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The girls you lusted after at school were nothing like her. They had shiny hair, fashionable clothes, plush, convincing smiles. At uni they got straight 2:1 grades, hung around the union bar getting their drinks bought for them by smitten rugby lads, gossiped and laughed in the library, making you frown behind your textbook while secretly you ached to join them. Now they’ve got husbands, beautiful children, good jobs—the kind that involve people skills, not poking around inside the chest cavities of the dead. They’re neat, finished versions of who you were supposed to be.
And when you let yourself imagine them—which wasn’t often—it was tame stuff, civilised. Crisp white sheets and candlelight and promises. Never like this.
Never outdoors, brick wall rough against your back, skirt hiked up, harsh breath and the trickle of rainwater into your open mouth. Later you’ll go home, stand alone under a hot shower, pull on fleecy pyjamas and curl up on the couch. But right now, the rain is everywhere, pervading the cracks of you. It runs in rivulets down your face, drips off the ends of your ponytail. And for a moment, soaked and glossed by it, grinding your hips against the press of her hand, her fingers seeking heat behind the fabric of your knickers, you feel like something of the outdoors. Of the night-time city—her city. Something sleek and feral, something she could want.
She’s wet through, too, and you can see her nipples, small and dark, through the front of her sodden blouse. No bra—never any concession to femininity or propriety. She’s all sharp, awkward angles; has one of those faces that oughtn’t to be beautiful, with its cadaverous hollows, its eyes sea-cold and granite-hard.
You could break yourself against her. It would be easy. Try to get through, try and try and try again, and get thrown back on the rocks each time. A suitable punishment for dreaming, for thinking she could ever need you. Stupid, she’d say.
So instead you content yourself with this. Her hand up your skirt, yours jammed down the front of her trousers, searching out the one part of her that’s soft and warm. Her fingers are slippery from the rain, not quite managing their usual dexterity, but you’re embarrassingly wet, regardless. She brushes the pad of her forefinger lightly over your clit, slips it back and down and in, and you’re gasping.
You retaliate—because you can’t just lean back and let this wash over you. Too dangerous; it’d be too easy to start believing your own fantasies. As it is, the sound of footsteps passing the mouth of the alley makes her pause and you shiver. The thought that someone might glance sideways and see the two of you together; carry you around in his mind’s eye entwined. This, preserved, somewhere.
The footsteps are gone, though, and you press two fingers inside her, thumb her clit and feel her squirm hot around them. Feel the momentary falter in her rhythm, open your eyes and see hers squeezed tight shut. And you withdraw your hand and thrust in again, harder, if only for the sake of feeling like you’ve given her something. After all, you know this is just post-case adrenaline. You know the only reason it’s you is that you’re the only person around who’s the right gender and not Donovan.
She’ll never want you like you want her, but maybe this time she’ll remember you tomorrow.
But, no. Don’t think about that now. You try not to—try to concentrate on the crook of her fingers inside you, the low, incipient surge of heat. To shrink your world to a point of pleasure. Her free hand sneaks up beneath your top to pinch a nipple, and your orgasm surprises you. It’s short, intense, and you make a sound that might uncharitably be called a squeak. She’s smirking.
Two can play at that game, you decide—glad, really, to have something else to think about. You don’t have her quick, nimble fingers, but you’re just the right height to nuzzle past the neck of her blouse and press teeth to her collarbone. You wish you dared bite hard enough to leave a mark—a bruise on pristine pallor, a reminder that you exist.
But then she’s coming in warm, wet pulses around your fingers, exhaling a sound you can almost believe to be your name. And she tips her head back and the rain falls upon her like a blessing, and, just for that moment, you let yourself imagine she’s yours.