Marcie got two glasses out, then went through to the living room to look for a CD, but while she was through there, the phone rang. Ben hadn’t heard the old-fashioned sound of the flat’s landline before, but Marcie was obviously used to it. He heard her say, “Hello?” then she slipped into a mysterious foreign language. He realised that she was speaking Maltese now, with all the rapid fluency of someone born to it, and he guessed she may be talking to her grandmother. He glanced through to see she’d played out the phone’s lead and taken it over to the sofa, where she was reclining as if ready for a long chat.

He busied himself with putting the pans on, weighing the rice, chopping the onions and slicing the chicken into strips. He opened the back door as he started frying to let the steam and cooking smells out, but he could still hear Marcie talking energetically and enthusiastically over the sizzling sounds. It seemed that at one moment she would be channelling angry indignation, then at the next laughing at the chattering gossip that she was sharing. He recognised his own name being used in the jumble of unintelligible words, and wondered just how much Marcie did share with her Nanna. They were obviously very close, despite living on opposite sides of Europe.

The meal was almost ready by the time that Marcie hung up, repeating words like “saħħa,” and the more familiar “addiju” as Ben looked around the doorway to see her bringing the handset closer to the receiver.

She came back through to the kitchen looking energised and a little flushed. “That was my Nanna,” she explained. “She sends you her love, and is glad you’re getting better.” Marcie automatically went back to what she’d started, getting the wine from the fridge for their glasses, then pouring some water to drink with their meal too as Ben served it up. “Ooh, that’s enough rice for me,” she confirmed, then humming along to the dreamy music as she took the drinks through.

Once Ben had closed and bolted the back door, he followed with the bowls of food and cutlery, taking his seat. “Thank you, this smells delicious,” Marcie said, before raising her wineglass and saying, “Saħħa!”

Ben raised his glass with a simple, “Good health!” Then, as they tucked into their meal, he asked, “I think you used that word to say goodbye to your Nanna. Is it Maltese, then?”

“Yes, it means good health too, just like you said, and like your Gaelic phrase. So you’ve learnt your first word in Maltese! Hmm, this is delicious by the way.”

“It’s just the Patak’s sauce,” he said self-deprecatingly, “You get on well with your Nanna then?”

“Yes, I think we do. I sometimes wonder if she’s treating more like one of her old girlfriends now, like the girlfriends that she had when she was my age even, gossiping away in the post-war years. Not that I mean she’s a lesbian,” Marcie said hurriedly with an embarrassed look, “I just meant close female friends, you know?”

“I know,” Ben reassured her, “I’d guessed that. So she knows all about me then, and Richard too?”

“Yes, I told her everything about breaking off from that old creep, and about how we’re getting on very well together.”

“You didn’t tell her everything, did you, like about last night?”

“Well, she knows you’re living here now, that your lungs are recovering and that you’ve become my boyfriend, but not just in the sense of being a close male friend, you know. I’m pretty sure that she’s joined the dots up for herself.”

“Doesn’t she mind? Isn’t she quite Catholic?”

“Yes, the church is important to her, and I think God and the saints are very real for her. But she was a teenager in the war, you know. I guess she saw a lot of death and suffering, but she must have also seen life and the importance of seizing opportunities for love when they came. She seems to approve of you a great deal, when I said what you looked like, what you did and especially when I said you were a sailor. She can understand what you do, working with wood and on ships’ crews, in a way that she can’t for my work or my life in academia. I also think if she were fifty years younger, I’d have to fight to keep her off you!”

“I’ll try not to dwell on that mental image,” he responded, making Marcie laugh. But he went on pressing his point, “So she doesn’t think we’re sinners, or something?”

“I don’t know,” Marcie said, sipping her wine before digging back into her food, eating eagerly as she went on, “I’m no Catholic now, and I don’t think my parents really were either, though they’d go to church quite regularly, especially for Christmas, Easter, Ascension and so on. But perhaps that was just as a connection to their childhood. There was a little Maltese community in Manchester that got together around the church, you see. I went to Sunday school and a youth club there, but it was more a social thing. The priests’ and the old folks’ Christianity didn’t really stick with me. But maybe if you really believe, then you know that we’re all born into sin anyway, but that we’re all saved too, by the crucifixion and the grace of God. So perhaps for my Nanna, we’re doing the right thing, but just the wrong way round, and that’s just the modern way to her mind, when it’s only old people who are still going to church.”

