Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They came up the motorway with the boot full of things that made sense to her mother – linen, a spare duck down duvet, a box of wine glasses wrapped in tissue – and the one thing that made sense to Tabitha: a shoebox with tubes of paint that had dried at the mouths, lids stuck on like fossils.

Guildford slid away behind them: the converted nunnery with sash windows and the bell that didn't ring anymore; lawns that fell away to a valley her father had once called "a pleasing aspect" without irony. On the back seat, his latest hardback sat in a tote bag, its jacket photograph of a ruined abbey glaring at the world. He'd signed it to her in a quick, affectionate hand, a line of Latin she would pretend to understand later.

Her mother narrated the journey in notes to self. "Make sure you get a spare key cut. We'll need a cleaner. Wednesday mornings? No, Fridays. And Tab, darling, don't put blue tack on the walls, it stains."

"They're our walls," Tabitha said. "You bought the place."

"That's not the point."

Her father glanced up from the index he'd been proof-reading, glasses low on his nose. "It's a very sound investment," he offered, which was his way of blessing her life.

The flat sat off Bold Street at the top of a narrow staircase that smelled of dust. The agent had already left the folder on the kitchen counter – safety certificates, inventory, the laminated card that explained the boiler. Through the windows: red brick, a strip of sky, a gull that drifted without flapping.

"It's just as we saw it," her mother said, approving the confirmations she'd arranged in July. She set the wine glasses in the cupboard in a neat row, her mouth folded the way it got when she was trying not to say what she actually thought.

"It's perfect," Tab said. The parquet floors were scuffed enough to be forgiven for whatever else happened to them. There was a radiator under the big window with dried paint drips in the grooves; it looked like a man had done it quickly and late.

Her father did the tour as if he were visiting a chapel: hand to the lintel, a nod at the fireplace with its stopped-up mouth. "Fine cornice," he murmured, pleased to find Latin words for something. He tried the sash; it opened with a scrape.

They left for lunch because her mother was even more unbearable on an empty stomach. Tabitha glared at the menu's fussy font for five minutes, frowning, then ordered the soup because it was easier.

"You're quite sure about Liverpool?" her mother said, cutlery straightened, the question late by two months and all the more pointed for it.

"It's where I want to be."

Liverpool felt like the opposite of everything she'd been given: controlled, brown-edged, loud. Interesting. She could say that to her father – interesting – and he would forgive any part of it because curiosity still counted as virtue in his church.

"It isn't Oxford," her mother said, lightly.

"No," Tabitha said. She thought of the girls at Cheltenham who could answer before the question had landed; of essays that came easily to other mouths. Her As had been earned in pictures, not pages. She'd learned to talk about brushwork because, unlike words and numbers, brushwork didn't move under her.

Back at the flat, unpacking quickly became a chore. Good towels in the bathroom; fresh flowers on the coffee table. In the bedroom, she set a small stack of art books on the sill: Morisot, Degas, a fat Monet with plates glossy as sweets. She liked Impressionism because it used blur as accuracy and edges as suggestion. It made her feel clever without lying.

Her mother folded the last of the tissue paper and stood with her hands on her hips. "Do ring me," she said. "Daily if you can."

"Weekly," Tabitha said, but gently.

Her father kissed her forehead. "Write to me when you've found a gallery you like," he said. "Tell me why."

He'd never cared much if her letters were riddled with mistakes, and she loved him for that.

They left with a wave from the top of the stairs she knew her mother had practised in mirrors. The door closed. Quiet properly arrived – no more lists, no more reassurances, the flat suddenly too full of her things to be anything but hers.

She stood a moment in the middle of the living room without moving, letting the fact of it settle. She'd spent plenty of time away from her parents at boarding school, but this was different. There was thrill in it and a thin thread of fear. She went to the kitchen and ran the tap until the water got properly cold, then filled a glass and drained it in quick gulps.

Her phone buzzed. MOTHER: Send a photo of the view. X
She took one, sent it, typed All good. xx.
Another buzz, this one Nick, her half-brother, the one who always answered: Don't do anything I wouldn't do Tab.
She smiled and texted back with a saluting emoji.

SOPHIE: Here in five. I've got two suitcases and a plant that might be dead.

Tabitha smiled before she could stop herself. They'd found each other on a freshers Facebook group; Sophie had messaged in ten perfect words: I'm clean, I'm tidy, and I don't steal food. They'd agreed on her rent and that they'd buy a hoover that wasn't awful.

The stairs shook. Then a voice from the hall, flat northern vowels and cheerfully unbothered. "Hello? I brought the dead plant."

"Come in!" Tabitha called, and Sophie appeared with two cases and a monstera with browning leaves. She was shorter than Tab had pictured, blonde hair in a choppy bob that fell to her chin, lipstick the colour of new strawberries, a T-shirt that said LEEDS LIT FEST in a neon font.

"Tab?" Sophie said, checking, and then they were hugging like old friends. "God, it's nice. Your mum must be thrilled."

"Ecstatic," Tabitha said, and showed her the cupboards: good knives, fresh tea towels.

"Right," Sophie said, assessing the space the way practical girls do. "We need loo roll, bin bags, bleach, pasta, wine, painkillers and crisps. And a blanket for the sofa if we're not going to freeze our arses off."

"Done," Tab said, relieved to be told what to buy by someone who didn't make it a judgement. "Waitrose?"

"Home Bargains," Sophie said. "I'll teach you."

They walked down into the afternoon, the air cool and damp. Liverpool felt less varnished than places Tabitha knew. A boy lugged a crate of cans to a corner; two boys skidded past on bikes as if they knew the world would move around them. Sophie kept up a running commentary that turned the city into categories. "That bar looks dodgy. You see that café? Definitely overpriced. You can tell those flats reek of weed just looking at them. Decent charity shop there — you could get a good jacket out of that."

At the till, Sophie plonked down bleach, cloths, a cheap bottle of rosé, a jumbo packet of bourbons. Tabitha added olive oil that cost too much and soap that smelled of fig and honey.

"Christ," Sophie said, eyeing the label. "That for the Queen?"

"It lasts," Tab said, too quickly, and Sophie grinned.

They carried bags home between them, fingers indenting into plastic.

Back in the flat, they unpacked to music from Sophie's phone and found common ground in their shared knowledge of noughties throwbacks lyrics. Sophie arranged the living room in a way Tab wouldn't have thought of, pulling the sofa a fraction off the wall, putting the lamp on a stack of books that made it look intentional.

"Better," she said. "Hygge. My cousin's obsessed."

They cooked pasta, opened the wine – "it'll do the job," Sophie said – and got tipsy fast. Sophie told Tab about Leeds and her mum, who was always trying to feed her up. Tabitha offered Guildford as if it were an amusing anecdote and not a diagnosis. "We live in an old nunnery," she said, watching Sophie's eyebrows, "if you can believe it. It's a listed building, 19th century. My father writes history books. My mother...organises."

"Must be nice," Sophie said, not unkindly, topping up both glasses to the same line.

"It's quiet," Tabitha said.

Sophie checked her phone, thumb flying, then locked the screen. "There's a freshers thing round the corner, but..." She glanced at the window, the newness of the room. "Feels rude to go out and leave the flat on its first night."

"Stay," Tabitha said, quicker than she meant to.

Sophie grinned. "Alright then. Housewarming. Rule one: we finish this bottle. Rule two: we make some flat rules."

They slid to the floor with their backs against the sofa, plates abandoned on the worktop. The open window let the sounds of the street in; now and then a voice rose and fell, the vowels broader than any Tab grew up with. Sophie stretched out her legs and told the story of her school like it was a dare: a form room that smelled of Lynx and poster putty, teachers who doubled up – Geography on Mondays, PE on Thursdays – because Mrs Daniels had gone off long-term and never come back.

Tabitha tried to picture it and failed. "That sounds exciting."

"What school did you go to? A posh one, I bet."

She covered her face with her hands and said, very quietly, "Cheltenham Ladies College."

"Fucking hell, Tab. That's, like, posh posh." Sophie grinned. "What was it like?"

"We had lacrosse in winter," she said. "There was a Latin motto above the dining hall. If you were late you had to stand up and say your name like you were introducing yourself to Parliament."

"Did you like it?"

"I liked parts of it," Tab said. "I liked the art studio. The light was good, and it was always quiet in there. I didn't like..." She let the end of the sentence trail. "How quick everyone seemed. Some of them could turn a page into a paragraph between supper and lights-out. I need more time than that."

Sophie watched her for a moment, then nodded. "No one checks how long it took once it's done,"
she said reassuringly.

They made their flat pact without a ceremony. Don't steal food unless it's an emergency, and then leave a note. Alternate the bins. If a boy is staying over, text the other one in advance so no one walks into anything they can't unsee. Clean as you go, because cleaning later is a lie.

"Also," Sophie said, bright with wine, "if either of us cries, the other makes tea first and asks questions second."

"Deal."

Sophie fished a little tin from her tote and shook tobacco into the lid. "You smoke?" she asked.

"No," Tabitha said, interested despite herself.

"Do you want to?"

Tab hesitated exactly long enough to make it a choice. "Show me."

Sophie rolled with quick, competent fingers, licked the paper, sealed it, and handed it over. "You look like a film star until you cough," she said. "Window."

Tabitha leaned on the sill and let Sophie shield the flame from the draught. The first drag was acrid, like ash and something chemical that clung to her throat; the second went wrong and made her eyes water. She laughed into the cough, wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Do I look glamorous?"

"Devastating," Sophie said, deadpan, then took the roll-up back and closed her eyes when she inhaled.

They talked until the bottle was dry. Sophie told a story about a science teacher who'd been caught having an affair with a teaching assistant who was his ex-pupil. Tab countered with a housemistress who could detect contraband nail varnish at twenty paces. They compared detentions (Sophie: chewing gum and backchat; Tabitha: skirt too short by an inch, laddered tights) and first crushes (Sophie: the drummer from a local band who said "mate" to everyone; Tabitha: a prefect from Winchester College who went off to Baliol and never thought about her again).

"Right," Sophie said, breathless from laughing, collapsing back to the floor. "Freshers' week policy. Are we shagging strangers or pretending to be above it?"

Tab twirled the stem of her empty glass. "I never really did casual," she said. "I might try being careless once."

"Fair."

"But I'd still like it to mean something," she added, colouring a little. "You?"

Sophie grinned. "I'm open to a mistake with good shoulders. No bringing home men who call their ex psycho, though. That's a flat rule."

"Deal. And veto power if one of us brings back a walking disaster."

They topped up with water and finished the pasta cold, forks straight from the saucepan. Sophie talked about her Saturday job on the tills, how you learn people by their baskets: nappies and Red Bull meant a rough night ahead; posh tonic and limes meant a party. The more they spoke, the less they performed.

"Alright," Sophie said at last, levering herself up. "Bed before I say something I'll put in a group chat and regret."

They rinsed glasses together without thinking about it. At the window, Sophie smoked the last centimetre of the rollie and stumped it out neatly on the tin. "Tomorrow," she said, "we'll go somewhere nice for coffee. And we'll buy a rug so your mum doesn't haunt us."

"Okay," Tabitha said.

They stood a minute with their shoulders touching, looking out. The street below was still itself: taxi office light, a siren from somewhere you couldn't see, the stubborn northern night. Sophie yawned. "You're alright, you," she said, like a benediction.

"So are you."

"Good night, Tabitha-who-lives-in-a-nunnery."

"Good night, Sophie-who-rolls-better-than-she-dances."

Sophie padded off, humming. Tabitha sat a moment longer on the arm of the sofa, feeling proud and a little smug that she was, for the first time, free.

When she finally went to bed, the window was still up an inch. She lay on her back and listened to the noises of her new home: the shift of someone on the floor below, the click of pipes figuring themselves out.

In the morning, she would learn how the bus worked and where the galleries were and which corner shops sold bread that didn't taste of cardboard. She would meet tutors who'd heard it all before. She would try to make friends with people on her course. She would fail at some of it and keep going.

For now, she closed her eyes and let Liverpool arrange itself around her, the new weight of having chosen it sitting warm in her chest.

Chapter Text

By morning, the flat smelled of coffee and the gingerbread spice candle Sophie had forgotten to blow out. Sophie dragged Tabitha to a café for a decent coffee, and they ended up on stools by a window, steam fogging the glass in circles where people leaned to talk. Sophie took hers white and sugary; Tabitha cupped a black Americano.

"Plan," Sophie said, spoon clinking. "We buy a rug for the flat, nick every pen they're giving out at the freshers' fair, and tonight we go where the cheap shots are."

They walked the fair in a slow loop. Flyers piled in Tabitha's hands until the letters started to blur; she folded them neatly and let Sophie do the talking. Netball, student radio, a charity shop rota. A boy with a megaphone shouted about a boat party and mispronounced Marseille; a girl in a society T-shirt drew a heart on the back of Tabitha's hand in glitter pen, unasked. When Sophie signed them both up for a poetry night – "for the drama" – Tab let it happen, thinking she could always not go. She liked the feeling of not being expected to know her mind yet.

At lunchtime, they split a sandwich on the art school steps, watching the city's chaos. A van beeped at a kid on a scooter. Two women laughed from a high window, hair in rollers, elbows on the sill. Sophie peered at the ink heart on Tabitha's skin and added two dots. "Now it's a face," she said. "Don't say I never give you anything."

Back in the flat, they unrolled a rug bright enough to cheer the room. Sophie napped on the sofa, head buried in her arms like a child. Tabitha sat at the little table, turned a Morisot postcard between her fingers and tried a wash of green watercolour on cheap paper. It came out flat and wrong. She rinsed the brush, felt oddly relieved by the ordinary clack of the jar against the sink, and promised herself she'd set aside time for painting at uni even if it made her feel slow.

As the light started to go, Sophie emerged reborn and decisive. "Right," she said, rooting in a suitcase. "Outfits. You: the black velvet dress with the little bow. It'll send men wild."

"It will not."

"It will. Hair up so they see your neck. Small earrings. Nothing that says 'please.'"

"And you?"

Sophie held up a silver top that looked like the inside of a sweet wrapper. "I'm going as a warning sign."

They ate toast at the kitchen counter, then took a photo in the mirror for Sophie's cousin, fairy lights strung around the edges. Through the window, Liverpool flickered to life with neon and bus headlights.

"Ready?" Sophie said, already halfway out of the door.

"Not remotely," Tabitha said, and followed.

**

The first bar near campus had been decorated by a student committee. Plastic plants drooped. The DJ – a boy with a mullet and a Patagonia T-shirt – played the same song twice and nobody complained because the drinks were two pounds with a wristband. Sophie somehow knew girls at the door and kissed their cheeks with a smile. Tabitha let herself be pulled into a circle and learned names in bursts that she knew she'd immediately forget.

"Freshers' week policy," Sophie said, raising her glass. "No crying in toilets unless it's funny, no going home with a man in a gilet, and no tequila until after midnight."

"What's wrong with tequila?" Tab asked, amused by her new friend's love of rules.

"You'll see."

Tabitha stared, then stopped pretending she wasn't staring. Girls with freshly highlighted hair held plastic cups of warm wine; boys in shirts their mothers had ironed already had them wrinkled to the elbows. Someone shouted the chorus into a friend's hair. The bar was sticky under her forearms and the air smelled of cheap alcohol and deodorant. It was good to be nowhere anybody expected anything of her.

They moved on, as groups do, by invisible consent. Outside, the air had cooled and the pavements shone under their own thin skin of damp. Sophie led with bravado, but none of them really knew where they were going. They turned down one street with a queue and then another with none, half following the sound of voices, half guessing. By the time they ducked into a pub with no line at the door, Tabitha had the sense they'd drifted off the student map entirely.

Inside, the air was thick with the smell of beer and something fried. It was the kind of place Tabitha would never have set foot in back home. At a table near the back sat four men, voices pitched low but carrying in the warmth. Not students; no hoodies, no backpacks. Coats open over shirts, hands loose around pints.

One of them – tall, lean, dark hair – looked up when the door closed. His gaze lingered. Not the casual once-over she'd learned to ignore – slower, more curious.

A history boy called Sam wedged his way to the bar and returned with a round of sambuca shots, pressing one into Tabitha's hand. It smelled like medicine. When he turned to tell a joke she didn't catch, she tipped the shot into someone else's glass. The man at the back table saw and let one corner of his mouth go, then went back to listening.

Tabitha slipped free of the group and edged along the bar. The wood was scarred with initials, sticky where the varnish had worn through. She was scanning bottles when she felt him step in beside her, close enough that her shoulder brushed the edge of his coat.

"Not a fan of shots, then?" His voice was low, threaded with the rough edge of a Liverpool accent.

She shook her head, more to clear the sudden nearness of him than to answer. "Not really. I prefer wine."

A pause. She could feel him looking at her, though she kept her eyes forward.

"Get yourself a vodka mixer. Better chance of keeping it down."

She raised an eyebrow. "An expert, are you?"

The corner of his mouth tilted, but his gaze didn't move from hers. "I've been in enough of these places to know what not to drink." He gestured to the wine sweating in the fridge. "Those bottles have been open for weeks."

She glanced up and saw him properly. Deep-set eyes, blue with a rim of navy around the pupil; lashes darker still. High cheekbones. The top lip had a clean, sharp dip that made his mouth look precise even when it wasn't moving. There was stubble, not artful, and a faint line on one cheekbone you'd only notice if you were this close. He smelled of wet wool and smoke and something clean underneath. Handsome, but not gentle. Not like the boys she knew from home.

"Tabitha," she said finally, holding her hand out before she could talk herself out of it.

He glanced at it but didn't take it. "Michael Kavanagh."

The skin inside her wrist felt abruptly exposed, as if it had expected his palm and missed it.

Sophie arrived at her shoulder in a rush of hair and silver and certainty. "There you are— oh my God, hello," she said to the man, Michael, her eyes looking him up and down without embarrassment.

He gave her the briefest look – neutral, patient – and then away, the social version of standing aside on a narrow stair. His attention wasn't on them anymore, and somehow that made the air between Tabitha and where he'd just been more charged, not less.

"Who was that?" Sophie asked, delighted.

"I've no idea," Tabitha said, aware of the pull low in her stomach.

"Christ alive," Sophie said happily. "He looked like trouble. And older."

"You're terrible."

"Correct." Sophie pinched the sleeve of Tab's dress. "You're getting stared at. It's the velvet."

"I am not," she said, blushing, though she could feel it was true. Men looked at Tab and then away quickly when she looked back; women let their eyes rest longer.

They stayed long enough for a second round that wasn't sambuca. Tabitha kept glancing at the back table. Twice, when the door banged and a gust dragged rain inside, he looked up, and each time he saw her first.

"Smoke?" Sophie mouthed, already moving.

The air was colder outside. Sophie lit two and handed one over; Tab took one drag, coughed, and passed it back, laughing at herself. A boy in a bucket hat asked for a light and called them angels.

"On a scale of one to disaster, how are we doing?" Sophie asked, wicked and fond.

"Somewhere in the middle," Tab said. "I think I'm having fun."

"That's the spirit."

They ducked back in for a last drink and found their corner again. When Tabitha glanced to the back, the table had thinned. The tall man was standing now, shoulders angled as he listened; he put money down and didn't wait for change. As he passed the bar he looked once more and then he was gone into the wet, coat collar lifted.

"Come on," Sophie said. "Home."

On the pavement, Tabitha glanced back. The pub window showed nothing but glare and their two reflections, soft and doubled. She let Sophie take her arm.

Chapter Text

Tabitha wasn't lost this time. She went back on purpose.

A week after the sambuca night, after the smirk across the room and the brush of his coat at the bar, she left her flat with a jacket that wasn't warm enough and told Sophie she was going into town. She didn't say where. She didn't tell her mother when the call flashed up, either. She let it ring out, then turned her phone face-down in her pocket and felt her pulse steady at the small, private act.

The rain had started again, thin and persistent. She cut the corner by the off-licence and took the same street as before, the one with the shuttered travel shop and the barbers that never seemed open. The pub sat dull and low-lit at the end.

Inside, the same heat hit her: beer, fryer oil, a thread of bleach in the air that didn't cover anything. A dog slept under a table near the door, one ear twitching. Different faces, but the same table at the back.

He wasn't there.

She went to the bar, flashing the polite smile she'd learned in places she didn't belong. "Glass of house red," she said, then heard herself. "Actually, lager. Half." It arrived in a heavy glass that smelled faintly of lemon cleaner. She took a cautious sip and pretended it was fine.

She waited ten minutes. Twelve. Told herself she'd leave after the song finished.

When the door opened and a gust of wet air came with it, she didn't turn immediately. She felt the shift first: voices dipping, greetings exchanged. Then she looked.

Michael. Same jacket, different T-shirt.

He saw her. She expected surprise, but there was none of that, just a slow ignition behind his eyes. He said something to the man beside him and moved to the bar, leaving a careful amount of space between them.

"You again," he said, the Liverpool soft in it.

"You make a habit of this place?" She tried to sound wry, casual, and heard herself fail.

He glanced past her to the back table, where two older blokes were arguing.

"Sometimes."

"I'm starting to see the appeal."

"That right?" A corner of his mouth twitched. His eyes flickered to the ribbon in her hair, the gold hoops in her ears. "Thought you were more...wine bar."

She took another drink of the flat lager and held his gaze. "People are full of surprises, don't you think?"

He seemed to approve of that.

"What is it you study again?" he asked.

"Art History."

"Pictures," he said with a sardonic smile. "You any good at it?"

"At looking? Yes." She let the beat run. "At picking fakes from the real thing."

That got the first proper smile out of him. "Be useful round here."

The barman slid a pint his way. He paid without looking, a folded note from his pocket. He stood sideways so she could see him without turning her whole body. Up close, there was damp in his coat, a few drops still clinging to the wool, and the smell of rain and smoke that clung as if he'd carried the night in with him.

"Your mates not with you?" he asked.

"They were. I'm—" She gestured at nothing. "Taking a breather."

"This isn't the usual place for breathers."

"And yet," she said, "here we are."

He didn't answer, took a drink instead. She liked that about him, she realised. His quietness. He watched the room without the need to be at the centre of it.

At a table near the door, a chair scraped hard. Voices rose. A man in a tracksuit squared up to another, shoulders tight, chin jutting. The barman didn't look up. No one did. The jukebox went on humming, a Stereophonics song vibrating through the worn-out speakers.

Tabitha watched the first man's hand curl near a glass. She heard the thought arrive in her head – this is the part where I should go – and didn't move.

Michael didn't, either. He set his pint down slowly, and without looking away from the bar said, "Keep your elbows in." It took her a second to realise he meant it not for politeness but protection. He touched her sleeve just enough to move her out of harm's way and let go.

The glass smashed before the warning finished, a bright crack. The tracksuit man surged forward, grabbing at the other man's collar, and the tight circle of space around them shifted as bodies leaned back or leaned in.

Michael was moving before she registered it, a clean, economical step that put him between the table and the rest of the room. He didn't raise his voice or posture. He caught the man's wrist mid-swing, twisted just enough to make the body attached to it remember pain, and pitched his words low.

"Don't."

The man went very still.

"Leave your pride on the table," Michael said evenly. "Walk out."

The second man – older, bleeding in a thin line along the hairline – had his mouth open to say something brave. Michael didn't look at him when he said, "You too."

It should have been laughable. It wasn't. Something in the room relaxed around the words, like everyone had been waiting for a decision, for someone to step in. The tracksuit man swallowed whatever he'd been about to do, wrenched his wrist free, and backed toward the door. The older one followed with a half-hearted, "soft shite," thrown over his shoulder that didn't sound convinced.

The door banged once. The dog under the table settled its head back on its paws. Michael wiped his palm on his jacket and turned back to the bar. He finished his drink, and only then did he look at her.

"You alright?"

She nodded. She wasn't sure she was. Her heart had climbed somewhere behind her ribs and was stuck there, beating where it shouldn't.

"Is that usual?" she asked, aiming for cool and missing by a degree.

"On a Thursday?" His mouth twitched. "Sometimes."

He picked up his empty pint glass, and the movement revealed a pale crescent scar at his knuckle. The strange, steady urge to touch it surprised her. He clocked the look and didn't move away.

"Students," he said, neutral, as if naming her condition. "You lot think this is all a laugh."

"Isn't it?" she challenged.

He gave a faint smile, one corner of his mouth lifting. "Until it isn't."

Tabitha's phone vibrated in her pocket. Mum. Then the message preview: Call me when you're in. House is quiet without you. Tabitha silenced the screen and slid it back. She held his gaze, and the rebellion in her chest – a small, bright, furious thing – grew teeth.

"Walk me back?" she said.

He didn't move right away. He glanced to the back table, tipped his chin once, a signal to someone, then pushed off the bar. "Come on, then."

They stepped into the rain. Streetlights cut the water into sheets. He walked slightly to the street side, the old-fashioned courtesy of it almost funny given the wrist he'd nearly broken five minutes ago.

"What do you even want with places like that?" he asked after a block.

"Which places?"

"Mine."

She could have said she didn't know. She could have said something wanky about art history and talked about texture and colour and the way some rooms felt more honest in bad light. Instead, she said, "They feel, I don't know, real. Like anything could happen."

