It starts with a pair of her shoes on your floor.
It’s always the little things, isn’t it? Obviously, you don’t think that her shoes are somehow magical, or that their positioning on your worn carpet is a prediction akin to those made from tealeaves, but that day it feels so incredibly important.
She’s never taken her shoes off at your flat before. You don’t know if it’s so that she’s always ready to leave, or because she feels uncomfortable showing you her socks, or because of any of a whole host of other reasons, but you’ve just left it alone. But that day she takes them off. She doesn’t make a big deal out of kicking them off at the door, exposing striped socks, and neither do you on the outside, but inside you know it’s a big step. You can’t explain why, you just know that when someone does something for the first time it’s always a big step.
Next, it’s coffee. Again, the coffee is nothing special, just your average latte from the café on the corner, but it’s the act of buying the coffee that makes it so special. She’s never let you buy her coffee before, insisting that she should pay for her own. It’s almost as if she’s studied some guidebook on how to be friends, on where the limits should go, and now that she’s learned the rules she’s slowly becoming comfortable breaking them. She lets you buy her coffee.
You don’t know what her guidebook says about friends buying friends dinner, but you don’t care. You ask her anyway. And when she says yes, you both know you’ve crossed a line, never mind that neither of you would dream of mentioning this. If you don’t speak of it, you can pretend it doesn’t exist, never mind that the tension in the room could be cut by a knife. And not one of those sharp ones you use for cutting onions, either. This job could be done with a butter knife. A plastic one.
She’s never done this before, and you’ve done it entirely too many times, but you’re still both equally nervous. It’s never mattered to you before, it’s been a means to an end, but now you finally understand what people mean when they say sometimes the means are better than the end. Not that you’re going to make a judgement on that before knowing all sides of the story.
It’s always the little things, but when you’re pouring her more wine and she touches your arm to let you know she’s had enough it’s far from a little thing. She’s been so careful about touching you until now, going by the guidebook, but now she puts her fingers on your arm like it’s nothing and you’re supposed to call that a little thing? It’s far from that, and judging from the look she gives you she knows exactly what she’s doing to you.
There’s a pair of her shoes on your floor flat again, but they’re different shoes this time, and they’ve been discarded in haphazard locations rather than deposited neatly by the door. You can see them from your perch on the sofa, but your visual field is somewhat blocked by her hair. You sweep it aside and she doesn’t even flinch, and that’s another one of those little things that are so far from little. It’s taken months, but she’s finally come to understand why you look at her the way you do.
There are so many little things over the next months, and you almost lose track of them, but you of all people know exactly how important the little things are, and so you notice. She leaves you notes when she has to leave early in the morning, for no particular reason except because she feels like it, and you notice. She answers her phone in front of you, always, even when she knows she’s going to end up yelling at someone. She doesn’t look the slightest bit uncomfortable doing it with you in the room, and you notice. She sees a rare edition of your favourite book in the window of that used book store she walks past every day, and she picks it up just because she knows you like it. She gives it to you that night as if it’s no big deal, as if she had found it in her bag and just handed it over, but you notice.
It ends with a pair of her shoes on your floor. She no longer pays any heed to where she leaves them, and it’s beginning to drive you up the wall. The streets outside are full of muddy late-winter slush, and by extension so is your flat. You mention this to her casually, but both of you are irritable from being cooped up inside for days due to the weather and so what you say comes out the opposite of casually. She says something snarky back, and you return the favour. Somewhere in the middle of it all, you marvel at how different she is to the girl who wouldn’t even take her shoes off in your flat.
You end up screaming at each other about everything that’s annoyed you for the past months. You’ve spent too much time in each other’s company lately, and her muddy shoes are all it takes to light the fuse. You keep going back and forth as the fuse burns, getting shorter and shorter, until it blows up in your face.
“It’s always the little things, isn’t it?” she asks before turning and walking out of your flat. It’s the last time you ever see her.
