NIKKI & JOE, CASUALLY | ✓

39: reminder: you're a fucking idiot

               'You don't have to do that.'

I glance over my shoulder to find Joe in the bedroom doorway, watching me make her bed with a smile. Shrugging, I resume, fluffing up the final pillow before I rest her well-loved orangutan cuddly toy against it, looping his arm around the smiling and legged avocado. 'I like to.'

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm finally leaving Joe's flat. After we've both spent the weekend doing a sum total of nowt productive—if you don't count the orgasms—she decided to head to the library to work on her new Open University course and so we pull on our shoes and jackets together.

My body is numb though it's hard to tell whether that's the weed or the sex. Maybe we're both getting old. My tolerance for bud is definitely fucked—can your tolerance for sex drop from inactivity too? Because I used to be perfectly fine shagging someone every night of the week during my year at halls but now I'm dead spent after a weekend.

Which shouldn't by any means be taken to mean that I wouldn't go at it right now again if she wanted.

Because it's raining again (surprise surprise), Joe takes her umbrella with her. She has one of them trendy transparent ones, except it's also got rainbows and unicorns on it and is so small it must be from the kids' section.

'Do you want to borrow one?' Joe offers me another from what turns out to be her umbrella collection. There are different sizes too; the kind that fold in small enough to be carried in a bag, ones with hooked handles and others with straight ones.

I suppose it is the fundamental accessory for Brits; why not have one for every outfit?

I don't ever use them cause it's always too fucking windy for an umbrella to do any good, but I select her rainbow one now. If it turns out to be cripplingly awkward next time we meet, at least I'll have summat to break the ice with by returning it. The discomfort germinates the moment she shuts her door behind us. Our footsteps echo in the stairwell.

To both of our displeasure, her careculo neighbour is smoking beside the door as we exit, cramming himself against the brick though even so, his left sleeve is soaked by the rain.

He looks up from his phone and beams. 'Give us a smile then, love.'

Joe rushes past him as fast as she can, only opening her umbrella when her shoulders are already damp, while I linger only to say, as politely as I can, 'Please, leave her alone. I'm sure we can all just be civilised about it. She's only trying to live in peace.'

The benefit of the rain is that he don't follow, though it don't stop him from calling after us. 'You do realise you've a poof for a boyfriend, right?'

'I'm not her boyfriend.'

I watch my feet as I trail after Joe to the bus stop. Now that the lust that has been compacting in my brain over the past three months is no longer fogging my sight, it becomes unavoidable that I do in fact fancy her. Romantically. Don't get me wrong, the lust is definitely still there—stronger, if owt, now that I know what she tastes like. But the rain air disperses it enough for me to see through to the other feelings clouded behind it.

Reminder: Joe is in love with Tamsin. Reminder: Joe don't want my feelings.

Joe will have no use for whatever anaemic affection I manage to cultivate. Joe wants me to fuck her because I'm good at it so that she can get over her mental block and shag a bunch of strangers so that she can get into a relationship with someone who sure as fuck ain't me, someone who probably lives in London, someone who's cool and has wealthy loving parents.