Now That You Know

I'm named after a song about strippers.

My mum knew this full well when she chose my name. She was basically a Police groupie, or she would've been if she hadn't been about 15 years too late. Had a poster of Sting on the wall over her bed and everything.

I wouldn't say Sting was a good influence, though. My mum took "Don't Stand So Close" as an invitation and stood so close to her history teacher that she got pregnant with me. I'm sure you heard about it; it was quite the scandal at the time. She had to leave the school, as did he. While he moved to France to teach English to children who didn't understand that he was a sexual predator, she was sent to the country to live with her Grandmum, who to this day remains so on the fringes of mainstream society that she still does not have a mobile phone.

But back to Mum. When she named me Roxanne, she thought she was helping me reclaim my sexual promiscuity, or that which she thought I would inevitably develop in my teen years. She imagined that I would grow up to be exactly like her: a young mum with no understanding of the word “no” who would marry her best mate’s older brother at the age of 27 and then divorce him for his significantly older uncle just five years later. Little did she know that I would become an anxiety-ridden software designer who is too afraid of her own shadow to form an intimate connection (much less a sexual relationship) with another human.

Which is to say, a disappointment. Mum fully expected me to have a baby before I got to uni, just like she did, and when that didn’t happen, she revised her vision of my future to include a more traditional track to motherhood: uni boyfriend turns fianceé after graduation, wedding by 25, pregnant by 27.

“Seeing anyone lately?” she asks me every time we speak on the phone, and when I say no, she launches at me a full list of every eligible (and some not) young male she knows or has heard of, including her friends’ sons, her friends’ friends’ sons, and the new bag boy at her local Tesco. (“He’s much more of a man than a boy, Zanna, so you really should consider it.”)

Suffice it to say, I do not consider it. I’m perfectly content with my life as it is, even though I’m desperately single and have, for the last eight months, lived in a room with no windows in a flat where I share a kitchen with eight other people, two of whom I never see and whose existence I have begun to doubt. I have a job that requires me to never leave my room, but in order to maintain my sanity, I spend an hour every morning walking, several hours every day in various coffee shops around the city, and and at least an hour of cumulative time riding the tube. And some days I do all of that without speaking to another human being.

On February 10th, a Friday, I wake up before Tessa but after Mar, which I can tell because when I go to the loo, Mar’s wet toothbrush is on the edge of the sink but the smell of Tessa’s shampoo isn’t yet in the air. Since I moved into the Warehouse (that’s what we call the flat, a converted section of a warehouse that was used to can fish a hundred years ago and still occasionally smells like it, if the wind shifts the right way), I’ve stopped relying on clocks to tell me what time it is. My room doesn’t have windows, so I don’t need the sun, either. As soon as I memorized my roommate’s schedules, all I had to do was figure out who was around and what they were doing, and I knew what time it was.

Tessa and Mar are the most reliable of my eight flatmates, because they work regular hours: Mar is a schoolteacher who works 7:30 to 4 (but sometimes later), and Tessa works a 9-to-5 in an office. From the toothbrush on the sink and the sound of Rusty showering in the second bathroom, I can guess that it’s around 7 in the morning. Rusty’s bedroom is across the hall from mine, and sometimes I can hear him playing video games in the middle of the night with his girlfriend, who lives in America.

“You’re up early.”

I turn around, toothbrush in my mouth, to see Niall standing in the doorway. Niall and I have a complex history that we pretend is simple, which means we edge along the line between “flatmates” and “friends,” constantly daring each other to tip our relationship onto the “friends” side. Every conversation we have is a bit like a fencing match: I push him backwards, feeling victorious, and then suddenly his foil is in my gut and I’m flat against a wall.

Or maybe all of that is in my head. My imagination is multifaceted.

“So are you,” I say, though it really isn’t that early for Niall. He works as a writer at an online newsmagazine that’s not as bad as Buzzfeed but not nearly as classy as it could be, and because of that, he keeps regular hours. Not that he’s told me any of this: Niall’s very friendly, but he doesn’t talk about himself very much, which might be one of the reasons I spend so much time thinking about him. As a child I was fascinated with mystery stories, with discovering answers to questions nobody even knew existed. And when it comes to Niall, I’ve got a million questions.

In the mirror, I see myself, toothbrush sticking out of my mouth, angry red zit emerging on my chin, and behind me, I see Niall watching me. He’s dressed for work, wearing a black t-shirt with the word “Friday” printed on it in white letters and a pair of dark jeans, and his brown hair is all mussed up. It looks like he did it on purpose in an attempt to make it look natural, but with Niall, you never really can tell. Maybe he’s just as carefree as he looks, just as indifferent to the world as he seems.

“Doing anything interesting today?” he asks me as I spit into the sink.

“Don’t know yet,” I say, pulling my hair back with a headband and turning on the water. It takes ages for the water in the Warehouse to heat up, which means that my conversation with Niall could go on for at least another thirty seconds. Every time I talk to Niall I never know what’s going to happen, and that’s both terrifying and thrilling.

“The Tate has a really cool special exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg stuff right now,” Niall says, leaning oh so casually in the doorway, his legs crossed at the ankle. I stick my finger under the tap and then gear up to splash water on my face. “The one with the stuffed eagle and the like. You should check it out. I’ve been meaning to.”

It sounds like he’s asking me to go to the Tate with him, which would be completely normal if we were regular friends or if we were dating or if we were normal flatmates, but Niall and I are not normal flatmates. At least not in my head. In my head, Niall and I are magnets in this complex, unending dance, constantly pulling and repelling each other. Which is to say that every time I look at him, I am 19 again and I’m looking at a stranger with the purest blue eyes and wondering why there are butterflies in my stomach.

“Sounds great,” I say. “Maybe if I have time.” And then I stick my head in the sink and splash some water on my face, barely missing my eyes.

When I reemerge, fumbling for a towel with my eyes closed, Niall is gone.

And that’s a good thing, because every time I speak to Niall, I fear that this might be the conversation where I break. I might finally say what I’ve been wanting to say to him since I moved in.

It's not that I haven't had plenty of chances. Niall and I have spent a decent amount of time together over the months that I've lived here. We've gone on family outings organized by Tessa and stayed in for family film nights organized by Tessa (if I were a psychologist I might suspect that because Tessa’s family all live far away in Wales, she’s using her flatmates to recoup the familial warmth she needs) and we've even spent a good bit of time alone together.

As an introvert, my favorite companion is myself, but Niall’s a close second. I spent an entire week with Niall last month when all of our flatmates decided to go skiing in France for a week. Niall couldn't go because of work and I couldn't go because of my anxiety (about skiing, traveling, and spending that many days in a cabin in the wilderness with all of my flatmates--but don't worry, I made up a good excuse about needing to work), so we ended up camping out on the couch every night that week and marathoning “The West Wing.” Talking to Niall feels a bit like talking to myself, if talking to myself made my blood pressure rise.

So while he may be a mystery, Niall’s no stranger. Here are half a dozen things I know about Niall, gleaned from passing conversations in the kitchen, evenings spent discussing whether Bartlett was a better president than Obama, and afternoons walking through the parks of London counting squirrels (Niall gives them all German names because he thinks the German inability to say the word “squirrel” is hilarious):

1. Niall likes avocado on toast but not on anything else, and hates the idea that avocado is like butter in texture. “It’s a vegetable,” he insisted as he shoved a piece of toast into his mouth. Crumbs fell as he spoke and it should’ve been disgusting, but somehow it was endearing. “Butter is a fat.”

