Henry and I walk home from work together, but when we get back to the flat he heads straight into his room, like he always does. After a day in the shop, I always want a beer or a glass of wine and a chat with one of our other housemates, but Henry seems to need at least a half hour alone to decompress. I’d found it weird at first, but I’m used to it now.

‘Someone left the breakfast dishes again,’ Freya says from the sink, her back to me.

‘How did you know I was here?’ I ask her, stopping behind her and resting my chin on her shoulder.

‘I didn’t know it was you. I just knew it was someone. And someone left the breakfast dishes again.’

That’s the main downside about all of us sharing a kitchen – people don’t do their dishes and sometimes they nick other people’s food. Between home and work, I spend way too much time stressing over other people’s bad kitchen manners. We take it in turns to cook most nights and it works out really well, but the dishes are a constant problem. Henry’s been trying to talk his dad, who’s our landlord, into getting us a dishwasher, but nothing doing so far.

I kiss Freya on the cheek and say, ‘Leave them. I’ll do them.’

‘I’m nearly done now,’ she says. ‘Get a drink.’

The kitchen and the bathroom were the only rooms we were all meant to share when I first moved in here. There are five other rooms – it’s a three-storey flat above a cafe in a Victorian terrace – and when I moved in they were all occupied. Freya and I both have back rooms. Even though it’s his dad’s place, Henry has a really tiny room next to the front door. When I moved in, Adam and Celine were in one front room and Henry’s cousin was in the other. After he’d gone, we interviewed a few people, but didn’t like anyone and finally realised that we just didn’t want anyone new, so Henry’s dad said we could all pay a bit extra in rent and convert the upstairs bedroom into a lounge. It was the best thing we ever did.

‘What are you making?’ I ask Freya, as I grab myself a bottle of Corona from the fridge.

‘Corned beef hash.’

‘Perfect,’ I say, shoving one of the dining chairs back against the wall so I’m out of the way. I sit down and stretch my arms over my head, feeling my back stretch and my spine click. Even though the shop’s not busy, I spend most of my time standing and it’s always good to sit down when I get home. The beer helps too.

The front door slams and Celine bursts into the kitchen, throwing her bag down on the table and yanking her jacket off.

‘Is Adam home?’

She hangs her jacket – caramel suede, expensive – over the back of one of the chairs, then runs her hands through her long dark hair. I didn’t think I’d like Celine when I first met her and I absolutely admit it’s because she’s so gorgeous. And smart – she’s a lawyer specialising in copyright. She’s totally intimidating. But she’s also lovely and funny and kind and I’m an idiot. She’d actually be the perfect housemate if it wasn’t for her and Adam’s rows. And then the making up. The making up might actually be worse than the rows – Freya, Henry and I have discussed it, but we’re undecided.

I shake my head. ‘Don’t know. Only just got home.’

‘I haven’t seen him,’ Freya says, turning from the sink to the cooker.

‘Ugh, he’s such an arsehole,’ Celine says. She opens the fridge, gets a beer and almost breaks the wall-mounted opener she smacks it so hard.

‘Bad day?’ Freya asks, stirring the contents of a pan with a wooden spoon.

‘Bad fucking life,’ Celine says. She takes a long swig of her beer then says, ‘I think it’s over this time.’ She peels her false eyelashes off and drops them into her bag.

‘Why?’ I ask. I’m not worried. She’s said it before. Loads of times.

She shrugs. ‘He’s been ignoring me all day even though we’ve talked about him doing that before. He knows I hate it. I don’t care if he tells me he hasn’t got time to talk, but he needs to tell me that, not just ignore me!’

‘What if he, ah, hasn’t got time to tell you?’ Freya asks.

I bite the inside of my mouth to stop myself from laughing.

‘Listen, if he’s got time to go to that fucking noodle place with his dickhead mate at lunchtime, he’s got time to text me. Knob.’

She opens the fridge, pulls out a head of lettuce, a packet of tomatoes and a red pepper, drops them onto the dining table and starts making a salad in an incredibly aggressive way, the knife screeching against the glass chopping board.

