12.39am

Sorry about the radio silence, stranger.

The boy’s grandmother came over to watch him so I could deal with some legal crap to do with paternity and the boy’s citizenship options and on and on. The only upside is that I can now casually toss out the phrase “met with my solicitor today” and feel a little British about it.

When I got back, the boy’s aunt was here—his mom’s sister. I’ve only met her once before, so as much as I wanted to pull out my phone and check all those precious messages I’d felt buzzing against my butt way back when I was leaving this morning, etiquette compelled me to be a half-decent host.

There was a lot to talk about. Heavy shit. Once they left and the boy was in bed, I had to just sit by the window and have a drink and turn it all around in my head, get it filed away and set aside before I finally read your texts.

Last meal on earth, you say? A classic conundrum.

I love food. I’m a good cook. I have about ten things I can cook really well, and I think that’s all you need.

If my mom was still here, I’d want her to cook my last meal, but failing that I’d do it myself. (Not because I’m amazing or anything, just because I’ll miss cooking once I’m dead.)

I’d pick out every ingredient and probably marinate something overnight. Steak, likely. Really good steak, grilled rare. Asparagus if it’s in season. Corn on the cob. Garlic potatoes with loads of butter. I’d invite you to join me, but I wouldn’t be upset if you couldn’t come. I’d understand.

Now here’s your next question: What question do you most wish I’d ask you? And what would your answer be?

1.33am

I just knew you’d be a good cook. I could sense it. Though I had no idea it would torture me so much to hear it. Here I am at one in the morning, bleary-eyed from the doze I’d just drifted into, and instead of going right back to sleep I’m drooling over your food.

Oh, I can almost taste the butter and garlic on the potatoes. I can nearly hear the sizzle of the meat. Maybe I can even see you doing it—though of course most of your features are blurred out, like an innocent passerby on a crime-prevention programme.

Also I’m now furious at my fridge for only containing microwave meals.

Tomorrow, I swear I’m going to order better food.

Food from a fancy restaurant.

And then when I eat, I’ll pretend you made it.

Even though you’re a sly one, to ask me such a crafty question. Now I will have to reveal double about myself—once in asking, and again in answering. Two for the price of one, as it were. Oh yeah, don’t think I didn’t notice! But as I’m still busy dining on your steak in my head, I will answer. And I’ll even give you a humiliating slice of my inner life, with it:

I would want you to ask me how my day was, like I live in a cheesy sitcom set in the suburbs. You put your coat on a hook and sit down at a huge dining table in an enormous kitchen, and then I tell you all about the cheese and pickle sandwich I had, and the sheets I ordered from Dunhelm, and the article I read online.

But most importantly, I would tell you about the window.

I opened the living room window for the first time in years, and stuck my hand out so I could feel the rain. It was warm, much warmer than I remember it being, and the smell of the air sung inside my body.

Now you go. You tell me what you would want me to ask, and how you would answer.

5.35am

I should really be asleep. The boy wakes up by seven most days, and I only got three hours tonight before his dreams woke him and he needed me.

Well, I say “needed me.” I’m not sure if I really help him much. I just sort of squeeze him and rock us back and forth on his bed until he stops moaning, and when he falls silent but is still breathing fast, I sing to him. Tonight I sang Thunder Road, which is a ridiculous song to sing to a child who’s having night terrors, but I don’t think it made anything worse, so, hey. Parenting.

I’m rambling here, because to be completely honest, your last text left me a little flustered. Not, like, frustrated. Like, weirdly sweaty and warm in the face.

Warm all over.

Warm from the way you describe imagining what I cook.

Warm to think maybe you’ll order something fancy someday and think of me while you eat it.

Warm because you made me laugh, with that throwaway comment about the blurry-faced passerby. I haven’t laughed in so long. I mean, I laugh for the boy’s benefit when we’re watching TV, a pantomime sort of laugh. But you made me laugh for real.

Did the rain on your hand feel as good as that laugh did? I hope so.

That made me warm as well, you talking about the rain and the air. You have a way of making the mundane sound … sensual. I want to backtrack and say not in a sexual way, but that’s not strictly true. It’s pretty fucking erotic.

