IN THE HOURS BETWEEN • TC

2. Back and Forth, Back and Forth

But it's too hot to get up, too hot to move, so she lays there, encumbered by the heat and the thought of having to change her clothes.

Minutes of drowsy half-consciousness turn into a slumber. Una is simply skimming the surface of sleep, waiting to sink but never doing more than trailing her fingers across the breaking waves.

At some point, some lazy, stifling point, she wakes up. Or rather, she makes the decision to rouse herself, makes the decision to roll over onto one side and open her eyes. She reaches groggily for her phone and checks the time. It's only been forty minutes, but it feels like a millenia. And it's just as hot as ever.

Una puts her phone back onto her bedside table and rolls over to the other side, to the cool patch of the duvet, her stomach colliding with the hunk of a novel she'd chucked to one side. She picks it up, flicks aimlessly through the pages until her thumb loses traction and one half of the book slaps on top of the other. Una looks out of the window. Knows she should probably start looking over her notes from last term. Consolidating, revising, getting herself ready for uni, which starts in October.

But her laptop is far away, on her desk. And it's too loud once the fan starts up; she tries to avoid using it in hot weather as much as possible because the noise drives her insane.

A knock on her door, and it's either her dad or Frank, because her mum never knocks. She rolls her head towards the source of the noise, and props herself up onto her elbows when she realises it's not any of them.

"Can I help?" she asks, because Timothée is standing there and he doesn't look like a drowned rodent at all. He looks clean, pleasant, his mouth set in a complacent smile. His hair is not yet dry but it has begun to curl away from his face towards the ends.

"I was wondering," he begins, and his voice is thickly accented, robed in a kind of richness that Una didn't notice before; Timothée's voice had been higher pitched when he'd asked to kiss her cheeks. More scared.

In fact, he still sounds a little scared now, but he's evidently making an effort to stand up tall. To look at her.

"Is there a...I forgot how you say it," he fumbles. His fingers tangle in front of him, just peeking from the cuffs of his hoodie, which is far too big for him. "The...climate. In my room."

(And it's not his room at all; it's the spare room that's usually Una's workspace, because the desk is in front of the window which means the lighting is better.)

She looks at him blankly, and Timothée shifts his weight from one foot to the other, smiling nervously, looking slightly pink. Una gets up, still holding her book, and he backs out of the room as he realises that she's guiding him to leave. She doesn't know quite what he's on about --

(Doesn't know quite why he couldn't have asked Frank.)

--but she obligingly follows him down the corridor to the spare room.

Timothée's gait is weird. Long strides that take up too much space to possibly be considered nervous, but he can't seem to walk in a straight line. He veers off to one side of the landing, then back into the centre and finally towards the door on the right hand side, all in the space of about three seconds. Una realises belatedly that that might have been an invitation for her to go in ahead of him.

She enters the room, and it's stifling. The windows are thrown wide open, but there is no breeze, no hint of coolness. Just suffocating warmth, the air pulsing with heat.

"The, ah," Timothée begins, pointing to the little heater/air conditioner on the bedside table. It had been put in the spare room at Fen's request. To make him feel welcome, she'd said, and Una had wanted to scream; she'd been asking for a fan since April, to no avail. Only now that Timothée's arrived, nothing seems too much to ask for. Everything goes to Timothée because we love Timothée even though he stinks and he's French.