Free One Night Stand by Julie Cohen

dregs of the cheesecake and licked it. ‘Mmm. That Hugh is an absolute angel. I wouldn’t mind licking this cheesecake off his chest.’
     
    I stood up and searched in a drawer for a Gaviscon; my stomach was queasy as anything, probably because of the conversation. I found one and crunched it.
     
    ‘I need to get to my desk in your room, so I can do some work,’ I said. ‘You mind?’
     
    ‘Of course not, sweetness. You go right ahead and work there all you want. Balancing your chequebook?’
     
    ‘Something like that.’ I dumped my tea into the sink and went upstairs. Before I opened the door to my white room, my office, the pristine brain of my house, I drew a deep breath. Then I surveyed the destruction.
     
    Clothes. Little tiny slip dresses, pairs of tights, eensy T-shirts, lacy bras. At least four mugs, from what I could see. Newspapers, an empty bottle of wine. One of my cereal bowls, full of cigarette ends, was balanced on the end of the unmade sofa bed. My desk was covered with bottles of make-up, brushes and used cotton wool.
     
    Get over yourself, Eleanor , I thought. You write smutty novels, not works of literary greatness. You don’t need a room of one’s own; you just need a keyboard and a filthy mind.
     
    I picked my way through the mess and turned on my computer. There were sticky rings from cups on the top of my desk. They had started to attract dust.
     
    I was never going to be able to work in here till June was out and I’d reclaimed the room. I shut down the computer, picked up a notebook, and went to my own room and shut the door.
     
    Five minutes of staring at a lined piece of paper and I knew it was no good. I was never going to be able to write a new scene for Throbbing Member . I wasn’t anal or anything. I mean, I’d had people staying with me before. Not long ago I’d had a total stranger in my bed, right?
     
    But I could hear her downstairs, scraping her chair back and singing. She’d probably be going through my bathroom cabinets next, and looking through the phone book for the number of her friend who looked like George Michael. Any minute now she’d light up a fag and I would be able to smell it.
     
    I needed space.
     
    ‘I’m going out,’ I called to June as I went down the stairs, and didn’t wait for her cheerful reply before I shut the front door behind me and went next door to Hugh’s. I unlocked the door with the spare key I had on my ring and went inside.
     
    It smelled of chocolate in here, and faintly of Hugh’s aftershave. ‘Hugh?’ I called, though June had said he’d gone to college.
     
    I didn’t usually let myself in to his house, though in theory I could whenever I liked, and he let himself into mine pretty often. But there was the matter of his girlfriends, and anyway, whenever I wanted him he seemed to show up near me one way or another.
     
    His house was tidy and clean, and my shoulders immediately relaxed. That was one thing Hugh and I had in common: we weren’t neat freaks, but we both liked things in place. We used to get teased about it at university, but then again people used to queue up to share houses with us because we would do the washing-up pretty often.
     
    Here, I could probably work. I searched through his CD collection till I found one I’d given him and that I also owned, and put it on. I settled myself on his brown leather couch, put a couple of cushions behind my back and another on my lap, and settled my notebook on top of it.
     
    Sitting like this, I was facing the shelves of books and DVDs that Hugh had on his wall, and I idly let my gaze wander over them. He had quite a few expensive cook-books; the rest of the shelves were stuffed with forensic thrillers and funny science fiction/fantasy paperbacks. We didn’t share taste in literature; I didn’t look through his shelves very often.
     
    Which was probably how I’d missed seeing that one of his shelves held a line of sixteen purple-spined books, every one of