I’m deliriously tired, and all my social filters have gone to bed, so there you are.

Can I join your fantasy and make it all old-timey? As you’re telling me about your day, can I toss my fedora smartly on the coatrack, then stride to the hutch where I keep my classy crystal decanter of Scotch and pour myself a glass?

Here’s where the fantasy falls apart, though, because in this black-and-white world I’d probably wear trouser socks, just like you’d wear pantyhose with seams up the calves. But here in reality I’d most likely plop down sideways on the chair next to yours and wedge my bare feet under your nearest thigh, and flex my achy toes, and one of them would probably pop, and that’s not very sexy, but reality rarely is.

I’d make it up to you by asking what you want for dinner, and hopefully it would be one of the ten things I’m really good at. Maybe Moroccan lamb stew, if it’s cold and dreary out.

Maybe I put the slow cooker on before I left that morning so you could smell it simmering all afternoon. I wonder if you’d sneak tastes or make yourself wait? That’d tell me so much about you.

I’d ask you all about the sheets, what thread count and what color, and what sort of cheese you used in the sandwich, and did you toast the bread, and was the article any good?

Is it completely patronizing to say that I’m proud of you for opening the window?

Is it creepy to say I got especially warm at how you said it sung inside your body?

Is it weird to say that now I feel as though I haven’t really lived, having never kissed a woman and tasted cheese and pickle on her lips?

None of these count as my question, by the way. Rhetorical and all. My real question this round is, have you ever been in love?

As for your question…

I’d want you to ask me my name.

And I’d tell you it’s Malcolm.

6.07am

Oh god, what a thing to wake up to.

I don’t know where to begin.

Or I do know where to begin.

I’m just afraid of all the things I want to begin with.

It’s that feeling again of am I saying too much? Or maybe going too far?

But I just have to tell you that you make toe popping sound really … something that I’m too embarrassed to label sexy. For a second I could almost feel them under my bare thigh, cold and yet somehow warming at the same time. Intimate, I think the word is, though to be honest I have no real idea at all.

I’ve never been close enough with anyone to just have little habits like that.

To maybe sneak a taste of their delicious stew—because I totally would. I could never wait for something like that, for something made with care for me by another person, for something that simmers and comes out of a slow cooker and sounds like sheer bliss.

My mouth is flooding just thinking about it.

My mouth is flooding just thinking about your other questions, oh your questions, oh you’ve no idea what a luxury questions are to me. They make me want to whisper in your ear instead of telling you across a table. About the cheese, which was soft and sweet, and the sheets that have buttons on them and fold so crisp and clean, and the article…

It was all about evidence that we aren’t alone in the universe.

And no no no it’s never patronising. No, it’s never creepy.

It’s the opposite, whatever the opposite of patronising and creepy is.

It sings inside my body too.

Makes me want to ask what you would taste like, if I were to taste you.

God. God. I have to … just stop there.

6.25am

Damn, I forgot to respond to your question.

Though I think you know the answer anyway.

No, I’ve never been in love.

Have you, Malcolm?

10.59am

I got a legit shiver, when I first read your reply. A shiver I just had to sit inside all morning, waiting for a chance to sit down and respond properly.

I’ve long known that hearing my name in certain breathy, vigorous contexts is like sex kryptonite for me, but I never would have guessed that reading it in a text could do that.

TMI? It’s, like, lunchtime, so I can’t blame it on delirium or booze. Oh well. What’s sent is sent.

For a second, I thought how sad it is that you’ve never been in love. But then I thought harder about it, and in a way maybe it’s not. It means you still get to feel that for the first time.

Actually, after I asked you that question, I regretted it. I thought, what if she asks me the same? Because I’m not very proud of my answer, to be honest.

In short, I’ve been in love. I’ve been in love so many times I’m beginning to wonder, have I actually ever been in love?

I fall in love easily. I’m quick to toss those three little words around, like they’re singles instead of fifties. Or the old me was. He was way better at falling in love than actually maintaining a relationship, though.

