Josie was only across the room. She stood there in black jeans and a yellow jumper Maisie had picked out a couple of months ago in a vintage store around the corner from Josie's house. There was no reason to go on that side of town anymore. George squeezed her hand. Maisie turned her head, but he was only looking at the menu. She tried to look at it too, tried to think of what coffee she even normally got, but Josie's presence filled up her head and squeezed everything else out. Her laugh flooded Maisie's ears and she really couldn't do anything but listen. She turned back to look, but Josie was facing the other way now, curly hair barely covering the back of her neck, where she'd gotten a tattoo of a flower and never told anyone what it meant.
"What are you looking at?" George said. His face tilted down to hers, a familiar frown on his face.
Her eyes wanted to slide back to watch Josie. She forced herself to hold his gaze. "Nothing. What are you ordering?"
George scoffed. Then, his face softened. Maisie felt a familiar knot in her stomach; she couldn't tell if she liked it or not, or whether she should. It didn't always stay there, but it came and went when his eyes found her. It wasn't quite like the butterflies, but it was close, and that was all she asked for. She wondered if he felt like it too. His voice was as level as it always was. "An espresso, probably. I guess you'll want one too?"
Maisie hummed at the chalkboards above the barista's head. "I might get a frappe or something."
"What for?" There was humour in his voice, but he didn't laugh.
Maisie shrugged. "Fun, I guess. An espresso is fine too, if you're paying." George always liked to pay, even though they both knew that he wasn't much more capable of that than she was. In fact, with her shifts at the bakery, she was probably the one who should have paid. But he'd always paid, and so he seemingly always would.
"No, no," he whipped out his wallet, "I'll get you a frappe."
"Are you sure?"
He stared down at her. "Why wouldn't I be sure?"
All she could do was shrug. He turned away, and Maisie took the chance to scan the cafe again. Josie had gone to a table with a few people who looked like they were on a lunch break, smart casual shirts loosely tucked in, sipping coffee and checking watches. A heavy weight in her stomach settled as she realised she didn't know who any of these people were, and yet Josie was laughing along, completely oblivious. Maisie was about to look away when Josie's head snapped up. Their eyes locked together. Josie levelled her gaze, expression unchanging.
George tugged on her arm, ripping Maisie's eyes away. Her skin felt icy, watched. He held out a plastic cup topped with whipped cream, face aglow.
"Thanks," she said, taking it, "you really didn't have to do that."
"Of course I did," he said, looking over her shoulder, "I love you."
"I love you too," she said at his smiling face.
He pointed to a free table and hurried over, ignoring a frustrated looking pair of women who had been leaning into a buggy, rattling toys and brushing off crumbs. Maisie winced and nodded apologetically to them, joining him at the table. The chair creaked as she sat down, wooden back digging into her spine. George reclined with his tiny coffee cup in his hand, stretching out his legs until they reached her lap. She shifted them across, the smooth surface of the worn down soles ruined with gritty dirt. She brushed off her palms and sipped her drink. He didn't speak, so she listened to the sounds of distant conversation, plastic cup cold on her palm, burning a little. She put it down.
"I figured we could go to mine after this, practise some stuff," George suggested, placing a hand on the sticky table.
"I have to be at work in two hours," she said, picking her cup back up. It left a ring of condensation on the wood. "But I could come after."
"When do you finish?"
"Five," Maisie said, "like usual." The frappe was barely coffee. It tasted like milk and sugar more than anything else. She sipped it anyway, stirring with her straw occasionally. The syrups seemed to cling to her teeth, and she ran her tongue along them idly. It occurred to her that when she first started dating George, she'd still had braces. She watched him as he gazed out of the cloudy window, followed the line of his jaw where stubble gathered hesitantly, the hair he'd been growing out for years curling gently at his neck. She imagined she could see past the colour of his eyes and into his brain, wondered how he saw her. Dark circles spread under his eyes like bad makeup, but it was a pretentious sort of tiredness, like he could have gotten more sleep but he had simply chosen not to. He wore eyeliner up until about a year ago, when he decided he couldn't be bothered anymore. She felt, with a crushing sense of her guts filled up with iron, that she was in love with him.
"What are you looking at?" he said, smirking.
She wasn't conscious of the smile spreading across her face until it was too late. "You."
He pretended to flip his hair, grinning. "Oh, well, I guess that's alright then."
"Shut up." Maisie was fuzzy with affection. "I'm going to the bathroom, I'll be right back."
Time felt like it had stopped, cornered in by cubicles and sinks and awkwardly low hand driers. Maisie stood in front of the mirror and reapplied her lipstick, the sticky click of the tube satisfying as she got more product onto the wand. She leaned forward over the sink and gently tapped it back on where it had rubbed away, mainly around the straw. The tap below her was dripping steadily, a small pool of water sliding down the curve of the sink. Her lips stuck as she pressed them together.
"Hey," someone said behind her.
Maisie glanced in the mirror, and found Josie's reflection behind her own. Josie stood slightly behind her, hands hanging at her sides. Maisie straightened up and clicked the lipstick shut. She put it back into her pocket. "Hi," she said.
Josie's reflection watched hers, eyes flicking around, not landing in one spot enough for Maisie to figure out what she was finding. The tap dripped. "You okay?"
"Yeah," Maisie turned to face Josie properly, "you?"
