The thing about Loughborough is that nobody warned me about the quiet.

Not quiet like nothing happening. Quiet like everything happening somewhere else. The campus was loud enough during the day, lectures, the track, the sports hall, the canteen at lunch with the football lads taking up six tables, but by nine in the evening my floor had a particular quality of silence that I hadn't encountered before, which was the silence of people who trained hard being completely unconscious in small rooms. I could hear the lad opposite, Josh, snoring through the wall sometimes. That was the extent of the nightlife.

I'd thought I wanted that. I'd thought: new city, fresh start, get your head down.

What I hadn't accounted for was the specific texture of lying awake at eleven o'clock in a single bed staring at a ceiling I didn't recognise yet, with my legs aching from the morning session and my phone on the pillow and Alison three counties away doing whatever Alison was doing, which was none of my business and I was fine about. I was fine about it.

I'd told nobody any of this. I wasn't sure I believed it myself and the summer was over and I was here now with my legs hurting and Josh snoring through the wall and a ceiling whose cracks I was starting to know.

---

Up at six, track by half six, back by eight, shower, lecture at nine or ten depending on the day. Tuesdays and Fridays I had a gap after the morning session which I was supposed to use for reading and mostly used for lying on my bed while my legs registered their formal complaints.

The halls were quiet by half eight. Long corridor, twelve rooms, communal kitchen at the end. My room was second from the left. Near the stairs, which I'd thought was good and turned out to be less good because the stairs were noisy at two in the morning when people came back from wherever they'd been, which I hadn't been to.

I was making it work. I was settling.

---

Kati did our floor Tuesdays and Fridays.

I'd seen her twice before it happened. Trolley in the corridor, headphones round her neck, moving between rooms with the efficient boredom of someone who'd done this floor a hundred times and found nothing worth remarking on. Late thirties maybe. Dark hair pulled back. Tattoos up her left arm from the wrist, a sleeve that didn't match itself, different styles from different years, like she'd kept going back without any particular plan. A bird near the elbow that didn't go with the geometric stuff around the wrist. Something in script near her shoulder I hadn't been close enough to read.

We'd nodded at each other. That was the extent of it.

Smiffy and Keano would not believe what I am about to tell you.

---

The third Tuesday I was thinking about Alison.

I want to be clear that this was not a thing I was doing on purpose. It was the particular way she'd looked at me across the room at Kate's wedding three weeks ago, half a second, across the reception, while Mark was talking to someone behind him, and how she'd looked away and I'd looked away and we'd both got on with it, and the looking away had been the right thing and I'd done it and I was glad and it was still in my head at nine forty in the morning on a Tuesday in Loughborough when I should have been reading about biomechanics.

I had one earbud in. I was on my back on my bed with my phone. My legs were making their feelings about the previous two hours known. I was thinking about Alison in a way that wasn't particularly sophisticated or defensible but was honest, which I was choosing to count for something, and I'd been at it for about four minutes when the door opened.

I hadn't latched it. I'd thought I had.

I had not.

Kati stood in the doorway with the mop in one hand, taking in the situation.

Her eyes went to the phone on the bed. Then to me. Then back to the phone.

Not embarrassed. Not apologetic. The expression of someone doing a quick practical audit of the available information.

I said nothing because there was genuinely nothing.

One more glance at the phone.

'You want me to come back,' she said, 'or you want some help with that.'

Not a question. Just the two options laid out plainly, like she was offering to do the bathroom first instead.

A pause during which my entire personality failed to show up.

'Sorry,' I said.

She tilted her head. 'Is not a problem.' She leaned the mop against the doorframe. 'Which one.'

---

She came in and shut the door.

She was direct in a way I hadn't encountered before. No corridor checking, no long pauses doing the work, no acknowledgement that this was unusual because apparently it wasn't one. She pushed me back on the bed, confirmed I was keeping up -- I was, barely -- and then she did what she was doing and I lasted considerably less time than I would have liked and made a noise into the top of her head that I will be taking to my grave.

She sat up. Pushed her hair back. Stared at the wall.

I stared at the ceiling.

A pause.

'You are the runner,' she said. 'Sports science.'

'Yeah.'

She nodded, like this confirmed something. 'My ex-husband ran. Not like yours. Just marathons.'

'Right.'

She stood, straightened her top, checked herself briefly in the mirror on the back of the door.

'I do the bathroom now,' she said.

'Okay.'

She picked the mop up and went in and I heard the water running and lay on my back thinking: Loughborough. Yes. Good choice.

---

She did the bathroom. She did the bin. She ran the hoover briefly and turned it off.

I was sitting up by then, more or less normal, watching her work. She moved round the room without acknowledging me, lifting things and replacing them exactly as they were. Her eyes moved across the books on my desk without touching them. She noted the photo I'd put up, my mum and me at the Cambridge parkrun last year, and didn't ask about it.

