They don't stay long with Sunny's parents. There's too much to say, too much not to say, so they say goodbye with hugs and promises to stay in touch and Sunny gets into the passenger seat of Viv's car. It has a familiar smell despite it being the first time Sunny's sat in it – that same smell that hit her when she woke up in Viv's bed. Something warm and woody, and a touch of vanilla from the air freshener dangling off the rear-view mirror.

Viv's a confident driver. Smooth and steady, a master of the gearstick as she shifts seamlessly from first to second, all the way up to fifth once they're on the open road back home. The journey drags on the bus but in the comfort of Viv's silver Ford Focus, the scenery flies by. They don't talk much. BBC Radio 2 is on in the background and whenever a song comes on, Viv taps her fingers on the wheel, her hands closer to five and seven than ten and two.

There's no air conditioning – or if there is, it's not working – so when it gets stuffy, Sunny cracks open the window with the hand crank digging into her thigh and she closes her eyes, feeling the breeze through her fingers when she sticks her hand out of the window.

"I don't know what I'm doing," she says ten minutes into the journey, already more than a third of the way home.

"Me neither," Viv says. She keeps her eyes on the road, even when she reaches for the volume and turns it way down. "Kind of uncharted territory for most people, I think."

"Yeah. Probably."

I can't be the only one, Sunny thinks.

"It's going to be really weird," she says. "I need you to know that. It isn't easy. It's really fucking confusing. I haven't wrapped my head around it yet and I've had a couple of days to get used to it."

Only when they reach a red light does Viv look at her. One hand is on the gearstick; she tentatively moves it to that spot just above Sunny's knee, not too high up her thigh. It's a move she hasn't had to think about for a long time – she's used to touching her girlfriend, playing with her hair, lacing their hands together, and now that all falls into this weird territory where neither of them is sure what's okay. Sunny isn't even sure what she's comfortable with. She can't decide if it's best to throw herself in at the deep end and follow Viv's lead as though nothing happened, or if she needs to dial it back to zero and figure it out from there. Neither seems right. Nothing seems right.

Twenty-five minutes after saying goodbye to Martha and Sylvia, Viv pulls into a reserved parking space outside her building. Sunny didn't register it when she left that first morning but now she recognises where they are: Viv lives on Black Sands' nicest road, twenty-five Georgian terraces arranged in a majestic crescent around a semicircle of a wildflower meadow. Her building is on the very end of the row of identical sand-coloured limestone facades, one of many of the houses that have been converted into flats. Of the twenty-five, only seven remain as family homes. The rest have been divvied up by landlords looking to maximise on rent.

"This place is so fucking posh," Sunny marvels as she gets out of the car, her eyes sweeping over the meadow and the railings in front of each house. The crescent is only half as high as the hill on which Delilah lives, but it still boasts a breath-taking view over the bay in which Black Sands sits, and the sea beyond. If Sunny's vision could stretch to six hundred miles, she'd be looking straight at Denmark's western coast. As it is, thanks to the limitation of the human eye and the curvature of the earth, she can only see a few miles into the grey ocean.

"Unlike me." Viv laughs drily. "Come on up, I'm on the top floor."

The terrace was built in the early 1700s and aside from adding electricity and splitting each floor into its own flat, not much else has changed. A lot of the original features remain, from the columns either side of every sash window to the wooden glazing bars separating each small pane of glass. There is certainly no lift, so they traipse up the two flights to Viv's flat – 25C, Seville Crescent – and Viv heads straight for the kettle.

"I don't know about you but I need a drink. Coffee?"

"Please." Sunny doesn't say how she takes it, and it makes her smile when she sees Viv reach for the cinnamon. This woman knows her, and it aches so much to know that she should know her too.

While Viv's making the drinks, Sunny takes a moment to check out the flat. It's bigger than hers – though that's not hard when Jupiter Court was designed to fit as many homes in a two-hundred-metre street as possible – but not as spacious as Delilah's, the ceiling not quite as high. But it is bright – there are no buildings outside to block the light from pouring in through the wide windows. One looks over the ocean, the other facing the private gardens behind the crescent, so Viv is privy to the glow of both the rising and setting sun.