"And you like that?"

Tabitha shrugged.

He made a sound that wasn't a laugh. "You'll grow out of it."

They reached her building. The street smelled of wet stone and the faint smoke of chargrill from a kitchen down the road. She put her key in the door, then looked back at him. Up close his eyes were darker than the doorway behind him, the rain beading on his lashes.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Eighteen." She added before he could comment, "Nearly nineteen."

He nodded, filing it, and pointed at the door. "Lock it behind you."

"Is that an order?"

"A suggestion."

She stood a fraction longer than sense would have advised, the urge to lean in so simple she had to recognise it to keep from doing it. He didn't move either.

"Goodnight, Michael."

"Goodnight, Tabitha."

The bolt sent its old, heavy sound down the hall. She stood with her back to the wood until the echo faded, then leaned her forehead against it and listened for his footsteps.

For once, Liverpool was quiet enough to hear them. They faded, slow and sure, until Tabitha could hear nothing but her own breath.

Upstairs, she switched on the lamp and unfastened her coat, letting it hang over the back of a chair. The silence pressed in.

She filled the kettle, watching the thin stream of water hit the metal, the slow build of steam. Her hands weren't steady – not shaking exactly, just more awake than the rest of her.

She took her tea to the sofa, tucking her feet beneath her. For the first time, she let herself picture him properly. Not just the shape of him, but the way he moved into a room and everybody noticed, the way he'd stepped in front of something that wasn't his problem and solved it without using more force than he had to. The steadiness under it all. There was danger on him – she wasn't stupid – but it wasn't the loud kind boys cultivated to feel bigger than they were. It was something learned and worn, like an old jacket.

You'll grow out of it, he'd said, almost lazy. Tabitha bit her lip. The words had landed like a dare. She found herself wanting, greedily, to be the exception to whatever he thought was inevitable.

She thought about telling Sophie, making it into something funny, a story about a stranger who talked like the whole place belonged to him. But she didn't. Not yet.

Through the window, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. She drank the rest of her tea in three quick swallows, switched off the lamp, and went to bed, the damp smell of the night still in her hair.

Chapter Text

Tabitha's first tutorial was in a room that had been a drawing studio once. It had high windows, paint dust on the boards, a white screen propped against a wall. Ten students sat around two pushed-together tables. A woman in her forties with a patterned scarf and bright red glasses wrote HARCOURT on the board and underneath it, in neat capitals: LOOK BEFORE YOU TALK.

"Welcome to the first-year Impressionism module," she said. "We start with looking. Morisot today, two interiors and a balcony. No reading. Tell me what you see."

A boy reached for theory and stopped when she smiled. "Not what you've read," she said. "What you see."

Tabitha let her gaze soften. The slide showed a woman near a window, light working its way across a dress. She knew the painting already from school, but the projector made it grainier, less perfect, and that helped. She spoke before she could lose the nerve.

"The brushwork holds back in places," she said. "Around the face. It's not careless, it's choosing not to finish. The space is spare but not empty. You can practically feel the air in the room."

Harcourt nodded. "Good. What else?"

From opposite, a boy in a navy polo neck and tortoiseshell frames lifted a hand. "There's a restraint to the colour," he said. "All these greys and creams, and then that small hit of blue. It's controlled."

"You sound like you've spent time in front of it," Harcourt said.

"D'Orsay last spring," he said and managed to avoid sounding boastful. He turned a fraction toward Tabitha as if sharing the painting with her specifically. "Henry."

She nodded once. "Tabitha."

Harcourt clicked to the balcony – a figure half-turned from the viewer, city smudged beyond. For a moment, the slide, the white room, the smell of old glue and coffee all fell away and she was back in a different kind of night, yellow light on wet pavement, a voice near her shoulder telling her to keep her elbows in. The memory caught her hard like the edge of a tabletop.

"Tabitha?" Harcourt said, not unkindly.

"The railing," she said, clearing her throat. "It cuts the space. It represents the idea that she's safe and not at the same time. The world's both there and not."

Harcourt held her eyes a second and moved on. They stayed with the slides until the hour slipped away. Someone tried to talk about the male gaze and Harcourt let them run for thirty seconds before guiding them back to the pigment itself. The discipline of it – the way the tutor kept them on the surface until they'd earned the right to go deeper – came as a relief. Here was a rule Tabitha could live with: look first.

At the end, Harcourt closed the laptop and said, "Liverpool has enough paintings to keep you occupied. Go and stand in front of one. Then write me a page on what it actually is, not what you think it means." She looked at Tabitha again. "Good eye."

Henry fell into step beside her on the way out.

"Coffee?" he said. "Or something approximating coffee from the student union."

"I wouldn't say no."

They walked along the path with the rest of the foot traffic – scarves and tote bags, the low shuffle of people who hadn't slept properly. In the café the machine rattled and a barista scribbled names on cups. They found a table near the window where condensation made the world outside look briefly painted.

"Where are you from?" he asked. It was the fifth question she'd heard today but the first that didn't sound like a test.

"Surrey," she said. "Guildford."

"Ah. I know the downs." He nodded. "I'm from London. Well – Chelsea, I'm afraid." His mouth acknowledged the cliché so she didn't have to.

"Tragic," she said, and his laugh sounded grateful.

He took his glasses off and cleaned them with a square of cloth he produced from nowhere. Without them, his face looked younger and fractionally less sure. "What did you think of Harcourt?"

"I like that she makes you look. School was all about conclusions and certainty, but I don't think that's what art is about. Not always, anyway."

"I agree," he said. "Although my school liked a conclusion too. They're very big on certainty."

"Which did you go to?"

"Eton," he said. She gave him a nod that said she'd already guessed. "It was intense. Tails on Sundays, roll-call that took an age. And two hours' prep under a yellow desk lamp every night," he added with a heavy sigh.

She thought of skirts measured with a ruler, of the way girls at breakfast could tell the mood of the housemistress by the set of a shoulder. "Boarding can be lonely," she said. "I was always glad for the distraction of hard work."

Henry's eyes softened. "Yeah. Everyone pretends they're fine. I did chapel just to have somewhere to be at six and rowed bow side badly. You pick a corner and get through. What was yours?"

"Cheltenham Ladies."

She saw the flash of recognition on his face, the ghost of approval, before he caught it and nodded once. He rested his forearms on the table. "What do you actually like? If no one's watching. Painters, I mean."

"Monet," she said. "Always. Also...sometimes Vuillard. I like how he paints people tucked inside the room instead of centre stage."

He brightened. "The colours look muted at first, then one jumps out and surprises you and makes you look again."

"Yes."

"And outside of art?" he said, careful, testing the limits of nosiness. "What do you like?"

"Riding when I'm home – early hacks on cold mornings. Then roast chicken if someone else does the washing up."

He smiled. "That's a very civilised answer."

"What about you?" she asked.

"Records," he said. "My father insists music only counts if you have to turn it over." He shrugged. "I think he just likes buying things."

They drank in companionable quiet for a minute. Henry traced the rim of his cup with a thumb.

"You were sharp in there," he said eventually.

"Talking through things is easier than writing paragraphs about them." She didn't add that paragraphs take her twice as long, that words don't always sit still when she asks them to. He didn't need to know that yet. Or ever.

A couple at the next table were arguing softly about a cleaner's rota. Henry glanced at the noise and back again.

"There's a small opening at the Bluecoat on Saturday," he said, almost as if he had to smuggle the offer past himself. "Friends of a friend. More wine than art but occasionally you see a thing that clips you round the ear. You should come. If you want."

"I might," she said. "Text me."

He wrote his number on a receipt even though phones existed, a gesture from another decade that made the invitation feel less exposed. He slid the paper across. Their fingers didn't touch, but she noticed the neatness of his nails, the gold signet ring on his little finger that was dull with age.

Outside, a bus stopped and loosed a handful of students who moved off in the same direction. Her head had cleared. She should have felt the old comfort of a familiar kind of boy – good shoes, careful vowels, someone who would be applauded at Christmas dinner – and she did, a little.

She saw, as if someone had held two slides up to the light, the difference between Henry's easy varnish and another kind of fluency: a hand closing over a wrist at exactly the right pressure; a voice that could settle a room; rain darkening the wool of a coat.

"You looked miles away," Henry said, not offended.

"Only a couple," she said. "Do you ever have the thing where you're thinking in pictures and the words have to come after?"

"All the time," he said, which she sensed was a kindness more than the truth.

They left together and drifted as far as the square before their paths split. He lifted a hand in a way that suggested he had learnt how to end a conversation without making anyone feel dismissed.

"I'll message about Saturday," he said.

"Do," she said, and meant it. It would be good to have a friend.

She walked without deciding where to go and ended up at the gallery anyway. The guard at the door barely looked up. Inside, the air was cooler, lights arranged to create a false daylight. She stood too close, then the right distance, then too close again. Harcourt's instruction hummed quietly – look before you talk – and Tabitha let herself obey.

A portrait she didn't know kept her for a long time. The sitter looked lost. The paint around the mouth was thin, as if the brush had run out on purpose. Up close you could see the decisions: where the painter had allowed a mistake to stay, where they had corrected it until the correction became the point. She thought about that – how sometimes the fixed bit was more interesting than the original.

Her phone vibrated. Sophie: WHAT ARE WE HAVING FOR TEA AND WHY IS IT PIZZA. A second later: I ACCIDENTALLY SIGNED US UP FOR ANOTHER POETRY NIGHT – SORRY IN ADVANCE.

Tabitha smiled and wrote back: Pizza is a valid life choice. Re poetry: fine. I'll bring judgement and wine.

Another message landed, an unknown number with a clipped, polite bracket of punctuation. Henry: Bluecoat, Saturday 6. I'll be the one pretending to know the gallerist. H.

She saved the number and put the phone away. She wasn't making promises to anyone, but she liked the idea of spending time in a space she understood.

On the way out, she stopped by the museum shop and flipped through the glossy postcard reproductions until she found one she liked, a monochrome Picasso of two faces kissing, a tear slipping down one cheek. The corner was slightly bent like someone had wanted it before her. She glanced around the shop and then slipped it quietly into her pocket.

Outside, the world seemed a little brighter. She smiled to herself, secretly pleased.

Chapter Text

By Friday morning, the kitchen smelled faintly of burnt toast and the damp tang of laundry left too long in the washing machine. Tabitha padded in barefoot, still in pyjamas, to find Sophie perched on the counter in an oversized hoodie, spooning cereal straight from the box.

"This came for you," Sophie said, holding out an envelope.

Tabitha recognised her mother's handwriting instantly. Or, more accurately, the neat block capitals her mother reserved for anything she thought might be handled by strangers. She slit it open with the handle of a teaspoon.

Dearest Tabitha,

We hope you're settling in. Enclosed is a little something for the essentials. Please don't fritter it away on junk food or dreadful wine. Have you considered joining a sports club? Your father says it's important to 'network' at university. We trust you're looking after the flat. Damp is a killer in old buildings – make sure the sash windows are shut at night.

Love, Mummy & Daddy

Sophie peered at the cheque over her mug. "Generous. What's the occasion?"

"There isn't one," Tabitha said. "They just do this sometimes."

"Your parents are nice," Sophie said cheerfully, fishing for another spoonful. "Mine send me supermarket own-brand teabags when they remember."

Tabitha tucked the cheque under the fruit bowl.

"So," Sophie said, brightening, "tell me about this gallery thing. Are you going on a date with Lord Whatshisname?"

"Henry," Tabitha said, failing not to smile.

"Knew it. He'll have a haircut that costs more than my rent and opinions about Bauhaus." Sophie swung her legs. "You going then?"

"Probably. He seems nice."

"Nice and posh is practically your blood type. Wear something that scares him a bit. I'll help you get ready." She tapped the overflowing drying rack. "And before any culture happens – launderette. Your mum's right. Don't dry in here unless you want mushrooms behind the sofa."

"I'll go later."

"Late-late?"

"Probably."

"Text me when you get there and when you're back. If Henry's a date, I expect a debrief."

After she'd gone, Tabitha took the postcard from her coat pocket – the monochrome Picasso from the gallery shop – and fixed it to the fridge with the lemon magnet. She liked that she'd taken it. It was proof that she could, after all, break the rules she'd been following her whole life.

Then she sorted sheets and towels into a basket and left it by the door so she couldn't change her mind.

**

She put it off until the streetlights were on and the pavements had that thin sheen they get after a day of cold drizzle. Sophie was out. The flat was quiet. Tabitha pulled on a long coat, looped a scarf once at her throat, balanced the basket against her hip and headed down.

The launderette's windows were steamed, tube lights buzzing behind the fog. When she pushed the door, a bell rattled. It was empty – eight machines along one wall, four dryers opposite, a corkboard with curled flyers, a split plastic chair. Warm detergent and faint bleach.

She chose a washer, paid by card, turned the dial. The drum took water and rolled. She sat, arms folded over the basket, and let her eyes lose focus.

She was halfway to dozing when the door at the back opened. Three men came out — puffers, trainers, one with ink up his neck — none carrying washing. They gave her a glance sharp enough to prickle her skin, then pushed out into the night. The door swung once behind them.

And opened again.

Michael. One hand still on the frame, eyes catching hers like she was the last thing he'd expect to find here.

"Oh," she said, stupidly.

He raised his chin. "Alright."

The silence stretched. He looked the same as before and not the same: lean coat, dark jeans, but the air of someone whose head had been somewhere else until a second ago.

"I didn't think you were the launderette type," she said.

"I'm not."

"Me neither." She waved at the row of humming machines, their noise too loud in the empty room. "First time."

That flicker of a smile. He pulled a chair out and sat, long legs stretched out. The strip lights bleached his face, made the cut of his cheekbones harder. Tabitha turned back to the machine, pulse fluttering, pleased and unsettled at once.

After a while, he said, "Bit late for this, isn't it?"

"It's quiet at this time," she said. "And my mother will kill me if I dry clothes in the flat."

That made him look at her properly. "You live with your ma?"

"No. My parents live somewhere else."

"Somewhere rich," he said without malice.

She lifted her chin. "What gives me away?"

"You can tell."

"Surrey," she admitted. "My parents bought the flat on Bold Street for me." She said it like she was daring him to laugh, half-hoping he would.

He didn't. Just twisted a scrap of paper between his fingers and looked back at the drum turning.

When the washer stopped, she pulled an armful of wet clothes out. He stood too, taking half before she asked, feeding them into the dryer. His arm brushed hers. The glass fogged, cleared, fogged again.

"You shouldn't be here alone at this time," he said after a while.

"Why not?"

"Because this city isn't like where you're from." His voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. "You don't go wandering around on your own in the dark."

"In case I run into someone like you?" she teased, though her voice caught a little.

He didn't smile. She glanced at his hands – broad, long-fingered, strong – and swallowed. The scrap of paper had become a tight little coil between them.

"Use Sefton Street next time," he said. "Daylight."

"You're not very good at putting people off," she said, sounding more confident than she felt.

His eyes flicked back to hers. "I'm not trying hard enough, then."

"Anyway," she said, "I've got plans tomorrow night, so no more launderettes for me. A gallery opening. Bluecoat."

That got the faintest flicker from him. "You going with someone?"

She dropped Henry's name like a pebble in a pond, waiting for the ripple. "He's on my Impressionism module. Old Etonian, speaks like he's got a plum in his mouth. You'd hate him."

Michael's mouth twitched, but not in amusement. "Sounds like your type." He looked back at the turning drum. "Good."

Her pulse kicked — not from his words, but from the absence of what she wanted in them. "Is it?"

"Yeah." It was almost too quiet to hear over the dryer. "Safer for you."

It stung a little, that word safer. She asked, "Is that what you want?"

"What I want doesn't come into it."

The dryer beeped. She stood and he stood with her. When he popped the door, a wave of heat met them. They moved warm cotton between them with easy coordination: pass, fold, stack. When the basket was full, he pushed the chair back against the wall with his foot and nodded to the door.

The air outside was cold and wet. A cyclist skimmed close; Michael's hand closed briefly on her elbow, nudging her in against the shopfront. Then it was gone.

"Are you always this careful?" she asked, watching him.

"Not usually."

"Just with me?"

He didn't answer.

At her door she fumbled with the key. Her pulse was quick, like before a show-jumping round, wanting to clear the fence before she lost her nerve. "Can I see you again?"

He stilled. For the first time that night, he looked unsure. She could feel him weighing it: hazard, want, the cost of both. Then he shook his head once. "Not a good idea."

She tilted her chin, as if height might tip the balance. "That wasn't the question."

"Tabitha—"

"You want to," she pressed. "I can tell. And I want to. So why are you making it complicated?"

For a second neither of them moved. His eyes stayed fixed on hers, steady, unreadable. She wanted to reach up and touch the crease between his brows, to push against his quiet control. Instead she held still.

Then he gave a small shake of his head, half disbelieving, and let out a low laugh. "Used to getting what you want, aren't you?"

"Yes." The word was quick, certain. Though in truth, she was more used to being told what to want and how to want it. Her own desires had never been the point.

At last, he said, "Sunday. Two o'clock. Café down this street with the red awning. Sit at the back."

Relief flared, bright and giddy. "I'll be there."

"Night, Tabitha."

"Goodnight."

She let the door close behind her and stood in the stillness of the hall, heart still racing. Later, when she crossed to the window, he was there under the streetlight — collar turned up, scanning the street. She pressed her palm to the glass, childish and serious all at once, as if that could close the space. He turned once, just enough to check the road, and she knew he'd felt her watching.

Chapter Text

By late afternoon on Saturday, the pavements were mostly dry; the sky had that pale, rinsed look Liverpool gets between rain showers. Tabitha stood in front of the mirror long enough to make herself annoyed by her own indecision.

Sophie leaned in the doorway with a make-up brush like a conductor's baton. "Wear the silver dress," she ordered, handing over a slip of fabric that shone like liquid. "And heels."

Tab stepped into the dress and did as she was told with the shoes.

"Right," Sophie said. "You look expensive and mean — perfect."

"I'm not mean."

"You are to men who think being 'arty' is a personality." Sophie flicked the brush under Tabitha's cheekbone. "He's posh, yeah?"

"Chelsea," Tab said.

"God help us." Sophie grinned. "If he's awful, text a skull. I'll ring with a family emergency."

"What family?"

"Yours," Sophie said, and kissed her on the forehead. "Go."

**

The Bluecoat was busy in that particular way openings are: coats slung on arms, men and women air kissing, trays of champagne moving with ruthless efficiency.

"Tabitha." Henry materialised as if summoned by her name, a cashmere jumper under his blazer, hair neat. He kissed her cheek. "Glad you made it. You look—" he began, then recalibrated. "Great. You look great."

"You too," she said, meaning it.

"Shall we look before we drink or drink before we look?"

"Drink," she said, grabbing two champagne flutes and handing one across. "Then look."

They started at the far wall and worked back slowly. The show was small — three painters, each with four or five works hung with enough space to let them breathe. One canvas was a stripped room with a chair and a shattered glass on the floor, maroon red wine seeping into the boards; another was a street corner in evening light; a third was a face painted from memory, not quite symmetrical. Brushwork that changed its mind mid-line. A palette knife that had left a ridge you could have tripped on if it were on the pavement.

In the next room, she felt watched, not by the paintings but by someone beside her who hadn't been there a second ago.

"Do you hate it?" said a voice, female, bright, Liverpool accent.

Tabitha turned. The girl was her age, maybe a year older – black bob cut blunt at the jaw, kohl smudged on purpose, a dress that looked hand-altered and a coat she'd probably nicked from her grandfather. Silver rings, half moons of ink near the knuckles, a nose stud. She smelled of cigarettes and violet sweets.

"I don't hate it," Tabitha said. "I think it's trying too hard."

"Good answer." The girl's smile had mischief in it. "Cleo," she said, offering the name like a card. "We sat near each other at that talk last week – the one with the professor who thinks everything's post-something."

"I remember," Tab said, and found that she did.

"Couple of us are going on later," Cleo said. "Proper party – not this. Multi-storey by Sandhills freight yards. Merseyrail, then follow the bass. You in?"

Henry's mouth did a tiny, reflexive no. "That sounds"—he searched—"energetic."

Cleo smiled at him politely and looked back to Tab. "Half ten. Wear something you can ruin."

"Text me the pin," Tab said.

Cleo was already typing. "Sound."

She disappeared into a knot of people near the drinks table.

"Are you actually thinking of going?" Henry said a minute later, when they'd found a quieter corner by a plinth with a sculpture that looked like a melting face.

"I might," Tab said.

"It's not really safe," he said, and the softness in his voice was genuine, not superior. "I'll get us a cab?"

The thought of a cab – warm, ordinary, going somewhere approved – made something in her go stubborn. "Let's see," she said, and took another slow mouthful of champagne.

They stayed until the drinks ran dry, then tipped themselves into the evening. Henry tucked his scarf inside his coat. "We could go for a drink somewhere," he suggested hopefully.

"Or we could catch a train," Tab said, feeling her own smile. "Just to look."

"Just to look," Henry repeated, and shook his head once, rueful. "Alright. But if it's dreadful we leave, and if there's a fight we don't stare."

"Deal."

**

Lime Street underground smelled like soot and damp. They took the yellow line round to Moorfields, switched for the Northern, the carriage full of kids in puffer jackets and girls with glitter on their cheeks, a man asleep with his head back and mouth open, two lads sharing earphones and sweating out lager. Tabitha held the pole and felt the balls of her feet ache; she didn't care. The train pulled in and out – Moorfields – Sandhills – and they got off with the small crowd. Henry checked his phone for the time every few minutes.

At the stop Cleo had sent, a stream of bodies climbed the stairs, following heavy bass. The car park rose out of the dark all at once – concrete, strip lights, a ramp that circled up into shadow. Someone had dragged orange fencing aside just enough; someone else had ruined a padlock. You paid a fiver to a boy with a bucket who said he was security.

Inside, it was warm with people. Not club warm – wet breath on concrete warm. Strobe lights chopped the crowd into frames. The sound pressed through her, low and relentless; she could feel it on her sternum. A girl in a crop top danced on the bonnet of a car with no plates. Two boys passed a bottle of vodka and drank it neat.

"This is mad," Henry said, which from him was a strong adjective. "Ten minutes and then we go?"

"An hour," Tab said, laughing, and he rolled his eyes in surrender.

Cleo found them near a pillar. She was wearing cut-off shorts with little studs on them and a pair of cowboy boots. She put her arms round Tab as if they'd known each other longer. "There you are," she shouted over the music. "Here." She pressed a plastic cup into Tab's hand – vodka and something sickly-sweet – and clinked it with her own. "To bad decisions."

Tabitha raised the cup and drank. She coughed and grinned and felt the grin stay.

Henry shifted, hands in the pockets of his coat, trying to look like part of it and failing. He wasn't judging, not exactly. He was probably estimating the distance to a taxi rank. She loved him a little for it and loved him not at all in any way that mattered.

Cleo grabbed Tabitha's hand and pulled her into the heat of the floor, filled up her cup then filled it again. The bass thumped heavy in her chest, the kick drum working the same point beneath her ribs while the hi-hats fizzed like metal filings in the air. They danced without talking – elbows loose, hair stuck to temples, velvet and sequins gone dark with sweat. Heat lifted off the crowd in sheets; where the fencing left gaps the cold came through and turned their breath to steam, a low cloud hanging above the moving heads. The music wasn't like anything she'd danced to before – no chorus to aim for, just engine and pulse – and she let it tell her what to do.

Cleo leaned in, mouth at Tabitha's ear. "Do you want a bump?"

"A what?"

"A key?"

Tab blinked. "Sorry?"

"Lemo?"

She shook her head, flushed and smiling. "I don't understand."

Cleo grinned. "Cocaine, babe."

"Ah." Tabitha's laugh came out bright, then she hesitated. She'd told herself she might try things here, just once, just to know. The thought of the line – quick, hot, done – appealed in the tidy way new experiences do when you first imagine them.

"Small," she said.

Cleo nodded and pulled a set of house keys out of her pocket. They ducked to the lee of a pillar where four other people were doing the same. Tab bent at the right moment, the taste like petrol at the back of her throat. It hit fast, clean for a second, then the world seemed to be turned up to max volume. Cleo handed her another drink, stronger this time.

When she looked up, Henry was watching, mouth a line. He didn't scold. "I'm going to get some water," he said. "Don't move."

"Alright," she said, a little too brightly. She meant to stay put; then the music heaved and the whole crowd shifted and she let it take her a few feet.

Cleo offered her another key, and this time she took it without moderation, chased the chemical drip back with a shot of vodka. Then there was more dancing, more drinks, more keys. She looked around for Henry and couldn't see him – couldn't see much, actually, that wasn't a blur. Cleo was laughing with someone she knew. A boy asked Tab where she was from and got lost in the crowd before she could answer. A second boy put his hands at her waist like he was checking for money; she moved them off without making it a scene and he melted into the dark.

The floor was slick with spilled drink. Air came in bursts with people through the gaps in the fencing. She was hot and then cold and then hot again.

"Tab," Henry said at her ear, sudden and blessed, a bottle of water cold against her wrist. "Drink this."

She did, obedient for once. The world steadied a bit, then tilted the other way.

