Chapter Text
Alicia had known Bailey the better part of a year before she ever saw her go quiet.
That was the thing about Bailey — she filled every room she walked into, whether the room wanted filling or not. She was the one who turned "can I get a coffee" into a full performance for the barista. Who called the bus driver "darlin'" and somehow got away with it. Who'd once squared up to a lad twice her size outside the chip shop for muttering something under his breath, and hadn't so much as blinked doing it. Loud wasn't quite the word. Bailey was weather.
So when she went quiet — properly quiet, not the strategic kind she used mid-argument to let someone dig their own grave — Alicia noticed the way you notice a room going cold.
It happened on an unremarkable Tuesday. They were at Alicia's kitchen table splitting a bag of crisps Bailey insisted on calling "proper," like there was an improper kind, and Alicia had made an offhand joke about a mutual friend's stag do — something about the lads being "tutti muscoli e niente cervello, dai" — and Bailey had laughed a beat too late, and then hadn't said much of anything for ten minutes after.
Alicia let the silence sit. She'd learned, in the year she'd lived in this grey little market town with its too-friendly rain, that people told you things at their own speed or not at all, and pushing only taught them to build the wall higher.
"You don't have to perform for me every second, you know," she said eventually, eyes on the crisps. "I like you fine when you're not on."
Bailey's head came up sharp, like she'd been caught at something.
"Dunno what you're on about," she said. It came out thin. Not her usual clip.
"Bailey."
"Alicia."
"You've gone somewhere else. In your head. I can see it on your face."
Bailey's jaw worked. For a second Alicia watched her reach for a joke — watched her hand actually twitch toward it, the way someone reaches for a coat by the door out of habit — and then not take it.
"Can I tell you somethin'," Bailey said. Not a question, quite. "An' you're not gonna — I dunno. Look at me different after."
"Nothing you tell me is going to change how I look at you." Alicia said it plainly, no drama in it, because she meant it plainly. "Try me."
Bailey stared at the crisp packet like it owed her money. Her thumbnail picked at the seam of it. "I'm a girl," she said. "Right. Obviously. But I mean — I weren't born one. Like, everyone thought I was a boy, when I was born, an' I'm not, an' I've been — I'm on hormones, have been a year an' a bit, an' I've not told hardly no one 'cause back home that's a good way to get your teeth put through the back of your skull, an' I dunno, I just—" She ran out of runway. "I just wanted someone to know. Proper know. Not guess."
The kitchen was quiet except for the tick of the boiler.
Alicia reached over and put her hand flat on the table, palm up, an open invitation rather than a demand. "Okay," she said.
Bailey blinked at her. "Okay?"
"Okay." Alicia let a small, warm smile in. "Bailey, I already knew you were a girl. You didn't have to tell me that part." She tipped her head. "The rest — thank you for trusting me with it. That's all. It doesn't change one thing about how much I like having you around, being loud and eating all my crisps."
"They're literally just crisps, I don't know why you keep sayin' it like that—" Bailey's voice cracked halfway through, and she pressed the heel of her hand hard against one eye, laughing wetly at herself. "Christ. Sorry. M'not — I don't usually—"
"You don't have to be sorry for crying at my kitchen table. It has seen worse." Alicia didn't let go of her hand. "For what it's worth — the way your face just went, right now? That's the real one, I think. I like that one best."
"Yeah, well." Bailey sniffed, hard, dragging herself back together with visible effort, patching the crack over with a grin that was only about seventy percent armor now instead of the usual hundred. "Don't go tellin' people I've got a soft side, they'll think I've gone soft."
"Your secret is safe with me," Alicia said, and meant that too — meant it in the way that made something settle low and warm in her chest, something she didn't examine too closely that night, or the next, though it would keep showing up, quiet and persistent, like a draft under a door.
Things were different after that, in ways too small to name individually but too many to ignore as a pattern.
Bailey started turning up at Alicia's without a reason first. She'd let herself flop dramatically onto the sofa mid-sentence about something that had happened on the bus, and Alicia would already be filling the kettle before being asked, because she'd learned the rhythm of it — Bailey talked loudest when she was working her way toward something quieter.
Alicia, for her part, started noticing things about Bailey she hadn't let herself notice before. The gap-toothed grin that showed up only when she was genuinely delighted, not performing delight for an audience. The way she went still and unshowy when someone in their friend group was actually upset — dropped the volume entirely, sat close, didn't try to fix anything, just stayed. The furious, protective focus of her when anyone was unkind to someone smaller or softer than her, which was, Alicia thought, most of the group.
And — this was the part Alicia kept to herself, tucked away like a good coat for later — she noticed she liked the sound of Bailey's voice more than was strictly reasonable. The rasp under it. The dropped H's, the innit she used like punctuation, the way "proper" could mean anything from very to correctly to good depending entirely on how she said it. She found herself replaying things Bailey had said, hours later, for no reason except that they'd been said in that voice.
She did not tell anyone this. She barely told herself this.
The county fair rolled into the fields on the edge of town in the last hot week of summer, the way it did every year — a scatter of striped tents, a Ferris wheel that had clearly seen forty summers and would probably see forty more out of sheer bloody-mindedness, the smell of fried batter thick enough to taste from the car park.
