By Tuesday afternoon, I am wearing two cardigans at my desk and my fingers are still so cold I keep hitting the wrong keys.
“Are you coming down with something?” Colin asks, pausing by my cubicle with a mug of Lemsip. “You look like you haven’t slept since the weekend.”
“Just the weather.” I tuck my hands beneath my thighs. “And my radiator’s making a weird noise.”
He nods, satisfied. Apparently a dodgy radiator explains looking like you’ve been dug up.
It isn’t the radiator.
Every night since Sunday, at around three, those same three hollow notes have come through the dark. I lie awake afterwards, watching the strip of light beneath my bedroom door. On Monday night, when I got up for water, the shadow in my hallway stretched into something tall and branched. I could smell river silt. It vanished when I found the switch.
I left the light on. At seven, I stepped around the perfectly ordinary coat rack and went to work.
By Wednesday lunchtime, I’m sitting alone in the kitchenette, waiting for the microwave to finish, with Lea’s chat open on my phone.
Something’s been happening since Sunday.
I look at the words until the screen dims.
If I send them, I’ll have to describe it. The sound. The cold. The way I keep checking how many hours are left before I can go back. She might tell Morgan. They might decide I shouldn’t do it again.
My thumb deletes the sentence.
The microwave beeps. I take out my soup and burn a fingertip on the bowl. For a second, it feels almost reassuring: actual heat, doing something I understand.
Then I sit down, and the cold begins creeping back through my sleeves.
That should be the part that frightens me most. Instead, I keep remembering how it stopped.
Twice this morning, when nobody was looking along my row of desks, I pulled Lea’s scarf from my bag and held it close to my face. Her vanilla perfume is fading. I can still find it if I breathe carefully. It brings back her arm around my shoulders at the door, then the room behind her, the voices above the table, the weight holding me there.
I put it away before anyone sees. There are limits to what I can blame on the fucking radiator.
My ribs feel too light when I lean back in my office chair. At home, I can’t finish a programme without getting up. I’ve turned the heating higher, made tea, dragged the duvet onto the sofa. Nothing keeps me comfortable for long.
I want Wednesday evening to arrive. I want Anna to be making dinner and Jules to say something rude from the doorway. I want the cold to stop.
I’ve stopped being very honest with myself about which of those I need most.
At five on the dot, I take my overnight bag from beneath the desk. I packed it before work: toothbrush, clean underwear, a T-shirt. Perfectly ordinary things for staying with friends. I checked them twice, as if forgetting toothpaste might be the embarrassing part of tonight.
I leave before Colin can ask how the radiator’s doing.
When I come up the escalators at Morgan’s station twenty minutes later, November rain is coming down in slanted sheets.
Lea stands just inside the tiled entrance with a large black umbrella, scanning the crowd. Her cheeks are pink from the wind. When she spots me, her whole face lights up, and my heart gives a small, inconvenient flip.
“Hey.” She pulls me beneath the canopy before I can reach into my bag. “Don’t bother with yours. The wind’s turning the cheap ones inside out. Come here.”
“Mine was twelve pounds.”
“Then it’ll do it with dignity.”
She hooks her arm through mine, and we step out onto the wet pavement.
The umbrella catches a gust. We lean into it together, shoulders touching, while water spills from its edge. Lea steers me around a flooded kerb without breaking stride. I’m suddenly aware of how easily she does this: makes room for me, assumes I’ll come closer.
I used to stand beside her in the staff kitchen and wonder whether I was keeping her from something. Out here, there isn’t enough space to invent a polite distance.
“You’re freezing,” she says.
Her hand slips down my arm and finds mine. She pushes both into the deep pocket of her coat. Her palm is warm, slightly rough near the thumb. I let my fingers close around hers.
“Did you forget your gloves?”
“Yeah.”
I could tell her now. No one else can hear us beneath the rain. I could start with the sound in my bedroom and leave out the rest until I know how she’s going to react.
“How was the boundary stone?” I ask instead.
Her steps slow. The brightness leaves her face, revealing the same strained look I noticed on Sunday, only worse.
“Heavy.” She watches the streetlamps break across the puddles. “We didn’t just clear the silt today. Morgan found the marker for the Deep Well. We spent four hours holding the ground open so she and Tessa could read the lower carvings.”
She squeezes my hand inside her pocket.
“Everyone’s completely wrecked. Anna’s had a migraine since three. Clara could barely hold the steering wheel coming back.” A tired smile touches her mouth. “Anna still insisted on making the curry. She even did a mild pot for you. I told her you’re a coward about chillies.”
