I JUST WANT YOU TO LIKE ME | ✓

▬ 12: tug of war

          Dominic wanted to take pictures. We were staying at a hotel in Ripon which he considered far enough from Leeds that it were unlikely we'd see anyone we knew. I told Má that I had a football tournament; she never came to any of them so the risk of her finding out it were a lie were minuscule. She handed me a twenty quid note with a sigh that they shouldn't plan these things for the weekend, that she were s'posed to work and what were she meant to do with Iris now? But she let me go.

Dominic bought us tickets to the Fountains Abbey though I hardly heard a word of the tour. I spent most of it pressed against the ancient columns as he kissed me out of sight from the European tourists who chattered excitedly in their own languages. It made me feel so liberated: kissing him in public. Even if it were still hidden from anyone except the spirits of those who used to live at the monastery. They'd be scandalised, I thought, if they were watching two men kissing and it only thrilled me more.

We held hands as we walked Ripon's empty streets in the evening. The only restaurants in town were a posh steakhouse and an Italian place with a neon open sign in the window signalling its affordability. We ate there an hour before closing when there were only one family present. When we returned to the hotel I told him I loved him and he kissed me with a hunger that were still foreign to me. I should have known then that his hunger were beyond lust, that when he kissed me, what he desired were to eat me whole.

I were so thankful to be wanted that when he pulled out a regular school uniform skirt and asked me to wear it, I did so immediately. The way he looked at me when I put it on were all I needed as a reward. But when he lifted the polaroid camera we'd used all day to photograph the abbey and the town, I hesitated.

Pictures are evidence. They could come back to bite me and there would be no heterosexual explanation for semi-nude photos of me wearing a skirt.

But I agreed, knowing if I didn't, the ice in his eyes would swallow the pupils to make them sharp again, sharp and so cold. The closest his eyes ever got to brown were when I followed orders. I thought, like in one of Bà Ngoại's folk tales, that if I pleased him enough, maybe the ice would melt from his irises and reveal lush earth.

Once he took enough pictures to please himself he handed me one. It were still developing but I looked at it incredulously nonetheless.

'What am I s'posed to do with this?'

'Give it to your next boyfriend.'

            Dr Qureshi looks at me for a long while. I'm so tired of his soaking wet full stops; they leave me drenched in my own sweat, but every time I break and fill them, I end up revealing summat he can decipher within seconds. He pretends he doesn't, that I'm not an open book for him — or open five-page brochure, more like, cause we both know there ain't enough in my mind to fill a book — but I'm pretty sure he already knows everything before I say it — just like Ziri always does.

When he speaks, his voice is as neutral as ever. 'Did you?'

'Aye...' I try to make the creases in my joggers symmetrical on each thigh. 'He liked it.'

'Did you like it?' There's an inflexion in his tone that makes it clear he already knows the answer. Unless I'm just paranoid and imagining it. Am I paranoid? Maybe I always have been, maybe I inherited it from Má, so maybe I am exaggerating.

Thankfully, he hasn't brought attention to the fact that I ghosted him for a month — at least that makes this a smidge easier. Though I'd still much rather not be here.