"Let's go," he said.

"In a minute."

"Tab, you're—" He stopped himself saying what she was. "It's not fun anymore."

Maybe that was the point. Maybe fun wasn't the word. She looked out across the makeshift floor at faces going in and out of light and had the prickle – the sense you get in a city when something is about to happen. At the far edge, two men shouted – not play-fighting or banter. Proper shouting. A scuffle, quick. The ring of people opened like a throat.

"We're going," Henry said, hand at her elbow.

"I just want to see," she said, and slid half an inch out of his hold. The crowd closed again. She felt the wave of movement pass through bodies.

Somewhere near the DJ, a girl went down hard on her hands and came up laughing with blood on her palms. A lad vaulted a low barrier. A bottle smashed. Voices went up a step and stayed there.

Henry's voice at her ear again, steady but firm. "Tab. Now."

She turned to say alright, alright, but the lights went to white for a beat and then dark, and in the dark something shoved from behind. She went forward, caught herself on someone else's shoulder, laughed by mistake, and the laugh emptied too much air out of her. The ground under her heels was wrong. Her stomach rolled. The bass and her heartbeat weren't friends anymore.

"Tab?" Henry again, but not close enough this time.

"I'm fine," she said to the air, and wasn't. She was aware of the stupidly thin strap of her dress where it bit into her collarbone; of the petrol-chemical drip at the back of her throat; of wanting to sit down and the ground not being the right place to do it.

A boy she didn't know was suddenly too near, trying to put something back into her cup. "You've dropped—"

"No," she said, sharp enough to hear herself, and pushed his wrist away. He shrugged, gone. Her phone buzzed somewhere that might have been her bag or someone else's pocket.

"Tabitha." Henry again, properly near now, relief in the way he said her name. "We're leaving."

"Alright," she said, grateful and contrary at once, and let him take her hand because standing up had become a decision she had to make over and over. He steered them to the edge where the air was clearer. Someone shouted "bizzies!" and it was like sending an electric shock through the air.

They got as far as the ramp before the night changed. A knot of boys came pelting down from the next level, faces up and open in that way that says run first, think later. One shoulder clipped Henry; he kept his feet, but Tab's heel went. She pitched forward and hit the ground with both hands. Skin opened — raw scrapes, grit already in them — and when she stood there were thin smears of blood across her palms.

"Down," Henry said. "Sit, sit here—"

"Not on the floor," she said.

"Then lean on the wall." He took off his scarf and put it between her and the concrete. "Look at me."

She tried. The edges of his face softened. Lights strobed somewhere above them. A siren wailed in the distance.

"I'm going to get a taxi," he said. "Stay exactly here. Don't move. Five minutes."

"Don't—" she began, but he'd already gone a few steps, turned back to check she was where he'd left her, nodded once.

When she closed her eyes, nothing made sense; her brain replayed flashing images on a loop like it was short-circuiting. She concentrated on breathing in fours like a riding teacher had taught her once – heels down, hands quiet, count – and, for a second, the world around her relaxed. Someone ran past and shouted something she couldn't make out. Her phone vibrated again; she couldn't make the numbers stand still to unlock it.

A man stopped in front of her, too close. Not Henry. Older than the students, younger than a dad. "You alright, love?" he said, not sounding like a person who helps.

"I'm with someone," she said, and tried to make her voice solid. He looked at the bare part of her shoulder and then at her hand on the wall.

"Come on," he said, reaching.

"No," she said, and couldn't put enough weight behind it.

Someone stepped in, taking the light off her. A hand closed around the man's wrist and moved it away. Then a voice, quiet and sure, said something she couldn't catch. Feet shuffled. Space opened.

"Tabitha," the voice said – her name, exact – and the relief of hearing it was so swift it made the back of her eyes sting.

She tried to lift her head. The outline was wrong for Henry. Taller, narrower in the shoulders. Coat, collar up. She wanted very much to see his face and couldn't make the eyes focus far enough.

"I'm fine," she told him, stubbornly.

"Course you are," the voice said, and there was a faint smile sitting under it. "Up you get."

A steady hand at her elbow. The world tilted, then levelled. A cool palm found her wrist. She thought of a launderette door, of a voice near her shoulder telling her to keep her elbows in, and the thought warmed her from the inside out.

"Henry," she said, because she knew she ought to say his name to someone.

"He's getting the taxi," the voice said. "We'll meet him at the road."

They moved. The ramp, the fencing, the cold. She put one foot in front of the other because the hand at her elbow made that the only available option, and she was grateful for the limitation.

On the pavement beyond the car park entrance, headlights smeared across wet tarmac. Henry appeared out of the traffic with a driver in a hi-vis behind him, flinging an arm to make the cab stop where it wasn't meant to. "Tab—"

"I've got her," the quiet voice said, and passed her hand to Henry's like they were exchanging something valuable.

The door opened. Henry climbed in first and pulled her after him, gentle and brisk. She sank into the seat and let her head touch the cold window.

"Thank you," Henry said to someone outside.

"Get her home safe," the other voice said. "She knows where to find me."

The door shut. The cab pulled away. Tabitha felt bad decisions sloshing in her stomach; squeezed her eyes closed to keep from being sick. The last thing she saw before the corner took the car was a figure under the streetlight with his hands in his coat pockets, looking down the road like he always did.

Then the night folded, and she slid under it.

Chapter Text

Sunday, two o'clock, the café with the red awning. Tabitha almost didn't make it. 

She woke with an iron taste in her mouth, palms stinging whenever she forgot and used them for something. There was glitter on her collarbone that wasn't hers and a bruise like a thumbprint coming up on her forearm. For a while she lay very still and let the room stop moving, then crawled to the bathroom and drank water straight from the tap.

Sophie texted a skull emoji and then: Still alive? Tabitha sent back a sun and a coffee and nothing else.

By the time she reached the café, the clouds had cleared; the world was bright in that rare but brilliant September way. She arrived early and sat at the back like he'd told her, coat folded on her lap, the table tacky around the edges where sugar had glued itself into a film. She hid her hands under the table. 

The door opened. People came in and out with shopping bags and prams. She wasn't watching for him, only aware of what it would feel like when he arrived – the way her attention would shift and then narrow.

He came in ten minutes late. Hood down, skin flushed from the cold, the line of his jaw rough with stubble. He did that quick audit he always did – counter, door, tables – and then found her. The same contained nod, as if they were picking up a thread neither of them had dropped.

"Tabitha," he said, stopping at the table.

"Hi."

He took the chair that put the room at his back for a second, then changed his mind and took the other one, the one that let him have the door. Up close, he looked better than he had in the launderette, less wired. Or maybe she just wanted him to.

"What are you having?" he asked.

"Tea."

"Tea," he repeated, almost amused.

"And a slice of that lemon cake," she added, because she wasn't here to perform austerity. She cleared her throat. "Please."

He brought the tray himself – two big mugs, a chipped plate with a slice of cake, napkins. He put the tray down and didn't sit right away; he looked at the table where her hands were hiding.

"Show me," he said.

She held her palms out like a child in a headteacher's office. The skin was raw, crosshatched. "It looks worse than it is."

He ignored that and reached for her left one. He didn't touch the broken skin – he braced her wrist lightly and tilted, reading the damage. Then he was gone to the counter and back with a stack of wet paper towels. 

"This'll sting," he said. 

He cleaned the edges of the scrapes carefully, extracting pieces of grit that he lined up on the table. He didn't look up while he did it, didn't talk. She watched his mouth press into its thinking shape and felt the ridiculous urge to lean forward and put her face against his shoulder.

When the last fleck came free he wiped both hands clean and patted them dry with folded napkins. "Let the air at it," he said. "You'll be sound."

"Thank you," she said. 

She cut a corner of cake, the icing resisting and then giving way. The lemon was bright, almost medicinal. Her stomach stayed in place. She watched him over the fork.

"You were there," she said. Not a question, not yet.

He didn't pretend not to understand. "I was, yeah."

"At the car park."

He nodded once. "Seen you on the ramp."

"Before that?" She remembered flashes – metal, white light, a hand at her waist she hadn't asked for – and felt the heat of embarrassment crawl up her chest. "Did you see me make a fool of myself?"

He looked at her properly then, as if checking what would hurt and what wouldn't. "I saw you get pushed," he said. "And I saw you say no when someone tried to put something in your drink." A small tilt of the head. "That's all."

"And the rest?"

"The rest is Saturday night in a bad place."

She wanted to say I went because it felt like a door and your world was on the other side, but the words sounded ridiculous in her head. Instead: "You helped me."

"I saw the lad you were with looking for a taxi," he said, not unkind. "He looked lost. Thought I'd speed the process up."

"Henry. Did you speak to him?"

"Enough." The corner of his mouth moved. "He's even posher than you."

She laughed and winced at the same time. "Were you working?" she asked. 

He thought, then gave her what she imagined was only part of the truth. "Keeping an eye on something."

"On me?" It came out too quickly.

"On a few people." A pause. "On you, once I'd seen you were there."

Heat moved up her chest; she hid it by sipping her tea. 

"You shouldn't have been there," he said after a moment.

"I know," she said. And then, because she was tired of being polite about the central fact: "I wanted to be."

"That's what worries me."

He reached into his inside pocket and took out a pen, then tore a clean strip from the paper under the table number. He wrote quickly and pushed it across.

"My number," he said. "If you're stuck. Any hour."

She looked at the paper, the scrawl of his handwriting. "You said you don't give your number."

"I don't."

"Why now?"

He waited long enough that she knew she wasn't going to be fobbed off. "Because last night I watched a man try to make a decision for you," he said. "And I'd rather it was me at the end of a line than some lad who thinks a girl who can't stand up is fair game."

Her face felt warm even though his voice hadn't changed. Gratitude, yes, and underneath it a flare of something darker and more shameless – the thrill of being singled out, held under a particular kind of attention. She thought of her parents and how quickly they would read him, file him away under a list of things they didn't keep in their house. The thought was like striking a match.

"And if I call," she said, keeping her tone steady, "you'll answer?"

"If I can." He nodded at the plate. "Eat. You're green round the edges."

She did as she was told, and while she ate she watched him watch the room. Not restless, not bored – just tuned to it. Two teens arguing about a hoodie at the till, a couple too loud in the corner because last night hadn't ended well. Every so often his eyes came back to her hands.

"Henry got you home safe," he said eventually.

"He did."

"He's a decent lad."

"He is," she said. Then, before she could help herself: "He's just a friend." She stopped there. He knew the rest. She watched it register and turn into restraint across his face.

The café door swung and a gust of cold made all the mugs fog at once. Tabitha held her warming cup and thought of Henry's careful scarf between her shoulder and the wall. She would text him later and say thank you in a way that didn't make him think there was more where that came from. She liked him, but liking and wanting were not, she was finding, always the same thing.

"Don't do that again," he said suddenly. "Not with Cleo. Not with any of them."

"Do what?"

"Make it easy," he said. "For bad things to find you."

There were a hundred clever replies available – don't talk to me like that; I'm a grown woman; you're not my father; define easy – and she let all of them pass because they were not the truth. The truth was he could talk to her like that. In fact, she wanted him to.

"I wanted to see," she said. "What it felt like. I'd never been to a rave before."

"And?"

"It felt like my chest was too small for my heart. Like if I stopped moving, I'd choke on it."

He seemed amused. "That'll be the lemo."

Tab grinned. "Maybe."

Silence sat between them for a few moments, not empty. She could feel the charged hum of everything she hadn't said – I think about you when I should be thinking about lectures; I like what happens to the air when you stand up – and everything he hadn't: I shouldn't, I won't, I will.

He pushed his coffee away and stood. For a frightening half second she thought he was going to leave with no more than a nod. Instead, he tipped his head towards the door. "Come on."

"Where?"

"Walk."

She put on her coat and followed him out. The sun was trying and failing to warm anything. He didn't touch her back or her arm; he moved beside her in a way that made room. They turned down a side street that was sheltered from the wind. Her hands ached in her pockets.

"You look rough," Michael said, not unkindly.

"I feel worse."

"You'll live."

"Thanks for the sympathy."

"If you wanted sympathy, you'd have called your ma," he said, and her laugh surprised her.

Halfway along the street, where the brick pinched in, he stopped. She nearly walked another step before realising he hadn't moved. The air between them seemed too still. He looked at her mouth, then back to her eyes, and for a second she didn't know what expression to wear.

"I shouldn't," he said.

Her pulse thudded. "I know."

Neither of them moved. Tab wanted to close the distance herself, but she held still, because some part of her wanted him to decide. She was aware of everything: his breath, the tiny shift of his hand in his pocket, the way his gaze didn't leave hers. 

When he leaned in at last it was deliberate. His mouth touched hers once, a brush, careful, like he could still stop if he wanted to. When he drew back a fraction her lips tingled with the memory of it. The second kiss went deeper, his hand closing around her jaw to keep her where he wanted her. She let herself give in, opening her mouth for him without thought, caught by the press and pull of it, the scrape of stubble against her skin, the taste of tea on his tongue. 

Her heart beat everywhere at once: in her throat, in the raw sting of her palms, low in her stomach where the want coiled tight. It felt almost illicit – the thrill of standing somewhere she had no business standing, kissing a man she had no business kissing, and wanting more anyway.

When he broke away his face stayed close, his breath warm against her lips, as if he hadn't fully let go of the decision to stop.

"This is a bad idea," he said.

"Probably," she whispered, already aching for him to do it again.

"Tabitha."

She waited.

"If you get stuck," he said, tipping his chin at the number folded in her pocket. "Any hour."

"Alright."

"And you text tonight – when you're home."

She rolled her eyes because that was safer than showing the pulse that went through her when he said it like an order. "That wasn't part of the deal."

"It is now."

"You're very bossy."

"Only when you make it necessary."

She wanted him again immediately, which felt unfair. She put her palm – the better one – flat against his coat for a second. He didn't look down.

"Sunday," he said. "Same time. I'll text you where."

She nodded. "I'll be there."

He walked her as far as the corner before her street and stopped in the shadow of a closed hairdresser's. No goodbyes. Just the small tilt of his head that meant go on then, and the sense, as she crossed the last stretch alone, that someone had placed a hand between her shoulder blades without touching her.

Back in the flat, she put the number on the mantel and looked at it like an object in a vitrine – plain, slightly dangerous. Sophie texted: And?? She typed back: Gallery good, party mad, will explain later. Then she deleted it and sent: Alive. Pizza?

In the mirror she looked like the day after – cheeks pale and eyes too bright, mouth a little swollen. She pressed her fingers to her lips and thought, with a steadiness that surprised her, of the way Michael had said her name on the ramp and outside the café and here, now, in her head. The sound slotted into place. 

She wanted to hear it again.

Chapter Text

Tabitha counted the days the way you count lengths in a pool – head down, push off, touch the wall, turn. She waited for Sunday's text that never came. When the day arrived, she put her coat on anyway and walked to the same café down the street. She sat at the back for forty minutes with a tea she didn't drink and texted him once: At the cafe in case you're around. Then, five minutes later: You okay? Nothing. She put the phone in her pocket and told herself the silence didn't mean what she feared it meant. On the way home, the wind came round the corner of the Philharmonic and made her eyes water. She blamed the wind.

A week slid past in a set of repeating rooms: lecture halls full of hungover students; the library in late light with a radiator that clanked; the walk back across Catharine Street where the leaves had started to turn. When she crossed a road she thought of the way he always put his body on the traffic side. When she washed her hands she thought of his voice saying this will sting before it did. It was astonishing how many ordinary things she could repurpose to think about him.

Cleo sent pins to parties with captions like feral and come ruin your shoes. Tabitha went twice and left early both times, the second because a boy with a skin fade and no sense of boundaries tried to put his hands on her bum and she saw herself, briefly, from a distance – not frightened, just bored by men who mistook confidence for permission. She walked home and made tea and studied.

Henry behaved like a friend. He brought her a croissant after a tutorial and made a joke at his own expense when the butter fell in his lap. He threaded himself into her days without asking for a larger claim on them, and she was grateful for that. 

On the second Sunday, she didn't go to the café. She texted Hope you're alive and put the phone screen-down on the table and stared at her palms until the urge to check passed. No reply. She did not cry. Her body complained in other ways; she slept badly and woke with her jaw sore from clenching. In the morning, she put concealer under her eyes and told Sophie she'd slept fine.

Sophie clocked the lie and dealt with it by making plans. "Your birthday is in two weeks," she announced. "We're doing it here. Low-budget glamour. Cleo's in charge of music, I'm in charge of canapés, you're in charge of pretending to like whoever I accidentally invite."

"I don't need—"

"You do," Sophie said, in the tone of a nurse applying a dressing. "You absolutely do."

She let Sophie look after her because that, at least, was simple. 

The night before her birthday, the city dropped five degrees. She crossed Abercromby Square and watched her breath come out white and remembered a different square at home where the gardeners clipped yew hedges straight with twine. The image made her shoulders tense. Lately she'd turned it into a game, weighing Guildford against Liverpool: would she rather be riding through the valley or bent over a desk in the library; sitting down to her parents' polished suppers or eating toast with Sophie at midnight. More and more, the answer tipped with the memory of a hand closing around her wrist, holding it steady. She wished he would text. She wished she didn't wish it.

On the day, the flat was scrubbed and rearranged to look like it was meant to host parties. Fairy lights had been strung across the living room wall. Sophie had bought a bottle of cava and two bottles of prosecco; a bottle of Bollinger arrived from Tabitha's parents. Sophie set down a Colin the caterpillar cake and found it hilarious. The room filled slowly, then all at once.

Cleo arrived with a tote bag of surprises and enthusiasm. "Happy birthday, you dangerous posh bitch," she said, kissing Tabitha's cheek and leaving glitter where she hit. "Present." She produced a small bag that turned out to be a necklace – a thin chain with a tiny star that caught the light.

"It's beautiful," Tabitha said.

"It's also from a market and was three quid," Cleo said. "But it's blessed."

Sophie put a crown of questionable plastic on Tabitha's head and took a picture that made them laugh. Henry came with a bottle of Sancerre too good for the table it was going on. He hugged her and didn't hold on too long. "You are officially nineteen," he said. "Your final year of being a teenager."

"Thank God," Tabitha said, and saw Cleo's quick grin.

The music was just loud enough to make conversation feel private. A boy from Sociology told a story about a lecturer who always laughed at his own jokes. Two girls from Tab's course discussed whether they'd ever sit naked for a life drawing class. It felt ordinary and perfect. 

Later – not early, not late – Cleo appeared at Tabitha's elbow with a palm folded around something. "Birthday treat," she said, not quite whispering. "Ecstasy. It's safe. Little hearts. You want?"

She dropped a small pink pill with a pressed heart into Tabitha's palm. Tab looked at it and thought of rules she'd followed out of reflex, of the way the world had opened at the edge of a car park and then slammed shut. She thought of Michael's number pinned in her room and of the absence that had replaced the promise it had carried.

"Half," she said.

Cleo broke it cleanly and put one piece in her palm. "Sip water. Sit if you want to. It's warm, you'll like it."

She let the half rest on her tongue, swallowed, waited what felt like an age. Then warmth came up from somewhere low. Her pulse raced without panic; it was as though someone had adjusted a dial that made everything brighter, friendlier. A hand on her shoulder felt kind. Someone turned the music up and the adjustment registered in her body before it reached her ears.

Sophie appeared with a glass of water and a motherly look. "How are we doing?"

"Floating," Tab said, truthful and a little astonished.

"Good. Stay hydrated. Don't fall in love with anyone who's not me."

"Under advisement."

Later, the other half. Later again, a small bump because Cleo said it would keep the night smooth. The room glowed. It was suddenly very easy to love her friends without needing anything from them. She stood by the window and watched the terrace opposite do its own party badly and found herself tender towards strangers. She put the star on the necklace at the hollow of her throat and smiled.

At some point someone put drum and bass on and Cleo whooped and Sophie rolled her eyes and moved the coffee table so no one would break an ankle. Henry made tea for a stranger, tended to people who had drunk too much or too little. Tabitha wanted to tell everyone all the good things she knew about them and realised she couldn't speak fast enough.

Her phone lay on the coffee table. She didn't mean to pick it up. She found it in her hand. She didn't mean to scroll to the number with no name. Her thumb did it. She didn't mean to call. She was already listening to the dial tone.

One ring, two, three. She pictured him not answering on purpose. Four. She closed her eyes because it felt safer to be blind. Five.

"Tabitha." Michael's voice, low, awake, no surprise, as if he'd known the call was coming and had been sitting still to hear it.

She sat on the arm of the sofa because her knees didn't feel trustworthy. "It's my birthday," she said, and then hated herself for leading with that, and then didn't, because it was true.

"Happy birthday."

"I took something," she said, straightforward. "A pill. I'm fine. It's just...a lot."

She heard him take a deep breath. "What did you take?"

"Um." A pause. "Ecstasy."

"You with your mates?"

"Yes."

Pause. She could hear noise at his end – door closing, a car. "Are you safe?"

"I think so."

"Think or know?"

A strange laugh caught in her throat. "I know. It's my flat."

Another small pause. "I'm coming."

"You don't have to—"

"Text me the door number."

She did, as if she'd been waiting for the instruction. She put the phone down and stood still for a second with her eyes closed. Sophie saw her face change and was across the room in three steps.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Tab said. "Michael's coming."

Sophie didn't ask who Michael was. She took in the way Tab's hands had curled round the phone, the way her mouth had softened, and she nodded once, as if a piece of a puzzle had slid into place. "Then we welcome him in and pour him a glass of something."

"He won't want anything," Tab said.

"Then he won't have anything. Do you want me to clear people?"

"No. It's fine." The word fine finally doing useful work.

Fifteen minutes felt like both a lifetime and no time at all. She stood by the kitchen door and drank water because Sophie put it into her hand. She chewed gum because Cleo had told her to, and she needed something to do with her jaw. She told Henry he was a saint among men and he said he preferred sinner and she laughed too hard and apologised and he squeezed her shoulder and went to sort out the music because the bass had started to rattle something in the cupboard.

The buzzer went. Sophie answered and listened and looked at Tab and mouthed okay. A minute, then the knock. Sophie opened the door and stepped back without smiling. "Alright," she said to him in her brisk, northern way that made men straighten, then moved aside.

Michael stood in the hall, posture easy but his face giving nothing. When his eyes found Tabitha, the neutrality shifted. Not much. Enough.

"Hi," she said, suddenly shy.

He looked at her and then at her hands, registering the healed grazes, the necklace, the dilation in her eyes. "Happy birthday," he said. "You alright?"

"I'm...yes. Thank you for coming."

"Let's go somewhere quiet," he said.

She took him to her room. The bed was made because Sophie had made it while pretending not to. A string of lights drooped by the mirror. His phone number was pinned on a cork board on the far wall.

He closed the door to the first click and stood with his back to it. She sat on the edge of the bed and felt the warm run of the pill even as it started to fade – a tide going out, leaving shapes on the sand she'd only half noticed on the way in.

"I called you," she said, as if it weren't obvious.

"I'm glad you did."

"You didn't text." It came out half accusation, half ache.

"I know. I should've sent a line."

"Why didn't you?"

He took a breath. "The car park wasn't nothing. A lad got glassed an hour after you left. Bizzies were slow and then they weren't. The wrong people were loud. I had to keep certain names out of mouths for a bit." He looked past her, then back. "Staying away felt like the only safe thing to do. I'm not saying I handled it right."

"You could have told me."

"Telling you pulls you in." He rubbed the heel of his hand along a knuckle. "I kept typing and deleting."

"It would have helped to know I hadn't imagined it," she said softly.

"You didn't imagine it. I walked past your street once and made myself keep going. Looked like a proper dickhead."

Tab smiled. The warmth in her body sharpened into a bright, clean want that was almost calm. "I thought you'd changed your mind about me."

"I tried to." A flicker of a smile. "Didn't take."

They were quiet for a moment. From the other side of the door came the thump of bass. 

He nodded at her hands. "They've healed nicely."

She hesitated. "Will you...sit."

He sat in the chair by the window and bracketed his hands between his knees, elbows on his thighs. He didn't reach for her and she didn't go to him. Instead, she lay back and closed her eyes, let the final waves of warmth from the pill wash over her. 

"How's it feel?" Michael asked. 

"It's good," she said honestly. "Really good."

He watched her for a second, then nodded. "I'm glad you're alright." Another beat. "Pills get cut with all kinds of shite if you buy from the wrong person, you know."

"Not now," she murmured. "Don't ruin my high. Come here."

He stood, checked her face, then sat on the edge of the bed. "This alright?"

"Closer." 

He hesitated a moment, then laid back so they were side by side.

"More," she whispered. 

He shifted closer until their faces were just centimetres apart. His hand settled along her jaw. She could see the ring of navy around his irises, could smell the clean scent of his aftershave. He brushed his mouth to hers, and Tabitha felt something fizz inside her. She tipped her chin and met him again, slower, sighed with pleasure in a way she could tell he liked. "Michael," she murmured, running her fingers through his curls, letting them knot and unknot. "I'm glad you came." 

