Page 76 of While I’m Still Here

We've spent nearly three years doing this, but now I can't understand why. Every look seems embarrassingly obvious in retrospect. Every inappropriate joke and drunken message. The Christmas party when I sat on his lap because there were “no chairs” despite there being at least twelve. The mistletoe kiss that almost happened, then didn’t, because somebody walked into the corridor at precisely the wrong moment. I used to think the lack of follow-through was part of the fun; now I just realise that I was waiting for a later that was never promised.

Unfortunately, Danny continues looking at me for most of the day, and I continue catching him. By lunchtime, I have caught him looking at the dress six times. By two, it's nine. At half past three, he appears beside my desk and places a file in front of me.

I take the sheet from him and glance at the box he's helpfully marked with a fluorescent yellow sticky note, because apparently my ability to locate a signature line has deteriorated along with the rest of my life. “You could've given me this this morning.”

“I was distracted.”

“By?”

Danny doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. His eyes drop pointedly towards the dress before returning to my face, and I immediately regret asking because the bastard has been doing this all day. I roll my eyes and reach for one. “Sexual harassment.”

“You wore that to work.”

My pen stops halfway towards the paper. “And?”

“And I've spent the last six hours heroically maintaining productivity despite you making extremely challenging working conditions.”

“Nobody asked you to.”

“I think I deserve recognition.”

“For managing not to hump my leg beside the photocopier?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a medal.”

“Piss off,” I tell him, looking back to the sheet.

Danny laughs, and I bend over the paperwork before he can see how much I'm enjoying this. That's the problem with him. It has always been the problem with him. Danny can make absolutely anything sound filthy without technically saying anything filthy at all, and after almost three years of working together, I should be immune.

I am not.

I sign my name, date the page and push the paperwork back towards him, expecting that to be the end of it. Danny came over for a signature. He has the signature. Normal workplace etiquette would now require him to return to his own desk and do whatever Danny Clarke does when he isn't wandering around the office irritating me.

Instead, he takes the empty chair beside my desk and lowers himself into it.

I glance sideways.

He settles back with one ankle resting over the opposite knee, the paperwork abandoned loosely across his lap, and studies me with an expression I recognise immediately. It's the same one he wore when I told him about the cancer. Not pity. Danny learned remarkably quickly that pity makes me want to bite people.

“You're different,” he says.

My stomach gives a small, unpleasant twist, because there are approximately nine hundred ways a person can tell a woman with breast cancer that she looks different and I don't particularly fancy hearing any of them.

So naturally, I reach for the joke first. “I have cancer, Clarke. I don’t expect myself to look the same as before, and you shouldn’t either.”

“Not what I meant.”

The humour fades from his voice before it fades from mine.

That's another thing Danny has become surprisingly good at. He doesn't avoid the word cancer. He doesn't lower his voice when he says it or look around first, as though malignant cells might be summoned Beetlejuice-style if we mention them three times in the office.

Titty cancer.

Titty cancer.

Titty cancer.

Oh, look, another lump,