We wake up next to each other, sprawled out and overlapping like we’re each in bed alone, warm but not too hot. I roll over and your hand’s on my back. It’s eleven already. We kiss and I get up to fix you breakfast: Choco-Shreddies swimming in milk. I bring the bowls up, and cups of tea, on the tray with the oil-painted fruit on it. Your hair’s tousled and you get some chocolate on the corner of your mouth. I wipe it away with my thumb. We stream some cartoons on my PC, like we used to watch when we were kids, our knees bent up together like mountains under the duvet. Then we get dressed. You straighten your hair like you like it, even though I prefer your bed-hair. While you’re doing that I take the tray back down and go clean my teeth. When I come back I smooth out the duvet and we’re ready to leave.

I lock the door behind us, noticing as I hold back the handle so it shuts properly, that cracks of naked wood are beginning to show through the faded blue paint. I think maybe I’ll paint it tomorrow. We start walking towards town. The sky’s overcast and the air’s cold. You’re wrapped up in the red-brown scarf and hat and gloves I bought you last Christmas, and your black coat, but you still walk close by me for warmth, and squeeze my arm when a sharp breeze cuts across us and makes the leaves pitter-patter along the pavement.

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In a coffee shop in Norwich, watching a girl I had never seen before drink an Earl Grey, I smiled to myself, secretly knowing that she would never know how much I knew about her, just from watching her as she sat there with a camera case, her companion, by her side. But it was obvious; it was in her clothes, in her movements, in her voice quiet with confidence as she spoke aloud, but still cracking timidly, unsurely, at the ends of her syllables, as if she knew what she said was worth saying, but did not know whether now was the time to say it, or if it was coming across right. And it was in the tiny rising intonation she added at the end of her statements too, as if hoping for reassurance, agreement. (From anyone else it would have seemed an annoying Americanism, but from her, it was somehow endearing). (more…)