The scanner beeped. Then again. Then again. Each one landed somewhere behind my ribs, a small stupid clock counting down to a decision I hadn't made yet.
I was third in line. The woman in front of me had eleven items in a ten items or fewer lane and I was quietly furious about it, the way you can only be furious when someone else's minor crime is keeping you from thinking about your own. A bag of clementines. A block of cheddar. I didn't need to be in that shop — I had cheddar at home. I'd come in because three days earlier I'd seen a woman working the register with green eyes and a ponytail and a face that made me forget I was holding a basket.
She was there again now. Tall, blonde hair pulled back, yoga pants under the shop apron, which should have looked ridiculous and didn't. She was asking the eleven item woman about a bag and the eleven item woman was taking her time, weighing the environmental implications like she was negotiating a treaty.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I had three opening lines ready. "Hi, I think we've met before," which was a lie. Something about the clementines being for a dinner party, which was a lie and also boring. The third I can't remember, which tells you how good it was.
The eleven item woman left. The man in front of me had a six pack of lager and nothing else and was already putting it on the belt. Forty seconds, maybe.
I put the clementines down. Then the cheddar. She picked up the clementines and scanned them without looking at me.
"Those are nice yoga pants," I said.
I said that. Out loud. In a shop. To a stranger who was being paid to stand there and scan my clementines. The heat came up out of my collar and kept going. I opened my mouth to undo the last four seconds and nothing came out.
She looked up.
Green eyes. Genuinely green, not the hazel people call green. Green like glass bottles held up to the light.
"Thanks," she said. "They're my flatmate's."
"Right."
"I spilled coffee on my jeans this morning so it was these or pyjama bottoms, and my manager's already on my case about the nose ring."
She didn't have a nose ring.
"I took it out," she said, reading my face. "That's the point."
Then she laughed. Not the polite customer service one — a real one, sudden and loud, loud enough that the woman on the next register looked over. It rearranged something in me. I don't know how else to say it. I'd walked in with a script and the script was gone and what was left was me, standing there red-faced, holding a block of cheddar I didn't need.
"I'm Nathan," I said.
"Sadie."
"Can I buy you a coffee sometime? Not to spill on you. Just to drink. In the normal way."
She looked at me for about two seconds longer than was comfortable. "Saturday. Twelve o'clock. The place on Brewer Street with the yellow sign. Don't be late and don't bring the yoga pants thing up again."
"Deal."
She handed me my bag. Our fingers touched on the handle and I thought about it the entire walk home. Thirty two years old, thinking about a finger on a plastic bag handle like I was fourteen. I knew how ridiculous I was. I want that on the record.
The place on Brewer Street was called something Italian I've forgotten. Yellow sign as promised, coffee slightly too expensive, chairs chosen for how they looked rather than how they felt. I got there eleven minutes early and spent ten of them reading the same paragraph of a book I'd brought as a prop.
She walked in at noon exactly. No yoga pants. Jeans, a green jumper, hair down. She sat across from me and said, "What are you reading?"
I showed her the cover.
"Any good?"
"No idea. I've been on the same page since I got here."
She grinned. "Nervous?"
"Bit."
"Good. Me too."
I don't remember the order we talked about things. She was from a town in Kent I'd never heard of. She'd dropped out of a teaching course because she hated standing in front of people, which she said with perfect irony, given that she now stood in front of people all day scanning their shopping. When she asked what I did I told her about the architecture firm, and she asked if I'd designed anything she'd have seen, and I said probably not unless she'd been to a business park in Slough. She hadn't. I said she wasn't missing much.
At some point the coffee arrived. At some point we ordered more. There was a bloke at the next table eating a croissant in the loudest way I have ever witnessed, really going at it, flakes everywhere, and Sadie glanced at him and back at me and bit her lip, and I bit mine, and we sat there like that, two adults vibrating silently, until he finished and left.
"Right," she said, after. "So."
"So."
