Begin Again | ongoing

ten

After falling asleep in an empty flat on Sunday, despite her mammoth nap, Sunny wakes up on Monday to the clattering of pots and pans and the unmistakable sound of Fenfen swearing as she drops something on her foot. Oh, the comforting sounds of life with a clumsy agent of chaos.

For a while, she lies there staring at her ceiling and trying to get her head around yesterday, now that she has properly met Viv and spent time with her. This isn't going to be easy. It's daunting and disorientating and yes, Viv is ridiculously beautiful and stupidly understanding of something that makes no fucking sense, but there is still this gaping divide between them that Sunny doesn't know how to close, because how do you catch up when there is so much missing in the middle? They exist on opposite sides of this black hole.

It struck her when Viv was talking through their first five dates that as much as she shares, no matter how many details she recounts, Sunny will never actually be able to remember their first year. She will never see that time as anything other than something that happened to someone else, someone who just so happens to be another version of herself. It's like watching a film with a protagonist who looks remarkably like her, only to be told it's her life, and she has to get with the program.

Trying to wrap her head around that is giving her a headache.

Today she is free. No work, thanks to her imaginary stomach bug, and no pressure to see Viv. Which means she has an entire day to try to find more answers about what happened to bring her here. It's been a long time since she last saw Astrid and Celeste, the owners of The Witching Well (yes, she knows she shouldn't call it that because she's pretty sure the nickname is a result of the town's misogynistic homophobia, but it did cast a pretty big fucking spell on her) but she thinks if anyone else needs to know what happened, it's them. They might not even know their front garden harbours a fission in time.

When it becomes clear that she isn't going to get back to sleep, Sunny rolls out of bed and tugs on a stretched-out salmon pink t-shirt and bright leggings over her faded sports bra and underwear that's lost its elastic. She hasn't worn a bra with underwire since she was fifteen and trying to fit in with her friends, who were far more blessed than her in the chest department. While they were trying on Bs and Cs and Ds, Sunny could barely fill a 28A. Now, she either wears a soft sports bra or nothing at all, because what's the point when she's as flat-chested as she was at thirteen? She isn't complaining – she loves having virtually no boob to speak of. Her t-shirts always fit right without stretching across her chest and she can run for the bus without having to hold anything down, unlike Delilah, who is cursed with 42F breasts and jokes that she could knock herself out if she jogs downstairs without tying down her chest.

"Morning, you sexy beast!" Fenfen says without turning round when Sunny emerges from her room. When she does at last look over her shoulder, her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. "Oh! Sorry, Tenny. Wrong sexy beast."

"You're harbouring more sexy beasts in here?" Sunny perches on the edge of the countertop, heels thudding against the drawer below. "I'm not enough for you?"

Fenfen grins and bops her on the nose. "You, my darling, are an incredibly sexy beast. Especially with that killer hair. But you're not the sexy beast I brought back last night. I didn't even realise you were here – I haven't seen you for, like, a week. Been shacking up with lover girl?"

"I went to see my parents," she says, snagging a piece of toast Fenfen has just buttered. Fenfen just tuts and pops another couple of slices of bread into the toaster.

"I was starting to think you were trying to work up the courage to tell me you're moving out."

"Not quite," she says, remembering what Viv said. She'd been about to ask Sunny to move in with her. She wonders what she would've said. She wonders how she used to feel when she saw Viv, if her heart skipped a beat or her lips couldn't help but smile.