The whole friend group went, six of them piling out of two cars with too much cash and no plan, and for the first hour it stayed that way — a loose, loud knot of people arguing about whether the waltzers or the dodgems were better, whether the funnel cake stall was a rip-off, whose turn it was to try and win the big stuffed shark at the ring toss that nobody had won in living memory.
Bailey won it on her third go, to the outrage of everyone who'd already spent a fiver failing.
"Oi — oi, look at that, look at that," she was crowing, hoisting the ridiculous shark over her head like a trophy, grinning at the stallholder like she'd personally wounded his pride. "Bog-standard aim, me. Natural talent."
"You knocked the bottle over with your elbow," someone said.
"Skill," Bailey said, "is knowin' where your elbow is."
She turned, shark still held aloft, and found Alicia laughing at her — really laughing, head back, one hand pressed to her own chest — and something in Bailey's face went soft and unguarded for half a second before she caught it and covered with a smirk.
"There y'go," she said, and shoved the shark into Alicia's arms without ceremony. "For puttin' up with me."
"You don't have to give me your prize, Bailey."
"Didn't ask, did I." Bailey was already looking somewhere else, cheeks a shade pinker than the heat quite explained. "Consider it payment. For all them crisps."
Alicia held the shark against her chest and didn't push it. She wasn't sure her voice would come out right if she tried.
By the time the sky went orange and then a deep bruised purple, the group had scattered into smaller pieces the way groups do at fairs — someone off queueing for chips, someone lost to the arcade tent, someone's phone dying mid-argument about where to meet. Bailey and Alicia ended up at the foot of the Ferris wheel more by drift than by plan, and neither of them corrected it.
"You scared of heights?" Bailey asked, buying two tickets before Alicia could get her purse out.
"No. Are you scared of me finding out you are?"
"I am not—" Bailey caught the look on Alicia's face. "Shut up. Get in the bloody carriage."
The wheel groaned its slow way upward, carriage swinging gently, the fairground shrinking below into strings of coloured bulbs and tiny moving shapes. The noise fell away by degrees until it was just the creak of the mechanism and the distant thump of a bad cover band somewhere near the beer tent.
They stopped, as the old wheels always did, right at the top — the operator loading the last carriages below — and the whole fair spread out under them like something spilled and glittering.
"Alright," Bailey said, quieter than Alicia had heard her all day, "that's — actually proper nice, that."
"Mm." Alicia was watching her rather than the view. "I like watching you have a nice time. You don't let yourself, much. Have nice, quiet things."
Bailey went still in the particular way she went still when something had landed somewhere it wasn't expecting to. "Dunno what you mean."
"I think you do." Alicia said it gently, no challenge in it. "You're allowed to just — enjoy something, Bailey. Without making a joke of it after."
The carriage swayed. Bailey's hand was resting on the safety bar between them, close enough that Alicia could feel the warmth off it, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all. Bailey's eyes were doing something complicated — flicking to Alicia's face, away, back again, like she was working up to a sentence and losing her nerve on the runway every time.
"Alicia, I—"
Below them, the wheel lurched back into motion, the operator loading the last riders, and the moment folded itself away as fast as it had opened, tucked back behind Bailey's usual grin before Alicia could catch what had almost followed it.
"—reckon I want chips," Bailey finished instead, too bright. "Come on. Before the good stall shuts."
Alicia let her have the exit. But she filed the almost-sentence away carefully, next to the sound of Bailey's real laugh and the memory of a stuffed shark shoved into her arms for no reason except because, and she thought, walking back down through the lights with Bailey's shoulder bumping hers every few steps, that whatever this was building toward, she was in no hurry at all to rush it.
Some things, she thought, were worth doing properly slow.
Alicia had never been a good sleeper in this country.
Back home, in her mother's flat with the shutters that clattered when the wind came off the hills, she'd slept like something switched off. Here the quiet itself kept her up — no scooters, no market voices under the window at dawn, no nonna two floors down arguing cheerfully with the television. Just English silence, thick and total, and her own thoughts filling it in without permission.
Tonight the thoughts were about Bailey. They had been, if she was honest with herself, for about three weeks — since a Ferris wheel had stopped at the top of its turn and left something unsaid hanging in the carriage between them like a held breath.
She rolled onto her side and found herself looking, as she had most nights since, at the shark.
It sat on the end of her bed where she'd dropped it that first night, ridiculous and lopsided, one stitched eye slightly higher than the other, and she had never once moved it to a shelf or a cupboard or anywhere a sensible person kept a stuffed fairground prize a grown woman had no business still sleeping near. She told herself it was because Bailey had won it. That it would feel like throwing away the memory of Bailey's face in that moment — delighted, unguarded, holding it over her head like she'd conquered something — to shove it in a drawer.
She knew that wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth had teeth, and she wasn't in the mood to be bitten by it at one in the morning.
Va bene, she thought. Fine. Let's look at it, then, since we're both awake.
