I Just Miss Your Accent

“I’ve been right here.”

“Your body has been right here.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “You wrote four hundred words on the housing board vote and then deleted three hundred of them. I heard you do it. The keys sound different when you’re deleting.”

You stare at her.

“I’m not wrong,” she says.

You look back at your screen. The cursor blinks.

“I’m just tired,” you say.

Priya doesn’t push it. She looks at you a second longer, the kind of look people give when they’ve decided not to say the thing they’re thinking, then straightens up and goes back to her own desk. You sit there with the housing board piece open and four hundred words that don’t sound like anything and a tab underneath it full of streets you’ve never walked down.

You stare at the board piece for another minute, then close the tab on Manchester entirely, like that’s going to fix anything, like the problem is the tab and not what’s underneath it.

You go back to the article. Read your own opening sentence three times. It’s fine. It’s a perfectly fine sentence. The housing board voted to delay implementation of the new zoning amendment for the fourth consecutive month, citing ongoing community input sessions that several residents have characterized as performative. That’s accurate. That’s the story. You sat in that meeting for two hours on Thursday night with your notebook out and your recorder running and you have everything you need to write this, and you can’t make yourself care about a single word of it.

You used to care. That’s the part that feels strange. You didn’t fake interest in this work, not for one single piece in six years. You liked the meetings. You liked the residents who showed up with their binders and their grievances and their twenty years of paying close attention to a neighbourhood that the rest of the city barely thought about. You liked being the person who wrote it down properly, who got the quotes right, who made someone’s frustration legible to people who would never sit through a zoning meeting themselves.

You still like all of that, in theory. In the abstract. You just can’t seem to access it from inside your own chest anymore, not like you used to, and you don’t entirely know when that happened, except you do, actually, you know exactly when it happened, it happened somewhere between a farmers market and a recording studio and a rooftop bar with the whole of Los Angeles spread out below you.

You delete the opening sentence and write it again, slightly differently, and it still doesn’t sound like anything.

Your phone buzzes on the desk.

Harry: lunch?

You look at the time. Quarter to twelve. He’s five hours ahead, which means it’s nearly five in London, which means he’s between things, that specific in between he gets during a day full of meetings and sessions that he never quite explains the details of, just mentions in passing like they’re nothing, like flying to London for two days of meetings is a completely ordinary Tuesday.

You: can’t talk long. is everything okay?

Harry: everything’s fine. just wanted to see your face

You smile at your screen despite yourself, despite the four hundred words of nothing sitting open behind the message, despite Priya twelve feet away definitely still clocking your general state of being.

You: give me ten minutes

You close your laptop halfway, just enough to signal to anyone walking past that you’re stepping away. You head for the small conference room at the end of the floor that nobody ever uses before one, the one with the good light and the door that actually closes properly. You sit down at the table and call him.

He picks up on the second ring, the screen taking a second to load. Then his face fills the small rectangle, cap off, hair pushed back, a window behind him already starting to get dark. London ahead of you in more ways than one today.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.” You settle back in the chair and pull your knees up slightly, making yourself small in a room that isn’t really yours. “How’s London?”

“Grey. Wet. Several meetings about things I will not be discussing with you because they’re boring even to me.” He tilts the phone slightly, like he’s trying to get a better look at you. “How’s the housing board piece.”

“It’s not happening,” you say.

“That bad?”

“I’ve written the opening sentence four times.”

“What’s it about.”

“Zoning amendment. Delayed again. Residents are annoyed.” You rub your eyes. “I know exactly what it should say. I just can’t make myself say it.”

He’s quiet for a second, watching you through the screen with that attention he gives even through a phone, even across an ocean and five time zones.

“I miss you,” you say. It comes out before you’ve decided to say it, less filtered than it used to be with anyone.

Something in his face softens. “I miss you too.”

“It’s stupid. It hasn’t even been that long.”

“It’s not stupid.”

You look at the conference table. At the little water ring from someone’s coffee cup that’s been there for as long as you’ve worked here. “I just don’t want to be here,” you say. “In the office. Writing about zoning. I don’t mean that as some huge thing. I just mean today. Right now. I don’t want to be here.”

“Where do you want to be?”

You think about it. “I don’t know. Anywhere but here, honestly.”

