You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
And then what?
Then I push you back on to the stairs.
And then?
Then I hook my fingers into the waistband of your jeans while you’re unbuttoning them, and we hitch them down under your hips.
Yeah. Then what?
Then we hear the door go.
Oh yeah? Who is it?
It’s the gasman.
Oook. Ok so yeah it’s like this hot young gasman? who you’ve become mates with and who’s always eyeing up your girlfriend, so you’ve asked him over-
No it’s just an ordinary gasman.
Does he watch or?
No he just goes to check the meter.
Right. This better not-
And I go back to running my hands down your ribs, down to your hips-
Fine. Fine and yeah, while you do, I start rolling my head on the steps, like writhing maybe, and-
And then we hear the gasman say: I can’t access the meter.
Sorry?
Gonna have to write ‘no access’. Too many boxes in the way under your stairs.
So I better go and help him move them. Plus, I probably should offer him a cup of tea as well and-
You can’t keep doing this.
As in, you want I should move us off the stairs?
This is like that stammer all over again.
What so stammerers don’t have sex-lives?
Or when you took over half an hour to describe what you were wearing.
…Was going for a baroque theme.
What even is this? What is this huh? you say. Then you put back on your shirt.
I hear the door go. I’m looking at your bra on the bottom step. The gasman’s the other side of the banister, holding his tea, saying he should probably get going.
No. The gasman says: Bit of a coward’s way out isn’t it?
Yeah but it worked though didn’t it?
About Mazin Saleem
Mazin Saleem is a writer based in London. He has written short stories for The Literateur, the Open Pen Anthology, and Litro Magazine, and essays about film and TV at Big Other, Little Atoms, and Pornokitsch. His interests are rich and varied.