She thought about the version of Bailey most people got — the one who filled a room before she'd finished walking into it, who called strangers darlin' and picked fights on other people's behalf and made a joke out of nearly everything, fast enough that you had to be quick to catch what was actually underneath it. Alicia had liked that Bailey too, from the start. It was hard not to. But she'd learned, over months of crisps and kitchen tables and late walks home, that the loud version was a coat Bailey wore, cut well, worn easily — and that under it was someone careful and soft and a little bit frightened, who flinched at kindness like she wasn't sure yet that it wouldn't be taken back.
Alicia thought about the day Bailey had told her. The way her voice had gone thin and lost its usual clip. The way she'd cried and immediately apologised for it, like crying were an inconvenience she was imposing on the room. Alicia hadn't told her — hadn't told anyone — how much it had wrecked her a little, gently, to watch someone brace for rejection from her, specifically, as though there were any version of Bailey that wouldn't be welcome at her table.
You didn't have to brace, she thought now, at the ceiling. You never had to, with me.
She thought about the fair. The shark shoved into her arms with a shrug, like it cost Bailey nothing, when Alicia had watched her win it fair and square through three humiliating pound coins and clearly wanted to keep it herself. The top of the wheel, the fairground spread out gold and moving below them, Bailey's hand resting so close to hers on the safety bar that she could feel the warmth of it without touching it. Alicia, I—
She'd turned that half-sentence over so many times in three weeks it had gone smooth as a stone in her pocket. She still didn't know what the rest of it was supposed to be. She had a guess. She didn't trust the guess, because she wanted it too badly to trust her own read on it — and that, she thought, was maybe the most honest thing she'd admitted to herself all summer.
She picked up her phone off the nightstand out of habit more than intention, and the screen lit the dark with the last thread open, same as always: Bailey, three days ago, a photo of a dog she'd seen on the bus with the caption this is now my son, followed four minutes later by don't tell the others I said that its embarrassing, followed thirty seconds after that by a string of exclamation points that meant nothing and everything, the particular punctuation of someone who felt something too big for the sentence and didn't know where else to put it.
Alicia knew that habit now. She'd learned to read the exclamation points the way she read Bailey's face — as a place where the feeling leaked out around the edges of the joke.
She thought about her own reputation in their group — the calm one, the one who noticed when someone had gone quiet, who remembered the pronouns and the allergies and who needed a water break before they asked. She was good at that. She liked being good at that. But she wondered, lying here at one in the morning with a stuffed shark for company, whether she'd gotten so used to being the one who held things steady for everyone else that she'd forgotten how to let herself want something the way other people were allowed to — messily, out loud, without immediately organising it into something manageable.
She didn't want to manage this. That was the trouble.
She wanted, quite badly and quite specifically, to be the person Bailey didn't have to brace for. Not as a kindness. Not as the mum friend, patching someone up and sending them off steadier than she found them. She wanted to be the place Bailey landed. She wanted, God help her, to find out what the rest of that sentence on the Ferris wheel had been going to say, and she wanted to be brave enough to let it matter if it wasn't the thing she was hoping for.
Piano, piano, she told herself — slowly, slowly, the way her mother used to say it, hands cupped like she was holding something that could spill. There was no fair happening tonight. No half-finished sentence waiting to be picked back up at one in the morning. Just her, and the quiet, and a shark with one eye set higher than the other, and the ordinary next day waiting on the other side of sleep, in which she would see Bailey again and say nothing about any of this, because some things were still worth doing properly slow.
Her phone buzzed in her hand, screen flaring bright in the dark.
Bailey, 1:14 a.m.: you awake
Alicia looked at it for a long moment, feeling something in her chest tip sideways, warm and unwise.
She typed back: Yes. Can't sleep. You?
The reply came fast, the way it always did when Bailey had been sitting there hoping.
Bailey: same. wanna talk or is that weird
Alicia pulled the shark a little closer under her arm, and smiled at the ceiling, and did not examine too closely why her heart was going like she'd run somewhere.
Not weird, she typed. Call me.
The call connected on the second ring.
"Alright," Bailey said, and even down a phone line at half one in the morning she managed to make one word sound like the start of an argument she was looking forward to. There was noise behind her — a telly on low, the particular echo of a small room.
"Hi," Alicia said, and pulled the duvet up under her chin, the shark tucked in the crook of her arm like she'd forgotten to put it down. "Where are you? It sounds like you're in a cupboard."
"Kitchen floor. Radiator's warm down here. Don't judge me."
"I'm not judging. I sleep with a stuffed shark, remember."
"You what?" A creak, like Bailey was shifting to get comfortable against the cupboards. "That's — no, hang on, that's dead sweet actually. Didn't peg you as sentimental."
"I contain multitudes," Alicia said, and Bailey laughed, low and real, the kind of laugh that didn't have an audience to perform for, just the two of them and a phone line and the dark.
For a minute neither of them said much of anything. Alicia listened to Bailey breathe and thought that this — this specific quiet, comfortable enough to just sit in — was new. They'd never run out of things to fill a silence with before. It was nice, she found, not to have to.
"Couldn't sleep either, then," Bailey said eventually. "What's keepin' you up?"
