Sentence

Kitty Ryan, 2007.

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Having coffee with Finn is more than pleasant, or fun, or even important. It is crucial.

If Mindful doesn’t see him, doesn’t walk slowly up to Smith’s in a lovely new pair of jeans and get laughed at as she orders something full of cream and cinnamon when she’s surely meant to be sipping black coffee out of a specially-shaped glass with subtle gilt edging, and if she doesn’t then enjoy flirting with the entire room as she licks the spoon clean, then something is wrong.

If she cannot enjoy simple company, the shadow and light-shift from the windows to his body and hers, bouncing from other people’s heads, and she can’t just enjoy feeling warm and joking about people she’ll have forgotten in two years, knowing that even if she forgets them she somehow won’t forget this friend, then something is wrong.

If she cannot dredge up an interest, any interest, in his designs, his work—even his smile, which is interesting even when it isn’t hers—and can’t even feign to cover that lack, then something is very, very wrong.

If Mindful ends up curled in his arms and crying so hard the world is no longer fit to breathe, longing for the contact even as her skin tries to shrink away, the entire organ a screaming, sensitised mass and her calm flaking as if some small, sharp nailed hand was scrapping away at weathered paintwork in her brain—and Finn might be the only one she loves who wouldn’t care about the wood rot—then the world really is going to end. (Except that it won’t, and living in it will become the problem.)

When Mindful can smile away Finn’s quizzical look and get him talking about his mad family and how all of them are demanding discounted silverwork, now; when she can explain away her sudden need to drink pale, flowery tea with jokes about whim and predictability being the most dire vice—and even pat his knee while she does so—and her new preference for long, arse-concealing jumpers is unremarked upon, everything is still, just about, all right.

Everything has gone all ephemeral, mind you, spider-web-in-snowstorm-secure, but as long as Mindful can have coffee with Finn, and keep him smiling, there might still be a way out.

Having coffee with Finn is more than pleasant, or fun, or even important. It is crucial.