Because She Loves Me by Mark Edwards

damp hair cold on my hot skin as she trailed kisses down my torso.
    Before she left, she walked round the flat taking photos with her phone: the rumpled bed, the kitchen, which was full of empty wine bottles, the sink piled high with washing-up, even the bathroom.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
    ‘You’re going to think I’m a real sap, but I want to be able to picture you here when I’m not with you.’
    ‘What, among all the mess?’
    She put her arm around me and held the phone up to take a snap of us together.
    ‘Say sausages.’
    She took the snap then told me she needed the loo before she went. I sat and flicked through the newspaper, becoming absorbed in the latest news about the Dark Angel serial killer who had been found guilty of the murder of twenty-three elderly people. There was a photo of the guy who had discovered what she’d done, a former neighbour of hers. He said he hoped she would rot in jail and then burn in hell. Not for the first time, I was glad my neighbours were agreeable.
    Charlie came back into the room, smelling of perfume. For a moment, she was caught in the sunlight coming through the window.
    ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked.
    ‘Just . . . because.’ I stood up and pulled her close to me, peering into her eyes, pretending to examine her. ‘Are you real?’
    She squirmed away. ‘What do you mean, you idiot?’
    ‘You seem too good to be true.’
    I had expected her to treat what I was saying jokily but she was surprisingly serious. ‘I’m really not that good.’
    Apart from some of the more intense moments in bed, most of our exchanges over the past week had been light-hearted and playful. This new gravity took me aback.
    ‘I was only messing around,’ I said and, after staring at the carpet thoughtfully for a few long seconds, she finally smiled.
    ‘I just want you to know that—’ she began. ‘Oh, this is crazy.’
    I took her hands. ‘What is?’
    ‘Nothing. I’m being stupid, that’s all. Ignore me. I’m about to start my period and it’s making me feel a bit girly and emotional. Please stop me before I say something I regret.’
    We hugged and I didn’t want to let her go. But Sasha needed me, and it was time I stopped being such a bad friend.

    As I was about to leave, my doorbell rang. It was Kristi, my cleaner.
    ‘I completely forgot you were coming,’ I said.
    Kristi was from Albania, a slim woman in her early twenties with black hair cut in a bob, dark eyes and a prominent scar that ran down her left cheek. Of course, I’d never asked her about the scar, though I wondered about it in the same way I’d wondered what she would be like in bed when she had first started working for me. I’d hired her during a period when I was crazily busy with work, last spring, and had got used to her weekly visits, during which she mostly did my ironing, half-heartedly. She wasn’t a very good cleaner, but I liked her and imagined a terrible background in which she sent home the pennies I gave her to a poverty-stricken mother, so I kept her on, always paying her slightly too much and telling her to keep the change.
    ‘You want me to go?’ she asked.
    ‘No, no, come in.’ I glanced around the flat. It was a mess and I noticed how Kristi wrinkled her nose. What did it smell of? Perfume? Sex?
    ‘I will tidy up, yes?’ she said, frowning.
    ‘Yes please. Let yourself out, OK?’
    I followed her gaze. There was a black, lacy bra on the sofa.
    ‘Um . . . Maybe just do the dusting and hoovering? I’ll tidy up later.’
    I left her looking disapprovingly around the room. It was weird. Before meeting Charlie I thought Kristi was hot. Now she looked rather plain and uninteresting.

    ‘Oh God, Andrew. Why am I such a cliché?’
    ‘You’re not. Well, you are, but these things don’t feel like clichés when you’re living them, do they?’
    ‘That’s almost wise.’
    We were sitting in The Commercial, opposite Herne Hill station, pints