The first time Tennyson Shelley woke up with the overwhelming sense that her life was over before it had begun, she spiralled into a crushing panic attack that stole her breath and spiked every fear, plunging the depths of every insecurity that lingered for hours. By the tenth time Sunny was gripped by the conviction that she wasn't making the most of her life and the fleeting days were turning into fleeting months that she couldn't get back, she rang her best friend and snottily sobbed down the line that she was going to die a forgettable underachiever.

Now, thanks to the soft souled wisdom that is Ravi Patel, she has a name for that feeling – twentiesitis. It doesn't bother her anymore. Not that she doesn't experience that horrible feeling every now and then, because it still creeps back at least once a month, but now she knows it isn't real and she isn't alone.

As Ravi said, "Darling, do you think you're the first twenty-one-year-old with a useless degree and a dead-end minimum wage job who doesn't know what they want to do with their life? Absolutely not. It just happens that the select few who do have a clue happen to be the vocal minority. Don't listen to them. Listen to me. I make three twenty an hour at a job I hate and I have no fucking clue what I want to do. You and me? We're in the same boat, babe. Except I'm not named after my mother's literary idols."

So no, Sunny doesn't give into that feeling anymore. She's twenty-three now, and she makes a whopping four pounds an hour at a job she mildly likes, and sure, she's not sure she wants to make coffee and serve pastries for the rest of her life but as her friends keep reminding her, she's twenty-three. A foetus in the eyes of the universe, if that. A speck. An amoeba. What's smaller than an amoeba? She isn't sure; she barely scraped a C in GCSE biology, but the universe doesn't give a fuck about her and she finds that oddly soothing.

I am virtually nothing, she sometimes thinks with a distant smile, and the universe agrees, so why am I stressed?

It's easy for her to think too hard about the vastness of the earth and the galaxy and beyond; it's so easy to slip into a dissociative state where she quietly ponders the meaning of it all, the point of it all. Because what is the point of humanity when all we do is live and die? Sunny sure as hell doesn't know.

When she was a child, she loathed the moments when her brain wandered down that path, paralysing her in place. She would be sitting on the floor of the school hall in assembly, six years old, silently panicking about the vastness of space and the insignificance of her. Now she thinks – ah. Everything will be okay. Because in the end, nothing matters. And if the history books will forget her name, why should she lose sleep over her lack of direction? Everyone ends up in the same place, after all.

These are the places her mind goes to as she makes coffee after coffee, her hands working on autopilot to fix mochas and cappuccinos, plating cakes and heating sandwiches. The monotony is a reliable comfort: she gets to work and she serves drinks and cleans tables until her feet start to ache, and then she works a few more hours until the end of her shift. In summer she gets to watch the day change, when she arrives at work when the sun is still high and she finishes when night has sunk its teeth in. The same can't be said for February. Dreary, droopy February.

The problem with winter: the days are so short that they merge into a hazy, nebulous blur that consists of eat-work-sleep on repeat until Sunny's version of a weekend rolls around – Wednesday, one a.m. until Friday, five p.m. – when she sleeps too much and eats too much and naps on the bus with her Walkman in her hand, the sun long gone by four o'clock.

The bonus of winter: early dark means cosy nights; cold hands wrapped around a hot mug; crackling log fires when she drags herself across town for a couple of days' respite with her mothers in their creaking house with its creaking willow tree.

It's only Saturday but Sunny can't wait for Wednesday, when she'll hop on a night bus – the 11A at quarter past one from the stop by the cafe that always stinks of piss and fags – which will deposit her on Salter Street forty-five minutes later, a ten-minute walk from her childhood home.

At some point between eight and twelve, she will wake up in her childhood bed to the gentle sounds of her parents going about their day. When not at work, Martha – the semi-retired neurosurgeon – spends her days in the garden or reading and analysing the kinds of long-winded old classics that her daughter hates; Sylvia – the English professor – spends her time tirelessly exploring every nuance of queer theory, every new word and label that crops up, and although she's in her sixties now, she still finds new ways to explain and understand her gender and sexuality.