2. Despite his insistence that butter is a fat, when we went to see a film during the Christmas holiday, he purchased a bag of popcorn and drizzled so much liquid butter onto it that the popcorn nearly disappeared. He told me he wasn't going to share, but as soon as the lights went down and the previews began, he shoved the bag in my direction and wouldn't take it back until my fingertips were as buttery as his.

3. Niall’s best mate from uni is currently spending a year and a half backpacking through Asia, working agricultural jobs on the way in order to afford the trip. For a second Niall considered going with him, but then he remembered that he likes having somewhere steady to hang his hat.

When Niall told me this, he was pulling me down the corridor by the hand, insisting on showing me the hook on the back of his door where, if he had a hat, he could hang it. If you've never gone into someone’s room to look at a hook they've got on the back of their door, it goes a bit like this. You crowd in and try not to step too heavily on the floor and he smells like aftershave and mint conditioner, and as he shows you the hook you can feel him looking at you, but you're too afraid to look back, and also you're too busy trying to memorize every photo he has tacked on his walls. When you spill back out into the hallway a minute later, you're breathing heavy and feeling thankful none of your other flatmates are home to see you.

4. Niall’s really good at flirty eyes. I figured this one out about two months ago, when I ran into Niall on the pavement outside our building and he helped me carry my shopping up to our flat. I kept insisting that I didn't need his help because the bags really weren't that heavy, and he kept insisting that he needed to help me because he wouldn't be happy with himself if he didn't, and in the end it was imagining Niall sitting around feeling bad about himself that made me hand over a couple of the bags. So I guess what I mean is Niall’s really good at emotional manipulation. Flirty eyes are just a blink away from puppy dog, you'll do anything I say eyes.

5. Niall likes IPAs and shitty beer and every beer the pub around the corner has on tap, but he does not like pumpkin beer or chocolate beer or Christmas beer or any other attempt to turn beer into a dessert. “If I wanted dessert,” he told me at the pub last week, “I’d just have ice cream.” I have no opinions on beer and agreed with him easily.

6. Niall is the kind of person who tilts his head and moves closer when he's listening to you, even if what you're telling him is that the code for the app you've been hired to repair was so extensively damaged by a previous freelancer that you might have to start from scratch. He nods and mhmms and makes you feel like you're not overreacting when you slam your laptop shut and insist that you're quitting freelancing and are going to get a job that requires you to work in a cubicle and press your pants.

And here's something I don't know about Niall: how he feels about me. Every conversation I have with him is more terrifying and exhilarating than the last, and the more time we spend together, the more I begin to suspect (wonder, hope) that he might feel the same way I feel about him (shaky knees, swirly butterfly tummy, blushy cheeks). Maybe I'm his favorite person to talk to, too. Maybe he wants to know everything about me, even things I don't know about myself.

And maybe, just maybe, he remembers.

******

The whole thing was a fluke, really. The whole night. None of it should have ever happened.

It all started with a phone call from Belle. I was in my second year of uni, living in a tiny bedroom in a student accommodation flat with three other people, two of whom were males who always left the kitchen a mess and one of whom was never home. On this particular evening, I was the only one around, which is why when Belle asked me to come out with her, I was reluctant. It was rare that I could bake without someone hovering over my shoulder, waiting to lick the spoon.

“It’s Saturday,” Belle was saying to me as I folded my socks. I hit speaker on my mobile and dropped it onto my bed so that I could use both hands to match a pair of stripes. “I’m not going to let you stay home and rearrange your wardrobe again.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” I lied, because she didn’t need to know that I’d spent the last hour organizing my jumpers by color. “I’m going to try this new recipe and--”

“You’re not,” Belle said. “It’s Valentine’s Day. Be ready in 20 minutes. And wear something pink.”

I knew I didn’t have any choice in what was going to happen tonight, so I dug through my newly arranged jumpers in search of something pink. The best I could come up with was a breast cancer awareness t-shirt my aunt gave me as a strange present once, and it didn’t seem appropriate, so I ended up in black. Belle only scoffed at it a bit when she arrived, and then she led me to the loo and smeared pink lipstick all over my mouth.

“This stuff transfers,” she told me as she ran her finger along the edge of my bottom lip. “So be careful if you snog anyone.”

“Who exactly am I going to snog?” I asked her, pushing her hand away from my face. “It looks fine. Can we leave now?”

“Now who’s eager to leave?” she asked me over her shoulder as she stepped out of the loo.

At the first pub we went to, the one closest to our uni, Belle ordered a pink cocktail from the specials menu and spent the entire 15 minutes it took her to drink it scoffing at all of the couples caught up in each other’s eyes. From our table, we could see (I counted) eight different couples, and the bloke with his arm around a tall blonde looked a lot like somebody Belle had snogged once during our first year.

The second pub was no better. I’d decided not to drink very much, because somebody had to carry Belle home should she keel over in a jealous, bitter puddle. While I was perfectly content being single, Belle loved having a boyfriend. She loved having somebody to text “sweet dreams” to every night, she loved having a default study buddy, but most of all (she confided to me once when she was tipsy), she loved making out.

“It’s just so much fun,” she’d said. “When your stomach does that little flip of excitement and it’s just so happy.” I had nodded, pretending I knew what she was talking about, and she pretended that she believed me.

It wasn’t that I was 19 and had never been kissed, it was that I had never been kissed well. I maintained that there was definitely a difference. My first kiss had been just before I left for uni with a bloke who lived in the same small town as my grandmum, and he was shaking so much I suspected he was afraid of me. It was not a pleasant experience.

By the third pub, Belle was beginning to consider the possibility that Valentine’s Day was not the best time to go out with your only single mate, because if there happened to be any single blokes hanging around, they would no doubt assume you were lesbians and insinuate that you should put on some kind of show for them.

“We need to get out of here,” Belle said as she crossed her eyes at a bearded man who was leering at her from the next table over. “I’m going to the loo, and then let’s go.” She tipped back her drink, downing the rest, and then set off for the restroom.

I was barely buzzed, having only finished a quarter of each of my drinks before Belle insisted we move onto another locale, and as I looked around the pub and watched the couple three tables over sucking hickies into each other’s necks, I thought that maybe it wasn’t so bad, being single. There was no pressure to behave a certain way, no pressure to go out at night when all I really wanted to do was stay in, no pressure to be constantly appealing.

Just when it was dawning on me that I got all of that pressure from Belle, a bloke approached my table. Actually, he bumped into it with his elbow. It was one of those bar tables where you’re meant to stand and lean on if you get tired, not very practical, so I figured it was an accident and nodded at him, expecting him to move on. But he didn’t. Instead he came around the table and said hello to me.

“Hi?” I said back, smiling at him slightly and trying to figure out if I knew him from uni. He looked to be about my age; he was wearing a buttoned-up shirt and jeans and his eyes were a bit red, like he’d had too much to drink on not enough sleep. “Do I know you?”

He shook his head. The music was so loud I could feel it in my body, vibrating just below my skin. He said something else to me, but I couldn’t hear it. “What?”

He smiled, laughed, shook his head, repeated himself louder. “I just wanted to ask you something.”

I could feel my heartbeat speed up, which was irrational, of course, because he probably just wanted to ask me where the loo was. I was the kind of practical girl who always knew where the loo was, as well as the nearest exits should there be an emergency that required an evacuation. “Go ahead.”

“Well, see,” he said, leaning in closer to me and raising his voice as he spoke directly into my ear, “my mates bet me that I couldn’t get a girl I’d just met to snog me. Since it’s Valentine’s Day and all. So, obviously, I have to prove them wrong.”

