At work I am stern. At home I am greedy. This is about the sweet act, the private hunger, and why I keep those two girls separate. I have tried to stitch them into one neat person for the sake of being honest, and it never quite takes. Honesty is not the same as giving every room the same version of you. Some rooms pay you. Some rooms undress you. I do not confuse the two.
I am thirty one. Basildon first, Hackney after. I supervise a small team in a bank in the city and I am good at it, which is a sentence that sounds dry until you have watched a twenty three year old try to blag a figure that does not add up. I have a face I put on for that. It is not fake. It is selected. Harsh, they say. Strict. A bit much. Fine. Numbers do not care if you want to be liked. People miss deadlines if you smile too early. So I do not. I walk in, I set the tone, I go home with a head full of other people’s mistakes and my own private weather.
The private weather is the part nobody at the office gets to meet.
I am not talking about a quirky hobby. I am talking about appetite. The kind that sits under a hoodie and looks harmless. The kind that can watch a film, paint my nails pink, text my mum about roast potatoes, and still be thinking about a mouth, a weight, a night that does not end at polite. I have a high drive and I have spent years treating it like a coat I take off at the door of respectable life. Not because I am ashamed of sex. Because I learned, young, that women are allowed to be one temperature at a time. Warm at work. Warm at Sunday lunch. Warm in the group chat. Hot only if it is a joke, and even then, only after two drinks.
I can be the joke. I am Essex. I can say something filthy and make it sound like banter so nobody has to sit with the fact that I meant it. That is a skill and a trap. The trap is that you start believing your own cover. You start thinking the greedy girl is a weekend extra rather than the same woman who just signed off a report.
She is the same woman. I just do not bring her into the lift.
There are practical reasons and there are older ones. Practical first, because I like things that add up. I do not sleep with people from work. Company policy is the tidy explanation. The real one is mess. I have seen what happens when a team starts sniffing around each other’s weekends. I have seen the girls go quiet and the lads get brave in the wrong way. I run a room. I cannot run it if someone in that room has had me making that sound on my own sheets. Power is already a funny thing when you are a woman telling men what to do with a spreadsheet. I will not hand them the rest of me as well.
So the hunger stays off campus. It goes to wine bars. It goes to my flat. It goes into long essays under a name that is not on my payslip. Dingo can say I was wet in a cab. The supervisor cannot. That split keeps my rent paid and my reputation in the building boring, which is exactly how I want my reputation in the building.
The older reason is less tidy. I was raised around women who could be filthy in the kitchen and saintly in the street, and men who acted like those were two different species. You learn the act early. Be sweet. Be useful. Be game but not sloppy. Be pretty but not asking. Wanting a lot gets you a look. Wanting a lot and being good at your job gets you a worse one, as if competence and appetite cannot share a body without something being wrong with you. I internalised that look before I had language for it. Then I grew a career on top of it. Then I grew a blog underneath it. Now I live in the gap on purpose.
The sweet act is not a lie. That is what people miss when they talk about masks. I am actually soft. I like onesies and chick flicks and a man who does foot rubs without being asked twice. I like being cuddled after. I like a kettle. I like the daft hope that someone tall and dark haired will turn up and keep me in check in the way I mean as a joke and also do not. I go home to Essex and I am someone’s daughter at a table. I laugh at reality television like it is sport. I can sit in silence with a friend who is crying and not rush her. That girl is real. She is also the girl who has taken a stranger home because her body was louder than her plans.
Greedy is real too. I do not mean cruel. I mean I want. I want kissing that goes on too long. I want to be looked at like I am not a task. I want high energy when I have chosen it. I want a night that leaves a mark I can press the next day and remember. I want oral that does not watch the clock. I want to come more than once and not apologise for the time it takes. I want to say stay there and have him stay. I want, sometimes, to be used in the way that is still care because I asked for it with my whole body. Then I want the blanket. Both. In that order or the other way round depending on the evening.
Keeping them separate is how I stay employed and how I stay myself. If I let the greedy girl run the office I would be a rumour before lunch. If I let the supervisor into the bedroom I would start managing the poor man like a junior. I have done a version of that. Tried to direct a night as if it were a workflow. It kills the heat. He can feel you clocking him. I can feel myself doing it. So I take the coat off at the door. I make tea. I put my hair up. I become reachable.
The cost is loneliness in a specific shape. Not the big cinematic kind. The commute kind. You spend all day being the person who does not need anything, then you come home buzzing and there is nobody there who is allowed to know. You can text a friend. You can write it down. You can pull someone if the Friday goes that way. You cannot lean across a desk and say I am crawling out of my skin. That sentence does not belong to fluorescent lighting. So you swallow it. You become slightly sharper with the team. You stay late because work is a clean hunger. Then you feel guilty for being sharp, which is rich, because the sharpness was only appetite with nowhere to go.
I have been single on purpose for a stretch because I did not trust myself to carry both girls into someone else’s life without making a mess. I have cheated in the past when the wanting outran the rules I had agreed to. I am not proud of that. I am also not going to rewrite it as empowerment. It was lack of control dressed up as chemistry. Staying single after that was the grown decision. Fun, yes. Freedom, yes. Also a fence I built so I would stop borrowing other people’s nights and calling it fate. The fence works. It also means I go to bed some evenings with a body that is wide awake and a head that is trying to be sensible. Sensible is overrated at half eleven.
Friends get the gossipy version after a drink. That is another split. Sober I am discreet. Two glasses in I will tell you about a mouth, a suit, a rumour, a night that left me grinning at my phone like an idiot. I do not do it to rank men like meat. I do it because women have always traded maps. Which ones rush. Which ones stay. Which ones kiss like they mean it. Which ones look ordinary and then ruin you. We do it in kitchens. We do it in group chats. We do it because the official story is still that nice girls do not have a dossier. I have a dossier. I keep it off my work laptop.