She set her cup down and looked at me straight on, no blinking. The kind of eye contact that makes you want to check behind you in case she means someone else.
"I don't do secrets," she said. "Not the ones we say and not the ones we swallow. If this goes anywhere, and I think maybe it could, that's the rule. That's the only rule."
I opened my mouth.
"I don't mean you have to tell me everything right now," she said. "I mean if we're together, properly together, we don't hide things. We don't go quiet when we should be talking. We don't protect each other from the truth because we think the truth will hurt. It always hurts more later."
There was something underneath that. Something specific — a wound she was outlining without showing me the scar. I could hear it in how carefully she held her voice level, and see it in her fingers pressed flat on the table.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay as in you're being polite, or okay as in you mean it?"
"Okay as in I mean it. I want to mean it. Nobody's ever asked me to be that... I don't know. Open."
"Exposed," she said.
"Yeah."
"That's the word." She picked up her cup again. "It's meant to be scary."
I nodded. The ground had shifted, some plate sliding under me, and I was standing on the new arrangement trying to find my balance. Nobody had asked me to be that bare before. In that overpriced café, in a chair designed by someone who'd never sat down, croissant flakes still on the next table, I wanted to be.
We walked back along Brewer Street and at some point my hand found hers. Her palm was warm and a bit damp from the cup and I could feel a pulse in her fingertips, or mine. Neither of us said anything about it. We walked.
The first night we slept together was two weeks later, at her flat, which smelled of lavender and had a crack in the bathroom ceiling she'd covered with a sticker of a cartoon whale. Afterward we lay there and she turned on her side and said, "Hold me and never let me go."
I thought she was joking.
She wasn't.
It became ours. Every night, without fail. She'd turn toward me, or I'd turn toward her, and one of us would say it. Hold me and never let me go. Whispered, sometimes. Mumbled into a shoulder. Once or twice barely audible over the radiator clicking. Always said.
The honesty pact was tested about four months in. We were on the sofa, her feet in my lap, some property show on in the background where a couple with an inexplicable budget looked at three identical houses and pretended to agonise.
"A bloke came in today," she said. "Bought a bottle of wine and asked if I'd like to share it with him sometime."
My stomach dropped. Physically dropped, like a lift with the cables cut. I felt it in my throat.
"He was good looking," she added, the way you'd report the weather.
"Right."
"I said no. Obviously. But I thought about it for about half a second before I said it, and I wanted to tell you, because that's the deal."
I sat with it. The discomfort was sharp and specific, like pressing on a bruise. I wanted to ask what he looked like. I wanted to ask if he was taller than me. I asked neither.
"There's a woman at work," I said. "Laura. She laughs at everything I say and I've noticed that I like it. I don't want anything to happen. But I like being noticed."
Sadie nodded. She didn't flinch. She just nodded.
"Thanks for telling me," she said.
We sat there a while with the property show nattering on, and after a few minutes the discomfort loosened. Not gone. Loosened, like a knot with slack in it. Closer to relief than I'd expected.
She nudged my leg with her foot. "The wine bloke had a moustache, by the way. Not a good one."
I laughed, louder than I meant to.
Sadie's mother was called Marion Cleary. She'd kept her own name when she married Sadie's father, which I respected in principle and found terrifying in practice, because it meant two surnames to get wrong when I was nervous, and I was always nervous around Marion.
The dinner was on a Sunday. Roast chicken. The smell hit me in the hallway before I'd got my coat off, over seasoned and aggressive, rosemary and garlic and something else I couldn't place. I would forever associate that smell with the taste of biting my own tongue.
Terry Blake, Sadie's father, shook my hand at the door with the grip of a man who'd been practising. Shorter than me, barrel chested, grey at the temples, eyes that measured you without appearing to.
"Nathan," he said. Just my name. Nothing after it.
"Mr Blake. Thanks for having me."
He stepped aside. The hallway was narrow and dark and had a framed cross stitch on the wall that said BLESS THIS MESS, which struck me as optimistic.