‘Would you rather peel the potatoes?’ Freya says. ‘I’m not sure the lettuce can survive that kind of abuse.’

Celine puts the knife down and crunches into a slice of pepper.

‘Should it be this hard?’ she says, looking at me and then Freya and back to me again. ‘I don’t know if it should be this hard.’

‘The pepper?’ Freya says.

‘Come on,’ Celine says. ‘I’m really asking.’

Freya and I look at each other. Celine and Adam fight all the time, but Celine’s never asked our opinion before.

‘I think it’s hard for a lot of people,’ I say, tentatively.

‘Is it hard for you?’ She stares at me and I realise how tired she looks. She’s got grey smudges under her eyes and her skin looks almost translucent.

‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ I say. ‘I haven’t had one for… a while.’

‘I know, but, I mean, in the past. Has it been hard? Did you fight?’

I shake my head. ‘I, um, no? Not really. But only because I’ve never really had a proper relationship. I’ve never really lived with anyone or even…’ I drink some of my beer, but my chest feels tight. I don’t really want to talk about this.

Celine frowns. ‘What about you?’ she asks Freya.

‘I don’t know,’ Freya says. ‘I think it’s different with girls? Or maybe it isn’t, I don’t know. But I like the fighting and the fucking, you know? I like a passionate relationship.’

Celine smiles for the first time since she came home. ‘We do enjoy making up, it’s true.’

‘Sometimes repeatedly,’ Freya says, holding the spoon out towards Celine. ‘Taste this.’

Celine takes some food off the spoon. ‘That is really good.’

‘Don’t put it back in the—’ I start to say, but the spoon’s back in the pan before I can even finish.

‘Celine hasn’t got any germs, have you?’ Freya says. ‘She’s perfect and pristine. I’d be honoured to have a bit of her spit in my dinner.’

‘Ugh,’ I say. ‘You’re the worst.’

‘I’m taking my perfect, pristine self for a shower,’ Celine says, putting her beer down on the table. ‘If Adam comes back, tell him I’ve left him and see what he says.’

---

‘There’s a new guy at work,’ Freya tells me, once Celine’s gone. ‘And he is right up your alley.’

‘Ugh,’ I say. ‘No thanks.’

Freya turns from the stove and just stares at me, her eyes narrowing, until I say, ‘God. What?’

‘He’s a writer—’

‘He works with you? So he’s actually a teacher.’

She shrugs. ‘You can be both. He’s published.’

Against my better judgement, this actually intrigues me. ‘What has he published?’

‘A novel. For children. Something to do with video games? And I think he said weasels? But the bell went, so I might have got that wrong. He said it was Book of the Month in Waterstones. Or Smith’s. He’s writing the sequel now. Anyway, he’s cute. And he reads. He was reading at lunch.’

‘A novel?’

She nods. ‘By David Nicholls. But not the film one.’

‘Us? Starter for Ten?’

‘Dunno. I only noticed the name. But he basically writes romance, right? For boys?’

I nod.

‘So!’

‘So what?’

‘He’s single, I checked.’

‘You’re suggesting I go out with a man just because you saw him reading a boy romance?’

‘And he writes!’

‘Yeah, I’m going to need more than that.’

‘Right,’ Freya says. ‘And that’s exactly your problem.’

‘What’s my problem?’

‘You’re too fussy.’ She turns her back on me while she lifts lids off pans and stirs stuff.

‘I don’t think I’m fussy!’ I say, pausing to drink some of my beer. We’ve had this conversation before, albeit not for a while.

Freya snorts. ‘Oh please. You wouldn’t go out with Neil because he said “fillum”.’

‘It wasn’t “fillum”, it was “chimley”. And that wasn’t the reason. I saw him picking his nose with his glasses.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she says, replacing the lids and turning round to look at me. ‘He does that. But, you know, everyone’s got bad habits, you just have to beat them out of them.’

I sigh, heavily.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says. ‘And you’re kidding yourself.’

‘What?’ I pick at the label on my lager.