“So she already thinks we’re going to get married,” Ben found himself saying, “Even though you didn’t know me on Monday morning?” He regretted speaking the thought out loud almost immediately though. If Marcie had called their talk of love dangerous earlier, this felt like this was even riskier territory.

But Marcie seemed unfazed, while she shovelled up the last of her meal. “I think that’s the eternal role of a grandparent, if they’ve kept a positive outlook, isn’t it? To live in hope of wedding bells, to perhaps even catch a glimpse of the generation that will follow, before they depart the stage themselves. Don’t look so worried, though!” she added urgently, gripping his hand, with a slightly panicked look in her own eyes. “That’s not what my mind is on. I just want to have fun with you here and now, to enjoy this mysterious new adventure that’s ahead of us, together! Though we’re just starting a new relationship, it feels to me as if we’ve been set free. We need to find ways to soar into the open sky, ways to fill your lungs with good fresh air again, and ways for me to let the wind blow through the dusty library, clearing the crap away so that I can find what’s valuable again.”

“That sounds good,” Ben agreed, finishing off his own plateful.

“Oh, I also told Nanna that you’re still wearing the cross that she gave to me. She thought that was a very good idea, that it would help her prayers work, her prayers for you to get better I mean,” Marcie clarified, suddenly seeming a little bashful.

“How do you mean? Had she prayed for something else too?”

“Oh Ben, I’ve got to be honest with you, haven’t I? Do you remember, back in the hospital when I first told you about her, I said there was that weird coincidence when she’d just rung me to say that she’d lit a candle? I think I told you then that she’d prayed for my happiness.”

“That’s not what she’d said, then?” Ben prompted as Marcie seemed to hesitate.

“She had prayed for me to find a husband,” Marcie admitted in a rush, looking down at her hands. “I’m sorry, but that’s the truth,” she said, looking up into Ben’s eyes with entreatment, “It means nothing though, it’s just a silly old woman thinking of herself getting older and her granddaughter still being unmarried when every woman in Malta had tied the knot by their twenty-first birthday in the olden days.”

“But you do also think it might mean something?”

“Oh, it’s ridiculous,” Marcie admitted, clearly in a flustered state as she reached out to grab Ben’s hand again, “But the last few days have felt so unreal. A part of me thinks that she’s put a spell on you, that her superstitions and her faith in the supernatural might actually mean something. And so her special candle and prayer triggered some genuine magical effect, making you fall across my path, literally, and making you fall in love with me. I want to deny it all, but I’m worried you’ll suddenly come to your senses, like you’ll come out of the trance that she’s laid on you. Then you’ll suddenly realise that I’m just a dumpy dark librarian who you wouldn’t have looked at twice at if I hadn’t been sitting there beside your hospital bed, clutching your hand.” As she raised her eyes to look into Ben’s, he saw how scared and confused she suddenly seemed, with tears already welling on her dark eyelashes.

“Marcie, come here,” Ben said, sinking to his knees and wrapping her in his arms as he knelt before her. His heart was swelling in sympathy at seeing how upset she was, how raw and fragile these ideas were to her, and how she trusted him so deeply that she could expose her vulnerability to him. “You’re an exotic Mediterranean princess, profoundly intelligent and feminine, with sexy glasses and the kindness of an angel. I love you. I didn’t lie about that. I’m not confused or bewitched, I’m sure of it. It’s the thing that lights up the rest of my sorry little world right now. I love you.”

“Oh Ben,” Marcie said again, sobbing against his shoulder now, “Thank you. What must you think of me? I’m a mess. My life is a car crash.”

“No, Marcie,” he corrected her, “You’ve passed through that, remember? I have too. We survived, and we found each other. We’re turning our backs to that now, facing the future, breathing in its fresh air. Deal?”

