I was only four minutes late, but Fran was already sat down, a beer in one hand, a sausage roll in the other.

I thought you weren’t going to come, she said.

Four minutes late is basically on time. I slid onto the bench opposite her.

I know, she said, but I’m basically a pessimist, though a hopeful one.

I get it, I said, like if you expect the worst, nothing can disappoint you, ever?

She opened her eyes cartoonishly wide and said, how did you know? Then she chomped down on her sausage roll. She really did chomp, mouth open, pink post-sausage mash in full view. Although I’d only just eaten, I suddenly felt faint, as if my stomach had been empty for days.

You want one, she announced.

How did you know?     

She grinned. Let’s just say I have an instinct for other people’s suppressed instincts.

Over two more rolls, four pints and three packets of crisps, we talked about being queer but neither vegan nor a fan of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, both of which the cishets seemed to think queerness consisted of; what it consisted of, neither of us could be sure, but huge backpacks, too much therapy, and the desire for the impossible, were certainly in there. We talked, only, it did not feel like talking, it felt as if we were already inside each other’s bodies, as if we had been living inside of them our whole lives, we were merely reminding ourselves of it.

When a silence finally bloomed between us, I leaned into it.

She scooted away.

Sorry, she said. It’s not — she sighed with a degree of concentration that made me certain this was a Strategy she’d worked out with her therapist.

There’s something you should know. Something about me. Sadness dribbled down her cheeks and I wanted to lick it off. I wanted to chomp it down. I wanted to poop it out.

Oh?

She stood up. Come to the toilets.

Maybe she had a kink. Yes, I thought, as we bundled into a cubicle, she was surely about to pull a rope or a butt plug out of her backpack.

I usually wait until at least the third date to share this, she said, but, and I’m sorry if this is too much, but it feels as if you, us, this date, is made, you know, of a different substance.

I tried, again, to kiss her, but she held up her hand in the manner of a traffic warden.

Slowly, and without meeting my eye, she unbuttoned her shirt. Something poked out from between the buttons — a hook. It jutted out from the space between her boobs, like an almost third boob, except that it was nothing like a boob; it was fleshy, yes, but thin and pointy, and it dangled right down to her thighs.

I’d never seen anything like it, I’d never dreamed of anything like it, and yet, just looking at it made my body feel like my body in a way I had long since stopped hoping was possible. I wanted to cry.

At this point, she said, people usually run. The few who don’t, well, she smiled at a square of toilet paper glued to the floor, they get too attached.

I reached towards her but she backed towards the sanitary bin.

I mean it. We’ll literally be joined together. She stared at the ‘Date not working out? Ask for Angela’ sticker. It’s not easy.

I didn’t care about easy. I’d never felt anything for anyone that wasn’t overshadowed by doubt. Yeah they’re hot, my brain would usually whisper, but they’re a bit pedantic, and their washing-up style is very different to yours, and sometimes when they ask if you want a cup of tea, you want to smack them. But I wanted Fran in the unambiguous and bodily way I’d wanted that sausage roll. I pulled her towards me. As our lips smashed together, I felt a short, sharp scratch, almost as if I was having a blood test, even though I wasn’t, and the scratch wasn’t in my arm, it was in my chest, and when I tried to pull away, we smashed foreheads.

Told you, she said. Then she unbuttoned my shirt and I unbuttoned hers and she pushed me back against the metro tiles, which were cold and slippery and hard, and we fucked.

Her flat would, in my previous life, have been a five-minute walk away, but in our new (but old-feeling) state, it took us almost twenty. If one of us walked too fast, or strayed more than a foot from the other, a pain would rip through the other’s chest, and she’d yell, and people would stare, and we’d stare back, and the people would transfer their stare to the floor in the hope that this would make us doubt whether they’d even noticed us, and we’d move on. I was quite a bit taller than her, so it took us a while to synchronise our pace.

We walked through her front door, and through all interior doors, at a right angle.

I’m desperate for a shit, she said, and I could already sense she was about to speed up, so I sped up, too, and we scuttled into her bathroom, like some mutant crab. There was, I noticed, an unusually large space between the sink and the toilet.

Squat there, she commanded, with your back turned.

I obeyed. I tried not to listen to the plop.

I hadn’t needed a shit before, but now I did — almost as if her needs were travelling through the hook. I didn’t even have to tell her this: she flushed, took one look at my face, and assumed what, only a few moments before, had been my position.