He’s quiet again. Not a worried quiet. Just a listening one.

“Hm,” he says.

You laugh a little, despite everything. “That’s all I get? Hm?”

“What do you want me to say? What would help you?”

“I don’t know. Something useful.”

“I could fly you to London right now,” he says. “That’s useful.”

“I have a job, Harry.”

“I’m aware.”

You smile at the screen and rub your eyes again. “I think I might book a session with my therapist,” you say. “Or get a massage. Honestly those feel like the same thing right now.”

“They’re not the same thing.”

“They’re functionally the same thing. Someone listens to me. Someone touches my shoulders. I leave feeling slightly less like a held breath.”

He laughs at that, properly, the kind that makes you feel like you said something good even though you weren’t really trying to.

“Book both,” he says. “See which one works better. Report back.”

“I’ll do a controlled study.”

“Very scientific of you.”

“I’ll see if they’re open tonight,” you say. “The massage place. If they have a slot I’m taking it.”

“Where do you go?”

“This little boutique spa place near my apartment. Bare Theory.” You shrug slightly. “It’s tiny, like four rooms, but the woman who runs it is the only person who’s ever actually gotten the knot out of my left shoulder, so I’m loyal.”

“Bare Theory,” he repeats, like he’s stashing it away. “Have fun.”

“I’ll try.”

You look at him for a second, his face filling the small screen, London getting darker behind him, and something in your chest does that thing it does now, the settling thing, even over a phone, even with an ocean between you.

“I should let you go,” you say. “You probably have actual important people to talk to.”

“You’re an important person.”

“Flatterer.” You lean toward the camera slightly. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” He smiles, the real one. “Go write about zoning.”

“Don’t remind me.”

You end the call and sit there for a second in the quiet of the empty conference room, phone still warm in your hand. Then you open the booking app before you can talk yourself out of it and check Bare Theory’s availability for tonight.

Six o’clock. One slot left.

You book it without hesitating, type your name in, confirm, and feel something in your shoulders ease slightly just from having done it. A small good decision made for yourself, before the actual good thing has even happened.

You put your phone face down on the table and look at it for a second.

Then you go back to your desk and open the housing board piece again, and this time the opening sentence comes out almost right on the second try, which you decide to take as a sign.

You leave the office a little before five, earlier than you usually allow yourself, but Priya doesn’t say anything when you grab your coat except a small knowing look that you choose to ignore.

The walk home is cold and quick, the December dark that arrives at four thirty and makes the whole day feel shorter than it is. You change out of your work clothes into something soft, the leggings and the oversized sweater that exist specifically for evenings that require comfort over presentation, and you’re pulling your hair back when you remember the conversation with Harry from earlier, the bit about booking a session with your therapist or a massage, functionally the same thing.

You pull out your phone.

You: are you free tonight??

The reply comes almost instantly, because Camille’s phone is essentially an extension of her hand at all times.

Cami: always for you. what’s the vibe?

You think about it for a second. Cami isn’t licensed in anything except, as she’s pointed out more than once, ten years of paying very close attention to you, which she maintains is more useful than a degree anyway. She’s not wrong, most of the time. She gives genuinely good advice that cuts through things faster than a real session sometimes does, mostly because she has no professional obligation to be gentle about it.

You: I need to wine and whine. having a moment

Cami: say less. my place, 8?

Cami: also bringing the good wine not the wine I pretend is the good wine

You: perfect. I have a massage at 6 so that works

Cami: a MASSAGE. look at you taking care of yourself

Cami: this is either very healthy or you’re spiraling and dressing it up as self care

You: can it be both…

Cami: it can absolutely be both. see you at 8 🍷

You put your phone down and look at yourself in the mirror for a second, hair pulled back, the soft sweater, a tiredness around your eyes that no amount of sleep seems to be fixing lately, and you think about Harry’s face on the screen earlier today, how he just listened, how he said hm instead of trying to fix something that maybe doesn’t need fixing yet, just needs saying out loud.

You grab your bag, your keys, your coat, and head out into the cold toward Bare Theory.

Bare Theory is exactly what it sounds like. Small and warm and the opposite of clinical, a place that smells like eucalyptus and something faintly woody, soft music coming from somewhere you can never quite locate, the lighting set to a specific warmth that makes everything feel slightly outside of regular life. There are four rooms. The one you always get is the second on the left, the one with the heated table and the small plant on the shelf that you have watched grow incrementally over the past two years of coming here.

