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As they huddled together on an inner city street early one morning, a man said to a woman. "What do you think about moving in?” A stranger wouldn’t have heard her response. It may not have been much more than, Hmmm, we’ll talk tomorrow. Her voice was low and hushed and the street was full, full of friends and lovers and drunks. She might have wanted to believe him but he was drunk and she knew that when he was drunk, he said things. The same way he said things in the morning with short-lived conviction and childlike sincerity, meant for nothing beyond that very moment. Everything he said was an act, every expression on his face has a purpose.

”I love you babe” he’d say over morning cigarettes.

“You’re beautiful”

That night however he’d fill her with lies about where he’d lost his phone, why he didn’t call and how he got that cut. Only a few hours earlier, in a bar just across the park from where they stood, a beer in his hand, a vodka in each of hers, he’d made fun of something she had done in bed, describing it in humiliating detail to an audience of his friends.

"How could you?” She cringed.

"What? You laughed about it too, I didn’t mean to upset you”

Later, they stood at the bus stop, he, wearing a ratty navy t- shirt and a suede vest and her, a mask of fury and feathers in her hair, both of them, the man and the woman glowing under the bright lights, tinged green by the nearby supermarket fluorescents, beading with sweat in the late summer heat.

If she was angry, she did not say as much only withdrew in her thoughts.

"Which bus are you catching?” He meant would she be sleeping with him that night.

"I washed the sheets. Not because I assumed you’d be staying.” He smirked.

Just as he said this, a bus roared to a stop in front of them, a brightly lit number 3 above its front windscreen. The woman kissed the man on the cheek and said,

"Your bus is here”

She did not want to be the one to remind him of all the things he’s said the night before on that morning after.

A few weeks later they would discover that he had been sharing his clean sheets with another. The woman would listen to the man, in his ill-fitting sincerity, as he explained that he loved this other woman and that he was very sorry. They would scream, she would cry and she would want to believe him but he would be drunk, and when he was drunk, he said things.