“Deal,” Marcie agreed, pulling back to look into his eyes through her tear-splashed glasses with a sad smile. He removed these tenderly and stroked her wet cheeks with the backs of his fingers, then kissed her cheekbones and the corners of her eyes, tasting her body’s salt on his lips. After resting against her forehead for a tender moment, he twisted his head and gently put his parted lips to hers, unsure of how she would respond. But she proved herself to be just as hungry as she had been before their meal, as she impulsively gripped his head and pressed her tongue and lips urgently against his.

He could taste the tikka sauce and wine in her mouth, as well as the saltiness of her tears, or possibly even her running nose, as their lips slipped over each other’s, smearing across their cheeks. But these flavours only added to his sense of her precious humanity, making his heart yearn for her even more. He would care for her as she had cared for him, he was sure, but more than that, their souls would nourish each other. This was what their kiss meant to him at that moment, that they were eagerly taking in everything they could of the other, but neither was diminished by that. Instead, by feeding on each other, they were both growing stronger, evolving, or transcending into an unknown heavenly realm, accessible only to the two of them.

Marcie had slipped from her own chair now to kneel on the floor against Ben, but with one knee raised so that her thigh pressed against his hip. He was drawing her in to press her body against his with one hand on her shoulder and the other on her round bum. Her hands were still gripping the back of his head, her nails pushing through his hair to rake his scalp from his crown to the back of his neck. And still they kissed with insatiable passion, Ben hearing Marcie’s urgent breath as it bubbled through her running nose.

The track on the stereo that neither of them had been paying attention to suddenly ended, leaving a silence that made them pause. Marcie pulled Ben’s head back by his hair, still tangled in her fingers, to look at him. “Holy Mary, I honestly feel that I have the strength in my hands to literally rip your clothes off right now! I can hear your t-shirt tearing in my mind. I would tear my own clothes off too, popping these stupid buttons, sending them flying across the room, digging my nails into my knickers to rip them apart too, and I would mount you. We would be rutting like animals, right here and now on the rug, with the mess of my tears and my snot all over my face, the dirt and sweat of a day spent pounding around Newcastle on our skin. And we’d rub your fresh semen and my slippery juices into all that animal mix! But I must be stronger still and resist, to let us both calm down and to save your lungs.”

Ben listened to Marcie’s speech with spellbound attention, excited and awestruck by her expression of sexual energy and her personal desire for him. But it made him feel humbled and perhaps a little ashamed too, of his own selfish urges or of his medical condition. She might genuinely be struggling to save his life once again, especially since they’d both witnessed how narrowly he’d escaped a second attack in the Dene. “You’re right,” he said with a reluctant sigh, finding her glasses on the table for her to put back on.

They helped each other rise to their feet, then Ben found the box of tissues, offering it to Marcie so that she could pull one out to finally blow her nose and dab her eyes. “Let’s do the simple things then,” he said, making a plan as they mentally dusted themselves down. “I’ll wash up now. You could put the kettle on, or pour another glass of wine, if you want.”

“Yes, thank you, though I’ll pass on the wine,” Marcie replied, slipping her free hand into his, “I could really do with a shower too, then I can slip into something more comfortable, as the cliche goes. Perhaps we could resume our chat about what you’d read in Tracy Cox’s book then. Perhaps it would be nice for me to show you some of those things we’d started talking about too, taking it slowly in a really calm and relaxed way.”

“That sounds very good,” Ben said emphatically, gripping her hand. Marcie leaned in towards him, raising her face to his, and Ben leant down to receive her peck on his lips. Then she released him with a sad smile and a gentle sigh, before turning to drop the window blind on the gathering twilight, leaving him to get on with stacking the dishes.

As Ben piled the dirty pots up in the kitchen, ran a bowl of hot soapy water and began washing up, Marcie put a new CD on the stereo, lit a joss stick, then made the tea. “Do you need me to dry?” she asked, holding a tea-towel.

“No, I think they’re fine stacked to drain, thanks,” he replied.

“I’ll go for my shower then,” Marcie said, hanging up the tea-towel again. Ben thought she seemed a little hesitant, then realised what was on her mind, “I don’t have to shut the door, you know. With you just here in the kitchen, we can still be together. I’m still a bit shy though, at the thought of you watching me while I wash, well, while I wash my girly bits. Do you understand?”

