for regina
dizzy’s all it makes us | matt/karen
It’s a habit they fall into with frightening ease.
Karen hasn’t spoken to him in about six monthswhen the text arrives – drinks Sunday night? I’m in town.x – six months, and he’s just pretending like everything’s fine, like this is a normal way of starting a conversation after half a year of silence.
She replies with sure before she can talk herself out of it.
*
“I missed you,” Matt says, with characteristic four-drink bluntness.
Karen’s feels her mouth run dry, and takes another sip of her cocktail – some foul, toxic concoction that Matt had insisted on ordering – to delay answering. When she looks up again, Matt is still staring at her, head cocked slightly to one side as if he’s intrigued by what he sees. As if he hasn’t looked her like this a hundred, a thousand times before; as if she’s something new, somehow.
“Oh, thanks, Matt,” he says eventually, a slow smile spreading across his face when it becomes clear she isn’t going to respond. “I really missed you too, you’re my best friend, hasn’t it been months since we hung out?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Karen mutters, half-embarrassed; he’s always done this, always had an uncanny knack for guessing at her every thought and feeling. “All that, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Matt nods, and they fall back into a hazy, four-drink silence until Matt slams his glass down and stands up decisively. “Right, these are on me,” he announces, fingers brushing against the back of her neck as he goes to squeeze out of the booth. “Same again?”
“Same again,” Karen manages; she avoids looking up, though, feeling the heat rise to her skin where he touched her. Matt just nods, runs one hand down the length of her arm to rap two knuckles against her wrist as he passes her, and saunters off in search of more cocktails.
Karen lets her head fall back against the booth, the sounds and movements from the rest of the bar melding into one continuous blur of noise and colour. It occurs to her that she might be drunk – drunker than she thought, anyway – or should that be more drunk? – and that her wrist feels strangely loose where it’s resting on the table next to her empty glass, like all the bones have been just slightly knocked out of their joints.
She’s not sure quite how long she just sits there, staring blankly at the table, but it can’t be much more than a few minutes before –
“Penny for them,” Matt says loudly into her ear, making her jump and then laughing when she all-but crashes into him; his hands go to her side to steady her, and her face is pressed against his arm, very warm and real under her skin through the shirtsleeve, and by the time she manages to extract herself Karen knows her cheeks have warmed to a bright, incriminating pink –
Matt just squints at her, and pokes his tongue out to make her laugh before she can panic properly; laughter bubbles up her throat like champagne. “You’re a child,” she says, wordlessly shifting on the couch to make space for him, and then –
And then all the air goes out of her lungs, because he’s resting an arm along the back of the couch, his fingers dangling dangerously close to the bit of shoulder left exposed by her top’s asymmetrical neckline; phantom goose-bumps erupt along Karen’s collarbone, and she takes a slow, steadying sip of cocktail number five before turning her head to look at him.
Mistake, because he’s so much closer than he was three seconds ago, his nose very close to hers, his eyes fixed on the crease at the top of her nose like he knows exactly what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, how the closeness of him is doing something huge and undefinable to everything she’d locked up in a box and shoved into the furthest corners of her memories a good four years ago.
“Matt –“ she starts, hearing the tremble in her voice and hating it, hating that he can still do this to her across four years and five thousand miles and a hundred texts left unsent, a million conversations left unfinished –
“Kaz.” His pupils are blown wide, the irises flecked with gold-grey-green-blue and never quite standing still long enough for her to pin down their colours. His voice is rough, low, and even though her chest feels like its trembling from the effort it’s taking to hold back everything she hasn’t said yet, Karen feels herself falter. Feels herself stop to listen, actually listen to the way his tongue trips over the next three words, “I missed you,” breathed into the inches left between them.
*
There’s a white fog clouding Karen’s mind, making everything seem jumbled and surreal. The Uber app on her phone seems strange and alien and altogether unmanageable in her hands, she can barely get her address out right when they finally give up and hail a cab, because Matt’s hands are burning through the waist of her dress and his mouth is hot against her neck, and every time she takes a step he takes one too, bringing their hips back into contact with an intoxicating, bewildering rhythm that matches the drumbeat that’s started up against her ribcage.