In hindsight, I had a pattern: see a girl, interact with her briefly, then construct an elaborate, baseless, two-dimensional concept in my head of who she is and how dating her would so perfectly accessorize and complete my life.

Fast forward. By the three, four, five-month mark, everyone’s resentful and disappointed. Inevitably. The poor woman’s fallen short of my ill-informed and unrealistic expectations about who she is, and often vice versa, because I put up plenty of fronts of my own.

The breakups always took weeks, too. These grinding emotional autopsies before the wretched, long-suffering relationship could finally be declared dead.

My romantic history is basically that Gotye song on repeat for four hours. Super fraught and beautifully tortured at first, then by the fifteenth time you’re like ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING XYLOPHONE.

I’m totally to blame. I wasn’t equipped to date actual human beings. I fell for a woman’s quirky dress sense or her tattoos or her art, one thing or another, then once the novelty wore off I’d lose interest. I’m cringing even typing this, but I feel compelled to be honest with you.

It sounds shallow. It probably was a little shallow, but more than that, I think I just felt empty. I was always searching for that perfect, unique, fascinating woman to stitch myself to, so I could quit feeling like half a human.

That’s too much to ask of someone. To complete you.

I wasn’t prepared for any of my exes to be actual people with their own feelings and faults. I was only worried about what being with them said about me. I often wound up with people just like me. Big on facades, but lost and echoing inside.

So while I’ve said “I love you” a dozen times and meant it, a part of me wonders, do I really even know what that feels like?

There’s got to be more than whatever I felt, because I was able to walk away from it again and again.

But something about you, about this, gives me hope. That suddenly I have a crush on someone based on nothing more than her words. Her thoughts. Her fears and dreams and cheese sandwiches.

No artifice, only substance. Sort of odd, mysterious, charming and sometimes ridiculous substance, but I like that. I can dig my fingers into it. It’s strange and squishy with funny lumps, but it feels good. So fucking good and real after swiping at holograms for all these years.

I don’t even know your age or your hair color or the sound of your voice or your name, but I like you. That gives me hope. Hope that maybe someday I’ll quit falling in love and simply love. I’ve always chased the noun, when maybe I should have been trying to master the verb.

I can’t believe I’m even typing all this to you. So soon. We’ve been chatting for what, four or five days?

I don’t even care if you’re secretly an old married guy or a cruel computer algorithm or a hyperintelligent cat.

I don’t care that you can’t leave the house and I’m in no position to attempt a relationship right now.

Whatever this is, it’s exactly what I want. I want your words. Unpredictable, inexplicable, kind, addictive words coming at me out of nowhere on a tiny screen. Lighting up my face and pillow in a dark bedroom or compelling my fingers to keep tapping tapping tapping while I make lunch. (Cold chicken sandwiches; I’ve got a mayonnaise smear on my phone, rainbow-izing my pixels.)

Better get the boy fed. But here’s my next question for you: what would you like for your birthday?

P.S. I love that you wouldn’t wait. I love that you’d steal impatient tastes on the sly.

P.P.S. When you described your mouth flooding it did unspeakable things to me.

P.P.P.S. My mouth currently tastes like stale black coffee, but ask me again in twelve hours and I’ll say bourbon. And I’ll probably say some other things once that bourbon starts working that I won’t with the sun still shining.

4.17pm

I don’t care that it was lunchtime. I do care that I sex-kryptonited you. My whole body fizzed when I read that—and the weird thing is I don’t even mind admitting it.

Probably because you admit things too. You say things like “crush” and “like” long before I do, and it eases open the heavy metal doors I usually put around any of my needier feelings. It makes them seem less needy and more reasonable.

Even after as little as five days.

Though I’ll be honest: it staggered me when you said them. In my little dark den, time is often fluid and foggy. I think it’s the fourth of June when it’s really ten weeks last Tuesday. But this whole thing has made time even bendier. Suddenly decades are being squeezed into five minutes. It feels like I’ve known you forever.

I’m forgetting what it was like to not do this.