“It’s fine,” Ben said. He was actually quite excited at the thought of watching her wet and nude in the shower, getting all soapy, but he was sympathetic to her modesty too, “Just leave the door open a crack, I promise not to peep. We can keep talking then, if you want.”

“Thank you for understanding,” she said, standing on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek while his hands were still in the sink, then disappearing into the bathroom.

He could hear the rustle of her clothes as she undressed, then a clear sound of gushing water that he realised was her peeing, before the click and the much greater rush of water that was the shower starting. “This laundry is getting quite full,” he heard Marcie shout, more loudly than was necessary, “How would you feel about putting a load on while I’m at work tomorrow morning?”

“Aye, will do, no bother at all,” Ben replied, “Separate light and dark, wash at forty, does that sound about right?”

“Yes, there’s a mixed load cycle. Leave anything of mine you’re not sure about, but my work blouses can all go through,” she said over the splashing water. “There’s a drying rack in the hallway cupboard, or try putting it outside if the weather looks okay and Shona’s not filled it up the line. Watch out though, because it’s a bit droopy and wonky.”

“I can cope with that, with all my experience,” Ben joked, and he heard Marcie chuckle at the double entendre too. He’d finished and drained the washing up bowl now, but she seemed to be taking a while. He guessed she may be washing her hair again. He imagined her struggling to get the knots out that he may have inadvertently tangled into it with his fingers when they were kissing. He could imagine her naked with arms raised, lathering her scalp with her fingertips, the shampoo running down her glossy breasts. But he was good to his word, and deliberately avoided trying to catch a peek of her through the ajar door.

As he finished wiping around the sink, he called out, “I’m taking my tea through, to sit on the sofa now.”

“Okay, I’ll be finished in a moment,” Marcie replied.

Ben settled down with his book, picking up Mort rather than finding Hot Sex again, but he found it a struggle to concentrate. He thought of Marcie, her enthusiasm and her fragility, and felt his heart aching to support and encourage her, to let her expand into her true self. He thought too of the way that they had managed to skate around the idea of marriage. It seemed the topic had come up easily, with neither of them being too rattled by it. It also seemed as if both of them had at least imagined the possibility of their new love turning into their happily ever after story, even though they weren’t realistically moving towards that yet. But then he thought of what they had actually done or planned to do together - the shopping, the washing, looking after the neighbours’ kids, taking an afternoon walk in the park, going to a doctor’s appointment. These seemed like exactly the everyday things that a married couple would do, and they had fallen into doing them together so naturally.

Ben had been aware of the shower stopping. Now Marcie came through from the bathroom with her body and hair wrapped in towels just as they’d been last night. She smiled warmly at him, then saw what he was reading. “Oh, you’ve gone back to Terry Pratchett. I thought you might be reading more from Tracy Cox now.”

“I don’t know,” Ben confessed, “It seemed a little seedy somehow, reading your book about sex.” At that moment he also felt self-conscious for sitting on Marcie’s sofa fully clothed while she was wrapped just in a towel. It almost felt as if he were a voyeur, ready to watch a striptease.

“Don’t be silly,” she chided, sitting down next to him, their knees pressed together. “You’ve already said it, we’re lovers now, and honest with each other too. We’re sharing our most intimate parts, in our thoughts as well as our bodies,” she went on, raising her hand to stroke his cheek as she spoke, “Behind these closed doors there’s nothing sordid or shameful or indecent about our sexual expression. Sex is a fun and positive part of what makes a healthy relationship. Sure, it’s primal and sometimes strange. We may well have surprises for each other yet, we might even surprise ourselves if we start burrowing around in the neglected parts of our psyches. I expect it’s quite likely one of us may sometimes come up with an idea that the other isn’t so keen on. But I hope we can at least voice and hear those ideas, even if we find the other just says, ‘No thanks,’ and then we move on.” She patted his knee, then rose to her feet again, clutching her towel under her armpit. “Come on, where did you put it? I probably need to revise what she said too. Top left?”

