Wendy rings asking me if I was down the pub, saying she's free for half an hour. As she walks in, Kim rings. I wave to Wendy. "Kim, I'm terribly sorry, but Wendy's here. Could we do this another time?" Almost before I finish the sentence she is expertly understanding. Later that evening, I text her. "I'm sorry about curtailing you so rudely this afternoon. It's just that I lose any semblance of manners once I see Wendy, even towards you."
Wendy gets us a bottle of wine, asks me about London. She's on form, going on a riff in which we are compared to additives in food. I want to put my fingers in her hair. We finish the wine and she goes to the bar, coming back with two glasses of port. We make some arrangements for me taking her dog out two days this week while she's at work. "The keys will be in Kitty's recycling bins. Stay as long as you want. Riffle through my knicker drawer, have a bath..."
Afterwards, she texts me, saying that I really am one of her favourite people in the world, and confirms our arrangement to take a bottle of port up to the park on Monday.
I try writing back but my fingers slow me down, as does my self-censorship, attempting, far too late now, to avoid saying what she doesn't want to hear. I leave it till the evening, so that I can respond in a measured and restrained way.
And you are one of my very best favourites too. I love being with you,
I miss you when you're not around, I love your irreverent,
unpredictable, bright, witty, conversation. I love looking at you.
I think you're utterly gorgeous, newly gorgeous every time I see you,
and wish I could rake my eyes over you constantly. You make my life
better for being in it. I missed you too when I was in London,
because it's you that I always want to share everything with. I am,
therefore, for all practical purposes, in love with you, although I
must turn my head away from the radiant obviousness of such an
inconvenient conclusion.
Thank you for today -- that all-too-short bit of the kind of heady
near-delirium that you bring with you was all the more enjoyable for
it being unexpected. If I could have written my ideal first full day
back here, you would have been the first person in it.
Monday's ours. And in the meantime I look forward to rummaging in your knicker drawer, and Kitty's recycling bins, tomorrow and Friday.
And then the melancholy sets in. I wish I didn't have to go to a sex club in Blackpool. I wish it could be with Wendy, part of the same spectrum of feeling for her that I already have. I wish I didn't find our rare, three-second embraces so thrilling, so opiate. I wish I didn't re-run them in such a viscously slow recall. I wish I didn't remember every tiny ridge and fold and hem of her clothes under my stroking fingers, millimetres away from her skin. I want her to want to stroke me too, instead of her holding me, willingly enough, but without desire. Mine for her is deadened through its enforced privacy, confined within the boundaries of me, expressed only in flat, inanimate, black and white typed words.