"I'm fine. Sorry for running off..." She said. Her voice was slurred in the typical Iris way that meant she'd been drinking. A lot.
"S'alright." He sat down next to Iris and smirked at her. "You're drunk."
"Well I had to do something to numb my lip, didn't I? She's only skinny but she's got the hit of a boxer, that woman." Iris whined.
Tommy felt himself relaxing as Iris showed traits of the wild and carefree girl he once knew.
The whole time he was in France, his thoughts always went back to that girl and he would study the only picture of her he had taken with him. In the tunnels, in the trenches, on the front. Whenever he felt as though he may as well throw himself in front of the gunfire, he looked at the picture and thought better of it. But when she walked into the church earlier that day, he hadn't known how to react.
The Iris he knew always walked with an air of confidence and self-worth, even when they wore rags as children. However, the Iris he saw now was different. She was dressed in the most glamorous of clothes, yet she hid behind them. Her eyes never quite met anyones gaze, and she almost cowered away from other people.
Gone was the goofy and often discourteous teenager he had loved. An elegant yet withdrawn woman was in her place. It pained him to say, but she even talked like a Londoner. The whole night he had been scoffing whenever she deigned to speak, her new-found southern lilt grating on his every nerve. It was refreshing to hear her brummie accent seeping in now she'd had a drink. "I bet she does, given all the women she used to fight over your dad when we were kids."
Iris chuckled. "Remember when she nearly had your mother by her hair? She was convinced she'd been sneaking round with Samuel."
"Yeah, I do."
Iris picked up the bottle of gin she had next to her and passed it to Tommy. "Drink; it might loosen you up a bit. Uptight bastard."
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He did as instructed. Anything to stay in the company of the woman he had missed every day for almost seven years.
"Why are you speaking to me all of a sudden then?" Iris asked bluntly.
"You what?"
"Piss off, Thomas." She propped herself up on her knees and faced him, "You've spoken to me like shit and looked at me like I'm some stranger from the streets since I arrived at the church and then you snog my face off. What changed?"
"Dunno. I wanted to speak to me old mate."
She scoffed. "I'm more than an old mate the way I remember it."
"The way you remember it, eh?" He asked with a crooked grin.
"Yeah." She sniffed and looked to a her hands. "I remember it all, Tom."
Tommy noticed her fiddling with the ring on her finger, shifting it off and on as though she couldn't bare to keep it on herself. "I do too."
She looked up at him, her eyes glistening with an emotion he couldn't read. "I miss you, Tommy. I miss when we were kids. I shouldn't have left." Iris knew she was chatting shit due to the alcohol in her system, but she didn't care. Every word that was pouring from her mouth was the truth.