Alicia could have deflected. It was what she was good at — turning a question back around before anyone got close enough to see the actual answer. Instead she found herself telling the truth, or a careful shape of it.
"Thinking about home, a little. It happens more at night. I don't know why."
"Italy home, or—"
"Italy home." She traced a thread on the duvet cover. "There's a kind of quiet there that's different. Not English quiet. It's — full. My mother's flat, in the evenings, you can hear five other families' dinners through the walls, someone's television, someone's nonna shouting down at the street. It's chaos, but it's warm chaos. I didn't know I'd miss noise like that until I moved somewhere polite enough not to make any."
"Why'd you leave, then? If you miss it that much."
"Work, mostly. There wasn't much where I grew up — my mother cleaned houses, my father wasn't really around after I was twelve, and I was good at English in school, so." She shrugged, though Bailey couldn't see it. "It felt like the practical thing. Come here, get qualified, send some money back, build something. I was very sensible about it. I'm always very sensible."
"You say that like it's a character flaw."
"Sometimes it feels like one." Alicia smiled at the ceiling, surprised at herself. "I was the oldest. My mother worked long hours, so I did a lot of the — the holding things together. Made sure my brother did his homework, made dinner, that sort of thing. I think I got good at being the calm one before I ever had the chance to find out if I was actually calm, or if I just didn't have another option."
There was a pause on the line, thoughtful rather than empty.
"That's — yeah," Bailey said. "That tracks, actually. Explains why you're so good at readin' a room. You've been doin' it your whole life, innit. Not just with us."
"Something like that." Alicia turned onto her side, phone warm against her ear. "What about you? What kept you up before I texted?"
Bailey went quiet for a second — not the performing kind of quiet, the real kind, the kind Alicia had learned to recognise back in her kitchen weeks ago.
"Was thinkin' about my mum, actually. Funny, innit, both of us on about our mums at silly o'clock."
"Tell me. If you want to."
"She's alright, my mum. Wanna say that first, before it sounds like a sob story. She works hard, always has, three of us and my dad useless as a chocolate teapot before he did one when I was ten." A short breath, half a laugh with no real humor in it. "But when I told her — about bein' a girl, like properly told her, not just 'oh Bailey's a bit different' — she didn't take it well. Not cruel, not chuckin' me out or nothin', just. Confused. Scared, I reckon, though she'd never say scared. Kept askin' if I was sure, over an' over, like if she asked enough times I'd change my answer."
"That must have been hard. Being asked to prove something you already knew."
"Yeah." Bailey's voice had lost its usual quickness; it moved slower now, like she was picking her way over something uneven. "Where I grew up, right, you don't stand out. Standin' out gets you a kickin', or worse. So I spent years just — makin' myself loud in other ways, so nobody'd look too close at the ways I was quiet. Cracking jokes, startin' scraps for other people so nobody'd start one with me. Worked a treat, mostly. Still works."
"It's why you're funny," Alicia said gently. "I don't think it's only armor. I think you'd have been funny anyway. But I understand why it became useful too."
"Yeah, well." A soft, surprised exhale, like she hadn't expected to be let off that easily. "Mum's comin' round, slowly. Calls me by my name now, mostly. Gets my pronouns right more than she gets 'em wrong. I try to remember she's tryin', even when it still stings some days. It's not nothin'."
"It's not nothing," Alicia agreed. "It's brave, actually. Both of you, in different ways."
"Don't go makin' me the hero of the story, I still nicked twenty quid outta her purse when I was fourteen." Bailey's grin was audible even through the deflection. "M'not brave. M'just too stubborn to let the world tell me who I'm meant to be."
"That's what brave means, Bailey. Nobody brave feels brave while they're doing it. They just didn't have a better option and did the hard thing anyway."
The line went quiet again, but it was a different quiet than before — thicker, like something had shifted and settled into a new shape.
"You're good at that," Bailey said finally, quieter than Alicia had heard her outside of that kitchen table weeks ago. "Sayin' the thing that makes it make sense. Nobody's ever really — put it like that before. Made it sound like somethin' other than me bein' a mess about it."
"You're not a mess. You're someone who grew up somewhere that didn't leave you much room to be soft, and you found a way to be soft anyway, just quietly, with the people you trust." Alicia hesitated, then let herself say the rest of it. "I'm glad I'm one of them. The people you trust."
"'Course you are." Bailey said it like it was obvious, like there'd never been any question. "You're the only one who's ever made it easy. The bein' me part. You just — you never made it a thing. You just let me be Bailey."
"You are Bailey," Alicia said, and heard the small catch in her own voice and didn't try to smooth it over this time. "That was never something I had to get used to."
Neither of them said anything for a while after that. Alicia listened to the faint sound of Bailey breathing, the radiator ticking somewhere on her end, and thought that she could easily fall asleep like this, phone warm against her cheek, if either of them let the conversation drop.
"Alicia."
"Mm?"
"Nothin'. Just — like sayin' your name, I think." A soft laugh, self-conscious, unlike her. "M'tired. M'talkin' rubbish."
