amazing I thought it wasn’t real!’ And then she said ‘I’m sorry for making it fly away’ and she covered her mouth with her hands and because she looked as if she might start to cry I walked over and folded her into me and held her there.
There had been no hesitancy in her desire that first night. None. She had stared and stared at my body, reaching out to me almost like a child might, greedy, hungry, touching me and rubbing my chest and my back and licking me until I was so hard I asked if I could be inside her and she said yes, and pressed me into her, and no, I wasn’t being too rough, and she bit into my neck as I came. And later on, when I tasted her, she pushed herself against my mouth and lifted her hips up from the bed and moved as I moved and then she said I can’t I can’t wait and she turned me onto my back and she was there looking down at me and moving so quick and saying jesus fuck and then it was over and she was in my arms and we slept. When I woke and buried my face in between her legs the scent was of oranges and something sharper and she opened her eyes. Later on she took me in her mouth again, all the way in, holding me there and moving her tongue around the tip of me and drawing me back out and back in and I pressed both my hands onto the back of her head and afterwards she sat up and stared at me again, licking my slick from her lips.
She liked it here. That first morning she said she would have preferred one of the outside walls to be made of something other than glass, but when the evening came and it went dark we sat in the middle of the living room looking out across London and she saw how beautiful it is.
The apartment covers the whole of the top of the building and has at its core a cluster of three central rooms: my bedroom, my bathroom and my study. Each of these rooms has a window hung with a slatted blind and a sliding panel in the wall so that they can either be made entirely open to the views beyond them, or instead, completely private. The little cluster they form is surrounded by a series of open spaces that flow from one another to make up the rest of the apartment. These spaces are loosely divided so that the kitchen and the living room look out to the south-west while the north-east end is much emptier, holding only a piano and a table and chairs for reading.
When she had been living here for a few months Rachel persuaded me to have the pictures removed from the outer walls so that nothing interrupted her view. I held out for some time but I could see what it was that she wanted, and in any case, she could do a lot of her work at home and would come to spend more time here than I did. She told me that she loved the apartment most of all when it was warm enough to push the panels in the outer walls right across as far as they would go, and that when we did it felt as though we were living outside rather than in. One summer night as we sat holding one another in the half-light, she said that we were a pair of travellers making camp in a desert of sky: our very own airborne oasis.
The balcony walls are made of a kind of Perspex. I had a line of apple trees espaliered low against the south-west end. Honeysuckle climbs among their branches and lavender runs along beneath them. Jasmine grows on a trellised arch that straddles the balcony and a series of troughs is strung out between the apple trees and the kitchen, raised up from the ground and filled with the herbs and flowers that my mother and I used to grow in the garden in Hampshire, so that in the summer months, when the panels are left open, the scent of all these things sweeps in with the breeze.
I told the architect that I envisaged a glass box placed over a series of rooms and open spaces, so that I could walk unimpeded around its periphery and look out at the city on one side and the greener reaches of north London on the other. And that is what Rachel used to do sometimes, walking round and round reciting the
There had been no hesitancy in her desire that first night. None. She had stared and stared at my body, reaching out to me almost like a child might, greedy, hungry, touching me and rubbing my chest and my back and licking me until I was so hard I asked if I could be inside her and she said yes, and pressed me into her, and no, I wasn’t being too rough, and she bit into my neck as I came. And later on, when I tasted her, she pushed herself against my mouth and lifted her hips up from the bed and moved as I moved and then she said I can’t I can’t wait and she turned me onto my back and she was there looking down at me and moving so quick and saying jesus fuck and then it was over and she was in my arms and we slept. When I woke and buried my face in between her legs the scent was of oranges and something sharper and she opened her eyes. Later on she took me in her mouth again, all the way in, holding me there and moving her tongue around the tip of me and drawing me back out and back in and I pressed both my hands onto the back of her head and afterwards she sat up and stared at me again, licking my slick from her lips.
She liked it here. That first morning she said she would have preferred one of the outside walls to be made of something other than glass, but when the evening came and it went dark we sat in the middle of the living room looking out across London and she saw how beautiful it is.
The apartment covers the whole of the top of the building and has at its core a cluster of three central rooms: my bedroom, my bathroom and my study. Each of these rooms has a window hung with a slatted blind and a sliding panel in the wall so that they can either be made entirely open to the views beyond them, or instead, completely private. The little cluster they form is surrounded by a series of open spaces that flow from one another to make up the rest of the apartment. These spaces are loosely divided so that the kitchen and the living room look out to the south-west while the north-east end is much emptier, holding only a piano and a table and chairs for reading.
When she had been living here for a few months Rachel persuaded me to have the pictures removed from the outer walls so that nothing interrupted her view. I held out for some time but I could see what it was that she wanted, and in any case, she could do a lot of her work at home and would come to spend more time here than I did. She told me that she loved the apartment most of all when it was warm enough to push the panels in the outer walls right across as far as they would go, and that when we did it felt as though we were living outside rather than in. One summer night as we sat holding one another in the half-light, she said that we were a pair of travellers making camp in a desert of sky: our very own airborne oasis.
The balcony walls are made of a kind of Perspex. I had a line of apple trees espaliered low against the south-west end. Honeysuckle climbs among their branches and lavender runs along beneath them. Jasmine grows on a trellised arch that straddles the balcony and a series of troughs is strung out between the apple trees and the kitchen, raised up from the ground and filled with the herbs and flowers that my mother and I used to grow in the garden in Hampshire, so that in the summer months, when the panels are left open, the scent of all these things sweeps in with the breeze.
I told the architect that I envisaged a glass box placed over a series of rooms and open spaces, so that I could walk unimpeded around its periphery and look out at the city on one side and the greener reaches of north London on the other. And that is what Rachel used to do sometimes, walking round and round reciting the
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