The ride to her flat passes in a hazy blur, and she just shoves a handful of notes at the driver before stumbling out, Matt’s hand tugging at hers insistently – she probably overpaid by an embarrassing amount, but can’t bring herself to care, especially considering the fact that neither of them had exactly paid much attention to the drive or the driver or anything other than each other, pressed together, breathing ragged and hands unfocused in the cramped backseat of the cab. There’s a bit of confusion at the front door – Karen drops her keys four times before Matt lifts his head from the crook of her shoulder, groans theatrically, and tugs them out of her hands, “Before you do yourself an injury – “ and that’s as far as she lets him get before she’s pressing him against the wall of her tiny hallway, kissing the breath out of him as her hands are busy with the buttons on his stupid winter coat and her feet are trying to toe off her shoes, or his shoes, she isn’t quite sure at this point.
By the time they make it to her bedroom, Karen’s left in one stocking and her top dragged scandalously low over one shoulder, and Matt’s shirt is hanging open wide enough for her to reach in to undo his belt and tug him closer by the belt-loops of his jeans, and there’s something so familiar about the look in his eyes as she walks backwards, leading him towards her bed – her bed, and it’s been six months, it’s been four years – that it sucks all the air out of the room, leaving Karen wanting, her breaths coming slow and heavy now, her limbs thick with intent –
And then Matt trips over the hair straighteners she’d left on the floor earlier, and he goes crashing into her dressing table with such pinpoint accuracy that it almost looks planned, make-up and tissues and a jewellery box flying through the room and his face ending up half inside the bedside lampshade. Karen sits down on the edge of her bed with a faint bump, and laughs. It’s so, so typical of them, the burning intensity of just seconds earlier being replaced with this, Matt scowling at her from inside the lampshade and Karen laughing so hard she can’t breathe.
Except then – after a long and extended get-me-out-of-this-lampshade-Karen bit and a half-hearted attempt at cleaning up, after Karen has pulled off her top because she was getting too warm and Matt has shucked off his jeans because they’re all covered in her stupid pretentious powders, Karen, what the fuck do you want snail extract on your face for – after all that, and after she’d made an impassioned defence of her creams and powders, Matt drops to his knees, and slowly, carefully, rolls her remaining stocking down her leg, his fingertips barely grazing her skin.
*
Karen wakes up cold. She rolls over, limbs protesting at the sudden movement, and spots her blankets lying in a tangled heap on the floor a few feet away from the bed. Ah.
She rolls back over, instinctively reaching for –
The other side of the bed is empty, which she doesn’t let fully settle before she’s moving on to the next thing on her list, and squinting at the bedside clock, the digital display reading 07:26 in a suddenly unbearably obnoxious red.
Okay.
Karen flops back onto her back, and stares at the ceiling. A shower, she decides. A shower, and some clean clothes, and a toothbrush, and then…
There’s a distant shuffling sound, unmistakably a body rolling over on the sofa, and the grunting, yawning sound that lets her knows Matt is half-asleep but waking up.
Then, she’ll go into the kitchen and make some coffee.
The rest will –
Will have to wait till then.
*
“Every time,” Matt says with a humourless laugh, slamming his mug down on the counter and pushing past her to get back into the living room. “Every fucking time.”
“Matt – “ There’s a high-pitched kind of whine in Karen’s ears, making it hard to think straight; she follows him, scowling at the brightness of her living room flooded with sunshine and pinching the bridge of her nose with two fingers. “Matt, come on, don’t just walk off –“
He barely looks up from pulling on his shoes and socks. “Got to go.”
Of course. Karen swallows back the bitter taste stinging the back of her throat, and nods. She’s not quite sure how they got here – she made coffee; he said something about needing to phone home; she made an ill-judged joke about the other woman; he’d tensed, she’d snapped, and here they are screaming at each other over the same old shit across her living room –
“You could stay,” she says, her voice coming out a few levels louder than anticipated, the pathetic undertones lost in the accusation. “You could stop putting your fucking shoes on, and stay for breakfast.”