There is a particular fear I will name because this piece is meant to be about hiding, not just hinting. I am afraid that if the wrong person at work ever found the greedy pages they would stop hearing my decisions and start hearing my body. I have watched it happen to other women. One personal detail and suddenly her authority is a punchline. She cannot be strict, she is filthy. She cannot be taken seriously, she has wants. Men are allowed a whole secret life and it makes them interesting. Women get the same life and it makes them available for comment. So I hide. Not the fact of desire. The access to it. You can know I write. You cannot bring it to my desk.
People like to say authenticity as if it were a moral shampoo. Be one thing everywhere. I think that is a luxury for people whose one thing cannot get them sacked or pawed. I am authentic in pieces. Each piece is true. The whole collage is me. You do not get the collage if you have not earned the room.
How the hiding shows up in dating is almost funny. I will meet a man and give him the sweet one first because I want to see if he can be kind when I am not performing heat. If he can talk. If he can sit. If he makes a joke that does not need a victim. If he looks at me in the hoodie and still seems interested. The greedy girl is easy to attract and hard to keep. Men clock appetite and think they have understood the product. They have understood the trailer. If I let her out too early he will aim at her and miss the person who wants the kettle after. If I hide her too long he will think I am mild and be startled later, which is its own awkward theatre. Timing is everything and I am still clumsy with it.
The ones who do well are the ones who can hold a contradiction without needing to solve it. Yes I am shy at the start. Yes I will say filthy things once I trust the door is shut. Yes I want to be looked after. Yes I want to be wrecked a bit. Yes I will be at my mother’s table on Sunday being asked if I have met anyone nice. Nice is doing a lot of work in that question. I have met people who were good with their hands and poor with the morning. I have met people who were gentle and bored me. I am looking for the overlap. Hiding the drive is partly a test. If he only wants the sweet act he will never survive me. If he only wants the hunger he will never stay for the film.
I keep the two girls separate for him as well, in a way. Not every man has earned the full inventory on night one. That is not playing games. That is pacing. I have been the woman who gave the whole weather at once and watched someone get greedy for the heat and lazy about the person. Now I let the night ask for what it needs. Sometimes that is talk and a kiss and a cab that does not come back. Sometimes that is clothes on the floor before I have offered tea. I try not to moralise either version. I do try to stay honest inside it. If I am only using him because I am buzzing and lonely I would like to know that myself, even if I never say it aloud.
Work days make the split sharper. A bad afternoon, a sloppy junior, a meeting that should have been an email, and I will come home with this specific restlessness that is not quite anger. It sits in the thighs. It sits in the jaw. I can run it off. I can have a bath. I can put rubbish on the telly and narrate it like sport. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes it is not, and the greedy girl starts pacing the flat looking for an outlet that will not text me at 2am with a half thought. That is when the old numbers in the phone get looked at. That is when a wine bar on my own starts to feel like a plan rather than a sad story. I do not judge her for it. I do judge the culture that makes a competent woman feel she has to sneak her own pulse.
I wish I had been taught that drive was just information. Not a character flaw. Not a brand. Not a reason to distrust myself. Information. Tonight I want quiet. Tonight I want a mouth. Tonight I want to be held and not touched further. Tonight I want everything. The supervisor in me loves a clear report. The rest of me is weather. Hiding the weather was how I stayed safe. Showing selected forecasts is how I stay sane. This blog is a forecast. It is not the storm itself. If you think reading me is the same as having me, you have not understood the first thing about a woman with two keys to her own house.
The sweet act gets underestimated because it looks easy. It is not easy. It is discipline. It is walking into a room of people who report to you and giving them none of the heat that would complicate their idea of your authority. It is laughing at a slightly off joke in the kitchen and not making it a moment. It is wearing the nail polish and the hoodie and letting colleagues think you are simply practical. Meanwhile you know what you look like when you stop being practical. You know the sounds. You know the way your accent thickens when you are close. You know you can be timid and then not timid at all. That knowledge sits behind your teeth all day. No wonder I am tired. No wonder I am particular about who gets invited in.
I do not want to become less greedy. I want a life where greed does not have to wear a disguise to buy milk. I am not there yet. The job is real. The gossip risk is real. My family’s right not to hear every chapter is real. So I keep splitting, and I write the join so I do not disappear into either costume. If you only met me at work you would not guess this page. If you only read this page you might forget I am also the woman who will stay late to fix a file. Both omissions would be wrong.
Here is the closest I can get to a philosophy that is not a lecture. Appetite is not the opposite of dignity. Softness is not the opposite of hunger. A woman can run a team and still want to be taken apart in her own bed. She can want that and still want a man who puts the kettle on. She can hide the second girl from the office without hiding her from herself. The minute I start lying to myself about what I want, the split turns nasty. The minute I tell the truth on the page, the day job feels less like a muzzle and more like a door I chose.
I will go in tomorrow and be stern. I will come home and be greedy or I will come home and be tired and only want telly. I will keep the names off the stories and the stories off the desk. I will still hope for the person who can sit with both girls without asking one of them to die so the other can be respectable. Until then I will manage the weather. I will write it down so it does not leak into a meeting. I will keep my small circle, my roast potatoes, my private heat, and the right to be more than one true thing before lunch.
That is why I hide it. Not because it is dirty. Because it is mine. Because the world is quick to use a woman’s hunger as a handle. Because I like my work and I like my want and I have learned they survive best when they visit each other on my terms. The sweet act gets me through the city. The private hunger gets me back to myself. I need them both. I just do not need them in the same room as my team.
