Right Here

I arrange to meet someone for dinner. I leave him waiting, but he still greets me with a smile and a hug. He's taller than I am even though I'm in heels and that's oddly comforting.

After the meal it's raining in the streets as I try to find the venue for a meeting I need to attend. He doesn't have an umbrella so he mimes how he would hold one over me if he did, and produces a scarf from his bag for me to wear. When we get lost, we get drinks in a quiet bar and talk about Kosovo and song lyrics and trousers before setting off on the expedition again. We bump into his uncle, who turns out to be heading to the same meeting as me, and together the three of us find our destination. He stands at the back of the hall for an hour while I sit in the audience, waits while I talk to people afterwards, and holds the door for me as we leave.

We return to the same bar afterwards, for another drink. It's a golden evening, when the brass bar fittings glow and the conversations around us are hushed, when the glasses are full of amber flecks of light and it's warm where you are. We sit sit by side along one seat, knees and accidentally hands touching as we talk and laugh and gesticulate. He leans one arm along the table in front of us, into my space, shielding us from the room, and his nearness, the almost protective nature of that act, fills me with a strange warmth. I don't ever want to move from there.

He asked me out once, years ago. I said no. We had met at a fancy-dress party in a crumbling little house in the back streets of Dublin, among fairies and hobgoblins and coloured cocktails. I thought he was the most delicious thing I had ever seen.

We've spent perhaps a whole week in each others company, if you added up all of the time we have ever spent together. And Monday to Friday of that week we spent kissing. Yet somehow, at some moment around Saturday morning, we seems to have decided that we were friends. Friends who might not hear from each other for months at a time, friends who know little about each other and less about the life the other leads, but friends nonetheless. Someone I just feel is a part of me, without having to think about it. Someone I can sit with and want to be nowhere else.

He leans forward, and I feel my skin crackle lightly. I want him to kiss me, and at the same time I don't. And I want to stay right here, in the golden barlight, undecided forever.