Third time this month. I counted on my fingers over the kettle like a woman who has her life together, which I do not, not at 8.12 on a Sunday, and not when there is a pair of size 10 trainers parked by the radiator as if they pay rent.
Same boy. Callum. Or Cal, if you are Mia and you have decided he is staying for breakfast again. He makes better coffee than she does. That is not a compliment to him so much as a warning to the rest of us. Sophie has not changed the locks. I give it a fortnight.
How we got here
The first time was almost charming. Mia came in loud at some stupid hour, laughing in that way she does when she wants the flat to know she has won the night. I was half asleep with a silk wrap on and last night’s mascara doing its own thing. I heard the kettle. I heard a man’s voice trying to be quiet and failing. I heard Sophie’s bedroom door click shut like a judgement.
Morning after number one he was gone by nine. He rinsed his mug. He said hi in the hallway without doing that sheepish shuffle men do when they have been caught in someone else’s kitchen. Fine. We have all been that person. I have been that person this week.
Second time he used the good towels. I noticed because I am petty and because I bought those towels and because there was a smear of someone else’s moisturiser on the white one. Mia said she told him not to. She said it while eating my yoghurt. So.
Third time is how you know it is not a story anymore. It is a situation.
The coffee problem
Look. I can live with a lot. Thin walls. A stranger’s boxers on the bathroom hook. The smell of a man who does not live here using our shower gel like it is complimentary hotel stock. What I cannot live with is bad coffee, and Mia makes bad coffee. She treats the Aeropress like it personally offended her at school.
Callum does not. He measures. He waits. He does that little tap on the counter that people who think they are good at something always do. Sunday just gone I walked in and there were three cups out. One for her. One for him. One sitting there like a peace offering I had not asked for.
I drank it. Obviously I drank it. I am not going to war before concealer.
Sophie came through in her robe, saw the third mug, and did the face. You know the face. The PR face. The one she uses on clients who have posted the wrong story. Tight smile. Eyes doing maths. She said morning to him like he was a delivery driver who had already been told to leave it in the hall.
He said morning back. Warm. Easy. The sort of easy that makes a flat dangerous.
Sophie is this close
Sophie works in fashion PR and lives like the communal areas are a showroom. She wipes the hob when nobody has even cooked. She buys flowers for the table and then gets quietly furious when someone uses the vase for leftover Prosecco. She is the reason we still have a plunger that works.
She has not said the sentence yet. The sentence is: he is here too much. She is circling it. She did the inventory instead. His toothbrush in the cup. His charger in the socket by the sofa. A hoodie on the back of Mia’s chair that has started to look like it belongs to the furniture.
In the group chat, which is still called who’s coming home tonight even though the answer is increasingly him, Sophie sent a photo of the trainers by the radiator. No caption. Mia replied with three laughing emojis and a heart. I replied with a single full stop. That is all the diplomacy I had in me before noon.
I do not hate him. That is the annoying part. He is fine. Better than fine if I am being honest, and I am always being honest when it makes the piece better. Tall enough. Good hands. Laughs at Mia’s jokes even when they are not jokes. Asks if anyone else wants tea, which is how you can tell he was raised properly or at least trained.
The problem is never the first night. The problem is the third. The third is when a guest starts putting his mug back on the same shelf. The third is when you stop introducing yourself and start stepping round him to get to the bin.
Mia thinks this is cute
Mia thinks everything is cute until it is not. She is messier than me, which is saying something, and I say that with love and a certain amount of side-eye. She will do anything for a feeling. A night. A boy who remembers how she takes her coffee even if he does not remember the name of the street we live on.
Parsons Green is not cheap and it is not big. Two bedrooms that pretend they are three if you count the box room Sophie uses as a wardrobe. We did not interview for a fourth person. We interviewed for each other, badly, after too much wine, and decided we could survive one another.
I asked her, properly, while he was in the shower and the pipes were doing that awful knocking thing they do. Is this a thing. She shrugged. She said she likes how she is with him. She said he does not do the disappearing act. She said it like that was rare enough to justify the towels.
Maybe it is. I have slept with men for worse reasons than reliable coffee and a morning that does not feel like a crime scene. I am not going to sit here and play house mother. I will sit here and notice, though. Noticing is free. Noticing is also content.
What the third time actually looks like
It looks like this. You wake up and there is a second toothbrush humming in the glass. You go to make tea and someone has already boiled the kettle and left it with an inch of water, which is a small violence. You hear two voices through a door that used to only have one. You put music on in the kitchen so you do not have to decide whether you are allowed to be in your own flat at full volume.
It looks like Sophie wiping the side he has just wiped, because she does not trust a man she did not hire. It looks like Mia coming out in his T-shirt and calling it an accident. It looks like me checking my phone at the table so I have somewhere to put my face.
He offered to get milk. That was the moment Sophie’s eye twitched. Getting milk is how they nest. Getting milk is how a Saturday night becomes a drawer.
I said we were fine for milk. We were not fine for milk. I would rather do a Tesco run in last night’s makeup than watch him learn our fridge layout.
I give it a fortnight
I said that out loud to Sophie while we were both pretending to look at our emails. She did not disagree. That is how you know I am right.
A fortnight is long enough for him to leave a book. Long enough for his name to start appearing on the Deliveroo order. Long enough for Mia to use the word we about the sofa. After that you are not hosting. You are absorbing.
Could I be wrong. Of course. He could get bored. She could get bored. Someone prettier could happen on a Thursday in Soho and the trainers vanish and we all pretend we never learned his coffee order. That is the usual ending. I have written that ending on myself more than once.
Or he stays. He learns the bin day. He starts having opinions about the thermostat. Sophie finds a locksmith. I write the piece anyway, because that is what I do when the flat gives me a plot.
People love to act shocked that women clock this stuff. Please. We have been doing the maths since the first time a boy hung his coat on the wrong peg and nobody moved it. Frequency. Towels. Milk. The way he says see you later instead of thanks for having me. It is all there if you are paying attention, and I am always paying attention. Being nobody is the fear. Missing the story is how you get there.
What I am not going to do
I am not going to have a big sit-down with a shared Google Doc and house rules in bold. We are twenty seven, not a student hall. I am not going to tell Mia who she can bring home. I bring people home. I have been worse. I have been louder. I have used the good towels myself and then denied it with a straight face.
I will not pretend I am above the gossip either. Sunday roast is going to be vicious. I can already hear it. Who he is. What he does. Whether the coffee is a personality or just a useful trick. Whether Mia actually likes him or likes the version of herself that exists when there is a man laughing in her doorway.
If you live with other women you already know this bit. Nobody wants to be the nag. Everybody wants to be the one who saw it coming. Those two instincts share a bathroom in this flat and they are both out of hot water.
Anyway
He is here again as I write this. I can hear the shower. Mia has put on the playlist she only puts on when she wants the morning to feel like a film. Sophie has gone for a walk that is definitely a walk and not an escape. I am at the table with his leftover coffee, which is still better than hers, which is still the only reason the locks have not changed.
A fortnight. Mark it. If the trainers are still by the radiator in two weeks I will update you, and I will not be kind about it. If they are gone I will still update you, because disappearances make better captions than slow invasions, even if the slow ones are more honest.
For now I am putting the good towels in my room. Petty. Correct. And if he asks where they went I will smile and tell him we ran out. We did not run out. We adapted. That is what you do when the same boy comes home again and nobody has quite decided what that means yet.
