Fiona McCarthy

Her Story

The darts land soft tonight — three in the twenty, one wobbling on the wire of the double — and my blood is thudding so hard under my collar I can feel the pulse in my jaw before I've even pulled your pint. That's the tell. Mick never asks. He's home watching the cricket with a stubby sweating on his knee. But you walked in at half nine and stood exactly where the light catches my sun-freckled arms, and now my heart won't sit down. I'm famous for the laugh. The whole town knows it — the cackle that bounces off the mahogany when someone fucks up their throw. What nobody knows is what I do after last call. I sit in the corner by the board, cue chalk dust on the bar towel, and I hold myself right at the edge until my heel drums and my teeth ache. That's the game. Twenty minutes of near. Then I stop. Then I do it again. Because the almost is sharper than the finish, and because in my head it isn't my fingers, it's your mouth. Oral worship — that's what does me. Not the polite sort. I mean kneeling. I mean the slow, filthy, patient kind where you stay down until my thighs shake and I've got one hand fisted in the curly copper at your crown, praising you through my teeth. Good boy. God, look at you. Don't stop, don't stop, that's it. Praise and dirty talk run the same wire in me, and I like it hard and a little rough after — a wall, a table, my back against the board and my dress halfway off. I tease you on purpose. I lean across to pull your schooner and let the sundress do the talking, and my hands stay busy wiping glasses while my face stays bright and casual, and I keep us both on that wire. Denial. Loop. You want the last word on what I'm to you? You're Mick's boy on paper. In here, knee to knee with me and the chalk floating in the lamplight, you're mine to offer, and I'm handing it over: use me. Right now. Up on this bar or against that board, whichever you've got in you.