“Excellent. My medical history is being circulated.”
The smile fades again.
“It was a lot today, love. Even for Morgan.”
At the name of the Well, something shifts behind my eyes. A brief taste of iron reaches my tongue. I swallow, trying to decide whether it was already there before she said it.
“That’s okay,” I tell her, much too quickly. “I’m here now.”
I mean that Anna shouldn’t have to hurt. I mean that Clara ought to be able to drive without her hands shaking. I do mean those things.
Lea looks sideways at me. I wonder what else she heard.
She gives a small, complicated smile and rests her head briefly against my shoulder as we turn into Morgan’s street. I keep hold of her hand. For the rest of the walk, I try to pay attention to that warmth instead of counting the doors left to pass.
When Lea opens the front door upstairs, nobody comes into the hallway to meet us.
The flat is quiet except for the hiss of the radiators. The air in the hall is thick with lemongrass, wet wool and ozone, like a greenhouse before a storm.
Lea keeps her voice low. “We’re back.” She helps me out of my wet coat, hangs hers beside it and props the umbrella over the tray of muddy walking boots. The cuffs of her jumper are pushed up; there’s a small snag near one wrist.
“In here.” Jules’s voice comes from the living room, flat and scraped thin.
I step out of my boots. Lea slips off hers beside the bench, and I follow her down the hall. Now I see why nobody got up.
They aren’t lounging on the sofa today. All five of them are already at the long table. Steam rises from bowls of pale green curry and jasmine rice, but hardly anyone is eating. Clara sits with her elbows on the wood and her face in her hands. Tessa stares at her spoon; her fingers are trembling. Anna has her eyes shut and a damp tea towel pressed to the back of her neck. At the head of the table, Morgan sits very straight, watching the candle in the centre with a hollow, feverish stillness.
The only normal thing in the room is the seventh place setting, squeezed onto the corner near Lea’s chair: a small blue bowl of mild curry, waiting for me.
“Oh, thank God,” Anna says, without opening her eyes. She manages a weak smile in my direction. “Hi, sweetheart. Yours is the blue one. I kept the chillies out. Eat while it’s hot.”
“Hey, Vic.” Jules gives me a tired two-finger wave. Her other hand is rubbing hard at her collarbone, as if she’s trying to work a cramp out of her chest. “Sorry we’re rubbish company. The woods fought back today.”
Lea pulls out her chair and nods at the kitchen stool Anna has dragged over from the island for my place. “Sit down, love. I’ll get you some water.”
I step up to the corner. My hand touches the warm ceramic of the blue bowl.
There’s a spoon beside it, and a folded napkin. Anna remembered. She was in pain, and she still made something I could eat.
For a moment, I see exactly how the evening could go. I could sit here, thank her, complain about work. Lea would bring water. Someone would tell me more about the stone, and I’d have a seat while I listened.
On Sunday, I counted six bowls twice. Tonight there are seven. All I have to do is sit down.
From three feet away, I can almost hear the magic coming off them: a low, metallic buzz that lifts the hairs on my arms and sets the cold lump at the base of my skull throbbing in time with my heartbeat. My mouth is watering, and it has nothing to do with the coconut milk.
Anna lowers the towel from her neck. Her eyes are wet. She tries to smile at me again, and I can’t hold her gaze.
I could say I’m freezing. I could tell them about the nights. Instead, I look at her hands and let myself think only about how much she needs me.
If I sit here trying to eat while that buzzing presses against my teeth, I’m going to scream.
“I’m not hungry yet.” My voice comes out thin. “Keep it warm for me?”
Everyone looks at me at once.
I don’t wait for Anna to protest or for Morgan to give me that small, tilting nod. Before Lea is back from the tap with my water, I’m on my knees, ducking under the apron, crawling into the narrow dark between their legs.
Above me, someone draws a sharp breath. Then the chairs scrape in, fast and tight.
I find the velvet cushion and pull it under my head.
A glass meets the tabletop. Lea’s chair scrapes into place on my right.
I flatten my back against the boards and close my eyes. The sounds are familiar enough that, for a moment, I feel almost calm.
There’s no settling tonight. It’s a clumsy, heavy rush. Heels land across my shins, my thighs, my stomach, my ribs. Anna’s clammy socks press down across my throat until my collarbone aches. Morgan’s left foot covers my nose and mouth in one firm movement, her sock damp and warm from a day in leather boots.
