Lust, et cetera by Laura Christine Rollinson
Image by Cottonbro for Pexels
Start-jerk-whip – you catch sight of your reflection in the wall-window, blue against the black, sat astride Seb, topless. Thrill stroking spine, igniting at its base. Spreading.
Rain lashes the glass, drowning out the tinny music that Seb has insisted you keep on. You zone out, focus on the bullet rain, and the desire for a cosy night under canvas plucks at your stomach, reaching a finger in and filling you – momentarily – with childish longing. Seb lifts you up, lowers you down, trying to find the right angle, and you’re back.
Hotness pulses, throbbing from your centre to the edges of your flesh as you find the right spot to lower yourself down onto him, into you, his hands holding your back. You’re about to flop off the edge of the sofa, burgundy, leather, cracked with age, but he grasps you – doesn’t do much else, just sort of sits there. The heat starts to seep out: the throb-pulse flickers and dies.
You imagined it in a large bed, a romantic headboard like something from a fin de siècle Parisian novel, silk sheets ripped from their tucking, soft against your back. You imagined it in a seedy B&B at the seaside, the scream of gulls punctuating your movement, the taste of salt and grease still on your gums. You imagined it up against a tree, in a forest so lush that leaves block the sun, your skin illuminated by lucent slices filled with pollen. ‘Livvy,’ he would say, in these daydreams, and you would melt at the sound of your name spoken by his tongue, in a voice that you dreamed up, a voice of gravel and depth – not his real voice.
Push forward for more purchase – find a place for your knees to settle so you’re not unsteady. Jacob – his face stabs and you see him in blinks. It’s not like this with Jacob. Big huff out, trying to expel him from behind your eyelids. ‘Rock the Casbah’ fades into ‘Ashes to Ashes’. You haven’t swept the floor – your clothes are discarded, coated in soft dust at Seb’s feet.
Seb texted you earlier:
Pleeeeeease could you do me a huge favour and cover Matt’s shift tonight? 7pm-midnight. I’ll walk you home x
You found the begging unattractive, but replied, immediately:
Yes xxx
You’re teaching a 9am seminar tomorrow and still have prep to do. But you always say yes.
In your imaginings, his olive arms, the soft black hairs on them, were met at his torso by something rippling, carved, almost. His arms are good. His body is… fine. Alright. You’ve had better.
What would happen if Alice walked past? There is no reason for Alice to walk past – you’re almost entirely certain she’s at home and not walking the streets of York in a vicious downpour. Imagine, though, her catching sight of your bouncing tits as she tries to glimpse Seb after hours. The face she would pull. The colour she would turn. Your thighs are starting to burn.
She thinks you don’t know. But you’ve seen her look. You’ve seen her glance cast your way when you’re behind the bar, and he’s there too, hugging you, sometimes, from behind, letting you rest against his chest, your arms covering his as they clasp at your waist. She thinks you don’t know that she is wondering what he smells of – talcum powder, salt, mint, on a good day – imagining what his body feels like. What it would feel like if she were in your place.
‘Sledgehammer’ now. Who even made this playlist? Sweat prickles on your neck; you shudder. Seb thinks it is him.
‘Are you alright?’
‘Yeah.’ Pretending breathiness. ‘You?’
He nods, slides his hands down to your hips. Bites his lip. You gulp a laugh.
Time for a proper look at the tattoo on his chest, blue and bleeding into his pale, soft skin – such a contrast to his arms, as if whoever drew him stopped giving a shit when it came to the torso. You squint: ‘Leeds,’ it reads. Try not to twist away – close your eyes instead to tamp down the surge of scalding horror.
Seb reaches up to kiss you, his tongue sliding a clack of chewing gum into your mouth, void of flavour, so foul you turn and spit it onto the dusty floor. Your mouth floods with foam gushing up your throat – swallow it down don’t spit again.
‘Ha! Sorry.’ What do you even say to that?
The seminar tomorrow spikes into your thoughts and you try to shake it of. Prufrock. You’ve taught it before – you’ll need to make it up as you go along. Alice plans her seminars carefully. But Alice isn’t fucking Seb after work.
