The Third Person

Used my right hand to gently touch her face, and told her that I loved her.

I was ready to come, but holding back until she was there with me. It didn’t seem like it would take long: we hit a perfect rhythm, where every thrust was bringing her closer to the edge. She’d tensed up a little more, and her quiet cries were growing more eager. This was getting serious.

And then suddenly, it really was. She stiffened up against me in a way that felt entirely wrong: frozen in a fighting position.

Her hands started patting my back in panic.

‘Oh, stop, stop. Please can we stop? I want to stop.’

I stopped immediately. My body objected strongly.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’

‘No, no. Please can we stop? Please? I’m sorry. I really need for us to stop.’

She was starting to cry.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We have stopped. Come on. Shhh.’

I slid out of her as carefully as I could and clambered back to my side of the bed, rubbing sweat off my face and then adjusting my cock. Her hands went to her face and her body started shaking. She had rolled over on her side, facing away from me. Her naked back was shuddering gently.

I felt strange: still turned on; frustrated; hurt; apologetic.

The only thing I could really do was move closer to her and put my arm around her. She was shaking uncontrollably. I pressed up against her back and tried to hold her, but it was difficult to find somewhere non-sexual to place my hand, and I had to lean back from her slightly to keep my cock away.

I said, ‘Shhh. It’s okay.’

I said, ‘It’s okay. Shhh.’

She was gripping my hand ever so tightly. It was the only indication I had that she didn’t want me to leave her alone.

I kissed the back of her shoulder gently and told her it was okay.

After a while, she stopped shaking and I could just hear her crying quietly. I gave her body a quick hug. She clenched my hand a little harder in a couple of communicative pulses.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Here – blow your nose.’ I untangled myself from her and pulled a few sheets of paper off the toilet roll we kept by the bed. She rolled onto her back and took it from me. ‘And you’ve got nothing to be sorry about.’

‘Yes, I have. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

She blew her nose loudly in reply.

I said, ‘Well in that case: I’m sorry, too.’

She dabbed at her nose. ‘Why are you sorry?’

‘Because I did something wrong.’

‘Can I have some more toilet paper? Thanks.’ She blew her nose again. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘I must have done something wrong.’

‘It’s not anything that you did. Don’t say that.’

‘All right, then, it’s not my fault. But I still did something.’

‘You didn’t. Please don’t say that. I don’t know why it happened.’

She started crying again, and hit her leg in frustration.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

‘It hasn’t happened for so long.’

‘No.’

‘I thought I was getting better.’

It was dumb, but it felt like I needed to say it a thousand times. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It wasn’t you!’ When she realised how angry she sounded, she started crying even harder. ‘Honestly.’

I just couldn’t help saying it, and so instead I didn’t say anything.

I had far too many hormones whizzing around my body, looking for somewhere to land, and I didn’t trust myself not to get angry. My cock was still hard and I’d been only seconds away from coming; it was as though I’d been slapped awake. I needed time to adjust, but I could tell that it wasn’t going to work. The world was receding to the size of a pinhead: to a point where nothing mattered to me anymore; where all I could feel was this awkward, badly arranged sensation of self-hatred, anger and disgust. I could have sat staring into space for hours. I could have pounded myself until I just couldn’t anymore.

And that’s the awful thing: it should have been about Amy and once upon a time it was. It doesn’t matter; it’s okay; here – look – smile! See – that’s better. I’d do everything I could to pick her back up, for no other reason than that I loved her and so that’s what you do. You take it on the chin and stay standing, because someone needs to. And nobody had ever hurt me, so what right did I have to feel affronted or damaged by what happened? And that’s why, for such a long time, I was understanding and sympathetic when something this catastrophic happened.

But it wasn’t like that anymore.

And looking back, I don’t know how to feel about how I behaved. It’s easy to judge yourself by Hollywood standards, where a couple of actions dictate your hat colour, but I suppose that life’s not like that. I’d like to think that I was understanding and good ten times out of ten but I wasn’t, mainly because on at least a few occasions it became about me too. There were a couple of times – like this one – when I was too self-centred to do anything for Amy. She had to sit there, propped up on the bed beside me, crying, and handle it all herself.

I hate myself for that. Fair or unfair, I hate myself so badly I wish that cold, hurt, staring version of me could just be dead.

I want to have always been good, not just average and normal. Not just a sometimes-man, like everyone else would have been.

Perhaps that’s the nature of trauma: more like a disease than an actual injury. It eats away at you inside, right in your heart, and anyone you let in there is bound to pick it up themselves eventually. It’s unavoidable. You drop a big enough rock into a lake and it doesn’t matter how wide it is: eventually the banks that hold all that water will feel the vibration as well. And start to erode.

Four years ago. You need to sort yourself out.

I never did say that to her, of course – I’m not that bad a man – but I think she probably heard it from me all the same. She probably couldn’t help but hear it in the silence between us, which was deafeningly loud. I wish I’d been selfless enough to say something to break that silence and hide that thought every time she could hear it. But I wasn’t. Instead, sometimes, it ended up like this: both of us sitting there, crying for our own reasons, so far apart in so many ways that we might as well have been in different rooms.

There are only two roads in and out of Uptown, but probably a hundred or more ways to actually get there. It’s a strange place. The place was founded about fifty years or so ago, in the northern part of the city, at a time when it was fashionable for offices to let their employees have access to the open space on the roofs of their buildings. The more prestigious companies even started to have their tops turfed and professionally landscaped: sculpted bushes and stereotypically pretty flowers were planted, and the grass was maintained at a very false, but undeniably vibrant, shade of green. You could take your sandwiches up top during your lunch break and catch some sun – and it was one of the few remaining areas of the city where you were actually allowed to smoke. I mean, if you wanted, you could even flick the butts over the edge of the building when you were done. Chances are there’d be nobody important underneath when they touched down.

It was only a matter of time before people had the bright idea of linking up the rooftops. The main points were already there, and it was just a matter of smoothing over the spaces in between. Building firms were drafted in to rig up supporting structures between the buildings, and then enormous, street-spanning platforms were constructed to connect the roofs. These, too, were turfed and tended. The council, unsure exactly how to deal with this, became guilty of letting all this grass grow under their feet, and by the time anybody started to object at the increasingly dark street-level, planning permission had been granted via backhanders to local politicians – which was normal – and large sections in the north of the city were already under cover. The companies with the most money bought roof space on the smaller buildings, extending their empire upside and building elaborate floral logo designs to catch