Landlady Sex Story

This landlady sex story started with an envelope that was two hundred short, and a woman who counted it twice.

Landlady sex story

Nadia owned the building on Charter Row — all four floors of it, converted from a hotel in the seventies, still carrying the old brass numbers by the doors. I was twenty-seven, in the top flat, four months into a job that was not paying what I had been promised.

She was forty-one. She wore reading glasses on a chain which felt like a thing a woman of sixty would do, and she did it anyway, and it worked.

“Two hundred short,” she said. She said it flatly, twice, the second time with the envelope held up.

“I know.”

“You know.”

“End of the month I’ll have it.”

She did not look impressed by this. She put the envelope down on the hall table, took her glasses off, and cleaned one lens on the sleeve of her jumper with a patience that felt worse than shouting.

“Come up,” she said. “I’ll make you coffee while you explain.”

Her flat was the first floor. Warmer than mine, which she knew, because she said — in the middle of me explaining — “You’ll be cold up there. The boiler’s the same one.”

She filled the kettle and talked over the noise of it. About the deposits. About the last tenant, a boy who left a bike in the hall for a year. About her ex-husband who had wanted to sell the building and move to Portugal and had done neither, because he had died instead.

I spilled my coffee. My hand was tired — I had been carrying boxes — and the cup went sideways and half of it went across the table and a little of it went on her.

She stood up fast, then did not move away.

“Sorry —”

“It’s hot,” she said, conversationally. “There, look.”

She was dabbing at her own shirt with the hem of it pulled out of her waistband, and it took me a second to understand that this was not a woman hoping I would look away.

Above us the tenant on the third floor began moving furniture, which he did most evenings and never once finished.

“Two hundred,” she said, and stepped closer. “Or something.”

And then, because I clearly was not going to speak, she said, “God, don’t look like that. I’m not doing it like a landlord. I’m doing it because you’ve been up there four months and you never once have said no to me.”

She kissed me with her hand flat against the wall beside my head and her coffee having made a small dark blot on her sleeve. She tasted of the coffee. She laughed when I got her zip stuck halfway and had to be shown, and she said, “There. Like that,” in a tone that was teaching, not mocking, and then she went quiet.

She kept her glasses on. I think she forgot.

After, she lay across the bed on her stomach with the sheet pulled to her waist and rebuilt the whole month for me out loud. Bills. The electric. The roof gutter that needed doing. As though we had not moved in any way, and were only two people agreeing paperwork.

“Two hundred,” she said. “Or the gutter, if you’re good with ladders.”

“The gutter.”

“Right.” She smiled into the pillow. “Or neither.”

I took the top flat for another two years. She never raised the rent, and she never made the offer again, and I never once paid full price in a way I could put on paper. More neighbour stories.