A Me and a You

I didn’t know where I was going, I’ll admit. Even if I’d had an idea in the first place, I couldn’t see though the tears in my eyes as they swelled and spilled out onto my cheeks. I was lost, fucking lost, and I was so very alone.

I knew after a while of walking down familiar streets and around corners I’d already been weary of once that night that I probably shouldn’t have left the pub, but I had anyway. There was no way I was going back and asking, grovelling, for a lift home. There was no damn way. I took some pleasure out of knowing she’d be worried but then, she was always worried. I was always worrying her. I never fully understood that part.

I pulled my coat tighter around my small frame as I walked into the wind, worried that it’d rain and I’d be stuck on the only damn street in London with no shelter to hide beneath. Of course, it poured down within the moment. My tired feet took me around the next corner and I stopped, because there was that damn pub again and there she was, smiling and laughing and about to get in the back of a cab. I didn’t recognise the guy following her. I certainly didn’t approve of the way he was looking at her legs, her ass, her…

“Hey!” It was always my big mouth that got me into trouble. I knew I’d have to bite my tongue one day, preferably before it was too late. It seemed I’d passed that moment by, though, as the man came over to my shaking form, still standing in the rain, the fake fur of my jacket sticking to my face.

“And what’s your problem, Nancy boy? Ehh?” His fat finger prodded at my chest as he reached me, causing me to fall back a step.

“Leave him, he’s not worth your time. It’s certain that nobody is worth his.” Her words were colder than the night and hit my face with much more force than the falling rain.

“Can we talk?” I knew I looked fucking stupid. There I was in my best coat and a rather tarty dress, asking a girl it seemed I barely knew to talk to me. I probably looked like a hooker. I probably looked like a cheap one, too.

“Listen mate, you stay away from her, a’ight? She’s mine, you hear me?” I heard him, alright, though still I couldn’t stop my words spilling out.

“She’s yours? Yours? You know you’re talking about a woman, yes, and not a car or your favourite shirt?”

“What?” I knew I was going to get hit. I almost prepared for it, but that look really didn’t go too well on my face. And so I stood there staring at him with a dumb expression on my face as his fist collided with my cheek, and I stayed quiet as she screamed at him to stop. She called him more names than she’d called me that night, which comforted me a little. He stopped hitting when I stopped moving, and then she stopped her screaming. I heard a scuffle and felt a soft hand against my cheek, and then my eyes opened to be met with hers. That soft hand slapped me then, and I couldn’t help the tears that escaped in streams as they had been just moments before.

“Stop your crying, Brian! Get up!” I could hear her screaming at me still, but I couldn’t move. “Get the fuck up!” She pulled me up herself then and pulled me out of the rain, around the corner and into the alleyway. We stood there slumped against the wall for a while as I caught my breath and cleaned the blood from my face with a few tissues from her purse. She sighed, and I looked away. I almost smiled, but it never really came across.

“We fucked here, me and you.” She took a look around as I said those words, and her eyebrows rose just slightly.

“So we did.”

“You were a good lay.”

“Brian –”

“I want more than that.” She sighed, letting her hair fall in her face as she slid down the brick wall of the alley. I was soon to follow her. “I want a me and you.”

“There is already a me and a you.”

“An us.”

“You know I’m not that sort of girl. Dressed the way you are, it doesn’t seem you’re that kind of girl, either.” A smile finally cracked through my mood as she said that, and I felt like proving to her then and there that I was certainly not that kind, and certainly not a girl.

“I meant what I said in there, you know.”

“What, before or after you made my life a public display?”

“…before,” I said quietly. “I didn’t mean the after.” Her hand found my knee as we sat.

“Yeah, I know.”

That was all that happened, really. As we walked back to her car in silence, I realised that was all that needed to happen. I’d got her to admit to me, though not so much in words, that she cared. That was enough. That was all I’d needed from her. We’d made love that night. We’d made love, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever done.