Begin Again | ongoing - Chapter 25: Chapter 25

Sunday morning is Sunny's least favourite time of week. Everything opens so late and feels so dead; her day feels cut in half when nothing gets going until eleven instead of eight, but she still has to be at work by five. Even though she didn't get home until almost two a.m. – thanks to an inexplicable post-pub crowd looking for sweet treats, a late-arriving graveyard shifter, and then a bus that never showed – she's up early because her brain just won't shut off. Her two modes are to sleep in so late the day vanishes, or get up way too early considering the time she fell asleep, and today falls into the latter category because by eight o'clock, she's wide awake with a whirring mind, going over every aspect of yesterday.
That was, technically, her first date. It was a long date. She feels like she's just pounded ten shots of espresso thinking about it, her head and her heart totally wired, energy fizzing out of her body like she's eaten a whole packet of popping candy – and she's also kind of exhausted, probably because she's only had five hours' sleep and her ideal is seven to eight. She was so distracted for her whole shift that Michelle asked several times if she was alright because she made the wrong drink, or she got lost in a daydream while scrubbing out the milk frothing jug. Michelle thought something was wrong but her worry swiftly turned to amusement when she realised that Sunny was still riding a high from a great time with Viv.
In typical dreary April Sunday fashion, the rain starts sheeting down the moment Sunny decides it's time to drag herself out of the flat. A literal storm comes out of nowhere – the sky turns thick and black, the heavy clouds practically pulsating as the rain pours, smacking the windows and slapping the pavement and pummelling the people outside who didn't think to bring an umbrella when minutes ago, the sky was merely dreary grey.
"Fuck that," Sunny mutters. It's not like she had a destination in mind. Sometimes she gets a little lost trying to fill her days before work, those awkward hours when all of her friends are working because they have normal hours, sociable daylight hours – not today, of course, because most of her friends don't work weekends. She has always liked the late shift but maybe it's time to branch out? The thought of working a regular nine to five, even if it's at Percolatte, makes her feel a bit sick, but it is in equal parts vaguely appealing. She'd had the same schedule as her friends. The same as—
No, she is not thinking this because of Viv. Absolutely not. That would be ridiculous, to want to change the hours she's worked for years because of a girl. Not that Viv is just a girl.
Sunny redirects that train of thought with a shake of her head. She grabs a couple of the discount books she got from The Book Nook the other day and as she's about to settle onto the sofa under the window, the kitchen phone starts ringing its shrill ring, and she thumps into the counter with an oof when she lunges for it.
"Hello?"
"Hi Sunny, it's me." It's Delilah, with that soft and thoughtful voice. "You picked up quick. Did you sense I was about to call?"
"I don't think I've quite reached that kind of mindreading level," Sunny says, "but I happened to be close to the phone and in want of a friend." She scoots onto a stool and clasps her free hand over her rib, which she's pretty sure she bruised in her leap for the phone.
"Oh, perfect! I was going to ask if you wanted to come over? I'd suggest going out but the weather's so foul and I'd rather watch it from the comfort of my sofa than in a café surrounded by soggy strangers."
"There's nothing I'd rather do," Sunny says, the day taking shape right before her eyes. She mentally checks the bus times and calculates and time it'll take to travel to Sandy Hill and climb the damn thing and then decides that it's worth the price of a taxi. "I'll be there in ten."
"Wonderful. See you soon! Oh, and Sunny? If you have any romance novels lying around that you wouldn't mind parting with, could you bring one or two with you? I seem to have read everything in my flat."
"Only you, Delilah," Sunny says with a laugh.
She doesn't know how people ever get to the end of their pile of books when hers seems to grow ten times faster than she can read through it. It might have something to do with the fact that any time she pops into Oxfam – which is most weeks – she comes away with at least three new reads, yet at the moment, she's barely reading one book a week. It's sad, really, considering how voraciously she consumed books as a child. Adulthood has got in the way, even though she doesn't feel like an adult.
Sunny may be turning twenty-five this year – which is fucking horrifying when in her head she's still twenty-three – but she doesn't feel like an adult. Not in the way her parents were adults at her age. When Martha was twenty-five, she and Sylvia had been together for five years already; they were engaged and living together. It was different back then, she tells herself. Being twenty-five in 2000 is totally incomparable with being twenty-five in 1964. Marriage is far from her mind when she still feels like a kid trying adulthood on for size. She's not sure it fits right, not yet. Give it a few more years, really wear out the trial.
