On Hold

“Are you sore?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to stop?”
“No.”

When he’s gone, before I leave for work, I strip the bed. It’s so wrecked I couldn’t even begin to reassemble it, and I know I’ll be too tired to deal with it when I get home. The sheet and flimsy blanket are twisted round each other in a tangled heap, the mattress has developed a strange lump in the middle, and the bed itself has travelled half a foot from the wall. I make it up with clean sheets, and put the quilt back on: two people can sleep with the covers hanging off the end of the bedstead, but it’s too cold to sleep quiltless when I’m alone.

It rained all day. Poor people who took a long weekend, I think, but I’m glad I’m in bed all day, lying sleepily on my side being fucked, with the rain pouring down outside the window. I’m glad that the blistering heat of the week before is gone, when I dreaded the thought of having to lie with my skin next to anyone else’s. I’m glad that it’s cool enough that I want to lie with my body pressed up against someone else’s, and that it’s a rainy day with nothing to do but fuck, and I’m grateful that I’m fucked so well.

For all the next week, though, my body clock is screwed. It adjusts too well to the erratic, purely physical sleep patterns of wake up and fuck till exhausted and sleep till the next fuck and eat to keep your strength up, and fuck and sleep again. I wake up restlessly hours before I can go to work, and come home and crawl into bed while everyone else is still noisily going about their day; at the weekend I sleep my night’s sleep all afternoon and lie sleepless and resentful at night. I’m in a holding pattern, where work, with all its last-minute flurry of frenetic activity seems an annoying irrelevance, and I’m perpetually waiting for the day to pass and real life to begin.