“Funny,” Matt snorts, though it isn’t, not one bit, and Karen feels regret welling up in her chest like bile at the way his voice hardens over the word.
“No,” she says quietly, slumping against the doorframe and watching with tired eyes as he finishes buttoning up his shirt. “No, it isn’t Matt, will you please just – “
He’s back on his feet and going to push past her, and she reaches out on basic instinct to grab onto the lapels of his jacket – he stops very suddenly, eyes burning into hers, and Karen feels the stupid, treacherous way she sways towards him as his hands come up to frame her face.
His lips brush against hers once, twice, three times before she leans in properly, their mouths moving in an unfocused, unhappy rhythm that does nothing to alleviate the way Karen’s pulse is hammering sickly against her spine. They kiss because it seems inevitable, because they were standing very close to each other, because – because, well, what else are they going to do?
When they break away, Matt rests his forehead against Karen’s, and lets out a shaky breath. She’s still clutching on to him by his lapels, but she lets one hand come up to rest against the pulse point on his neck, her fingers stuttering over a purpling mark she knows she’s responsible for. She can feel his heartbeat under her touch, fast and uneven, and she wants to dig her fingers in, wants to anchor herself to him, wants to open her mouth and scream, let her lungs expand and fill the room with noise and make him listen make him look make him stay –
His hands drop from her face, and he pulls himself away. After a moment, she lets him.
*
Four months later, she’s arching her back on his ludicrously spacious modern-living bullshit sofa, her hands scrambling for purchase against the smooth material, clenching and unclenching into erratic fists as he moves against her; finally, she settles for winding one hand into his hair and tugging, making him look up at her with a surprised smile quirking his lips.
“Problem, Gillan?” he asks, and oh, she could smack him. And then he licks his lips, his eye contact bold and direct and somehow almost tangible, and he is definitely, definitely getting smacked for this – just as soon as she’s –
“No,” she says, letting her head fall back against the sofa, smiling involuntarily up at the ceiling. “No, you…carry on.”
He does.
*
They don’t even make it to morning this time; the clock reads 23:47 when Karen pulls her dress back on, cheeks stinging with angry tears.
“Karen…” Now it’s Matt who’s tired, Matt who’s leaning against the wall and watching as she buckles her heels with shaking fingers. “Kazza. Come on, I didn’t mean it –“
“Yeah, you did,” Karen says shortly, keeping her back turned; she can’t look at him, if she looks at him she’ll crack, and then – she can’t look at him.
“I just –“ she hears him bite back a frustrated growl. “I don’t get why you’re suddenly making a big deal of this.”
Neither do I.
“I’m not,” she says, looking around desperately for something for her eyes to focus on – a forgotten bracelet, her Oyster card, anything – “Forget it. See you whenever.”
He follows her to the door. “Karen…”
Don’t make this complicated, Kazza, is still ringing in her ears as she pulls the door open. Like an accusation, like she’s the one in the wrong here for daring to think that anything else is ever, ever going to happen –
Except they tried that, didn’t they?
“See you whenever,” she repeats dully, turning around at the door and leaning up to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth, because – well – because it’s not like this is actually goodbye, is it? She’s not going to kid herself about that, at least.
He’s still staring at her, all wide, sad eyes, and his fringe hanging over his forehead, and his hands half-extended in front of him like he’s actually considering reaching after her, holding on to her, asking her to stay –
And then he watches her walk away, and she won’t hear from him for another few months.
*
Stay another day, she hums, her lips whispering across his skin.
He rolls her over so he’s hovering above her, arms braced either side of her face, and she can look up into his eyes and see pure, unbridled adoration written all over them. I wish, Kazza, he smiles, leaning in to kiss her nose. But some of us have still got a job to go back to.
She just rolls her eyes, and leans up to hook her arms around his neck, pulling him flush against her and rolling her hips up to meet his. Tell Steven you’re calling in sick.
