Free The Calling by Neil Cross Page A

away.’
    He stretched his arms. ‘Best be getting back.’
    ‘I don’t want to go to work,’ she groaned, stretching her neck. ‘I want to take the day off. I’m tired.’
    ‘We could play hooky,’ said Mark. ‘Go to the pictures or something. I haven’t been to the pictures for ages. Especially not in the afternoon.’
    ‘Me neither.’
    ‘We should totally do it,’ he said. ‘Say we’re in a meeting. Go to the pictures. Grab a Chinese afterwards.’
    ‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘But no.’
    So he slipped his tobacco tin into his pocket and they strolled back to work.
    In her memory they were arm in arm, although of course that can’t be right. Not yet. Not then.
    That afternoon, she’d been distracted and clumsy. She spilled a cup of coffee over her desk.
    Just by sitting there, laughing at the past, she’d felt that her John, that boy, was nothing more than a memory.
    He’d catch her sometimes, after one glass of wine too many. She’d be tearful, going through their old photos again.
    ‘Look at my hair,’ she’d say. Or, ‘Christ, look at those boots. What was I thinking?’
    Or she’d say, ‘God, remember that flat? The one on Victoria Road?’
    And Luther would oblige her by flicking through the albums, unaware that the man looking at the photos was not the boy they pictured.
    Somewhere along the line, that boy had joined the dead and Zoe had spent years waving to him from a far shore, trying to call him back.
    And now it’s not even lunchtime on this strange day a year later and she lies naked on a hotel bed with Mark North in the warm afterglow of orgasm.
    She nuzzles his neck, kisses him. He turns, kisses her.
    She knows she’ll feel guilty. She’ll get up and walk naked to the shower and walk back and dry herself and Mark will watch; of course he will – he’s going to watch her do these everyday things because here and now everything she does is fascinating, vertiginous, magical. Just as everything he does is fascinating and magical to her.
    She’ll towel herself in front of this man who has just come inside her, twice. And she’ll dress: underwear and tights and shirt and suit and shoes, and she’ll toy with her hair and reapply her make-up. She’ll make an appointment with the doctor to pick up the morning-after pill because neither of them had been planning this and neither had thought to pop into the chemist and buy condoms.
    The morning-after pill may give her a headache and sore breasts and it may nauseate her; she’ll have to think of a good lie and practise it over and over again until she no longer thinks of it as untrue. That’s the only way to lie with any success to the man she married.
    She’ll kiss Mark goodbye and because she knows now that their bodies fit, there’ll be no awkwardness between them. She likes his smell, the hint of fresh tobacco in his sweat; the few grey hairs on his chest, the scar on his upper arm.
    She can feel it all, like the faint foreshadow of tomorrow’s hangover throbbing through the bright white glare of dancing drunk.
    But all she feels right now is the satisfaction of being fascinated. And of being fascinating.
    When, reluctantly, she gets out of bed and walks naked to the shower she doesn’t cry and she doesn’t laugh. She just washes herself and tries not to think.
    Paula’s been on the game more than twelve years, during which time she’s sold pretty much all she has to sell. But she didn’t truly find her niche until she fell into the erotic lactation game. That was a few months after Alex was born.
    Now she trades under the name Finesse. Compared to some of the crap she went through when she was younger, it’s easy money; she gets to spend her working hours in a clean little flat, and most of her lactophiliacs are long-term customers, middle-aged men who like to engage in what they call Adult Nursing Relationships. Sometimes they like to go the whole hog and assume the role of a breastfeeding infant, complete with