Begin Again | ongoing

nine

They don't stay long with Sunny's parents. There's too much to say, too much not to say, so they say goodbye with hugs and promises to stay in touch and Sunny gets into the passenger seat of Viv's car. It has a familiar smell despite it being the first time Sunny's sat in it – that same smell that hit her when she woke up in Viv's bed. Something warm and woody, and a touch of vanilla from the air freshener dangling off the rear-view mirror.

Viv's a confident driver. Smooth and steady, a master of the gearstick as she shifts seamlessly from first to second, all the way up to fifth once they're on the open road back home. The journey drags on the bus but in the comfort of Viv's silver Ford Focus, the scenery flies by. They don't talk much. BBC Radio 2 is on in the background and whenever a song comes on, Viv taps her fingers on the wheel, her hands closer to five and seven than ten and two.

There's no air conditioning – or if there is, it's not working – so when it gets stuffy, Sunny cracks open the window with the hand crank digging into her thigh and she closes her eyes, feeling the breeze through her fingers when she sticks her hand out of the window.

"I don't know what I'm doing," she says ten minutes into the journey, already more than a third of the way home.

"Me neither," Viv says. She keeps her eyes on the road, even when she reaches for the volume and turns it way down. "Kind of uncharted territory for most people, I think."

"Yeah. Probably."

I can't be the only one, Sunny thinks.

"It's going to be really weird," she says. "I need you to know that. It isn't easy. It's really fucking confusing. I haven't wrapped my head around it yet and I've had a couple of days to get used to it."

Only when they reach a red light does Viv look at her. One hand is on the gearstick; she tentatively moves it to that spot just above Sunny's knee, not too high up her thigh. It's a move she hasn't had to think about for a long time – she's used to touching her girlfriend, playing with her hair, lacing their hands together, and now that all falls into this weird territory where neither of them is sure what's okay. Sunny isn't even sure what she's comfortable with. She can't decide if it's best to throw herself in at the deep end and follow Viv's lead as though nothing happened, or if she needs to dial it back to zero and figure it out from there. Neither seems right. Nothing seems right.

Twenty-five minutes after saying goodbye to Martha and Sylvia, Viv pulls into a reserved parking space outside her building. Sunny didn't register it when she left that first morning but now she recognises where they are: Viv lives on Black Sands' nicest road, twenty-five Georgian terraces arranged in a majestic crescent around a semicircle of a wildflower meadow. Her building is on the very end of the row of identical sand-coloured limestone facades, one of many of the houses that have been converted into flats. Of the twenty-five, only seven remain as family homes. The rest have been divvied up by landlords looking to maximise on rent.

"This place is so fucking posh," Sunny marvels as she gets out of the car, her eyes sweeping over the meadow and the railings in front of each house. The crescent is only half as high as the hill on which Delilah lives, but it still boasts a breath-taking view over the bay in which Black Sands sits, and the sea beyond. If Sunny's vision could stretch to six hundred miles, she'd be looking straight at Denmark's western coast. As it is, thanks to the limitation of the human eye and the curvature of the earth, she can only see a few miles into the grey ocean.

"Unlike me." Viv laughs drily. "Come on up, I'm on the top floor."

The terrace was built in the early 1700s and aside from adding electricity and splitting each floor into its own flat, not much else has changed. A lot of the original features remain, from the columns either side of every sash window to the wooden glazing bars separating each small pane of glass. There is certainly no lift, so they traipse up the two flights to Viv's flat – 25C, Seville Crescent – and Viv heads straight for the kettle.