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She sits down at his table without warning; this bleach blonde girl with wide, amber eyes that stare blankly and for a moment he thinks he might have slipped into some other person’s life, like she’s looking at him and he’s supposed to already know her. She doesn’t do anything but stare like she’s cataloguing his ears and his nose and his sharp cheekbones and close-cropped hair, and while John’s a bit reluctant to put down the newspaper he was reading, she looks lost more than anything and maybe he likes to play the hero once in a while, if the wind’s in the right direction.
And so, it goes like this:
“Hello.” He says, blinking, waiting. She’s beautiful in that wise-beyond-years way. Haunted, just a bit.
“Hello.” She places her coffee cup on his table, nails bitten to the quick. “You were staring at me.”
It’d been a second, he admits to himself. A blonde waiting for coffee at the end of the service window, wearing a short denim skirt and see-through tights, ignoring the world because she’s lost in hers. He’s human, he’d stared.
Now, it’s time to obfuscate, dance around it. “I thought you were interesting.”
Those wide eyes narrow on him. “Interesting or interested?”
“Both, probably. Maybe neither.” Why does it feel like she’s interrogating him? “Is there a reason you’re here, or-”
“I dunno, spose you seemed lonely.” She shrugs and something fades in her eyes again. “And I’m interested.”
“What makes you think I am?” John pulls off his reading glasses and folds them on top of his newspaper. “Lonely, I mean, not interested.”
She licks her lips, curls her hand around her to-go cup. He thinks he can read her name scrawled on the side of it, just about. Rose, it looks like. It suits her, even if it’s not her name.
Rose – he thinks – shrugs at him. “I see you in here three times a week, always the same days. Same drink, same paper. It’s a pattern.”
“It’s not the same paper.”
It earns him a tiny smile. “You know what I mean.”
“So, because I come here a lot, that means I’m lonely?” He’s a bit incredulous at the accusation, ruffled that she’s had too quick of a read on him, disarmed because she’s a fucking mystery. Blondes don’t just sit down at his table.
She side-steps. “Do you drink espresso because you like it or because of the tiny cups?” Her smile hasn’t disappeared, only grown.
“Tiny cups.” John admits, unsure why. “How old are you?”
“23, I think.” She frowns like she’s not making fun of him, like she’s genuinely trying to remember, and it baffles him. “Yeah, 23.”
Something about her doesn’t fit in the same way he doesn’t quite fit either – he’s intense, he knows, it puts people off and so he puts them off first. Walls build back up quicker than anyone trying to take them down brick by brick. Yes, he’s lonely.
“How can you see me every time I come in, but I don’t see you?”
“Maybe you just didn’t notice me.” She quirks a strange little smile again, because she knows it’s bullshit and she just wants the compliment.
“Trust me, I would’ve noticed you.” He scoffs and she – amazingly – blushes.
“I don’t drink coffee.” He looks pointedly at her to-go cup as she obstinately takes a sip, maybe trying to play cute and coy. “Alright, I normally don’t drink coffee.”
“Not answering the question is your specialty, isn’t it?”
The girl snorts and grins. “It’s a skill I learnt from a friend.” Those eyes, wide and dark, pierce him. This answer – at least – is honest. “I live upstairs.”
“Ahh,” John leans back, crosses one leg over the other. “You’re lonely too.”
“More like grieving.” She swallows, he can see, hesitates, taps her short nails onto the cup. “Do you want to have sex with me?”
If he’s taken aback, he hopes it doesn’t show. She’s gorgeous, young – too young – and he does love the little denim skirt. “Just in general or are you propositioning me?”
“Both, probably.” She’s a tease. He shouldn’t like it. “Now. Do you want to fuck me now?”
John’s not sure, exactly, why he doesn’t jump at the opportunity immediately. Who is he, after all? Just some middle-aged Northern bloke living alone in London with a face that looks like his, boring-nothing job, drinking espresso because the cups are tiny, and they make his hands feel big. Beautiful women, especially ones like her – like Rose – don’t just ask if you want to fuck them on a Wednesday at ten-thirty in the morning.
He tries not to say yes. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”
Her eyes roll and she leans back too, taking her rare coffee with her. He’s failed, somehow. “Why? Am I not meant to like sex? Is that only for men?”
“You don’t know anything about me.” John says, strangely worried about who the fuck he was talking to, suddenly. “I could be a psychopath for all you know, and this is some elaborate mental manipulation to get you alone and vulnerable.”
