CHAPTER FIVE #3
"I don't know how to do this the way other blokes do it.
Cal just — decided, one day, in a flood, that Josie was worth staying for, and that was that, and it looks so simple when he tells it.
I don't have a flood. I've just got a gap I left in a row of chairs, and four years of you sitting one seat away from me at every gathering, and I don't know what the version of Cal's flood is for someone like me.
I keep waiting for some big obvious moment to hand me permission, and it's not coming, and I don't know what to do with that. "
Pip reached out, slow, the way he'd reached for her hand that first night, and took his.
"Maybe there isn't a flood," she said. "Maybe for people like us it's smaller than that.
Maybe it's just — deciding, on an ordinary Friday, outside a pub, to stay standing here a minute longer than you need to, instead of finding a reason to go check on something.
Maybe the permission's not going to arrive from outside.
Maybe you just have to hand it to yourself. "
Renz looked down at their joined hands, and then at her, and didn't move to check on anything at all, standing there in the quiet after-pub street with the ordinary town going about its ordinary Friday night around them, and let himself, for once, simply stay exactly where he was.
? ? ?
Neither of them called it anything, afterward, but it became a fixture of that fortnight regardless — the two of them, most evenings after work, ending up at one kitchen table or the other with no particular plan attached, no declared occasion, nothing either of them would have described, if pressed, as a date, because a date implied a beginning they hadn't officially agreed to and both of them were still, cautiously, circling the idea of an official start the way you circle cold water before committing to the swim.
The Tuesday after the pub night, he turned up at her flat with a bag of prawns he'd got cheap off Baz and a bottle of the wine she liked, and cooked at her stove without asking whether that was presumptuous, and she let him, standing at the bench beside him peeling shells into the bin with the easy wordless coordination they'd perfected years ago carrying chairs, and somewhere between the second glass of wine and the smell of garlic in butter, it occurred to both of them, separately, that this was already the shape of an ordinary shared life, whether or not either of them had signed anything official to make it so.
"This isn't a date," Pip said, not quite a question, testing the shape of the denial the way you test ice before trusting your weight to it.
"No," Renz agreed, plating the prawns with more care than the meal strictly required. "Definitely not a date."
"Good. Wouldn't want to get ahead of ourselves."
"Terrible idea, getting ahead of ourselves.
" He set the plate down in front of her and sat, close, one careful degree from touching, the same careful degree they'd maintained for four years running, though the degree itself had started, lately, to feel less like distance and more like a held breath waiting for permission to release.
"Though I will say, for a man not on a date, I did think rather hard about which wine you liked. "
"For a woman not on a date," Pip said, "I did notice."
They ate slowly, talking about nothing that mattered and everything that did, the specific easy intimacy of two people who'd spent four years learning each other's rhythms without ever formally declaring the learning, and when he left, late, at her door again with his hand on the frame, neither of them kissed the other, not yet, both of them still moving at the pace their own particular caution required — but he stood there a beat longer than the goodbye demanded, and she let him, and something in the extra beat said more than either of them had yet found the words for.
It happened properly the following Thursday, in the end, in a moment neither of them had planned for or particularly expected — Pip reaching past him for the salt at her own kitchen table, an entirely ordinary domestic gesture, and finding herself close enough, suddenly, that the space between them had narrowed to almost nothing, and neither of them moved to widen it back out again.
"We could keep pretending this isn't happening," Renz said, quiet, his voice gone rough in a way she'd never quite heard it before.
"We could," Pip agreed, not moving either. "Bit tired of pretending, though, if I'm honest."
"Yeah," Renz said. "Me too."
He kissed her first, finally, four years of careful circling collapsing into the space of a single unhurried moment, his hand coming up slow to her jaw the way he did everything, careful, deliberate, giving her every chance to pull back that she didn't take, and when they broke apart neither of them said anything immediately, just stood there in her kitchen with the salt shaker forgotten on the table between them, both of them faintly, disbelievingly amazed that something four years in the making could land, in the end, so simply, so entirely without the fanfare either of them had half-expected it would require.
"Well," Pip said eventually, a laugh catching in her throat. "That took you long enough, Kowalski."
"Worth the wait, though," Renz said, and kissed her again to prove it, and neither of them found a single reason to argue with that assessment.