To the soundtrack of turning pages (from Martha – Mar to her wife; Mum to her daughter) and the occasional murmur of goodness me, have you heard of pansexuality? Maybe I'm not a lesbian after all (from Sylvia – Sylv to her wife; also Mum, or sometimes, exasperatedly, Mother, to her daughter), Sunny will yawn so hard her back arches and cracks and she'll lope downstairs in a stretched-out t-shirt, and she won't give a fuck about her unshaved legs because neither of her mothers have shaved since the seventies.

But that isn't for another – ugh – three days. As Sunny glances at the clock above the coffee machine currently sputtering out an espresso shot, Saturday becomes Sunday and she forces herself to stand straighter, push her shoulders back, and paste on a smile for the last hour of her shift.

Percolatte is the kind of place where people gather during the day, spilling into the coffee shop with bags and buggies to see friends and read books, to catch up over a coffee or get homework done after school. After the sun sets, the crowd changes. The people who step into the warmth of a cafe with soft orange lights and mismatched furniture are older and wearier, treating themselves at the end of a long shift or preparing for one to start. They take advantage of the cafe that never closes; they are patient when the till is out of action for a few minutes either side of midnight; they are grateful for a place to rest and rejuvenate at three, four, five o'clock in the morning.

The hour between six and seven a.m. is the strangest time of day at Percolatte, when the crowds mix – there are people in suits grabbing a coffee before work; there are people in last night's glad rags who don't want to go home yet after a long night; there is everyone in between. But Sunny never sees that crowd. She once found her favourite shift and she never changes it, if she has a choice: she dons an apron at five o'clock, that nebulous time between afternoon and evening, and she works until her hands are cramping and her back is sore and at one o'clock, once the sky is deepest black no matter the season, she hangs the apron up and drags herself home.

Fifty-nine minutes to go, she thinks, glancing at the clock for what feels like the hundredth time in the last hour. At least Ravi's here. He doesn't work here, but he works here – sometimes, when Sunny's behind the counter, he turns up with his crossbody satchel and makes himself comfortable at the smallest table, the one closest to the coffee machine, which is almost always empty. Most people find it too cramped and too loud. Not Ravi. He likes to be as close to his closest friend as possible as he writes lyrics and hums melodies, and bounces ideas off her when she isn't sweating over the difference between a latte and a cappuccino and a mocha.

Sunny is not a natural barista. She's still not sure how she got the job, but she won't complain because she makes nearly a hundred and fifty quid a week and every now and then someone even tips her, dropping their change into the tin with her name on it. Every barista has their own tin on the counter for the duration of their shift; anything in it by the end is theirs to keep. Most of the time it's a handful of coppers or a shiny five pence piece, change from a fancy £1.95 mocha or a basic 95p flat white.

Once it was fifteen quid. Ten of that was from a guy who flirted hard and left his card, giving Sunny a wink when he paid with a twenty for a £6.85 order. When she gave him his change, he pocketed the coins and rolled the note around his finger before dropping it into her tin. He was attractive in an objective way, Sunny was fairly certain of that, but she wasn't attracted to him, considering he was a he.

As much as she hates to suppress her queerness, she soon learned that guys – it's always guys, the ones who have never thought to ponder their gender or sexuality – tip a lot better if they have no idea that she's a lesbian. So she smiles and laughs and they think she's interested, and they pay for her bus fare home when their twenty pence pieces clang into the tin with her name and a drawing of the sun.

"Are you even listening?" Ravi asks. Sunny looks up, his voice startling her away from the monotonous drone of the bulky machine that churns out hundreds of cups of coffee each day.

"Huh?"

Ravi chuckles. "I take it that's a no." He taps the eraser end of his pencil on a graphite-filled page of his composition notebook. He has shelves filled with identical notebooks, which he buys in bulk from Woolworths as though he's scared they'll stop selling them. He never has fewer than three in his satchel, in case he's hit with a whirlwind of inspiration and somehow fills four hundred and eighty pages.

"Sorry, I got kinda mesmerised by the bubbles. They're hypnotic." Sunny's staring down at the beige bubbles on the smooth surface of the black coffee she's made him. Decaf, of course, at this time of night. She pushes it across his table, careful not to let it slosh over the rim and ruin whatever song he's working on now. "What were you saying?"