The sun won't dip below the horizon for more than three hours and the sky is clear, so the flat is illuminated by the rays pouring through the window behind the kitchen counter. There are books everywhere. A couple of floppy paperbacks on the sofa. Hardbacks and mass markets stuffed onto mismatched shelves along the length of the wall between the front door and the window. The oak dining table could seat six if it wasn't drowning under piles of novels that take up half the surface; even the kitchen countertop is covered in cookbooks, a couple of them open as though Viv left in the middle of meal planning.

There's a recess between the bathroom and bedroom just big enough for a desk, which holds yet more books and a bulky computer, the kind Sunny uses at the library, and she figures that while Viv may not be posh, she must have money – a place like this doesn't come cheap, especially without anyone to share it with, and it's furnished like it belongs to an adult with art on the walls and soft throws draped over chairs. Everything fits the beachy colour scheme, from the sandy wooden floor and the wicker chairs around the table to the two sofas, one yellow and one blue; it feels light and airy and so grown up. Sunny's instantly ashamed of her flat, filled with whatever she and Fenfen could find in charity shops. It still looks like a student hovel even though they graduated nearly three years ago.

"This is so grown up," she says as she looks out of the window behind the sofa. The chilly North Sea glitters under the sun; it looks so inviting even though she knows that the water is probably barely five degrees. "Don't tell me you're a forty-year-old who looks amazing for her age."

"Sunny!" Viv almost drops two mugs of coffee on her way to the sofa. "I'd be a fucking cradle snatcher if I was dating you at forty. Jesus. No, I'm twenty-six."

"Ah, an older woman." Sunny grins. Viv scoffs.

"Hardly. It was my birthday last month, and you'll be twenty-five in a few weeks."

"What the fuck?" That almost winds her. She's only just coming to terms with being twenty-four.

"Time flies when you're having fun." Viv sips her coffee and nudges the cinnamon-doused one across the table.

"Time flies when you get sucked into the multiverse and spat out fourteen months later," Sunny deadpans. Viv's cheeks flush scarlet, as though, in the moments of normality since getting home, she'd managed to push that predicament out of her mind.

"Drink your coffee," she says, fumbling over the words, "and then I'll show you around."

*

Viv's bedroom is different to the rest of the flat. The floorboards are older and darker and the beachy colour palette has been switched out for that of a raspberry gateau, all pinks and browns and whites. There's another window in here, an identical large sash that the bed sits opposite, covered in a rumpled pink duvet and only as many pillows as necessary.

Viv has dug out a bunch of photos from the last year, shuffling through and holding out the pertinent ones to Sunny, who's lying the wrong way round on the bed, staring at the painting Fraser did. It's a stunning abstract piece, the murky blues and dull greys of the ocean and the sky switched for a soft sunrise palette; Sunny and Viv are reimagined in pinks and oranges and reds, an explosion of colour that matches the caption Fraser's scrawled at the bottom: these girls are on fire and they burn so bright. She needs to thank him, praise his talents. She's sure she already has, considering she commissioned the piece, but if a compliment falls in the black hole and she can't recall it, did it really happen?

"Our fifth date, if my memory serves correctly," Viv says, holding a line of photobooth photos, different to the ones Sunny slipped inside her copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. She flips over the pictures and reads off what it says on the back. "Sunny & Viv, 14/04/99. Oh! It's exactly a year ago!"

She hands the strip to Sunny, tapping the last of the five pictures. They're both red-faced and laughing, arms around each other. "This was at the arcade on the pier," she says. "Right before this picture, the security guard had whipped the curtain open because someone told him there was a couple shagging in the booth."

"Oh my god. Were we?"

"No!" Viv's hand flies to her chest. "I don't fuck on the fifth date."

Bringing up sex opens up a whole new can of worms that Sunny would rather stay shut. While her attitude could well have changed in the last year with the right person, it was never something she was much interested in before. She opens her mouth to ask the question but she can't find the right words, can't formulate the perfect question to encapsulate everything she needs to know with minimal awkwardness.

Viv seems to get it. It's easy to forget that she knows Sunny inside out. They've been together for a year – she can't be a stranger to her quirks. She predicts what Sunny's about to say and she sits on the edge of the bed.

"Sex isn't a big deal for me either," Viv says.

"Have we done it?"

