The Mating Season - Beth

I sent the text at half past seven, standing at the lake in the cold.

The swans were there. They usually were by then, and I'd started to think of them as something mine, which was exactly the kind of thing you do when you live mostly alone in a place you haven't chosen. You claim things. The lake. The particular light at that hour. A man who appeared out of nowhere one February morning and knew things about swans.

I'd been thinking about the uniform since the previous night. It was hanging in the spare room wardrobe, pressed, waiting for my first shift at Addenbrooke's on Thursday. I'd taken it out and looked at it and put it back and then taken it out again, which told me something I didn't try to argue with.

I sent the text and put my phone in my pocket and watched the swans for a while longer. Then I went home.

---

He texted back inside ten minutes. *Yes. Twelve thirty?*

I said yes and put my phone face down on the kitchen table and made coffee and stood at the window looking at the back of the houses opposite. Someone had put a trampoline on their patio. It barely fit. I thought about that for a while instead of thinking about what I was doing.

The thing about Josh is that he's not cruel. He's not neglectful in the obvious way, not absent on purpose, not unkind. He calls most evenings, reliably, the same time, and we talk about his day and my day and neither of us says anything much, and afterwards I put my phone down and the house goes on being quiet in the way it is. He'd be horrified if he knew. Not because of the moral fact of it. Because he genuinely doesn't understand there's anything missing.

That's the part I can't explain to anyone.

---

I put the uniform on at twelve. Checked the blind was half down. Opened a bottle and put two glasses on the table, which I recognised was either very confident or very stupid, and sat down and then stood up again and sat back down.

I'd done my hair. Not elaborate, just pinned up, the way I'd wear it for a shift. A little mascara. The tights were new.

I sat there with my wine and thought: you are twenty-nine years old and you have dressed up in your work uniform for a married man from across the road and you have two glasses out. And I didn't feel as bad about that as I probably should have, and the not feeling bad was a fact I sat with rather than tried to resolve.

When I heard the knock I went to the door and opened it.

His face when he saw me was enough. That was the whole answer.

"You'd better come in," I said. "You look terrible."

---

I'd been thinking about the first morning since it happened. Not obsessively. It was just there, sitting in the background of whatever else I was doing. Him at the lake, the stillness of him, talking about swans without any of the self-consciousness most men bring to noticing things.

The talking was what I hadn't expected. Not just the lake, not just the café, but the texts going on past ten at night sometimes, both of us saying things that apparently needed saying, and neither of us pretending otherwise.

I'd told him things I hadn't said to anyone. About my mum's house, Chorley New Road, the sisters, the texture of a life I'd followed Josh away from because I thought I could carry it with me. He'd told me about his marriage, careful at first, the way men are, and then less careful, and I'd listened without offering him anything that looked like absolution because that's not what he was asking for.

He was fifty-two years old. He had two grown children and a wife and a house in Cherry Hinton and a life that sounded, from the outside, entirely fine.

I'd known something was wrong with the entirely fine part before he'd said a word about it. You can hear it, that particular flatness of a life that's become its own routine, in how someone talks around the edges of it.

I recognised it because I was twenty-nine and living in mine.

---

We kissed for a long time, standing in the kitchen, and I felt some of the morning's nerves leave my body and something more honest take their place. His hands were on my waist, through the tunic, and he was unhurried in a way that made me less so.

"I've been thinking about this since the first morning," I said, against his mouth.

"Which bit."

"All of it. You. This." A pause. "I went home that day and told myself it was nothing."

"And went back the next morning."

"Yes," I said. "I did."

We moved to the sofa. I let him take his time. That was part of it, part of what I'd been thinking about. His hand went under the tunic and found the waistband of the tights and I lifted my hips slightly without being asked and he worked them down to mid-thigh and then his hand came back up and I felt him through the fabric, not in a hurry, just finding out. I watched his face. He was paying close attention.

"*There*," I said, without meaning to say it out loud.