"You're not talking rubbish." Alicia closed her eyes, smiling in the dark where no one could see it but somehow feeling like Bailey would know anyway. "Stay on the line. You don't have to say anything else. I just don't want to hang up yet."
"Yeah," Bailey said, soft, easy, none of her usual armor left in it. "Yeah, alright. Me neither."
They stayed like that until the sky outside Alicia's window went from black to the grey-blue of almost-morning, saying less and less, the silences growing longer and gentler between them, until somewhere past four Alicia heard Bailey's breathing even out into sleep on the other end of the line, and she lay there a while longer just listening to it, the shark tucked warm against her chest, before she let herself drift off too.
Two days after the phone call, Alicia still hadn't told anyone about it, though there wasn't much to tell in the way that would sound sensible out loud. Nothing had happened. They'd talked, and fallen asleep on the line, and texted easily and often ever since, small things — a photo of a dog, a complaint about the weather, Bailey sending three separate voice notes because she "couldn't be arsed typing it all out." It didn't sound like much. It felt, privately, like everything had rearranged itself half an inch to the left.
She was thinking about it — about Bailey's voice going soft and unarmored somewhere around four in the morning — when her phone lit up with Viola's name, and the small, automatic muscle in her chest that had nothing to do with wanting to answer clenched anyway, and she picked up on the second ring.
"Cara, you're free this afternoon, yes?" Viola never really asked questions so much as she announced the answer she expected and waited for the world to catch up. "I need your eye. I'm doing the thing at the gallery Thursday and I have narrowed it to two coats and I cannot decide alone, my brain has simply stopped."
"I have work until three," Alicia said, which was true, and also the kind of thing she said when she wanted an exit that wasn't really an exit.
"Perfect, three is perfect. I'll meet you at the little place on the corner, the one with the good pastries, we'll make an afternoon of it." A pause, brief and practiced. "You're a saint, you know that? I don't know what I'd do here without you."
Alicia said something that agreed with her, because that was the shape the conversation always took, and hung up, and sat for a moment looking at the ceiling with the specific, familiar tiredness of having said yes before she'd actually decided anything.
She had known Viola since they were girls — different towns, same region, their mothers loosely connected through a cousin of a cousin — though back then the gap between them had been the kind you could pretend didn't matter, two girls the same age arguing about pop songs. It mattered more now. Viola's family had never cleaned anyone's house. Viola had come to England the way people came to a party they were confident would be improved by their arrival — not for work, not for money, but because, as she'd said once, entirely without irony, "London plays better than Milan right now, everyone who matters is either here or pretending to be, and I would rather be here."
It was, Alicia sometimes thought, the exact same country, entered through two completely different doors.
The gallery coat emergency, when it materialised in person, turned out to require forty minutes of Viola trying on nearly-identical black coats under a shop assistant's patient eye while narrating, at length, the several overlapping social calculations involved — who would be there, who she needed to be photographed near and who she needed to avoid standing too close to, whether the shorter coat read as "effortless" or merely "cheap," a distinction she delivered with total seriousness.
"What do you think," Viola said, turning in the mirror, meaning the coat.
"They both look lovely on you," Alicia said, meaning it, and also not entirely present in the answer, because some part of her was still turning over a text from Bailey from an hour ago — you doin anything fri night, was thinking chippy + film, nothing fancy — and she had been composing a reply in her head all afternoon that she hadn't yet had a clear ten minutes to actually send.
"You always say that." Viola pulled a face, fond and a little exasperated, and turned back to the mirror. "You never have opinions when it's about clothes. You have opinions about everything else, don't think I haven't noticed. But dress you up and you go quiet as a nun."
"I have opinions about clothes."
"You have opinions about whether clothes are practical. That's not the same thing." Viola said it lightly, no real edge in it, but Alicia felt the small, precise accuracy of it land anyway, the way Viola's observations about her always did — noticing something true and then setting it down without picking it up to examine what it might mean. It was, Alicia thought, the strange gift and limitation of Viola both: she saw people clearly and then moved on, because looking too long at anything wasn't really the point of looking.
They settled at the corner table with the good pastries after, and Viola talked — about the gallery thing, about a man she was deciding whether to be seen with, about her mother's latest attempt to summon her home for a cousin's wedding, delivered with the specific weary performance of someone who wanted credit for how burdensome her life of choices was. Alicia listened, asked the right questions in the right places, laughed where laughing was wanted, and noticed, somewhere under the noticing, that Viola had not once asked her a question that wasn't really about herself in disguise — how's work, meaning does it interfere with anything I need from you; you look tired, cara, meaning I need you at your best for me — and that this was not new information so much as something she was, for the first time in a long time, actually letting herself register instead of smoothing over.
"Thursday," Viola said, over the last of her coffee, "you'll come. Not just help me choose — come. I need someone in the room I actually like."
"I'll try," Alicia said, already hearing herself say yes before she'd finished the sentence.
"Don't try. Come. It's not the same weekend as anything, is it?" Viola waved a hand, already certain of the answer. "You don't really have anything on, do you?"
