Page 106 of Undefined Terms

Fine.

It’s fine. Don’t need the word. Need the person.

‘You’re staring again,’ Celyn says. The shimmer on the eyelids.

‘Am I.’

‘The staring thing. The quiet thing.’ A pause. The laptop closes. The click of it, decisive. ‘You’ve been doing it all week.’

‘I haven’t done this before.’

‘Monday you looked at me for ten minutes without talking. Wednesday you went to make tea and stood at the counter for five minutes with the kettle cold.’ The voice is level. Factual. ‘And now you’re sat there with a warm pint looking at me like you’re trying to memorise something.’

Celyn’s right. All of it’s right. Just not why.

‘People memorise things they’re about to lose,’ Celyn says. Quiet. The accent thicker. The Welsh pushing through because the control’s slipping. ‘I’ve had it before. The looking. The long silences. The staring at me like I’m already past tense.’

The shimmer on the eyelids. The dress. The full makeup on a Wednesday night and I think. Did you do this for me? Did you put the dress on because you thought I was pulling away and the dress was a way to hold on?

‘I’m not leaving.’

‘Because if this is the part where you tell me London was easier,’ Celyn says, and the voice cracks. Small. A fracture in a load-bearing wall, the kind you don’t see until the plaster falls. ‘If this is you working out how to say it was simpler before me.’

‘Celyn.’

‘Then just say it. Don’t stare at me for a week. Don’t let me sit here and type and pretend I can’t feel you leaving from across the table. I’ve had that. I won’t do it again. I can’t do this.’

The hand comes up. Pushes the hair back. The gesture. But wrong. Too fast, too rough. Celyn’s fingers catch in the earring. The small hoop, winces, doesn’t stop.

‘I’m not leaving.’

‘Then what.’

The word. The word I’ve been sitting with for twenty minutes that doesn’t have a name and doesn’t need one.

‘I was thinking about Block C,’ I say. And Celyn’s face closes, pulls back, the armour going up, and I watch it happen in real time and I think: this is what you do. This is what you’ve always done. You read people and you’re brilliant at it and right now you’re wrong. You’re wrong and you don’t know you’re wrong and the wrongness is breaking your face.

‘I was thinking about Block C,’ I say again. ‘And then I was thinking about you. And then I stopped thinking about Block C.’

The eyes open, everything underneath showing. Young.

‘I’m not leaving,’ I say. ‘I’m the opposite of leaving. I’m so far from leaving I can’t see leaving from here.’

Celyn doesn’t move. The laptop, table, dress. Everything held in the same moment. The earring still crooked from where the fingers caught it.

‘You can’t know that,’ Celyn says. Low. The voice underneath all the voices that I’ve never heard before.

‘I know concrete,’ I say. ‘I know when something’s set.’

Silence, the bar, the rain starting. Celyn’s hand on the table, the blue nails chipped to nothing on the thumb, and I put my hand over it. Cover it. The knuckles under my palm.

Celyn looks at our hands. Looks at me.

‘Nobody stays,’ Celyn says. Almost nothing. A sentence falling out of a place that doesn’t usually open.

‘I’m staying.’

The hand turns under mine. Fingers lace through. The grip is tight. Tighter than it needs to be, the grip of someone holding on to something they’ve been braced to drop.