He followed her lead, mouth fitting to hers again, unhurried. His top lip traced the bow of hers; he paused, breathed her in, went back. When she parted her lips he answered with his, tongue touching hers once, then again, testing what she wanted. His thumb stayed at her pulse. The rest of his hand cupped the side of her neck. 

"That alright?" he asked against her mouth.

"Yes," she said, and pulled him closer by the front of his T-shirt. "Stop asking."

He adjusted his weight so he wasn't on her – one hand braced on the mattress, the other steady at her jaw. She felt the drag of his stubble at the corner of her mouth, the faint mint of his breath under the taste of coffee. She kissed him slower still, letting him feel the choice in it. When his tongue slid along hers she met it, tipped her chin, opened to him for a longer pass that made her stomach drop pleasantly, like the first second of a lift moving. She found the neck of his T-shirt and slid her palms beneath, letting them move across the muscled plane of his back. He made a sound low in his throat and kept the kiss level, careful, as if he refused to take more just because it was there.

He lifted his head a little, close enough that their noses touched. They breathed together, foreheads resting.

"Stay," she said, voice roughened by the night and the pill and him.

"Alright."

He toed off his shoes, set his coat over the chair, opened the window a crack, checked the water on the nightstand, then lay beside her on top of the duvet. He found her wrist and set two fingers there. 

"If anything feels wrong, you wake me."

"I will."

He kissed her once more and let his forehead rest against hers while the last gentle waves of the pill moved through her and ebbed.

Chapter Text

Tabitha surfaced the next morning in pieces. Cotton mouth. Tender jaw. The soft glow of last night still moving through her limbs in small, tired waves. Michael was awake before her – she knew because when she opened her eyes he was already sitting up, one hand braced behind him, watching her.

"You okay?" he asked.

She nodded and immediately amended it. "Mostly."

"You'll dip in an hour." He reached for the glass on the bedside table and handed it to her. "Sip."

She did. The water tasted metallic. He touched two fingers to the inside of her wrist.

"Bit of scran'll help," he said. "Bananas are good. Keep it dead plain."

"You're very practical," she murmured.

"Good job I am," he said, "isn't it?" 

He stood and tugged his T-shirt straight, then pushed the window open further. Cold air rushed in, a welcome relief from the stale warmth of the party.

"I can make toast," she said, starting to move.

"You can lie there for two minutes," he said, already at the door.

She heard the sound of quiet footsteps, the soft clink of a knife against a plate in the kitchen. She listened and felt an odd peace – the sort that comes from letting someone else look after you for a while.

He came back with buttered toast and more water. She sat up and ate slowly, testing the sore bits inside her mouth, the ache of her jaw as she chewed. Her hand found the bottom of his T-shirt and held it, as if doing so would keep him with her for longer. 

"My head feels..." She searched for a way to describe it, the way the warmth and love had flooded in and drained out again, like someone had pulled a plug. "Kind of empty."

"It'll pass."

She could feel him watching the door. "Do you need to go?"

He nodded, cupped her cheek. "Sorry."

"Don't be." She turned her face to kiss his palm. "Thank you for coming."

When he met her gaze, she felt something pass between them, a current of understanding that said: Yes. This. 

They went into the living room. It bore the evidence of a night well spent: stale cava sat warm in abandoned glasses, spilt mixers had dried sticky on the floorboards. Light came in thin and winter-flat, showing cups rimmed with lipstick and a paper crown under the radiator, Cleo asleep on the sofa with one boot half off. Sophie lay on the rug with a cushion over her face.

Cleo peeled one eye open, clocked Michael, and offered a lazy salute. "Morning."

"Alright," he returned.

Sophie sat up, hair in a nest. Her gaze flicked from Michael to Tab to the closed bedroom door and back again, calculations done in a blink.

"Hi," she said, brisk. "Do you want tea?"

"I'm heading out," he said. "Ta, though."

He turned to Tab. For a second she thought he'd leave it at that, and then he leaned in and kissed her once, certain and unfussy, in the full sight of the room.

"I'll text you," he said, quiet enough for her only.

"Okay."

"Eat. Sleep." He turned to the others. "Keep an eye on her, yeah?"

When he left, the door shut with a soft click. Silence held for one very short second.

"Who," Sophie said, eyebrows up, voice bright with shock and delight, "the living hell was that?"

Cleo sat up too fast and winced. "That," she said, pointing with a ringed finger, "was fit."

"And from Liverpool," said Sophie, surprised.

"Nothing wrong with that," said Cleo, letting her own accent thicken. 

Tabitha pressed her palms to her cheeks, which felt warmer than the rest of her. "Michael."

"Michael," Sophie repeated, tasting it. "You're dating a local?"

"I'm...seeing him," Tab said, and heard how weak that sounded. "We've been seeing each other."

"And he stayed," Sophie said, pleased in spite of herself. "In your bed."

"It wasn't like that," Tab said quickly. The corner of her mouth spoiled that claim by curling. "He looked after me."

Cleo made a heart with her hands. "I love men who act like radiators."

"Radiators?" Sophie said.

"Dead dependable and hot when you need them."

Sophie snorted and collapsed back onto the cushion. "Right. Today is a pyjama day. Films and carbs. No existential crises before noon."

"Too late," Tab muttered, dropping onto the sofa beside Cleo.

Cleo leaned her head against Tab's shoulder. "He proper kissed you in front of us. That's hot."

"It was," Tab said, surprising herself with the honesty.

Sophie rubbed her face and peered through her fingers. "Okay, gossip. Where did you meet him, and what does he do, and how worried should I be?"

Tab opened her mouth and then didn't have an answer she liked. "Met him at a pub during fresher's week," she said. "You were there, actually. Then I ran into him a few times. He's... around."

"Around," Sophie repeated, unconvinced. "Does 'around' pay council tax?"

Cleo looked between them, amused. "He's not a student, is he?"

"No."

"He has a vibe," Cleo said, satisfied. "Bit of the docks. Bit of 'don't ask me that question.'"

Tab picked at a thread on the sofa. The truth presented itself – not in words, in the gap around them. "I don't actually know what he does," she admitted. "I haven't asked."

Sophie sat up straighter. "What do you mean you haven't asked? Don't you want to know?"

"Yes," Tab said. "But I don't want it to matter."

Cleo nudged her with a knee. "Then let it not matter today."

Sophie pointed a warning finger. "Just make sure you find out before you get in too deep."

"I will."

Tabitha smiled, then lay back with the cushion over her eyes. The comedown tugged at the edges of everything, but not in a way that frightened her. Somewhere under it sat the feeling of his number in her phone like a weight, and the memory of his hand checking her pulse, and the kiss that had made the morning feel like the beginning of something.

"Right," Sophie said, clapping once, businesslike. "Film. Something with minimal plot and maximum entertainment."

"Mean Girls," Cleo said.

"We're not watching Mean Girls again."

"It's my religion."

Sophie rolled her eyes and reached for the remote. "Fine. But we're ordering food first. Wagamama? Pizza? Chippy?"

"Chippy," Cleo and Tab said together, which made them both laugh.

"Right then," Sophie said, searching for the menu on her phone.

While Cleo and Sophie debated whether gravy or curry sauce was better with chips, Tabitha's phone buzzed. For a second she didn't move – fear and hope had the same weight – then she looked.

The message was short.

Still ok?

Something eased in her chest. She typed: Yes. Toast and water and two terrifying women.

Three dots appeared, disappeared. Came back.

Sound. I'll ring later.

She put the phone face down on the table and let herself feel pleased.

Cleo watched her, smiling. "He texted, didn't he?"

"He did."

"Made up for you," Cleo said softly. 

Sophie returned with blankets and threw one over each of them. "One more thing," she said, settling. "Henry sent a message at five in the morning asking if you'd made it to bed alive. He's a sweetheart. Possibly a slightly besotted sweetheart."

Tab felt a flicker of guilt press against her happiness and fade. "I'll talk to him."

"Do it gently," Sophie said. "He really likes you."

"He deserves someone who wants the same things as him," Tab said. "I don't think that's me."

"True," Cleo said. "And before you panic – you're allowed to want something messy. Your twenties are for bad bangs and good stories."

They watched the film and ate chips out of paper that turned their fingers shiny. Every so often Tab checked her body like you check a bruise and found that, though she felt tired and fragile, there was a steadiness in her that hadn't been there the day before.

Later, when the daylight had gone flat and the street outside had started its evening traffic, Sophie dozed with her mouth open and Cleo scrolled without reading. Tab lay quiet and let her mind stand in two places – the sofa with the girls she already loved, and the doorway where he'd kissed her like he wanted everyone to see. 

Tab reached for her phone and typed a new message before she could overthink it.

Come over tomorrow? Just for a bit.

She watched the dots arrive.

Yeah.

She didn't have answers about work, or danger, or what her parents would say when they eventually had to have that fight. She had chips, and two friends, and a message that said he would call later, and the clean feel of the word we beginning to put down roots.

Chapter Text

The next day, Tabitha booked a study room in the library and locked herself in with a stack of books and a half-written essay because it was better than spending all day checking her phone. Michael had said he'd come over, but she knew better than to take his word as a guarantee. 

Still, she couldn't help it. She wrote a few stumbling words, looked at her messages – nothing – then wrote a few more. Deleted an entire paragraph. Rewrote the same thing, not as good the second time around. By late morning, her concentration had thinned to threads.

Henry texted: Coffee? I'm in town.

She looked at the blank page, then at the clock, then at herself in the dark glass of the study room window. Okay.

They met at a quiet place near the cathedral with exposed brick walls and plants trailing from the ceiling in macrame hangers. Henry stood when she arrived, as if they were at a grander lunch, then sat and pushed the sugar towards her without asking.

"How's first term treating you?" he said. "I've already got a relationship with my footnotes that borders on unhealthy."

"What's the module?"

"Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century and an 'Approaches to History' thing where we argue about what counts as evidence. Last seminar, a boy said memes were primary sources and you could feel the room age ten years."

She smiled. "I bet you're glad you chose an art history module with me."

"It's the highlight of my week," he said a little too sincerely. 

She told him about Methods and Approaches, the way Panofsky made her feel dense and then suddenly, for a second, like a genius when something clicked.

"Do you miss home yet?" he asked.

"Not really," she said, and then, to be honest: "I miss my half-brother. Nick. He doesn't live with my parents, but I saw him a lot in the holidays."

"Older?"

"Seven years. Works in London. Goldman Sachs, global banking." She pulled a face she couldn't quite categorise. "He's always tired but he makes it look like a choice."

Henry's eyebrows went up. "My uncle's there. Wealth management division. Lives on emails and airport lounges. Nice man, terrible phone manners."

"Sounds like Nick," she said, oddly cheered by the coincidence.

Henry grinned. "See? We're wildly well-matched in the family Rolodex stakes."

Tabitha blinked, took a moment, forced herself to smile. They were both aware of the gentle joke under the line.

He glanced at his watch and back at her. "Are you around Thursday night? There's a members' talk at the Athenaeum. The curator from the Maritime Museum is doing something on Liverpool's trade routes. Not actually boring, I promise. We could get a drink after."

She liked that he'd chosen something that was his world but close enough to hers that she wouldn't need a translator. She also knew why she'd said yes to coffee today.

"I'd like that," she said, then held his eyes. "As friends."

She watched a brief flash of disappointment cross his face before he schooled it back into an easy smile. He exhaled slowly and nodded. "As friends," he echoed. "I suspected as much."

"I didn't want to be unclear." 

"You're very clear." He took his glasses off and cleaned them. "Don't worry about it, Tab."

They settled into silence that she wasn't sure how to fill. Guilt pressed like a hand at her throat, even though she knew she had no real reason to feel it. Henry turned the spoon on his saucer once, as if deciding whether to say a thing, and then did, carefully.

"Tabitha, may I ask something nosy, and you can tell me to stop?"

"You can ask."

"The chap from the party. Michael." He kept the name neutral. "Are you seeing him?"

She felt her body do a quick, involuntary take. "Yes," she said. "I think so." She tried a small smile. "It's...new."

"Right." He nodded as if that matched whatever he'd suspected. "I only ask because he seemed—" a beat while he chose the least stupid word "—finished. As in, not an undergraduate. And...with a certain edge. I'm not auditioning for the role of disapproving uncle; I just wanted to check you're alright."

"I am." She meant it. "Thank you for asking."

"I won't give you a speech," he said, palms up, peaceable. "You don't need one, and I don't get a vote. If—" he allowed himself half a wry smile "—if you ever require extraction from a less-than-ideal situation, text me and I'll arrive with a cab."

She felt a prickle of annoyance at the implication. "I can handle myself," she said quickly. And then, because she knew he meant well, "That's kind of you, Henry."

They spent the rest of the time on safe ground. Henry admitted, with mock despair, that he'd started buying his wine in crates from Tesco; Tab agreed it was a tragedy that the nearest Waitrose was thirteen miles away in Formby. By the time the sun shifted off the table, they both rose at once.

At the door, he said, lightly, "Thursday, no pressure. If you're buried in Panofsky, I'll forgive you."

"I'll come," she said. 

They parted at the corner.

Back in the library, she lasted another hour. She typed a line, then backspaced through it, hearing someone else's voice instead of her own.

At 3.11 p.m., Michael's name lit the screen.

Be round about 7.

She stared at the full stop. Then: Do you want anything to eat?

A beat.

Only if you're already cooking.

She put the phone down, gathered her books and laptop, and felt a decision forming. If he only ever saw her under bad strip lights and worse ideas, he'd get the wrong picture. She wanted him to see the other version – the one who could keep time, keep a pan at a simmer, keep her head.

She abandoned her essay and headed to the shopping centre to find a decent supermarket. Marks and Spencer had sliding doors and lighting that made the vegetables look freshly picked. She bought skin-on chicken thighs, a bunch of tarragon that smelled faintly of anise when she crushed the stems, fine beans, proper butter, a lemon, potatoes for dauphinoise. For pudding she let herself be carried by greed and got a dark chocolate tart in a box and a small tub of crème fraîche. She added a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé because she wanted the cold, flinty bite of it against the richness.

Back at the flat, she cleaned as if a parent were coming. She peeled the loose tobacco off the coffee table that Cleo had promised – and failed – to clean up. Then she set her phone on the windowsill where she could pretend to not look at it.

She cooked with the window cracked and the extractor fan on low. Potatoes sliced thin, layered with cream and garlic, salt, a little nutmeg. Chicken dried with kitchen roll, skin salted, browned in the pan, finished in the oven with tarragon tucked under the skin and lemon halves thrown in to scorch. Beans blanched and shocked in cold water because she'd learned the trick and liked to show it off. She laid the table, put two water glasses down. She lit a solitary candle then took it away and put it back again, furious at herself for caring.

The oven clock ticked over to 7.01. She took the potatoes out and let them sit. The buzzer went a few minutes later. 

She opened the door and watched his face do the sequence – her, the smell, the table, her again.

"Alright," he said softly. "You've been busy."

"It's just chicken," she said, feeling suddenly exposed. "And...things that go with chicken."

He stepped in, shut the door behind him. "Looks more than 'just' to me, that."

She reached for the wine. "Do you—?"

He checked his phone without making it rude. "I can only stay half an hour." He looked up apologetically as he said it. "Work."

Tab felt her cheeks go hot with the effort of keeping her face ordinary. Of course he had work. Of course she hadn't asked. The table looked suddenly staged, as if she'd set it for an audience instead of him.

"You should have said," she managed.

"I should have," he said, and came close enough to take the bottle out of her hands before she over-explained. "It smells unreal. I'm not leaving without eating something."

"I was trying to—" She stopped. The honest word was impress and she hated it. "To not look like a train wreck."

His mouth did the ghost of a smile. "You don't."

"I did last week."

"You're a student," he said, as if that explained everything. 

She looked down at her palms. "I wanted you to see that I'm not always like that," she said. 

He touched her chin, tilted her head up. "You don't have to prove anything to me."

She breathed, and some small knot unclenched. "Sit," she said, grateful. "Eat before supper gets cold."

"Supper?" He raised an eyebrow, a faint smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. "Supper is a biscuit before bed. This is tea."

Tabitha watched him take a seat and smiled in spite of herself. "Tea is in the afternoon with cakes and scones and champagne if your grandmother is in town."

"What about dinner, then?"

"Dinner is a formal event. Black tie. In my world, anyway."

"Your world is mad, you know."

They ate at the little table with their knees nearly touching. He took one mouthful of potatoes and made a low sound that sent a bolt of pleasure right through her. "That's dangerous."

"Cream," she said. "It covers a multitude of sins."

"Doesn't taste like sin," he said, and forked another piece, then reached for a chicken thigh with his fingers. "That's proper."

"Glad you like it." She poured them each a glass of wine and raised hers. "To tea," she said, trying out the word in its new context. 

He grinned. "To supper." 

They ate. He asked what she had on this week and she made herself sound busy but found she didn't need to embroider – her calendar was beginning to get crowded. "Two essays due soon," she said. "One on Early Netherlandish painting – symbolism, van Eyck, the whole Panofsky business – and a methods piece where you have to compare two critics."

He nodded. "Clever, you."

"I don't feel it when I have to write." She kept her tone level. "The looking bit is easy. Getting the words to stay where you put them..." She shrugged. "Takes me longer."

He sat back a little, not pitying. "I'm better at talking than writing," he said. "Always have been. I'm alright with people. You can tell a lot fast if you pay attention."

"And is that part of your job?" Tab asked carefully. "Paying attention, I mean. Understanding people."

Michael took a slow sip of wine. "Yeah," he said eventually. "Suppose so."

"What else?" She knew she was pushing her luck. She didn't care. 

"I sit in on conversations and make sure they end tidy. If someone makes a mess, I fix it. That's the most of it." He wiped his fingers on a napkin and looked at the time again, apologetic before she could be wounded. "Ten minutes."

"Right." She tried for light. "I'll race you through pudding."

He glanced at the boxed tart and shook his head. "Keep it for when I'm back."

"When you're back?"

"If you want me. It'll be late."

There was no sense pretending she didn't. "Late is fine." She crossed to the bookcase and took the spare key from the lemon dish before she could overthink it. "Use this."

He looked at the key, turned it over a few times. "You shouldn't hand spares round."

"You're not a stranger," she said. "And I'd rather you let yourself in than wake the street at two."

He didn't do the performance of refusing. He pocketed it. "I'll be quiet."

"You usually are," she said, and the small secret pleasure of usually warmed her throat.

He cleared his plate, set it by the sink as if that might buy him another five minutes, then came back to her. "Ta," he said.

"For what?"

"For making it nice to come in from outside."

He bent and kissed her – no rush, no apology for the half hour – a clear, certain press that told her he'd thought about doing it on the stairs and decided to wait until here. "Eat the rest," he said. "Don't wait up stupidly late."

"I'll try not to."

He touched her jaw with two fingers and was gone, quick on the stairs. The flat felt too big, just like it always did when she was newly alone. She wrapped another plate for him – chicken, a slab of potatoes – and laughed at herself for the foil label she stuck on top: Michael, as if someone might confuse it for leftovers belonging to a different criminally handsome man.

She did the washing up, grateful for the method of it, how it gave her something to do with her hands. After, she tried to read and met the same paragraph about van Eyck three times. She texted Sophie how's the date and got back Pulp Fiction is his favourite film. Pray for me. 

After she'd brushed her teeth, she paused with her hand on the light cord, thought of Michael letting himself into a dark flat and decided to leave it on. 

The key turned a little after one. A pause as he put his shoes down neatly, not the usual careless thud. Keys into the lemon. She heard him trying to be quiet in the kitchen – the tap running once, a cupboard door closing softly – and smiled in the dark.

He came to her room and paused in the doorway. "Tabitha?" he whispered. 

"Here." She switched the lamp on low. "You ate?" 

"I did." A quick half-smile. "Left me a note like my ma."

"Shut up and get in," she said, grinning.

He slipped off his coat and jeans, the mattress dipping as he climbed in beside her. She went straight to him, face in his T-shirt, breathing cold air and soap and the thing that was only him. He set one hand in her hair, the other flat between her shoulder blades, and held her there. 

"Did I wake you?" he asked quietly. 

"No," she murmured, curling her leg over his like it belonged there. "Couldn't sleep without you."

He made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh and pulled her closer until their stomachs met. His feet were cold; she yelped, then tucked them between her calves to warm them, giddy at how ordinary and intimate it was to share warmth this way. He rubbed his chin once against her temple and she felt the lift of his chest, the loosening of his muscles as he sighed. 

Questions moved to the edge of her tongue – work, risk, all the bits of him that weren't hers – but they could wait. She kissed the hollow at his collarbone, tasting salt and skin, and felt the answering kiss on the crown of her head. The ease of it, of her and him together, made her smile. 

"I've got you," he said. He stroked her hair back and let his hand settle at her nape. "Sleep."

She did, quickly, with his breath warm on her cheek and her hand still on his back so she'd know where she was when morning came.

Chapter Text

Snow came early and thin, a film the city couldn't shake. The laminate floors of lecture halls squeaked under trainers. In the mornings, a white crust grew on car roofs, and people wrote swear words in it with a knuckle as they passed.

Tabitha's days narrowed to desk, seminar, desk. The library smelled of damp wool and highlighter pens. She lived on coffee and hauled a stack of books with her everywhere. Michael was busy too. They put quick calls between other people's needs – he'd give her five minutes because someone else would take the next hour. She learned to love the small snippets they got, moments when she'd hear him going about his life and carving out time for her anyway. 

Her first feedback session came on a Wednesday when the frost didn't lift all day. The tutor, Dr Ellis – glasses on a cord, ink on his fingers in that performative way professors often have – waved Tabitha into a chair and slid her essay across the desk with the mark ringed once: 52.

"You see well," he said without warmth. "But you do travel writing. Where's the argument? This reads like a guided tour of van Eyck. 'Look to the left, look to the mirror, isn't the dog interesting?'" He flicked a page. "You name Panofsky and never use him. You quote to avoid deciding. If you don't have a claim, you don't have an essay. Work on that. Cut the flourishes." He capped the pen. "Low 2:2. It can go up. But you'll have to make choices."

Tabitha's face remained mercifully calm while her stomach tipped. She nodded and wrote down sentences she wouldn't be able to read later because her eyes were blurry.

Outside, the air slapped her. She stood by the bins behind the arts block and breathed until her throat stopped threatening tears. Then she checked her phone. Nothing from Michael. A message from her mother instead.

We're in Liverpool next Saturday. Lunch at one – we'll book. Perhaps a gallery after? Can't wait to see how you're getting on. 

Love, Mummy & Daddy x

Her heart did a somersault and landed badly. Lunch. A gallery. Inspection wearing a smile. She wrote back of course and immediately wished she'd said let me check, then hated herself for wishing anything at all.

Back at the flat, Sophie noticed the look on her face immediately.

"What happened?"

"Feedback," Tabitha said, dropping her bag. "Also my parents are coming to visit next weekend."

"Jesus." Sophie opened a cupboard and came back with hot chocolate, the emergency kind with the tiny marshmallows and a shot of whiskey. "Sit. Tell Auntie Sophie."

Cleo emerged from the sofa. "Who's died?"

"No one," Tab said, and then told them anyway – Ellis' pen, the 2:2, the text with the kiss from her mother like a sticker over a bruise.

Sophie made a sympathetic noise. "We'll tidy," she said, practical as ever. "We'll hide the alcohol and pretend the bin has always been emptied."

Cleo tucked her legs under her. "And you're not taking them to the car park under the docks, so it'll be fine."

"What do you want to happen?" Sophie asked, quiet now.

Tab looked at the mug in her hands, the skin that had formed on the hot chocolate while they'd been talking. "I don't know. Part of me wants to dress like a problem and introduce them to Michael."

Cleo's eyebrows went up with delight. "Chaos."

"Another part wants to keep him mine for a bit," Tab said. "Before anyone has an opinion."

"Valid," Sophie said. "Your mum scares me."

"I want to see him," Tab said, surprising herself with the honesty. "Everything feels better when I've seen him."

"Ring him," Cleo said. "Worst he says is I'm at work."

She called. It rang once.

"Tabitha."

Hearing her name in his voice steadied her. "Hi."

"You alright?"

"No," she said, because lying seemed like a waste of breath. "Feedback was brutal. Parents are coming up. I feel like I'm being tested on how to be a person and I haven't revised."

"Where are you now?"

"Home."

"I can be by the river in half an hour," he said. "Pier Head side. Wrap up. It's daft out."

"I'll come," she said, already moving.

**

The quay threw the cold straight at them. The river was black and quick. Ferry horns staggered out through the cold as if reluctant to leave their warm mouths. Gulls shifted on the railings, one foot tucked up against the weather.

Michael walked towards her with his hands in his coat pockets and that half-tilt of the head that passed for a hello. Up close, his ears were red; his breath fogged.

"You're freezing," he said, putting one of her hands inside his pocket. His palm was warm. "Walk."

They set off along the water. Their feet made the quiet grinding sound of snow that's been hanging around for too long. For a while they didn't talk. She could feel his attention running ahead of them and circling back – the same way it did in rooms, just adjusted for weather and open space.

"My parents are coming next Saturday," she said. "Lunch and a gallery. It's the last thing I need right now."

"What are they like?" he asked. 

