Page 68 of Omega’s Forward

I don’t sit down. I go out onto the terrace with a fresh mug of tea and stand at the rail.

From up here I can see the whole street. It runs down from the main road along the side of the old warehouses to the river. The tide is coming in. The water is high and brown against the wall.

I watch the corner where the street meets the road.

I know how this looks. A grown man leaning on a rail in the cold, watching a corner. My mother used to stand at the front window when my father was late home from the rink, before she finally left the bastard.

I swore I would never in my life stand at a window for a man.

A van. A cyclist. Two boys in school uniform who should be in school. Every time something moves at the corner my whole body goes tight.

Ten to eleven.

I think about the last time I saw him. The corridor outside the dressing room. He walked past me eight feet away and didn’t look. That’s the last thing I have of him. That, and the back of his neck as I left.

He didn’t want to look at me then. In ten minutes he’ll have to.

I don’t know which of us I’m more afraid for.

Five to.

A black cab comes down from the road, slows outside the wine bar, and moves on. My heart goes up with it and comes down. It wasn’t him. He said the Tube. He’ll walk from the station. It’s twelve minutes if you know the way, and he doesn’t, so he’ll be lost—

Eleven.

Nothing.

Five past.

Then someone comes around the corner from the main road.

He’s a long way off but it is too big to be anyone else. He’s got a suitcase, dragging it behind him with one hand. It keeps catching on the curbstones and jerking his arm back, and every time it does he stops and yanks it straight and comes on.

He walks with his head down, checking the numbers on the buildings.

He looks tired.

He stops opposite the wine bar and looks up at the warehouses. Not at me. He hasn’t seen me.

I take the stairs faster than I’ve taken them in months. The hallway at the bottom has a wire glass panel in the door, and through the panel I can see the street. The street is empty.

He’s not there.

For one second I stand there with my hand on the latch and wonder if I am going mad.

Then a shape crosses the glass. I open the door.

The cold comes in first. Then him.

Woodsmoke. My body knows it before my head has finished catching up. My mouth floods. My knees go loose. It goes down my spine and settles low and warm.

He’s frozen on the step. His nostrils flare. His pupils go wide and black in the gray light, and I watch him take me in, coat, face, the whole of me, and then I watch him breathe in and get the rest of it, everything I’ve been carrying since the summer, and his eyes come down to the buttons of my coat and stay there.

There is over six months between us. Six months and an entire ocean.

“Everett,” he says.

His voice sounds wrecked and it goes straight through me. God, I’ve wanted him.