She – Rose, he needs to remember. Her name is Rose – laughs. “I’m not sure whether you’re trying to talk me out of sleeping with you, or if you’re trying to talk yourself out of it.”
“Whatever you think you’re gonna get from that, if we did…” he waves his hand. Obfuscate again. “It’s not gonna make you hurt any less, trust me.”
The light crashes and burns from her eyes. He hit a nerve, but then, wasn’t that her point? What she wanted?
“Counting on it actually.”
John’s fascinated again. Not often – maybe once or twice in his life – he’s met people who interest him like this, like he wants to climb inside their minds and pull them apart just to learn how they manage to live, why they make baffling choices that make no logical sense. He suspects that the answer is always ‘because they can’.
But he can’t, can he? She’s grieving, wanting to hurt, to burn a bit, escape from something by tearing him open. Brick by brick.
“Are you married?” She asks, her eyes flitting down to his left hand in search of a ring, and he sees her regret for the first time, thinking the worst of him. “Or with someone?”
“Neither.” He says, drawing eyes to her lips as her tongue sneaks out with a grin. “Were you?”
The hurt crosses her eyes, deeper, deeper, deeper until it disappears. “Nope, neither. Just fell apart and I’m still…” she hesitates. “Falling. It’s been, like, a year.”
John doesn’t know what to do or say, wrings his hands in his lap and wishes he hadn’t put the paper down, or stared at this girl, or found this coffee shop because now he gives a shit. He doesn’t like lingering behind his messes, just cuts and runs, but there’s an odd feeling inside him that he has to stay for hers.
“Did you love him?” He’s afraid of the answer.
“Yes.”
“Do you still?”
“Always. But he’s gone, right?” Asking as if he knows her story. “I keep trying, but he’s gone.”
His eyes narrow and he sees her like she’d seen straight through him right at the beginning, twinging at his loneliness and bricks. She’s got the saddest eyes he’s ever seen, not that he cares to look for sadness in other people.
“Do I look like him?”
Rose chuckles, private, just for her. “Not now.”
John doesn’t understand, couldn’t ever understand. Whatever happened to her, it’s bad, that he can tell. She’s more alone than he is, and that’s saying something.
“I’m old enough to be your father.” He still hasn’t said no; she won’t until he does.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Oh, she’s cheeky suddenly, flirty, and there’s the youth back with vibrance. He’s far too old to be doing this. It’d been gone from his system by the time he was her age, making a mess of women and lingering a bit on one or two of them before moving on to the next.
He shouldn’t say yes.
“So, you live upstairs?”
Next thing he knows, he’s at her front door. It’s steel grey, modern in a heartless way, and it groans when she opens it, letting him follow inside. It’s a poky studio flat with enormous windows on one wall, ceiling to floor, a wide view of the sky and the city, like they’re floating above it.
The flat’s a bit empty. Of course, there’s stuff, everyone has stuff – pots and pans in the sink still needing a wash, shoes by the front door he has to step over. It’s a mess, really, but there’s no photos on the walls either, no art or knick-knacks, nothing of her life. It’s a showroom, if a lived-in one, and tells him everything he wants to know about the woman he’s just met.
This isn’t her life. It’s a placeholder. She’s waiting.
The key in her hand drops to a side table. Her bed is half-made with plain, pale blue bedsheets, a vague effort to look like a grown up, pyjamas dropped on the floor where she’d dressed that morning. It turns him into a surrealist.
“Place is a mess,” she says, awkward, sleeves of her white jumper pulled over her hands, fiddling with her fingernails. “Can’t keep anything clean for the life of me.”
“I’m not here to judge you,” he steps towards her because she doesn’t, the words lingering on him. “Not sure why I’m here, to be honest.”
“What’s your name?” Her teeth scrape her lip, and he wonders when and how she found the courage to ask him.
“John,” he says, but it’s not enough. “John Smith.”
She snorts again and the hurt crashes her eyes, like the name means something. But then she says: “Nobody’s actually called John Smith. It’s one of them universal constant things. So common it’s uncommon.”
“It’s my name,” he shrugs. She unbuttons his shirt from the bottom, tugging it out of his trousers. “Had it all my life.”
Her fingers are shaking, and he helps her with the buttons as they pop open. “I’m Rose. Just Rose.”