Before Fran, I’d never dated anyone for more than eight months, I’d never lived with a partner, I’d only said I love you twice. 98% of my dates ended firmly in the Friend Zone. So when my friends, many of them having come into my life as potential dates, found out we’d already moved in together, they were shocked. Shocked and appalled! It’s just not like you, said one. I’m worried.

What they couldn’t seem to understand was that before Fran, I’d felt as if I had an almost-empty fruit bowl where my self ought to be. The ‘almost’ consisted of a rotting banana and three crispy clementine leaves. The bowl was made out of fake wood, on offer from Wilko. I woke up most days disappointed that my body, despite this lack, was still here, still in need of all the things bodies need. I woke up late, usually too late to shower before my first meeting, I ate lunch at 11am or 3pm or never, and by ‘lunch’ I mean a few spoonfuls of Tupperware leftovers, eaten cold, and whilst standing in front of the fridge.  I frequently went days without leaving the house. People thought I was vibrant, but that’s because talking was my No.1 strategy — developed without the input of any therapist — to distract from the fruit-bowl feeling.

Now, I sprang out of bed and into running shoes, I ran around the park, or, if I was feeling particularly energetic, to the woods, or, if it was a weekend, to the cafe on the other side of the woods, which sold delicious coffees and pastries. Fran had been doing these things for years, and whilst I hadn’t touched a running shoe since school, I took to it like a dog to water, she said. Or, I said, like a duck to air, because ducks like air, they sleep on the shore, with their beaks tucked into their wings, and she laughed, and then we stopped by the pond to ventriloquise their dreams. I ate lunch when she ate lunch, which was at 1pm, out of sight from our laptops, hearty, and warm. We both worked from home; living together was easy, so long as we scheduled our calls at different times. If I felt bored or tired or lonely or scared, I’d only have to brush the hook with my pinky finger, and the feeling would go, and then a space would open up; I didn’t know what, if anything was in it, only that it would fill with the future any minute now. Any minute now!

The weirdest thing was that no one noticed the hook — not strangers in the park, not the man in the corner shop, not our friends.

Fran didn’t think it was weird. They’ll think we’re just like any other coupley couple. The hook is so thin, so stretchy, that no one can see it; their brains filter out anything they don’t expect to be there.        

As a test, we both wore tank tops to a brightly-lit bar, angling our bodies so that the hook looked almost like a glow stick, or a rod of lightning, which I decided to interpret as a sign that we were soon to reach the future the hook had been promising. 

We talked to our friends, who were sitting opposite us. We glanced at the hook between sentences. We even asked them, a few drinks in, whether there was anything they noticed.

No, said the friends, looking worried. Why? Are you pregnant?

We laughed and laughed and laughed.

Now they looked annoyed. Seriously, what is it?

Oh, we said, it’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Later that night, the friends sent me a message to say, we like Fran, but we are starting to wonder if we’ll ever see you alone again. We miss you.

They were stupid, so stupid. What, or who, was there to miss? The thought of my body, unattached to any other, was too sad to bear. Plus, Fran’s fruit bowl was made from olive wood that was unquestionably real, and replete with fruit that was unquestionably perfect.

The perfection, of course, didn’t last. I thought it would, and when it didn’t, I thought that telling this story from the perfect angle might revive it, at least for the time of the telling. But these words are sugar-sticky; there isn’t a sentence I can mash into them that shows which part of what happened next happened first, or how, or why.

There was the night when I sat up — the ‘I need to pee’ signal — when she pulled me back down to the mattress. Hold it in, she mumbled, I’m having an exceptional dream. When I tried to move, she gripped my wrist so tight I could still see the outline of her fingers in the morning.

There was the day I suggested we go to a craft fair and she said that she hated craft fairs and so did I, I just spent all my time criticising the art, which wasn’t really art, more like imitation, and done badly, and I said, what if I enjoy the criticism, and she said, well I don’t, I want to go the garden centre, and so we went to the garden centre, and I pretended to myself that I wasn’t pretending to her that I didn’t hate garden centres.

There was the night when she asked if I wanted a cup of tea, a cup of the loose-leaf oolong she usually saved for special occasions, at least, she used to, but every moment with me felt so special it blew the concept of the ‘occasion’ out of the water — she asked me all this, and I wanted, what I really wanted, was to smack her.

There was the day I fancied a biscuit only half an hour after breakfast, I jumped out of my seat, but she didn’t follow.

Ouch. She clutched her chest. Holy fuck.

Sorry.

She scowled at me, I mean really scowled, like a character in a 1950s children’s book. You can’t accept that we’re two different people, with different wants, different needs.