‘Dream Man is only perfect because he doesn’t exist. If he did and you ever actually met him, you’d learn that he has skiddy pants and picks his feet and doesn’t know which is Khloé and which is Kourtney—’

‘I don’t know which is Khloé and which is Kourtney.’

‘Seriously? Khloé’s really tall and—’

‘And I don’t care,’ I interrupt.

Freya pulls a face. ‘You know Kim, right? That’s the most important thing. Actually, did you see the thing about…’

She starts telling me something she read about Kim Kardashian’s new baby – or that she’s going to have another baby, I’m not sure – and I congratulate myself on a successful subject change. It’s not usually quite that easy to shift Freya’s focus. Particularly when it comes to my lack of love life.

---

After dinner – we had to turn up the music in the kitchen to drown out Adam and Celine’s shouting while we ate Freya’s corned beef hash – I go to my room and read one of the new romance novels from the delivery today until my eyes are closing and I’m reading the same line over and over. I take a break to download the sample of the latest David Nicholls (I’ve read One Day, but nothing else) and then switch off my light. It’s not even ten o’clock.

I’m almost asleep when I hear low moaning coming from downstairs. I groan and roll over, pressing my face into my pillow. Great. No chance of me getting to sleep for a while yet then.

‘Oh god, yes. There. There. Yes.’

I bang my head on my pillow.

‘No! There!’ Celine shouts. ‘Not there. No. No! There!’

Celine lets out a low moan and I clamp my hands over my ears and try to do what I’ve done to help me get to sleep for years now: tell myself a story. For as long as I can remember, I’ve daydreamed before going to sleep. I’m not a big daydreamer during the day, but I always like to have a little story to tell myself when I get into bed. I think I can even remember the very first one. We were on holiday in Cornwall, staying in a static caravan that belonged to someone Dad knew from the pub. We went out on a boat trip around the bay and the guy who owned the boat was really cute. I remember Dad teasing me about how smitten I was and I got annoyed ’cos I was embarrassed. But then in bed that night, I told myself a story about being out on the boat again, but just me. And the guy had fallen overboard and I’d had to leap in to save him. And that was it. I’m not even sure there was any kissing. Just that he needed help and I saved him and it felt good.

‘Shit! Ow, no. That’s my hair. You’re on my hair!’

As I got older, the dreams definitely started to include kissing. And sometimes more, but usually not because the set-up was so involved that I fell asleep before I got to any sex business. The dreams almost always involved a celebrity or a character from a TV show or film. After watching Friday Night Lights, Tim Riggins kept me busy for months. Sometimes I’d get something wrong in the set-up – dream me would say something real me would never say, or someone else would do something annoying or out of character – and I’d have to go back to the beginning. Over the years, I’ve come up with a series of concepts that always work, no matter who the leading man is: sitting next to a stranger on a plane who turns out to be someone super hot. Or trapped in a lift. Or on holiday on a tropical island where the super hot guy just happens to be on holiday alone, recovering from heartbreak. They’re all flexible, all reliable. I don’t know if anyone else does this. I hope so. I’ve no idea how anyone gets to sleep otherwise.

‘Oh yeah,’ Adam groans. ‘Go on. Go on! Go on!’ He sounds like he’s encouraging a horse.

But once I started having the park dream – the recurring dream I’ve been having for ten years now – that was the thing I thought about before bed the most often. I would relive the actual dream and then embellish it a little. We’d have a picnic. Or we’d be kissing on the bench. Or I’d be in the park waiting for him and would see him in the distance and know he was coming to meet me. Or he’d be on the bench alone and I’d be late and watch him for a while, knowing he was waiting for me, knowing how happy he’d be when I got there, knowing we were in love and happy together. Once I pictured us arriving at the same time at opposite sides of the park and running to meet each other, but that one was too cheesy even for me.

Adam is making a high-pitched squeaking noise, so I scrunch my eyes up and try to focus on the park dream. I’m in the park… And he’s on a bench…

‘Oh fuck!’ Celine shouts. ‘Oh shit!’

‘Get in!’ Adam shouts.

And then they’re both mercifully quiet. I think about the park dream and slide one hand down between my legs.