At the door she stopped.

'My name is Kati,' she said, without turning round.

'Finn,' I said.

'I know. The list.' She put her hand on the door handle. 'I am here again Friday.'

She opened the door and went out and the trolley wheels went down the corridor and then there was nothing.

---

I thought about Friday for two and a half days.

Not obsessively. Just in the background, in the gaps between lectures and training and the canteen and lying awake at eleven staring at the ceiling. I thought about the way she'd said *which one*, like the question was entirely administrative. I thought about the mop leaning against the doorframe while she got on with it. I thought about her clocking the photo of my mum and saying nothing about it.

I looked up Hungarian names on Thursday evening without fully knowing why. Put the phone down after about thirty seconds.

On Friday morning I did the track session and came back and showered and made sure the door was properly latched and sat at my desk reading about biomechanics, which I had genuinely been meaning to do.

By nine fifteen I gave that up.

I lasted until half nine before I gave up on latching the door too.

---

She knocked this time. Twice, not loud.

'It's open,' I said.

She came in with the trolley, clocked me sitting on the bed, clocked the unlatched door.

'You left it open,' she said.

'Yeah.'

She considered this. Then she stepped inside, left the trolley in the corridor, and closed the door and this time she did latch it.

She turned round.

'Last time was quick,' she said. 'You were surprised.'

'I was.'

'Today you are not surprised.'

'No.'

Something in her face that wasn't quite a smile. Then she kicked her shoes off and reached up and pulled the band from her hair so it fell to her shoulders. She looked different immediately, younger maybe, less efficient.

'Take your shirt off,' she said.

I did.

'So today,' she said, 'we do it properly.'

---

She surveyed the room the way she always surveyed rooms. Taking inventory.

Her eyes stopped on the kit bag by the desk.

She went over, crouched down, opened the top, and pulled out the drawstring from my spare hoodie. Turned it over in her hands. Seemed satisfied.

'Hands,' she said.

The drawstring was right there between us.

'Hands,' she said again, in the tone that wasn't waiting for a discussion.

I put my hands up.

She tied them to the headboard with the knot of someone who actually meant it. Not complicated. Just completely certain. I tested it once and that was enough information. She watched me test it with the expression of someone who has already accounted for that variable.

She stepped back. Reached under her skirt. Pulled her knickers down, stepped out of them, held them for a moment.

'You will need to be quiet,' she said. 'The walls are thin.'

She wasn't wrong about the walls.

She folded them once, which I found for some reason extremely alarming, and that was that.

'Okay,' she said, to herself rather than me.

Then she just got on with it.

---

I want to be accurate about what followed because I think accuracy is important and also because I have genuinely never encountered anything like it and sports science gave me no framework whatsoever.

She was unhurried in a way that should not have been possible given the circumstances. She took her time in the way that someone takes their time when they have decided how long something is going to take and is not accepting amendments. When I was close she knew before I did, which I don't fully understand even now, and she stopped, and waited, and watched my face with that practical expression while I stared at the ceiling and thought about several completely unrelated things with enormous concentration.

Then she continued.

She did this three times. Four possibly. I lost count around the third because my ability to count had temporarily relocated.

The second time she stopped she sat back and pursed her lips and blew a slow warm breath across me and I made a noise that the knickers dealt with efficiently. Then she tilted her head slightly and blew again, cooler this time, and the difference between the two was genuinely something I was not prepared for and I said her name into the ceiling, or tried to, and she made a small sound that might have been satisfaction or might have been amusement and were possibly the same thing.

She checked her phone once. Put it back on the desk. Continued.

I was a sports science student. I understood interval training. I understood the principle of controlled stress and recovery and adaptation. I understood it academically and I was lying there being administered it by a Hungarian cleaner with my own drawstring and her knickers and the biomechanics reading on the desk two feet behind her and I want to be clear that nothing I had studied had covered this.

---

When she finally decided that was enough she said *now* in a completely level voice, like she was giving a timing cue, which I suppose she was, and I didn't need any further instruction and the knickers were doing very necessary work and I lay there afterwards for quite a long time not doing anything.

She untied the knot. Put the drawstring back in the hoodie, the hoodie back in the bag, the bag where she'd found it.

She retrieved the knickers without comment and put them in her uniform pocket.

She checked her work.

'Good,' she said. Not to me. Just to the room.

---

She sat on the edge of the bed and I watched her and didn't say anything because there wasn't anything useful to say. She put her hand flat on my chest and pushed me back and climbed on and sat there with her hair still loose and I lay there thinking: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing and that is apparently fine.

'You were thinking about a girl,' she said.

'Tuesday. On your phone.' Not accusatory. Just the fact, stated plainly. 'Who is she.'

'Nobody. Someone from home.'

'She knows you think about her like that.'

'I don't know what she knows.'

