One Night Stand (4 page)
Authors: Julie Cohen
‘I only live around the corner,’ I gasped.
He smiled and I could see his perfect teeth. He seemed to have a lot of teeth, but I wasn’t exactly seeing one of anything.
‘All right,’ he said.
3
Iopened my eyes the next morning, and then the sunshine made me close them.
My head was hurting. A lot. I groaned, turned over away from the window, and opened my eyes again. My bedside table came into focus. On it was the bottle of lemon-flavoured liquor that I’d bought a year ago on a cheap holiday to Naxos, and which had stayed three-quarters full for the past eleven months.
It was empty. Here was the reason for my headache. Bad, stupid Eleanor, for drinking dodgy liquor in bed and -
There were two glasses on the nightstand.
Memory teased at the back of my headache. I’d worked down the pub - and met that man - and then -
I sat up in bed, my head pounding and my stomach rolling. There was no man in my bed, and no sign of one in the room. My duvet and pillows were pretty messed up, but that could be because I’d had a restless night.
Except I was naked.
I ran my fingers through my hair, which seemed to be standing on end.
I never slept naked. I wore a T-shirt and knickers. Unless I was in some sort of relationship, which I most definitely was not at the moment.
But that man, last night -
I grabbed the pillow next to me and sniffed it. There was a distinct scent of expensive aftershave.
Right. This meant nothing. Maybe he’d come home with me, we’d had a couple of drinks - comprising most of a bottle of ropey booze - and we’d passed out, after which time, in my sleep, I’d removed my clothing.
‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Is there anyone in the house?’
No one answered.
Good. So maybe he’d had a nap, and then woken up and gone home and I hadn’t got naked till after he’d left. Just because I’d never undressed myself in my sleep before didn’t mean there couldn’t be a first time.
I slung my legs over the side of the bed and winced. My thigh muscles were sore. So were my rear-end muscles and my arm muscles and my stomach muscles - what there were of them. I felt as if I’d done a rather hefty session of callisthenics.
I felt, in fact, very much as I’d described one of my heroines feeling after an all-night orgy session with six or seven virile policemen. Give or take the handcuff marks.
I checked my wrists. No chafing.
‘Thank God for small favours.’ I hauled myself out of bed, pulling on my dressing gown.
‘All right,’ I said to myself as I went down the stairs. ‘I remember kissing him. I brought him home. We had some drinks. We did some exercises or something. He went home and I took off my clothes and went to sleep.’
Halfway down the stairs I spotted my bra, dangling from the handrail.
Stomach ever sinking, I reached the bottom of the stairs and saw my knickers on the floor. In my living room, my jeans were on the couch, my T-shirt on the coffee table, my socks draped over the stereo.
I hadn’t undressed myself in my sleep.
I opened my dressing gown and looked down at my naked body. The skin on my breasts and belly was pink, as if it had been rubbed with something rough. I remembered my date’s facial hair, which apparently had been intimately acquainted with a great deal of my body.
And I didn’t remember a minute of it.
Someone knocked on the door, and I froze. Him? Coming back to pick up where we’d left off?
I swallowed, gathered my courage, and opened the door. If it was him, at least he could fill me in on the night’s events, and let me know whether I’d enjoyed them or not.
It was Hugh.
He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, looked as if he’d recently showered, and he was staring at me.
‘Morning,’ I said.
‘Morning, Eleanor,’ he replied, and his voice was a little bit weird. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Great!’
Normally I would have stepped aside to let him in, but I was intensely aware of my clothing scattered around my normally neat living room. Instead I nodded brightly, causing more pain to pierce my head, and repeated, ‘Great! How about you, did you have a good night?’
‘
You
did,’ he said, and he tilted his head in an attempt to see around me. ‘Are you on your own?’
You
did,’ he said, and he tilted his head in an attempt to see around me. ‘Are you on your own?’
‘Of course I am. Who would be here?’
‘That’s what I was wondering.’
‘Why would you wonder that?’ My attempt at being nonchalant was dreadful, but between the headache and the sick stomach and the lost memories of a completely uncharacteristic one-night stand, I was having a hard enough time remembering how to talk.
Hugh raised both his eyebrows at me. I remembered the guy in the pub doing the same thing when I’d flirted with him. He was also staring at my mouth.
I touched it. My lips were slightly sore, and I remembered the friction burns on the rest of my body. It seemed I’d done quite a bit of kissing, too, beyond the one kiss outside the pub that I could remember.
‘I don’t think you could make all that noise yourself,’ he said.
‘Noise? Were we - was I making a lot of noise last night?’
He raised his eyebrows higher.
Hugh’s terraced house was next door, and his bedroom and mine shared a wall. It wasn’t exactly soundproof.
‘Well, I hope I didn’t disturb your fun and games with Henrietta.’
‘Harriet,’ he corrected, and annoyance flickered across his face, though I thought it was unfair of him to be bothered that I couldn’t remember the name of his date when he hadn’t been sure of it in the first place. ‘So who is this guy? I didn’t know you had plans last night.’
‘Oh, you know, these things just happen.’ I shrugged and rubbed my hand over my lips again. Because these things did not just happen to me, and Hugh knew that as well as I did.