Sorry, I said. I’m really sorry.

I sat back down. I didn’t move until she stood up for a pee. I didn’t need to pee, I peed anyway, it smelt like anger, not mine but hers. In the split second between my flushing and her standing up, I saw myself as I used to be, peeing, alone, or perhaps in the semi-company of my phone. I felt sick. I felt as if I didn’t have a body to be feeling sick or anything with. It took me a few days, which felt like years, to identify this feeling as homesickness, a further week for me to attach to the feeling the words: I want. I want, I want to get away from her.

But I couldn’t transform words into non-words, I couldn’t remember what non-words were. When she asked if I wanted to celebrate our three-month anniversary by returning to the bar where we’d first met, I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no, and when she asked if I had an alternative suggestion, I said I don’t know, and when she said that it wasn’t fair to make her do all the emotional labour of making decisions, I said sorry, and when she told me to stop saying sorry and start changing my behaviour, I said that whenever I wanted anything that she didn’t want, she shot me down, and she stopped walking so abruptly that my chest skin ripped.         

Ouch.

Sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just, I would never shoot you down, I’d never shoot anyone down, I’ve been a pacifist since I was seven and a half. Then she pushed me into the bar. You have to order.

There were twelve beers on tap, two ciders, and five flavours of sausage roll, four of them vegan.

When the cishets queuing behind us began to grunt and cough, she elbowed me. It’s not life and death. Just choose.

I said pale ale, I said chorizo, I said chorizo and red pepper, I did not say that my words weren’t real because my ‘I’ wasn’t, I was a fruit bowl again, only, it no longer contained a rotten banana, it no longer contained three crispy clementine leaves, it was completely, I mean completely, empty.

Good choice, she said, when we’d eaten our sausage rolls.

But when she leant towards me, I climbed up onto the bench so quickly that she screamed, she screamed so loud that all the cishets stopped talking, but I didn’t care, I wanted someone, anyone, to witness how weird this had been, because it had been, it was over, the future we’d been promised was in the past, how it had got there without ever touching our present, I didn’t know, I still don’t, I’m sorry. I said I was sorry. I can’t do this anymore.

Oh no, she said, you’re just scared, people always are, at this point, the point where we are really getting to know each other, the real other, not the mirage.

She was crying and I was crying, and every time I moved, she screamed, and every time she screamed, I moved, and then I jumped onto the floor, and the cishets parted like the sea for Moses, and I did feel a bit like Moses, like I was headed towards the end of an important story, I didn’t look back I just pushed open the outside doors and when they slammed behind me I felt  —

— but there isn’t a word.

There isn’t a word that can describe what happened, there isn’t a word that can describe how what happened was tangled up with what didn’t happen, how I ran and we stretched and I chomped and we ripped and we tore and we bled. We bled all over the floor, which was, at least, tiled.

Fucking hell.

I’d accidentally run into the smoking area. A cishet bloke was staring at my chest. We were wearing the same plaid shirt with red and black squares.

Did you get stabbed?

Blood was blurring my reds and my blacks into the same purplish brown. 

I’m not sure.

The doctors didn’t believe me when I said there was no weapon, no aggressor. There were just two bodies moving towards, and then away from, each other. There was the time their wants had skipped in the same direction; there was that time’s ending; there was my inability to notice the ending until we were already in the middle of something else.

They gave me dressings and infusions and stitches and pills. Nothing worked: the hole, which was just bigger than needle-sized, and right between my breasts, continued to bleed. They sent me home with a month’s supply of dressings; it would heal by then, and if it didn’t, I’d learn to live with it, people did. 

That was two years ago, and whilst the bleeding’s stopped, the healing hasn’t, every day the scar is a little bigger than the day before, and by bigger I mean longer; I mean, it’s too long to fold into my sports bra, or into a dating App message. I mean I’d love to do what Fran did. I’d love to just unbutton my shirt and say, there’s something you should know. But if I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that I’m not Fran. I’m not Fran, and when my next girlfriend leans in to kiss me, I’ll let her. I’ll press my chest against her chest, closer and closer, until I feel it, the moment I miss most of all: that first scratch — so sharp, so short.

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‘So What Style of Attachment Would You Call This?’ is taken from The Moon is Trending, available now from SALT.

Clare Fisher is a prose writer and Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield. They are the author of the novel, All the Good Things (Viking, 2017), and the short story collections, How the Light Gets In (Influx Press, 2018). Their work has been published in six territories worldwide, won a Betty Trask Award and been longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Award and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Twitter: @claresitafisher