"Stifling." She pursed her lips. "Mummy thinks there's a proper way to do everything. She's the kind of person who name-drops Soho House – very new money, I know. Daddy used to lecture in history at Cambridge. Now he spends all his time writing books. They expect me to be just like them."

"In my world," Michael said, "money isn't old or new. It's just money. Most people don't have enough of it."

"Money isn't everything."

"Says the rich girl."

She felt the subtle admonishment and pressed her lips together. 

"So what do they expect when they visit?" Michael asked after a moment. 

"A tidy girl doing a tidy degree," she said. "Not high, not messy, not kissing anyone they didn't pick." She huffed a laugh that had no air in it. "They won't say that out loud, of course."

He nodded. "And the lad with the accent who turns up late and doesn't explain why – where do you want him in that picture?"

"I don't know," she admitted. 

"They wouldn't like me," he said before she had time to elaborate. "It's not worth the argument, Tab. You've got enough going on."

"I'm not ashamed of you."

"I know."

They walked. The wind came round a corner and went straight through her coat. He noticed and put her other hand inside his other pocket, so she was anchored to him at the hips and wrists.

"What are your parents like?" she asked, gentler.

He took a second. "My auld fella went when I was a baby," he said, matter-of-fact. "Don't remember him. My ma did her best. She had good months and bad months. Sometimes there were aunties and cousins and loud houses on Sundays; sometimes it was just us and the telly and whatever we could afford. I got a job as soon as I could get one. School and me didn't agree after sixteen." He glanced at her and then away again. "My ma's funny when she's well. Always knows how to make people smile."

Tab let the information sit. "Are you close with her?"

"When I can be." A small smile. "She'd like you. She likes people who look like they were brought up proper."

That made her laugh properly for the first time since the text. "And do you have extended family? People you see?"

"A few," he said. "A man called Ronnie took me under his wing when I was young. The Phelans have been good to me."

Tabitha filed those names away for future reference, pleased that Michael had finally given her some details about his life, no matter how small. 

They stopped where the path narrowed and the wind dropped a fraction. Lights from the other side of the river made a ragged line in the water. His hands stayed over hers in his pockets.

"What do you think I should do?" she asked. "About my parents."

"Once people like that have seen my face," he said, "they don't unsee it. And if they decide they don't like me, which you know they will, you'll hear that on birthdays for the next ten years. You don't want that."

She could picture it with humiliating clarity – her mother's voice going careful, her father's concern dressed as reason. The knowing tone people use when they think they're saving you from yourself. Michael was right, she thought, glancing at him. He had the kind of face that suggested trouble without announcing it – the kind that made you think you wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of him.

"I'll take you for scran after they've gone and listen to you complain until you feel better," he said. "Yeah?"

"Thank you," she said, squeezing his hand.

They stood there until the cold got unbearable. She watched a couple walk past with a dog that looked like a small polar bear and tried to imagine being the sort of person who brought a dog to the river in this weather just for the pleasure of it.

"I had awful feedback on an essay today," she said after a while. "The professor was brutal."

"What did he say?" Michael asked. 

"Basically that I'm afraid of having opinions. Low 2:2." She tried to make it light and failed miserably. "I feel stupid."

"You're not."

"I want to go back in there and argue."

"You could," he said. "Or you could walk and let your face calm down."

She gave a small laugh that fogged the air. "Walking, then."

They started back. Somewhere near the museum, he tugged her to a stop and shifted her scarf so it sat higher and covered the bit of her throat the wind kept finding. He kissed her slowly, and she shivered at the sudden warmth of his mouth. When he drew back, his breath made a small cloud between them.

"Good luck with your parents," he said. "And if that professor is in your head at three in the morning, ring me."

She smiled into her scarf. "What if you're asleep?"

He brushed his thumb across her bottom lip. "Doesn't matter."

He tipped his head, stepped back into the wind, collar up. For a second she thought he might add something; instead he turned, hands in his pockets.

She watched the set of his shoulders and knew he'd already gone somewhere she couldn't follow tonight. The scarf where he'd fixed it kept his heat for a moment, then let it go. She swallowed; the lump in her throat stayed. By the time she crossed the road, the cold had moved back in. The number 52 and next Saturday's lunch shouldered their way to the front again. She put her hands in her pockets and walked home.

Chapter Text

On the day of her parents' arrival, Tabitha woke to the sound of Sophie shoving bottles into the recycling and Cleo swearing at the hoover.

Her mother stepped into the flat exactly on time in a camel coat and a cloud of Chanel No.5. Her father followed with the look of a man who had been dragged out of a train of thought and was still tidying after it in his head. They brought a paper bag from a bakery on Hope Street.

"Darling," her mother said, kissing the air near both cheeks, eyes already running an inventory. "That staircase is lethal in this weather. We've taken a room around the corner with underground parking, thank goodness."

"It's nice to see you," Tab said, only half meaning it.

Her father put a hand on her shoulder and kept it there for a second longer than usual. "How's the library?" he asked, as if it were a person she'd started seeing.

"Good," she said. "Well-stocked."

Cleo appeared in the doorway, hair in two plaits, T-shirt with a band Tab's parents wouldn't recognise. "Hello," she said, bright. "I'm Cleo."

"Lovely to meet you, Cleo." Her mother's smile widened. "And where are you from?"

"Kirkdale."

"Kirk...where is that, darling? Near the park everyone talks about?"

"North," Cleo said, amused.

"Ah. You'll have to point it out for us." Rosemary's smile didn't move. As she slipped off her gloves, she leaned close to Tab, too low for anyone else: "Keep an eye on your things, won't you? These suburban areas can be lively. You do collect such vivid friends."

Tabitha bit the inside of her cheek and glared at her mother. 

Sophie breezed in with a tray of tea like a woman auditioning for the part of the world's most sensible flatmate. "Mr and Mrs Lancaster, welcome."

"Rosemary," her mother corrected. "Christopher."

They drank tea. Her mother asked after modules, deadlines, whether she'd found a decent dry cleaner. Her father said Panofsky with the faint pleasure of a familiar surname and asked how she was finding him. Tab said dense and rewarding and felt her her mother noticing the dark rings under her eyes.

Lunch was already booked. They walked past the Philharmonic, where snow dusted the railings, and into a Georgian townhouse with sash windows and napkins folded into origami shapes. Her mother gave the wine list the concentration other people reserve for wills.

"How's your flatmate, Sophie?" her mother asked.

"She's lovely. Keeps me organised."

"And the other girl, Chloe?"

"Cleo."

"Cleo," her mother repeated it like a foreign word. "Very spirited."

Tab looked at the fork until the shine blurred. Spirited was her mother's shorthand for too much.

"You know who's in Liverpool," Rosemary went on, still studying the wine list. "Camilla Ashdown – from Cheltenham. Why don't you meet up, darling? Her father's in the Cabinet now."

Christopher looked up. "Transport, isn't it?"

"Something like that." Rosemary nodded. 

"I bet he's thrilled she ended up at Liverpool," Tab muttered under her breath.

A small pause. Her mother's smile held, but the corners thinned. "Camilla is very bright. You might drop her a line."

Tab pictured Camilla as she'd been at school, with her shiny prefect badge and hockey stick. She'd once made a year seven girl cry by scolding her for wearing eyeliner to chapel. She was polished, efficient, not at all kind.

"I'll be fine," Tab said. "I've got friends."

After lunch, they headed to the Walker. Halfway up Hope Street, Henry came out of the Athenaeum with a book under his arm and an expression that brightened when he saw her.

"Tabitha! Hello." He clocked the polished version of her – smart coat, parents in tow – and adjusted himself into a height of politeness that would have got him into any drawing room in England. "Mr and Mrs Lancaster," he said as if he'd been presented with those names in a childhood primer. "Henry Miles. History. Plus an Impressionism module where I met Tabitha." 

Her mother's face eased with relief. "Henry," she said warmly. "How nice."

They spoke for five minutes at the kerb as if the three of them had known one another for years. Her father enquired about supervision; Henry mentioned school and, almost as an afterthought, "I was at Eton."

Christopher's eyebrows lifted. "My father was there." Pride and nostalgia. Rosemary looked pleased in the exact way Tab had expected.

When they'd finished being delighted by one another, Henry said, "This is serendipitous – would you like tickets for tonight? I've spares for the ballet at the Empire. Swan Lake. A friend in the production gave me them, and I haven't had time to get a group together. It would be a crime to let them go unused."

Her mother visibly brightened. "How kind," she said. "We'd be thrilled, if Tabitha is?"

"Of course," Tab said. She could feel herself making the face she wore for invigilators and headmistresses and anyone who needed to believe the best in her. Henry met her eyes as if to ask, Are you sure? and she nodded, grateful and irritated with herself for being grateful.

"Wonderful," Henry said. "I'll text the details." To her parents again, with a little bow you could only pull off if you'd been unconsciously practising since birth. "A pleasure."

When he'd gone, her mother said, "What a charming young man," and her father said, "Good head on him," and Tab felt something inside her tighten and then press against the bars of her ribs.

They went home so she could change into a dress her mother would approve of. The snow in the gutters had gone grey. On the way to the theatre, her mother took her arm. "You do look pretty," she said, which was always also a warning not to spoil it.

The Empire smelled of perfume and the glossy paper the programmes were printed on. Her mother bought three and handed one to Tab. Henry met them in the foyer looking devastatingly like a good idea. He had, of course, already found their seats and smoothed the way past an elderly couple who were taking a year to put their bags under the chairs.

During the first act, Tab watched the dancers reach for impossible shapes and hold them, wishing she had that kind of restraint. The ballet lessons her mother had forced her to attend as a child had lasted less than three months. 

At the interval, Henry queued for drinks; her mother leaned on the ledge and surveyed the crowd the way she surveyed a dinner party she had planned – calm, satisfied, a little judgemental.

"He's lovely," her mother said, watching Henry shoulder his way back with two glasses. "Is he your boyfriend?"

"No," Tab said, too fast. "We're friends."

"Shame," her father murmured. "He's very—"

"Suitable," her mother supplied, trying not to sound obvious and failing.

"Kind," Tab said, because it was true, and because if she didn't add a word of her own the sentence would belong to other people entirely.

Henry returned with champagne. "To the lake," he said, good-humoured.

On the steps after, the cold took their breath. People were loud with relief at having sat still so long. Henry walked them to a taxi rank and handed her mother into a cab.

"Thank you," her mother said again. "So thoughtful."

"My pleasure," Henry said, and to Tab, lower, "Is everything okay?"

She opened her mouth to say yes and found she couldn't make the word sound true. "It will be," she said.

He squeezed her elbow once and let it go. "See you soon."

In the cab, her mother's hand sat warm over Tab's knee. "It's all very reassuring," she said. "Friends like Henry. The ballet." She turned her head to look out at the lights along Lime Street. "So much culture up here now."

Tab faced the window and watched her reflection roll her eyes in the dark glass. She thought of Michael's hands in his pockets by the river, of the sentence he hadn't needed to finish – people like that won't unsee me – and felt something contrary and hot climb the inside of her throat.

Back at the flat, her parents lingered for half an hour. Her mother touched the limp leaf of a house plant and made a dissatisfied noise at the back of her throat. Her father checked his watch and said he might read for half an hour before bed.

When they had gone, Tab stood in the quiet kitchen and tried not to see the evening from above: her, performing; them, approving; Henry, perfect in every way that would make a life smooth. Her phone was on the windowsill where she'd left it. No message. She didn't ring Michael, though she badly wanted to.

Cleo came in, beanie on her head, cheeks red from the cold. "How were the aristocrats?" she asked, dropping chips from a paper cone onto a plate and sliding it across.

"House of Lords adjacent," Tab said, eating one even though she wasn't hungry.

"And Henry?"

"Glorious," Tab said and couldn't keep the bite out of it.

Cleo watched her for a second. "Ah," she said. "You've got that look."

"What look?"

"The look that says you're about to do something inadvisable and delicious."

Tab rinsed the salt from her fingers, dried them carefully on a towel, and considered how much trouble the word introduce could cause if you put it in the wrong sentence.

"I'm tired," she said. "Night."

In her room, she undid her earrings and lined them up on the dresser. Snow had started again outside, silent flecks falling through the glow of an orange street light. She lay on her side and watched her breath cloud the cold bit of air by the window and vanish, cloud and vanish. One thing stayed: she wanted Michael. She turned off the lamp and let the wanting sit with her in the dark.

Chapter Text

By eleven the next day, Tabitha's mother had confirmed their dinner plans: Seven-thirty. We'll meet you there.

Tab tried the library and lasted twenty minutes. The words wouldn't stop moving on the page. She walked home instead, showered, tweezed a clean strip under each eyebrow because it calmed her, laid a dress on the bed that wouldn't make her look like she was trying to start a fight.

Her parents had booked a place they would recognise as civilised: piano music and low light, three sets of cutlery laid out on white tablecloths. She arrived early and let the waiter pour the first glass to the proper line. Her mother and father were cheerful, pleased with themselves after a day spent browsing in museums and galleries. They asked polite questions about her course and professors.

Tabitha drank and answered. She could hear herself being good. 

When Henry came up, as easily as the weather, she felt her hands clench. Her mother said wasn't he marvellous last night, and wasn't the conductor excellent, and Liverpool is really coming up in the world, darling, it's extraordinary. Her father wondered aloud if Henry's grandfather had known his own father at Eton; wasn't it funny how these things recur?

Her phone lay facedown by the bread plate. She turned it over, thumb already moving. 

I want to see you.

The reply came before the waiter finished taking their orders.

No parents.

She didn't reply. She ordered a second glass of wine with the starters and a third before the mains. Her face felt warm. She lifted the phone again, typed the name of the restaurant and the street, added the postcode without thinking, and sent it. No explanation. Just the address.

A beat. Then from him:

Tab.

No parents?

She put the phone back on the table, screen down, and felt her pulse start to race. She thought of her parents' delight in Henry and the ballet, and of Michael, against the grain of their polished dinners and careful guest lists. She wanted him. She wanted them to see that she did. 

Her mother watched the room and then leaned in. "You're very quiet."

"I'm fine."

"Good," her mother said briskly. 

Half past seven came and tipped into thirty-two. She hadn't been sure Michael would come. Then he was at the door. A few heads turned. The maître d' straightened, hand to his tie. Michael spoke to him without taking off his coat.

She stood. "Back in a second," she told her parents and crossed to him.

"Michael." She kissed him on the mouth, not careful, tasting cold air from outside. He didn't kiss her back straight away. His hand came to her forearm – steady, not tender. 

"You didn't answer me," he said quietly. "No parents?"

She forced a smile. "Come and meet them."

Something in his face went dangerously still. "You set this up."

Tab hesitated. It was too late to back out now. "Come on."

She took his hand and led him through the room. People looked. She liked that they did.

At the table, she said, bright as a bell, "Mummy, Daddy, this is my boyfriend. Michael."

The word boyfriend landed like a stone lobbed against a car window. Her mother blinked once as if checking the light. Her father didn't offer his hand. It was the reaction she'd hoped for, but seeing it play out in real time didn't come with satisfaction – only guilt when she felt Michael's hand loosen in hers. 

"I beg your pardon?" Rosemary said.

"Evening," Michael said.

"Do sit," Tab said, already pulling a chair as if this had been arranged.

Her father found his voice first. "We're having a family dinner, Tabitha."

"I know."

"Enough," her mother said under her breath. "This is unacceptable."

Tab put a hand on Michael's thigh. He looked at her hand, then at her, anger starting to take shape. She swallowed. The certainty that had propelled her before was quickly diminishing.

Her mother looked up at him and tried for a neutral tone that came out like steel. "Michael...?"

"Kavanagh."

"And what do you do, Mr Kavanagh?"

"He's with me," Tab said quickly. "That's the important bit."

"Don't you dare," Rosemary said, eyes on Tab now. "Don't you dare do this in a restaurant."

Tab set her jaw. She lifted a hand toward Michael's shoulder, as if to prove something. He caught her wrist – gentle, definite – and hissed, "Enough," only for her. Then: "Outside."

She stood. He didn't touch her again. He walked ahead and she followed because she already knew there was nothing to be gained by letting this happen at the table.

Out on the pavement, the cold was blunt. He stopped under the awning and turned.

"What was that?" he demanded.

"I wanted them to meet you."

"You wanted to wind them up." The Scouse in his accent thickened, the edges rougher as if to prove a point. "I asked you about parents and you swerved it."

"They treat me like I can't make my own decisions," she said. "Henry this, Henry that. I'm sick of it."

"And I'm what, your row?" He laughed once without humour. 

"I wanted them to see—"

"You wanted a reaction and you got one." He shook his head. "I've been in plenty of rooms where I don't belong. I walk in when I choose it. Not because your ma needs something to clutch her pearls over."

"You're not listening," she said, hearing herself sound young and hating it. "I care about you."

"Then show it different. You don't pull that shit with me." He stepped closer. "You made a show of me. That's not on."

"That's not true."

"It is." He didn't blink. "You like me. Fine. I like you. But if this is going to be me getting paraded every time they get in your head, nah. Girls like you—"

"Don't," she snapped. "Don't 'girls like you' me. You're the one who won't tell me anything. I know three facts about your life and one of them is your name. You keep me in the dark and then tell me off when I push against it."

He stared at her. "You want details for what, table chat with your ma?"

"That's not fair."

"It's exactly fair." Heat came into his voice now. "You set me up, Tabitha. You knew I'd come. You knew I'd come because you text me and say you need me and I turn up. That's on you."

She swallowed. Guilt flickered again and she stamped on it. "I'm not ashamed of you."

"I know you said that." He looked past her to the window where her mother was sitting. "This isn't about shame. You don't blindside me. Ever."

She reached for his sleeve. He moved his arm and she let her hand fall.

"I wanted you there," she said quietly. "With me."

"Then tell me," he said. "Ask me. Don't play games. Not with me."

"We're not a game."

"Tonight was."

They stood there, breath moving pale in the air. She thought: Say you'll come back in. Say we'll start again. He didn't.

"I'm not going back inside," he said. "You sort your evening. Sort your head. Don't put me in front of them like that again."

"Michael—"

He was already stepping away. "I'll see you when you can look me in the eye and not use me for a row."

He went. No look over the shoulder. She shivered, the last of the heat she'd carried out with her long gone now. 

Inside, her mother hadn't moved. Her father's hands were flat on the table.

"What," Rosemary said, voice low, "was that?"

"My boyfriend," Tab said, because the word still had power. "You asked."

"Don't be facetious." Her mother rearranged the napkin in front of her. "Is he why you've gone so distant with us? You don't seem yourself."

Tab sat. Her hands had started to shake. She put them in her lap.

Her father cleared his throat. "How old is he?"

"Twenty-six."

Silence.

"And this is serious, is it?" her mother asked.

"Yes."

Rosemary's eyes narrowed. "Have you slept with him?"

"Mother—"

"Answer the question."

"I'm not answering that," Tab said, heat riding up her neck.

Rosemary's voice went cool. "If you have, you should get yourself checked. Men like that—"

"Stop," Tab interrupted. "Stop talking about him like that."

"Tabitha, for goodness' sake," her father said, finally losing the gentle tone. "That man is not for you."

"Because of his accent?"

"Because he is not like you," her mother said sharply.

"You don't know him."

"I know his type," her mother said. "What they do to girls like you. He will not be the one crying when this goes wrong."

"Rosemary," her father warned, to no effect.

"You are bright," her mother went on. "You are nineteen. You have every door open to you. And you think this is, what? Romantic? A stance? It's stupid, Tabitha. It's beneath you."

Tab heard the word beneath and felt something snap. "He's not beneath me. He's better than anyone you'd pick."

Her father tried: "Tab—"

"No," she said. "No. I don't need your blessing."

"You need your common sense," her mother said. "And if you won't find it yourself, we'll help you. This"—a small, tight gesture that included the table, the room, her coat on the back of the chair—"is not happening again."

"What does that mean?"

"It means," her father said, measured, "that we will not sit and watch you make this mistake."

"I'm not making a mistake," Tab said. "And even if I was, so what? At least I'm choosing it. At least it's my mistake."

"You're choosing badly." Her mother lifted her glass and put it down again without drinking. "You are not doing this to us."

"To you," Tab repeated, and laughed, a little wild. "There it is."

People at the next table pretended not to listen.

Tab stood because if she didn't, she would cry, and she refused to give them that. "I'm done."

"Sit down," her mother said sharply.

"Or what?" Tab picked up her bag. She walked out on legs that felt borrowed and didn't stop until she hit the cold. The air made her throat sting. She put a hand to the wall because the ground felt unsteady.

Her phone lit her palm. She didn't message Michael. Pride, anger – she couldn't separate them. She scrolled to Cleo instead and called.

"Where are you?" Cleo asked.

"Out," Tab said. Her voice sounded strained. "I need to forget everything."

Cleo laughed. "You're in luck. There's a thing tonight. Warehouse by the docks. Proper, not student nonsense."

"I'm coming."

"You sure, posh girl?"

"Yes."

"Bring cash and don't wear shoes you like."

She ended the call. Snow began to fall again, fine flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground. Tab tucked her scarf up to her mouth and started to walk, fast, before she changed her mind.

Chapter Text

Cleo tipped a bag of her clothes onto Tabitha's bed. Lycra, mesh, a skirt that was basically a belt; a bomber jacket stitched with badges. She thudded a drum and bass playlist into the room  and opened a warm bottle of supermarket vodka.

"Tonight," she announced, "we reset your brain."

Sophie perched on the radiator in pyjamas, hair in a claw clip, seminar reading on her lap. "Be careful," she said, already knowing they'd be anything but. "And don't let anyone hand you a drink they've opened for you."

Cleo rolled a pill between finger and thumb, then slipped it back into its plastic bag. "I'll look after her."

Tab sat cross-legged, mascara wand in hand. "My mother asked if I'd slept with Michael," she said, because she couldn't hold it in any longer. "Suggested I get myself checked if I had."

Sophie made a strangled sound. "She did not."

"She did."

"Christ." Cleo blew out a laugh and then caught Tab's face, softer. "You alright?"

"Not really."

"What happened?" Sophie asked.

She told them: the text, the address, the table, the word boyfriend laid down like a card. The anger in the street. "He was right," she finished, hating that the admission stung. "I blindsided him. I'm so embarrassed I could crawl out of my skin."

"He'll get over it," Sophie said. "Trust me."

"I'm not so sure," Tab said, staring at her hands. "After tonight I can't tell if I've broken it. He was so angry. Properly angry."

Sophie slid off the radiator and put her arms around Tab from behind. "Give him time."

They built Tab into someone reckless. Fishnet tights, a black crop top she'd never have bought for herself, Cleo's silver chain around her waist, an old army jacket to throw over it all. Cleo wore red vinyl shorts and a ripped T-shirt. Sophie lined Tab's eyes, stepped back, approved. "You look like trouble."

"Good," Tab said, for once meaning it.

They drank vodka with flat lemonade, faces pulled; Sophie, ever the sensible friend, pushed twenty quid into Tab's bra. "Call me if anything goes sideways," she said, kissing her temple. "And keep your phone on you, not in a coat you'll throw on a speaker."

Cleo checked her own little pharmacy. "Hearts again. Good batch. We'll start small."

"What exactly is the plan?" asked Sophie. 

"Warehouse rave," Cleo said. "Out past town – Brunswick Business Park, back of Herculaneum Dock. Proper heavy one. We'll be back before your lecture in the morning."

Sophie snorted. "Sure you will."

They left to the sound of the bass still leaking from Sophie's speaker.

**

The warehouse was already humming. They stuck a fiver in a bucket at the door, and then it was all heat, light and bodies. People wore sequins and neon under unzipped coats. Lights strobed white, then purple, then white again.

Cleo found a quiet corner and passed Tab half a pill and a water bottle. "Small first."

They danced. For a while that was all there was: Cleo's grin flaring and vanishing in light; the shove-and-give of bodies moving together. Tab drank vodka from a shared plastic cup, and later, when the pill kicked in, water to stay sensible. Warmth ran out through her arms and back again. The jacket went around her waist. She reached for Cleo's hand and found it.

"I needed this," she shouted.

Cleo cupped her cheeks and kissed her quickly. "I know."

Tab closed her eyes and focused on the bass, how it found its way up through the soles of her shoes and into her chest. Thoughts tried to climb up with it – the look on Michael's face outside the restaurant; her mother saying men like that – and slid off again. She let them go.

After a couple of hours, Cleo pulled her towards the roller door for air. Outside was a frost-bitten yard with a chain-link fence bowed in places, a burnt-out Fiesta half-sunk at the far corner with no wheels and the dash ripped out. A shopping trolley slept on its side. Beyond the fence: dark water and the stink of the river, cold and metal-salt. Boys in puffers blew sweet vape clouds; girls in mesh tops bounced on the spot to keep warm, tights laddered, trainers filthy.

"You good?" Cleo asked, rolling a cigarette. 

Tab nodded, grinning. Their breath fogged and hung between them. Her mouth tasted of citrus gum. "I want the warm back," she said. "Half?"

Cleo put the rollie in her mouth, checked her phone, then her palm, then nodded. "Half." She tapped one into Tab's hand from a little grip-seal bag, dropped one for herself, handed over water. "Sip."