Your massage therapist, Mei, is already waiting when you check in, clipboard in hand, the small professional smile that transitions immediately into a real one when she sees you.

“Hi stranger,” she says. “It’s been a while.”

“I know,” you say. “Life got complicated.”

“I can always tell,” she says, completely unbothered, and leads you back to the second room on the left.

You change and lie down and let the heated table do its first small miracle and stare at the little circle of the face cradle and breathe in the eucalyptus and try to let your brain go quiet, which it doesn’t, not really, not tonight.

Mei starts with your shoulders.

She stops almost immediately.

“Okay,” she says. “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you have about six weeks of stress living in here.” She presses a thumb into something near your left shoulder blade and you make a sound that is not entirely dignified. “When did this start?”

“I’ve been a little in my head,” you say, muffled slightly by the face cradle.

“A little.”

“Maybe more than a little.”

She works without saying anything for a moment, just the music and the pressure of her hands finding all the places you’ve been holding things without realising you were holding them. You close your eyes and let yourself just be a body on a table for a minute, not a writer with a half finished piece and a restless chest and a boyfriend in London and a trip to Manchester in February that is starting to feel like the only real thing on the horizon.

“You want to talk about it or you want to be quiet,” Mei says. She always asks. It’s one of the reasons you come back.

“I don’t know,” you say honestly.

She nods, like that’s a completely acceptable answer, and keeps working, and you lie there and let your thoughts do what they do when your body finally stops moving for five minutes.

You think about the housing board piece, four hundred words of nothing, the opening sentence written and rewritten until it stopped meaning anything. You think about Priya’s face this morning, the look she gave you before she went back to her desk, the one that said I see it even if you don’t.

You think about Harry in London right now, five hours ahead, probably done with his meetings, probably in a hotel room or a car or a restaurant with people you don’t know, living the part of his life that exists without you in it, which is most of it, which is fine, which is the arrangement, except lately fine has started to feel like a word you’re using to cover something that isn’t quite fine.

You think about Manchester.

February feels both very close and very far. Close in the sense that it’s almost December, that the year is ending, that you have started, quietly and without announcing it to anyone, researching neighbourhoods and markets and pubs and the specific coat situation required for a Manchester winter. Far in the sense that it is still weeks away and you have a housing board piece to finish and a desk to sit at and a life to keep living in the meantime.

You think about what he said. You don’t have to blow your whole life up. You just have to start.

You haven’t started. Not really. You’ve booked a massage and researched some broken link blog posts and texted Cami that you need to wine and whine, which is something, but it’s not starting.

“Okay,” Mei says, from somewhere above your right shoulder. “I’m going to need you to breathe.”

“I am breathing.”

“You’re doing that thing where you breathe but you’re not actually letting it go anywhere.”

You breathe properly. Something in your upper back releases slightly, just a fraction, just enough to notice.

“That’s better,” she says.

You lie there and breathe and let her work on the six weeks of stress that apparently took up permanent residence somewhere between your shoulder blades without asking permission. Thoughts surface now that your body has finally stopped moving.

After a while you say, mostly at the table: “I think my life is about to change pretty significantly.”

Mei doesn’t stop working. “Good or scary.”

“Both, probably.”

“Those are usually the same thing.”

You smile at that, facedown. “I met someone,” you say. “Or. Not met. It’s been a while now. But it’s.” You pause. “It’s the kind of thing where I can feel it pulling at everything else. Like it’s not enough anymore to just be here doing what I’ve always done. And I don’t know if that’s about him or about me or about both and I can’t quite tell anymore which parts of this are what I want and which parts are just because of him.”

Mei is quiet for a moment, working a knot loose near your neck that you didn’t even know was there.

“Does it matter?” she says eventually.

You think about it. “I don’t know.”

“Wanting something because of someone isn’t the same as not really wanting it,” she says simply. “People change what they want all the time. Usually because of something or someone. That doesn’t make it less yours.”

You lie there and sit with that for a second.

“He wants to take me to Manchester in February,” you say. “For two weeks.”

“Manchester,” she says.

“England.”

