‘I think I’ve got something in it.’
‘Do you want me to look?’
I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I can’t even open it.’
‘I’ll wait with you.’
‘It’s two a.m.’
‘Night owl,’ he said. I could sense rather than see his peat-dark eyes fixed on me. His soft, curious smile. ‘Hey, how come you’re by yourself?’
I smiled back at him. ‘It’s two a.m.’
‘I came to halls a couple of times.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And I tried calling. I left messages.’
‘Oh.’ We had a communal phone, in the bathroom of all places, with a whiteboard next to it. But expecting any of us to be reliable message-takers was always going to be a tall order. Besides, there was rarely space, among the myriad scrawled insults and cock-and-balls sketches and coded orders for mushrooms and weed.
‘So anyway, the other day, I kind of... wrote to you, instead. A soppy little letter.’ He shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe he’d done it. ‘You’ll probably get it tomorrow.’
I felt my heart open out in my chest, a tiny parachute. ‘What does it say?’
‘Ah, I couldn’t possibly. I think the mortification would genuinely finish me off.’
Something about the way he said this made me nervous. ‘So, how come you’re here? Are you okay?’
‘Um, it’s kind of embarrassing.’
I considered for a minute what he might mean. ‘Is it appendage-related?’
At this, he laughed. ‘What?No. What?’
I laughed too. ‘Sorry! I assumed when you saidembarrassing—’
‘—it must be to do with my penis?’
At this, a woman two chairs away huffed, loudly. She was bleeding quite heavily from the temple, which I guessed meant she wasn’t in the mood for smut.
I put a hand over my face, letting my hair form a curtain around my rapidly heating cheeks. ‘Can we pretend I didn’t just say that, please?’
He reached out, gently tucked my hair back behind my ear. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Why?’
‘Because. You look lovely when you blush.’
Eventually, as dawn was beginning to dilute the darkness, I got seen by a doctor. She diagnosed a scratched cornea, then gave me drops, an eye patch, and precisely zero sympathy for having been clumsy with my contact lens.
Josh got us a cab back to campus, then walked me to my block. Without saying anything, we sat down together on the wall outside.
It was getting light, the sky flaring pink. Somewhere nearby, a robin was singing. The morning smelt of pine needles and frost.
‘You never did tell me what you were in for,’ I said, after a moment.
He laughed softly. ‘Ah. Well, that was actually a strategic decision.’
I nudged him with my elbow. ‘Hey, I look like an actual pirate. We’re all friends here.’
I immediately regretted the clumsy turn of phrase, because – was it my imagination, or did he momentarily look slightly crushed?