He gets bored, lifts you up – your thighs thank him – lays you onto the sofa. Maybe this will be better. The slick of sweat on your back slides against the leather. You can feel the chewing gum staring at you as he rams himself back into you.
You don’t spend all this time waiting to enjoy it with Jacob – you don’t have time to form thoughts. Not even the first time. It was like he knew, instinctively, what you wanted. You’ve wondered, before, if he reads sex blogs. Or if it’s a natural gift. He definitely doesn’t hawk masticated gum into your mouth.
Ha – what is – ah? Redness throbs through your limbs stop thinking – out of your head, back to this old leather sofa cracked, grimy, knee dents – slimy. Touch his face stubble under fingertips pushing through his skinscrape – scrape on your neck you want it. You smell disinfectant cutting through the air from the loo. Sigh out and the feeling is gone.
You can’t ask him to rub his face on your neck. He talks about the girls he fucks with the other men who work here. They’ll make up a nickname for you.
‘Is this good?’
‘Yeah.’ Trying to mean it. Hoping to mean it. ‘Keep going.’
He stops, though, reaches across to the little table still crowded with empties. Fishes something out of a glass and pops into his mouth and chews – ‘You’re so filthy’ – and lowers his head to kiss you. Cocktail cherries. He sneaks them to you, sometimes, to circumnavigate with your tongue then crush between your teeth as you pour pints of lager and shove ice into a metal shaker. He doesn’t usually pick them out of an abandoned glass. Your stomach recoils and rebounds off your spine. Suppress shoulders shuddering.
You didn’t tell Alice about the time Seb kissed you after work. It was six months ago, the end of a long Saturday. You had washed all the glasses – without hooking anything out of them to eat – wiped all the tables, taken out the bins. He made you both rum and cokes, sat at the bar and watched you drink. Didn’t touch his. You don’t like rum and coke: drank it anyway. He told you about his girlfriend, about how clingy she is. How she wasn’t a cool girl, like you. You struggled to control your facial expression. But when he brushed your thigh, ran his finger up the inside of it, you let him kiss you. It lasted for about a minute before he backed off, jumped up, turned; said you needed to go, and he’d walk you home if you really wanted but it would probably be fine, wouldn’t it, walking back on you own? You nodded, let yourself be hustled out of the door. He barely spoke to you for three weeks.
You had so wanted to tell Alice. You imagined her face, sat next to you in the research building, your coffees cooling on your desks, as you described his lips, his tongue, his teasing touch. You thought about how she’d feel, like needles stabbed under fingernails. About how you’d feel, full of something. Smugness. Pride. But you didn’t even write it in your diary.
He’s slowed down. Jacob again, creeping into your thoughts whenever he gets a chance. You met him here, served him a pint of Carling. He looked like the kind of guy who would ask for whatever wanky IPA you had on. Carling shocked you. So basic you respected it.
You kept Jacob on a thread for a couple of months, dangled him and pulled him up like a yoyo when you felt like it. You became friends. He’s doing a postdoc at your university, in another department, and you started meeting on campus for lunch, sometimes going for a walk around the lake when your eyes were all blurs and zigzags after an afternoon hunched over books and laptops. Filling your lungs with air that has been filtered through birch, laurel, weeping willow. Alice’s mouth draws into a line every time you get up, stretch, say you’re off to meet him for a bit. She doesn’t approve of Jacob and you can’t be bothered to work out why. He’s nice: quiet, very funny; always friendly to Alice. Makes her a cup of tea in the morning if he’s stayed over. Makes her breakfast sometimes, too, if she shows her face in the kitchen: fried egg sandwiches, porridge with lots of cinnamon and sugar, French toast thick with melted chocolate.
She said, once, ‘You know what I think of Jacob.’
‘What,’ you replied, ‘that he’s a sub-par guitarist, a good scholar, and an excellent fuck?’ You walked off, out of the arts building, leaving the mature student sat opposite – wispy grey hair startled out from the side of his head – agog.
