‘I’m not. I’m just refusing to laugh at you. We’re not fighting, remember?’
She dropped her hands from her face, exhaling. ‘I did say that, didn’t I?’
‘You did. And there’s no walking it back now, Shaw.’
I don’t know where I found the courage44to flick the tip of her nose gently with my finger, but it made her smile, and that sent some harp-string in me thrumming, a gentle, warm vibration.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let me help you hang your fairy lights.’
The summer sun was setting by the time we’d finally managed to unpack everything, which left us with two fully kitted-out bedrooms, with desks squeezed in front of the windows and books carefully organised, if haphazardly stacked, on the shelves – and a living room which was completely empty, apart from our wedding photo on the wall.
‘So we clearly need to buy some stuff,’ I said, leaning against the kitchen bench and regarding the empty space. ‘A couch, to start with.’
Sadie nodded, taking her hair down, shaking it out and then I assumed tying it up again, although by that point I had avertedmy eyes. ‘Want to go furniture shopping next weekend, once we get our first pay cheques?’
‘We could try looking on Facebook Marketplace. We might be able to get one cheap.’
She shook her head, hair now safely tied in a topknot. ‘I love cheap, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve been burnt before with second hand couches. Someone gave my mum one after my dad left. They must have really wanted to rub salt into the wounds, because it was full of bedbugs.’
‘Jesus Christ, Sadie.’
‘Not interested in your pity.’ The acid note in her voice was deeply familiar. ‘But I’m not interested in bedbugs either. Besides…’
‘Besides what?’ I prompted, after a few moments.
‘It’ll be a good test, don’t you think?’ The expression on her face was almost shy, and it was deeplyunfamiliar. ‘Seeing if we can get through buying a couch without some stupid argument?’
‘You’re on,’ I said, making up my mind then and there that we were going to pass this test with flying colours. She could have whichever couch she wanted, even if it was neon pink and cost eight million dollars. ‘Let’s go shopping.’
‘It’s a date.’
I nearly melted into a puddle at her feet.
Then something in her eyes lit up, and the urge to fall to my knees before her got even stronger. ‘I’ve got an idea. Get your doctorate.’
‘My doctorate…?’
‘The piece of paper ESU gave you the same day they gave me mine, Fisher, keep up.’ She snapped her fingers.
I obeyed, because my brain wasn’t working fast enough to argue. She fetched hers too, and then she hung them on the living room wall, on either side of our wedding photo.
‘The actual most important day of our lives deserves to be commemorated too,’ she said, standing back, regarding the wall.
‘Good idea,’ I said faintly. ‘Looks good.’
I wasn’t going to let that sting.I was not. I knew, as well as she did, that what we now had on our wall was two truths and a lie.
Sadie laced her fingers together and stretched her arms over her head. I had to avert my eyes again. ‘Want to eat that cheese? I’m starving.’
‘Sure,’ I said, to the black industrial lighting strip on the ceiling.
We didn’t own any glassware – like the couch, the wineglasses in our share house had been someone else’s property – so we ended up drinking white wine out of tea mugs: hers, the ridiculously enormous one with the C.S. Lewis quote on the side; mine, a normal-sized black one with the logo of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies on it. We took them out to the balcony, setting the cheese platter down on the table Isamu and his incredible arms had brought up for us, and sitting on either side of it, chairs wedged in close to avoid crushing the herb garden.
Sadie put some brie on a cracker and ate it, closing her eyes as she tipped her face up towards the sky. ‘This is nice.’
The sun was setting over the river. The light was Aperol Spritz orange. It caught faint freckles on her skin, turning her hair into living flame against the green backdrop of the plants.
‘Yeah,’ I said, unable to take my eyes off her. ‘It is.’