"I'm good," she said, picking at the sleeve of her jumper. "I saw you were here with him."
Maisie nodded. "Who George? Yeah. Are you here with work?"
"No," Josie glanced behind her at the close sound of footsteps, but whoever it was passed the bathrooms without coming inside, "those are Freya's friends."
Maisie forced herself not to react. She had no idea who Freya was, and Josie knew that. Whatever she was trying to do wasn't working. Maisie wasn't interested. She didn't want to know who Freya was because then she'd know more about Josie, more to think about, more to miss out on. The bitterness clung to her tongue and didn't let go. She wished there was some kind of development in her life that she could keep secret from Josie, but not much had really changed. "Well," Maisie scrounged for the right words, "you looked very happy." Those were not the right ones.
"I am." Josie straightened up her back and put her hands back at her sides. Her face morphed, one corner of her lips turned up and eyebrows lowered. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"
Maisie couldn't help the hot feeling crawling up her throat. She swallowed it, but it vibrated in her stomach. "It has." It wasn't Josie's fault, really, but it felt like it was, and that was all that counted.
There was a moment when all Maisie could hear was the tap dripping, and brief snatches of conversation from outside the door. She was sure if Josie listened hard enough she'd hear her thoughts, but they wouldn't keep silent no matter how many things she threatened them with. Josie glanced over her shoulder, hesitated, and half turned. Her chest rose and deflated with her breath for another few seconds. "Maisie," she said half-heartedly.
Maisie fixed her with a gaze and said nothing.
"I just thought you should know," Josie paused, "that Freya saw him a couple weeks ago."
"He has a name," Maisie said before she could trap the words in her throat.
Josie's face darkened and she rolled her eyes. "She saw George a couple of weeks ago."
"And?"
"And he was with someone else."
Maisie scoffed. "I'm not the only person he hangs out with, Josie. He's allowed to have friends."
Josie's shoes squeaked as she turned away and placed a hand on the metal door handle. She paused, looking down at it like she couldn't understand how it worked. With her head still lowered, she murmured, "They're not friends." Before she could do anything about it, the door swung back into Maisie's face.
The cold feeling returned. It wasn't numbness, that would have been a blessing. It was like someone had thrown a bucket of ice over her, those seconds after, when all her muscles tensed up and her breath got caught somewhere on the way out and didn't come back in. Maisie dragged the air into her lungs and forced her hands to tuck a stray hair away from her face. She didn't look any different in the mirror. She felt tired, but it didn't really show. She considered splashing some water onto her face, but she'd been in the bathroom long enough.
The cafe was muted to her as she weaved through tables of people she didn't know. George was sitting, sipping at her frappe. Her stomach twisted. He found her in the room and grinned around the straw, flashing his teeth.
"You took a while," he said, placing it back onto the table. There were streaks of condensation where he'd been moving it around. He pushed it back towards her. "I figured you wouldn't mind."
Maisie didn't have enough energy to care. She leaned into the sharp angles of the chair and looked at him. The sun had moved around through the window and cast a bright light across one half of his face, plunging the other half into a stark shadow. The straw was damp, so she just held the frappe close to her face. "Josie was in the bathroom."
His face morphed so quickly it was hard to imagine he'd looked so calm before. The shadow curved across his face, the frown deepening into it, his eyes seemed to blaze. "Did she bother you?"
Her mind decided it was protective anger. If they weren't in public, he would have come over to her and wrapped his arms around her, protecting her from whatever was bothering her. "Kind of."
George shifted in his seat, eyes searching behind her. "What did she say?"
Maisie twisted in her seat, but Josie and that whole group had gone. She hadn't worked out which one was Freya, and she wasn't sure she wanted to. "She said," the words got stuck, "she said a friend of hers saw you a few weeks back."
He didn't say anything, but his gaze was on her so intensely that she had to avert her eyes to anywhere else.
She continued, "She said that this friend saw you with someone."
His face scrunched up, but the rest of his body was languid and unmoving. "What does that matter?"
Maisie's limbs were filled up with static. She wanted to run away. She imagined how good it would feel to just go, letting her limbs take her somewhere. She imagined the burning of her lungs, the sweat across her forehead. She imagined Josie seeing her. She imagined falling to a stop, scraping up her knees. She imagined George catching up to her, laughing, telling her it was a dumb idea. He always picked her up in the end. She looked at his face. "She suggested you were cheating. With someone. They saw you with them a couple of weeks ago."
His laughter threw her so far off guard she was surprised she hadn't fallen off her chair. George cackled with laughter, pretending to wipe away tears from his cheeks. A few people at the tables around them turned around, pulling faces. Maisie shrunk in her chair. After he calmed down, George settled his sights back on her, a smile still playing on his lips. "She told you I was cheating?"
Maisie nodded. "More or less."
"With who?"
"She didn't say." Regret was pooling into her mouth. It stuck to her teeth and her tongue. She sipped her frappe, trying to get rid of it but it was half melted and didn't taste as good warm.
"Who told her?"
"Freya," Maisie said quietly.
"Who's Freya?"
Maisie paused. "I don't know. Her friend."
"So Josie, who isn't your friend, told you that her friend you've never met, saw me cheating on you, with some unspecified person?" He looked right into her eyes and smiled. "And you believed her?"
There was a lump forming in her throat, because without meaning to, she had.