She stared at the clutter on the kitchen table while he made tea, the kettle rumbled and skirled, a black notebook lay open at a list bulleted with stars in sharp black ink, there were doodles in the corners and things scored out with smaller notes squeezed above and below, last minute, crammed into a crammed page. The kettle boiled and he was pouring the milk in with the teabag before putting in the water, still boiling, this was how she liked her tea to be made. He left it to brew as he hurried to the sound system and put in a Cd, she frowned, if he left the tea too long it would stew and be too dark and strong but she would still have to drink it so she didn�t come across all bitchy. He knew she was funny about tea, typical of him to leave it to stand and rush off to do something else while the first thing he was doing was still half done. She struggled against her irritation and tried to avoid thinking about the tea getting cooler and stronger every second while he faffed about with cd�s, choosing just the right one for his mood and her mood and the situation and the time of year and the temperature and the bloody irritating thing was that he always got this just right. Just fucking perfect every time.
The music came on and she heard him rush past her to rescue the tea, a little breeze from his body moved the air around her, the page of the notebook lifted slightly and settled back. She stared at the knots in the wood on the table and tried to press down on her irritation, relax.
The music was fucking perfect, just fucking perfect.
He had the least expressive eyes of any one she had ever known, they stared out of his clever head without giving anything away. There was dirt in the grain of the wood, the varnish had been worn away and the surface was rough and grubby except at the edges where it stayed in tact, it would have been a nice little table if he looked after it. Perhaps she should score out a line on his list and squeeze in some table cleaning reference. The bin thumped open and the tea bags flopped in. The bin was overfull and the lid jammed up, he pressed the pedal but the lid stayed up, then a plastic bag was over his hand and he squashed the rubbish in, thrusting it down vigorously before letting go of the plastic bag, the bin exhaled a strong rotten smell before the lid dropped neatly into place. The lid can�t create a seal, she thought so the smell would be seeping out slowly until he emptied it. Why not just do it now, why leave it and leave it until you can�t cram anything more in and the room smells and the bin liner splits and it all falls all over the place when you lift it out. But he would leave it and that would happen and then he�d shout and swear at the bin as if it was the bins fault. The bin lid was filthy and streaks of brown ran from the lip at the top down to the floor, he never washed bins; he didn�t notice the streaks or filthy lids. He didn�t notice things
He put the tea down in front of her and sat down to face her, they looked at each other over the steaming cups, she looked at the tea, it looked just right, she was glad it was. They talked and as they did she decided to get a smoke out, she didn�t need to ask for an ashtray and then she watched the smoke curl away from her fingers and mingle with the steam from her tea as they chatted. The track changed and she felt her foot starting to tap, she pressed it firmly to the floor and sipped her tea, it was only a tiny bit too strong and very hot. He was talking, using lots of hand gestures and facial movement his body was forcibly relaxed and his manner was formally casual. She laughed inwardly, he had always hated how keenly she read him, how she could hear the truth behind his lies when he spoke, the words were convincing but the tone betrayed, that flicker of his eyelids, a slight twist in his mouth, a jerkiness in his movements that in time he tried to conceal with an over languorous spreading of his body in a chair or against a wall, his whole body had always betrayed him. She knew it frustrated him that she could read him so well, it frustrated her too, she hadn�t wanted to know all those things his body told her. She hadn�t wanted to feel the awful twisting in her guts as his body bellowed its painful truths at her over his whispering lies, so she learned to stare at his eyes. His blank lying eyes ignored the screaming of his insistent fingers and the yelling of his eyelids and the whole hullabaloo of his truth telling body, so she stared straight into his eyes. Ha, look me straight in the eyes and tell me the truth, people thought that was the test, for her it was look straight into the eyes and believe the lies. He had always held her gaze, believing that this was convincing, he never looked away to the upwards left or right like people are supposed to do when they were lying he always looked straight at her. She suspected he had prided himself on this, never realising for a moment how much of an ally she was in his deceptions of her, a willing partner in her own betrayal.
She put the cigarette out; lingering over the time she could spend looking at the ashtray, the cigarette, her hand, a breather from the tension of looking at him as he talked and producing the right faces for the right comments, laughing at the appropriate time and pretending that his body wasn�t howling at her like a wounded dog. After a while she finished her tea and he offered her another and she said yes just so she could relax and he could relax before the silent exchanges between his body and her eyes continued.
Earlier that day she had been driving somewhere and this song had come on, the song that used to be their song, she had remembered how they had both smiled and exclaimed simultaneously when it came on and how at that moment she knew he was special, and she remembered the agony of her love for him. How her love could crush the air from her chest and make her heart jangle against her ribs, the swelling of joy in her when he came to call, the longing when he was gone, and the feeling that she was not quite good enough. The memory brought tears to her eyes.
She looked at him now as he placed a second cup in front of her and she busied herself with another cigarette and realised that the tears were not for the loss of him or for the way things ended, they were for the loss of that love, that feeling. That awful and beautiful passion that had betrayed her so many times as she stared into his eyes and forced truth into lies. He never knew that the reason she could read him so well was that she loved every inch of him, every movement and sound and sight of him. She had watched him with the ardent love of a pet dog waiting with its tail half mast, not sure whether to wag or cower and she had learned the story of him by heart. Perhaps if she had told him how much she loved him then things would have been different, but she didn�t think it would have mattered.
And now they were sitting at his table, chatting while she waited for their daughter to deliver herself from her bedroom at her Dads and she had seen in his eyes that he wanted her, she could see the bond between them quivering in the blue cigarette smoke and the steamy air, she could hear his body yelling at her to love him again. She looked at the window, it was dark outside and condensation streaked the pane, everything about the night felt heavy with moisture, it had crept under the draughty door and through the chipped window frames. She smiled and finished her tea, daughter appeared with bags and smiles and they exchanged farewell kisses. She opened the door to leave and was surprised to see no rain, it should have been raining. It felt like rain.