And there it was — the automatic yes rising up in her throat, well-worn, comfortable as an old coat, easier by far than explaining that she did, actually, have something on, something small and unglamorous and entirely hers: a boy she'd met at a fairground, chips in greasy paper, a film neither of them would really watch. It sounded like nothing next to a gallery opening. It sounded like nothing, and it was the thing Alicia actually wanted, and those two facts sat side by side in a way that made her feel, briefly, like she'd been caught at something.
"I do have plans, actually," she said. "Friday."
Viola blinked, genuinely startled, as though the sentence had come from someone else's mouth. "Plans plans, or Alicia plans, where you cancel them if I need you?"
The honesty of the question — asked without malice, just Viola's usual flat clarity, unaware of how much it revealed — sat Alicia back in her chair for a second.
"Plans plans," she said, and heard how strange and small and definite it sounded, coming from her.
"Oh." Viola studied her for a moment with real curiosity now, the performance dropping half an inch. "Who is he?"
"It's not — " Alicia stopped, because she didn't actually have a tidy word for what it was, and found she didn't want to reach for the nearest wrong one just to close the conversation quickly, the way she usually would. "A friend. Bailey."
"The loud one? From your little group?" Viola's eyebrows went up, not unkindly, just cataloguing. "Cara, no offence, but she seems like a lot."
"She is a lot," Alicia said, and something in her chest went warm and fierce and immediate, surprising her with its speed. "She's also the only person who's ever asked me what I want without needing the answer to be useful to her first."
She hadn't meant to say the second half out loud. It hung there over the pastry crumbs, plainer than she'd intended, and Viola looked at her for a long moment with an expression Alicia couldn't fully read — something between amusement and the faint, unfamiliar discomfort of being, however gently, seen through.
"Well," Viola said eventually, recovering into brightness. "Bring her Thursday, then, if she's that important. I'll behave."
It wasn't quite an apology. It also wasn't nothing, coming from Viola, and Alicia decided, for once, not to do the work of deciding which it had been.
She texted Bailey on the walk home, the evening going soft and gold over the rooftops.
Friday still on. Chippy and a bad film, exactly as advertised.
The reply came back fast, the way it always did.
Bailey: knew you'd cave to my superior plans eventually Bailey: also I've picked the film n its terrible on purpose, fair warning
Alicia laughed out loud on an empty street, unbothered by who might see her doing it, and typed back: I wouldn't expect anything else, and meant, underneath it, something larger and quieter that she wasn't ready to type — that saying no to Viola had cost her almost nothing in the end, once she'd actually done it; that she'd spent so many years being good at making herself convenient that she'd half forgotten convenient and wanted were different things; that somewhere in the last month, without her quite noticing it happen, she'd started keeping a small, stubborn corner of herself just for the things — for the person — she actually chose.
It wasn't a big thing, one Friday held onto against Viola's certainty that it wouldn't be.
Alicia noticed, somewhere around Thursday lunchtime, that she had refolded the same three jumpers twice.
This was not, she told herself, putting the kettle on for the second time in twenty minutes, a thing she did. She did not fuss. Fussing was for people with time to spare on outcomes that didn't especially matter, and she had spent most of her adult life being far too sensible for that particular hobby. And yet here she was, on a Thursday afternoon with nothing more demanding ahead of her than chips and a bad film with a friend, treating her wardrobe like it owed her an explanation.
She caught her own reflection in the kitchen window, faintly amused at herself. It wasn't the anxious kind of nervous, she realised — not the old, familiar hum of having to get something right so nobody would be disappointed in her. It sat lower than that, warmer, closer to the feeling of standing at the top of the Ferris wheel with the whole fair spread out gold beneath her. She hadn't felt this particular flavour of nervous in a long time. She wasn't sure she'd ever let herself feel it on purpose before.
She put the good jumper back on the hanger. Then took it back off the hanger. Then left it on the bed, undecided, and went to go find something for Bailey instead, because that felt like the more honest use of her nervous energy, if she was going to have some regardless.
She hadn't planned on a gift. It arrived as an idea the way most of her best ones did — sideways, while she was meant to be thinking about something else, standing in the little market near the flat on her way home from work, half-listening to a stallholder haggle with someone over secondhand records.
She wasn't looking for anything in particular. That was, she thought afterwards, probably why she found it.
It was a stall two down from the records — one of those cluttered tables of odds and ends, keyrings and charms and small painted trinkets that had no organising logic beyond having survived long enough to end up there. And there, wedged between a chipped ceramic robin and a keyring shaped like a teapot, was a small enamel charm of a scruffy little dog, mid-trot, one ear up and one ear down, painted with more enthusiasm than precision.
Alicia picked it up before she'd fully decided to.
This is now my son, Bailey had texted her, weeks ago, about a dog on a bus she would never see again, and Alicia had known even then, reading it in bed with the shark tucked under her arm, that under the joke was something Bailey meant every word of — a small, specific tenderness she wasn't quite practised at showing without hiding it inside a punchline first.