“I know where Manchester is.” She moves to your lower back, finds something immediately that makes you exhale sharply. “And what’s stopping you?”

“Nothing, technically. I said yes. I’m going.”

“So what’s the problem?”

You think about it properly. “I don’t know how to want something this much without being scared of it,” you say. “I’m not used to things feeling this big.”

Mei works in silence for a moment. Then she says: “How long have you been coming here?”

“Two years, nearly.”

“And that knot in your left shoulder.”

“What about it?”

“It’s gone,” she says simply. “Finally.”

You laugh, surprised, and she laughs too, and then she says: “Girl. An hour is not enough for all of this. You know that, right?”

“I know,” you say. “I have wine and a best friend scheduled for eight o’clock.”

“Good,” she says. “That’ll do the rest.”

You come out of the second room on the left feeling approximately forty percent more like a person than you did going in, which is the Bare Theory guarantee, or close enough to it. Your shoulders sit differently. Your neck moves without the specific resistance it’s had for weeks. The knot in your left shoulder, the one that has been a permanent fixture since approximately the second year of your last relationship, is gone.

Mei hands you a small glass of water in the waiting area and squeezes your arm.

“February,” she says. Like it’s a prescription.

“February,” you confirm.

She pulls you into a quick hug, the unselfconscious kind, and you let yourself have it for a second before you pull back and gather your coat and your bag and head toward the front desk to check out.

The girl at the front desk is young, maybe twenty three, with the warmth of someone who genuinely likes their job and isn’t performing it. She looks up when she sees you coming and smiles and starts typing something.

“You’re all set,” she says. “You’re all taken care of.”

You stop. “Sorry?”

“You’re all set.” She nods at the screen. “Taken care of.”

You look at her. “Did you charge the card on file?”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks at the screen and then back at you with an expression that is trying to be professionally neutral and is not quite getting there.

“I wasn’t really supposed to say anything,” she says. “But.” She tilts her head slightly. “Your boyfriend called earlier and took care of the session. And the tip.”

You stare at her.

“He asked us not to mention it,” she adds, in the tone of someone who is mentioning it. “But he sounded really sweet so I thought you should know.” She pauses. “Harry, right? He said to tell you to enjoy your evening.”

You stand there in the warm eucalyptus-scented reception of Bare Theory with your coat half on and your bag on your shoulder and your newly de-knotted left shoulder. You don’t say anything for a second because you’re not entirely sure what to say.

“He sounds like a real sweetheart,” the girl says.

“He is,” you say. Quietly. Meaning it completely.

You finish putting your coat on and push through the door into the cold night. You stand on the pavement for a second and look at the street, at the city moving past in the dark, all its usual noise and indifference. Then you take out your phone.

You: did you call Bare Theory?!

The reply comes back before you’ve even put your phone back in your pocket.

Harry: enjoy your evening 🙂

You stand there on the cold pavement and laugh to yourself and think about a man who calls a massage place from London to sort out the bill before you’ve even walked in the door, who asks them not to mention it, who probably assumed they wouldn’t, who didn’t do it to be thanked.

You: you’re ridiculous

Harry: you said that already

You: I’m saying it again

Harry: noted. how are your shoulders

You: the left one is fixed. Mei says hi. I say love you.

Harry: tell Mei she’s a genius. I love you too.

You: she knows

You put your phone in your pocket and start walking toward the subway, toward Camille’s apartment, toward the good wine and the whining you’ve been promising yourself since noon. You think about February and Manchester and a person five hours ahead of you who calls massage places and asks them not to mention it.

You think: this is a good thing that is happening to you and let yourself believe that.

You stop at the wine shop on the corner of Camille’s block, the small one run by a man named Patrick who has never once in four years tried to upsell you on anything. You stand in front of the reds for a moment before picking something that costs more than your usual threshold, because Mei fixed the knot in your left shoulder and a stranger at a front desk told you your boyfriend called from London and tonight feels like it deserves something good.

You grab a bar of dark chocolate from the basket by the register, the kind with sea salt, because you are a person who contains multitudes and also because chocolate and wine is a meal if you believe in yourself.

Patrick rings you up without comment. You tip well. You always tip well at the wine shop on the corner of Camille’s block because someday you will need Patrick’s help picking something important and you are playing a long game.

