Begin Again | ongoing

thirty-three

Somehow, just like that, as though time squeezes itself down into the space of a second and slips through the eye of a needle, a week passes. Sunny doesn't notice the hours building into days as she goes to work and serves hundreds of customers and drags her tired body home at one in the morning. Except it's not home, not yet. It's Viv's flat she is drawn to each night. She gets in at quarter past one and sometimes finds Viv sleeping. On those nights, she sheds her uniform and slips into bed next to her. Sometimes Viv is still awake, so lost in a book that she's shocked to hear Sunny come through the door, shocked to realise it's one o'clock already. On those nights, they stay up and talk. They share music and their day and they slip under the covers together – to sleep. Only ever to sleep.

In the day, Sunny puts on any one of the CDs she forgot and she wastes hours playing with Britney. Cats are the ultimate time wasters, she thinks – it's far too easy to while away the day with a laser or a feather on a stick. She devours book after book, her mind at last settled enough to enjoy reading again – she realised on Thursday that in the weeks since she woke up in this life, she has read only one book, her brain to full of everything else to slip into someone else's reality. But now she is reading again, working her way through the shelf where Viv keeps all of her favourites; she writes notes on sticky tabs and slips them between the pages, marking the passages she loves, the characters she adores and abhors.

It's been more than a week since she last saw Fenfen. She hasn't spent the night at home since before getting Britney; she hasn't seen Fenfen since before that. They were already ships in the night but now that Viv's flat has started to feel like home to Sunny, she's had so little reason to go back to the flat she pays to live in. As much as she loves Fenfen, she has got too comfortable here; the thought of having to go back to her dark, cramped little flat makes her sad, and the last thing she needs at the moment is any reason to feel sad. This is the natural progression of things, she thinks. It's not like she and Fenfen were going to live together forever. She just never thought too hard about moving out, but now she has Viv. Viv, who she wants to spend her time with, her life with.

"What's on your mind?" Viv asks as she clasps a necklace around her neck without looking, without having to pull the fastener round to the front to see what she's doing. "You look very deep in thought."

Sunny pulls on a pair of dark jeans, about as smart as she gets, and says, "I was just thinking about how long it's been since I spent the night in my flat. I haven't seen Fenfen in a while."

"You know you can go back, right?" Viv brushes a few stray lilac hairs off her chest. Sunny quite likes that her hair is on her girlfriend's clothes, proof of their proximity. "I love having you here but you can stay at yours whenever you want."

"No, that's the thing." Sunny purses her lips and pulls on one of Viv's floppy shirts over her tank top, the blue linen a perfect complement to her hair. "I don't want to go back to mine. It's just weird, not seeing Fen."

She makes a mental note to invest in a few more grown-up pieces for her wardrobe, most of which looks like it could belong to a ten-year-old – she and Viv are having supper with Astrid and Celeste tonight, and only an hour ago did Sunny realise she had nothing appropriate to wear except the black of the shirts and trousers she wears for work. She's trying to figure out which buttons to do up and which to leave open when she catches a glimpse of Viv in the mirror. Viv's paused in the middle of clasping a second necklace, one with a pendant that sits between her breasts, and she's staring at Sunny with a look on her face that Sunny can only describe as daylight.

"You mean that?"

"Mean what?" She has forgotten already; her mind has moved onto other things by now.

"You don't want to go back to yours?"

"Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do. Mean that, I mean." She pulls on a pair of socks and hopes her plain white pumps are the right footwear. She is not the best socialised of people, no idea how she should dress for supper with a pair of octogenarians. Her day to day style is so different to Astrid's or Celeste's, who always look ready for a dinner party at a moment's notice. "Maybe we can talk more seriously about, you know, living together?" She looks up at Viv through her eyelashes. Not because she's trying to be alluring, but because she's got her finger wedged in the back of her shoe.