‘I am trying to get out as fast as possible,’ I hiss.‘Respect the effort.’
By the time I escape with six slightly cracked eggs and a bruised ego, I look up to see Luke standing by the fence, arms folded, grinning.Arsehole.
‘You made that look complicated.’
‘Itwascomplicated.Your chickens are fucked.’
He’s still smiling when I stomp past him, mumbling something about scrambled eggs and tetanus.
We cook together in that not-cooking-together way.I scramble the eggs.He butters toast.We bump elbows and insult each other and he steals a bite of my eggs and I pretend to be outraged.
‘What’s on the schedule today?’I ask through a mouthful of toast.
‘Water run.Check the troughs.Make sure everything’s working.’
‘And after that?’
‘Fix the tractor.’
‘You sound so casual about that.’
He shrugs.‘Have I turned you off yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I admit with a smile.‘There’s still time.’
He takes a final bite of toast, chews, swallows, then eyes me over his coffee mug.
‘Are you wearing my shirt?’
I glance down.The soft, oversized t-shirt I threw on earlier hanging off one shoulder.‘Yep.’
Luke raises an eyebrow.‘Bold.’
‘I’m out of clean tops,’ I say, like it’s no big deal.Like wearing his clothes doesn’t feel dangerously … intimate.
He nods once, easy.‘I’ll chuck some washing on before we head out.’Just like that.
I’ll chuck some washing on.
Like we’ve been living together for years.Like he knows my laundry schedule.Like this – toast, teasing, his shirt on my body – isn’t some temporary glitch in our separate lives, but a rhythm we’ve always known.
It hits me sideways.
That one sentence.So offhand.So domestic.Soordinary.
And suddenly, my chest tightens in that slow, suffocating way that makes it hard to breathe properly.
Because this is how it starts, isn’t it?
The comfort.The softness.The illusion that someone might stick around.I’ve seen it before.My father used to make promises with that same easy tone, that same careless confidence – as if reliability was as simple as saying you’d be there.But then he wouldn’t be.Over and over.He never had to shout or storm out to break us.He just forgot about us.Drifted.Always chose something else.
And I watched my mother spiral through the aftermath of that forgetting – until I learnt, somewhere along the way, that it’s safer to expect the exit.To assume that things will end.Because they always do.
They don’t stay.
Not for me.
Not really.