He groans, dropping his head to the crook of her shoulder. Can we not talk about fucking Steven, please?
I never said anything about fucking Steven, she giggles, breath hitching in her throat as he rocks down against her. Sunlight streams in through the half-open blinds, warming her skin, and she’s never felt more at home than she does right here, her back pressed against bare floorboards, moving boxes stacked around the edges of her brand-new living room, they’ve sort of put together a bed in the bedroom but somehow they didn’t make it that far this time –
*
– And suddenly it’s three months later, and they’re screaming at each other down the phone line, and the cracks she’d felt watching him walk through the security check at LAX have widened into something somehow insurmountable, and five thousand miles didn’t seem like a problem until it suddenly, awfully, was.
*
It’s been four years since then – four years since they broke up, except Karen isn’t sure that’s the right word to use when they never really dated in the first place, when their mismatched puzzle-pieces never quite lined up, when the timing and the distance and the them was never quite right, only almost, and somehow that hurts most of all.
She’s not quite sure when this started, their strange, half-circular rhythm of going months without talking to each other, until they’re getting drinks and falling into each other and falling right back out the following morning, year-old hurts and barbed words and sharp insults traded just as easily as the easy touches and intoxicating, intoxicated kisses –
She thinks it might be around the time he first started walking red carpets as one half of a power couple, but if she probes that particular bruise any further she’s going to destroy herself over it.
Every now and then, they’ll try to make up in the interim, and this time’s no different; Karen’s barely been back in LA for a week when her phone chimes with a text from him.
Sorry, I’m a twat.x
Nice. Succinct, to the point, signed with a fucking kiss like every text she’s ever received from him – Karen replies too quickly to reconsider it.
Can you not bother me for a bit please
He’s a shit texter always has been, so when her phone buzzes not five minutes later she’s convinced it must be unrelated, some calendar notification or a text from her mum or something, but –
Just wanted to clear the air, I really am sorry if I said anything that upset you.x
Well.
That’s…
Karen stares at the three texts stacked up on top of each other, and before that the long gap before his last text, sent sometime four months ago – drinks Sunday night? I’m in town.x – before she makes up her mind, her fingers flying over the screen in her hurry to get the words out, old hurts and new hurts and a strange sense of freedom buzzing through her veins the more she writes.
we both know I need to get over you matt can you please just let me try.
Sent, before she can take so much as half a second to reconsider and erase.
Fuck.
*
It’s going to go wrong. It’s going to go so very badly wrong. He’s going to call, and demand an explanation, and she’s going to cobble something semi-plausible together about being drunk and emo, you know how I get, and he’s going to force a laugh but he’s still going to know, because she just told him, and -
He doesn’t call.
He doesn’t call, and he doesn’t show up on her door in the middle of the night looking tired and shellshocked and recently single, either. Not that that was ever going to happen, Karen.
He doesn’t call, he doesn’t show up, he doesn’t acknowledge her text with even so much as a question mark or some obscure emoji –
It just sits there at the bottom of their conversation, left dangling without a reply.
Karen thinks maybe she’s getting what she’s asked for; maybe this is what letting her do that means; maybe he’s taken her text at face value and just…not bothering her for a bit.
It’s unexpected, and it’s kind of freeing, and it hurts like hell.
For a while, her days are filled with the white noise of waiting for a response from him – she’ll wake up, disoriented from a dream where he’d texted her, to find another, even more nonsensical text waiting for her, and it’s only halfway through an entirely illogical conversation that she’ll wake up for a second time and realise that, no, there still hasn’t actually been a text. She’ll pull out of her phone at random intervals during the day, each time thinking she’ll somehow have tricked her phone into showing her the notification she’s hoping to see - like if she’s unpredictable enough about when she goes to check it, at some point she’ll simply conjure a reply into being –
He doesn’t message her, and she eventually stops waiting quite so actively – but she still waits.