The walk to Camille’s is four minutes. You know it well enough that you could do it blind, past the dry cleaner and the Italian place that always smells incredible and the little bookshop with the handwritten recommendation cards in the window that you stop and read sometimes when you have nowhere to be. Tonight you don’t stop. Tonight you have somewhere to be and a lot to say and a freshly de-knotted shoulder and a glass of good red with your name on it.

Camille buzzes you up before you’ve even finished pressing the button, which means she’s been watching for you, which is a Camille thing, that attentiveness she has for the people she loves that she would never describe as attentiveness because she thinks it sounds soft.

You take the stairs, push through her door. She’s already in the kitchen in her silk pyjama set, hair up, the apartment warm and smelling like the candle she keeps on the kitchen counter that costs more than your grocery budget and that she insists is essential.

She looks up when you come in.

“Hey babe.” She tilts her head. “You look relaxed.”

“I feel relaxed,” you say, which is true in the body even if the head is still catching up. “Mei fixed the knot in my left shoulder. The one that’s been there for two years.”

“No.”

“Gone. Completely gone.”

Camille puts her hand on her chest like this is genuinely moving. “That’s incredible.”

“It is.” You hold up the wine and the chocolate. “I brought offerings.”

She takes them, inspects the label on the wine, nods with the approval of someone who knows what she’s looking at. “Okay you went good wine. This is a real night.” She starts opening it. “How was the rest of the session?”

“Really good,” you say, dropping your coat over the back of her chair and toeing off your shoes. “Mei’s great. We talked a little. Nothing heavy. Just.” You pause. “It was good to be still for an hour.” You sit down on her couch and pull your knees up and look at your phone and think about how to say the next part.

“And then,” you say.

Camille looks over from the kitchen.

“When I went to check out,” you say, “the girl at the front desk told me it was all taken care of.”

Camille puts the wine down. “What do you mean all taken care of?”

“I mean Harry called from London while I was in the session and paid for the whole thing. The session and the tip.” You look at her. “And asked them not to mention it.”

Camille stares at you.

“Holy shit,” she says.

“I know.”

“Holy shit.”

“I know, Cami.”

“He called from London.” She points at you. “From London. While you were in there. And just.” She makes a gesture that encompasses the magnitude of the thing. “Just sorted it?”

“And asked them not to say anything,” you say. “The girl told me anyway because she thought he sounded sweet.”

“He is sweet,” Camille says, with some feeling. “That is genuinely the sweetest thing I’ve heard and I say that as someone who covers a lot of sweet content professionally.” She picks the wine back up and finishes opening it with renewed purpose. “Okay. We are drinking this entire bottle.”

“Agreed.”

She brings the glasses over and sits beside you and pours generously and you both drink properly, not a delicate sip but a real one, the kind that says we mean business and also I haven’t eaten dinner.

“To Harry calling from London,” Camille says, raising her glass.

“To Mei fixing the knot,” you say.

“Both,” she says. You both drink.

You sit there for a moment in the warm apartment and let the wine and the evening settle around you and it feels like exactly what you needed, which is this, Camille’s couch and the good candle and the kind of quiet that isn’t actually quiet but is full of everything that doesn’t need to be said yet.

Camille disappears without warning.

You hear her in the bedroom, the sound of a drawer, and then she comes back holding something soft and colourful, which she throws at you across the couch with no preamble.

“Pyjamas,” she says. “Get comfortable.”

You unfold them. They’re nice, properly nice, a matching set in a dusty blue with the softest fabric you’ve ever touched.

“Where are these from,” you say.

“Selena Gomez’s beauty brand event last week,” she says, dropping back onto her end of the couch. “They sent everyone home with a goody bag. The pyjamas were in it.” She reaches into the pocket of her own set and produces two sheet masks, still in their packets, holds one out to you. “Also these. Gratis. Very hydrating apparently.”

You take the face mask. Look at it. Look at the pyjamas. Look at Camille sitting there with her wine glass and her silk set and her Selena Gomez face mask like this is completely ordinary, which for her it basically is.

“Your life is so strange,” you say.

“I know,” she says happily. “Go change. You’ll feel better.”

You come back from the bathroom in the dusty blue pyjamas and Camille looks up and points at you immediately.