“Obviously,” I repeated, trying to sound flirty and not as if I was currently trying to quiet the exclamation points bouncing around in my mind. All Belle’d had to do was step away to the loo and a cute guy who was clearly well on his way to being drunk off his arse was flirting with me. I glanced backward over my shoulder to see if Belle was coming back, thinking that if she were here, this bloke never would’ve spared me a glance.

“So your boyfriend’s not off in the loo or something, is he?” he asked.

“No.” I shook my head. “Wait, what?”

“I just want to know before, so he doesn’t show up and punch the dickens out of me.”

That made me laugh, which in turn made me blush, because what he’d said wasn’t very funny and I wasn’t nearly intoxicated enough to be laughing at things that weren’t funny. My laughter seemed to encourage him, though, because he took another swig of his beer and then set it down on the table next to Belle’s empty glass before stepping even closer to me.

He smelled like liquor, or maybe the whole place smelled like liquor—it was hard to tell. He was just a bit taller than me, barely taller than me at all in the boots I was wearing. I could see now that his lips were chapped, but not so chapped that kissing him would be unpleasant.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” he said, his fingertip skimming my cheek as he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. It felt like my skin was on fire. “If that’s alright.”

I nodded numbly. The music seemed to grow even louder and I could feel his hand, heavy and soft as it rested on my cheek. His fingers were callused but not too rough. I felt like I was trapped in that moment just before you fall asleep, when all of your senses amplify. The cricket outside your window suddenly seems too loud, the blanket twisted around your legs too heavy, the sound of your heartbeat much too fast.

But I wasn’t about to fall asleep. No, I was about to experience the most unreal kiss of my life, and I was about to get it from a stranger.

I didn’t know that at the time, though. All I could think was that I wasn’t drunk enough for this and then his lips were brushing against mine and I was gasping at the softness of him and grabbing his coat to pull him closer to me. Before I closed my eyes I saw that his were bright blue, blue like seaglass that’s so beautiful it could only have come from nature. Man would never have been able to master its color.

When we broke apart, I couldn’t catch my breath. He grinned at me, muttered a thank you, and walked off, all before I could say anything. I was still standing there, mouth open like an idiot, when Belle popped up in my field of vision.

“What the fuck was that?” she asked me, her eyes wide and a mischievous grin on her face. “You totally just got pink lipstick all over his face. Who was that?”

“No one,” I said, wiping at my lip. When I glanced down at my thumb, it was clean, not even a trace of pink lipstick. I looked over her shoulder and across the pub, but I didn’t see the guy. Maybe he’d declared victory to his friends and they’d moved onto another pub, another dare, or maybe he’d rushed off into the loo to wipe off all of my lipstick. “Let’s go.”

So we did.

And I never saw him again. I went home and lay awake replaying the kiss in my mind and wondering if I’d imagined it, if my subconscious mind had created the whole thing out of some desire to make me feel less alone on a contrived, greeting card holiday. Over the next few weeks, I convinced myself that it was a once in a lifetime occurrence, a moment between two strangers that was never meant to be more than that, and I moved on.

Then, a year and a half later, I met up with a group of potential flatmates who lived in a converted warehouse, and he happened to be one of them.

******

The best part of being a freelance web-designer-slash-software-engineer is that I can make my own hours. I can work wherever I want, whenever I want, and I never have to leave my bedroom. I also don’t need business cards, because in the tech world, they’re basically irrelevant. Instead I’ve got a website and a QR code.

None of that is normal, as Belle reminds me every time I see her, but since I like to attempt to at least resemble a normal human being, I usually leave the flat at least once a day. After my encounter with Niall in the bathroom, I get dressed and gather up my things into my messenger bag. Today I’ve got a bunch of different projects I’m working on, and I need to finish at least one of them.

My favorite cafe is on the South Bank, not too far from the Tate Modern, and as I’m boarding the tube, I wonder if it was a coincidence that Niall mentioned the Rauschenberg exhibit, or if he remembers me mentioning this cafe a few months ago. I try not to delude myself into believing the latter, but it’s hard. Niall has the memory of an elephant and a heart the size of one, though he’d never admit it. He’s also peculiarly honest.

I say peculiar because I’ve suspected for a while now (baselessly, of course) that Niall is a genius. A daft genius who doesn’t remember a girl he kissed in a bar once, but a genius nonetheless. Even though he lives in a flat with eight other people, he manages to have a completely private life that none of us know very much about. It takes a genius to keep that many secrets.

I’ve got secrets too, though.

Secret #1: I read every single piece of Niall’s writing that gets posted online, even the pieces about sports and foreign politics. I follow him on twitter (from my anonymous account, of course), and I check his feed daily so I never miss a post. None of it’s particularly interesting, and half of it’s in sports jargon that I don’t understand, but at least he’s not half bad at grammar.

Secret #2: No one has any idea I do this, which makes it a secret, but what makes it a difficult secret is that Belle doesn’t know about it. Belle doesn’t even know that Niall is my flatmate. She’s never even managed to see my flat in all the time I’ve lived there, and whenever she complains about how we always hang out at hers, I remind her that she only has two flatmates and I’ve eight, which means that I basically live in a zoo.

As I’m eating a blueberry scone and sorting through my inbox, she texts me and asks me if we can do something tonight. It’s a Friday, and for a while, Friday was our film night, but then Belle’s schedule got a bit crazy—she got a new boyfriend and a promotion at work all in the same week—and I got bumped down a bit in her list of priorities, and film nights kind of fell to the wayside.

I’m about to text her back and let her know that yes, of course, I would love to see the new Shakespeare adaptation with her, when I get a text from Tessa.

Family dinner tonight, it says. Please bring dessert!!!!

Family dinners are Tessa’s monthly attempts to make every one of our flatmates sit down at the massive dining room table—it fits a dozen people—together and pretend that we’re all friends. Since coordinating nine different schedules is a nightmare, family dinners always come together at the last minute. I know that I’d face Tessa’s enormous wrath if I miss one, and everyone else would be annoyed at me too, since I’m in charge of dessert.

(I’m always in charge of dessert.)

Can’t, family dinner tonight, sorry, I text to Belle, along with a sad face emoji.

I open up a few of my favorite dessert blogs and begin looking for something to make for tonight. Belle must be psychic, because as I’m considering a German chocolate cheesecake, I get another message from her.

U making dessert?

Yes, I shoot back. Almost immediately, she replies, Can I crash?

Bringing guests to family dinners isn’t unprecedented (Tessa’s been known to bring a significant other a time or two, and Rusty’s American girlfriend joins every time she’s staying with him), but I know I have to check with Tessa first. If the residents of the Warehouse were a group of Girl Guides, she’d be our troop leader.

Of course you can bring someone, she replies, and I pass the message onto Belle, feeling my stomach sink when she tells me how excited she is.

If I’m good at keeping secrets, Belle is terrible at them. In our first year of uni, I told her that I suspected that her lab partner was cheating on his girlfriend with my lab partner, and by the next week, the psychology laboratory was a war zone and the rats we were experimenting on were running scared.

I didn’t blame Belle, though. I figured most people had the same suspicions I did and maybe even Belle’s lab partner’s girlfriend had as well. The next month was Christmas, and when we came back from holiday, I told Belle how much I hated the jumper my mum had gotten me. My mum visited the next month and insisted on taking us to brunch. Belle spilled about the jumper almost immediately.

There’s a chance that Belle’s completely forgotten what Niall (of the “infamous V-Day pub snog,” as Belle calls it) looks like, but I doubt it. Belle’s bad at keeping secrets, but she’s even worse at forgetting them.