He leaned against the doorpost. ‘Is he really still there? I’d like to meet him.’
‘No.’ It came out quickly, the answer to both questions.
‘He left pretty early, didn’t he?’
Hugh was still looking annoyed, though I had more reason to be annoyed than he did. ‘Hugh, I don’t need you to play the inquisitor about my private life right now, I need to go and have a bath and take some aspirin.’ I ran my hands through my hair again.
Hugh’s eyes dropped from my face, and I realised that my action had made my dressing gown gape open a little on my chest. When I looked down I could see the red friction marks. I pulled the dressing gown closed, and gave Hugh a pointed stare.
‘So I’ll see you later,’ I said.
He nodded, his gaze still on my dressing gown. ‘Right,’ he said, but he didn’t move, so I shut the door.
Noise. The mystery man and I had made lots of noise, enough noise to penetrate a brick wall.
I knew from past experience, from trying to get to sleep when Hugh was having fun next door, that every word didn’t get through. Only the loud bed creaks. The cries. The screams. Particularly the high-pitched female ones.
I leaned back against the door.
Not only had I had drunken sex with someone I didn’t know and forgotten all about it, but it had also been loud, uninhibited, orgasmic,
screaming
sex.
screaming
sex.
‘Shit,’ I said.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Maybe it was a blessing that I didn’t have any memories to be ashamed about. But then again, I hadn’t had an orgasm with another person in such a long time that it seemed brutally unfair that I didn’t remember this one - or ones, as seemed to be the case.
My eyes popped open. I also didn’t remember something else about the sex.
I raced upstairs and dived straight for the bedside table drawer. It wasn’t hard to find the box of novelty coloured condoms, given as a party favour at a hen night for a university friend last spring, still pristine and sealed. A brilliant metaphor for my own sex life, up till about ten hours ago.
But there was the machine at the pub. I’d suspected him of going there anyway. I crawled across the bed, grabbed the wastepaper basket, and rifled through it. No sign of wrappers or used sheaths.
Maybe he was a slob. I got down on my hands and knees and looked at the floor, under the bed, in the hallway, anywhere that a drunken man could drop or fling a used condom. Then I went downstairs and looked through the living-room bin, under the couch, between the cushions. I checked the toilet and the sink and the bathroom bin.
It was only when I’d emptied the contents of the kitchen bin on to the floor and was sitting amongst banana peels, coffee grounds and cheese wrappers did I give in to the inevitable conclusion.
I’d slept with a man who resembled an eighties pop star and I hadn’t used protection.
4
It was Sunday afternoon down the Mouse and Duck, and I put on the kettle in the kitchen and put an extra spoonful of instant coffee in my mug. I felt like a rotten tooth.
‘Slip a bit of brandy in that, you’ll feel better,’ Jerry said to me on his way through the kitchen to his flat upstairs.
I shuddered at the thought, and Jerry chuckled and handed me the milk.
‘You’ll need to put on a braver face than that if you’re going to turn into a drinker, girl.’
His voice was full of friendly compassion, and I searched his face for any awareness of what I’d ended up doing last night as well as drinking. He didn’t appear to be hinting at anything, so maybe he’d missed my flirting with George Michael man. Maybe that meant that the whole pub had missed it, which would be a considerable relief.
‘I’ll stick with coffee, thanks, Jerry.’
‘You all right down here by yourself?’
‘I’ll be fine. I’ve had worse hangovers.’ The spoon clunked against the side of my mug and I winced. ‘I think.’
He chuckled again and left me to it.
I brought my coffee into the pub and sat with it behind the bar on a stool I’d pulled back there. The Sunday afternoon sunlight was not kind to the Mouse and Duck. It filtered through week-old cigarette smoke and shone on seats leaking stuffing, and tables ringed and scarred and burned. The wallpaper and ceiling and net curtains were tinged nicotine-yellow. The only small bit of beauty was the stained-glass window above the lounge-bar door; blue and purple with the pub’s building date, 1923, in red glass in the middle. It threw a puddle of colour on to the worn and gummy carpet.
Paul and Philip had the football on the TV in the corner, but they were obviously aware of my hangover because they had the volume turned down much lower than usual. Paul smiled at me but I didn’t catch any knowing wink or nod, so maybe I was safe with them, too.
The left-hand door opened below the stained-glass window and Hugh came in. He was wearing the same jeans and sweatshirt he’d had on earlier, and he was alone. I poured him a pint of Coke and he sat on a bar stool, pushing a cardboard box towards me.
‘Thought sugar might help,’ he said.
I peeled open the lid. Inside was a whole, perfect, glazed strawberry tart, the size of my palm.
‘Gorgeous.’ I took it out of the box and weighed it in my hand. It was still warm. ‘Is this what you’ve been making this morning?’
‘It’s practice for next week,’ he said. ‘A couple of the other ones didn’t come out as well.’
I took a bite of it and closed my eyes as the pastry and fruit dissolved in my mouth and the world suddenly became a whole lot better.
Hugh had quit his latest job in I.T. nine months before to train as a pastry chef at the local college, and I was often his official taster. Or, more often, Hugh had used his latest cake or pastry concoction as a sort of seduction tool to lure yet another young lady into his bed, and I got the leftovers the next day.
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