The person in bed beside me feels like a stranger. Her sleeping form, chest rising and falling in the dark and the sound of her breathing barely audible over the rain battering against the window. In the morning the ground will be soaked, the skies like iron, London commuters shaking umbrellas outside red busses and cursing. The person in bed beside me hates the rain but I remember a woman who doesn't, one who will let the drops soak her clothes to transparency and look at me with wet eyelashes and rile me to murder. There is a creak in the hall as the house settles.

In the morning, all the umbrellas in the house are missing and the stranger in my bed blames me.

------

He infuriates her as much as she infuriates him, the biting back and forth, the inability to be in the same room together for too long before the storm between them crackles and one of them bows out, fearful that someone will notice. She boasts she will cook her partner a chicken that weekend. He dismisses her out of hand: I'd rather be poisoned than eat what you make. She'd love to poison him, she says and she has won this round.

When did that fury, that rumble of anger, become something else entirely? A different emotion, but one that scares her more, somehow.

She goes home to her partner, three umbrellas hidden in her handbag. When she shops, every chicken in the supermarket has been sold. The bare shelves taunt her. Her partner cannot understand how there is no chicken. He throws a plate and she screams until she's white in the face.

-------

We're both sick of chicken, this stranger and I. The freezer is stuffed to the gills. She tells me she is becoming vegetarian.

I cannot find it within myself to care. We tiptoe around each other in the house, the furniture holding itself stiff. Apprehension makes the paint peel from the walls. Toast burns in the toaster of its own accord and the towels do not dry on the rail. Fight builds in me and I see it struggling to escape in my tense knuckles, my aching neck, my rounded shoulders.

The stranger makes the decision for me. I am repentant, a coward. She leaves and I stay.

------

Her time is up. The sands of the hourglass have run out. Her mother will laugh. Can't keep a man, can you? She hasn't found a man who can be kept. The one she wants, the one she fears, is much more than that. A drunken bargain, woken from a threat (I wouldn't marry you if I were forty and desperate) (I'd marry you, forty and desperate. Then, I'd have won). She'd spin him like a hurricane and in return he'd throw her to the wolves. Her equal, her rival.

But this man is white faced and drawn this morning.

An argument with the missus?

She left. Go on, gloat, you with your man under your thumb.

A spark, a moment of pure fire.

Actually...