Weeks pass, and she tries taking up hot yoga, and she’s tried a new smoothie diet, and she’s started and ditched about a dozen short film scripts; she’s filled with nervous energy but never actually finishes anything she starts, too jittery and restless to settle into any one idea. Her friends tell her she’s changed, tell her they’re worried about her overworking herself – which Karen has to laugh at, because this is her first really quiet phase, professionally, in about four years. All the work is work she’s making for herself – gathering interest for her feature film, talking to producers about securing funding, contacting people she wants to make shorts with – and she knows, she knows it’s good. Knows it’s the next step on this nebulous thing she’s calling ‘her career’. Knows it’s better, more grounded, a lot more real than just going out for auditions and hoping the casting director takes a shine to her… But to her, it just feels like more of the same, her calling people, her asking people to meet up, her asking and asking for their trust and their respect (and their money, which even now feels like a strange and uncertain place to start a conversation from). It’s still her running after other people, never quite being the one who walks away, who lets other people do the running –
It’s entirely possible Karen’s mixing metaphors here, but just once she wishes her phone would ring first.
Just once she wishes she was asked to stay.
*
When it does happen, she almost misses it.
She’s on her way to the showers after a spin class (yes, she goes to spin classes now, yes, it’s ridiculous, yes, it’s entirely the sort of thing Matt would give her shit for if he was here) when her phone starts buzzing. Normally, she’d just let it ring, and check the voicemail later, but –
She doesn’t know what makes her do it, but Karen hooks the towel tighter under her arms, unlocks her locker, pulls out the still-buzzing phone, and – and sees who’s calling.
“Hello?” Her tongue feels strangely heavy in her mouth, like she’s drunk too much milk too quickly, and the pause that follows her answering the phone does precisely nothing to make her feel better about…any of this.
“Kazza!” He sounds the same – he sounds exactly the same – Karen sits down. “How’s it going, man?”
“I’m…fine,” she says cautiously, trying out the words to hear how true they sound. “You?”
“Yeah,” he says, with an audible smile. “Not bad.”
There’s a pause.
“I missed you, K-face.”
Karen bites down, hard, on her lower lip.
“Sorry,” he says quickly, worry staining his voice like wine. “Is it okay that I’m calling you?”
“Yes,” Karen says, before she can change her mind; the word rushes out too quickly for it to be anything other than true. “Yeah, of course it’s okay.”
He breathes out, sounding relieved; Karen presses the phone to her ear with one shoulder, and hugs both arms around herself to keep the towel in place. She feels faintly ridiculous, still covered in sweat, sitting there semi-naked in semi-public, feeling the tears threaten to well up behind her eyelids, but –
“I’m coming over next week,” he says, sounding much more at east and matter-of-fact now that she’s given him the go-ahead to keep talking. “Meetings and that.”
“Yeah?” Hope, small and fragile and stupidly warm, blossoms like embers somewhere between Karen’s ribs. “Want to hang out?”
“Kaz,” he says softly; she presses the phone tighter to her ear. “I’d love to.”
*
Except then –
He hugs her quickly when he sees her at the bar, arms barely brushing her shoulders for a quick pat and a friendly ruffle of her hair before he’s bouncing back on the balls of his feet, shoving his hands in his pockets, and grinning at her with a nervous energy coursing off his shoulders. Karen feels the disappointment sink through her like lead, and wordlessly leads the way inside to find a booth.
It’s wrong all evening – they’re both all awkward pauses and too-loud compensations, sidelong glances and studied avoidance. He asks her if she’s seeing anyone, and Karen makes a fifty first dates joke that falls so horribly flat that she can see him wince. She doesn’t ask him a single question about his life back in London, and soon enough they’ve exhausted everything there is to say about mutual friends, House of Cards, and the drinks menu at this bar; Karen keeps buying more drinks, mostly for something to do, and Matt matches her round-for-round. By the time they’re standing up to leave, she’s unsteady on her feet, he’s got a permanent worry-line creasing his forehead, and the night air outside tastes bitter and unresolved.