I drag in a greedy breath through the weave, waiting for the black silt to pour down through their feet and kill the shivering in my chest.
Nothing happens.
A faint, prickly heat brushes the bridge of my nose and the skin of my throat, like static from a jumper fresh out of the tumble dryer. Then it stops.
I shift my shoulders, waiting for the change I remember. On Sunday it reached me all at once. Now the noise behind my eyes grows louder, and the cold stays where it is.
Something presses against it, catches, and slips away. I feel it most clearly where the fabric touches my cheek. I hold still, then move again, trying to find whatever position I had before.
Nothing feels right.
I thought I knew how to do this. It was the one part of the evening I hadn’t been frightened of.
Above the table, someone makes a ragged, frustrated sound.
“It’s not moving.” Anna’s voice cracks. Down here, she grinds her heel harder into the hollow of my throat, until it hurts. “Morgan, it’s still right in my temples. Why isn’t it going?”
“Wait,” Morgan says. Her ankle goes rigid, and she forces her sole down over my mouth and nose until my cartilage flattens and my eyes water.
“Mine’s stuck too.” Jules sounds rattled. Both her feet press flat and hard into my stomach, as if she’s trying to jump-start a stalled engine. “It’s just buzzing in my ankles. Vic? Are you doing something different?”
“Mm-mm,” I manage into Morgan’s arch. Panic goes through me, cold and sharp. I lift my hips a fraction, trying to find the contact I remember. Nothing changes. I hear myself make a small, frightened sound and stop.
For half a minute, all six of them shift and press. Wool and cotton rub against my jeans, my jumper, my neck, until the friction makes me hot and the air under the table grows so thick with trapped pressure that my teeth ache.
“Stop,” Morgan says.
Her feet lift away from my face.
Cold air hits my flattened nose. Her chair scrapes back, and Morgan drops to one knee beside the table leg and leans down to look at me.
Her dark eyes are wide and very bright, rimmed with grey exhaustion. She looks at my face, then down along my body, where the others’ socked feet are still piled in a heavy, useless tangle across my jumper and jeans.
She reaches in and lays two bare fingers against my cheek, where her sock was resting.
I gasp. A sharp pulse jumps between us, with a flash of cold stone and deep water. Morgan flinches and takes her hand away.
It’s over at once. I wait for the rest, the warmth, the quiet. Nothing follows.
Morgan looks at her fingers. Then at my jumper. She presses her lips together.
“I think it’s the fabric.”
No one answers. Above my legs, a spoon clicks against a bowl.
“What we touched today was stronger,” she says. “And Friday’s work cleared for me. That doesn’t mean it cleared for you.”
“Sunday too?” I ask.
Her eyes come back to mine.
“Possibly.”
The word catches up with me a moment after she says it. The cold, the noise, the long hours in my flat. She hadn’t asked. I hadn’t told her. Now she’s looking down at me as though this might be the first time she’s wondered where it all went.
Her lips part. For a second, I think she’s going to ask. How my week has been. Whether I’ve been sleeping.
Above the table, Anna makes a small sound into the towel.
Morgan’s eyes go to her. When they come back to me, the question has gone. I watch it go.
“Direct contact did something,” she says, looking at her hand again. “We need to try with less between us.”
She turns towards the others.
“Everyone take your socks off.” Then she looks at the collar of my jumper. “Vicky. Your clothes too. Everything except your knickers.”
For a few seconds, there’s only rain against the glass.
One spark on my cheek. That’s what she has to go on. Somehow we’ve already reached everything.
“Morgan, hang on.” Lea’s voice cuts across the room. “She’s freezing already. You can’t ask her to strip on the floor.”
“I saw the contact work.” Morgan keeps her eyes on me. “I expect it will be different once we remove the barrier.”
“You expect?”
Morgan glances up at her. The pause is long enough for me to hear Anna draw a careful breath.
“Look at her hands, Lea. Look at Clara. We can’t go to bed with this still in us.”
Anna makes another small sound into the towel.
Lea’s foot draws back from my side. I wait for her to say something else.
I should say no.
The thought is clear. I could get up, put my coat on and go home. There’s curry waiting for me. I could eat it on the stool and let Morgan find a better idea.
I picture myself walking back to the station, though. The empty flat. The strip of light under my bedroom door at three in the morning. My own hands tucked under my arms, waiting for something I’m too ashamed to tell anyone about.
I don’t think I can do another night like that.
