5. CHAPTER FIVE
1008 Words
Chris: Settling in for the night or still surviving the café?
Irene stared at the message for longer than she should have before typing back.
Irene: Just got home. Why?
Chris: Just checking your schedule.
She laughed. Actually laughed. Alone in her flat, sitting on her bed, laughing at her phone like a teenager yanking her leg.
"Stop it, Irene" she whispered.
But she was already typing back.
It started simply enough.
Back and forth. Easy. No pressure.
But somewhere around 10 PM, the texts stopped being short.
Chris: Can I ask you something random?
Irene: You're going to anyway.
Chris: Favourite time of day.
Irene: That's not a question.
Chris: Favourite time of day?
She smiled despite herself.
Irene: Early morning. Before the city wakes up. Everything feels like it belongs to me for a little while.
A pause. Longer than usual.
Chris: That's the most honest thing you've said to me.
Irene: Don't make it weird.
Chris: Mine is late night. When everything goes quiet and you can finally hear yourself think.
Irene: That sounds lonely.
Chris: Sometimes. But I've gotten used to my own company.
Irene read that twice.
Me too, she thought.
She typed it before she could stop herself.
Irene: Me too.
Another pause.
Then —
Chris: See? We're not so different!
By 11 PM the texts had turned into something neither of them had planned.
Childhood stuff. The kind of details that don't come up in normal conversations.
Chris: I grew up in Cork. Youngest of four. My brothers all went into safe careers. Engineering. Law. Finance. My mother cried when I said I wanted to do music.
Irene: Did she come around?
Chris: She came to my first real show. Didn't tell me she was there until after. Cried again. Different kind of crying that time.
Irene felt something warm settle in her chest.
Irene: That's a good story.
Chris: What about you? Where did you grow up?
Irene's fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She didn't talk about this. Not usually. Not with anyone except June, and even with June she kept certain doors closed.
But it was late. And the flat was quiet. And something about the darkness made honesty feel safer.
Irene: Nowhere specific. Everywhere a little bit. I grew up in care. Foster homes mostly. Belfast was just the city that stuck.
She sent it before she could take it back.
Her heart thudded.
The three dots appeared.
Disappeared.
Appeared again.
Chris: Thank you for telling me that.
Not "I'm sorry." Not "that must have been so hard." Not the usual things people said that made her feel like a subject to be pitied.
Just "thank you for telling me that."
Irene exhaled slowly.
Irene: Don't make it a big deal.
Chris: It's not a big deal. It's just you. And I'm glad you told me.
She put the phone down.
Picked it back up.
Put it down again. Drowning in her thoughts.
"June cannot know about this text. She will actually combust" Irene said to herself and giggled.
Almost immediately after that, a text came through that said "hey b***h, watsup with you and your new man?" from June.
"Speak of the devil" Irene muttered.
"He's not my man, June" she replied.
June said with a winking emoji "not yet but soon sista". "Good night"
It was almost midnight when her phone rang.
Not a text. Not a random notification.
A call...
She stared at his name on the screen for three full seconds before answering.
"Hello?" Her voice came out quieter than intended.
"You type too slowly," he said.
She laughed. "Excuse me?"
He said "I've been waiting four minutes for your last reply."
"I was thinking---"
"So I thought I'd just call."
Just like that. As if it was the most natural thing in the world. As if they'd been doing this for years.
Irene leaned back against her pillow, pulling the blanket up.
"Fine," she said. "You called. Now what?"
"Now we talk," he said simply.
And they did.
For nearly two hours.
She found out he played guitar first, before anything else.
That he picked it up at twelve because he wanted to impress a girl in his class and then completely forgot about the girl because he fell in love with the instrument instead.
That he had a scar on his left hand from a broken guitar string at seventeen that he was oddly proud of.
That he hated flying but had been on more flights than he could count.
That he always ordered the same coffee not because it was his favourite but because routine was the only thing that kept him grounded when everything else kept moving.
She told him things too.
Small things. Then bigger ones.
That she'd taught herself to cook out of necessity at fourteen and had accidentally gotten good at it. That she'd wanted to study literature once, in another version of her life. That she hated loud spaces but worked in one every day because silence at home was sometimes worse.
That Belfast wasn't her dream but it had become her default, and she wasn't sure yet if that was settling or surviving.
"There's a difference?" he asked.
"I think so," she said quietly. "I just haven't figured out which one I'm doing yet."
A beat of silence.
"Maybe you don't have to figure it out alone," he said.
Irene stared at the ceiling.
Her heart was doing that unreasonable thing again.
"You're very smooth for someone who just happened to be passing by a café," she said, steering them back to safer ground.
He laughed. Low and warm.
"Caught me."
"Were you ever actually passing by?" She asked.
A pause...
"...The coffee is decent" he said.
"I knew it" she replied.
"You are decent," he corrected. "The coffee is average at best."
"I said that first," she pointed out.
"I know. I liked that about you."
They switched to a video call somewhere around 1 AM.
She almost didn't accept it.
But she did...
- Writer