There’s a moment, before his car arrives to take him back to his hotel –
He’s got his hands shoved deep into his pockets, and Karen’s eyes get stuck somewhere along his jawline –
He turns his head, catches her eye, forces a quick smile –
And then doesn’t look away, and it’s the longest they’ve looked at each other all evening, and –
Karen moves too quickly to reconsider her options; she reaches up, her fingers framing his face, her thumbs tracing over his cheekbones, and pulls his face down to hers. Their mouths move against each other in a strange, half-forgotten rhythm –
He pulls away, just a little, his eyes open wide and staring into hers. “Kaz?”
“I don’t care,” she says quickly, heart beating loudly in her ears. “I don’t care if it’s just this, I changed my mind, I don’t care –”
He frowns at that, opens his mouth to argue – she kisses him instead, presses her leg forward against his, arching her body into the spaces left between them, and she’s warm now in a way this whole strange, cold evening hasn’t made her feel, the blood thrumming in her veins with urgent, frenetic energy, and it’s the only real thing in the world, his lips pressed against hers, his hands coming to hold on to her waist like they’ve never wanted to do anything else, his pulse jumping in time with hers –
He pulls her into his car when it pulls up, because, well – what else was he going to do?
*
And then, a familiar pattern:
Scattered clothes on anonymous floors; his lips pressed to the curve of her shoulder; her hands tangling themselves into his hair, into the bedsheets, into whatever she can hold onto; his hips sinking down into hers, his breath hot against her cheek, the weight of him warm and steady and real –
Early sunlight; a moment or two of fragile, uncertain balance; an unreadable look in his eyes when he turns his back to scroll through his phone; a half-heard jibe as she makes her way from bedroom to en-suite; his shoulders tensing in an immediate, unbidden response.
“I should go,” he says, the minute she steps out of the bathroom, and oh, that’s new; there’s no tension to his voice, no half-suppressed accusation. Just something raw, and gentle, and sad, about the way he’s looking at her. “I’ve got stuff on.”
“Right.” Karen swallows back the taste of his toothpaste lingering against her tongue. “See you later then?”
“I -” He hesitates, and in that pause she works out what that look means. “I don’t think so, Kaz.”
“Right,” she says again, the word landing with a dull, blank sound even to her own ears. “Busy tonight?”
“I can’t,” he says quietly, looking so directly at her that she knows he’s forcing himself not to look away. “Kaz, you said you…didn’t care if it’s just –”
“I don’t,” she says quickly, needing to assuage his guilt even as she can feel him drawing away – “I don’t care, I swear, it’s not a problem for me –”
“So, what?” Matt asks, voice rising with something like panic. “We don’t talk for months, then get drunk and sleep together and end up fighting about all the same old shit we were fighting about four years ago?”
Hearing him spell it out like that is… Karen presses her lips tightly together, and hugs her arms around herself. “I don’t care,” she repeats quietly; pathetically. “I really don’t care, we can just –”
Matt cuts her off by taking a slow, careful step towards her; tilting her chin up with two fingers; brushing his thumb over the tear clinging to her lower lashes. Karen falls silent.
“I didn’t know,” he says quietly, his voice very low and controlled. “I didn’t know what I was doing, you’ve got to believe me –”
She does. “I do.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, his mouth quirking into a strange half-smile like he can hear how absurd the words sound. “I wish –”
Karen shakes her head, closing her eyes tight to stop the inevitable, treacherous tears from running down her cheek. “Don’t.”
She hears him heave out a sigh. “Okay.”
He helps her gather her things together, finds her purse from where she’d tossed it under the armchair, hands her the coat she’d left tangled in a heap with his on the floor; walks her to the lobby, one hand hovering a few millimetres from the small of her back, the heat radiating up and down her spine; waits with her while she waits for a taxi.
There’s no kissing him goodbye this time, and somehow – Karen rests her head rest against the cab’s window, watching LA rush past her – somehow that, more than anything, makes it feel final this time
*
Karen cancels what she can, pays lip service to what she can’t get out of, walls herself up in her flat and drinks her way steadily through a box of disgustingly expensive champagne she’d been gifted a birthday or two ago.
Somehow, the days pass.