“I know, I read your coffee cup.” He smiles then, when she does: a shared joke that’s not about her ex-whatever lingering his presence between them. If he’s gonna fuck her, it’s gonna be him that fucks her. “It suits you. Rose.”
Her eyes flare up at him, needy and dark at the sound of her name rumbling in his chest. She’s small without her boots on and he looms over her like some predatory thing, an animal smelling blood and wanting a taste. Suddenly, he doesn’t think she looks so young; just fuckable, beautiful, his for an hour or so to pull apart until she forgets. It doesn’t matter to her that he’s no-one, just an ordinary bloke with odd ears and hard angles, lean like a runner.
She pulls his shirt apart and splays her hands across his chest, looking at her fingers as they run across the white cotton of his t-shirt, lingering, feeling. His heart’s going like the bloody clappers beneath her palm and she seems sad again, drifting.
“Stop,” John mutters, wrapping a hand around her wrist tightly. “Be here with me.”
Rose blinks up at him and it’s then that he bends and kisses her. She pauses for a second before she comes undone, before her reluctance melts away and he shoves his tongue into her mouth, punishing her for something that’s not her fault. There’s a moan that’s someone’s, one of them, he doesn’t know, and she tugs at his belt impatiently.
Their teeth clash and it’s messy and uncoordinated, more than a bit passionate to his surprise, because she comes alive under him, demanding more and more with her lithe, eager tongue and whimpers as he shoves up her jumper and pulls it off.
He’s not felt like this in years. Perhaps ever. There’s a thread between them when she lets go of this ghost haunting her, in the moments where she’s seeing John and not the bastard who he thinks killed a bit of her heart.
One of his hands grabs her breast, groping over the lace of a black vest until she’s shoving him down to the bed and she’s not wearing a fucking bra, and he’s gonna fucking die if he doesn’t get his mouth on her tits soon.
He hauls her into his lap and yanks down her vest until he’s got his prize, thin straps digging into her arms, and he bites and sucks and gropes, harsh and greedy, hoping it’s what she needs too. Rose grinds down into his lap, on his thigh, digs her nails into his scalp to hold him in place as he winds a hand through her hair to control her.
“John,” she gasps at his bite and it’s a fucking victory when she shoves him flat onto her bed, crawling up over him for more.
Not this missing man’s name, but his. He’s won.
Now he’s the one scrabbling for his belt with her, dragging everything off only enough to get his cock out because he’s hard and needs to feel more of her skin on his. Her hand wraps around him and he seethes at her reluctance to give him more. This was her idea and she’s the one holding back; she’s pulling away, building up walls.
But it’s only a second until her lips are around him and he’s watching her too intently, considering they’ve just met. He won’t deny he’d thought about this as soon as he’d seen her face – a wide smile and full lips just begging to wrap around his cock and suck him and the sight is everything he’d imagined at the table. Her hair drags down to hide her face and he shoves it out of his way just to see her. Rose’s eyes are closed as she kneels next to him, legs spread, head bobbing slowly up and down until he’s leaking onto her tongue, and he has a hand still on her head, guiding.
Up and down, smooth and sweet and hot, wet, suction. Messy, uncoordinated.
“Rose,” he says again as she moans, and he has to stop himself from fucking her face entirely. “Rose, stop.”
She does, with some reluctance, opening her eyes as she licks the drop of liquid from his cock and takes it down her throat. He shudders at the sight of her swollen lips and her tits out and marked from his teeth. He needs to bury himself in her body and burn.
“Condom.” She nods, understanding the heat in his eyes.
In a second, she’s climbing over the bed on her knees to one of the nightstands while he tries to drag her skirt and tights and soaked knickers off in one move, desperate to see what he’s done to her already without trying too hard. It doesn’t escape his notice that the box of condoms is brand new as she pulls a couple of them out, pink at the cheeks for her expectations of him. He’s an old man, maybe middle-aged at best, but he could probably fuck her twice if that was what she wanted.
John lifts his hips off the bed and gets his trousers and shoes off, kicking them down while she rolls a condom onto his cock with a teasing grip on him.
Before he can protest, she’s clambering back into his lap and sinking down onto him too quickly. She’s wet – more than wet, soaked – but he can feel how long it’s been for her and frowns at the grimace painted on her face as she fights past it, eyes screwed shut again. He reaches for her hips to stop her, but she bats him away, uncaring as she takes all of him into her body at once and he’s shaking for the tightness, at how her walls clench and anchor. It’s selfish, in a way, but he admires her for it, for taking pain and loss into control.
