Someone else was still naked. I am not being cute about it. Proper naked. Tea towel situation at best. He was stirring oats like this was a normal Tuesday and I was just a girl with eyeliner down her face taking notes between bites.
I was.
How we even got here
Look, it was not meant to be a house party. That is what everyone always says and it is always a lie. Mia sent a pin at ten past nine. Sophie said she was staying in. I put mascara on anyway because I am constitutionally incapable of staying in when a location drop appears in the chat.
The flat was in Hackney Wick. One of those warehouse conversions that photographs better than it lives. Fairy lights that had given up in one corner. A speaker balanced on a stack of hardbacks. Someone’s bike in the hall like a threat.
We arrived fashionably late which in London means the good wine was gone and the cheap stuff had already started making people sincere. I hate sincerity after midnight. It is sticky.
There was a boy in a navy jumper who kept appearing at my elbow with a look that said he had decided something about me. I had not decided anything about him yet. That usually comes later, if it comes at all.
The bit that stopped being a night out
At some point the music got quieter and the people got louder. Classic inversion. A girl I vaguely knew from a different party started crying about a man who was in the next room talking to someone else. I gave her a cigarette I did not want and a look I did. She thanked me like I had performed surgery.
Mia disappeared upstairs with a photographer. Of course she did. Sophie texted from home: are you alive. I sent back a photo of the ceiling because the ceiling was spinning a bit and I thought that was funny.
It was not that funny in the morning.
I ended up on a windowsill with the navy jumper boy. His name was Tom or Tommo or something that wanted to be shorter than it was. He told me he worked in “content.” I nearly left. Then he said it without the pitch and I stayed, which tells you everything about my standards after 2am.
We kissed because the alternative was talking about his start up and I have a hard limit on that. His mouth tasted like warm beer and mint that was losing. Fine. I have worked with worse.
I am not going to do the whole play by play. You know how it goes. Hallway. Then a room that belonged to someone who collected vinyl and regret. Coat still half on because taking it off felt like a meeting I had not agreed to yet.
He was fine. I was better. That is not arrogance, that is just the notes.
Breakfast like a hostage situation
Sleep happened in pieces. I woke up because someone was laughing in a way that meant they had found a second wind and I had not. My phone was on 7%. The notes app was already open from where I had started typing in the dark like a freak.
porridge
naked man oats
whose flat????
mia missing one shoe
Downstairs the kitchen had become a canteen. A girl in last night’s dress was cutting bananas with a bread knife. A boy I did not recognise was looking for coffee like it owed him money. And there he was. Tom or Tommo. Bare as the day. Holding a wooden spoon.
“Protein,” he said, when he saw me looking.
“That is porridge,” I said.
“Same family.”
I sat down because my feet hurt and because leaving would have required finding my other earring. Someone put a bowl in front of me. It was actually good. Slightly too much salt. I ate it anyway and typed with one thumb.
Sophie would have hated this kitchen. Too many strangers touching the cutlery. Mia would have called it atmosphere. I called it copy.
The naked man offered me honey. I took it. I am not above honey at 7:41am in a stranger’s warehouse.
The inventory
Here is what I had on me:
One heel. The other one turned up under the sofa later, next to a lighter that was not mine and a hair clip that might have been.
A dead phone that came back just long enough to show sixteen messages in the flat chat. Sophie: if you are dead I am keeping your coats. Mia: a blurry photo of a rooftop I did not remember agreeing to.
Lipstick in the bottom of my bag, the good one, somehow unharmed. I put it on in the reflection of the microwave because there was no clean mirror and I refuse to face daylight unfinished.
The boy asked if I wanted his number. I said I already had it, which was a lie, then I took it anyway. Not because I was going to use it. Because leaving empty handed feels like bad manners when you have already seen someone cook oats with no clothes on.
Leaving is the real skill
Getting out of a house party that has turned into breakfast is a specific talent. You cannot do the Irish goodbye at that hour. Too much light. Too many people who now know what your face looks like without the club to hide it.
I found Mia on the stairs putting on one shoe. She looked annoyingly fine. “You wrote it already, didn’t you,” she said.
“Half.”
“Good. I am starving for a Pret that is not this.”
We left the vinyl boy a note that said thanks for the floor. I signed it with a kiss because I am who I am. Outside Hackney Wick was doing that pale Saturday thing where the canals look clean and the people who went to bed at midnight look superior.
I do not want to be them. I want to be the girl eating porridge next to a naked stranger and still making the last train of thought onto the page before the battery dies.
What I kept
The story, obviously.
The honey on my thumb that I licked off in the Uber like a child.
A photo I should not have taken of the kitchen, faces cropped, because the light through that mean little window made everyone look like they had survived something minor and glamorous.
Sophie opened the door in Parsons Green in a clean jumper and looked me up and down like a customs officer.
“Breakfast?” she said.
“Porridge,” I said. “Do not ask.”
She asked.
I told her the short version and saved the rest for this. That is the arrangement. She gets the headline. You get the bit where a man with no trousers on tried to explain macros while I was still wearing last night.
I showered. I wrote the other half. I did my mouth again in the bathroom mirror because maintenance is not vanity when it is also the job.
The party did not end. It just changed temperature. That is the only version of London nights I trust. The ones that refuse to die on schedule and then have the cheek to feed you.