Oxygen (Catfish And The Bottlemen/1975)

Saffron

I awoke to misty morning condensation on my skin, on the window, dripping on the sill. The house was freezing but it had been the heating clicking on, the pipes creaking, that had woken me from my sleep.

Rhys' arm weighed heavy on my waist, his breath tickled my hairline and when I tried to push myself up and sneak away he tightened his grip, hugged me back into his embrace.

"Rhys," I mumbled a small smile curving on my lips as I nestled into the sheets, a warmth washing over me as he squeezed me close.

It was like love, the feeling in my chest, but not quite. It was love like tarmac on the roads, melting in the sun, like tar in your lungs. It was sticky and it clung to you and you could feel it, but you weren't sure you wanted to.
And I wasn't sure I wanted to. I wasn't sure how I felt about him back, home in my bed.

I wasn't sure I liked waking up next to him anymore, I wasn't sure I wanted to wake up with him ever again and thats how I'd felt three mornings in a row now, but there I was. Wrapped up in his embrace.

It was to be a disjointed morning. It had been a disjointed week and I as slipped from my bed finally, treading softly to the shower I thought about how quickly everything else had faded out since he'd come back.
How even last nights party had done little to ease the tension prickling between us all.

I couldnt work out why it was there, what it was, that kind of strange static which kept sparking between us all, that uncomfortable anticipation which refused to allow us to settle in the same room as eachother.

Katie had retreated to her bedroom, she spent her days listening to George Harrison, smoking hash and though she lingered in the kitchen door frame from time to time, watching me stirring soup, she rarely said a word and I rarely said a word to her.

Fliss had spent all her time with Jazz, writing songs in her windowsill, in the mornings they'd wake up together in the garden with Rudy, or on the living room floor having passed out midway through one of their deeper conversations at 4am.

As I washed my hair I tried to wash away that sticky feeling, but it was stuck in my eyelashes and it clung to me. I tried to brush it from my hair but my hair was in knots and eventually I gave in, sinking down against the wall, the water overwhelming me as I closed my eyes and tilted my head back.

I could hear my phone ringing in a different room, I heard Rhys pick it up but I couldn't tell who he was talking to because his words were warped by the walls between us. I only heard the door slam and his feet thudding down the stairs.

A little butterfly escaped from my stomach to my lungs, making itself at home on a bed of alveoli. Perhaps he'd changed his mind. And if he had, did I mind?

I turned off the shower, stepped onto the mat and wrapped my towel around my shoulders, hesitating to look in the mirror. Hesitating to see the strange faraway look in my eyes.
In the cold of my bathroom the whole world was real and yet, with Rhys on my phone downstairs, talking to one of my friends, I felt like it wasn't my world to be part of. It wasn't a world in which I had control. All I could really do, was put some clothes on and go downstairs.

And downstairs was cold too, and Rhys was in the kitchen.

I hovered in the doorframe, the shadow I should have cast across his back washed out by the morning sunlight streaming through the open window.

I watched him quietly, listening but not listening closely to what he was saying.

He stood with his back to me, leaning on the counter, smoking absent minded as you like, exhales directed at the broken blinds.

Every now and then he'd shift slightly and I'd flinch thinking he was about to turn around, but by the time he turned I was too concentrated on the curve of his shoulders as he hunched over my phone, to see he'd turned at all.