‘This Charming Man.’ Jacob tried to play the riff for you once but mangled it. Badly.
There was a night, after knowing Jacob for weeks, letting him think you weren’t interested in him in that way, that Seb brought a woman into the bar. A girl: she looked nineteen at most. What your grandma would call a proper dollybird: lots of make-up, her tonged curls shining with spray. Definitely a bit dicey for someone Seb’s age. Anyway, they were twisting around each other, limbs snaked and snared together. You wondered if he’d split up with his girlfriend and not told anyone.
So, walking home after seeing Seb unhinge his jaw and devour an almost-child, you texted Jacob.
What are you up to? X
You thought, for a few minutes, that he was ignoring you, or had gone for an early night. Then his reply came through.
Not much. Watching a really shit film. Why? x
Do you want to come over? X
He was waiting on your doorstep by the time you got home.
You know you shouldn’t keep going with it. Not when you know Jacob has feelings for you, real, actual feelings, not friends with benefits feelings, sometimes wanting to sleep with someone who is nice and clean and actually quite good at sex feelings. You should be honest, cut him loose. Let him find someone who wants his cling-attention. But some nights, you want to fall asleep in sheets that aren’t cold when you roll over, to be near a warm, breathing body for a few hours. Sometimes, you wake up and he’s spooning you. So you keep pulling the yoyo up. There are weeks that go by when he’s the only person you’re sleeping with – sometimes, for three nights on the bounce; others, every two or three weeks, in between men you meet in the bar. Occasionally, one of your students. It’s fine – they’re legal.
You stifle a sigh. If you could, you would take your phone out, scroll your social media for a bit to see if you could find anything to make you feel like you know you should feel. Or look at pictures of Jacob. You have an album on your phone. It never takes long for lust to cool, for the heat to disperse into the air like ice melting into an oily spirit.
Seb is still on top of you, thrusting away so ineffectually you had almost forgotten he was there. How long it will take? You wonder if Jacob is still awake. You exhale.
‘Dy-Na-Mi-Tee’ startles you like waking from the very first drops of sleep. A song you haven’t heard since you were a kid. Were you asleep? What were you thinking? Jacob.
You think about Jacob more, close your eyes, lean your head back put yourself in his room, his guitar leant against the wall no dust on its shoulders its shine unsmudged, his duvet – greenblue clean-smelling – shoved away. His glacier-blue eyes an inch from yours your foreheads touching, his breath thawing your face electricity jolting up your arms through your legs – it is him on top of you. Eyes closed: forget the prison-looking tattoo, try to smell fennel and citrus and think about Jacob’s shoulders, his surprisingly well-sculpted shoulders – you’re almost there and it will all be over –
Head jerk – sleep? – you twitch your eyes open: tattoo, up and down you can see nothing else but the spilt ink stain. Lust withers, desiccated. A husk. It looks like the tattoos your uncles have, done by the one guy on the estate, permanently shirtless, with a tattoo gun. You realise it in a retch. Scales fallen.
Seb comes and you lie underneath him, sticky with relief, his face buried into your neck, the urge to throw him off restrained in a clenched fist. His smell – stale beer and armpits – makes your stomach roil again.
‘I can’t believe we just did that.’ Half-laugh. ‘I’ve never slept with anyone here before.’
That’s a lie; he told Matt he fucked Philippa on the bar in the lull after Christmas.
‘Can I just?’ Try to get up, push his shoulder. You pull your dusty clothes on – ‘Witness the Fitness’ – stop yourself from running to the loos to wipe the ick from out of yourself. Sit on the toilet, take out your phone, swallow down the urge to sick up. A text from Alice asking where you are. So tempting to tell her what you have done but you want to see her face. You leave her on read. Go to another thread, type:
You up? x
Laura Christine Rollinson (she/her) is a writer and historian from West Yorkshire. She writes novels, short stories, poetry and creative non-fiction about women and the body. Her story We Make Our Own was published by Dear Damsels in 2023.