Two weeks later, she’s back at spin class and hot yoga, her body slowly coming back to her after weeks of inertia. A week after that, she opens a new Final Draft document and starts work on a new project; the words come fast and angry, and she’s sent of the first draft of a new short film to her producer before she can reconsider. Rewriting and casting and talking about crew takes up all her attention for a solid month, and then – in the inevitable scheduling lull before they can actually start filming – Karen does what her friends have been pestering her to do for literally years, and lets them set her up on a blind date.
It goes, predictably, terribly – but it still feels like a victory when she’s laughing about it over a pitcher of cocktails with Rose and Steph the following night.
And then –
It happens with such perfect timing that Karen wants to laugh, and call up whoever’s responsible for writing this Hollywood-movie absurdity to complain. She’s getting ready for another date – he’s called David, and he’s “really fit in a weird way, and so your type, really artsy and weird,” thanks, Rose – and is just scrolling through Twitter while she waits for her moisturiser to sink in
There are ten – no, twenty – no, she keeps scrolling, and it’s closer to fifty – replies to her most recent post (something inconsequential about Irn Bru, she’s getting so bad at this); and they’re all linking her to a motley collection of gossip blogs. She doesn’t click on anything straight away, too unnerved by the headline previews – True Love No More For Acting Royalty – Shock as British It-Couple Split – Bad News for Everyone’s Favourite Prince and Princess –
She clicks back to her main feed, scrolls blankly until she sees a post from Lynne, asking for privacy and reminding everyone (again) that Matt doesn’t have Twitter, and then –
And then Karen puts her phone down, and stares blankly at her own reflection for a long time.
*
It’s nothing to do with her.
She makes it through her date on autopilot, mechanically ordering a salad and laughing in what she hopes are all the right pauses in her date’s conversation.
It’s nothing to do with her.
He asks her to go for a drink, and she agrees, knocking back one, two, three glasses of wine, keeping a smile carefully in place and refusing to let her hands go anywhere near her phone.
It’s nothing to do with her.
He kisses her outside the restaurant; asks her up to his flat for a coffee; it’s only when he sits down too close next to her on the sofa and tries to suavely take the coffee he’d just handed her away again that Karen comes to her senses.
“I’m sorry – I think there’s been a misunderstanding –” she’s laughing, but mostly at herself, because who actually expects coffee when they’re invited in for coffee? She’s really knocking every branch on the idiot tree as she falls, here. “I should go, sorry, sorry –”
David – or Daniel – no, she’s pretty sure he introduced himself with call-me-Dave – watches her go, looking completely bewildered at the whole thing. Karen suspects the fact that she can’t stop laughing can’t be helping, but it’s an unreal, panicked sort of giggle that just keeps bubbling over, without her being able to do a thing about it. She laughs all the way downstairs, laughs all the way home in an Uber, and is still laughing when she walks up to her front door and –
“I’m sorry,” Matt says, looking up and seeing her standing a few feet away. He looks shit, pale and stubbly and wearing what looks like clothes from three days and several long-haul flights ago. “I didn’t…think about calling ahead.”
Karen just nods, and waits for him to get out of the way for her to unlock the door to her flat and let them both in.
*
She makes them both mugs of strong tea; arranges leftover Christmas cookies on a plate; silently leads the way into the living room, sits herself down on the edge of the sofa and waits for Matt to fold himself into the armchair a few feet away.
“It was killing me,” he says quietly, into the silence.
Karen takes a moment to sip at her tea, wincing as the too-hot liquid runs down her throat. So much for diversionary tactics. “What was?”
“This,” Matt says, eloquently, and then pulls a face. “All of it. Not seeing you, not…hearing from you.”
“Could have just picked up the phone,” Karen says, trying (and failing) to inject some humour into her voice. “Didn’t have to go dumping your girlfriend just to get on a plane –”
“Kazza.”
“– Sorry.”
He shakes his head, brushing the apology off. “No, I just.” He stops, sucking in a shaky breath and then slowly breathing out, “It’s not like that.”
“Like what?”