******

By 6:00, I’m elbow deep in a bowl of dough, peeling out strips and laying them flat on wax paper all over the kitchen table. There’s flour on my face, flour in my eyes, flour in my nose. The oven beeps, letting me know that it’s preheated, and I sigh, looking at how much work I’ve still got left to do. I should’ve known cinnamon rolls were a bad idea.

But it’s exactly like me to attempt to bake something new when I’m stressed up to my eyeballs. There are several ways tonight could go. Either Belle will expose my crush on Niall—I haven’t told her about it, but she’ll know as soon as she sees us in the same room together—or she’ll let him know about the infamous V-Day pub snog, or both. Probably both.

I brush a piece of sweaty hair off of my forehead, smearing more flour on my face in the process, and consider my options. I could run away as soon as I pop these in the oven. I could call Belle and tell her I’m sick and then hide in my room all night. Or I could be a mature adult and deal with whatever happens.

“Need any help?”

I flinch at the sound of his voice. Niall. I can usually recognize who’s entering a room by their footsteps, but I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I didn’t even hear him coming down the corridor. My heartbeat is already speeding up, and he’s barely said anything. I don’t turn around, but I say, “Sure, thanks.”

He comes around the table and into my view, and I can see that he’s added a cardigan over his t-shirt. He pushes the sleeves up and crosses into the kitchen to wash his hands. “How was your day?” he asks over the sound of the running water. “Get a lot done?”

“Yeah,” I say, which is a blatant lie. After I agreed to bring Belle as my guest to family dinner, my productivity went to shit. All I did this afternoon was eat three blueberry scones and a tuna salad sandwich before going to Tesco and staring at eggs for twenty minutes. What was the difference between farm fresh and organic? Did anyone really know? “How about you? Good day?”

“It was alright,” Niall says. The water turns off, and a second later he’s in front of my again, drying his hands on a paper towel. Tessa says they’re bad for the environment and insists we switch entirely to reusable dishtowels, but Tessa rarely cooks, so we’ve all done a pretty good job on ignoring her opinion on this issue. “What are we doing here?”

I want to ask him more about his day, maybe even make fun of him a bit for being so evasive, but instead I instruct him to flatten out the dough strips a bit and spread the cinnamon sugar paste over them before rolling them up. He gets right to work, and my mind goes a thousand directions at once.

It has a tendency to do this when Niall’s around. First it starts thinking about what it would be like to have Niall as a boyfriend, if he’d help me bake things all the time, serving as my assistant and taste tester. Then it wonders what Niall’s thinking right now, if he’s wondering what I’m thinking too or if he’s just thinking about work or some film he saw last week or an article he read this morning. And then I get distracted by Niall’s forearms as he kneads the dough and am forced to give myself a silent lecture on how he’s my flatmate and I should absolutely not be looking at him like that.

But then I look at him like that anyway.

“You ever made these before?” Niall asks, and my brain suddenly fears that he can read its thoughts and my cheeks go hot.

“No,” I say. “I know they’re more of a breakfast food, but I thought they’d be nice because of the weather.”

“The weather?” Niall asks. I look up to and see that he’s smiling at me in a trying not to laugh at you kind of way. This is one of Niall’s trademark looks. Really, he should copyright it. “Cinnamon rolls go with the rain?”

I nod. “Don’t you think? The rain always makes me want to cozy up on the couch with hot cocoa and a book. And a cinnamon roll, of course.”

“Of course,” he says. He grabs a spoonful of the cinnamon sugar paste and begins smearing it on the dough. “Makes perfect sense.”

I pause, my hands in the dough, and raise an eyebrow at him. “Are you making fun of me?”

Now he actually does laugh. “Of course I am. You’re so much fun to make fun of, Zan.”

Zan. My heart skips a beat. Niall only started calling me by my nickname’s nickname recently, after I wandered into the kitchen late one night and found him drinking tea at the table. I managed to work up the courage to join him, and we talked for a while, during which time he told me that he struggled with insomnia and I told him that I think nicknames are either really patronizing or a sure way of showing somebody how much you appreciate their company. I hope he’s going for the second.

“Well, thanks, I think,” I say.

“You’re welcome.”

I meet his eyes for a second, and then I have to look away because I can feel myself growing flustered. There’s no way Belle is not going to guess that I have a crush on Niall. I’m so stupidly obvious about it that every single person who lives in this flat must know. Niall probably even knows.

I finish laying out the last strip of dough and go into the kitchen for a second spoon. I dip it in the cinnamon sugar paste and start at the other end of the table from Niall, spreading it down the strips of dough. We work silently for a few minutes, and all the while I’m deep in thought, wondering what he’s deep in thought about.

Before I realize I’ve moved, we meet in the middle of the table at the last soon-to-be cinnamon roll, my hip bumping his. I take a step away and look up at him, hoping my hands aren’t shaking. “Sorry,” I say. “I’ve got this one.”

“Hmm?” He takes a step toward me, completely obliterating the space I just put between us, and grabs my spoon out of my hand. Then he grabs my hand.

Now my brain is definitely on overdrive. It’s screaming what the fuck?!?! and what is he doing?!?!?! and did I miss something?? He spreads his fingers between mine, linking our doughy hands together, and then he turns and somehow my body turns to, and we’re face to face.

“You know, Zan,” he says softly in that same amused tone. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Yeah?” I say. Instead of answering, he pushes even closer to me, his free hand brushing my waist and coming to rest just above my belt. He leans down, his blue eyes growing ever larger as he comes nearer, and then—

Bzzzzzzz.

I pull myself out of his grasp and try not to trip over my own feet as I go into the kitchen. Belle’s early, but of course she is. I hit the button on the panel above the lightswitch to unlock the front door for her.

“It’s my mate, Belle,” I say to Niall, who hasn’t moved from his spot next to the table. I can still feel his hand on my waist, his touch burned into my skin, which should be impossible because I’m wearing a knit jumper. “She’s—”

“Zanna.”

I meet Niall’s eyes, which look even more blue somehow. He looks like he wants to say something, or like he wants to laugh at me, or both. Before he can do either, I turn and rush out of the room.

*****

As I walk down the corridor to let Belle in, I resist the urge to look back at Niall and try to talk myself off this metaphorical cliff we just got way too close to. Niall was going to kiss me. He was definitely going to kiss me. And if he had? Who knows what would’ve happened.

“Hi!” Belle says when I swing open the door. She’s dressed in head to toe pink and red, with a dark pink macintosh as her top layer. And she’s wearing a pink lipstick that instantly reminds me of the one from the infamous Valentine’s Day.

“You know it’s not Valentine’s Day yet, right?” I ask as I step aside to let her in. I gesture at the coat rack on the wall and she hangs up her bag before taking off her coat. Now I can see that her sweater is dotted with hearts, and even her jeans are maroon.

“I’m just trying out this outfit,” she tells me as she straightens her jacket on the hook. “Harry’s taking me out for this whole big V-Day event tomorrow, and I want to make sure I look perfect.”

“You look very festive,” I tell her, looking her up and down. She’s even wearing red eyeliner, which somehow she’s managed to use to bring out the copper in her eyes. Red eyeliner would make me look like the undead. “I’m sure Harry will love whatever you wear.”

“You don’t understand,” Belle says. She glances around to make sure no one’s listening and drops her voice to a stage whisper. “He’s going to ask me to move in with him.”

“How do you know that?” I start down the corridor toward the kitchen, maintaining a slow pace so as to delay the inevitable as long as possible. Maybe Belle is so engrossed in her Harry drama that she won’t even really look at Niall. Maybe I’ve been doing all of this worrying for nothing.

“Well, we talked about it a few weeks ago,” she says. “Plus the other day I heard him on the phone with his landlord talking about making a second set of keys.”

