Coffees with Luke & Audrey

VII

“The purpose of a relationship is not to have another who might complete you, but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.”

— Neale Donald Walsch

She began to know him. Not in the way you know a friend, but the way you know someone you’ve known forever. She knew he hated avocados but for some reason or another insisted on eating them. She knew his favourite colour was blue, and that he had a dog called Peach. He lived alone, not far from the university but far enough that you couldn’t see it outside the windows. He was a good cook and had a rather cynical sense of humour. He found peoples expressions fascinating and in his spare time liked to draw faces. She let him attempt to draw her once, but during the middle of it (she was supposed to look serious) her mind jumped to the scene in Titanic and she found herself laughing before she could stop. He glared at her and told her to shut up but she’d only giggled harder, and by the end of the night the sketch of her had a moustache and devil horns that, for some reason, she thought would be funny. And it was, but in that lame way like when your mum tells you a joke but you only laugh because she genuinely thinks it’s funny.

She met his family. His mother also loved to cook and always smelled like fresh bread. His father had a smile that looked so much like Luke’s it was uncanny. His older brothers went out of their way to embarrass him and his little sister was intelligent and the most ticklish person she had ever met.

He met hers, too. Her mother took to him instantly (“Oh, Audrey! You didn’t tell us he cooked!”), and he pretended to understand what her father was talking about when he put on the football. He found out Luke was lying soon enough, but he was not mad. On the contrary, he looked a little amused (which did not happen much).

Luke helped her with her writing, pointing out random things in the streets that he thought were interesting (most of the time they weren’t really, but she appreciated the sentiment all the same). And she helped him with his psychology by testing his knowledge before upcoming exams and offering help when he was stuck searching for the right word to use for an essay.

There were fights too. Plenty of them. Maybe even more than was healthy (she often thought they only happened because one or both of them were bored). But a lot of the time they never meant anything and even when they did, and they would not speak for days, in the end it would always sort itself out – even when, on one memorable occurrence, she threw a frying pan at his head. She missed, obviously, but it had taken a while for him to stop flinching whenever she raised her hand, much to her entertainment.

She couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment it happened, though she suspected it was sometime between the way his expression would light up when something interested him, to when he’d tried sketching her. But soon six months passed, and she could call him her best friend.