He did it again with two fingers and I tipped my head back and stopped being composed about it. He kept the same pressure and the same pace and I'd known it was going to happen before it did and it happened anyway, sooner than I'd meant, and I made a sound into the cushion that I hadn't planned.

Afterwards I lay there and felt the colour in my face and felt very precisely the shape of my own capacity for surprise.

*Fuck.*

"Don't say anything kind about it," I said.

"I wasn't going to," he said, and I was glad.

---

At the mirror I watched his face in the glass while he watched mine, and the look on him was quiet and true and entirely unperformed, and I thought: there. That's it exactly. That's the whole of it.

Upstairs. Now.

---

I took his shirt off because I wanted to and because I wanted him to know I'd decided, and he let me. Not passive, just unhurried. That particular quality of presence, of not filling the room with himself.

I sat still while he took my hair down. He did it slowly, each pin, and I watched his face and thought: he's not performing anything. He genuinely wants this moment. There's a difference and I know what it is.

He laid me back and undid the buttons of the tunic one at a time, no theatre about it, just doing it, and pushed it open and looked at me for a moment before he did anything else. I stayed still. The staying still cost me something. I was glad of it.

He worked down slowly. Mouth on my stomach, on my hip, and then he took the tights the rest of the way off and I felt the cold air and then his breath and then his mouth, and I stopped managing my reactions very quickly after that. He was thorough and patient and read me as carefully as he'd read me on the sofa, adjusting, not guessing, and I found myself telling him with my hands rather than words, pressing down slightly, and he understood that as well.

I came with my eyes open, making sounds I hadn't heard myself make before. He waited until I was done and then waited a little longer.

I'd said what I'd said about older men to him in the café because it was true, and I needed him clear on that. He didn't have anything to prove. He wasn't watching himself. He was just there, rarer than I'd known, before him.

---

Josh's name lit up the bedside table and I saw it and I made a choice and knew I was making it.

"Leave it," I said.

I felt the weight of that choice settle somewhere, not guilt exactly, more like acknowledgement. A door going shut quietly.

He was above me and inside me and I felt the full fact of that for a moment, the weight of him, the stillness before he moved, and then he moved and I stopped thinking in complete sentences. I told him what I needed, a word, a shift, *slower, there*, and he followed, and the ease of it, the following, was more than most people would understand if I tried to explain it.

At some point I reached for the mirror on the bedside table and angled it, caught his eye in the glass and held it. Kept it. I wanted him to see I was completely there. He looked back at me in the glass and I watched his face change and tipped my hips up and he went deeper and the sound I made was not quiet.

When it happened his face did something I filed away without quite having words for yet. I lay underneath him afterwards and thought: well. I didn't know it could feel like that.

---

"Can I ask you something strange."

"Go on."

"Do you think fantasies say something true about a person. Or are they just." A pause. "Something your brain does to you."

He kept his hand moving. "Both, probably. Depending on the fantasy."

I found him with my hand and he let me. "I've got one I've never told anyone. Josh doesn't know. Nobody does."

"You don't have to."

"I know. That's why I want to."

He kissed me, unhurried, and I kissed back and then pulled away just enough to keep talking.

"I think about being in the house alone. And someone getting in. Not invited." I kept my eyes away from his face. "And I can't stop them."

His hand moved and I paused, steadied myself, and went on.

"More than one, sometimes." Flat, the way I read things to myself when I've been carrying them too long. "They just take turns. I can't do anything about any of it."

I stopped.

He waited.

I felt myself decide something.

"The part I haven't said." Still not looking at him. "It's not strangers."

I let that sit.

"That's the part I've never understood and have stopped trying to. Not people I don't know. People from my life. People who'd know me afterwards. Colleagues sometimes. Friends." I turned and looked at him then. "More than one of them. Not stopping."

The room was quiet.

I watched his face. Not asking for reassurance, I wouldn't do that, but there was an impulse in me to say something that sounded like *please don't think badly of me for this* and I held it down and watched instead, which told me more than asking would have.

He didn't move away. His hand stayed where it was.

"You don't need to understand it."

"Most people would be horrified."