She nods and shrugs one shoulder. "Yeah. Occasionally, if the mood is right and we both feel like it." She looks at Sunny, who is currently in the midst of a brand-new panic thanks to the realisation that the black hole has taken her virginity too. It's not a bad panic though. More of a confusing one, and oddly relieving.

"We'd been together for a couple of months before it ever came up," Viv says, "so I figured we were probably on the same page. I think we'd been watching Sex and the City one night? And you blurted it all out."

"What exactly is it all?"

Viv rubs her wrists, twisting a thin bracelet round and round. It's a delicate silver chain with three teardrop-shaped beads in red, orange and pink. "You said how you weren't that interested in sex and you were scared that I was going to get sick of waiting."

Viv already knows. Of course she does, this is her girlfriend, but it's such a relief to not have to come out all over again. Sunny drops her head back on the duvet and smiles, flooded with relief.

"I found this book once," she says, "and it made me realise that there are options other than being obsessed with sex. I felt so weird up until then. All my friends were so fixated on it through school, and I never cared." She sits up, legs crossed, wrists draped over her knees. "I mean, it's not like I never think about it, but my desire is a drop in the ocean compared to Samantha Jones's."

Viv laughs, those bright eyes crinkling. "I think most people's is."

"I felt so validated when I found that book," Sunny muses.

"So did I."

Her eyes go wide. "You read it?"

"You showed it to me, to explain what you were trying to say, and it helped me put into words what I'd felt my whole life," Viv says. "We're not so different, bambi."

"Oh my god."

"It was a good night. That was the night that I thought, yeah, this is something special."

Sunny's still hung up on the fact that her girlfriend is the same as her. She managed to find herself a shining lesbian unicorn in a town full of boring old heterosexual horses.

"Ironically, that was the night we first slept together," Viv says, breaking her out of her reverie. "I think the sharing and the revelations pushed us into a new realm of connection and it just kind of ... happened. Like, we'd figured out we were on the same page and suddenly we had to read between the lines and touch every word."

The analogy forces a laugh out of Sunny as she pictures herself as a book, pages spread open as Viv reads every word, tastes every syllable.

They spend a little more time going through photos and rehashing old conversations until they both grow weary – Sunny is tired from trying to catch up on all the dates she's lost, and Viv is exhausted from recalling the dates she's lived – and Sunny heads downstairs to catch the bus to Jupiter Court.

"Hey, Sunny?" Viv says, hanging halfway out of the door.

"Yeah?"

"Don't be a stranger. If you get scared or overwhelmed, please don't run away again. Tell me first. Just ... let me know if you need space, okay? I'll give it to you. But I need to know it's what you need."

"Okay."

Viv holds out her little finger. Sunny loops hers around it, sealing the promise that she hopes she'll be able to keep. Honesty is paramount but she's not sure that this won't all be too much too soon, not sure she won't find herself jumping on the first bus she sees to get some air away from town.

"I'll try," she adds. "I promise to try."

"That's good enough for me." Viv smiles. "See you later, bambi."

Sunny's halfway gone before she turns around and cocks her head to one side and asks, "Why d'you call me that?"

"Bambi?"

"Yeah."

"'Cause you're my bambi lesbian," Viv explains, managing to explain nothing at all.

"What does that mean?"

Viv looks surprised, like this is something Sunny should know. It must be something she came across in the period between that last conversation with Ravi, and dating Viv. "You know, a bambi lesbian. Like you and me. Lesbians who prefer kissing and hugging to sexual stuff."

"Oh." Sunny feels her cheeks go pink. There's a term for it? Her heart grows three sizes and her smile blossoms. "I like that. Where'd you hear it?"

"From you." Viv leans against the doorframe, arms folded. "You heard it from your mum and came over straight away to tell me you found a new term that felt right. You were so cute and excited and your eyes were all big so, yeah, you kinda looked like Bambi too." She shrugs. "The nickname stuck."

Sunny's smile turns into a grin. There's a word for people like her – a word that sounds just right for how she feels, a word that sits somewhere along that spectrum of asexuality she's been mulling over for so long. "I like it," she says quietly.

Viv lets her arms drop, raising a finger to tuck her hair behind her ears. "So do I."

*

sunny is my precious little asexual bambi lesbian and i hope you like her <3