A moment. 'She knows,' Kati said, and left it there.

She reached down and pulled her top over her head. Plain black bra, practical, not chosen for this. She reached back and undid it and dropped it on the floor and I stopped thinking about Alison completely and without any effort at all, which was probably the most useful thing Kati did for me that year.

---

Tattoos down the arm and two more I hadn't seen, something small on her left hip, a line of text I couldn't read along the bottom of her ribs. Softer than I'd expected. Fuller, less careful, the kind of body that had done things and stopped worrying about it.

I reached out and touched the text on her ribs.

'What does that say.'

'It's Hungarian.'

'What does it mean.'

She considered it like she'd half forgotten it was there. 'It means: this too will pass.' A pause. 'I got it after the divorce.'

'How long ago.'

'Four years.'

'Does it help,' I said.

She thought about it seriously, which I hadn't expected. 'Sometimes,' she said. 'Not always.'

She put her hand on my jaw and turned my face up to hers.

'Stop asking questions,' she said, and kissed me.

---

She kissed like she was thinking about something else at the same time and the kiss was just the most convenient way to keep her mouth occupied, and then about ten seconds in she stopped thinking about the other thing and put both hands in my hair and the whole register shifted and I forgot what I'd been about to think.

We got the rest of her clothes off and she lay back and stared at the ceiling.

'Come here then,' she said, which was the least elaborately phrased invitation I had ever received and also one of the most effective.

I got my mouth on her neck and worked down and she stayed very still, the way she did most things, like stillness was a form of assessment. Then she stopped staying still. Her hands settled in my hair and she said *yes* in that quiet certain way, like I'd confirmed something she'd been waiting to find out, and I took that as instruction.

I worked further down.

I got my mouth on her arse.

She went completely still, a different quality to it entirely, and then said something in Hungarian in a register I hadn't heard before. Lower, and considerably less composed. I kept going. I put my tongue to her, slowly, letting her feel it, working in small circles, and she made a sound loud enough to matter and her hand in my hair stopped being gentle. I lapped at her steadily, unhurried, taking my time with it the way she'd taken her time with me, and she said something else in Hungarian that had completely abandoned the calm of everything she'd said before, then stopped managing the sounds she was making because she was past that now, past the walls and the corridor and whatever was left of her composure, and I kept going, and her hips were moving and she was wet and swearing softly and pulling my hair, and she tasted clean and faintly salt and I could feel her working against my mouth, needing it, and she was asking for it in two languages and I gave it to her until she was shaking.

Then I worked back up, got my mouth on her properly and two fingers inside her and she was soaking and swore at the ceiling and gripped my hair to the point where I yelped, which she paid absolutely no attention to, and when she came she went rigid all at once and then boneless and let out a breath that seemed to have been waiting some time.

I surfaced.

She was flat on her back, staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone who has just finished something on a to-do list.

'Good,' she said, to herself rather than me. Then, finding me: 'Come up.'

---

She put her hand flat on my chest when I was done and I moved to the side and we lay there for a bit and neither of us said anything and the corridor outside was completely silent.

My legs had stopped hurting. I noticed that.

'The girl from home,' she said eventually, at the ceiling.

'Yeah.'

'She has a boyfriend?'

'Yeah, husband.'

Kati nodded. 'That's the worst kind,' she said. 'When they have someone and they still look at you.'

I thought about the half second across the reception room. Mark's hand on Alison's shoulder for forty seconds during the best man's speech. The way we'd both looked away and got on with it.

'Yeah,' I said.

'You'll be alright.' Said without sentimentality, just as information. 'It goes.'

'Your husband.'

'Different.' The tone that meant the door was closed. Then, after a moment: 'He met someone while he was running. A marathon. A woman he passed at the twenty mile mark.' A pause. 'She was faster than him. He found this attractive.'

A beat.

'She was faster than him,' I said.

'He likes to be beaten,' she said. 'I found this out too late.'

I didn't know what to say about that so I didn't say anything, which she seemed to appreciate.

---

She dressed efficiently and without ceremony. Bra, top, shoes. Hair up. A quick check in the mirror that found nothing remarkable.

She picked up her phone from the desk, checked it, put it back in her pocket.

'I have a daughter,' she said, not turning round. 'She's nine. She goes to her dad's on Fridays.'

'Right.'

She turned then. 'I'm telling you because you'll wonder.'

'Okay.'

'Not because it's your business.'

'Understood.'

Something in her face shifted slightly. Not quite the smile again but near it.

She opened the door and picked up the trolley handle and looked back at me sitting on the bed.

'Next Tuesday,' she said, 'I will bring something better than a drawstring.'

'Okay.'

'And read your books sometimes. You're paying for this.'

She went out and the trolley went down the corridor and I heard her knock on the next door and the routine just continuing like corridors do, like Tuesday mornings do, like everything does.