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He gets two fingers into me with spit and nothing else, twisting, spreading, rough. It burns. It’s not enough, which is exactly what I want. I hear him spit again, and then the wet sound of him slicking himself.

“Now,” I say. “Do it now.”

He lines up and pushes. The head of his cock forces past my rim and it hurts, a hot, tearing stretch with almost nothing to ease it. I make a noise I’ve never made in my life, and it comes straight back off the door into my own face. He stops.

“Kieran.”

He pauses, listening.

“Don’t stop.”

“Say Nashville or don’t.”

“I’m not saying it.” I push back onto him and take the rest of it, every thick inch, until his hips are against my ass. My knees give; he catches me around the chest with one arm. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”

He fucks me against his own front door with one arm around my chest holding me up and the other hand flat on the wood beside my head. It’s hard and deep, the burn turning into something else by the tenth stroke, dragging over the place inside me that makes my eyes close.

There’s a strip of cold coming under the door along the floor. It goes across my ankles on every stroke. The bolt is at the height of my sternum, and it digs in every time. His stubble is on the back of my neck. He still has his shirt on. I can feel the buttons of it down my spine, his belt buckle hitting the back of my thigh. Neither of us has taken one thing off that we didn’t have to.

I hold on to the frame of the door with both hands and let him have it.

Neither of us says anything else. There’s nothing to say. There’s the door taking it, the two of us, a car passing below. Outside the fish-and-chips place, a man laughs at something.

I get a hand on my cock. He knocks it away and takes over himself, his fist tight and spit-slick, fast and hard, out of rhythm with everything else. I go first. I come all over the inside of his door and his hand, clenching down on him, my forehead against the wood.

He goes about four strokes later, buried deep and pulsing inside me as he fills me, his teeth in the top of my shoulder through the shirt.

We end up on the floor.

Not deliberately. My legs go; he goes down with me. Neither of us tries to fix it. We sit on the floorboards inside his front door, my back against his chest and his arm across me. Both of us wrecked, half dressed, with the hall light still on. My pulse is still fast. His hand spreads over my sternum as if he can feel it. I let it stay there.

He doesn’t say anything for a long while.

Neither do I.

There’s a mark on the inside of his door at about the height of my shoulders where the paint has worn through to the wood. I look at it and start working out what I owe for him this, because that’s what I always do.

Nothing comes.

Not because there’s nothing I owe him. There’s too much of that now. It’s stopped being a number. I’ve never had a debt I couldn’t write down.

At some point his hand closes on my shirt at the shoulder and stays there, a fistful of fabric. Outside, somebody kicks a can down the sidewalk.

18

Imove four appointments on Friday, and none of them are difficult.

The retired one wants to talk about his daughter’s tuition and will talk about it just as happily on Wednesday. The one in the other sport doesn’t answer his phone at all, ever, and gets a message. The two here are in the last week of a season and would forget I existed if I let them.

That’s my practice. That’s nine years of building a legitimate front for a job that was never legitimate, and the front turns out to be four people who can be moved a week without anybody’s life changing.

Then I go to the market on the quay and buy food.

I haven’t done that in a long time. I usually eat standing up at a counter, out of containers, in an apartment where the oven manual is still taped inside the door because nobody has ever removed it. I know how to cook. My mother fed a family of three on a cleaner’s wage. She taught me because she worked nights and somebody had to know how.

I buy a chicken, two heads of garlic, onions, a bag of small potatoes, carrots, a bunch of thyme from a woman who wraps it in newspaper, butter, lemons, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine.

I let myself into his apartment at half past one on Saturday.