To not be glad for you and your realisation about love. To root for you to find that person who isn’t just the idea of what you want. To imagine the unspeakable things.

Then think about doing them to you.

And the bourbon on your lips…

I went to sleep this afternoon thinking of the bourbon on your lips. Like syrupy sunlight, I imagine it tastes—because honestly I have no real idea. I’ve never had a single sip of the stuff, but oh I would drink a barrel of it down if it came to me from you.

In fact, that’s what I would ask for, for my birthday.

A case of you.

What would you want, in return?

9.10pm

Greetings from the chair by the window. Socks off, feet on the sill, radiator ticking.

A case of me, huh? Was that a Joni Mitchell reference, stranger? If we kissed, would it taste so bitter and so sweet?

Hopefully not too bitter. Sweet with a sting, because, as promised, I’m drinking bourbon now that I’m off-duty, relatively speaking.

Not a big dose, just a single on ice. It’s clinking softly in this quiet room, the glass glinting in the light of the reading lamp.

Rain’s streaking and pattering at the window, and while this time last week that fact would have depressed me, tonight it’s … I’m not sure. Atmospheric? That’s a ten-dollar word, but it’s still not quite right. There ought to be an adjective for when something’s at once melancholy and seductive. Perhaps the French have one.

It feels like longing, distilled.

What would I want in return, you ask? Let’s stick with Ms. Mitchell.

For my birthday, I want you here, or me there. I want the summer, because my birthday’s in late June. I want us on a couch, and the windows open, and the breeze dry and cooling as the sun drops. Thanks to you, I want the first time we kiss to have Car on a Hill be playing, because that song is sexy as fuck. Then Help Me, because goddamn.

You’d taste the bourbon, and what would I taste, I wonder? Do you drink wine? Do you drink at all? Would I taste mint from your toothpaste or gum, or some lingering salty tang from whatever it is I made us for dinner? Or would I just taste you?

Would it be slow as molasses, or fast and frantic and grasping, like the thrashing of a drowning man? I can’t even guess, and that makes me want to imagine it all the more.

Are you there, stranger? Reading every line as it makes your phone shiver or ping?

Tell me what you imagine.

9.53pm

I love that you know the song.

That you know I want sting when I say bitter.

And that you described all of that to me. Oh, your descriptions are blissful. I can almost see that glinting, can almost hear the sound of ice against glass. Every word you just said sunk me deeper into that glowing light and the heat of some summer we’re not actually in. Into those kisses, heavy with alcohol and sweet with cinnamon—because that’s what I taste like.

Always cinnamon, from the sugar on cookies or the centres of sweets.

And I would be frantic, definitely frantic. There is no way I could be slow with something like kissing. Not after so long imagining what it would be like. Not when I’ve seen it a thousand ways through the TV screen but never actually felt it. Just hearing you suggest it is enough to make me feel half starved—greedy for something slick and soft against my lips.

For hands, too, would there be hands?

I want there to be hands.

In my hair, on my back, on me all over.

You’d feel me shiver if you did. Hell, if you strain hard I’m sure you could feel me through your phone. My teeth are practically chattering; there are goose bumps all over my arms. Like I’m afraid almost—though maybe I am? It feels like terror, this terrible charge running through me. It makes me want to burst out of my own skin.

And once I had, I would run to you.

Tell me that you would run to me too.

10.26pm

I could run to you. Our bodies could meet with a force that borders on violence, charged with ferocious desperation.

Or I could be still as a rock, watch you running. Watch you growing closer, closer, features coming into focus, and brace myself like I was standing before a rushing wave, and let you crash over me, drown in all that need and curiosity.

Or I could come up behind you in a quiet room or a crowded train station or a damp and lonely park. Curl a palm around your shoulder and turn you, slowly. Study the surprise and recognition in your eyes for a long breath before I brought my mouth down on yours.

What color are those eyes? Don’t tell me brown, blue, green, hazel. Be specific. Tell me maple syrup, tell me the sky in winter, sea glass, bay leaf.

And yes, there would be hands. Before our lips ever meet, there are hands.

Mine are homely, my fingertips dry and hard as horn from playing the guitar.