“Well,” I say. “That’s very exciting.”

“I know!” she gasps, linking her elbow with mine. “After he hung up I checked his recent calls while he was in the shower just to make sure that’s who he was talking to, and it was, so—”

“Belle! You checked his phone?” I shake my head, but I’m not surprised. In addition to being a terrible secret keeper, Belle is also a world-class snooper, two things that do not go very well together. “That’s so bad.”

Belle shrugs. “I just didn’t want to get my hopes up for nothing. Also, his flat is kind of awful, so I’ve been doing some research to convince him we ought to get a new one. I didn’t want to waste all of that time and effort if he wasn’t actually going to ask me.”

Oh God, I think. I hope Harry sticks around, because Belle seems to be really fond of him, but he seemed very normal to me when I met him a few weeks ago at a pub. He seemed like the kind of person who might be easily overwhelmed by Belle’s crazy.

Niall, on the other hand, will, I suspect, be able to handle Belle’s crazy. But that doesn’t mean I’m eager to expose him to it.

Maybe she won’t recognize him, I tell myself as I lead Belle deeper into the depths of the flat. Most of the square footage in the place consists of hallways, a necessity when subdividing a warehouse into flats with nearly a dozen bedrooms each. Belle follows me down the long corridor to the kitchen, her booths loud on the concrete floor. Finally, we reach the kitchen, and Niall’s still standing at the table, rolling cinnamon rolls.

“Hey,” I say, my heartbeat picking up again when he meets my eyes and smiles. “This is Belle, my best mate. Belle, this is—”

“Hey,” Belle says, her eyes lighting up. She drops my arm and takes a step toward Niall, and I swear my life flashes before my eyes. “Aren’t you--”

I cross distance separating us in half a second flat and grab her sleeve. “Belle, I’ve been meaning to show you this new mascara I bought. Come see it.”

“But I’m talking to--”

I yank her out of the room after me before she can finish the sentence. “Excuse us, Niall,” I shout over my shoulder.

Belle is the kind of mate who likes to yank me out of my comfort zone and shove me places I really, really don’t want to be. I hate it, and it’s also the main reason I keep her around. Without her, I never would’ve snogged Niall in a pub three years ago. I never would’ve had that buzzed memory to carry me through every successive Valentine’s Day, all of which I’ve spent alone.

But I also wouldn’t be in this situation right now. I wouldn’t have to forcibly remove her from the kitchen so she doesn’t spill my secret (the most important one out of all of them) to Niall.

“That was rude,” she huffs as we turn the corner. “Why didn’t you tell me your flatmate is--”

“Shut up,” I hiss, pulling Belle down the hall as fast as my legs can go.

“What the fuck,” Belle says, less a question and more of an observation, as I push her into my room and close the door behind us. “That is him, right? The bloke from the pub? From the infamous V-Day pub snog?”

I glance backwards at the door, hoping that no one followed us. It’d be just like Tessa to smell a juicy conversation through the walls and burst out of her room in the hopes of overhearing it. Honestly, I’m surprised she didn’t appear during the almost kiss in the dining room. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“What the fuck,” Belle says again. She sits down on the edge of my bed, then immediately stands up again. “I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Because he doesn’t know it’s him. I lean back against the door. “Because it’s not a big deal.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Belle repeats. She crosses the room and stops right in front of me, looking up into my eyes. “Do you hear yourself? You and this guy—”

“Niall,” I say. “His name’s Niall.”

“Fine.” Belle rolls her eyes. “You and Niall are the biggest missed connection in the history of missed connections, and you’re just standing here acting as if him being your fucking flatmate isn’t the biggest sign from the universe since ever.”

“What do you want me to do?” I ask her. I wish I could have her optimism. I wish I could look at my life like it was a romance novel just a chapter away from the climax. But I’m the one who’s spent the past 8 months living with a bloke who hasn’t acknowledged that we once shared the best kiss of our lives—or at least my life. “It’s not like he remembers.”

Belle’s mouth drops open. “What? He doesn’t remember?”

I shrug. “Either that, or he regrets it so much that he’s embarrassed to bring it up.”

Belle frowns, and turns around, walking to the far end of my room and back again. Then she looks up at me, a light in her eyes as if something’s just clicked for her. “But you never brought it up either.”

“Of course not,” I told her. “Stop looking at me like that, it’s weird. And I don’t really want to be so humiliated that I have to move out. I like living here.”

“You like living here because you get to look at him all the time.”

“What?”

“I saw you just now, staring at him. You’re totally hot for him.”

“God, Belle,” I say, blushing at her language. I am not totally hot for Niall. That sounds so primal. I know there’s absolutely no way I can tell her about the almost kiss; she’ll probably bring it up at dinner. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She sits down on my bed and grabs one of my throw pillows, the one with the fraying edge. She runs her fingertips through the threads as she talks. “You’ve literally been crushing on this guy since he rocked your world with that kiss three years ago. You’ve been long-distance crushing on him, and now that he’s right here in front of you, you’re not doing anything about it.”

“He didn’t rock my world,” I say, wondering why it’s suddenly so hot in here. It’s not like I’m remembering the kiss from three years ago in vivid detail, his hand on my cheek, the fabric of his shirt between my fingers— “And I don’t have a crush on him. And even if I did, he doesn’t remember, so it’s a moot point.”

She rolls her eyes. “You don’t know that he doesn’t remember. Maybe he thinks you don’t remember and that’s why he hasn’t said anything. Or maybe he’s embarrassed about the whole thing because he kissed a stranger on a dare on Valentine’s Day, and he doesn’t want to bring it up because of that.” She nods to herself. “Yeah, that’s probably it. Do you remember ever silently mutually agreeing to never mention it?”

“Silently mutually agreeing?” Now I’m the one rolling my eyes. “Tell me, Belle, what does that look like?”

“It’s like, your eyes met and he blushed and you blushed and then you looked away but then when you looked back and your eyes met again, he nodded so you nodded and in that moment you knew, you just knew, that you’d agreed never to mention your passionate kiss as strangers that occurred in the Crooked Fern pub one Valentine’s Day many moons ago.” She clutches her hands over her heart and closes her eyes for a second. “God, Zanna, this is, like, the most romantic story ever.”

“No, it’s not,” I say flatly. “It’s fucking weird, is is what it is. It’s creepy for me to be pining after him because of one kiss.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Belle stops waving her arms around dramatically and puts her hands on her hips. “Zanna, he ruined you.”

My stomach turns. I’m thinking all about how I’m a modern feminist woman who can’t be ruined by a man, but I don’t have the presence of mind necessary to verbalize a coherent argument right now. All I can manage is, “What?”

“He ruined you,” Belle repeats. “Look me straight in the eye and tell me you’ve had a better kiss since that one in that grimy pub.”

“You just said it was romantic,” I remind her, and the look she gives me in return says, I’m not joking. “And you’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not,” she says, looking at me pointedly. I know she’s thinking about the two boyfriends I’ve had in the past three years, if you can even call them that. The first one lasted a month, and the second, three weeks and a day.

But that had nothing to do with the memory of Niall that lingered in the back of my mind. Both of those blokes were about as boring as a dictionary.

“Come on, Zanna,” Belle says. “You’ve been dreaming about him for so long. And now he’s finally here, right in front of you, and you’re sitting scared.”

“I’m not sc—”

Belle throws her arms up in resignation. “Is it me you’re trying to convince, or yourself?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. “Because I’m done listening to it. If you want to waste this magnificent chance at what could be true love, that’s up to you.”