The rain pours harder as she gathers up a selection of books for Delilah, only choosing ones she's already read and can therefore vouch for: every shade of romance from cute and dorky to steamy smut is represented in the stack she loads into a rucksack, and a couple that don't fit into the usual tropes of the genre – books with swoonworthy romances that aren't the star of the show. Sometimes Sunny feels like a fraud, loving love so much when she's never experienced it for herself. She swoons over fictional characters – even the cishet couples, which make up an embarrassing percentage of the books she reads – even though it's all foreign to her.
Until now.
Now there is something. Someone. Sunny feels the need to delve back into her books and take notes this time.
There is something slightly magical about a rainy Sunday. It's a hangover feeling from Sunny's childhood, when a downpour at the end of the week meant indoor activities with her parents, the three of them curled up in quiet company reading together in companionable silence; playing board games or endless rounds of rummy; doing the crossword while preparing a full on Sunday roast. Martha wasn't always there – emergencies don't stop for the weekend, she'd say if she got called away, kissing her wife and her daughter as she left – but nothing could tear Sylvia or Sunny from home on a drizzly weekend.
Those days may feel like forever ago now but Sunny can recreate the feeling with Delilah, who is the human embodiment of home, creating a sense of comfort and peace wherever she goes. She is always happy to wrap up in a blanket and read, only getting up to refill her tea or offer up a biscuit and though her flat doesn't have that cut-off remoteness that Sunny's family home has, it seems to block out all unwanted noise as though there's a force field around the place. Sunny never hears the general clatter of Delilah's neighbours or the rumble of engines. It's like stepping into a little patch of heaven, like this flat in this building on this hill was carved out as a sanctuary, even when Sunny arrives soaking wet from the run between the back of a grubby taxi and the front doorstep, which isn't protected from the elements.
By the time she's rung the intercom and Delilah has buzzed her up, she's frozen and chattering and soaked through, looking like a particularly soggy pre-teen with her hair plastered to her face and her cerulean hoodie turned navy by the torrent outside.
"Oh my gosh, you look like a drowned pixie!" Delilah cries out, pulling Sunny in and unzipping her hoodie for her, tugging it off and replacing it with a warm, fluffy towel because Delilah is never not prepared. If she didn't already have towels fresh out of the dryer, she probably took one look at the weather forecast and hung some up on the heated rail.
"It's so gross out there," Sunny says with a shiver. She scrubs the towel over her hair to squeeze out the drips and unzips her rucksack to find that her books have been spared the rain. Delilah's face lights up at the sight and she claps her hands in glee, dropping to her knees to look through the selection.
"They're yours to keep; I've read them all already."
"Are you sure? That's a lot, Sunny." She looks up, both hands tucking her hair behind her ears. She's switched her black and blue box braids for loose curls that sit on her shoulders, a thick fringe that brushes the tops of her glasses – she spends more on wigs than Sunny spends on books, and Sunny can't bear to think of how much money she has sunk into her passion for stories.
"Of course I'm sure. I won't be reading them again. Think of it as reimbursement for the years you've spent picking up my pieces each time I implode on your doorstep." She runs the towel over her hair again and slips off her wet shoes inside the doorway, and her socks are damp enough that she has to shed those too.
"What else are friends for but putting each other back together and building each other up?" Delilah stands, holding the book she's chosen to start today. She rifles through a wicker basket beside the sofa and presses a pair of socks into Sunny's hand. Not any socks, but the thick, fluffy kind with pompoms. "Another important friend business," she says. "Friends don't let friends walk around with cold wet feet."
In the space of ten minutes, Sunny's in dry clothes with warm feet and she and Delilah have taken up their usual positions on the sofa, occupying a corner each as they cradle hot tea. The radio is on in the background, a low burble of BBC Radio 3 that doesn't intrude with its classical music and smooth-voiced presenters. It's the perfect backdrop, almost drowned out by the rain. It's really slatting down now, pouring so hard that Sunny can't tell what's the sky and what is the skyline, all the shades of grey running together like a watercolour left out in a storm.
"What's new with you?" Sunny asks, head bent over her chamomile tea. "I feel like so much is going on at the moment, I'm struggling to keep track of everything." She shakes her head as though shaking off the past ten days or so. "How're you?"
"I'm good, I'm good," Delilah says. She's staring at her mug but Sunny can see the hint of a smile playing on her lips, so she reaches out a foot and prods Delilah's calf.
"Come on, spill. What is it?"
Delilah lifts her head and tilts it to one side, lifting a shoulder in mild confusion as she says, "I met a girl?"