It wasn't much of a gift. It cost less than the coffee she'd had with Viola on Tuesday, would fit in a coat pocket, wasn't the kind of thing anyone would call impressive. Alicia turned it over in her palm and thought that this, exactly, was the point of it — that Bailey flinched at anything that felt like it was trying too hard, that came with strings or expectations attached, that asked to be thanked properly. This was small enough to just be a nice thing. Small enough to just be given.
"Fifty pence, love, if you want it," the stallholder said, not looking up from the record dispute two stalls over.
Alicia paid for it and put it in her coat pocket, and felt, absurdly, like she'd got away with something.
Bailey: oi wot time we doin this tmrw, gotta plan my chip strategy
Bailey: this is not a joke I have Opinions about chip shop order
Alicia, walking home with the little charm knocking gently against her keys in her pocket: Seven? And I'm not asking what the opinions are, I'm scared of the answer.
Bailey: wise. very wise. some things are better left mysteries
Bailey: also bring a jumper the film's shite and I plan on complaining loudly the whole time, might get us slung out
Alicia: I'll bring two jumpers. One for the cold, one for the shame of being with you.
Bailey: 🖤 harsh but fair
She read that last message twice on the doorstep before she let herself go inside, and did not examine, for once, why a single small black heart sent by someone who dropped exclamation points like punctuation could sit so warm and disproportionate in her chest.
That evening she found herself doing something she hadn't done in longer than she could easily place — sitting on her bed with the little dog charm balanced on her palm, turning over, quite deliberately, whether it said too much.
It was only a keyring. She reminded herself of that plainly, the way she reminded herself of most things — sensibly, evenly, no drama attached. It wasn't a declaration. It was a fifty-pence dog with one ear up and one ear down, bought because it had made her think of someone, which was, she supposed, generally what gifts were for.
But she also knew — had known since a Ferris wheel stopped at the top of its turn and left a sentence hanging unfinished in the carriage between them — that with Bailey, the small things were never really small. Bailey noticed the fifty-pence gestures more than the expensive ones, because the fifty-pence ones came without an angle. A shark shoved into her arms without ceremony, for puttin' up with me. A dog, mid-trot, with mismatched ears, for no reason except that Alicia had seen it and thought of her.
She wrapped it in a scrap of tissue paper from a drawer she never used and put it in the pocket of the jacket she'd already decided, twice now, to wear tomorrow, and made herself stop thinking about it, mostly, though not quite entirely, until she fell asleep.
She thought, right before she did, that she couldn't remember the last time getting something for someone else had felt like a gift to herself as well. Viola never made her feel that. Nobody, really, had in a long time.
Bailey did, without seeming to try at all.
Tomorrow, she thought, and let herself smile into the dark.
Bailey was waiting outside the chip shop when Alicia arrived, hands jammed in her jacket pockets, hair scraped up into buns slightly less severe than usual, like she'd tried twice and settled for the second attempt.
"You're late," Bailey said, which wasn't true, Alicia was two minutes early, but arguing the point felt like less fun than letting Bailey have it.
"I'm devastated. Will you ever forgive me."
"Dunno. Depends how good you are at decidin' chip orders under pressure." Bailey shoved the door open with her shoulder, holding it for Alicia with a flourish entirely at odds with the gesture's practicality. "Right. Rules. No askin' for just 'chips,' that's an insult to the chip, you gotta commit to a vision."
"I didn't know chips required a vision."
"Everythin' requires a vision, Alicia, that's basic life philosophy, that." Bailey was already leaning over the counter, rattling off an order with the ease of long practice — chips, a battered sausage she insisted Alicia try one bite of "for cultural reasons," curry sauce on the side because "mixin' it in is a crime against the chip and I won't hear otherwise" — and Alicia stood back and watched her do it, charmed in a way she didn't bother hiding anymore, not from herself at least.
They walked back to Bailey's with the paper parcels warm against their chests, the evening gone soft and blue around the streetlights, Bailey narrating a long and entirely unnecessary defence of curry sauce the whole way, and Alicia thought, not for the first time, that she could listen to this particular kind of nonsense indefinitely and not once get bored of it.
Bailey's flat was small and a bit chaotic in the specific way of somewhere lived in rather than displayed — a sofa with one cushion permanently askew, a shelf of records stacked more by mood than alphabet, a string of fairy lights pinned crooked along the top of the window that Bailey caught Alicia looking at and said, too quickly, "don't, I know, they're stupid, I just like 'em," in a tone that made it clear she'd been braced for someone to say so before Alicia ever had the chance.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were gonna."
"I was going to say I like them too." Alicia set the chips down on the low table and looked around properly — a framed photo of Bailey and who was probably her mum, younger, awkward-smiling; a small collection of nail varnishes lined up by colour on the windowsill; a sticky note on the fridge in Bailey's handwriting that just said don't forget, tuesday, in a way that gave away nothing and everything about the quiet mechanics of a life Alicia was only starting to be let into. "It suits you. All of it."
Bailey didn't quite know what to do with that, visibly, for a second — shrugged one shoulder, busied herself finding the remote, said "yeah, well," which Alicia was starting to understand functioned as Bailey's all-purpose translation for I don't know how to hold a compliment, please continue anyway.