One is on your throat, thumb on your jugular so I can feel your pulse, fierce and frantic. The other thumb is at your temple, fingers in your hair, palm covering your ear so it rushes like the ocean.

What does that hair feel like?

And your hands. Tell me about them, stranger. Tell me what they feel like and where they are on me. Where they are and where they don’t yet dare to go.

10.43pm

The train station, yes, I want the train station. Your mouth on mine before we’ve even had a chance to be awkward with each other. No stuttered hellos and shaking of sweaty hands. No remarks about the traffic getting there or the delays on platform three. Just your mouth, and then that warm pressure. Those hands where you said they would go.

I’ve often imagined someone touching me like that. Cradling my head, my throat, holding me in place for a kiss. Somehow I always thought the reality would be his hands held loosely at his sides. That he wouldn’t have enough imagination to do anything more, unless the more was groping my breasts or tugging off my underwear.

I’m under no illusions about real life.

And yet you make me believe in something so much sweeter.

You make me spend ages coming up with just the right colour of my eyes—something pretty, but also something that isn’t lies. They are smooth stones at the bottom of the ocean, dull at first glance, I think, but hinting at a hidden blue light. And when I’m done with thinking this up, I turn to my hands, as soft and plump as sleeping birds.

They look new, my hands. As if I’ve never done a thing with them.

I suppose I haven’t. I’ve never slid my fingers over the hard slant of a man’s shoulder blade, searching for all the grooves and jutting parts that I so long to feel. I don’t know what it’s like to find the parts of his body that make him gasp and arch.

But I know where they are.

I think about where they are on you.

I would be thinking about them as you kissed me, on that platform.

Tell me more about kissing me on the platform.

11.19pm

I’d start softly, just a glancing of my lips, the tiniest bump of the tips of our noses, the mingling of shallow exhalations, the rough brush of my chin against yours. I’m habitually overdue for a shave, so while the touch is gentle, my jaw won’t be. I hope that’s all right.

I’d want to kiss you so softly that it’s like a whisper in the crowd. Make you focus until the bustle of the platform fades to nothing and you can hear my breathing and the parting of our lips. So quiet I can hear the pulse that’s thumping against my hand.

Now you tell me what comes next. If this is your first kiss, let’s make it everything you’ve been wanting. Worthy of a movie.

It seems there’s so much you’ve never experienced. I won’t make a fetish of it, but I won’t lie—I want to be the one to bring those things to you.

You say your hands are like birds. Have you heard of bowerbirds? I saw a documentary about them when I first moved here. They live in Papua New Guinea, and the males build these elaborate nests to impress the females. They stack and pile and ornament them with bright, ripe berries and shiny beetle shells and flowers and stones and all sorts of things.

That’s what I’d want to do. Lay everything out before you, every sensation and sound and smell and sight and taste that comes with sex, sweet and dark and filthy alike, and watch you inspect and explore every one. Watch you unwrap each new thing like a candy and slip it past your lips, hover it under your nose, hold it to your ear or cup it in your hands.

Now you tell me, how do you want to be kissed?

11.50pm

Ohhhh yes that all sounds so good. The way you want to touch me. The things you want to offer me. But please don’t be afraid of making it a fetish, if the fetish makes me feel like this.

All new and open and ready, just waiting for you to go farther.

Because that’s what I want.

Farther.

More.

Faster.

Filthier.

I want your kisses somewhere other than my lips, every single one of them rough with that stubble, burning with that stubble. Turn the skin of my throat red with it, and don’t you dare stop there. Every inch of my body is as pale as milk—it all needs marking. It needs you to score great grooves into the curves and planes, until I’m covered.

Until I’m gasping.

Because I know I would be. I run rough things over my throat, the slope of my breasts, my stomach, just thinking if that’s how it would feel. And when I think I have it right, the air rushes out of me. Sounds push past my lips—ones that I’ve never let out before. Usually I put my fist in my mouth. I cover my face with a pillow.

But somehow I think that would be the wrong move with you.

I think you would want to hear me.

Oh god, I hope you would want to hear me.