She sees him standing at the bus stop with his blond purposefully-touselled just-out-of-bed hair. She imagines a little pot of Bed Head Hair gel on his bathroom shelf, his finger indents pressed untidily into the grey gloop. She says hello. She’s not sure why. It never leads to anything much.

Hi. He looks disgruntled. There is a part of her which wants to have something out.

Why are you being like this? She’s not sure like what exactly, but this question is a relic from the past, and she thought she might like to resurrect it. Just for something to say, she thinks in retrospect, because there’s no other question that seems to go. Even this one, it doesn’t really work. It’s too out of the blue. She shuffles from foot to foot with her arms stuck out straight at her sides, like a penguin. He used to draw her attention to it, this quirky nervous twitch.

His hands fly up in mock defense. She forgets in between seeing him how the dimples in his cheek make her feel. She thinks very hard the words ‘emotional fuck-up’, and looks at his shoes instead.

Woah, he laughs.

Did you tell me anything not a lie when we were together? Anything? An out of the blue assault on his senses and sensitivity, not that he ever had much of that, she thinks to herself. Catch them when they’re least expecting it. She rationalises like hell once she gets home. Retrospective rationalisation. A permed, elderly woman huddled round-shouldered in her non-nondescript, entirely shapeless coat inches away from them slowly, never moving her eyes from the crack in the flexi-plastic bus shelter on which they’ve been fixed since the inappropriate hello. If her friends could see her now, they’d tut and groan and say not again, and leave him be! Or even we told you so. Bitches. She kicks the metallic blue frame. Pushes her foot into the gap, and just about manages to pull it back out without falling into him. Onto him. She still doesn’t look at his face. Baby Face. Dimple Cheeks. She shakes the playful words from her head.

He thinks a while, or pretends to, long fingers stroking the fuzz clinging to his face. He thinks this is funny, she realises. Emotional fuck-up.

Yeah, he says at last, and he’s not smiling. I told you once you looked nice. That was true.

For a fuck, she says, her eyes burning.

He says with a little glint of triumph in his eyes, I don’t need to tell you that you look nice for you to want me.

The present tense is his trump card. Emotional fuck-up. She would like to rip the flesh tunnel from ear. Tear the lobe right down the middle. His justified self-mutilation, she used to hate that. Still, it’s not her who’s got to wake up to that every morning anymore. She pretends to herself she’s glad.

True that, she says, and walks off in the rain, no umbrella, no bus.