60.

In the movies, whenever couples hook up, the next scene usually cuts directly to wherever one of them live – they’ll be kissing, undressing, so passionate they can’t contain themselves. Everything will be so desperate but synchronized. But movies do that. It’s like seeing a character find parking right outside of their destination. Usually, in real life, we circle around, trying to find anywhere to park. But movies cut to the conclusion because they don’t have time to spend on that meaningless shit.

Rachel walks me back to her car – a Yaris – and then drives me back to my own; she grabs my address, but says she’ll follow me back to my place. I have no idea what I’m doing, but my heart’s thumping, thinking this is too unfamiliar and unexpected for me, and the natural defence is to lie and get out of it, although I explicitly did this to do something different.

And the world’s still open.

Not like trying to fly or drive out of here.

Nothing’s stopping me here.

Except my anxiousness.

At one point on the drive, I think I lose her, and have to slow until I find some car’s overtaken her and slipped in between us; but then, five minutes later, I do lose her, and even though I pull over to the curb and wait, hoping to see her (but hoping is the wrong fucking word; I’m waiting out of courtesy) I also start to think it’s for the best.

By the time I near home, I begin to rue the missed opportunity, and curse my reluctance, and not being able to just go with it. I work myself up into such self-loathing, that I vow if I ever get the opportunity again, I can’t piss it away.

That mindset lasts until I turn into my street, and I see her car parked outside my place. Then my heart’s accelerating into arrest, and that façade of determination and composure is exposed as just that: a façade cracking open to reveal something dark that I’m sure is not of this world.

I park in the drive. Get out of my car. She’s already out of hers and walking toward me.

“Lost you somehow,” she says. “I think I was speeding.”

“I stopped to wait.”

“I must’ve driven right past you.”

Wordlessly, I walk her to the door, unlock it, and push it open.

Once I step inside, this does get movie’ish; she closes the door with such suddenness that I think she must be planning to mug me, but she guides me to the couch, prodding me into a sitting position, and then straddles me, kissing me before I can voice a protest.

She’s a good kisser, too – like kissing as a teenager, when the act is still somewhat innocent, but also implicit of something more. Somewhere, I lost that, although I don’t know where – it might’ve been some dissolution that was so gradual that I just never noticed it went.

I never know what to do with my hands in this situation, too – with Lana, maybe, because we were comfortable with one another (or comfortable enough); but I don’t know how forward I should be, although she happily peels off her blazer, yanks her blouse (and somehow her bra with it) over her head and tosses them aside, even as she’s kissing me.

“You’re so stiff,” she says.

But I don’t feel it – typically, I’m thinking I’ve become so conscious of my body I put too much pressure on myself to have an erection.

She laughs, likely understanding how I’ve misread her. “All of you,” she says. “Loosen up.”

Untangling herself from me, she peels down her jeans and steps out of them. She’s only wearing this little g-string underneath. Her body’s supple – yoga or pilates or just-taking-care-of-yourself supple, her breasts small, her nipples like protuberant buds.

“Come on,” she says, grabbing my wrist for the second time.

My flat’s not difficult to navigate, and I guess most houses and flats would be logical in construction. The bedroom’s obviously not in my living room or kitchenette, which leaves the short, dog-leg hallway, the first door to the right being my bedroom.

She twirls me, like a Tango twirl, and pushes me down onto the bed, then falls on top of me, kissing me briefly, then working her way down until she unbuckles my cargo pants, and my underwear, and yanks them down my thighs.

I want to tell you that I’m magnificent, that being unburdened and with this new, beautiful, challenging woman elicits from me some Herculean effort worthy or porn awards, that even with my inexperience and diffidence, I find in myself (as a man) some ravage potential.

Because for most people getting intimate, this is typical behaviour – this is sex: letting go of clothes, of inhibitions, of everything but some carnal need that’s like the ultimate in gratification, but it’s been a long, long, long time since I knew any of this, and even then alcohol did a lot of the heavy lifting.

I think about not being ready, that I should be ready, and even when she takes me in my mouth, I’m somewhat ready, but not enough. Things don’t work as well, or as readily, as you get older, and now that it’s become a thing I can’t shake that focus.

All the old tricks come into play – trying not to think of anything, but that’s impossible now, like trying to … well, I don’t know what. I can’t think of a metaphor. So I flip to my Kylie Minogue fantasy, but she doesn’t manage to do it for me, and I feel peculiarly guilty even trying it now, although it’s never been an issue before.

Rachel comes back, kisses me, while running a hand under my t-shirt and into my chest hair. “You don’t find me attractive?” she asks.

“It’s definitely not that.”

“Do you get out of your head much?”

“Not anymore,” I say, slowly. “Not really.”

She smiles this sad little smile that I know I’m about to be mothered, and I hate that – hate that I’m this incapable.

“Tell me something you’ve never told anybody,” she says.

“What? Why?”

“It’s an exercise in letting go.”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you know.”

“I’m not sure.”

“First thing that springs to your mind – now!”

“I like the theme song from the TV series Baywatch.”