It comes out like a question, like she isn't sure if that's what really happened. Sunny nearly throws a cushion at her.
"Delilah! Why is that not the first fucking thing you said when I walked through that door?"
"Because you were cold and wet!" Delilah's laugh ripples the surface of her tea. She blows on it for a few long seconds before taking a sip. The steam fogs up her glasses but she makes no effort to clear them.
"Um, are you gonna tell me about her? Do I have to beg for details? Do I have to bribe you with more books? Because I will, you know. Tell me everything and I'll bring you every book I own."
She rolls her eyes as her smile grows. "It might be nothing. It's only been a couple of days since we met."
"Yet you clearly like her already else you wouldn't be acting all coy right now. I bet I'd burn my hand if I touched your cheek right now." Sunny reaches out to try but Delilah swats her away with a chuckle.
"Stop it."
"How did you meet her? What's her name? What makes you like her?"
"I went to get my helix pierced," she says, pushing her hair behind her ear to show off two new hoops on the curve of her ear, the silver bright against her deep brown skin, "and Trent asked if I'd mind letting the new girl do it for half price."
"You do love a bargain."
"Mmm," Delilah hums. "I do love a bargain. So of course I said that was fine, and oh my goodness, Sunny, when I tell you that the most intoxicating woman I've ever seen came out of the back room, wow."
Sunny revels in this side of Delilah, which doesn't come out much. The grinning, doe-eyed, love-struck girl who is a sucker for a girl with piercings and tattoos, who once went on a date with a girl purely because she liked the astrological tat that crawled from her wrist to the crook of her elbow.
"What's her name?"
"Ionie," Delilah says with such reverence, it's like she's speaking the name of a deity. "She has all these amazing tattoos up her arms and a septum piercing – I never realised how sexy a septum piercing could be, oh my goodness – and she's a Virgo. And she's the only other Black girl I've met in Black Sands. Turns out her mum moved here from Jamaica too, a few years after my parents."
"Oh, wow. So you guys are, like, meant to be." Sunny feels her smile grow at the thought. She adores Delilah and only wants for her to be happy, and if that means being in a relationship then she will champion that with all her heart.
"That's what I said."
"Delilah! Oh my god, you didn't." She claps a hand over her mouth in second-hand embarrassment, her face heating up at the thought of the potential fallout
"I did." Delilah covers her hot cheeks with her hands, eyes wide as she shakes her head. "It was a joke, or at least it was meant to be a joke, but then she said that we'd have to give it a go and see."
"Holy shit." Sunny sits a little straighter, shock pushing her body up. "Why did you even joke that in the first place?"
Delilah laughs quietly to herself, a rumble that originates deep in her lungs, as though remembering an inside joke. "When I pulled my hair back so she could get to my ear, she saw my tattoo"—she pulls her hair back now to show Sunny, even though she knows exactly which tattoo Delilah's talking about, the little Cancer symbol that she went with her to get four years ago—"and she showed me hers, which is the same but Virgo, obviously."
"Nice." Sunny pulls a waffle knit blanket off the back of the sofa and drapes it over her lap, snuggling into the thick material. She can't abide English weather, so unpredictable and changeable. Just yesterday it was warm enough that she wore shorts and a t-shirt on the seashore for hours and now she's chilly indoors in a tracksuit bottoms and a jumper. "How'd you know she's gay?"
Delilah shrugs, lips pouted. "I didn't. Not for sure. But I got, you know, vibes." She wiggles her fingers, jazz hands in miniature. "Plus she had gay shoes."
"What're gay shoes?" Sunny asks, wondering if they're something she needs to invest in. "Are those, like, rainbow trainers with I love girls written across them?"
"Close. More like sturdy black lace-up boots," Delilah says.
Sunny frowns. "What's gay about those?"
"Like I said, it was the vibes. Anyway, I wasn't even thinking about asking her out, I was just being awkward. She's the one who asked me out."
Since when did queer dating in a place like Black Sands get so easy? Is this what Sunny missed in the year she lost? The place has opened its mind with the new millennium and she loves it, but it's disorientating.
"Damn, Lilah," she says with a laugh. "How long did you know the girl before you had her begging at your feet? Sounds like you got pretty close in, what, ten minutes?"
Delilah grins. "I did stay a little longer than a helix piercing should take." Her finger goes to the new piercing, running the pad over the silver loops. "While she was preparing the piercing, she was talking about how she's training to be a tattoo artist too, so she asked if I knew anyone who'd want to be a guinea pig." She pulls up the sleeve of her jumper to reveal a forearm wrapped in clingfilm, under which Sunny can make out a simple black line drawing.
