Between Us

by Mhairi McFarlane

Do liars always know they’re lying?

the worth of literature is not only determined by the passage of time,”

“Why is Great Expectations better than Fifty Shades, though? Is it because it’s by a dead man, Miss? Isn’t that sexism? And . . . alive-ism?”

because Great Expectations is about class, social mobility, and the way we use that social status to judge human worth, and Fifty Shades is about a billionaire having sex with a college student.”

“Exactly, Miss, so a college student boning, like, Elon Musk, is socially climbing, then,”

Can success really change a person, though? she wondered. Maybe it only brings elements that were always there to the fore?

your friends were your adopted family, where you felt real belonging—it

She’d never met people who had stuck to her like this, who’d made her part of a gang.

It might turn out that you were in fact self-indulgently pissed off at the realities of being a decade into cohabitation with a workaholic. She could hear her mother’s voice. “There are worse addictions, darling.”

Memory-generating brain cells start dying off age thirteen. Some of my pupils are proof.”

Some accusations, from someone you knew well, were like being shivved under the ribs, an attack by an expert assassin who knew exactly how to puncture a vital organ in one economical move. You felt it because you knew it was true. Others were out of the blue, from nowhere: like a Frisbee arcing through the air, straight at you.

Love was not meant to be balance transfers.

That’s the lie of the open relationship, I think. It’s never going to hurt anyone, until it does.

you often regret cowardice but you never regret bravery.”

“An imperfect attempt to help is better than a self-protective nothing.

Now he can’t have you, he really wants you. A tired love had become a sharp hunger again.

She’d known this day was coming now for a long time, but it was no less weird. Like the shock of a death after a protracted illness. It was slow, but fast at the end.

“Don’t start with your diets don’t work spiel,” Lorraine added. “If diets don’t work, how come everyone’s gotten thinner when they’re rescued after shipwrecks?”

“Sometimes, in dating, I feel like I ace the interview because I don’t really want the job,”

Everything was a slight if you were determined to find one.

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.

It turned out life was not like romantic comedy films. Making grand statements about your passion to an unwary person you knew well was not like that scene at the New Year’s party in When Harry Met Sally; it was excruciating.

I’m just trying to put the puzzle pieces together, having shared my life with someone who was hiding half the jigsaw from me.”

Control is what he calls ‘love,’”

It doesn’t come close to what you owe me. Which is my freedom, from your mendacious shit,

“So I’m a stupid girl for not spotting it? It’s the victim’s fault? It’s the woman’s fault?”