With that, she turns on her heel and exits my room, leaving the door ajar behind her.

Belle sure does love a dramatic exit.

******

When we get back to the dining room, Mar is there, having just arrived home from her day at school. She looks exhausted, but manages a smile when I introduce her to Belle. If Belle’s the most extroverted person I know (aside from Tessa), then Mar is the most introverted (aside from me). When I first moved in, I thought she hated me, but it turns out she’s just massively shy.

After she goes to her room to change her clothes, I show Belle how to roll the cinnamon rolls and we get back to work. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her sneaking glances at Niall, no doubt attempting to read his mind and see if he really does remember the infamous V-Day pub snog.

“So Niall,” she says after a minute or so. “What do you do?”

“I’m a writer,” Niall says. “Online journalism.” He grabs one of the baking sheets and begins loading the cinnamon rolls onto it. “Zan, you make frosting for these?”

“In the fridge,” I say. While Niall isn’t looking, Belle widens her eyes and mouths, Zan! at me. I roll my eyes in return. “For after they bake. They need an hour, so we should put them in around 7.”

Niall nods. “What do you—”

“How long have you lived in the Warehouse?” Belle asks, seemingly unaware that she’s just cut Niall off.

He gapes at her for a second and then answers. “About 10 months,” he says. “My first year out of uni I lived with a couple of mates, but it was awful. I knew I’d only be able to stay friends with them if I moved out, so I found this lot on Craigslist and I haven’t looked back.”

“Really,” Belle says. “No girlfriend, then?”

I try not to be too obvious about glaring at her as Niall shakes his head. “Nope, no girlfriend. Not at the moment.”

“Right, well.” Belle doesn’t look at me, but I can tell she has her scheming face on. That’s when she tries to look as angelic and harmless as possible, but if you look more closely, you can see that she’s very capable of ripping your jugular out with her teeth. “If there’s someone you’re interested in, you’d better move quickly. Us girls don’t wait around forever, you know.”

Niall looks at me, clearly confused, and I drop my eyes to the cinnamon rolls at hand and pretend that I’m not paying any attention. “Right,” he says to Belle. Then, to me, “I think this is the last one.”

I nod. “Thanks for your help, Ni.”

“Anytime,” he says, smiling at me. It’s pretty hard to ignore the way I get a bit lightheaded looking at him. He lifts one of the full trays and carries it into the kitchen, just in time for Tessa to appear, preventing me from berating Belle for her performance.

“I’m Tessa,” she says brightly, shaking Belle’s hand. Tessa is also wearing a jumper embroidered with hearts, making it clear to me just how much my two mates are cut from the same cloth.

“Belle.” Belle grins back and compliments Tessa’s lipgloss.

“Thanks!” Tessa says. Niall reappears with a sponge and begins wiping down the table. I hold my hand out for it and he passes it over. “I love your lipstick too. Excuse me, I better go fetch everyone else.”

When she returns a few minutes later, she has all of the flatmates in tow. First there’s Mar, who heads into the kitchen to begin making a salad, and then Rusty, who’s brought several bags of crisps in various strange flavors. Next up is Bethan, who was in charge of the appetizers. She brings them out on a tray (veggies, hummus, some crackers) and Belle takes to her right away. I’m quite content to let them head off into the living room to talk about the new song Bethan learned on her ukulele, Mar tagging along.

Then there’s Zachary, who ducks into the kitchen and puts water on to boil. Zachary, a chef by trade, always goes a bit over the top when it’s his turn to do the main course, so Tessa follows him so that she can keep a close watch.

“You can’t set off the fire alarm again,” she chastises him.

So it’s just Niall and I left at the table, along with the two most elusive flatmates, Matty and Lor. It took me a month of living here to stop mixing them up. They’d be nearly identical if it weren’t for Lor’s glasses, thin wire frames that look like they belong in another century. Matty and Lor speak about themselves so infrequently that I’ve begun to suspect that they both work for MI6, though Lor must be an analyst, not a field agent. He fiddles with his glasses so often he’d surely be taken out on a mission because he forgot to watch for bullets.

We finish loading the cinnamon rolls onto the baking sheets and I start cleaning up as Niall, Matty, and Lor engage in a technical conversation about football that I can’t follow. They sit down at the table, forcing me to work around them as I wipe it clean of flour and cinnamon sugar. When I bend over to wipe the table in front of Niall, his hand brushes across the back of my thigh, and I’m so surprised I don’t even react.

Thank God Belle isn’t around to see it.

******

During dinner, I sit at one end of the table between Belle and Mar, and Niall’s at the complete opposite end, so I don’t have to worry about Belle trying to interrogate him again. That doesn’t ease my nerves any, though. Belle keeps shooting me meaningful looks and then gesturing with her head in Niall’s direction, as if she wants me to take some kind of action immediately.

I manage to make it through dinner unscathed. Tessa and Bethan keep Belle occupied with stories from their workplaces and questions about Harry, which is Belle’s favorite subject, closely followed by, it seems lately, the infamous V-Day pub snog. And of course I’m expected to talk too, voicing my support for Harry and agreeing with everything Belle says. I can’t be bothered to do more than that, because I’m still thinking about the almost kiss.

When everyone has finished eating, I go into the kitchen to get the cinnamon rolls out of the oven and the icing out of the fridge. I’d thought about letting everyone ice their own, but now I decide to do it myself, if only to keep out of the dining room for longer.

That’s before Niall appears in the kitchen, plates from dinner in his hands. As he passes me on his way to the sink, he walks so close that he brushes my bum with his hip. He greets me, breathing, “Zan” in my ear, as he goes by. Luckily, Rusty, who’s right behind him with the rest of the plates, doesn’t notice.

I manage to get all of the cinnamon rolls iced and loaded onto a tray before Niall can come close to me again (even though I want him to—damn, do I want him to). Tessa squeals at the sight of them, eagerly reaching for the first one, and for a moment, I’m distracted with my own cinnamon roll.

At one point I look up and catch Niall staring at me all the way from the other end of the table. Thank God no one else is looking at me, because I flush so hot I’m afraid to touch my own skin. I meet his eyes, and it’s like everyone else in the room fades away. It’s just the two of us, alone in a crowded room together. As I look at him I realize that all I want to do is look at him. I want to spend every moment looking at him and touching him and—

“Zanna.” Belle puts her hand on my elbow, drawing my eyes away from Niall. “Harry just asked me over. Do you mind if I leave?”

“Of course,” I say, feeling a bit ashamed at how relieved I am. If Belle leaves now, she won’t have a chance to talk to Niall again.

“Thank you for having me,” Belle says to Tessa, and then she stands up and thanks the whole room. “It was nice to meet you all!”

After a chorus of goodbyes, I walk with her down the hall to the front door. I expect her to tell me how nice my flatmates are or badger me about Niall, but instead she’s quiet. When we get to the door, she gives me a look that means good luck with this mess and you better make a move on him soon and for fuck’s sake, Zanna. Or maybe that’s all in my head.

“Thanks for coming,” I tell her. “Have a good day with Harry tomorrow.”

“I will!” she says brightly, smiling for a second before raising her eyebrow at me pointedly. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, shutting the door behind her before she can say anything else.

******

I go back to the kitchen and begin clearing the desert plates from the table. I can hear everyone in the living room, laughing at a bad joke Rusty’s no doubt just told. I’ll join them soon, I tell myself, but the truth is, I’m exhausted. Family dinners always make me feel like I’ve run a socialization marathon.

I carry everything to the sink and turn the water on to let it get hot. We have a dishwasher, but tonight I think I’ll wash the dishes by hand. Maybe it’ll help me relax.