Ben agreed, still feeling a little unsure of sharing absolutely all his sexual thoughts and urges with Marcie. She had found the book now though and pulled it down, seeing his bookmark and saying, “Is this where you got to? How long were you reading it for?”

“I got back from the shops about eleven, and I found it soon after. Then I was reading until you rang, around twelve-thirty.”

“Maybe an hour and a half then?” Marcie calculated, sitting down next to him again. He thought she seemed a bit surprised, and wondered if she was realising just how slow his reading was. “Well, you’ve got plenty still to get through,” she said non-judgmentally, flicking through the chapters, “But you can probably skip the bits on dating, making the first move and sexually transmitted diseases. I think we’ve already covered those. But I’m sorry now that I’ve thrown out all my old Cosmo’s. You could have read some of the more concise, less salacious articles in there. Maybe I could help to find some good bits for you in this book and fold down the page corners so you don’t have to plough through the whole thing?”

“That sounds good,” Ben admitted.

“Oh, listen to me!” she exclaimed, “I’m wrapped in nothing but a towel, alone with my hot new boyfriend, and I still end up playing the helpful librarian. I’m sorry. I’ll go to the bedroom to dry my hair and peruse my nightwear, then I’ll come back to see if we can pick up where we left off earlier with our sexy chat. Sound good? Oh, and are you going for a shower too, or did you just want to sit tight with one of these books?”

“Aye, I’ll have a shower now. I’ve not really got nightwear myself though.”

“Perhaps I won’t let you move on from the wrapped-in-a-towel stage, then,” Marcie said with a cheeky smile as she rose from the sofa and made for the bedroom.

Ben picked up the Hot Sex book that Marcie had left lying on the sofa. He flipped through the first few pages to find the table of contents, then turned to the chapter titled Sexual Etiquette to confirm that it was about dating. He was amazed that Marcie had managed to get a feel for the book’s topics so quickly, then determined which parts would be unimportant for him, or to them both. He knew that she had read it herself, but it had sounded as if that had been a while ago and she’d forgotten much of it.

Hearing the muffled sound of Marcie’s hairdryer brought him back to the moment. He rose to his feet, set both books aside on the table, then picked up his empty mug to drop beside the sink as he went through to the bathroom. Thinking of Marcie’s shower earlier, he left the door ajar as he undressed, then got under the warm water.

A few minutes later, as he was rinsing the soap off his body, he was a little startled by the sound Marcie’s voice almost beside him at the door, softly saying, “Knock knock.”

“Come in,” Ben said.

“Are you sure?” she asked, even though she was already sneaking around the door and pulling it to behind her. “It seems a bit unfair when I wouldn’t let you watch earlier, when I was in the shower.”

Ben stopped the water and moved around the shower’s glass panel to see her clearly. She was wearing a plain white nightdress with a thick band of embroidered lace trim around its low square neckline and broad shoulder straps. He noticed that the fabric seemed to be gathered in tiny pleats below this band, allowing the thin cotton to fall loosely over her bust straight down the hemline, which was well below her knees. Just as when she was wrapped in a towel, the warm colour of her tan skin seemed enriched by the nightwear’s brilliant white. She had brushed out her dried hair again too, so its glossy waves made that wonderful dark nimbus around her upturned and hopeful face.

“It’s different for boys, maybe,” Ben said in response to her comment even as he admired her, “We’re proud to show off whatever we can, whenever we can get away with it, I guess.”

“Well, you’ve got a lot to be proud of,” Marcie said with a dreamy smile, looking down at his exposed genitals as she handed him his towel. After moments of excitement all through the day, and especially this evening, Ben felt that his penis had settled into a kind of relaxed enlarged state, filled with blood but not erect. It had been long when he’d washed it in the shower, and though it had briefly risen when he’d popped back his foreskin to rinse around its head, it had softened again now.

Yet the sight of Marcie in her nightdress had once again stirred something in him. Perhaps it was the wide expanse of speckled skin exposed across her clavicles and chest, or the way that her loose hanging breasts rose below the light fabric, or simply the subtle scent of her clean hair and skin. Or perhaps the stirrings came from deeper associations, of an ideal clean and feminine purity dressed in an ecclesiastical surplice, ready to be defiled by the wild pagan lust of his naked male body. Whatever it was, his arousal was returning firmly now that he had stepped out of the shower, and there was no hiding it from Marcie.