“See,” she says. “Better.”

She’s right. They’re unreasonably soft, the kind of fabric that makes you want to cancel all future plans and just exist in a warm room forever. You pull the face mask packet open and smooth it onto your face and drop down onto her floor, back against the couch, legs crossed, wine glass in hand, and let the evening properly begin.

Camille puts music on, something low and easy, the kind of playlist she keeps for nights like this, not a vibe she’s curated for content but the one she actually listens to, which she’s played for you so many times over so many different versions of hard nights that you know every transition.

She slides down from the couch and sits beside you on the floor, back against the cushions, shoulder touching yours, and tops up both glasses without being asked.

“Okay,” she says. “Talk.”

You look at the wine in your glass. At the face mask packet on the coffee table. At Camille’s apartment, all warm and specific and full of her, the candles and the good art and the little dish by the door where she keeps things she doesn’t want to lose, and you think about how many versions of a hard thing you’ve said out loud in this apartment over the years.

“I hate my job,” you say.

Not I’ve been struggling with motivation, not I’m a little uninspired, not the softened version you’ve been giving everyone including yourself. Just the plain thing.

Camille nods slowly. “I know.”

“I sit at that desk and I look at my notes and I think about all the places I haven’t been and all the things I haven’t written and I just.” You stop. “I feel like I’m behind glass. Like I’m watching my own life from slightly outside of it.”

“Yeah,” she says. Quietly. No performance in it.

“There’s so much more out there,” you say. “I know that sounds like something someone says right before they have a breakdown and buy a ticket to Bali, but I don’t mean it like that. I mean it like.” You search for it. “I went to LA for a week and I ate at a restaurant where the menu changes every week and I sat on a rooftop and I went to a recording studio and I interviewed a woman about sofrito and I just.” You shake your head. “I want more of that. All of it. I want to go places and write about people in them and not spend another winter covering the same planning committee vote I covered two winters ago.”

Camille is quiet for a moment. Then she says: “I get it.”

“I know you do.”

“More than most people,” she says. “I travel constantly. I know what it does to you, seeing different places. It ruins you for standing still.” She pulls her knees up. “Once you know there’s more out there you can’t unknow it. It just sits there.”

“It just sits there,” you agree.

“So what’s stopping you.”

You think about it. “It’s new,” you say. “All of it. Harry. The idea of changing anything. I’ve been in this job for six years. I’ve been in this city my whole adult life. I’m comfortable. I know where everything is. I know what my weeks look like.” You pause. “There’s something safe about that even when it’s making you miserable.”

Camille looks at you with that expression she gets when she’s about to say something true and she knows it.

“You met someone,” she says carefully. “Someone who is actively showing you new things. Taking you places you haven’t been. Making you see your own life differently.” She pauses. “It’s okay to want more because of that. That’s not weakness. That’s just how things go.”

You sigh. The face mask pulls slightly at your cheek when you do.

“You have been in your bubble,” she says. Not unkindly. Just plainly. “A very good bubble. A very you bubble. You built it carefully and you’ve kept it safe and it’s served you.” She looks at you. “And now it doesn’t fit anymore. And that’s not a bad thing. It just means you grew and don’t fit in your bubble anymore.”

You stare at the middle distance. At the candle on her coffee table burning down slowly.

“What do you actually want,” she says. “Not what makes sense. Not what’s responsible. What do you actually want.”

You don’t hesitate.

“I want to be with him,” you say. “Properly. Not across an ocean with a FaceTime schedule and a countdown to the next visit. I want to be in the same place. I want to wake up and have breakfast and go see things and write about them and come home to him.” You stop. “I want that life. The one that doesn’t look like this one.”

Camille looks at you for a long moment.

“Then do it,” she says simply.

“Cami—”

“Quit your job,” she says. “Go. Go overseas. Go to Manchester, go wherever he is, go everywhere. Write about all of it. You’re a good enough writer that people will read it wherever it comes from.”

You look at her. “I don’t want to be a gold digger.”

Camille laughs. Not a polite laugh. A real one, the kind that takes over her whole face, the kind she can’t help.