The film, once it started, was exactly as bad as promised — a low-budget monster thing with dialogue that seemed actively hostile to the concept of subtext — and Bailey commentated over the top of it with real, committed outrage, at one point pausing it entirely to demand Alicia appreciate the physical impossibility of a particular death scene.
"That's not — that is not how necks work, Alicia, I refuse—"
"I believe you."
"You're not even lookin' at the screen."
"I'm looking at you being furious about a rubber monster. It's more entertaining than the film."
Bailey went a bit pink at that, unpaused the film with slightly too much focus on the remote, and Alicia let herself enjoy having landed it.
She gave her the charm somewhere in the film's second, even worse act, during a lull where the monster was doing something slow and unconvincing in the background.
"I got you something," she said, and heard herself do the thing she still hadn't fully unlearned — soften the gift before it even landed, in case it wasn't wanted. "It's stupid. Don't make a big thing of it."
"Now I have to make a big thing of it, you've basically dared me."
Alicia pulled the little tissue-wrapped bundle from her jacket pocket and put it in Bailey's palm without further ceremony, because ceremony, she suspected, would only make Bailey more nervous about it, not less.
Bailey unwrapped it carefully, which surprised her — she'd expected the paper torn off in one impatient motion, not this, fingers picking at the tissue like it mattered — and went very still when the little enamel dog sat revealed in her palm, one ear up, one ear down, mid-trot toward nothing in particular.
"This is now my son," Alicia said quietly, echoing it back to her.
Bailey didn't say anything for a second. When she looked up her eyes were bright in a way she didn't immediately try to blink away or joke past, which was, Alicia thought, its own small and significant thing.
"You remembered that." Not quite a question.
"I remember most things you tell me, Bailey."
"Christ." Bailey looked back down at the charm, turning it over once in her fingers, careful with it in a way that didn't match anything else about how she moved through the world. "Nobody — " She stopped, started again. "It's daft, i'n it, gettin' soppy over a fifty pence dog."
"You didn't get soppy over the dog. You got soppy because someone was paying attention." Alicia said it gently, no triumph in it, just truth laid down plain. "That's allowed to matter, even if it's small."
Bailey didn't answer that directly. She unhooked her keys from where they sat on the arm of the sofa and threaded the charm onto the ring right then, deliberate about it, and said, "stayin' on there forever now, this is, no arguments," in a voice that was trying hard to sound offhand and not quite landing it, and Alicia decided not to point that out either, and let her have the dignity of the attempt.
They ended up closer on the sofa than the film strictly required, Bailey's socked feet tucked up under her, shoulder warm against Alicia's, the last of the chips gone cold and forgotten in their paper between them. The monster met its inevitable, poorly rendered end. Neither of them was watching it happen.
"This was nice," Bailey said, low, some of the day's noise gone quiet out of her voice. "Better than nice. I don't — " She stopped, tried again, visibly working her way toward something the way she had on the Ferris wheel, the way Alicia had come to recognise as the shape Bailey's honesty took when it was finally winning out over her nerve. "I don't let people in much. You know that. An' I dunno when it happened with you, exactly, but it did, an' I—"
The wall behind them thumped, hard, twice, and a muffled voice hollered something about the volume that neither of them had actually turned up.
Bailey blinked, the moment snapping like a pulled thread, and let out a short, disbelieving laugh. "Oh my days. Denise. I will actually kill her."
"You should let her live. She's efficient, at least." Alicia was laughing too, helplessly, the tension of a second ago dissolving into something easier, though not entirely gone — still sitting warm and unfinished somewhere under her ribs, the way the top of a Ferris wheel had sat unfinished for three weeks already.
"You were sayin' something," she added, softer, giving the door back to Bailey without forcing her through it.
Bailey looked at her for a long moment — really looked, the way she had at the top of the wheel, eyes doing that same complicated flicker between courage and retreat — and then shook her head slightly, half a smile, half something more careful.
"Later," she said. "I will. Just — not with Denise thumpin' the wall like a woman possessed, ruins the mood a bit."
"Later, then," Alicia agreed, and let it sit there between them, a promise loosely made and not yet collected on, and found she didn't mind the waiting nearly as much as she once might have.
Bailey walked her down to the corner near the bus stop after, hands back in her pockets, keys jingling faintly with their new small addition.
"Thanks," Bailey said, at the corner, meaning more than the chips. "For the dog. And the — all of it, tonight."
"Thank you for the terrible film."
"Oi, it was a masterpiece, that."
"It was a war crime."
Bailey grinned, wide and real, gap-toothed and entirely unguarded, and for a second neither of them moved to say goodnight, the space between them small and charged and neither of them in any hurry to close it properly, until the bus rounded the corner and made the decision for them.
"Night, Alicia," Bailey said, soft, none of her usual performance left in it.
"Goodnight, Bailey."
Alicia got on the bus and didn't look back until she was seated, and when she did, Bailey was still standing at the corner, hands in her pockets, watching the bus go, and Alicia thought, watching her get smaller through the window, that whatever Bailey had almost said tonight was going to keep her up long after she got home — in the good way, this time. The right kind of awake.