At first she thinks it's a mountain range or ocean waves until she turns her head and realises it's a minimalist nude, a single line that depicts the half silhouette of a woman with a hint of breast and the curve of a hip. It's mesmerising. The longer Sunny stares at it, the more impressed she is.
"It's awesome. Very subtle. Very sexy. If that's what you asked for," she says, "then she definitely knew you're gay."
"She showed me a book of designs she'd created and said she'd do it for free right then and there if I agreed to it." Delilah smiles down at her new tattoo before dropping her sleeve. "So of course I agreed."
Sunny winks. "Another bargain."
"Exactly."
"Maybe I need to go and meet this hot new girl of yours and get a cheap tattoo." Rolling up her sleeves, she twists her arms this way and that, examining her pale skin. "How painful is it?"
"It's not bad. Not as painful as the one behind my ear. That one really stung, like several wasps decided I was a tasty snack. This one was more like a vengeful cat."
Sunny purses her lips in thought before pushing that train aside to return to the one in the station. "So when's your date?"
"Tonight."
"Are you excited?"
"And nervous." She rubs the back of her neck and finishes her tea, pushing her mug across the coffee table. "She seems incredibly cool. She might lose interest when she realises the only things I can talk about are astrophysics, astrology, and romance novels."
"Or, more likely, she'll realise you're incredibly beautiful and smart and talented and she'll start planning the second date within half an hour of the first one because she'll already know she needs to spend more time with you."
"That's sweet," Delilah murmurs. "Thank you."
"Do you know what you're doing?"
"Nope. She said she'd pick me up at seven, so if you don't hear from me by tomorrow morning, tell the police to question Ionie from Blank Canvas. I don't get murdery vibes from her, but you never can tell. Don't they say that serial killers are usually attractive and charming?"
"And they're almost always middle-aged white guys. How often do you hear about serial killers who turn out to be young Black women?" Sunny raises her eyebrows in question and Delilah's expression relaxes.
"Never. Though she could be the first."
"And that would really fucking suck." Sunny squeezes Delilah's hand. "But I doubt it. The slim chance of getting murdered is not a good enough reason to be scared to go on a date with a girl you're attracted to."
Delilah's smile grows into a grin and she pokes Sunny's thigh. "You know something?"
"What?"
"That's almost exactly what I said to you when Viv asked you out, and look how that's going." Her smile dips. "Wait, it's going okay, isn't it? Sorry, I keep forgetting about the whole multiverse thing."
"It's going well," Sunny says. She recounts everything that's happened since she last saw Delilah, which she realises is quite a lot – she hasn't seen her since the day after Lickety Split, which feels like an age ago already. As she finishes the tale of the seven hour date, her cheeks start to hurt from smiling so hard and her tummy is all aflutter as she says, "I think I really like her. It's weird. It's also weird how unweird it is. I think it should feel weirder, considering everything that's happened, but it's starting to feel normal."
"You're settling in," Delilah says.
"Yeah." She pats the sofa cushions and says, "I feel rooted here. At first I felt like I didn't belong and this was some temporary, floaty thing. But now it's solid and real and I think I'm in love."
Even though they must have had this conversation before, even though Sunny is living through things her friends lived through a year ago, Delilah squeals with glee and pulls Sunny into an enveloping hug.
"That's fantastic, Sun. See, it's destiny, fate, whatever you want – the universe knows what it's doing. It knows you two belong together. Which"—she casually flips her hair over her shoulder—"I knew all along. I promise you, the first time I met Viv I knew this was going to be serious."
That doesn't scare Sunny anymore. She isn't terrified of the thought of Viv being the one. It's oddly comforting. It feels like safety and security and she craves another date, she wants to do this with Viv – tuck up on the sofa with her and talk for hours on end, fill her brain with the little titbits of knowledge she'll have learnt since they've been together.
That's something she should tell Viv, probably. It's not like she has to wait to find out if she feels the same. But she won't do it yet. Not quite. They still need to finish that game of Monopoly first, and Sunny needs to figure out what they did for their second date so she can recreate it.
The kettle is boiled again. More tea is poured. Biscuits are found and tipped onto a plate and shared as she and Delilah fall into their easy pattern of chatter; their tea goes cold as they dig out books and fall into their stories. Sunny picks up a new book, one she found in the bargain section, and realises it's a sapphic romance. Usually when she reads she can picture the characters, creating these new people in her head, but not this time.