Tab swallowed and felt the promise of it almost straight away – a space in her head clearing where she could forget, pretend to be the kind of person who doesn't care what anyone thinks. She looked at Cleo – kohl smudged, neon dots painted along her cheekbones, smoke unfurling from her mouth – and loved her so much it made her chest ache.

Back in, the room had somehow got even busier. The DJ had pushed the tempo; the bass felt like a floorboard you could jump on forever. A girl with a red Liverpool top barged in, delighted. "Your skirt," she yelled at Tab, "where's it from?"

"Her," Tab shouted back, pointing at Cleo.

"Icon," the girl told Cleo solemnly and shoved a strip of gum at both of them. "Chew or your jaw'll hate you tomorrow."

They danced. Ten minutes. Twenty. Time sped up and tracks bled into one another so it felt like one long, right decision. Tab felt huge love for strangers.

The change came small at first: a pocket of space opening where there hadn't been one. Two men shouldered past, eyes on the shutter. The track didn't stop, but the mood changed. Cold pulled under the roller door. Someone climbed a stack of speakers and was dragged back down by mates, laughing too loud.

"Bizzies," a voice near her said into no one, and then the word moved through the crowd the way fear does, passed hand to hand.

Blue strobed through gaps under the door. A bottle went under Tab's foot; her ankle skidded and she gasped, reached for Cleo, righted herself. People started to move as a unit, not dancing now but pushing toward exits.

"Cleo," Tab said, already letting herself go where the bodies went.

"Here," Cleo answered, and then wasn't. A hand slipped out of hers – sweat, grip lost – and Tab grabbed for a sleeve and got a stranger. She went sideways, lifted off her feet for half a second, came down on someone else's shoe. The friendly heat of the place turned unpleasant.

She found a wall, pressed her back to it, dragged a breath. Faces went past, all urgency. "Don't push, don't push," a woman's voice kept saying, useless.

Tab's phone was in her hand before she knew she'd decided. The screen was too bright; her thumb wouldn't stay where she put it. She stared long enough to remember how names worked, hit the one without a surname, and held it to her ear.

One half-ring, and then his voice: "Tabitha."

"I— I can't—" She had to swallow twice to uncurl her tongue. "They're here. The police. I can't find Cleo. I can't— I don't know where the door is. I'm sorry, I'm—"

"Where?"

She spun and the room didn't help. "Near Sefton Street, the business park there. I don't know the name—"

"Pin it."

Her hands shook so badly she fumbled the screen; the map juddered and then sent.

"Stay where you are," he said. "I'm two minutes away."

"Michael—"

"Stay there."

The line died. She pressed her spine to the wall and counted breaths: in, out, in, out. A girl shoved past with tears on her face. Her jaw trembled; she tried to chew gum she didn't have.

She looked up and saw a compact man in a dark bomber jacket heading towards her, and then Michael behind him, moving like he'd planned each step five seconds before it happened.

"Here," Michael said. "On me."

He put her behind him and used his shoulders and everyone else's instinct to clear a path. The other man threaded ahead with quick steps, elbows out. They found air by a side door turned into an exit funnel; the cold hit her skin, and this time she felt it. People steamed.

Michael turned once they were in the dark. "Where's your coat?"

"In the— I lost it."

He looked at what she was wearing and did the smallest, angriest exhale she'd seen him do. He took off his jacket and put it on her hard enough that she felt told off. "In the car."

They went to a black BMW. "You drive," Michael said to the other man, tossing him the keys. And then, as if only just remembering she didn't know him, "That's Banksey."

Banksey slid into the driver's seat and half-turned. "Alright?"

She nodded, pressing her tongue behind her teeth. Look normal.

His eyes flicked to her mouth, then her eyes; he gave a small snort. "High as a kite, aren't you?"

"Maybe," she said with a small smile. 

Michael finished arguing with the man at the gate who'd decided to be a hero, came around and got in beside her in the back. "Go," he told Banksey.

Tyres grabbed the cold road; blue lights shrank in the rear mirror. Only then did Michael look at her.

"What the fuck are you playing at?" he said, very quietly.

She opened her mouth and found only excuses. "I wanted to forget."

"I warned you not to make it easy for trouble to find you."

"You were angry," she said, which sounded like a plea and made her jaw shake harder.

"Still am," he said. "Seatbelt."

She fumbled it. He reached across and did it one-handed, patience nowhere in the movement.

"I lost Cleo," she said, panic lurching back. "I don't know where she—"

"She'll have got out," Michael said. "I'll have someone check." He tapped a message. "You—you're done for the night."

"Don't take me home," she said, too fast. "Please. My parents— Sophie— just...not there."

He stared at the road over Banksey's shoulder for two beats, jaw tight. "Fine."

They drove along the river where the cold made the water look like sheet metal. Tab curled into his jacket; it smelled of his aftershave. Her heart was still up, but the comedown was beginning to creep in, that strange sensation of having the plug pulled in your brain. Michael didn't speak. She didn't, either, because anything she said would make something worse.

Banksey pulled into a bay. "You're alright here?"

"Nice one," Michael said. "Check who was shifting there. If the bizzies lifted one of ours, give us a bell before word gets back to Ronnie."

"Sound." Banksey idled a second, checked his mirrors and rolled off.

Michael lived on the top floor of a newer block by Princes Docks – long windows, concrete softened with rugs. From his flat you could see the ferries swing past the cruise berth and the red crane lights up towards Waterloo Dock. The kitchen looked like it had never been used.

"Water," he said and put a glass in her hand. "Drink. Shower if you need it. Towel's on the back of the door."

"Michael—"

"Not now."

She showered because he'd said it and because the smell of the warehouse had got into her hair. When she came out he'd put a T-shirt on the bed and turned the heating up.

"Thank you," she said.

He looked at her for the first time since the car, properly. "Don't thank me for dragging you out of your own bad idea."

"I'm sorry."

"Not the word I'm after." He sat on the edge of a chair and folded his arms. "You did two stupid things tonight. You set me up at that restaurant, and then you came here"—he gestured towards the window, the city, the night—"to do more stupid shite. That's twice in twenty-four hours. I haven't got the fucking patience for a third."

She wanted to say I know. She wanted to say I won't. The words felt cheap in her mouth.

"I was hurt," she said instead. "By them. By you."

"And you made it my job to sort it." He shook his head. "I'll always come when you ring. Don't make me hate that about myself."

She flinched. "I won't."

He stood. "Bed's yours. I'm on the sofa." He nodded at the glass. "Finish that."

"Will you—" She caught the question, reframed it. "Can we talk tomorrow?"

"If I'm not working."

He left the door to the bedroom half-open. She lay down and stared at the ceiling. When she closed her eyes, blue lights kept blinking on the back of her lids. Her jaw ached; her hands couldn't decide if they were hot or cold. She slept badly, getting up twice to drink water and once to listen for him breathing in the next room. It came slow and steady, a metronome set to someone else's life.

**

Morning made everything look ordinary and therefore worse. He handed her coffee in a white mug and didn't ask how she was.

"Cleo?" she said.

"Still up," he said. "Afters in Anfield. Sophie's spoken to her."

"Thank you."

He didn't answer.

The drive back was quiet apart from the heater. The city outside was thawing. He pulled up half a street away from her flat. She turned to him with the apology she'd rehearsed and found there wasn't a version that improved anything.

"I am sorry," she said anyway.

He nodded once, like he'd been expecting the line and didn't care for it. "Sort yourself out," he said. 

He didn't wait for a reply. She got out and shut the door and watched the car go.

Upstairs, Sophie was at the table with a cup of tea and a face that said she wanted answers and sleep in equal measure. Before Tab could speak, her phone buzzed. A message from Cleo: Alive, you chaos magnet. Come over later.

Tab sat down slowly. She held a mug with both hands and let the heat try to get into her.

Chapter Text

Tabitha took the Merseyrail north because the bus would have made her sick. Central to Kirkdale – three stops, a mindless stretch in the tunnel where you see yourself in the window and look like a ghost.

Outside the station, the light already felt like evening. She walked past a parade of shops – barbers, bookies, a café with a hand-written sign announcing all day brekkie, a shuttered charity shop – and turned into a terrace street with neat little yards and colourful doors. Cleo's house had a pebbledash front and two wheelie bins tucked against the front wall.

Cleo opened the door in socks and a massive hoodie, eyeliner smudged. "There she is," she said, pulling Tab in. Warmth rushed at her face – steamy radiators and toast. "You look done in, babe."

"I am," Tab said quietly.

The hallway had children's drawings stuck to the walls and a school letter about World Book Day half-hidden under a takeaway menu. A pair of tiny trainers sat neatly by the shoes. The living room beyond was small and clean, television on low, gas fire lit. Cleo's sister, Fern – eight? Nine? – lay on the rug with her homework open and nail stickers on her fingers. She grinned up, gap-toothed, no judgement at all. "Hiya, Tab."

"Hi." It came out soft.

Cleo's dad hauled himself up from the armchair with the quiet groan men make when they've done a week on their feet and introduced himself as Carl. He had warm eyes, weather-beaten skin, a mouth already half-way to a smile. "You alright, girl?" he said. "You want a brew?"

"She wants three," Cleo answered for her. Then, aside to Tab, "Come on. Back." She breezed past the damp washing drying on the radiator – school shirts, a once white bra gone grey – and took Tab up the narrow stairs.

Cleo's room was a small riot: posters, lava lamp, a desk drowning under palettes and lip liners. A duvet with a neon lightning bolt print. She pushed clothes onto the floor with her foot and made space. "Sit. You look like you've been chewed."

Tab sat and immediately covered her face with her hands. "I've made a mess," she said into her palms. "Of everything. Michael, my parents. I can't believe I did that. I keep seeing his face outside the restaurant and I just—" Her throat closed.

"Yeah," Cleo said, not unkind. "Heavy one." She sat on the bed and set a hand on the back of Tab's neck, thumb moving in small circles. "Tell me what happened after I lost you."

Tab recalled the warehouse, the crush, the blue lights, the phone call, Michael and Banksey threading through the crowd. His flat. The silence there. "He put me in his bed and went and slept on the sofa," she finished, tears finally coming. "And I lay there like a child and I could hear him breathing and I just felt wrong. Like I'd broken something."

Cleo pulled her in and let her cry into the hoodie. She smelled of dry shampoo and cigarette smoke. "Course you feel rotten," she said into Tab's hair. "You did too much in twenty-four hours. Parents, pills, bevvies, bizzies, Michael. Anyone's head would go. Don't make decisions on a comedown, you know."

Tab laughed around a sob. "You sound like Sophie."

"Sophie's right sometimes," Cleo said gently. She let Tab go, passed her a loo roll for her nose. "So." Cleo propped her chin on her hand. "You like him."

"Yes."

"And you used him to make a point 'cause your ma was doing your head in."

Tab winced. "Pretty much."

"Right. We do nothing mad till your brain comes back. No texts, no getting a fringe. Agreed?"

Tab managed a half-smile. "Agreed."

Carl shouted up the stairs, "You two want scran? Beans on toast here if you want it."

Cleo shouted back, "Nice one, Da," then to Tab, "You should eat. Come down."

They ate in the warm room with Fern reading bits of her book out loud and Carl nodding at the right places. The beans smothered the toast; the butter was generous. Tab's stomach was grateful. 

"Is your mum in the picture?" Tab asked, wiping sauce from her thumb.

Cleo shrugged. "My ma's just like me, you know. Can't be pinned down. Great for a good time, not much good as a mother. She's down south at the minute, some fella who makes lamps out of driftwood." She rolled her eyes. "Dad's the one who makes sure Fern's uniform is ironed and there's bread. Auld fella's a saint."

Fern, without looking up, said, "He's not that old."

Carl snorted behind his paper. "Nice one, kid."

After, Cleo made tea – strong, two sugars for Tab – and took her back upstairs where it was quieter. She shut the door with a hip. "Right. Michael. What do we know?"

Tab cupped the mug. Her hands had started to feel like her own again. "Not very much," she admitted. "He told me little things. A man called Ronnie took him in when he was young. This family, the Phelans, have been good to him."

Cleo went still. "The Phelans," she repeated.

"You know them?"

Cleo blew on her tea even though it didn't need it, thinking. "I'm not snitching," she said, more to the room than to Tab. "And you don't repeat me. But yeah. Everyone round here knows the Phelans. They're not small time, you know. They've got – how do I say it – they've got the big line."

"The what?"

"The gear," Cleo said plainly. "Most of the coke moving round here touches them one way or another. Comes in from Colombia. You know – boats, lorries, all that. Not my field, but you hear bits. Then it goes out through lads they trust. Not the end-of-night rats, the ones above. Those ones cut it, push it further. County lines – kids on trains with burner phones, down to Widnes, Wrexham, up to Southport. Stash houses. Bizzies get the kids 'cause they're easy to grab. The family at the top stays sound."

Tab held her cup tighter. "And Michael?"

Cleo met her eyes, kind even as she pressed. "If he's with the Phelans, he's close to it. You don't get close without being in. And if he says he's busy, he's not doing shift work at Tesco, is he?"

Images flashed unhelpfully – Michael's hand at her neck, careful; Michael's jacket over her in the yard; Michael's voice last night when he said stay there and the way her body had obeyed. She tried to put those next to boys on trains and lorries through docks and her mind slid off the join.

"I don't know if I want to be caught up in all that," she said quietly. "I didn't realise..."

"I know," Cleo said. "It's not small. My cousin's mate got lifted on the Wrexham run last year. Sixteen. That's just how it is, isn't it? But look"—she softened—"you already knew something was up, you must have."

Tab put the mug down because her hands had started to shake again. "I thought if I just didn't ask him..." She shook her head. "I was stupid," she said, a bitter taste at the back of her mouth. "About all of it. Now he probably hates me."

"You were mad," Cleo said. "It's different. You didn't mean to chuck him under a bus. You did, like, but you didn't mean it that way."

Tab let out a short laugh. "Christ."

Cleo bumped her shoulder. "Text him when you're ready. Not today. Today you have toast and Lucozade and a shower. You say, 'I'm sorry I blindsided you. I won't do that again.' You don't ask for a meeting. You let him decide. And whatever he is – and he is what he is – he's not stupid. He cares about you. He showed up in two minutes in a room where anyone else would've gone the other way. That's not nothing, you know."

Tab breathed. "What if he's done with me?"

"Then he's done," Cleo said simply. "And you'll feel like you're going to die for a week and then you won't. But I don't think he's done. He's just... proud. And you poked his pride. Lads like that, you can't take the piss, not in front of people. Say sorry proper. Then see."

They sat in the familiar teenage quiet of a friend's room. Downstairs, Fern laughed at something on the telly and Carl told her to turn it down and Fern didn't.

"You sure you're alright?" Cleo asked after a bit.

"I will be," Tab said. She rubbed her eyes. "Thank you."

"Always," Cleo said. "You're my mate."

They went down for another tea because Carl wouldn't hear of them leaving without it. He wrapped a foil parcel of leftover chip-shop pie for Tab. Fern pressed a sheet of stickers into her hand and said, "For your laptop." They were stars.

Outside the air had turned sharp with cold. The streetlights flicked on in a stagger down the road. Cleo walked her to the corner.

"You've got me," Cleo said, tugging Tab into one last hug. "And Sophie. And Fern when you need stickers. Don't go doing anything daft tonight."

"I won't."

"Good. Text when you're in. And Tab?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't tell anyone I gave you sound advice. It'll ruin my whole personality."

Tab smiled properly then. "Never."

On the train back she put a star sticker on the back of her phone and smiled at it. Cleo was right; she still had her friends, two girls who'd do anything for her, and that wasn't nothing. The carriage rocked. 

She watched herself reflected in the black window, her face pale, someone behind picking at a hangnail. She thought of Michael's door clicking shut on her this morning and of him saying sort yourself out. She thought of men on trains with burner phones, of boys who occupied a world she'd never known about until now.

At Central she surfaced into the early dark. She texted Cleo, got back a row of hearts and a skull emoji because even affection here came with a joke. She put her hands deep in her pockets and walked home slowly, feeling her head at last begin to knit itself back together.

She thought of the word sorry, and whether it could be enough.

Chapter Text

Tabitha told herself she would give Michael space. She went to the library and stared out of the window. She ignored her parents' texts because answering would be like pushing a finger into a bruise. She stood in the shower until the hot water ran out and listened to the flat fall back into silence. She didn't message him. The last thing he'd said lived in her ear: Sort yourself out.

Cleo's talk kept looping. Ronnie. The Phelans. Boats, lorries, kids with burner phones. The more she tried not to think about it, the more the words set up camp.

On the fourth afternoon she opened her laptop and typed Liverpool drugs into the search bar, then Phelan Liverpool, then Ronnie Phelan. The screen filled with old headlines and grainy photos that all used the same vocabulary – gangland, seizure, operation – and a few faces that weren't his but maybe lived near his world. Her heart thumped like she'd been caught. She closed the tabs fast, cleared her history, shut the lid as if the computer might look back at her and tell someone.

Better not to know. Not like that.

Her phone lay facedown on her books. She turned it over and typed, Can we talk?

No reply. The minute hand on the library clock seemed to move slower than usual. She tried to read a paragraph from a textbook and retained half a sentence at best. When the phone finally buzzed, it wasn't an answer, just Sophie: House party at Izzy's later. Come or I'll cry.

She wrote back: Coming. Then shoved everything into her bag and walked home.

Cleo was already doing eyeliner in the hallway mirror. "You're not going as a witch, are you? We've got twelve witches."

She settled on a silver slip dress with a tinsel halo on a thin wire that Cleo found in a Christmas box at her dad's house and a set of wings she already had from past costumes. Sophie drew a thin line of glitter at each of her eyes. "Saint Tabitha," Sophie announced, handing her a glass of cheap prosecco. "Patron of getting yourself into situations."

"I'm an angel."

"Same thing."

The phone buzzed on the table. Ten minutes, was all he wrote.

Sophie and Cleo saw the look pass over her face. Cleo looked her up and down and said, "Michael's gonna combust when he sees you in that."

"I'll be at the party," Tab promised. 

"Sure you will," Sophie said, kissing her cheek. "Text us."

Outside, Halloween had the city up on its feet. There were kids in capes, a man in a skeleton onesie smoking a cigarette outside a corner shop. Fake blood down bare legs in the cold. A black BMW idled at the kerb; she recognised the shape of him even with his face in shadow. He didn't get out. When she got in, he pulled away before the door had shut properly.

Michael kept both hands on the wheel. The line of his jaw was set in a way she'd learned not to try to soften. He headed towards the river, then north along Dock Road where the cranes cut the skyline into hard shapes. Past the sugar wharf, past a yard stacked with pallets, past the smell of the water when the wind was strong. He turned into a car park that looked over the river and killed the engine. For a moment the only sound was metal cooling.

He looked at her outfit then, one slow pass, and for a second his mouth quirked before he rearranged it into a line.

"Angel," he said flatly.

"It was this or a cardboard bat."

"Right," he said. "Say what you need to say."

"I'm sorry." She felt her throat go at the honesty of it. "For the restaurant. I knew what I was doing, and I know it was wrong. And for the warehouse party. I swear I won't do it again."

He stared ahead. "I drove like a dickhead to get to you the other night. My head was gone at the thought of you getting crushed in a door. You can't do that to me, Tab."

"I know," she whispered. "I won't."

He tapped the steering wheel with two fingers, a habit he had when he was thinking his way around a feeling. "Tell me straight. Is this a phase for you? A kick against your parents? You pick me 'cause I'm the opposite of Henry and you get to feel wild for a bit?"

"No," she said firmly. "I picked you because I wanted you. I still do." She swallowed. "But I did use you that night. I wanted to watch my mother's face when she saw you. I'm ashamed of that."

He nodded once, a small concession to the truth in it. "Right."

They sat with that for a minute. Kids let off a firework two streets over; the flare went up ugly and brief and died.

Tab took a breath. "There's something else. Cleo told me some things. About the Phelans."

He went still.

"I didn't go digging past headlines," she said quickly. "I don't want to know that way. But I need to ask—" She squeezed her fingers together in her lap, bracing. "What you do. Could being near you put me in the crosshairs?"

He looked at the windscreen for a long second. Then back.

"I'll keep your name out of the wrong people's mouths. But you have to do your part. Don't go looking for trouble in daft places, and I'll make sure it doesn't find you."

She nodded. "I can do that."

He let out a breath and finally let himself look at her properly – the silver slip, the stupid halo band, bare legs in October. His jaw flexed; his eyes dropped and he dragged them back to the glass. "Course you'd turn up dressed like that," he muttered. 

"It wasn't for you."

"Tell them wings that." A tiny, unbelieving shake of his head. She smiled inwardly. "Where you off to?"

"A house party. It's tame. Sophie's there."

He weighed it. "Fine. Don't walk home on your own. Text me when you want to leave."

"Could I..." She found the seam of courage and tugged. "Could I sleep at yours after? Just sleep."

He stared forward, then at her, then forward. "Yeah," he said at last.

He drove her to Izzy's, stopped under a tree that hadn't yet shed all its leaves. She didn't get out straight away.

"Michael?"

"What?”

"Thank you for coming the other night."

He kept his hands on the wheel. "Text me later," he said, and that was the end of it for now.

**

The party had normal music and normal people and a bowl of crisps going stale on a cobweb tablecloth. Sophie wore a pair of cardboard bat wings and a skin-tight PVC catsuit. Cleo had fangs and a glittery stream of red at the corner of her mouth. The kitchen was too warm; the living room too loud. People said, "Angel!" and put their arms round her for photos.

She lasted forty minutes before the thought of sliding into the dark of his flat and sleeping near him was so bright she couldn't resist it any longer.

"I'm going," she told Cleo in her ear. 

"You're glowing like a sinner," Cleo grinned. "Go on then. Tell him I said behave."

Tab downed two glasses of vodka punch for liquid courage, texted on my way and ordered a cab that took nine minutes and felt like thirty.

The lift to his floor hummed on the way up. At his door, she hesitated for a second and then knocked; he'd left it on the latch. The flat was dim except for the kitchen light. He stood by the counter in a black T-shirt, eyes flicking to the halo still absurdly perched in her hair.

"Take that off," he said.

She did. She set it on the table, stepped out of her coat. The slip held on by hope and straps. She stood and let him look. His gaze moved over her – dress, legs, wings – and the part of her that had been jittering all evening went still. Tell me what to do, she thought. Please.

He didn't move for a second, and then he did, the anger not gone but repurposed. He came to her and put his hands on her shoulders, thumbs along her collarbones, slid them up her neck until they rested under her jaw. He tilted her face up and kissed her, slow at first, until her mouth opened to him and the week's worth of restraint fell to the floor with her coat.

"Say it again," he murmured. "Tell me you're sorry."

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

She swallowed. The desire was almost a physical itch under her skin. She wanted his hands on her, wanted to earn them. He waited. "For scaring you. For blindsiding you." A breath. "I'm sorry."

"Look at me." She did. His thumb brushed her bottom lip. "Again."

"I'm sorry."

"Tell me you won't do it again."

"I won't."

"Properly."

"I won't do it again."

He brought his thumb back to her mouth and this time she took it in, teeth grazing the pad. "Good girl."

She let him turn her, a hand at her hip, until her shoulder blades touched the wall. His mouth found her throat, spare hand skimming the edge of her thigh. She liked the neatness of it – ask, answer, reward – the way her body softened just because he'd said so.

"Bed," he said, light pressure at her wrist. She went. The room was warmer than last time, or maybe that was just her. She stood between his knees and cupped his jaw, feeling the roughness there. He kissed the inside of her wrist; her pulse fluttered. 

"This outfit," he said, shaking his head. He trailed a finger down the silk. "You should dress up for me more often."

"It wasn't—"

He grabbed her hips before she could finish and pulled her onto his lap, knees bracketing his. The slip rode high; the wings bent uselessly and then fell to the floor. 

"There goes my good behaviour," she said with a quick, nervous laugh.

He looked at the crumpled wings, then at her shoulder where the strap had slipped. "Too late for that."

He nudged the strap back with a knuckle and drew her close, steadying her with his forearm. The other hand took its time – the inside of her knee, the slow slide inward – so she could feel it coming. When his fingers pressed the silk of her knickers she took a sharp breath and buried her face in his neck.

"Let me," he said, voice low.

She bit her lip and nodded. He eased the fabric aside and stroked her once – bare, slick – and waited. She shivered. Pressure, then patience: slow circles that made her hips tilt. He held her with his forearm and worked her with his hand, finding the right spot and staying exactly there until her breath got quicker.

"Tell me what you want," he said, pulling back to look at her.

"Michael—"

"Tell me."

She shook her head, tucked her face against his shirt so he couldn't see her blush. 

His thumb slid where she was most sensitive, the tip of a finger slipping inside – just enough to make her gasp – then in again, deeper. She felt herself tighten around him as she adjusted. "This?"

"Yes," she managed. She let out a shaky breath. He kissed the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the soft place below her ear.

"Eyes on me," he said quietly.