"Most people have a version. The shape changes but the thing underneath is the same. Wanting to be wanted past the point where refusing is possible. Wanting it taken rather than given."

"Yes. Exactly that." A pause. "All of them. Not stopping."

I held his eyes and felt something put down that I'd been carrying in both hands for a long time. He'd understood the actual thing, not just the outline of it.

His hand moved again and I let him and after a moment I looked at him.

"Your turn."

"Your turn what."

I stilled my hand, pointedly. "Something you've never told anyone. Or I stop."

He laughed. I didn't.

"Alright. Feet."

I blinked. "Feet."

"A woman's feet. In good stockings. Or used a certain way."

"Used how."

"You're very literal."

"I want to know."

"Your feet," he said, "around me. Or on me. Properly."

"Properly."

"Yes."

A beat. "You mean like. Your spunk on my feet."

"That would be one version of it."

I laughed, the kind that came out before I'd decided to. "You should have told me that on day one."

"Yes, well."

"By the lake."

"In retrospect."

I shook my head, still smiling. Then I felt something I recognised from the other side of it, five minutes ago. He'd handed me something real. Something he hadn't said out loud before. I knew exactly what that felt like.

"I'm due a pedicure. Fresh gel. Everything." I raised an eyebrow. "We'll try that."

"And yours?"

I went still. It had been a question I'd been carrying since before I'd said any of the rest of it.

"There's a belt on the chair."

He looked at the chair.

"Not now if you don't want. But I'd like to feel like it wasn't my terms. That's the point of it."

"I know. That's what I mean."

I looked at him for a long moment. Something settled that didn't need saying. Then I sat up.

"The tights. They're on the floor somewhere."

---

He found them. I took them from him, looked at them briefly, and handed them back. There was something deliberate in that, giving them back. They'd been on my body an hour ago and now they were for something else entirely, and we both understood that without saying it.

I sat up and he lay back and I took my time finding the angle, watching his face rather than what I was doing. I'd known about this for weeks, in the way you can know something completely and understand none of it. He'd told me. He'd texted me once about the socks, the exact thing he wanted, and I'd read it and thought I understood and I hadn't understood at all.

That's how it works for me with most things. The facts arrive first and the reality follows later, and there's a gap between them that you can't close without the practical demonstration.

He wrapped the tights loosely around himself and drew my feet together and I felt the nylon against my bare arches, warm and close, and my feet pressed together without meaning them to. The sensation was nothing I'd have thought to anticipate. Not his skin. The sheer fabric between us, his warmth through it, and my bare feet finding their own pressure back.

I kept my eyes on his face. Not on what I was doing. On his face, reading every shift in it.

His eyes had been closed. Then they opened and went to my feet and stayed there with an intensity that did something I hadn't anticipated. I have never been looked at quite like that. Not my face, not my body. My feet. The focus of it, the fact that this was the thing, I felt it land somewhere and thought: oh. So that's what that's like.

Being wanted for something you'd never thought of as wanting. Being desired for the precise curve of your arch, the red of your toes, the way the nylon caught the light when you moved. I was twenty-nine and I had been looked at in a lot of ways and none of them had felt like that.

I pressed the sole of one foot flat against him and watched his face change.

"*There*," he said, very quietly. Not to me. To himself.

I kept the pressure, the slow movement, watching. His hands came to my ankle, not directing, just holding. I felt the warmth of him against my arch and noticed I liked it, which surprised me, and I filed the surprise away for later.

His breathing changed. I found the rhythm, the angle of my arch, where the pressure needed to be, and I worked it out the way I did everything, with close attention and no performance. His eyes stayed on my feet, that same focus, burning and entirely unperformed, and I thought: this is what it looks like when something is genuinely wanted. Not performed want. The real thing.

I eased off slightly once, deliberate, and watched what that did to his face. Then I went back to where I'd been and he made a sound low in his throat.

"Tell me when."

"Not yet."

I kept going. The nylon warm against my bare soles, his hands loose around my ankles, the specific quality of his attention on my feet rather than my face. There was a power in it I hadn't expected. Not the kind of power I usually had over the pace of things. Something rawer than that. I was doing this to him. I could see exactly what it was doing.

