I spent twenty minutes on the lips. Twenty. Not ten. Not a quick swipe in the hall while Mia shouted that the Uber was two minutes away. Twenty full minutes in the bathroom mirror, sitting on the closed loo lid with my phone torch on because the overhead light in our Parsons Green flat is the colour of a hangover.
Charlotte Tilbury, the expensive one, the one I tell people is my everyday when it is absolutely not. Liner first. Then the pencil to fill. Then the bullet. Then blot. Then another coat. Then I sit there and look at myself like the job is not finished until I believe it.
That is the bit nobody puts in the cute night-out photos. The sitting. The staring. The tiny corrections. I am not doing it for him. I barely knew him yet. I do it because if my mouth is not right, the rest of me feels unfastened.
The point of the whole production
Look, I know how this sounds. A girl who will not leave the house until her face is done. Very 2014. Very try-hard. I do not care. Makeup is the one thing I control before the night starts controlling me.
Sophie leaned on the doorframe and did that face she does. The one that says you are doing too much for a Thursday. I told her it was Friday. She said same difference. Then she asked who I was meeting and I said I was not meeting anyone, I was just going out, which was true in the way things are true before they happen.
I had a message from a boy I had been circling for a week. Not dating. Circling. We had spoken outside a private members place in Soho the weekend before and he had that annoying thing some men have where they look at your mouth when you talk. I noticed. I always notice.
He said he might be about. I said I might be too. That is how these things start when you are twenty seven and refuse to look like you tried.
Soho does what Soho does
The bar was too loud and the lighting was the kind that makes everyone look slightly famous and slightly ill. I had a dirty martini I did not need. He arrived twenty minutes late, which I would have judged if I had not been late myself on purpose.
He looked better than I remembered, which is irritating. Dark jumper, nothing clever. He smelled like he had actually showered, which in this city feels like effort.
We talked about nothing. Work he would not explain properly. A friend of a friend. The fact that everyone we know is either engaged or having a quiet breakdown in a shared kitchen. I laughed at the right bits. He watched my mouth again.
I felt the lipstick every time I spoke. That waxy little awareness. I keep thinking that is why I like it. You can feel yourself wearing it. You know it is there until someone takes it off you.
We left because the bar started filling with people who wanted to be seen more than they wanted a drink. Outside it was that damp London cold that gets under your coat no matter what you paid for it. He asked if I wanted another one somewhere else. I said I wanted a cigarette I do not even smoke. We walked.
The stairwell was not romantic
It was the side door of a building I could not name if you paid me. Between a late restaurant and whatever sits above it. He pulled it and it opened, which in Soho is already a small miracle. Concrete steps. That particular smell of cleaning product and old rain. A strip light buzzing like it wanted to die.
I should have said no. I did not.
He kissed me before the door even shut properly. Not a polite one. The kind that arrives with a hand on your jaw like he has decided. And there it went. Twenty minutes. Gone. I felt it smear immediately, that soft drag of product leaving my mouth and going onto his.
I made a noise that was half laugh. He pulled back just enough to look and there was colour on him. On his bottom lip. A bit on the edge of his mouth. I thought, well that is coming home on my face now.
Then he kissed me again and I stopped thinking about the liner.
My back hit the wall. Cold through the dress. His mouth was messy and I could taste the gin I had bought him. Hands under the coat, then under the dress, then I was on my toes because the step made us the wrong height and neither of us wanted to move down to a flatter bit like sensible people.
It was not slow. Stairwells do not do slow. Every time someone walked past on the street the sound bounced in and we went still for a second, mouths still together, waiting to see if the door would open. It did not.
He pushed the dress up. I helped, which I always do, because I am not going to stand there like a statue and pretend I stumbled into it. Knickers pulled aside. His fingers first, and I was already in that state where the argument in my head has lost. Then he was inside me and the back of my head tapped the wall and I thought about my hair for one stupid second before I stopped caring.
It was the angle more than the romance. Hard. A bit clumsy. His mouth on my neck so he would not make a sound against my lips. I had one heel not quite planted. I came anyway, faster than I wanted to admit, with my hand in his hair and my ruined mouth open against his cheek.
He finished not long after, forehead on my shoulder, breathing like he had run for the last tube. For a moment neither of us moved. Just the light buzzing and a motorbike outside and the ridiculous fact of standing there with my dress still up.
Then I laughed. Properly. Because what else do you do.
The walk back to looking like a person
He used his thumb on my mouth like that would fix it. It did not. I could feel the state of it. Patchy. Gone in the middle. Liner still clinging at the corners like a crime scene.
We fixed clothes in that silent little dance people do after they have been less than elegant. He had my lipstick on him and I did not wipe it off. Let him walk through Soho like that. Not my problem.
Outside I opened my bag. Compact. Lip liner. The same bullet. Tissues that were already dying. I did not do it on the pavement. I am not an animal. I waited.
He asked if I wanted to come back to his. I said I had an early thing, which was a lie, unless you count looking at myself in the morning as a meeting. He nodded like he understood and maybe he did. Some men are better at the leaving than the staying. I prefer that, most nights.
We kissed once more on the street and it was already different. Less hungry. More like a full stop. Then he went one way and I stood there with my phone out for an Uber like a girl who had just been to dinner.
Priorities, in an Uber, at 1:40am
The driver did not speak, thank god. I flipped the camera on and nearly laughed again. I looked like I had been eaten. Which, in a manner of speaking.
I did the whole face in that back seat. Not well. Well enough. Wipe. Concealer on the chin where his stubble had pinked me. Powder. Then the lips again, quicker this time, because the performance was over and this was just maintenance.
A woman in a nice coat, going home, mouth put back on. That is the version I prefer arriving in the kitchen.
I keep thinking about how ridiculous it is. The care, then the mess, then the care again. Like I need the evidence removed before I can be myself in my own flat. Or maybe I need the evidence removed so I can pretend the night was lighter than it was.
Both can be true. I contain a lot of nonsense.
Home, and the bit I will actually remember
Mia was on the sofa with a face mask on, which is rich coming from her. She looked at me over the top of it and said you look freshly reconstructed. I said I spilled a drink. She said sure.
Sophie was already asleep. Or pretending. The group chat will get a cleaned-up version tomorrow. Not the stairwell. Not the twenty minutes. I will say Soho was dead and I came home early and they will not believe me and that is fine.
I sat on my bed and took the rest of it off properly. Makeup wipe after makeup wipe. The last of him leaving my mouth. There is a moment in that process where your actual face comes back and it always feels slightly too honest.
I did not text him. He did not text me. That is the correct ending for a stairwell.
Would I do it again. Yes. Will I still spend twenty minutes on the lips next time. Also yes. The night can take the makeup. That is what it is for. I just like being the one who puts it back on afterwards. Feels like I won something, even if the only prize is arriving home looking like I meant to.
Anyway. If you see a girl in the back of an Uber at two in the morning redrawing her mouth under a streetlight, do not assume she is vain. She might be. She is probably also just finishing the story.