“A year?” he questions, though his body is urging him to flip her onto her back and fuck her into the mattress, pound and tear and take. He’s not the man she wants, but he’ll pretend to be a better one, for her.
“We never did this.” Rose says, her eyes opening as her soaked cunt accepts him, lets him spear her open and fuck her properly. “I wanted to.”
Insanity. “Maybe he’s gay?”
And she bursts out laughing until it dissolves into tears that track down her cheeks like rainfall. If he hit a nerve again – he doesn’t think so – she doesn’t seem to mind it that much. Just puts her palms onto his chest and rides his cock, twisting her pelvis until she’s gasping on top of him, chasing her pleasure.
She lets him grip her hips this time, guiding, sneaking to squeeze her arse as she rides him, clenching and hot and wet and for a brief moment, only his.
“John,” she gasps again as he rubs her clit with a rough thumb, wanting more of her intoxicating spell. “Please.”
He doesn’t know what she needs because it might not be something he could even give, but he’ll try. Rose bounces on him as he keeps rubbing her, but he’s a selfish, greedy man and buries himself even deeper when she crashes back down onto him. He’s only human and he wants to see her explode, have her come on his cock until she screams his name and no other.
“Here with me.” It’s a command as her eyes drift on his face, fog over with the pleasure he brings her with his selfishness. He’s almost seething, hating the ghost for existing, as if he could fuck it out of her body. “Me.”
It’s too easy to imagine falling hard and fast for this girl. She dismantles you, takes your bricks to build her own walls. The closer he thinks he’s getting to discovering the truth of her, the more she fucks her pain away on him.
There’s his hand around her neck, almost squeezing, his fingers twitching in need of getting deeper into her, to take control like she is. Rose is wild in another way, not reluctant or societal. When he shoves two fingers into her mouth, and she sucks on them, he feels her moan as vibrations in her throat that threaten to rip him apart too.
Sweat’s building between them, slick bodies simply fucking and rutting but her mind is here with him when he meets her eyes and lets her get erratic and feel her strong thighs quake at his side. John rips his fingers from her mouth and smacks her backside hard, fingers gripping into bruises as he fucks up into her pliant body. She clenches hard and gasps and breaks, so he does it again and again and again.
He can’t understand how any man would want anyone, anything else. He just can’t understand.
That urge to flip her grows stronger inside him; it roars like a beast he hasn’t felt in years, not since he was still handsome. How long has it been since he’s wanted, craved? This girl who doesn’t belong, older than her years, just about alive, and she’s torn him apart without trying, like she knew him already.
Her breath comes in pants as she leans back, eyes locked on his, and takes and it must burn every muscle in her body to keep this up, but she chases it nonetheless. Rose breaks as he rubs her clit and she screams his name – John, John, John – as her only faith.
Only now does he let go. Turns her onto her back before she can get her mind together and bends her knees up until they hit her chest and he fucks her hard and fast and deep, only letting go when she loses speech. John comes hard and shudders, shaking, broken, emptied. He kisses her and she kisses him.
A second stretches into a minute. He’s never had this before.
“Hello.” She says, cupping his cheek with tenderness he hadn’t expected. It makes his stomach catch.
This girl isn’t his.
“Hi.” He feels the press of her body beneath his, still trembling and his ego swells despite himself. “Good?”
“Uh-huh.”
And as smiles go, it’s stunning the one she gives him, makes him pause and bury the odd aching loneliness back down. Just a little longer. The world owes him this.
John rolls off to the side and gets rid of the condom without a thought as she curls up to him, an arm around his waist and her face in his neck until she slides a cheek to his chest and pauses, her eyes screwed shut while their bodies calm back down.
There’s a smile on her lips when he looks down at her, chuckling as he realises he’d never even bothered to take his shirt properly off and her vest is still bunched down under her tits. She giggles and it’s the lightest sound in the world, completely free. They dissolve into it together, the ridiculousness of it.
He lets her rest and listen to his heartbeat, and it feels like it comforts her. They don’t say words, not like that, just lie together and touch and kiss and she runs her blunt nails over the line of his jaw, catching on his stubble and the need stirs in him again like a miracle.
