"Sorry about that," I said at last. I straightened up and wiped my face with the back of my wrist.
"For what?"
"Making an idiot of myself. I didn't intend to do that."
Cassie shrugged. "So we're even. Now you know how I feel when I have those dreams and you have to wake me up."
"Yeah?" This had never occurred to me.
"Yeah." She rolled over onto her stomach on the futon, reached for a packet of tissues in the bedside table and passed them to me. "Blow."
I managed to work up a weak smile, and blew my nose. "Thanks, Cass."
"How're you doing?"
I caught a long shuddery breath and yawned, suddenly and irrepressibly. "I'm all right."
"You about ready to crash?"
The tension was slowly draining out of my shoulders and I was more exhausted than I'd ever been in my life, but there were still quick little shadows zipping past my eyelids, and every sigh and crack of the house settling made me jerk. I knew that if Cassie switched off the light and I was alone on the sofa the air would fill up with layers of nameless things, pressing and mouthing and twittering. "I think so," I said. "Would it be OK if I slept here?"
"Sure. If you snore, though, you're back on the sofa." She sat up, blinking, and started to take out her hair clips.
"I won't," I said. I leaned over and took off my shoes and socks, but both the etiquette and the physical act of undressing seemed way too difficult to negotiate. I climbed under the duvet with all my clothes on.
Cassie pulled off her sweater and slid in beside me, curls standing up in a riot of cowlicks. Without even thinking about it I put my arms around her, and she curled her back against me.
"Night, hon," I said. "Thanks again."
She gave my arm a pat and stretched to switch off the bedside lamp. "Night, silly. Sleep tight. Wake me up if you want to."
Her hair against my face had a sweet green smell, like tea leaves. She settled her head on the pillow and sighed. She felt warm and compact, and I thought vaguely of polished ivory, glossy chestnuts: the pure, piercing satisfaction when something fits perfectly into your hand. I couldn't remember the last time I had held anyone like this.
"Are you awake?" I whispered, after a long time.
"Yeah," Cassie said.
We lay very still. I could feel the air around us changing, blooming and shimmering like the air over a scorching road. My heart was speeding, or hers was banging against my chest, I'm not sure. I turned Cassie in my arms and kissed her, and after a moment she kissed me back.
I know I said that I always choose the anticlimactic over the irrevocable, and yes of course what I meant was that I have always been a coward, but I lied: not always, there was that night, there was that one time.
For once I woke first. It was very early, the roads still silent and the sky-Cassie, high above the rooftops with no one to look in her window, almost never closes the curtains-turquoise mottled with palest gold, perfect as a film still; I could only have been asleep an hour or two. Somewhere a cluster of seagulls burst into wild, keening cries.
In the thin sober light the flat looked abandoned and desolate: last night's plates and glasses scattered on the coffee table, a tiny ghostly draft lifting the pages of notes, my sweater hunched in a dark blot on the floor and long distorting shadows slanting everywhere. I felt a pang under my breastbone, so intense and physical that I thought it must be thirst. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and I reached over and drank it off, but the hollow ache didn't subside.
I had thought my movement might wake Cassie, but she didn't stir. She was deeply asleep in the crook of my arm, her lips slightly parted, one hand curled loosely on the pillow. I brushed the hair away from her forehead and woke her by kissing her.
We didn't get up till around three. The sky had turned gray and heavy, and a chill ran over me as I left the warmth of the duvet.
"I'm starving," Cassie said, buttoning her jeans. She looked very beautiful that day, tousled and full-lipped, her eyes still and mysterious as a daydreaming child's, and this new radiance-jarring against the grim afternoon-made me uneasy somehow. "Fry-up?"
"No, thanks," I said. This is our usual weekend routine when I stay over, a big Irish breakfast and a long walk on the beach, but I couldn't face either the excruciating thought of talking about anything that had happened the previous night or the heavy-handed complicity of avoiding it. The flat felt suddenly tiny and claustrophobic. I had bruises and scrapes in weird places: my stomach, my elbow, a nasty little gouge on one thigh. "I should really go get my car."
Cassie pulled a T-shirt over her head and said easily, through the material, "You want a lift?" but I had seen the swift, startled flinch in her eyes.
"I think I'll take the bus, actually," I said. I found my shoes under the sofa. "I could do with a bit of a walk. I'll ring you later, OK?"