Marion was in the kitchen. She did not come out.
At the table, Sadie squeezed my hand under the tablecloth. Marion served the chicken and addressed me exactly once in the first twenty minutes.
"Does he take sugar?" she asked Sadie, pouring the tea.
I was right there. In the chair directly across from her. I could have reached over and taken the bowl myself. But she looked at Sadie and Sadie looked at me and for a moment nobody said anything at all.
"No," Sadie said. "He doesn't."
I felt myself shrink. Actually contracting in the chair, shoulders drawing in, spine curving. I thought about saying something. I thought about a dozen things. I said none of them.
When Marion asked Sadie where she'd met me, Sadie told the truth. The shop. The yoga pants comment. Marion's face did something complicated.
"At your workplace," she said. Not a question.
"Yes, Mum."
"While you were working."
"Yes."
Marion looked at her plate. Terry looked at his. I looked at the cross stitch.
The rest of the meal was conversation happening around me, like weather around a lamppost. Marion spoke to Sadie. Terry spoke to Marion. Now and then Sadie pulled me in and I said something that landed flat and then we all went quiet again.
Afterward I helped clear the plates, because it seemed better than sitting there. Terry was at the sink already, sleeves rolled, running water over a serving dish. I picked up a tea towel, stood next to him and started drying.
We didn't speak for a while. The tap ran. I dried a plate. He washed a glass. The kitchen smelled of chicken and washing up liquid and something faintly metallic off the old taps.
Then he said, "She doesn't laugh like that for anyone else."
He didn't look at me. He handed me the next plate.
I stood there holding it, hands wet, tea towel over my shoulder, and I didn't say thank you, because he hadn't said it for me to thank him. He'd said it because it was true and he wanted me to know he knew.
I dried the plate. He washed the next one. We finished the dishes in silence.
Sadie's friend Jodie was a different project entirely. Small, fierce, opinions about everything and especially me. The first time I met her, at a gathering in Sadie's flat, she watched me from across the room for a solid hour before coming over.
"So you're the yoga pants bloke," she said.
"Apparently."
"Bold strategy."
"Not a strategy. More a failure to think before speaking."
She didn't laugh. She looked at me like someone deciding whether to file a report. "Sadie talks about you a lot."
"That's good. I think. Is that good?"
"Depends whether you're planning to stick around."
I wanted to say something convincing, something that would settle it there and then. But people who need to convince you are usually the ones you shouldn't trust, so I said, "I hope so," and she seemed to accept that, or at least to file it for later.
It took months. Jodie came round slowly, grudgingly, the way a cat approaches new furniture. She never said "I was wrong about you." She just started including me in the group chat and refilling my glass without being asked.
The proposal was nothing. It was everything and it was nothing. A Tuesday, I think. Or a Wednesday. One of the forgettable days. We were in bed. The sheets shifted as she turned toward me, cotton on cotton, a sound I knew as well as my own breathing.
"Hold me and never let me go," she said.
Her breath was on my lips. Close enough to feel, not close enough to kiss.
"Marry me," I said.
My voice cracked on the second word. On "me." On the smallest, stupidest word in the sentence. No ring. No speech. Only the thing I'd said, and the crack in it, and the dark.
Three seconds. She didn't answer for three seconds, and I know because I counted them, and in each one I lived a whole version of my life where she said no. Where she pulled back and said she needed to think. Where the silence went on long enough to become the answer. The flat without her things in it. Me eating standing up at the counter. Somebody else behind the register at the shop.
Then she said, "Yes."
Just that. The one word. No tears, no gasping, nobody throwing themselves at anybody. She said it the way you confirm something you've known a long time, like when someone asks if you want the heating on and you say yes, because obviously, because what else would you
She put her hand on my chest. I put mine over it. The radiator clicked. Outside a car alarm went off and stopped and went off again, and I thought about getting up to look but I