"I want to see. When you do."

He held on long enough that I asked twice more.

When it happened his face changed in a way I wanted to keep. He took hold of my foot and pressed the sole of it to the base of him and I watched him go, each shot warm against my skin, and I curled my toes and felt it in my arch and between my toes and along the sole and I kept watching his face throughout because I wanted the whole of it, the precise moment, the sounds he made, the way his hands tightened on my ankle without knowing they had.

Afterwards I rubbed my feet slowly together and felt what he'd left there and thought: I know something now I didn't know an hour ago. Not about feet particularly. About the difference between being told a thing and being inside it. The theory and the practice. The facts versus the actual experience of them.

I reached for the sheet on the floor and cleaned my feet and lay back and looked at him.

"I like knowing things," I said.

"I know," he said.

---

With the leather between my teeth I had nowhere to go with any of it. No words, no control of the pace, no composure to maintain. He'd pulled my hips back and taken hold of the belt and the position alone had done something I hadn't anticipated, some rearrangement of what I'd thought I knew about myself. He held the belt taut across my mouth and set the rhythm and I felt myself stop running it, stop trying, because it had been taken out of my hands.

I hadn't known I wanted that until it was happening. But I'd been carrying that knowledge since I was nineteen and it was here now, actual and real.

He held still once, deliberate, deep, and waited.

I made a sound into the leather.

He waited.

I understood. I breathed. I waited with him.

When he went again the belt pulled and I grabbed the sheet with both hands and stopped trying to say anything at all and just let it happen, all of it, the sounds, the wanting, every bit of it I'd been managing since I was old enough to know it was there.

---

Afterwards I lay face down and didn't speak for a while. He sat beside me. I turned my head and looked at him, my hair across my face.

"Right," I said.

He moved the hair from my face. I let him leave his hand there.

His palm, warm and still. The room going quiet around us.

The voicemail notification lit up on the phone.

I looked at it. He didn't say anything.

"You should go," I said. "Before I don't let you."

I kissed him at the door, once, and meant it. Watched him cross the road toward the science park, the low afternoon sun over the fens, the estate continuing around him as if nothing had happened.

I closed the door and stood in the hall. The mirror was there. I looked at myself in it for a moment. Hair down, uniform still on, feet bare on the cold tile.

I looked like someone who'd made a decision.

I went back upstairs and called Josh.

---

I called him just after eight. He told me about a meeting, I told him about the agency shift, and we talked for twelve minutes and neither of us said anything much, and I put the phone down and the house went quiet.

I sat for a moment. Then I went back upstairs.

Not in a sentimental way. I wasn't trying to recreate anything. I just knew what I had and what I wanted to do with it, and there's a version of honesty in that I've always preferred to the alternative.

I took my time with the setup. That part matters to me. The vibe on the left, the other on the right, everything where I could reach it without looking. I'd learnt some time ago that I do this better when I don't treat it as something to be got through.

I closed my eyes and went back.

His hands first. The unhurriedness of them, the way they moved without rehearsal. I'd filed that properly and it came back intact.

His face in the glass.

*You're so fucking eager for it*, he'd said. Not cruelly. As a plain statement of fact, and the plainness of it had done something I hadn't been ready for. Being seen that clearly and having it said aloud like a thing simply observed.

I worked up to it gradually, which is how I do most things. I knew where I was going and I didn't hurry the approach. I took time to get the angle right, the pressure, the exact shape of the thing, until I had it, the vibe held firm and still, the other halfway, and then I stopped moving and held everything there.

His hands had trembled. That was what I'd kept without knowing I was keeping it. Not much, nothing obvious, but I'd been watching closely. That small loss of steadiness in a man who'd been otherwise entirely present. I held it in my mind now and kept perfectly still with it and felt what it did to me.

*Eager*, he'd said.

I let go.

I worked both together afterwards to take out the last of it, methodically, until I was certain I'd had everything there was.