‘WHAT R U DOING TONIGHT WOULD U COME OUT WITH US PLS DAN.’

Dan, who used to send amazing text messages – ‘WHAT is the numerical version of the alphabet? If A is the first in the alphabet, 1 is the first in the WHAT?’ – had lately become the tersest texter to have walked the earth, writing messages in a neutral form of old-fashioned chatspeak, like he was taking an early shot at being a suburban dad: ‘CAN U PICK UP THE AGE,’ he’d write. ‘HAVING A GOOD DAY U.’

It was an interesting gesture, but difficult to support when I knew he had the full deck of syntactic possibilities at his disposal, and when catch-up opportunities were thinner on the ground than they had been this time a year ago.

He was sitting in the kitchen in his thick bathrobe of deep green, casually opening the weekend paper to the quiz page and smelling the surface of a cup of homemade brew. It was warm today already, it would hit thirty degrees, and the sweatiness of his dressing gown would somehow be the point of wearing it: a general refusal to roll with the punches, especially if no punches were right then aimed at him.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘You want me to come out tonight,’ I said.

He peered over his paper, a wonderful prop.

‘We would like you to come out tonight,’ he said.

‘We’ was he and Lachlan, who was also in the kitchen, leaning on the bench and also drinking coffee, heavy in the matching deep green robe he called his own.

Lachlan looked at me seriously. He nodded at me seriously. He was a serious person, a serious Lachlan, a serious boyfriend for my housemate Dan. And I was not against this, at least not every part; but I could not help resisting the very swift progression from his Fitzroy apartment into our lives and home, first hooking up with Dan, then sleeping in Dan’s room, then sometimes appearing in the kitchen in the mornings, where he stood stoically waiting for Dan to finish showering and then shepherding him out of the house and to their jobs.

The truth was that this was an increasingly rare scenario, because Dan stayed at Lachlan’s more and more of the time. I probably would go out tonight because I knew that if I didn’t, I would go to sleep by myself at this townhouse in Brunswick with Dan and Lachlan having gone to bed in Fitzroy, given that Lachlan’s Oxford Street apartment was closer to the queer party they planned to attend.

‘Who’ll be there tonight anyway,’ I said.

‘Nobody knows,’ said Dan.

I stared at him. He stared at me. This was a frequent pattern.

‘You’re just going out tonight with nobody else there?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As a couple.’

‘Doing what?’ I said.

‘Drinking and talking.’

‘Drinking and talking?’