Chapter 5 Almost Like Before
1412 Words
He texted three days later.
Maltby Street market on Saturday. Food, mostly. Come if you want.
She read it standing at the kitchen counter. Put the phone down. Made coffee. Came back.
What kind of food? She typed.
The kind where the label tells you the cow had a name.
So unaffordable.
Completely. Still good though.
She looked at the message for a moment. Outside the courtyard was doing its morning thing—bicycle, forsythia, and pigeon arriving on schedule. She picked up the phone.
Fine. Saturday.
She put it down before she could change her mind, which took effort, which told her something she chose not to examine before coffee.
***
She got there second.
Not planned. The roadworks on Tanner Street added four minutes; now she was turning the corner, slightly breathless, and he was already outside, looking at something on a stall, and she had three seconds to watch him before he looked up.
The smile came before he’d decided to have it.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Roadworks.”
“I walked past three sets and still made it.”
“Then you’re faster than me.”
“I’m always faster than you.”
“You have longer legs.”
“That’s not the flex you think it is.”
She laughed—quickly, surprised—and fell into step beside him, and as they walked under the arch into the heat and noise of the market, something in her chest loosened slightly, like a knot that had been pulled tight all week was finally let go.
Okay, she thought.
This is just a market.
He came back with two cups twenty minutes later. She was looking at olive oils with names that required a degree to understand, and he appeared at her shoulder, held out a tea, and she took it before she’d registered what she was taking.
She looked at the cup.
“You didn’t ask,” she said.
“You always have tea.” He said it like it was the most ordinary thing. “You’ve had tea at eleven in the morning since I’ve known you.”
She looked back at the olive oil.
Ten years of someone knowing how you took your tea shouldn’t feel like anything. It was just information. Stored data. The kind of thing that didn’t mean anything except that he had a good memory.
It felt like something anyway.
She moved to the next stall.
He made her laugh at the cheese counter.
Not a polite laugh — the real kind, the involuntary kind that came out before she’d decided whether it was appropriate. He’d been reading the tasting notes in a voice of escalating gravitas: aged eighteen months, notes of ambition and regret, and she’d lost it, actually lost it. Standing in a market on a Saturday morning, when she looked up, he was watching her with an expression she wasn’t ready for.
Just open. Warm. Like he’d been waiting for it.
She looked at the cheese.
“Stop,” she said.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing a thing with your face.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Yes, you do.” She moved along the counter. “You always do.”
He followed, not pushing it. But she felt him filing it away—the way he did with things he wanted to keep—and she felt it landed and told herself it didn’t.
They ended up on a low wall at the quieter end of the market with their second drinks and nowhere to be. She had a small pottery bowl in her lap—grey-green glaze, something about it she couldn’t name—that she’d bought because she’d looked at it three times and he’d said, "Just get it," with the easy certainty of someone who knew when she’d already decided.
She’d gotten it.
“Tell me about Edinburgh,” she said. Something to talk about that wasn’t this — the wall, the afternoon, the inches, the way the morning had felt like the best version of something she’d told herself she was over.
He turned his cup. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you actually want to say. Not the version you’d tell someone who asked politely.”
He looked at her sideways. A pause. “It was necessary. I needed to be somewhere that didn’t have any of my… any of the mess in it. Somewhere I could figure out who I was without the context.” He paused. “That sounds more together than it was.”
“What was it actually?”
“Running,” he said simply. “Dressed up as a plan.”
She looked at her bowl.
“Did it help?”
“It helped me see what I’d been doing. Here. To you.” He said it without flinching.
"It took me a long time to get to that."
She didn’t answer immediately. Let it sit. “I did the same work,” she said eventually. “I just didn’t go anywhere. Just stayed in London and took it all apart in place.”
“That’s harder.”
“It’s cheaper,” she said.
He laughed. She laughed. And then they were both laughing on a wall in Maltby Street, and it was so natural, so specifically and exactly them, that she felt the pleasure of it and the danger of it simultaneously—two separate currents running through the same moment.
She stopped laughing first.
He noticed. She felt him notice.
“You went somewhere just now,” he said.
“I’m here.”
“You were. Then you went.”
She looked at the market. A man with a dog that had clearly decided the afternoon was for lying down, regardless of location. Two women sharing something from a paper bag, laughing at something on one of their phones.
“It’s strange,” she said. “Being here with you. It feels… ” she stopped. Started again. “It feels like no time has passed and also like all the time has passed, and I don’t know what to do with both of those being true at once.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Too easy,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I know.” He turned to look at her. “I feel it too. And I’m not going to pretend I don’t, because I spent a long time pretending things to you, and I’m done with that.” He held her gaze. “Is that okay to say?”
She considered it. “It’s honest.”
“Is honest okay?”
“Honest is better than the alternative.” She looked at her bowl. “Just go slowly. That’s all I’m asking. Whatever this is, just go slowly.”
“Okay,” he said. Quiet. Like a promise he meant.
“I mean it, Daniel.”
“I know you do.” He looked at her steadily. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She held those words in the space between them and didn’t build anything on them yet and felt the effort of that restraint in her chest like something physical.
The market packed down around them, and they stayed on the wall, and the light went from afternoon gold to early evening amber, and she stopped noticing the inches at some point and couldn’t have said exactly when.
His arm came to rest against hers.
Not a move. Not a gesture. Just two people who had run out of space on a wall, and neither of them shifted away, and the contact was warm and unhurried and said nothing and everything.
She looked at the bowl in her lap.
The grey-green glaze shifting in the low light. The irregular lip where someone’s hands had shaped it and let it be imperfect.
She thought, careful.
His shoulder, solid and warm against hers.
She thought, You knew what you were doing when you said yes to the market.
The amber light.
His arm.
The bowl.
She stayed exactly where she was.
And the most frightening thing — the thing she carried home with her on the tube, turning it over all the way back to Keswick — wasn’t that it felt like before.
It was that it felt better.
- Writer