She tried and failed and tried again, breath catching, hands fisting in his shirt. He guided her with his palm, let her take over the rhythm when she started to move on her own. Heat came up low in her belly. She could think of nothing but the place where his hand worked, fingers curling inside her, the rough of his stubble when he nuzzled her throat. She rolled her hips hard once; his grip tightened.

"That's it," he said, almost a breath. "There you go."

It came on fast. She went still against him, then shuddered, fingernails biting into his shoulders. He kept her there, working her gently through it, until the tremor ran out and the sounds she made turned into small, helpless breaths. Only then did he ease off. 

He pressed his forehead to hers, kissed her softly. He was still hard against her thigh; his palm at her back had loosened, but his jaw was tight. She could feel the memory of the restaurant and the warehouse lodged stubbornly between them.

"Michael," she murmured. She ran her thumb along his cheekbone. "Let me show you how sorry I am."

He caught her wrist and shook his head. "Not tonight."

"I want to." Then, softer: "Please."

He searched her face; whatever he saw loosened his grip. His hand slid to the back of her neck.

"Alright," he said, rougher. "Come here."

She knelt between his legs, silk whispering as it hitched. He watched her as she unfastened his jeans and eased them down. Her hands skimmed his thighs and paused, uncertain, gaze flicking up to meet his. 

He dragged his thumb across her lips slowly. She knew then, with a burst of satisfaction, that he was already imagining how her mouth would feel around him. She kissed the soft skin above his waistband, the inside of his thigh where she could feel his pulse. The last of her nerves disappeared. 

When she wrapped her lips around him he exhaled hard through his nose, one hand fisting the sheet, the other tight in her hair. She tried pressure, less and more, watched his face, the way his fingers curled in the cotton. 

"Christ, Tabs—" His hips twitched; he caught himself, jaw set. "Steady."

She eased, then took him again, slower, deeper, her hand working where her mouth couldn't reach. His grip tightened. She didn't stop. She kept her eyes on his until his breath stalled, the sound he made as he came catching in his teeth.

For a second she rested her forehead against his thigh, breathing, tasting salt and the sweat on his skin. "Come here," he managed, dragging her up into a kiss. 

She laughed once against his mouth, giddy, and he caught the sound with another kiss. He lay back, pulling her with him until she was tucked along his side. Her heartbeat thundered under his palm.

"No more daftness," he said into her hair.

"No more surprises."

He reached past her, killed the light, and found her hand in the dark, their fingers lacing. "Proper angel, you," he murmured. 

She smiled. Last time she'd stayed at his flat, he'd taken the sofa and left space between them; tonight there wasn't any. She pressed her face to the warm place under his jaw and let herself sleep.

Chapter Text

The email came just after ten, subject line so bland it took her a second to register the sender. Harcourt. Essay feedback attached. She opened it braced for a polite mauling and sat back hard when she saw the number: 69.

One off a first.

"Okay," she said to the empty flat, then again because the word felt good in her mouth. "Okay."

Sophie and Cleo were out. The November sky had gone bright and improbable, the kind of blue you get for one day and then not again for a month. Sun pushed through the big living room windows; dust hung in the air. She made coffee, put on a jumper she'd painted in before – ruined cuffs, a smear of sap green that had never washed out – and pulled the easel from behind the sofa.

She hadn't painted properly in months. Sketches, yes; lecture doodles; a fast ink of Michael's jaw in the margin of a reading list that she'd covered with her hand when someone leaned over. But not this. Not oil. Not the slow, thick kind that lets you change your mind without punishing you for it.

The box still smelled like her childhood: turpentine, linseed, old metal. She set out the colours in the order she always had – titanium white, Naples yellow, yellow ochre, raw umber, ultramarine, alizarin, phthalo blue. She held the palette knife the way the teacher at school had shown her when she was eleven and hadn't yet worked out why letters jumped lines and arguments slipped out of shape but colours did exactly what she asked. "You see it, so paint what you see," he'd said then, kind and pragmatic. "The reading will come."

She stretched a new canvas. The sound of the staples gave her a quiet thrill. First thin underpainting – ochre and ultramarine knocked back to a neutral, brushed on with more solvent than was sensible. Loose marks for the dock cranes she could see in her head even with the curtains closed. The river's long stretch. The way lights sit on water and wobble. She worked wet into wet, letting the paint slip then hold, finding edges with the knife and then losing them again.

Something unlocked, and she felt herself relax into it, everything else melting away except the oil on the canvas. The flat warmed; the sun moved slowly along the floorboards and onto her shins. She thought of nothing and then of everything at once: the 69; Michael's breath on her cheek in the dark; the stupid halo band on the table; Cleo's laugh; her mother's mouth when she'd said get yourself checked. Her hands kept going. The surface started to become a place.

When she stopped for water, she realised she was smiling. She took another canvas out and drew without measuring – the angle of his window from memory, the way the docks fill the glass and make his flat feel like it's parked in a view. Then she blocked in a study of his hands, not his face – she wasn't brave enough for that. The set of his wrist bone, the veins that lift when he turns a key, how careful his hands are when they're angry.

She worked until the sun slid off the wall and the light went cold again. She cleaned brushes properly for once – rags into a jam jar, palette scraped down.

A knock came, then the door opened on the chain and Cleo's eye appeared in the gap.

"It's me," she said, voice too bright. Tab flipped the chain. Cleo had her hood up, hands jammed into the pocket of an oversized hoodie. She spotted the easel before she'd finished pulling the door shut.

"Oh, hello, talent."

"You're meant to text."

"I did." Cleo flashed a screen full of unreads, kicked off her trainers in the same motion, and crossed to the window. She stood in the sun stripe like a lizard. Up close, her eyes had that glassy, too-awake look. "Anyway, I've been sacked."

Tab blinked. "What?"

"The burrito lot." Cleo turned away from the window. "Manager says I'm not a culture fit. Which means I told a lad to stop calling me darlin' while I was rolling his tea up like a carpet. Also there's forty quid gone from the till on a night I was on. It wasn't me. He knows it wasn't me. But it's tidy to say it is."

Tab put the kettle on as if that might fix things. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," Cleo said, folding herself into the sofa. "I'll pick up something else. Just...I've got bills. I'm not crying about it," she added, as though someone had accused her.

"You're allowed to cry," Tab said.

"Later," Cleo said briskly. "When I've blagged a shift somewhere. My ma would call it character-building."

"Can't your dad help at all?"

"He can't pay for me to swan around and pretend to learn about the nineteenth century. Fern needs shoes. We're not all made of money, Tab," she said, slightly acidic. 

"I know that."

"I mean— sorry. That sounded like a slap."

"It's alright," she said quickly, even though it stung. 

Tab made tea and put sugar in both without asking. Cleo took it and looked at the canvases while she blew on the surface.

"That's the docks," she said. "And that"—she tilted her head—"is a hand I recognise. Babe, you're finished."

"It's practice," Tab said, aware of the heat in her face.

"Practice my arse. You're gone for him. You painted his hands. That's, like, level ten."

Tab covered her grin with the mug. "It's just a present."

"Oh, we're at presents." Cleo's eyes warmed. "Good. Nice to see you happy."

"I could—" Tab started, then made herself go there. "If you need a bridge...I could lend you something."

Cleo's chin came up. "I don't want to be your charity case."

"I didn't mean—"

"I know you didn't." Cleo blew out a breath. "But you've never had to, have you? Borrow. Or choose between heating and the bus."

"I..." Tab felt her face go hot. "I've worked hard."

"Have you ever worked worked?" Cleo asked, not cruelly. She just seemed tired. "Like, a job."

"Not properly," Tab said and hated the sound of it. "I used to get up at six to muck out my horse every day."

Cleo stared, then gave a single, disbelieving laugh. "That's not the line you think it is, love."

Tab shut her eyes. "I know. I know. I just— I'm trying to say I'm not lazy."

"I never said you were." Cleo stood too fast for it to be casual. "I'm knackered and gutted and I'm being a cow. I need to sort my head."

"Cleo—"

"I'll message you later." She tugged her hood up, then stopped, hand on the door. "The hands one," she said, nodding at the canvas. "Keep it for a bit. Look at it in different light. Then give it him." A beat. "Don't put a ribbon on it. Men like him don't know what to do with ribbons."

The door shut with the careful click. Tab stared at the door and tried to sort the jumble of her feelings.

Her phone buzzed. Sophie: Fireworks Saturday, Sefton Park. Union are doing a bonfire. Come freeze your arse off x

She typed, I'm in. Then – because the feeling that had carried her all morning hadn't left, not even after the sting – she texted Michael before she could second-guess it.

Bonfire Saturday at Sefton Park. Come with me? Proper date.

She watched the three dots come and go, stomach tight.

Time?

7

Alright 

She wiped the yellow smear from her wrist and looked at what she'd made. Satisfaction rose in her chest, a warm glow of pride. The flat held the smell of oil and coffee and a day that had gone right in at least one way.

Chapter Text

Michael came to the flat before the bonfire. The buzzer rasped, and Sophie's "Hello, Michael" floated down the hall. Cleo yelled, "It's Baltic on the stairs – shut that door!".

Tab was in her room with the wardrobe open. He leaned on the doorframe first, then wandered in and lay on his back across her bed, hands laced behind his head. It put his shoulders level with her knees as she rummaged for tights that weren't laddered.

"Hi," she said and heard the smile in her voice.

"Alright."

He watched her pick a jumper, change her mind, pick another. She felt his attention the way you feel sun through glass. When she dropped down beside him to pull the tights on he reached, not quite thinking, and caught her ankle – warm, proprietary – and she had to sit very still for a breath.

"You're staring," she said.

"Course," he said. "You're worth looking at."

She leaned over and kissed him because all day she'd wanted to. He kissed back, hand sliding to the nape of her neck, thumb at her jaw. Tabitha thought of Halloween after the party, how his hand had slipped beneath her dress and known just what to do, how her body had ached for him. They both felt the pull of just-stay-then: shut the door, let the night go without them. She broke first, laughing against his mouth.

"Bonfire," she said, breathless. "If we're late Sophie will send a search party."

He groaned into her throat. "Five more minutes."

"Two."

They took three, then dragged themselves apart with the reluctance of people already thinking about later. He sat up and watched her plait her hair, watched her pull on a wool hat and then decide against it, watched her check the mirror and pull a face at herself.

"Can I ask you something?" she said, shrugging a jacket on.

"Go on."

"It's about Cleo." She told him about the burrito place, the missing forty pounds, the pride that bristled when Tab offered to lend money. "I thought I was being helpful and I think I made it worse. I keep putting my foot in it."

He lay there a second with his hands back behind his head, and then he let out a low laugh that wasn't unkind. "You don't know it, do you?"

"What?"

"Being skint." He tipped his chin towards the ceiling. "Not being able to say yes to a round. Saying no when your mates want you out and you just can't." He looked back at her. "Doesn't make you bad. Just means you don't know."

She felt the hot, stupid sting of being ignorant when she meant well. "I don't know what to say to her."

"Don't start with cash," he said. "Even if you've got it. Feels like charity, and she'll hate that. Sit with her while she applies for a job instead. Put the kettle on. Send her stuff that's actually decent – bar work where the boss isn't a gobshite, that kind of thing. If you order food, order too much by accident and tell her to help you out. Offer lifts when you can. And don't make speeches."

"I didn't make a speech," she argued.

He smirked. "You probably did, yeah." He reached and tugged the end of her plait softly. "You're handy, Tabitha. Just go quiet with it. She'll meet you halfway."

"Thank you," she said. 

He rolled to his feet in a single shift of muscle. "Come on. We'll be late."

They collected Sophie and Cleo on the way out. Sophie wore a red scarf and a matching coat that fastened with wooden toggles. Cleo's eyeliner was electric blue to match her fingerless gloves. She clocked Michael and put on her fake-posh voice: "Driver, if you would be so kind."

"In you get," he said, amused. They piled into the BMW like kids – Sophie fussing with her hat, Cleo calling shotgun and then offering it to Tab with a wink. He took them through the dark in a stream of cars heading the same way, wipers ticking, radio off.

Cleo leaned forward in her seat to look at him properly. "So then, Michael," she said, approving. "Taking our girl on a proper date. Nice one."

"Behave," Tab muttered.

"We're very proud," Sophie added, deadpan. "There will be a certificate."

Michael's mouth tipped into a wry smile. "Can't wait."

By the time the trees thinned and floodlights washed the grass, they were in Sefton Park. Students moved in chevrons of coats, while hi-vis stewards with radios waved people towards the field where the bonfire would be lit. The Palm House loomed glassy in the dark like a ship lit from within. Stalls did mulled cider and hot dogs, and there was a generator thrum behind the cheery signage.

They walked, slow in the crush, and Michael let his arm find the small of Tab's back. She felt herself lean without thinking, watched her breath curl white into the air.

By the path, a van sold toffee apples, pink-red under a heat lamp and a hand painted sign. "God," Tab said. "I haven't had one of those since I was little. Used to love them."

He peeled away without announcing it and came back with one. "Share," he said, pushing it into her hand. The sugar shell caught the light. She bit and it cracked loudly, the sour apple hitting after. She laughed with her mouth full. He took it and bit into it with a grin, then offered her the polished side. She took another bite, absurdly happy to be borrowing from his mouth.

"You two are disgusting," Cleo said cheerfully. "Give us a bite."

They let her. Sophie was peering at a map of the field on her phone. "If we stand there," she said, pointing, "we'll be out of the smoke but still see the catherine wheels."

"Lead on," Tab said.

They found a spot near a rope line where logs had been dragged into rough seats. Tab and Michael sat; Sophie and Cleo flanked them. The wood was cold through tights. Michael's hand found both of hers and bracketed them inside his coat pocket, a warm envelope. The bonfire-to-be sat in the centre of the field made of pallets and stacked wood, an effigy tucked so deep you wouldn't know he was there until the flames took him.

"Nick's birthday is tonight," Tab said, watching a steward fuss with a traffic cone. "My half-brother. Bonfire night baby. He always got fireworks with his cake."

"What do you lot do for it?" Michael asked. "Back home."

"Used to be a whole thing when we were kids," she said. "Grown men arguing about which fireworks were decent. Daddy would do a display in the garden and insist on strict safety protocols while my mother handed out glasses of whisky for the adults. Nick loved it. We'd write our names with sparklers and pretend it was magic." She glanced at him. "When's yours?"

"Sixteenth of March."

"Almost St Patrick's Day."

"Mm." He shifted. 

"Do you milk it anyway – green pints and all?"

"I don't really do birthdays." He squinted at the next firework. "Christmas is better. Everyone's fed, no one kicks off."

"No one kicks off at Christmas?" She looked up at him, amused. "What utopia is this?"

"In my head," he said dryly. 

"Who do you spend it with?" She knew the answer and asked anyway.

"My ma," he said simply. "Then later I'll go and see the Phelans."

Tab nodded, squeezed his hands.

"You must have had some nice birthdays," Michael said. 

She held his gaze for a second, then looked back at the pile of wood. "I used to think my seventh was the best," she said. "I got my first pony." His eyebrows did a quick, predictable climb. "He had a ridiculous name. Montague. Monty."

"Course he did." He laughed.

"Don't be mean." She shoved his shoulder playfully. "I loved him more than anything." 

His laugh faded. "What happened?"

"He died," she said, the words hitting the cold air and staying there. He turned to her properly. "My fault. I was twelve. Took him out with a girl from the yard and we stopped in a field and had a picnic. He ate something he shouldn't have. Next day he looked off and my mother still made me go to a show because there were people there she wanted to see, and during the round he—" she put a hand low on her own stomach "—he folded. They said it was a plant, poisonous. Yew, maybe. I still don't know. I just remember the sound of him hitting the poles and my mother saying don't make a scene." She kept looking at the wood so she could finish. "I didn't ride for a year after."

He shifted closer and said, quietly, "I'm sorry. That's a bad thing to carry."

She nodded. He lifted her hands to his mouth and breathed warmth into them. They stayed like that a moment, the sound of the field coming up around them – snippets of conversation carrying on the cold, the odd shriek of glee from somewhere by the food stalls.

"Right," said a man in hi-vis into a megaphone, and the crowd gave one of those communal shuffles. A flare went; the bonfire took like it had been waiting. Flame moved up through the cheap wood. Someone whooped, then smoke drifted and the whole field leaned away.

"Here we go," Sophie said, satisfied. Cleo clapped once in the pure, daft joy of something big catching fire.

They watched. She watched him, the light and shadow making and remaking his face, the neat focus he brought to everything. He looked at the fire like a piece of machinery with parts to understand.

"Lancaster," someone said behind them, and the tone told her even before she turned. Henry. He had a sensible coat and a neatly tied scarf with his initials stitched into the fabric. With him were three boys in nice knitwear. "You made it."

"Hi," she said, genuinely pleased. "Good night for it."

"Perfect," he said, crouching beside the log so he wasn't talking down to anyone. 

"How's your week?" she asked.

"Library, library, library. I can hear the printers in my sleep," he said, his eyes flicking once to Michael's hand over hers in the pocket, then back with careful neutrality. "Enjoy tonight, Tab. Stay safe."

One of Henry's friends – tall, with a jaw like an unkind sculpture – had been looking at Michael as if trying to place him. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, closed it again. They drifted off with polite goodbyes.

Michael leaned in, voice for her alone. "He's got a thing for you."

"I've told him we're friends," she said softly. She thought about adding I only want you but held it back; she was pleased by the trace of jealousy she detected, by the way he'd angled his body closer. 

His thumb pressed once on her knuckles in her pocket. "Good."

The first rockets went up – white, white, green, a gold that hung and then fell like shattered glass. Tab felt the old, childish pleasure of it, like biting into the apple earlier. Michael looked up with his mouth relaxed, the line gone from his jaw. She wanted to put the picture somewhere safe for later.

A heavy-set man in a puffer with a football top under it was doing a tour along the rope line like he wanted to be seen. He spotted Cleo and veered towards her. You could feel the change in her body before he arrived: shoulders going high, chin coming up, that quick calculation of whether to be friendly or hard.

"Alright, girl," he said with a nasty grin. "My phone's been quiet."

"Evening, Kane," Cleo said flatly. "I told you, I'll sort it."

"Yeah? Where's my money, then?" He leaned in, faux-intimate. "'Cause dates are dates, you know. I'm not your ma." His hand landed on her sleeve, casual and not at the same time. "We can do it friendly."

Michael stood. He put himself between them, and the cold around their small group seemed to intensify. Tab felt something like electricity ride up her spine.

"Keep your hands to yourself," he said, voice low.

The guy in the puffer blinked, laughed too quickly. "Big man, is it?"

"You'll get your money," Michael said. "Later. You won't speak to her tonight. You won't put hands on her anywhere. Now fuck off."

The other man – Kane – glanced around for back-up and found none. Whatever bravado he had didn't survive the way Michael didn't blink. Recognition worked its way over his face. "Sound," he said eventually, light and false, and sloped off into the crowd. 

Cleo blew out a breath she'd been holding for a minute. "Nice one," she said quietly. "He's all mouth."

"Yeah," Michael said, like he didn't quite agree. The anger was still there, banked; Tab could feel it like heat on a closed oven. He put his hand on Cleo's shoulder and squeezed once, the way you do with a sister. "Text me if he tries anything tonight."

Cleo nodded and looked at her shoes. "You're a good lad," she said.

Sophie touched Cleo's arm and asked the same question Tab was thinking. "What does he want money for?"

Cleo's mouth went flat. "Nothing," she said. "Don't worry about it, Soph."

Tab bit her cheek and kept her eyes on the fire. Sophie, reading the room, forced a bright smile. "Right. I'm getting a drink before the queue turns biblical." She vanished into the crowd.

They watched a stack of pallets give way, sparks jumping and dying. By the time Sophie threaded back through with a plastic cup and a handsome man by her side, her worry had given way to a grin. "I'll bring him back," she said to Tab with false innocence. "So if you could find somewhere else to sleep..."

"Can I stay at yours?" Tab asked Michael under the crackle.

"Yeah," he said. "If I beat you there, door'll be on." He hesitated, then added, "Key's on the fuse box if I'm not. Top one."

"Okay." She tried not to look visibly thrilled.

"Youse are making me feel dead single," Cleo said in passing, and then, softer so only Tab could hear it, "I'm sorry for snapping. Other day. I was being a cow."

"It's fine," Tab said and hugged her hard. "We're alright."

"We are." Cleo looked away, blinking fast. "I'll sort the Kane thing. I will."

"I know," Tab said. "If you need me, say."

They walked for a while around the lake where dark water gathered the fireworks and wobbled them; past the Palm House where couples took photos with faces blown out by screen light; under trees that kept their leaves late, copper and tired. Michael's hand stayed at her back or her pocket or wrapped around her fingers. She kept finding small reasons to lean closer.

His phone went off. He looked at the screen and you could watch his face do one thing then another: ease, then tighten. He let it buzz out. It started again within a minute. He held her look, apologetic without words.

"Go," she said. "I'll walk with Sophie."

"I'll be quick."

He stepped away into the shadow by the bandstand, and his mouth went into that undemonstrative line it took when he was listening hard. He spoke low, then lower. She couldn't hear the words but she could read his body: a held breath, a glance at the ground for patience, a quick nod. He came back quickly.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

"Work," he said, and she knew that was all he was going to give her. He brushed his thumb along her cheekbone. "I've got to go."

"You'll meet me at yours?"

"I will."

She wanted to kiss him. She could tell from the way he was looking at her that he wanted it too. They didn't make a show of it with Sophie and Cleo and everyone else around. He put his hand at the back of her head and pressed his mouth to her hair, in the bit where the plait began.

"Be careful," she said.

"Always." He looked over her shoulder at Henry, who was watching without watching. "Play nice," he added, with a ghost of a grin.

"Play nice," she echoed. "Drive like a—"

"Not tonight," he said. "I'll be sensible." He flicked his eyes at Sophie. "Don't let her bring a murderer home."

"He's called Tom and he studies mechanical engineering," Sophie said, appearing at Tab's elbow like a conjuror. "Murderers don't do STEM."

"That's exactly who does STEM," Cleo said, deadpan.

Michael laughed, squeezed Tab's hand once and was gone, cutting through the crowd without brushing a sleeve.

They watched the last volleys – big golds and silvers that hung and broke and came down soft as ash. The bonfire kept its core red, new wood collapsing inward with the perfect sound of timber giving up. Henry drifted back to stand near Tab, hands deep in his pockets. "I don't like that man you're with," he said mildly.

"I know," she said, equally mild.

"I'm not moralising," he added. "I'll walk you to the gate."

"You can walk me to the road," she said. "After that I'll be fine."

Sophie was giddy about her successful pull and Cleo had recovered her swagger. They made plans in quick, overlapping lines – chips or no chips, taxi or bus. At the road, Henry's friends muttered something and peeled off. Henry paused before following and turned back to Tab. 

"See you in Harcourt's tutorial," she said.

"You'd better," he said, softening.

Alone on the pavement for a minute, Tab let the night settle. Woodsmoke clung to her hair and scarf; her hands smelled of sugar from the apple and of him from his pockets. The sky was the odd, lidless black you only get over a park. She felt good. Not high, not reckless. Warm through to the centre.

She ordered a cab, made cheerful small talk with the driver. She climbed the stairs to Michael's place with a pleasant ache in her feet. He wasn't back yet. She found the key where he'd said, on top of the fuse box in the hallway. She let herself in.

The flat was as before: long windows, docks framed within them like paintings, the neatness of a life she was still only guessing at. She turned a lamp on and stood at the glass, watched a crane's small red light blink, blink, blink.

Five minutes later, headlights swept the ceiling and the lock turned. Michael came in with a tired look on his face and the smell of smoke still stitched to him. She crossed to him without words. He put his hand at her waist and the other at her neck and let his forehead rest against hers.

"Hi," she said.

"Alright."

"How was—"

"Don't ask," he said. "And I won't have to lie."

"Okay." She smiled. "Tea?"

"Please."

They stood in the quiet while the kettle worked, his gaze following her around the kitchen. When she handed him a mug, he put it down untouched and hauled her in and kissed her like he'd been thinking about it all the way back from wherever he'd been.

Later, when the mugs had gone cold and the city had dialled itself down to harbour lights and the odd lorry, Tab lay awake listening to Michael's steady breathing. She twisted and untwisted a strand of his hair around her fingers and wondered, in the last few blinks of consciousness before sleep, how she had ever lived without this.

Chapter Text

In the fog of sleep Tab felt the mattress dip and a mouth brush her temple. "I've got to go out," Michael whispered. "I'll be back." The door clicked softly.

She lay there and listened for the sounds of the night and found it strangely quiet, the distant whir of traffic almost undetectable. When sleep didn't come, she got up and padded to the kitchen in Michael's T-shirt. She flipped the kitchen light, and the docks came up in the glass: cranes steadying the sky, water a darker black. The clock on the oven said 04:07.

In the cupboard above the kettle she found four different types of coffee: Italian ground in a bag sealed with a paper clip, a dark roast with a zip lock, a jar of instant for emergencies, an unlabelled bag he'd decanted and sealed. She imagined him deliberating over which type to buy in the supermarket and smiled at the ordinariness of it. There were four mugs, all uniform except one with a Liverpool FC logo and a chipped handle, and a tray with sugar packets palmed from cafes. In the drawer: batteries, elastic bands, two rolls of black tape, three Zippos, a short pencil and a folded paper map of the city with a crease worn into it where the docks meet the ring road. Beside the sink, a neat bowl of coins and keys: one stamped with a fob, one unmarked.