Morgan is watching me. Exhaustion has tightened her face, but she still looks as though she has an answer. I want her to be right so badly that it’s difficult to hear anything else.
Five days ago, I spent twenty minutes getting a deodorant mark off my party top. Now I’m lying under her table, considering where I can put it when I take it off.
My eyes sting. I look away from her, towards Anna’s chair.
“If it works,” I say, “you’ll stop when it’s finished?”
“Of course.” Morgan answers at once.
I don’t know how either of us will tell. I nod anyway.
My hands go to the hem of my jumper.
The others pull their feet back a few inches to give me room, though nobody pushes their chair away. Around me in the dim, there’s a hurried rustle of wool and cotton as they reach down and peel off their damp socks.
Under the low boards, I drag my cream jumper and thermal top up over my ribs. My elbows knock against the apron and brush Jules’s shin as I fight the fabric over my head. I reach behind my back, unhook my bra with shaking fingers and pull my arms free. The draught along the floor finds my bare breasts and stomach, and my breath catches.
I don’t look out between the chair legs. With my eyes shut, I unbutton my jeans, lift my hips off the wood and shove the denim and my socks down over my knees and ankles, kicking them off.
There’s nowhere to put them. In the crowded dark between twelve legs, I push the bundle, jumper, top, bra, jeans and socks, against the table leg by Lea’s ankles, and lie back down.
I’m in nothing but a pair of plain black cotton knickers. The pine is cold under my shoulder blades and spine. The shame starts in my face and keeps going, down my throat, across my chest, as if it’s looking for somewhere to stop.
Morgan gets up from beside the table. Her chair creaks as she sits down again. Then the chairs scrape in tight.
And twelve bare feet come down on my skin at once.
The sound that comes out of me isn’t a word.
The first thing I notice is the heat. Without socks, every foot is a different temperature. Tessa’s arches on my thighs are damp and almost cool. Jules’s soles on my stomach are hot, wide and heavy, the heels sinking into my soft skin with her whole unguarded weight. Something near my hip is cold from the floor and warms as it presses.
The second thing is the texture. Calluses. The rough rim of a heel. The tacky drag of sweat where a sole slides instead of lifting. A toenail, catching once along my ribs. With socks, they were weight. Now they’re skin, and I can feel every place where theirs ends and mine begins.
Above the table, all six of them let out a long, shuddering groan, and down in the dark, their feet stop being polite.
Nobody checks where they’re treading.
On my chest it’s roughest. Bare feet crowd in from both sides, sliding slick and sweat-warm over my ribs and breasts. A heel bears down on my sternum. Warm, damp toes flex against my left breast and flatten it against my ribcage without the slightest hesitation, chasing the heat of my skin.
On my right, where Lea always sits, one foot rests against my side more carefully than the rest. I know it before I’ve worked out how. The toes lie still. The heel barely presses.
Then the magic starts to move, and Lea’s foot changes too. It slides up over my ribs and presses in as hard as the others, greedy for the same thing they are.
Even Lea’s.
Beside my hip, her heel shifts blindly for leverage and comes down on the heap of my clothes. I feel her trample the soft wool of my jumper into the floor, again and again, every time she adjusts her weight.
Anna’s bare foot slides over my throat. Without the sock, I can feel every calloused ridge of her heel in the hollow above my collarbone, the damp, salty underside of her arch sealing over my pulse, her other foot braced hard against my shoulder.
And then Morgan’s bare feet claim my face.
Her left sole comes down flat across my mouth and nose. Her right foot presses against my cheek and jaw, turning my head into the cushion.
Her skin is fever-hot and tacky with sweat, and smells of skin and the leather inside her boots. A loose fibre from her sock catches against my cheek. Every breath I take is hot and salty and thick with the smell of twelve tired, unwashed feet pressing me into the dust.
Right behind the smell comes the flood.
It doesn’t trickle this time. Somewhere, a sluice gate gives way, and black water comes through.
Through the skin of my thighs, my stomach, my breasts, my throat and my mouth, the filth of the Deep Well pours out of their soles and straight into my blood.
My back arches off the floor, and Jules and Anna press their heels down harder, on instinct, to keep the connection tight.
“God, yes,” Anna gasps above the table. Her voice is shaking with relief. Down here, her toes clench against my neck and smear a fleck of dark sock lint across my throat as the migraine drains out of her head and into mine. “There it goes. Oh, Christ, it’s finally moving.”