“You look lovely in that nightdress,” he said weakly.

“Thank you, though I know it’s not as revealing as you might have hoped. I’m sorry I’m still a bit prudish about letting you see me undressed too,” Marcie said in idle chatter, leaning back on her hands against the bathroom door. Ben wondered if her light manner covered the hunger that she’d spoken of earlier, which still seemed to be in her eyes as her gaze kept falling to his manhood. He could do nothing about the way that it poked out and bobbed around as he dried himself. He even wondered if she was sitting on her hands to stop herself from trying to grab it, as he vividly remembered her doing earlier in the morning.

“It’s nice to think of your eyes on me, in a way,” she went on, “To feel that I am the object of your desire. But there’s still a critical voice in my mind when I look at myself in the mirror, and perhaps I’m worried that you might hear that voice too.”

“You can ignore that voice, ignore those worries. You’re beautiful, and my inner voice is yelling the truth of that. You’re a feminine goddess, the ideal form, like those old statues, but real, living and warm.”

“I think that could be the voice of your rod. No, you don’t need to wrap him up straight away,” she said as Ben began tying his towel around his waist, “He wants you to tuck him away inside my pussy, and he’ll tell you to say anything at all if it encourages you to help him do that.”

“He wants me to give you a hug now, I think, while I’m naked, to press him up to your clean nightdress,” Ben confessed, letting the towel drop.

“That’s okay,” Marcie replied, “We can let him cuddle up between us a bit.” She held her arms out and Ben stepped forwards into them. He held her, savouring the feeling of the soft pleated cotton and the warmth of Marcie’s skin beneath, brushing the bare skin of his abdomen and his upright member. He couldn’t really get his arms around her, with her back still pressed to the bathroom door, as his had been in the kitchen earlier, but he cradled her head in his hands as she buried her face into the curve of his neck and shoulder. She was running her hands over his back, then caressing his skin with the tips of her nails, and then clutching his buttocks. He bent his head down to bury his nose in her brushed hair, inhaling its clean scent deeply as he felt himself reach a stiff rigidity against her. He raised his hips to extenuate the sensation, and luxuriated in the feeling of his glans emerging of its own accord from his foreskin.

“Hmm, with our height difference,” Marcie murmured against him, “With your long rod and my droopy boobs, you’re almost reaching them with him, aren’t you? Perhaps you could put him between them, like you do with your pillows, rubbing against me to make yourself come across my chest that way. That would be the original titty-fuck, I guess, giving me the pearl necklace as I think it’s colloquially known.”

Ben felt excited by this idea and leant back a little, pushing his hands against the door above Marcie’s head and rising on tiptoes to see his glossy red head pressed into the diaphanous white pleats of her nightshirt. He shifted his shaft sideways a little, and realised its head was indeed pressing into the soft cushion of her breast. He rubbed it against her, again feeling the warmth of her skin through the thin cotton against his sensitive frenulum. He imagined her nipple just there, rubbing him underneath his glans, and he felt a dizzy rush as if he was already close to ejaculation.

“Stop! Slow down, Ben. I didn’t mean right now! We’ve got all night,” Marcie said urgently, pushing the flat of her hand against his chest. He stepped back, realising only now that he was panting with his urgent arousal. He saw his penis, stretching up with its banana curve at its fullest wooden extent, twitching involuntarily. He also saw how her clean nightshirt seemed a little crumpled over the mound of her breast where he’d been pushing himself against her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I was getting carried away.”

“It’s okay,” she replied tenderly, lifting her hand to his cheek, “You know I’m hungry for it too. But maybe you’d better wrap that towel around yourself after all. I’ll take you back to the sofa where we can be a bit more relaxed.”

Ben had to back off further to let Marcie open the door. He quickly tugged his foreskin over his glans as he scooped his towel up and wrapped it around his waist, then he let Marcie give him a smiling peck on the lips before she led him by the hand to the cosy living room.