Between Us

by Mhairi McFarlane

Perhaps that was the magic of any holiday: it lifted you out of the familiar and gave you a brief aerial view of your life in progress. It made you confront your world’s smallness in a vastness of opportunity.

They were like Friends episode titles. The One Whose Grandad Invented Striped Toothpaste. The One Who Kept a Chinchilla Called Shamone. The One Who Naked Video-Called Him at Three A.M.

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Nearly a decade on, it was as if their love was a neglected, autumn leaf–strewn swimming pool. It technically still existed, yet Joe had drained the water out, inch by inch. If you jumped into it, there was nothing there. You’d break your ankles.

Roisin hesitated on the bottom step, trying to press record on her memories. To take in the otherworldly atmosphere of blank-eyed statues, dusty floors, and soaring high space, the chalky-sweet smell of the lilies.

If one became the other, overwrote him like an old videocassette.

Much as she loved Dev’s idealism, Roisin felt sure that these two portraits would be less of a sequence, and more like bookends.

There being no correct and appropriate moment to raise any problem was one of the ways the game felt rigged. Pick an otherwise pressured time? She was thoughtlessly adding to it. During a nice evening out? Ruining it. Try to raise it on a quiet day? Ambush.

“Between us” meant nothing.

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Such close contact was a strange mixture of fireworks and security. That was it—that’s what Roisin had noticed during the hand-holding. It was completely natural, and yet wildly exotic at the same time. Exhilaratingly new and already familiar. He was a safe place, full of danger.

Her feelings for Matthew McKenzie had arrived in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. Slow, but fast at the end.