The Real Story

Kit was standing outside my flat when I got back from the shop, which had never happened before, not once in eight weeks. The wrongness of the image took me a second to place: a man built for doorways he could see every angle of, standing in a narrow communal hallway that smelled of someone else’s cooking, hands in his pockets, looking, for the first time since I’d met him, like he didn’t quite know what to do with his own height.

“You could have texted,” I said, more gently than the words sounded.

“I did text. Three times. You left your phone on the sofa this morning, I’d guess, because you’ve been answering me within four minutes for a fortnight and today it’s been three hours.” He said it without accusation, just an observation, though something underneath it suggested the three hours had cost him more than he wanted…