely and bent over me, chest against my back.

"Need a second," he said.

"Fine."

We stayed joined while he rested his forehead between my shoulder blades. His breath warmed my skin. I reached back and touched his thigh. After half a minute he kissed the back of my shoulder. Then he moved again.

The pause had changed something. He was slower, more deliberate, and I felt each stroke more clearly after the stillness. My own arousal rose again, not towards climax exactly but into a dense ache that made me push back against him. Marco made a sound, louder than anything he'd done so far.

"There?" I asked.

"Don't talk."

I laughed once.

"Bossy."

"Kate."

The way he said my name shut me up. His rhythm finally began to lose its steadiness. He pressed deeper, stopped, then pulled back and moved again. His hand tightened on my hip. The muscles in his thighs went rigid against mine. I felt his cock pulse inside me before I heard his breath break.

Marco came slowly, in several contractions with pauses between them rather than one sharp release, his body holding itself almost painfully still through the first and then moving once, twice, as the rest followed. He bent over me again, one hand flat on the bed beside mine. We stayed like that until his breathing settled. When he withdrew, he shifted carefully away from me.

I rolled onto my back. Marco sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at the floor.

"My sock's gone."

I started laughing. He looked at me.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Now you're doing it."

"Occupational hazard."

He shook his head and went to find his sock. I lay naked on the bed and listened to him walk down the stairs. For perhaps thirty seconds I had the oddest view of my own life: Marco, from the bar, looking for one black sock among the clothes in my house while I lay upstairs with sore thighs and beard burn beside my left nipple. It was funny and deeply satisfying. Marco came back with the sock in one hand and my shirt in the other.

"Found this too."

"Keep it."

"It won't fit."

"Coward."

He dropped it on me. We slept. I woke sometime after six with Marco on his back beside me and one arm flung over the pillow above his head. Grey morning had started at the curtains. Sleep had flattened the expressions I knew from the bar. There were fine lines around his eyes and a crease across one cheek from the pillow. His soft belly rose and fell under the sheet.

I needed the loo. When I came back, he was awake.

"Morning," he said.

"Technically."

He checked the time on his phone.

"I should go."

I nodded and pulled the sheet higher. He had a bar, deliveries, a flat, a life I knew surprisingly little about for somebody whose working week I could almost recite. Marco sat up and rubbed both hands over his face.

"You all right?"

"Yes."

"Good."

That was as much debrief as either of us managed. He dressed in stages, locating clothes from two floors. I found his other trainer under the hall table. He found my bra on the sofa and put it on the armrest without comment. At the front door he kissed me once, brief and rough enough to make me feel the beard burn again. Then he opened the door.

"See you," he said.

"You probably will."

He gave me a look that might have become a joke if either of us had been more awake. It didn't. Marco went downstairs. I stood in the hall in my dressing gown and listened until the front door closed below. A few seconds later his keys made their ordinary little clatter out on the pavement.