“Hold still, Vicky,” Morgan says, though I couldn’t move if I tried. She leans forward in her chair and drives her bare arch down over my nose and mouth until my lips are mashed flat against my teeth and my head is pinned between her soles.
It’s heavy and suffocating and utterly filthy. I can feel the cold sludge of the forest shaft filling my lungs, tasting of wet slate, dead leaves and black water, while the relief I’ve waited three days for makes it harder and harder to hold on to a thought.
And the most humiliating thing, the secret that makes a hot tear leak from the corner of my eye and soak into Morgan’s ankle, is how badly my body wants it.
Every time someone shifts above me and a bare heel digs deeper into my ribs or flattens my breast, a wave of dark, narcotic heat rolls from that spot all the way down to my toes. The ache that froze me at my desk is gone in an instant, replaced by a heavy, slow pleasure that makes me want to sink straight through the floorboards. I don’t try to turn my face away from Morgan’s sole. I open my mouth against her salty arch and breathe her in, and let them tread their dark magic and their sweat into my skin until my mind goes black and quiet.
I don’t know how much later it is when the pressure finally lifts.
A spoon scrapes the bottom of a bowl. Clara laughs, bright and easy, with none of the strain I heard when I came in. One foot moves, then another. Cool air reaches the places they’ve left.
For a moment, I try to follow the warmth. My shoulder lifts towards a retreating sole before I understand what I’m doing.
Then I see the underside of the table.
A pale knot in the pine. Candlelight coming through the gap beside Morgan’s chair. My own hand on the floor, fingers spread, with a dark sock fibre caught beneath one nail.
I am still here.
Nearly naked, underneath their dinner.
Chairs scrape back. Someone mentions the kettle. I hear Tessa stretch and sigh, then Jules asking whether there are biscuits.
My face gets hotter. I draw my knees together and cover my chest with one arm, although there’s nobody down here to see me yet. There’s salt on my lips, dust stuck to my damp shoulder. When I swallow, the place where Anna’s heel pressed hurts.
If someone leans down now, I’m going to cry. I can feel it waiting, and I can’t bear the thought of trying to explain.
I turn onto my side and reach for my clothes.
The jumper has been trodden flat against the boards. I pull it free from beneath a chair leg and find grey dust rubbed into the wool, with warm, damp patches where Lea’s heel kept landing. I’d chosen the cream one because Lea said it suited me the last time we went for coffee.
I rub at a mark with my thumb. It spreads.
From above, Anna says, “Oh, I can actually look at the light again.”
Someone answers her. I miss the words.
I gather the rest: bra, thermal top, jeans. One sock has ended up behind the crossbar at the far end. It takes three attempts to reach it, my bare elbow dragging through dust each time. I keep stopping to listen for footsteps coming round the table.
Nobody does.
It should make getting dressed easier. Instead, by the time I’ve wrestled my top over my head, I’m holding my breath to keep it steady.
I pull on my jeans, then both socks. My fingers keep losing the button. There’s still warmth deep inside me, but my hands won’t behave, and the room sounds much further away than it should.
At last, I crawl out backwards and get one hand onto the kitchen stool to help myself up.
The blue bowl is still at my place. A skin has formed across the curry. Beside it, the glass Lea brought me is full to the top.
I stand looking at them for a few seconds.
Everyone’s moving towards the sofas. Clara is telling Tessa something about the lower carvings, talking quickly now, turning her head easily as she speaks. Morgan stays at the table, writing in the small black diary beside her empty bowl.
I want someone to look at me. Then Morgan’s pencil pauses, and I turn away before she can.
One arm folded over the marks on my jumper, I go into the kitchen.
The tap takes a second to run cold. I fill a glass too quickly and spill water across my wrist, then set it down with both hands. On the counter beside the sink are the two curry pans, lids on, and Anna’s chopping board scattered with coriander stems.
I could still have some. I haven’t eaten since lunch.
The thought of going back for my bowl makes my throat tighten.
I wet a piece of kitchen roll and wipe my face. A little floor dust comes away, and one dark fibre. I wipe again. My cheek stings, and the paper begins to break up in my fingers.
The taste of iron stays. So does the smell of deep water, even after I rinse my mouth.
I stop scrubbing.
The door creaks behind me.
Lea steps in, still barefoot, her trouser cuffs rolled above her ankles. The grey around her eyes has gone. She looks awake in a way she hasn’t all evening, and for one ugly second I wish she didn’t.
Then she sees the wet paper in my hand.