Rachel snorts. “That’s the best you’ve got?” She sits up, and taps my chest. “Something got stuck inside you.”

“That was just … life.”

“Life fucks us all over at some point – some people more than others.”

“I don’t want to give you the pity speech.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

She pecks me on the lips, then starts out of the bedroom, her near-nudity confronting me with how I’ve fucked up this evening, although some other part of my mind assures me that inevitably, she would’ve discovered just how unqualified I am, and that would’ve been even more disastrous – and embarrassing.

Stopping at the doorway, she turns. I expect some condemnation – for her to mock me, to tell me this would be the fantasy of so many men, that anybody else would, at the very least, bluff their way through a coupling, but there’s nothing mean or unkind in the way she looks at me, nor is there anything that’s pitying (which would be so much worse).

“Look me up when you find your way out,” she says.

“And if I don’t?”

“Your loss.”

She leaves then, and I wonder if I should go into the living room because that would be the polite thing to do – to see her out. I hear her dress, and then decide there’s nothing I can say or do that’ll do that’ll add anything to the situation other than redundancy.

When she leaves, I flop back onto the bed and am unsure what comes next.

61.

Autumn texts me in the morning as I’m making breakfast: Coming in today?

And it feels like my old life coming to claim me – I can’t leave it, and I can’t embrace anything new, so what do I have left but the ordinary?

No, I tell Autumn. Still not great.

Seen a doctor? she asks.

No.

You should.

I’ll see how I go, I respond, although Autumn would have to know this is all bullshit, because if I really was so sick I missed three days, I’m hypochondriac enough to get myself checked.

But what’s emerging now is the belief just how empty I feel – not just the way I usually feel, because there always seemed possibilities. This is like possibilities are being taken away, leaving me just with the reality, and I don’t like the fucking reality – that’s why I ended my life to begin with.

I really don’t know what to do, so I go back to bed, and then I’m filled with a hopelessness I’ve never experienced before – not even that first night I stepped in front of a train. This is it. I should be done with this – go back, see Luca, take a door, or whatever comes next.

Of course, the same carrot dangles in front of me – writing. The meeting with Regina today, and even though I’ve already bungled it twice, it – writing – remains my fallback, that one hope that might offer something more.

So late in the morning, I drag myself out of bed, shower, force some food down, and catch a train into the city, rehearsing possible scenarios in my head. They never occur the way I imagine them, and knowing that, I push them out into territory I haven’t explored before – I’m not going to dazzle Regina, so maybe I need to accommodate her, write something in alignment with her vision of what I need to do. I could enjoy that, surely.

When I get to the café and sit opposite her, the nervousness is back. I’m pinning a lot on this. She doesn’t know it – or maybe she does. So many writers would talk to her, want her approval, and need her support. It’s a stupid fucking thing about the industry that you spend all your life writing, and pin your success on just that one person saying, “Yes.”

“I know my first two books haven’t done that well,” I say, once introductions are out of the way and we’ve ordered drinks, “so I’d really like your guidance on what to do next.”

She sits back a little, as if surprised.

“What do you think I should write?”

“I think you need to do something a little more genre,” Regina says. “You deal with too many literary concepts. They’re not accessible to everybody.”

“I can do that,” I say, thinking about basic genre plots, like murders and kidnappings and all that stuff.

“Ground your writing more, too,” Regina says.

“I’m not really flowery or anything.”

“You’re a minimalist,” Regina says. “That’s fine. But I think people need more basic description, too.”

“Okay,” I say, thinking this isn’t bad at all. “Genre and accessible writing.”

“That’s not to say you can’t write what you want to write,” Regina says. “Mix it up if you need to. Like Melody Merlo.”

“You really think her first book was good?”

“It’s fantastic,” Regina says. “It should be on school syllabuses. The story, the writing, the hope – she balances it all so delicately.”

“You think it’ll stand the test of time?” I ask, because now I’m thinking of what Victoria told me – remember Victoria? She’s Gainsboro’s CEO; she told me that the higher-ups at Gainsboro knew Melody was bubbblegum fodder for short-term gain.

“That first book will be read long after we’re gone,” Regina says.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I say.

“Sorry?”

And I think now that either I’m connecting with an idiot, or Regina’s connecting with an idiot, but we’re so far out of sync with one another this is futile. I know it’s unbridled arrogance of me to dismiss Regina’s feedback, but all I see is just another fucking folly in this life.

“I was thinking of writing a spy thriller,” I say. “Like James Bond. But a woman. Jane Bond, maybe. Or something similar. Jane Beck. Jane Bach. No, wait, that would make her German, wouldn’t it? Jane Beal. What do you think? I’ll make her lesbian, too.”

“I don’t think you should be writing that story,” Regina says.

“Because of the lesbian thing?”

“There’s a cynicism to the way you’re pitching it.”

“I’ve really got no fucking hope with you, have I?” I say, rising. “I should’ve left the moment you called me a white dude.”

“Excuse me?”

I don’t answer, though, and head back to the station.