She padded barefoot through the rooms. It pleased her, having the place to herself for a while. Not for snooping, she told herself. For learning. The way you learn a person by the objects they think are ordinary.

The spare room wasn't spare. A heavy bag hung from a bracket, dull red leather scuffed along one side. The ceiling plate had been reinforced with a metal spreader. Tape and hand wraps lay in a loose tumble on a chair, the last session abandoned half-tidy. She held a wrap, felt the stretch and the stiffness where sweat had set it, imagined him winding his hands, thumb first, then knuckles, the small private ritual before you let something hit back.

A chest of drawers stood against the wall, white and flat-fronted, the kind you buy when you think you'll only be somewhere a year. She opened the top and found, pushed to the back behind receipts and a dead biro, a cheap black phone. Beside it: a grip-seal bag of SIM cards. She touched the corner and left it where it was, heart working harder than it should. 

Under a loop of old hand wrap lay a 6x4 print, its gloss dulled at the edges. Three men stood shoulder to shoulder under strip lights: Michael with fresh wraps and a flushed cheek; an older, thickset man in a dark suit with his hand settled on Michael's shoulder; a younger dark-haired man grinning, knuckles scabbed. A ring rope cut the frame on the diagonal. 

She'd known the name long before the face. Ronnie. He looked, in the photograph, almost ordinary. She turned the photo over. In pencil: Vauxhall ABC – Charity Night 2016. Ronnie / Michael / Jamie. She put the photograph back exactly as it had been and eased the drawer shut.

In the bathroom she pressed the spray of his aftershave to the inside of her wrist. The cabinet was the neatest thing in the place: cotton wool pads in a glass, toothpaste, shaving foam, two razors. At the back, tucked where it would not get reached for by accident, a single tampon still in its cardboard. She stared at it for a beat. Lifted it, turned it in her fingers, put it back exactly where it had been.

Don't make a story if there isn't one. Still, the thought persisted: a girl in this mirror, her hairband on the side, laughter in the steam of a shared shower. Before me. Of course before me.

She switched lights off behind her and slid back into the warm Michael had left. She didn't sleep. She lay on her side and watched the window turn from night to almost morning. A key turned in the front door just after six.

He eased in, shoes off in the hall. Then the bed moved and the mattress accepted his weight. He came in under the duvet with the cold on him, tucked himself behind her and set his mouth to her shoulder. She rolled over so they were face to face. In the thin grey light, his eyes looked darker.

"Are you..." She kept her voice small. "Are you seeing other women?"

His brow pulled in the way it did when he didn't understand a question on purpose. "What's put that in your head?"

She breathed once, braced. "There's a tampon in your cabinet."

His body went still; she felt him stiffen. "You've been going through my stuff? We said—"

"It wasn't like that. I was just looking around. I wanted to know you."

He held her eyes. Whatever else he might have said, he swallowed. "No. I'm not seeing anyone else." His voice lost the sharpness as quickly as it had come. "Course I'm not. If there's something in there, it's old. Didn't know it was there."

"When was the last time you had a woman here?" 

He shifted closer, settled her hand under his T-shirt on the heat of his back like he meant to anchor her with it. "Few months," he said. "Before you."

"Was it serious?"

"Not like this." The line slid through her and left warmth behind.

She touched his jaw. "How many people have you been with?"

He smiled with his mouth shut, eyes softening. "You want numbers now?"

"I don't know," she said, embarrassed. "Maybe. I'm not trying to catch you out."

"A handful," he said. "Nothing that stuck. One that went a couple of years. Proper, but we ran out." He tipped his head. "You?"

"One." The word was embarrassing even to her. "Seventeen. I wasn't sure I wanted it. It just happened. After, I felt...wrong. Like I'd been put down in the wrong place."

His hand slid into her hair and stayed. "It won't be like that with us," he said quietly.

"I know."

He kissed her softly. When he pulled back, he yawned and hid it in her shoulder. 

"Come here," she said and tucked him against her, his head under her chin, one leg hooking both of hers. His breath went long and even within a minute. She lay awake a while and counted the slow beats of the city beginning: a van, a door, a gull that couldn't be bothered yet to be urgent.

By nine the light had found them. He surfaced and groaned and put an arm over his face. Tab made coffee and set it beside the bed. 

Michael caught her wrist and pressed it to his mouth. "You're an angel."

She smirked. "I know."

They took the morning apart without speaking much – her in his T-shirt making toast with too much butter; him at the window, one hand on the glass, the other around the mug, looking out like the view was something to be checked rather than admired. He had that post-night stillness that wasn't sleepy so much as careful.

"Are you working today?" she asked.

"Later." He tilted his head at the docks. "Come with me tonight."

"Where?"

He smiled properly now. "There's something I want to show you."

**

Tabitha went home to shower and change and spent the day in lectures she couldn't quite concentrate on. By late evening she had done nothing but sit in rooms and think about five in the morning.

Michael picked her up late, after eleven, and drove north without telling her where. Up past streets with names she didn't know – houses with tiny gardens all doing their best, corner shops lit too bright after dark. He turned off near a row of shuttered units, slipped down a service road that looked like a mistake, and nosed into an abandoned multistorey where the pay machines were dead and the cameras pointed at the floor. They went up a ramp that smelled of damp concrete and brake dust. At the top level, the wind met them hard when they stepped out.

They climbed the shallow slope to the outer wall and there it was: the whole of the city, lit and laid out, the river a run of black water, the cranes like careful black stitches against it, the great bulk of the Anglican sat in its own night, the business towers at the Pier Head a series of tidy rectangles, a scatter of floodlights from a pitch somewhere beyond the terraces. Behind them the empty decks of the car park echoed their footsteps; in front, Liverpool glimmered, alive.

"This is where I go when my head's too loud," he said. 

He came in close, slid his hands into her coat pockets and fitted himself along her back. His chin found her shoulder; his breath warmed the side of her neck.

"Show me," she said.

When he lifted her hand, she felt her pulse accelerate under his fingertips.

"There," he said, sighting along her index finger. "Princes Dock. That light on the crane's always out. Past it – Stanley. Good scran if you know where to look. There – Palm House. Daft in daylight, fairy tale now." His mouth was near enough that the words touched her ear. He moved her hand slowly, on and on. "There – my ma's. Too dark to see now. There – the tunnel spits the cars out. Don't be there late unless you have to. There – Otterspool. Walks."

His grip tightened. The city noise seemed to thin. He held her hand steady over a darker patch and kept it there long enough for her to feel the message in his hold before he spoke.

"And there," he said, softer, "that's a place you stay away from."

He lowered her hand but didn't let go. She could feel the weight of the warning in the way he kept their fingers closed, the way his chest stayed pressed to her back like he'd put himself between her and whatever that patch of night meant.

"Okay," she said, throat dry. "I'll keep clear. I won't go near it. I won't ask."

He nodded against her temple and, after a beat, eased his hands but kept one of her fingers hooked with his, as if to say: good.

She looked where he'd pointed and felt something click into a map she could carry. Guildford was hedges squared off and polite dark; here the night smelled of water and metal, and light didn't hide what it touched. Her mother would have said it was bleak. It didn't feel bleak to her; it felt like a place with possibilities. 

They sat on the low wall, concrete cold through her jeans, his shoulder to hers. A ferry horn dragged across the water and fell quiet. Two floors down, wind worked a loose sign and made it knock. She thought of the tampon she'd found, the neat cabinet, his hand closing around hers when he'd said it won't be like that. The way he had stood between Cleo and Kane.

"I was thinking earlier," she said. "About what you want from this – from me, I mean."

He made a small sound that could have been a laugh. "Does everything have to be transactional?"

"I didn't mean it like that." She watched the river's slow shift. "I mean you're older, aren't you?"

He turned his head a little, studying her profile in the dark. "That bother you?"

She shook her head. "No. I like it." Her cheeks warmed, so she added quickly, "Twenty-six. Old enough to hire a car. And you can buy alcohol in America."

The corner of his mouth moved. "Old enough to know when to say stop."

She smiled into the dark. "And when not to?"

He let the question hang, long enough for her pulse to jump.

"When you listen."

"I'm not great at that."

"I've noticed." His fingers found her wrist, thumb slow over her pulse. "We'll work on it."

She shifted closer, put her head on his shoulder. They watched a plane take off from Speke, a tiny light cutting through the dark sky.

"This place," she said. "Can we keep it ours?"

"Yeah," he said. "Ours."

Chapter Text

A week later, Cleo pitched up mid-morning with the energy of a small weather front and a pink Guerilla Girls tote bag. She stole the warm mug from in front of Sophie and glanced at the canvases propped by the radiator.

"Look at you," she said. "Little Turner."

"Absolutely not," Tab said, but she didn't move the study of Michael's hands from the bookcase. She liked it there – the knuckles half-shadowed, the brushwork rougher than she meant it to be. Every time she passed she caught herself stopping to look, her chest pulling a little tighter.

"Trial shift tomorrow," Cleo added, dropping into a chair. "Duke Street. But I'm still firing off applications. Not putting all my eggs in some lad's rota, you know."

"Do you want help with your CV?" Tab asked, careful with the offer.

Cleo hesitated a half-second, then nodded. "Go on then. Make me sound good."

They worked at the table, knees touching, Cleo dictating chaos, Tab arranging it into bullet points that didn't lie but did look after her. She replaced banter with customer rapport, dead boss a knobhead with handled difficult situations with calm. Sophie pretended not to watch and slid biscuits across without breaking her typing rhythm.

"Transferable skills," Tab said, typing. "De-escalation. Cash handling. Shift lead."

"De-escalation?" Cleo snorted. "I told Kane to wind his neck in the other night."

"Maybe don't put that," Tab said, smiling.

By one, Cleo had three clean versions that she'd emailed to herself. She stood, smoothed her hoodie. "Nice one."

After she'd gone, the flat felt full of her anyway – the lidless laugh, the red lipstick prints on the mug. Tab washed the cup, dried it, set it back. Then she checked the time again.

She'd texted her parents the night before – Can we talk properly tomorrow? – and her mother had replied in a minute: Yes, darling. Seven. Her chest had been tight since.

She moved the little study an inch to the left so the light caught the knuckle better. Not centre stage, but not hidden. She made tea; she didn't drink it. Sophie looked over the top of her laptop and read her like a road sign.

"You've got this," she said. "Don't get wound up."

"I won't," Tab said, though her palms were damp. She took the call on the sofa, laptop balanced on the coffee table, painting just inside the frame over her right shoulder. Her own reflection on the black screen made her feel twelve again, waiting for exam results to be read out.

Her mother's face came up first, well lit, composed, the good pearls. "Tabitha." Her father leaned in from one side, a hand coming to rest on Rosemary's chair back.

"Hi," Tab said. "Thanks for making time."

"We always have time," her father said. A pause. "We haven't spoken properly since the other night."

"No," Tab said. "We haven't."

"We were—" her father began.

"—humiliated," Rosemary finished crisply. "You blindsided us. You humiliated yourself. You humiliated that man."

Michael, Tab thought, pulse accelerating. She lifted her chin. "I didn't humiliate him."

"You dragged him into a family dinner you knew he would not enjoy, and you threw the word boyfriend at your parents like a grenade," Rosemary said. "If that isn't humiliation, it's something extremely adjacent."

Tab breathed in through her nose. She'd rehearsed versions of this, and none of them felt any less raw now it was happening. "I shouldn't have surprised you," she said. "It was unkind. I wanted you to meet him, and I did it badly."

Rosemary's mouth softened. "Thank you."

"I mean it," Tab said. "I'm not doing that again."

"Good," her mother said, and in the tiny pause after the word was the rest: now stop it.

Her father leaned in a little more. "We've been talking," he said. "We think the sensible thing would be a...pause. A cooling-off. You've barely started term. You're under a great deal of pressure already."

"I'm fine."

"You don't sound it," Rosemary said. "You sound caught. Between whatever this is and your work."

Tab kept her voice level. "My work is going well. I got a sixty-nine on Harcourt's essay."

Her father brightened, seized on safe ground. "That's very good."

"It is," Rosemary agreed. "I'd like you to put your attention there. Keep your head down this term."

"My head is down," Tab said. "Being with Michael doesn't change that. I care about him."

"You care for Henry," her mother said. "Don't you?"

And there it was: the model held up with a smile.

"I like Henry as a friend," Tab said. "That's different."

Rosemary took the opening and stepped through it. "So this isn't a phase."

"No," Tab said firmly. Her pulse surprised her with how steady it was now.

"Then help us understand," her father tried. "What do you know about him?"

"I'm not going through his life with you." She thought of the way he touched her hair in the dark, the warmth of his hand on her hip. None of that could be listed like items on a shopping list.

"It doesn't matter what she knows about him," Rosemary snapped. Then she leaned in to the camera. "We're not reassured. If you won't listen to us, we'll speak to the university. The pastoral team exists for a reason. They can—"

"Mother, no." The words came out sharp, louder than she meant. "I'm nineteen. You do that and you embarrass me at my own faculty."

"We would be looking after you," Rosemary said. "Other people can see what you won't."

"They'll see parents interfering." Tab forced herself to breathe. "If you call them, you will hurt me, not help me."

Her father lifted a hand, peacemaker. "Let's not make threats," he said mildly, which meant he agreed with the threat. "We only want you to be sensible."

"I am being sensible," Tab said. "I know where my limits are. I set them myself."

"Exactly what worries me," Rosemary said. 

Silence chorded tight between them. In the corner of the screen, Tab caught the small flick of her mother's eyes towards the bookcase – the little study of hands just in shot – and back again.

Her father cleared his throat. "Christmas," he said. "We'll collect you on the twentieth. Carols on the twenty-first. Lunch with the Paiges on the twenty-third. Granny at noon on the day. It's all in the diary."

The neatness of it made her bristle. She pictured it – the false cheer, the timetable visible from the moon – and at the same time, Michael turning up at one a.m., shrugging off his coat, curling cold feet into hers. The two versions of her life sat side by side and the tilt between them felt irreversible.

"I'm not sure yet," she said. "I've got work to do. Let me see how the next fortnight looks."

Rosemary's eyebrows lifted a millimetre. "It's Christmas. You come home."

"I said I'll tell you when I'm sure." She kept her tone even. "I'm not being difficult. I'm thinking."

"We don't like what you're thinking," her mother said. "We don't like the direction any of this is taking."

"That's a shame," Tab said, surprised by her own calm. "But I'm not ending it because you tell me to. That's not happening."

Rosemary sat back the smallest amount, as if to get the whole picture of her daughter on the screen. "Then understand us," she said, cooler now. "If this goes on, we will not facilitate it. No introductions. No polite lunches. No money for...extras." She let the word hang. "We won't applaud while you dismantle good prospects for a man who has you keeping things from us already."

Tab raised an eyebrow. "Have you ever considered I might keep things from you of my own free will?"

"And yet you're asking us to trust you."

"Yes," Tab said. "Trust me to run my life."

Her father's mouth turned down with tired kindness. "We can't trust a choice we think is bad."

"Then don't," Tab said and found that her hands had stopped trembling. "But don't make calls about me behind my back."

Rosemary looked at her for a long second – measuring, perhaps – then inclined her head. "We'll speak next week," she said. "I expect you to have come to your senses."

"I expect you to have calmed down," Tab said evenly.

Her mother's expression did a small, precise rearrangement that meant: enough. "Goodnight, Tabitha."

"Night."

The screen dropped to her own face, pale in the laptop's light, and then the room was just the room again. The tea was cold. Sophie slid across the sofa without comment and put her head on Tab's shoulder.

Tab let her head tip against Sophie's. The hurt in her chest ebbed, and behind it, the stubborn fact that she had chosen differently – Michael's steadiness, Cleo's noise, Sophie's wordless comfort – and that choice was beginning to feel like a life.

Chapter Text

Methods tutorial, Tuesday morning. Five of them in a narrow room with a window that showed nothing but the back of another building. Dr Dutta had them start with the straightforward bits first – composition, light, where the eye goes – before anyone was allowed to talk about meaning. 

Tab had her laptop open for notes. On screen: the week's slide – a cropped Sam Walsh – and beneath it the class pad where she'd typed "figures like cut-outs; diagonals pull you through; light from somewhere you can't see." She liked Dutta. She even liked the insistence on the basics.

Her inbox pinged.

From: Student Wellbeing & Pastoral Support
Subject: Quick check-in?

Dear Tabitha,

We hope you're settling in well. A member of your family has been in touch with some concerns and suggested we reach out. If you'd like a confidential chat, we can offer an appointment this week. 

Best,
Lindsay Sutton

Tab's face felt hot; her eyes stung. 

"Tabitha?" Dutta said. "Two sentences on what the light's doing, before we jump to labels."

She swallowed. "I— sorry." The room was too small to hide in. Four other heads turned. She heard her own voice from a distance. "I need to— excuse me a minute."

"Is everything okay?" asked Dutta.

"Fine," she lied, already standing. "Sorry." She closed the laptop, grabbed her coat and left.

Out in the corridor, she put her back to the cool wall and read the email again on her phone. 

"They did it," she said under her breath. "They actually did it."

Sophie was in a seminar; Cleo had messaged about her trial shift at the Duke Street place. Tab stared at the screen and felt the kind of humiliation her parents meant to prevent. She pushed off and kept moving until she was outside.

**

Michael opened on the second knock. One look at her face and his mouth tilted, not quite a smile.

"Come in," he said. "Shoes."

She kicked them off; the flat smelled like coffee. He waited until the door was shut, then touched the sleeve of her coat. "What's happened?"

She held her phone up. "Pastoral team. 'Quick check-in?' Because my mother rang them like I'm a child."

His eyes moved once across the email and back to her. "That what she threatened?"

"Yes. And she did it." She heard her own voice go brittle. "I'm so—" the word flared and burned—"angry. I want to throw something."

He studied the pulse jumping in her throat. Then he nodded at the corridor. "Come on."

He took her to the spare room. The heavy bag hung quiet and dull in the window's winter light; tape and wraps lay where he'd left them. He set a chair with his foot, sat, and reached for a roll of hand wrap.

"Give us your hand."

She held it out, already embarrassed by the trembling she couldn't stop.

"Open," he said. He looped the wrap round her wrist, smooth and snug, then across the palm, through the fingers. He worked without rush, care evident in each movement. "Thumb stays out. Gloves won't save you if you tuck it. Elbows in. Chin down. Don't smack it – hit it. Turn your knuckles over."

She watched his mouth move as he spoke and had to look at the bag to keep from leaning forward. The wrap ran across her skin, warm where his fingers followed it.

"You're enjoying this," she said.

"Bit," he admitted. "You look good cross."

He finished the first hand, pressed his thumb into the heel of her palm to check tension, and started on the other. Having him this close made heat rise up the back of her neck. He smoothed the last seam and sat back. "Right. Stand there."

He reached under the chair and pulled out a battered pair of boxing gloves. "Put these on," he said, sliding one over her wrapped hand and yanking the Velcro snug. "Don't let your wrist fold." He tapped the other glove into her palm.

She took her position where he pointed. The leather smelled like sweat and something medicinal. He stood beside her, just behind, hands light at her elbows. "Left hand – jab. Straight out, straight back. Don't pose."

She hit and got the wrong sound – flat, slappy. He caught her wrist, corrected the angle with two fingers, set her shoulder back in the joint. "From your feet. Hip, then hand. Breathe."

The next one landed with a dull thud she felt up her forearm.  He nodded. "There you go. Again."

The pastoral email was still white-hot in her head; so was Rosemary's voice. She put both in the target and worked. Breath, step, snap. The bag swung; he killed its arc with a palm and fed it back to her. She found a rhythm she didn't know she had – jab, cross, breath; jab, cross, breath. Each right hand came with a small, startled jolt of satisfaction.

"Don't watch your fist," he said. "Pick a spot and hit through it."

"Where?"

"There." He pointed to the middle of the bag. "Imagine your mother's earring."

She laughed despite herself and the third cross landed better. He made an approving sound, low in his throat. "That. Again."

Her forearms burned fast; the wraps cut a new path across her knuckles. She kept going until her lungs burned and her head came back to her body. When she dropped her hands, he stepped in and peeled back the glove strap and loosened the wrap a touch at the wrist.

"Better?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, surprised. "Much."

He hooked a finger under each glove and tugged them off, set them on the chair, then pressed his thumb along her knuckles, checking for a complaint she wouldn't admit. The touch was practical. It didn't feel practical. He lifted one wrapped hand to his mouth and set a kiss to the ridge of the cloth. "Good," he said.

She caught his eye and her breath hitched, desire tugging low in her belly. He exhaled slowly. For a second neither of them spoke. The room held the soft swish of the bag slowly stilling.

He broke the moment first. "Water," he said. "Come on."

In the kitchen, he ran the tap, put the glass in her hand and another in his. She drank and watched a muscle work in his jaw when he swallowed.

"They called my university," she said, quieter now. "Like I'm theirs to manage."

"They'll stop when it stops working."

"It's not going to work." She set the glass down. "I'm not going home for Christmas."

His eyes lifted to hers, surprised. "You sure?"

"Yes."

"Alright." The word came out pleased and careful at once. "What do you want it to be?"

"Ours," she said, then flushed and tried again. "I mean – just us."

"Sound," he said, and his mouth did that brief, private smile she was coming to live for. "At yours, then. We'll do it there."

"We can get a tree," Tab said excitedly.

"One of the little ones from Smithdown nobody else wants," he agreed. "We'll get lights, a daft angel. Dinner late," he went on. "I'll do a roast."

"You cook?"

"I can follow instructions." He tapped the knife block with a knuckle. "You can sit there and tell me I'm doing it wrong."

"I would never." She smiled. 

"You would," he said, amused. "We'll walk by the river after. You can open something small in the morning if you like that."

"I do," she said, feeling ridiculously happy at the thought. "We should get mulled wine."

"And them tins of Quality Street everyone pretends to hate."

She wanted to kiss him. She didn't. She stood very close and memorised the picture he was making for her: him in her kitchen, a tree, the winter light, his hands busy with a roast that would probably be too much for two.

"What about your mum?" she said, remembering. "Won't she want you?"

"I'll go see her," he said. "Early." He hesitated, eyes flicking to her mouth and away. "You could come if you wanted."

"If you're sure," she said softly.

"We'll see how she is that morning."

"And the Phelans?"

"I'll put my head in late. Ten minutes." His face didn't change at the name. "Won't be long."

She nodded. Her phone lit on the counter. Cleo: Boss is a muppet but he likes my chat. Got shifts Fri & Sat. Also bought a present for myself. Bargain - don't shout x. The picture that followed was a pair of Yeezys. 

Tab decided to ignore the fact that the shoes obviously weren't cheap and wrote back Proud.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Cleo got the job," Tab said. "Sort of."

"That'll keep her busy," he said, not entirely convinced. "Tell her to swerve Kane."

"She says it's sorted."

He gave the sort of look you give a forecast that promises sun in November. "Right."

She flexed her fingers at the table, worrying the edge of a knot. He caught her hands and checked the seams, a thumb smoothing the ridge at each wrist. "Still snug?" he asked. She nodded.

"What do I tell the pastoral team?" she asked.

"Tell them you're sound," he said. "And if you ever want to talk to them, that'll be your idea."

She drafted a reply and read it to him because it made her feel braver. "Thanks for the message. I'm doing well and will reach out if I need support. Please don't contact me at the request of third parties."

"That'll do."

She sent it.

Michael reached past her to the drawer, took out a biro and a takeaway menu, flipped it over. "Right," he said. "List."

She laughed. "We're making a list."

"You like lists," he said. "I listen." He wrote: TREE, LIGHTS, WINE, QUALITY STREET, ROAST (CHICKEN OR BEEF?), WALK, then paused and held the pen out to her. "Go on."

She added PALM HOUSE LIGHTS; XMAS JUMPERS; PHONE OFF. He watched the last one appear and nodded.

"Put 'paint' on it," he said. "You should paint. You're happier when you do."

She kept her eyes down to hide her smile. "I might," she said. Then, because her chest had filled with something tender and she had to say it out loud: "This is what I want."

He touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. "I know."

They stuck the menu to the fridge with a wad of blu-tack. 

"Alright," he said, stepping back to admire their work. "Christmas."

"Christmas," she said and felt the decision move from idea to fact in the space between them.

He gestured towards the spare room with his chin, mock-stern. "You've still got rounds in you."

She grinned. "Do I?"

"You do." The corner of his mouth lifted. "Go on then, Angel. Ten good ones."

She went. He followed. When her fist hit leather and landed right, the email lost the last of its power. When she stopped, breathless and bright, he caught her around the waist and held her close. They stood like that until her heart slowed against his T-shirt.

Back in the kitchen, he unwound the wraps, careful as he'd tied them – cloth loosening, palms pink where the pressure had been. He rubbed each knuckle once with his thumb, the last of the adrenaline draining away.