John crawls down as she spreads her soaked thighs and he eats her out like a starved man trudging through the desert for a drop of water. She’s a fountain of youth and he is almost dead, clinging to the skin of this world. His tongue curls delicately around her, hoping the taste of her would linger in his memory long after she walks out of his life.
It’s a blip for her; he’s not mistaken there. A placeholder, like the flat they’re fucking in.
But it’s still his name Rose is crying out, his face she shoves back into her sex as he tries to catch a breath, his name she whispers as she comes on his face quick and dirty.
He presses a kiss to the inside of her knee as she collapses into her bed, gorgeous, fucked, and exhausted. He’ll take this with him when he walks home around lunchtime, back to his boring-normal job and nothing life – for just one moment, even a single cascading second of time, this girl belongs only to him, and she is free from being haunted.
And so is he.
-***-
She inspires him, in a way, even if he never sees her again. John walks home, dumps his clothes and showers and decides he needs to feel like a good forever is possible.
The boring-normal job is fine, even nice on some days when the college kids laugh at his bad jokes and their grades are decent and he gives a fuck about teaching again. But it bores him stupid too, the same shit day-after-day, the same questions and answers and he itches to run from it more and more.
At first, it’s for fun. Circling random jobs he finds in the paper while he drinks his espresso out of a tiny cup, pointlessly hoping for a glimpse of brassy blonde hair and a smile that doesn’t come. If she still lives upstairs, he doesn’t see her, and she doesn’t come down for a drink anymore.
Rose doesn’t drink coffee, he remembers every time.
When he walks back into a lab six months later, twenty-odd years after he first did, something is reborn inside him. Excitement, intrigue. He loves a challenge, after all, and what better place for a challenge, something to make him feel alive again than Torchwood?
He meets a man called Pete Tyler, a fucking millionaire with an actual heart – more of a miracle – who shows him round, shows him off, talks him up to the low-level staff and cracks jokes with him because Pete wants him to stay. John shakes a hundred hands that day, asking questions and marvelling at some truly incredible tech upstairs. It’s not his field, strictly speaking, but he’s got a hand in so many pots that it might as well be.
“Here she is, lady muck.” Pete says to him as they finish going through office after office, schmoozing while Pete’s trying to get him to say yes to this job. But John’s heart stops at the sight of blonde hair, shorter than he remembers it being.
The girl turns and he tries to hide the heat that sears up inside him. She looks blank at first, glancing between him and Pete like he’s the ghost now. It’s odd, seeing her in office-wear, but he smiles at the sight of her tights.
“John, this is my stepdaughter, Rose.” Pete says. “Head of Tech Ops. Rosie, this is Dr John Smith, hopefully the new co-ordinating manager in the physics lab if we can poach him from London College.”
“Rose,” John says, rolling the name around his mouth for the first time in six months. He wasn’t sure about taking the job offer, but he definitely fucking is now. “Nice to meet you.”
Pete’s phone beeps. Neither of them can tear their eyes off the other so they barely notice. “Sorry about this, love, can you finish up with John? Your mum’s exploded the bleeding microwave again.”
Without a word – because the universe loves a laugh – they’re alone and he doesn’t know what to say. His hands hang at his sides, remembering with interest at how she felt in them.
Rose smiles differently now, shy, and tentative and sweet, embarrassed, confused all at once. It’s cute.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” He replies, extending his hand for her to shake.
She does, her grip shaking but firm. “So…”
“Your stepdad offered me a job,” he explains, even though he doesn’t have to.
“You gonna take it?” She drops his hand, cordial and friendly, the corporate mask on. John just grins.
It’s then that he knows one day she’ll rip his heart apart. Whatever Rose was looking for, she was still looking even now and wasn’t going to stop. Not even for him.
“Yes, Rose. I’m taking the job.”
Her lips twitch and her eyes graze his face, his body, his hands and he knows what’s inevitable – late nights skirting each other, her dangerous missions that will stutter his heart, trying to pretend they don’t want each other, him pretending he won’t fall for her. The point where they break and he fucks her over her desk after a too-close call.
Rose will be his for as long as she’ll let him. She smiles and he sees his future painted by her.
“Good.”
John will lose her one day. But he thinks that’s okay, because she understands what his future holds. She’s living it now. He’d rather be ripped apart than live like nothing can touch him anymore; the pain will be worth being haunted.