But then Niall shows up.

“Need any help?” he asks, sending my pulse racing. He stands beside me, bumping my hip lightly with his, and reaches for a towel. “I’ll dry?”

“Sure,” I say. And that’s how I end up washing dishes with Niall, passing clean, wet dishes to my left so he can dry them and pile them on the counter. He doesn’t try to talk to me over the roar of the water, and I’m perfectly content to work in silence. More than once, his dry fingers brush my soapy ones, sending my stomach soaring. It happens enough that I begin to suspect he’s doing it on purpose.

It takes about 15 minutes to get through them all, and finally I turn off the water and set the sponge down on the sink. I grab a towel to dry my hands and turn around to watch Niall lift a stack of plates into one of the overhead cupboards.

“Thanks for your help,” I say, leaning against the counter and watching him. His t-shirt moves as he reaches up, exposing a sliver of pale skin above the waistband of his jeans.

“No thanks necessary,” Niall says, shutting the door and turning around to look at me. He runs a hand through his hair, pulling it upward, as if it needs his help defying gravity. “Your mate’s nice.”

“You don’t have to lie,” I say. “She can be a bit intense.”

That gets me a Niall grin, the one I love so much. “I was gonna say brazen, but yeah, that works too.”

I can’t help the smile that takes over my face. “She’s always like that. Not much of a filter, that one.”

“Hmm.” Niall crosses the room and comes to stand directly in front of me, just a step away. “About earlier…”

“Yeah,” I say, nervously tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. Niall’s only a few inches taller than me, but this close to me, he seems massive. I have to tilt my neck back a bit to look into his eyes. “You wanted to ask me something?”

“Yeah,” he says, moving closer. “You have the brightest eyes,” he says, standing so close to me that I take a step backward, bumping my arse against the counter. “Like stars.”

“Are you drunk?” I ask him, even though I know full well that he isn’t; I know he only had one beer. But, despite our earlier almost kiss, it’s hard for me to imagine him saying these things to me if he were sober. Is this it? Is he about to acknowledge what happened between us so long ago? Does he actually remember?

“No,” he says, his voice softer now. His eyes flick downward before meeting mine again, and I know he just looked at my mouth. “Just a bit…”

“What?” I ask. “Are you okay, Niall?”

He lifts his hand and rests his fingers on my cheek, and it’s so strange and so sudden that I almost pull away. I can hear my pulse beating in my ears. What the hell, I think, imagining that I’m watching myself on telly, watching this moment occur and thinking that this is so out of character for Niall, thinking that maybe I should rewatch the last half hour of the episode to see if I missed something. It’s like when we cut to commercial, Niall and I were sitting at opposite ends of the dinner table, acting as if we were strangers, and now the adverts are over and he’s practically on top of me.

“You really do have beautiful eyes, Zan,” he says, and then he kisses me.

His lips are soft against mine and I’m so surprised for a second that I don’t close my eyes. Just when I think he’s going to pull away, I feel his tongue soft against my lower lip, and when I gasp, he deepens the kiss.

And then I’m not thinking about it. I’m not thinking about much of anything as my hands travel of their own free will, moving up his chest to settle behind his neck. He moves even closer to me, his other hand cupping my cheek for a second, and then he drops both of his hands and breaks the kiss for a second, just long enough for him to grab me around the waist and lift me so that I’m sitting on the counter. He steps up between my spread legs and runs his hand along my thigh as he breathes heavily.

I’m glad to know it isn’t just me. My heart skitters in my chest, like it’s doing the salsa with a new, undeniable partner. From this new angle, I’m looking down at Niall, just slightly, and I only have time to think about how this is so unlike our other kiss, the one three years ago, so much stranger, so much more… intimate, before he has his hands on me again, pulling my face down to his. His lips skid across my jaw before meeting my mouth again, and all I can do is sigh.

When he finally pulls away, he rests his hands on my knees and smirks at me. All I can do is look at him and try to catch my breath.

“What was that for?” I finally manage to ask.

“Wanted to,” he says, and then he backs out of the kitchen and leaves me there, red-faced and sitting on the counter, alone to think about how I really am hot for Niall, god dammit.

******

The next morning, I wake up just before 8, and the kiss is the first thing I think of. Last night, I ducked into my bedroom and locked the door instead of rejoining everyone in the living room. I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I wouldn’t have been able to sit on the couch with Niall and pretend he hadn’t just snogged me in the kitchen like our lives depended on it.

But now I’m definitely going to have to face him, and everyone else as well. It’s Sunday morning, which means everyone is home, even the ever-absent Matty and Lor. I’m longing to talk to Niall about it, to ask him why he did it and maybe if we can do it again. Lord, that’s going to be an awkward conversation.

I decide not to overthink it and force myself out of bed before I can change my mind. I grab a sweatshirt off my desk chair and head for the loo, then the kitchen. When I get there, Niall is sitting at the small four-seater table, along with Mar and Tessa.

“Good morning,” I say to no one in particular as I head for the coffeepot and wonder if I should’ve brushed my teeth. I can feel Niall’s eyes on my back as I reach into the cupboard for a mug.

“Morning,” Tessa mutters, eyes glued to the screen of her mobile. There’s a half-eaten bowl of porridge on the table in front of her. Mar doesn’t say anything.

“Sleep well?” Niall asks me, his tone so suggestive that Tessa and Mar have to have noticed it. But when I turn around, Mar’s still typing away on her laptop and Tessa is still mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, no doubt, on her mobile.

“Not bad,” I say, meeting Niall’s eyes. I feel like we’re magnets again, fencers, challenging each other. You first, I’m thinking. “You?”

“Alright,” he says. Then he stands up from the table, grabs his mug, and abruptly leaves the room.

Now Tessa’s paying attention. She looks at his disappearing form and then turns her eyes on me. “What the hell was that about?” she asks as soon as Niall is out of her frame of vision. This whole place is pretty echoey thanks to the concrete walls, so he probably heard her, but Tessa doesn’t seem to care. “Since when is Niall awkward?”

“It’s Zanna,” Mar says, not looking up from her laptop. She continues to type, the click clack of her fingers on the keys making music with the humming of the fridge.

“What do you mean it’s me?” I ask her. I can guess what she’s thinking: that it’s my fault, that I’ve made Niall uncomfortable somehow. But she can’t possibly know what happened last night, could she? Did she walk in on us and we were too engrossed in each other to notice? I pick up my napkin and start to tear it into strips. This is one of the ways I cope with my anxiety, my therapist has told me, but she isn’t particularly concerned about it since the destruction is minimal. Same goes with biting my nails and drinking so much water that I have to pee every forty minutes.

“Niall has a crush on you,” Mar says, not looking up from her laptop. “Has for months, I reckon.”

“What?” I finish with my napkin and grab another one out of the basket that sits on the table. “He’s told you this?”

“No.” Mar shuts her laptop now and reaches for her tea. “I just know. Same as I know that you like him too.”

“What?” It’s Tessa this time, practically jumping out of her seat. “Zanna! Why didn’t you tell me?”

Because I wasn’t sure of it myself. Because I don’t know how to explain it. Because calling this thing just like doesn’t seem like enough. Especially after last night. When I don’t answer, Tessa grabs the napkin out of my hands and drops it on the table.

“Talk to us, Zanna,” Tessa says, sitting down at the table again. “Why didn’t you tell us that you like Niall?”