Matt’s mouth twists itself into an unhappy grimace, and he shrugs slowly before answering; she can see some of the tension lift from his shoulders, but he’s still holding himself completely inwards, like he’s not sure she isn’t going to kick him out (which, she isn’t either, so).
“I thought…it was better to be honest,” he said, eyes flicking up to catch hers and flying away again too quickly for her to register whatever emotions he’s trying to convey or hide with a hollow laugh. “I mean, god, I’d managed to miss some pretty colossal stuff with…you, and shit, so – I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything else, and.”
Karen waits for him to continue, watching the muscle working in his jaw – it’s stupid, it’s so, so stupid, but all she wants to do right now is cross the room and pull him into her, brush the hair out of his eyes, let him sleep and let him feel better –
“And,” he says harshly, pulling them both out of their respective silences – there’s a determined angle to his jaw now, like he’s not going to let himself off the hook this time – “Turns out most people don’t react all that well to finding out you’ve been sleeping with someone else for going on two years.”
“But you weren’t,” Karen blurts, unthinking. “I mean, you stopped –”
“Yeah,” Matt smiles humourlessly. “That didn’t help much.”
Karen suddenly feels very small, and very cold. “Oh,” she says slowly, drawing her knees up to her chin and curling her hands around her ankles. “So you…”
“I didn’t do the breaking up,” Matt says, blinking rapidly and looking pointedly away; she lets him, though the move does little to hide the tears threatening to spill from his eyes. “Not that it matters much, I suppose.”
Karen nods, slowly. “So now you’re –”
“Here,” Matt says, his voice rising like it’s a question he doesn’t have an answer for, and Karen feels it settle somewhere between her collarbones.
“Here,” she repeats, and he turns his head to smile fleetingly at her.
“Is that okay?”
And it’s –
He hasn’t said anything, and he’s not here to make some grand declaration, or ask her to come away with him, or any other of the hundred-and-one Harlequin novel scenarios she’s let play out in her mind’s eye –
He’s just here.
“Course it’s okay, moron,” she says, getting up and rolling her eyes when he chokes on his tea at her sudden change of tea. “Wait there, I’ll get you blankets.”
She comes back with blankets, and a bottle of wine and two glasses, because – because the tea’s gone cold, and it’s her best friend who’s come here after a break-up, and she’s not going to let him sit there on his own while she goes and has a minor aneurysm in her bedroom over what it all means.
*
Karen wakes up warm.
The mid-morning sun is streaming in through a gap in her curtains, and there are two sets of blankets tangled over her legs, and – and an arm slung carelessly around her side, pulling her close. He’s still asleep, his breathing slow and even against her neck, and for a few minutes she just…lets it be this, lets herself lie there and feel his chest moving in time with hers –
And then he shifts, and his breathing changes, and the next second he’s sitting up and staring at her, eyes wide.
“Well,” Karen says, her tongue rough with sleep and wine against her teeth. “Shit.”
Matt manages to smile at that, cautious and tentative in the bright sunshine; she can hardly look directly at him without squinting, but there’s something tender in his smile even so, something she can’t quite explain away with the wine and the guilt and the rebound.
“I should…” he starts, and Karen closes her eyes, waits for the inevitable – meetings, people to see, planes to catch, I’m sorry – “Get dressed.”
“Okay,” she says, trying not to let the word sting too much as she forces it past her lips. “Okay.”
“No, hey -” he leans over, presses the pads of his fingers to her cheek. “I was gonna – “ she’s going to cry, she’s going to start crying if she doesn’t get him out of her flat right now – “We could get breakfast?”
Oh.
And it’s not a promise – it’s not a decision – it’s not anything really, it’s just breakfast – but Karen smiles, and nods, and feels something unlock at the base of her spine when he presses a kiss to her shoulder before disentangling himself from the sofa and getting to his feet.
He’s going to get dressed; she should probably shower, come to think of it; and then they’re going to get breakfast.
The rest…
He winks at her, halfway through pulling on his jeans. “Ogling again, Gillan?”
Karen giggles, leaning back against the cushions and folding her arms. “Yep.”
The rest can wait.