“Babe,” she says, when she gets herself back. “Babe. You are this worried about being a gold digger.” She shakes her head. “A gold digger would have been on a plane six months ago. A gold digger would not be sitting on my floor in free pyjamas agonizing about it.” She looks at you. “You are the opposite of a gold digger. You are the person who argued about valet parking.”

You open your mouth.

“Twenty dollars,” she says. “You argued about twenty dollars.”

You close it.

“The fact that you’re this worried about it,” she says, “is exactly why it’s not a thing.” She tops up your wine. “You’re not taking from him. You’re building something with him. There’s a difference.”

You sit with that. The music moves through something slow and the candle burns and outside the city does its winter thing, cold and loud and indifferent, and you think about what she said and let it settle somewhere it maybe needed to go.

“What about you,” you say eventually.

She looks at you. “What about me.”

“If I go. If I actually do this.” You look at her. “You’re here. Everything is here.”

Camille is quiet for a second. She looks at her wine glass, turns it slightly in her hand, and then she looks back at you with the expression she gets when she’s made a decision and is about to say it like it’s obvious.

“Move over there,” she says, “and there’s a good chance I will too.”

You stare at her.

“I’ve been thinking about it anyway,” she says, with the casual air of someone who has absolutely been thinking about it. “London’s got incredible content potential. The fashion. The food. The general Britishness of everything.” She waves a hand. “My following is forty percent international anyway. It makes sense.”

“You would move to London,” you say slowly. “For content potential.”

“I would move to London,” she says, “because my best friend might be there and I have been mildly obsessed with the idea since you told me about Manchester and I looked it up at one in the morning.” She shrugs, completely unbothered. “Also the content potential.”

You look at her for a long moment.

Then you lean your head on her shoulder.

She leans hers on top of yours.

“I’m scared,” you say.

“I know,” she says. “Do it anyway.”

“Okay,” you say. “Okay. So what do I actually do. Right now. Tonight. What’s the first step.”

Camille looks at you like the answer is extremely obvious.

“You get on the phone,” she says. “Right now. And you tell him everything you just told me.”

You look at her. “Everything.”

“All of it. The job. The wanting more. The being scared. All of it.”

You exhale slowly. The face mask has dried slightly at the edges. The wine is nearly gone. Outside Camille’s window the city is doing its December thing, cold and lit up and completely indifferent to the fact that you are sitting on your best friend’s floor in free Selena Gomez pyjamas about to potentially blow up your entire life.

“What if he says no,” you say.

Camille laughs, short and certain. “Then fuck him,” she says. “Do it anyway.” She pauses. “But he won’t. You know he won’t. He wants this too. He’s been trying to find ways to make it work since approximately the rooftop in LA.” She looks at you. “You doing this makes it easier. Not that anything’s going to happen, but even if it did, even worst case, you move or you come back. You’re not disappearing. You’re just going somewhere.”

You look at her. “Do you actually want to do this? Come with me. Not just saying it.”

She grabs both your hands in hers and looks at you with the complete seriousness she reserves for the things that matter.

“I would do anything with you,” she says. “I mean that. Ten years and counting. You go, I go. Maybe not immediately, maybe not the same week, but.” She squeezes your hands. “You’re not doing this alone. You’re never doing anything alone.”

You look at her for a second and feel something loosen in your chest that you didn’t even know was tight.

Then you throw back the rest of your wine, set the glass down on the carpet, pick up your phone, and press his name before you can think about it any further.

It rings twice.

“Hey lovey.” His voice is warm and a little tired, the end of a long day in London settling into it. “You all good?”

You open your mouth.

“No,” you say.

A beat. His voice changes immediately, sharpens slightly, the tiredness gone. “What’s wrong, what happened?”

“Nothing happened,” you say quickly. “I’m fine. I’m at Cami’s. Everyone’s fine.” You look at Camille. She gives you a small nod, the go on kind. “I just.” You take a breath. “I need to tell you something.”

“Okay,” he says. Steady. Just waiting.

“I want to quit my job,” you say.

Silence.

Not a bad silence. Just him taking it in, sitting with it, which is what he does.

“Okay,” he says.

“I’ve been trying to write the same piece for three days and I can’t do it,” you say, the words coming out faster now, the wine and the pyjamas and Camille’s hand still on your arm making it easier than it would have been at your own kitchen table. “I can’t make myself care about it and I used to care, I really used to care, and now I sit at that desk and all I can think about is every place I haven’t been and every person I haven’t written about and this whole other version of my life that I can’t stop thinking about.” You stop. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Not in a scary way. Just in a this doesn’t fit anymore kind of way.”