“Because it’s more complicated than that,” I say, knowing that Tessa won’t let me leave it at that. Tessa’s job (she works for an insurance company) stifles all of her creativity, so she’s prone to dramatics. It’s for this reason that, even though Tessa is probably my closest friend in the flat, I haven’t told her about my crush on Niall. I can imagine her reaction. At first she’ll want to set us up, play Cupid, maybe lock us in a closet together with the lights off so I can throw myself at him. But then she’ll start thinking about what will happen if it doesn’t work out. Will we throw the stable fabric of the flat off? Will we force everyone to choose sides, causing a civil war that ultimately leads to half of us moving out?

So she’ll decide the possibility of something happening between me and Niall isn’t worth the equally possible collapse of life as we know it. She’ll give me a squeeze and say, “Don’t worry, Zanna, there are other fish in the sea.”

But then she’ll watch “Friends with Benefits” or “A Cinderella Story” (Tessa’s list of favorite romance films is a bit atypical) and she’ll lecture me on how true love is a shame and I can’t keep waiting around to find the one so I have to take a chance with Niall while I have, well, a chance.

She’ll go in circles about it for a while, but however it ends, it won’t be good for me. And that’s without the whole we once snogged in a bar when he might’ve been more wasted than I realized and the we kissed again last night and he told me I have beautiful eyes details thrown in. If you give Tessa a bit, she wants the whole damn thing. Which is why I’ve given her nothing.

“Obviously,” Mar says. “Everything is complicated. That’s just how life is.”

I stare at Mar and wonder if she talks to her students like this. If she tells those baby 13 year old girls whose hearts are breaking for the first time that being crushed by a boy who can’t grow a mustache is just part of life.

“This isn’t that kind of complicated,” I say. “This is weirder than that.”

Tessa rolls her eyes. “It can’t be that weird. It’s not like you dated his brother or got married one night in Vegas or—”

“They didn’t have to go to Vegas for that,” Mar says dryly, and all of a sudden Tessa’s lighting up like a firework. Her eyes go wide as she looks at me and she raises her hand to cover her gasping mouth.

“Oh, come on,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Niall and I aren’t married.”

“Not exactly,” Mar says. “But I saw you both last night, and it was pretty clear to me that wasn’t the first time.”

Shit. My stomach sinks. “Mar, you can’t say anything to him.”

“Wait, what?” Tessa’s saying, but I ignore her.

“Mar, you have to promise,” I repeat, setting down my mug and putting my hand on the table next to her laptop to emphasize how important this is. “You can’t tell him. He can’t know.”

Mar raises an eyebrow. “He can’t know that he kissed you in the kitchen last night? I’m pretty sure he knows that, Zanna. He was there.”

“WHAT?” Tessa grabs my arm and starts jerking it toward her. “Zanna, what the fuck are you talking about? You kissed Niall in the kitchen last night?”

“Yes,” I say, trying to shake off her arm. “And once before, but he doesn’t remember the other time.”

Mar quirks, but Tessa speaks before her, absolutely incredulous. “What do you mean he doesn’t remember? Was he asleep? Wasted? How could he not remember?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “But he doesn’t remember. It was a few years ago and we didn’t even know each other, so—”

“I won’t tell him,” Mar says, ignoring Tessa’s gaping mouth. For the first time in her life, she might actually be speechless. “But you have to. He clearly likes you, and you like him, so you can’t start whatever this thing is with a lie.”

I open my mouth to reply, but I can’t think of anything to say. Sighing, I put my head in my hands. I know she’s right.

“You should do it today,” Mar says. “Before you lose your nerve.”

“Mmhm,” I say into my arms. There’s no way I can talk to Niall here, not with all of these eyes (in particular, Tessa’s) on us. Eventually, I manage to sit up and leave the kitchen, my coffee in hand. As I walk away, I hear Tessa talking about how she needs a flowchart so she can keep all of this Niall/Zanna kisses straight.

In my room, I sit on my bed, drinking my coffee and typing out and erasing and retyping a text to Niall.

Want to take a walk with me? In half an hour?

I hit send before I can second-guess myself. Belle’d be proud of me.

******

Niall meets me in front of the building. He’s there first, like I knew he’d be (I listened for the front door before I came downstairs). When I push out the front door and walk toward him, it almost looks like he’s smiling.

“Hi,” he says, brushing his hand against mine. “Which way?”

“Whichever,” I say. Usually I’d put my hands in the pockets of my coat, but I leave them out in case Niall wants to hold my hand. By some miracle, it’s not raining today, and the sun is peaking through the clouds as if it’s just remembered it has to transition into spring at some point. “You decide.”

Niall nods and goes left, toward the small shopping area a few roads over. He doesn’t say anything right away, and I’m too busy panicking internally to speak. Originally I was thinking we could go to a cafe and get some tea and have this conversation sitting down, but now I’m not sure I’ll make it that far.

After a few minutes, it becomes clear to me that Niall’s waiting for me to talk. I’m the one who asked him to walk with me, so I’m the one who has to start this conversation. Before I can talk myself out of it, I come to a complete stop on the pavement.

Niall walks another pace, realizes I’m not beside him, and turns back. “Zanna? You alright?”

I nod. “We have to talk about last night.”

That smirk from last night returns to his face. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” I talk a deep breath and try to figure out how to do this. What could I possibly say right now that won’t sound utterly ridiculous? “You know the pub in Seven Dials, across from the music store?” I ask him, looking above his head so that I don’t have to meet his eyes. I can never tell what Niall’s thinking, but in this moment, I don’t even want to attempt to guess.

“The Crooked Fern, sure,” he says. He’s still staring at me, a bit too closely, like he’s the one trying to read me. “What about it?”

“Well, um,” I say, realizing I have no idea what to say. I bite my lip and his gaze slides down, watching. Then something sparks in his eyes, and I wonder if it’s the recognition I’ve been waiting so long for.

“Yeah?” he says as his smile widens. “What is it, Zan?”

“Um,” I say again. I smooth my tongue over the bit I was chewing. “I was there once, on Valentine’s Day, and—”

Before I can finish the sentence, Niall starts laughing. I love his laugh, I really do, but I don’t enjoy it when it’s at my own expense.

“What?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest self-consciously. Have I got something on his face? Why doesn’t he realize that this is a very difficult moment for me? “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, I just—” Niall manages to catch his breath, but he keeps on grinning at me. I’m clearly not in on the joke. “I thought you’d forgotten.”

“You thought—what?”

He takes a step closer to me, and then another and another, and suddenly his hand’s on my chin. “I wasn’t sure it was you at first, because you didn’t say anything when we first met, and you were so good at acting like you didn’t recognize me. But then last night…” His thumb brushes across my lip, making me shiver. “When I kissed you. I knew it was you.” His hand drops from my cheek and falls to his side, and instantly I miss its warmth. It’s scary how quickly I’ve become addicted to these affectionate touches from Niall.

“So that’s why you kissed me?” I ask, just wanting to be sure. After so many months of not talking about this, I want to know everything. “To check if it was me?”

He shakes his head. “No. I kissed you because I wanted to.”

“Right.” I nod and take a step toward him, my heartbeat practically roaring in my ears. I’m sure there are other people on the pavement, walking their dogs and pushing their baby carriages and wondering what the hell these two idiots are doing blocking the pathway, but I don’t notice any of them. “I’m glad you did. I wanted to kiss you too.”

Now Niall smiles, slowly at first, and then it takes over his whole face. “Oh yeah?”

Sometimes you have to go first. Sometimes you have to be the first one to take a risk, the first one to put their heart on the line, stick their hand out into the dark and hope somebody will grab it. Because only when you do that, only when you put yourself out there, will the other person maybe be willing to risk themselves too.

Niall put himself out there last night, and now it’s my turn.

“Yeah,” I say. Then this time, I kiss Niall first.