The Coffee Cup

Tressa took a sip of coffee so hot that it gave her an honest reason not to speak. Elian watched her put the cup down. The reason would not last.

“I’m sorry about the shirt remark,” he said.

“You can be annoyed with me.”

“I know. I don’t want to use something kind you did as ammunition.”

She looked towards the bag on the chair. It was still open where he had looked inside. A whole evening could acquire evidence against you if you began examining it in the wrong spirit.

“Thank you,” she said.

Outside, the bicycle had gone. Somebody else stood beneath the streetlamp, reading a message. Life below the window had no obligation to wait for them to improve.

“I didn’t come here thinking you had broken a confidence,” she said. “I came wanting you to say there was no way anyone could ever be hurt by this.”

Elian leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“I can’t say that.”

“I know. I wanted it anyway.”

She could hear how bare the admission was without its practical clothing. No question about arrangements, no offer to make tea. She had wanted an impossible promise and felt injured when he would not manufacture one.

“When I left my marriage,” she said, “there were so many things I could make orderly. Who kept the house. Which account paid what. The solicitor sent letters and eventually the letters stopped. I think I kept expecting the feelings to do the same.”

He looked at her without moving closer. She was grateful; touch could have let her stop before she reached what mattered.

“I was very good at telling Selwyn there was nothing to worry about. He was twenty-seven. He knew perfectly well there was something to worry about. But I could give him a task, and then we both knew where to put our hands.”

“And now there isn’t a task.”

“There are a hundred tasks. None of them makes this harmless.”

She glanced at her coffee. It had become drinkable while she talked, but she did not pick it up.

“I don’t regret you,” she said. “I want that said clearly. I regret the way I arrived tonight.”

Elian’s expression eased a little. “I heard the difference. Eventually.”

“Not at first.”

“Not at first.”

She accepted it. The room felt less defended without becoming comfortable.

He looked at his hands. “I’ve done some of it too.”

“What?”

“Made a job out of somebody else’s feelings. When he didn’t want our usual walk, I started keeping Saturday mornings free anyway. As if I could be ready whenever he decided he wanted the old arrangement back.”

“You asked me for Saturdays.”

“Yes. Because I noticed what I was doing. Not because I’d stopped wanting to do it.”

She thought of the first and third Saturdays written in her diary, the almost embarrassing pleasure of those two little squares. He had not asked because he possessed some natural certainty she lacked. He had made the request against his own habits.

“I thought you were better at this,” she said.

He laughed without much humour. “I’m good at being quiet. It can look similar.”

She did not rescue him from the admission. He had not rescued her from hers.

“Sometimes when you ask how I am,” he said, “I hear a question about whether things are better with him. Then I answer that instead of what you asked.”

“I do ask it sometimes.”

“Yes. But sometimes you want to know whether I’ve had a bad day at work. I make you responsible for not upsetting me, and then I’m pleased with myself for requiring so little.”

He looked up. “I don’t want to be with you like that.”

The words frightened her until she heard their object. Like that. He was still here, telling her what might make staying possible.

“Neither do I,” she said.

They sat quietly. The pause contained work, but not the old kind where she invented a plan for somebody else to approve. She tried to imagine the next time Selwyn asked a question that frightened her. There would be a next time. He did not have to be malicious or unusually needy for that to be true.

“I can tell you I’m unsettled,” she said. “Without asking you to remove it.”

“You can.”

“And you can say you’ve had enough of talking about him. That isn’t asking me to love him less.”

“No.”

“It will probably sound like that for a minute.”

His mouth moved into the beginning of a smile. “Then we might need a minute.”

She looked at him, wanting him closer now without wanting the touch to count as a verdict. He seemed to understand the distinction, or at least to be making the same difficult one.

“Would you sit here?” she asked.

He came to the sofa. She moved aside enough for him, then rested her hand on the cushion between them. He put his hand beside hers. Their little fingers touched.

“I’m still cross,” he said.

“So am I. Mostly with myself. It’s not a very useful place to put it.”