He’s quiet for a moment.

“I know,” he says gently.

“I want to come to you,” you say. “Not just February. Properly. I want to figure out what that looks like.”

Another beat of quiet. Longer this time.

“Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah,” you say. “I don’t have it all figured out. I don’t know exactly what it looks like or how it works or what I’d do for money at first or any of the practical parts of it. I just know that I’ve been sitting at that desk for three weeks feeling like I’m behind glass and I come alive when I’m with you and I want to write things that matter and I can’t do any of that from here anymore.” You pause. “I think I’ve known that for a while and I’ve just been scared to say it.”

“I know you have,” he says. Quietly. Not I told you so. Just I know.

“I don’t want you to think this is because of you,” you say, and then you laugh a little because you’ve said that before, on a street in November walking to a diner, and he said the same thing back then that he says now.

“I know it’s not because of me.”

“It’s not not because of you either,” you admit.

“I know that too,” he says. A pause. “I want you to come. I want you here. I’ve wanted that since and I haven’t pushed it because it had to be yours.” Another pause, shorter. “But I’m really glad it’s yours now.”

Your eyes go warm at that. You tip your head back and blink at Camille’s ceiling.

“I’m scared,” you say.

“I know.”

“What if I quit and it all falls apart and I have nothing.”

“You won’t have nothing,” he says. Simply. Completely certain. “You’ll have your writing and you’ll have me and you’ll have Cami who I’m assuming is sitting right next to you nodding very aggressively right now.”

You look at Camille.

She is nodding very aggressively.

“She says hi,” you say.

“Hi Cami,” he says.

“He says hi,” you tell her.

“I heard him,” she says. “Tell him I’m proud of both of you.”

You relay this. Harry makes a small sound that might be a laugh.

“So,” he says. “What happens now? What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” you say honestly. “I think I just needed to say it out loud to someone other than Cami’s living room floor.”

“Well,” he says. “You said it.”

“I said it.”

“And I’m saying it back. Come. Figure the rest out as you go. You’re good at that even when you don’t think you are.”

You sit there on Camille’s floor in the dusty blue pyjamas with the dried face mask pulling at your cheeks and the empty wine glass beside you and the candle burning low on the coffee table and you think about a housing board vote you cannot make yourself finish and a second tab full of Manchester neighbourhoods and a knot in your left shoulder that is finally, finally gone.

“Okay,” you say.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” You take a breath. “I’ll figure out the notice period. And the logistics. And all of it.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he says. “Together. Don’t panic.”

You close your eyes for a second.

“I love you,” you say.

“I love you too,” he says. “Now go finish the wine.”

“There is no more wine.”

“Then go get more wine.”

You laugh, properly, the kind that comes from somewhere real. “Goodnight Harry.”

“Goodnight,” he says. “Lovey.”

You hang up.

The apartment is quiet for a second. Just the music, low and easy, and the candle, and Camille sitting beside you on the floor not saying anything, which from Camille is its own kind of everything.

Then she picks up both your empty glasses and stands up.

“I’ll get the other bottle,” she says.

“You said that was the good wine.”

“This calls for the other good wine.” She looks down at you with the expression she gets when she’s happy about something and trying to be moderate about it and failing. “You did it.”

“I did it,” you say. Like you’re still catching up to it.

She goes to the kitchen. You sit there on her floor and look at the candle burning on the coffee table and think about Manchester in February, about streets you haven’t walked down yet, about a market on Saturdays and a pub pie and a park where he used to sit and think, about all the people in all the cities you haven’t found yet, about the sofrito woman and how there are a thousand of her everywhere.

You think about a second tab with broken photo links that you’ve read twice without absorbing.

You’re going to absorb it now.

Camille comes back with the other good wine and drops back down beside you and fills both glasses and holds hers up.

You hold yours up.

“To blowing up your life,” she says.

“To blowing up my life,” you say.

You both drink.

Outside New York keeps going, loud and cold and completely indifferent, the city that never asked you to stay and never asked you to leave, just kept moving and let you decide for yourself.