Alisha lets out a long, slow breath. It lies somewhere between disappointment, exasperation and sadness.

They look out at the stars.

‘Do you miss Rose?’ asks Alisha, after a while.

Dillon thinks. It suddenly seems to him that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about love, and sex, and desire, and who he wants, and when, and how much. And it seems like, ‘Do you miss her?’ is an easier question.

‘Yes,’ he says.

He thinks a little more.

‘Every day,’ he says.

‌After

Many things will happen. Alisha and Dillon and the rest of their class will finish their A-levels. They will dance on the street in the June nights, singing their freedom. Then Alisha will return to school in September to resit, chastened.

Dillon will accept a place at university, but he won’t go, not yet. He’ll work for a while, building up some money. He’ll make films in the woods, on his own, arty, pretentious films that one day he will be embarrassed of. Not yet, though. Now, in this pause before adulthood, he’ll look through the camera at the path from the bridge, and the rocky hollow, and the low rich green of the forest floor, and know that he’s the first person to have seen these things, and they are his.

One night he’ll talk to his dad, properly, about his mum.

He’ll meet Alisha at the school gates some days and walk to the bridge. They’ll stand on the parapet, now, and smoke a cigarette together. Sometimes they’ll see the younger kids under the arches, smell the weed drifting up, hear the shrieks and the laughter.

Sometimes, at night, he’ll go and sit quietly on the stairs in the empty house at the end of the long block.

Sometimes he’ll write letters. Sometimes he’ll receive them.

And in May, while Alisha is doing her exams for the second time, Dillon will borrow his dad’s car and drive down to an anonymous town with a new-build prison outside it. He will wait in the car until the doors open, and Rose emerges. He will just look, at first.

She won’t be the same, now. Her body will be leaner, stronger, clad in grey tracksuit. Her face will be blunter, her nose still squint from the policeman’s elbow. Her hair will be short.

He’ll get out of the car, his legs trembling.

When she sees him, she’ll smile. Not because she thinks she has to, or he wants her to. Not nervously, because she doesn’t know the rules. Instead, she’ll smile at his beauty, and her own roughness. She’ll smile because there are new rules now. He won’t know these new rules, but she will. They are hers, and she made them for him.