Lusting For Her Roommate

The bathroom door doesn't lock anymore. Nobody ever fixed it because nobody ever needed it to, because the flat at number 14 has been Lindsey and Claire's flat for four years now, and roommates who share a fridge and a Tesco order and a coconut shampoo don't really lock doors against each other.

This is going to become a problem.

Lindsey Miller is thirty-two. She works from home. She buys herself flowers every other Friday at the corner shop and arranges them in her grandmother's chipped jug on the kitchen counter, where her flatmate Claire will find them later and say aw babe, you got us flowers! and never, ever realise that us is doing more work in that sentence than Claire could possibly understand.

Because Lindsey has been quietly, catastrophically, in love with Claire for forty seven months. She has memorised her coffee order. Her cycle. The names of her four exes. The song she sings in the shower through the wall every morning. The exact route the floral tattoo takes up the back of her right thigh and disappears under the hem of her shorts when she stretches on the living room floor before a run. Lindsey has built a whole cathedral out of casual touches and borrowed jumpers and the sound of Claire calling her babe through two thin walls, and she has never said a single word.

Claire, meanwhile, is sunshine in human form. Twenty seven, dark hair, chipped front tooth, dimple, leggings that should be illegal. She drapes her bare legs over Lindsey's lap on the sofa every Thursday night without thinking about it. She wanders into the kitchen in just a t-shirt and knickers and asks if Lindsey's seen her bra. She kisses Lindsey on the top of her head when she leaves for work. She has absolutely no idea. None. She's been single for six months and she's started talking about a guy at the climbing gym and Lindsey is going to lose her mind.

A slow burn sapphic story about wanting the woman across the kitchen table, about every casual touch that has been quietly killing you for years, and about what happens when sunshine finally, finally notices.