“No.”

She turned her hand and took his. He held it firmly. Neither leaned in for a kiss.

For a while they spoke about the actual evening they had intended to have. He had made soup. She had assumed he would want help cutting bread, and he said he was capable of cutting bread without a witness. She asked whether that was an invitation to stay for it. He said yes.

They ate at his small table. The soup needed salt. Tressa said so, then watched herself prepare to soften the remark because they had already had one disagreement. Elian passed the salt without looking wounded.

“We’re going to have to allow for badly seasoned soup,” he said.

“I was hoping this was a temporary flaw.”

“It’s been going on for years.”

She laughed. He smiled at the sound, and the evening became possible again without pretending they had never hurt each other.

Afterwards he washed the bowls while she dried. She did not use the familiar arrangement to lean against him. They needed an ordinary task that stayed ordinary. When he passed her the last spoon, she put it in the drawer and stepped away.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

He turned off the tap.

They had loosely planned to spend Tuesday evening together, a meal at hers after he finished work. She could see the question forming in his face before she reached it.

“I’d like an evening to myself,” she said. “Not because I want you to worry about what it means. Because I’ve spent today listening for everybody else’s voice, and I don’t like the sound of mine.”

He dried his hands.

“I think I would too.”

It hurt a little, being agreed with so promptly. She let the hurt pass without offering it to him as another responsibility.

“Shall we speak Wednesday?” she asked.

“Yes. Not to examine whether we’ve done Tuesday correctly.”

“What if I waste the entire evening?”

“Then you’ll have achieved something I regularly manage.”

She smiled. They agreed he would ring after work on Wednesday. A real time, not an indefinite permission to disappear. The third Saturday was still theirs. Neither cancelled it as a gesture.

In the hall she put on her coat. He stood close enough that she could touch him, but did not reach until she did. She put her palm against his cheek.

“I want to keep learning you,” she said. “That sounds more dignified than I feel.”

“It sounds all right.”

“Even the soup.”

“Especially the soup. There will be more.”

She kissed him once, a quiet kiss with a promise limited to what she could honestly mean. He kissed her back. When she left, she did not mistake the fact that she was sad for proof she should have stayed.

· · ·Scene break

On Tuesday evening Tressa took her supper to the small table by the front window. She had cooked enough for one without congratulating herself. The room was quiet, but it was not the silence of somebody refusing to speak to her.

Her phone lay beside the plate. Once she picked it up and looked at Elian’s name. She could send a joke. She could explain something more gracefully than she had managed yesterday. She could make him answer and call that a courtesy.

She put it down.

Instead she took out the northern-islands book and read three pages without remembering them. Then she went back and read one properly. The author of the old guide had assumed the reader would possess a car and a remarkable tolerance for rain. She drew a question mark beside a route in pencil, then rubbed it out because she did not yet know what the question was.

She had expected the evening to clarify her feelings. It mostly reminded her that she disliked the way the lamp reflected on glossy paper. She moved to the sofa and finished her tea there.

At half past eight Selwyn called.

Her hand hovered above the phone. She was allowed to answer. An evening to herself was not a punishment she had imposed on her family.

He wanted to know whether she had the number for a tradesman who had repaired her gate. She found it in her address book, read it out and waited while he repeated it. He asked how she was. She said she was having a quiet evening.

“Anything wrong?”

She looked at the guidebook on her knee.

“Nothing I need you to sort out.”

“That wasn’t quite what I asked.”

“No. I’m a bit tired. I’d rather talk another day.”

He accepted that with only a brief pause. They said goodnight. She had not told him about the argument, had not invited him to decide whether Elian had been fair, had not mentioned the application. Keeping something private had felt less like carrying a secret than leaving an object in its proper room.

She returned to the book. On the page was a photograph of a harbour at ten in the evening, light still lying across the water. She wanted to go there. She wanted Elian in her life. Those wishes were not automatically the same plan.

For the first time that day, she read without listening for her phone.