Her eyes move to my neck, to the flattened sleeve of my jumper. She lets the door fall almost closed behind her.
“Vic.”
“I’m fine.” It comes out automatically, rough and too high. I turn to pick up my water. “Honestly. Glad the migraines are gone.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
I take a drink. The glass taps against my teeth.
Lea stays where she is.
“I was going to come round and help you up,” she says.
I stare at the coriander on the board. “I got up.”
“I know.”
In the living room, Jules laughs at something. The sound carries through the door, then dies away. Lea draws a breath as if she’s about to call back. She doesn’t.
“I thought you were alright,” she says. “While it was happening.”
“I wanted it to work.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean—” I stop. My free hand has found the dust on my sleeve again. I press my thumb into the wool. “I wasn’t just doing you a favour.”
There. Enough of the truth to make me feel sick, without telling her any of the things I practised keeping quiet on the train.
Lea looks down at her hands.
“You still don’t have to tell me it was fine.”
I let out a breath. I hadn’t realised how much effort I was putting into that.
“I heard you argue with her,” I say.
Lea nods once.
“Then you stopped.”
She looks at me. For a moment, I think she’ll explain how bad the day was. The stone, the pain, Anna barely opening her eyes. I’ve already got all of it ready for her; I could give her the fucking speech myself.
“Yes,” she says. “I stopped.”
Her fingers curl against her palms.
“When it started moving, I was so relieved. I just wanted it out. I didn’t think about anything else.”
I look at the small snag in her cuff. There was rain caught on it at the station. I noticed it when she took my hand.
I can’t make the two moments fit together. Both happened tonight.
“I can’t tell which bits I’m upset about yet,” I say.
Lea’s face changes. She nods again, slower this time, and comes to stand beside the counter. Close enough that I can smell her perfume, leaving a space between us.
“Alright.”
She takes a clean piece of kitchen roll and wets it under the tap. She holds it out rather than reaching for my face.
I take it. Our fingers brush.
I wipe the dust from my elbow, then fold the paper over to find a clean patch. Lea watches me without filling the silence. I’m grateful for that. I’m angry that being grateful feels so easy.
“I liked the walk,” I say eventually.
Her gaze lifts to mine.
“Before we got here. That was nice.”
“It was.”
“I was trying to work out whether you’d put your hand in your pocket with mine because I was cold.”
“You were cold.”
I wait.
Lea looks down, and a small, uncertain smile touches her mouth.
“I also wanted to hold your hand.”
The glass is still cool between my palms. I put it down before I can hide behind another drink.
“Oh.”
“I wanted to kiss you outside the station,” she says. “Then you started talking about the boundary stone, and I thought I’d got it wrong.”
My heart gives the same inconvenient flip it did when I saw her under the umbrella. It hurts a little this time.
“I thought I’d got it wrong too.”
Lea looks at my mouth, then away. Her hand rests on the edge of the counter, a few inches from mine.
“Down there, when we were that close…” She stops and presses her lips together. “I kept thinking about it. About kissing you.”
I look at her.
“That isn’t the same thing, Lea.”
“I know.” Her cheeks colour. “I’m making a mess of this.”
“Yes.”
She gives a small nod. She doesn’t laugh, and neither do I.
I know what she wants now. That ought to make this easier. Instead, I’m looking at the woman who brought me under her umbrella and the one who didn’t notice me getting dressed alone, and they’re both standing in front of me.
I want her to touch me. I don’t want to have to make any of this okay first.
“Vic?”
I lift my eyes.
“Can I kiss you?”
For once, she waits without assuming she knows my answer.
I look at the door. There’s a narrow gap between it and the frame. Morgan could call for me. Someone could come in looking for a clean spoon. I could pick up my glass and ask Lea to move.
Instead, I turn towards her.
“Yes,” I say. “I want that.”
She comes closer. Her fingertips touch my jaw so lightly that my breath catches, and she pauses until I tip my face towards hers.
Her lips are warm and soft, with a faint taste of coconut milk. I close my eyes and kiss her back.
One of her hands settles at my waist. The other slips into my hair, loose enough that I can move. When I lean forward, she meets me. When I take a breath, she waits.
My fingers close around the wool of her jumper, just below the snagged cuff.
I’m still standing against the kitchen sink. My supper is still getting cold in the other room. Somewhere beyond the door, Morgan’s chair scrapes across the boards.
Lea draws back a little and looks at me. Her thumb rests against my jaw.
I keep hold of her sleeve and bring her close again.