“If it was Sinatra or Fitzgerald, it wouldn’t be so awful,” Veronica mused at one point, and George laughed gratefully at her attempt at humour, reaching his hand in a rare gesture of affection across the bed. As their fingers intertwined, Veronica felt a sudden surge of tears rushing to her eyes, but she resisted the heaving in her chest, and in the dimness, George didn’t seem to notice.

Nor did he notice Veronica slipping into recollection of another night, many years ago, when she had steadied her breath and gripped the edge of another bed in much the same way. She had been sixteen, at her parents’ house in Oman. There was a party to mark their imminent departure for Nairobi and a friend of her father’s had been gallantly swinging her from room to room. He was much younger than her father, perhaps thirty or thirty-five, and she’d had a crush on him for years. That night he talked on and on about how mature she was, how beautiful she’d become. When he led her to her bedroom, it had seemed inevitable almost, natural…

Cutting into her own musings, Veronica wondered why she was suddenly remembering this now.

Brushing the thought aside, she laid a hand on top of her empty stomach. George didn’t notice this either, and it no longer surprised her to catch herself this way, but familiarity didn’t stop the sadness. With her other hand, gently, she squeezed George’s still intertwined fingers, and he squeezed back, but she didn’t feel bolstered. The intimacy of skin seemed only to illuminate its more usual absence, and without intention, tears threatened again – hot, burning, laced this time with a feint fury directed squarely at the man next to her. Because it was him, after all, who had made her feel this way. It was his doing – he with his cool, constant composure, his pulling away from vulnerability, his pulling away from her. It was his fault that she had become so pathetically grateful for the fleeting touch of skin, for these scraps he threw to her.

Veronica glanced at the clock. It was 4.13am. “I can’t believe he’s still going,” she said. “It’s getting light out.”

“I can’t do anything else.”

A slight curtness had appeared in George’s tone and he withdrew his hand from hers. She moved her head to study him. They hadn’t spoken in many minutes now and she wondered what he had been thinking about to shift his mood. Had he somehow sensed her tear-tipped anger? Something in his mind had quite plainly hardened, like clay left too long unattended. It was a pattern that seemed to be growing increasingly frequent between them. What had once been malleable and soft and waiting for the tender imprint of the other, was all at once brittle and breakable and cold to touch. Often now, they found themselves this way, slipping without warning between alliance and combat, unspoken thoughts erecting themselves between them, and once begun, neither of them could stop the hardening in the air.