He pushes a thick flop of black hair off his forehead and brings the mug to his nose, inhaling deeply with his eyes closed. When he opens them, his glasses are fogged up. "I was asking"—he takes off his glasses to clean them, and Sunny knows she has just become a blur—"if you still want to come to Fraser's exhibition tomorrow?"

"What time is it again?" Sunny asks, madly searching her brain for a memory of Fraser's exhibition. He may be one of her closest friends and Ravi's boyfriend, but she has a sieve for a memory, information only sticking when it's unavoidable, too big to fall through the holes.

"Twelve. So you've got plenty of time to catch up on your beauty sleep."

Her brain digs and sifts and rummages until – aha! Fraser, the substitute teacher and suffering artist whose hands are never free from paint and ink, has a few of his pieces going up in the gallery off the town square, a celebration of local talent. She can picture the event pamphlet stuck to the fridge with alphabet magnets that spell out cock, because her flatmate is apparently a twelve-year-old boy (she isn't, of course – Fenfen Liu is a tour de force of a twenty-five-year-old woman who loves nothing more than making dick jokes and getting dick, inevitably from boys who think her name is Fern).

"I'll be there." Sunny smiles a genuine twinkling smile even though she's been on her feet for seven hours and it's so late and dark and she's so tired.

"Wanna get brunch first?"

She pouts and taps her bottom lip. "Hmm. Do I want to get brunch with the second happiest couple I know when I'm still devastatingly single and will no doubt be the third wheel while you guys practically throat fuck each other?"

Ravi frowns. "Wait, we're only the second happiest couple you know?" he asks, because that's the part to be confused by. "Who's got us beat?"

"My parents," Sunny says simply. Martha and Sylvia Shelley met on the day Morrissey was born, which Sunny reckons is why they love The Smiths so much. "And they've been together for forty years, so you've got a long way to go yet."

Ravi stretches his back, a languid smile on his lips, because he has every faith in his relationship. He and Fraser have been together for five years and with every obstacle thrown their way, they've only grown closer. He knows they will be together until death do them part.

"Anyway," he says at long last, "you won't be third wheeling; Delilah's coming too."

"In which case, brunch is a yes."

The core four, together again. Sunny smiles to herself. Delilah is one of her favourite people, and not only because she's a whiz at all things hair (she's responsible for Sunny's current and favourite look: a short bob that grazes her jaw, deep brown roots fading to blonde ends). Delilah is the human embodiment of a lavender bath with a mug of sweet tea. She is the stars and the moon, the soft palm of a warm hand, and Sunny's third favourite lesbian – after her mothers, of course.

"Speaking of being devastatingly single," Ravi starts, putting down his pencil and closing his notebook so Sunny knows he's serious, "is there anyone you're interested in?"

Sunny scoffs. "I'm pretty sure I know every queer girl in this town, and they're either my friends or my parents." She grabs a cloth and starts wiping down the counter so it at least looks like she's doing something when her colleague glances over. A twenty-four-hour coffee shop is a great idea in theory, she thinks, but in reality, the only people who come in after ten are drunks and night shifters. There are long stretches of quiet between eleven and one, and she's glad she doesn't work the graveyard shift.

"That can't be true." Ravi leans across the table, almost falling off his chair, to grab a newspaper. He flips through to the personal ads and runs his finger down them, saying nothing as he finds nothing.

"I'm pretty sure you have to be at least thirty-five before resorting to the newspaper."

"Let's draft you an ad." He licks a finger, turns a page, and pretends to write down an application for a personal advert. "Me: cute tomboy lesbian looking for love. You: hot blonde with massive tits."

"Ravi!" She snatches the pencil off him. "That's not my type. You think I'm that shallow?"

He gives her a mischievous grin, pressing dimples into his smooth brown cheeks, and takes the pencil back. "I'm just looking for a reaction," he says. "I have no idea what your type is, seeing as you've never dated."

Slumping against the counter, Sunny twirls her hair around her finger. "I don't have a type. At least, not a physical type. And I don't think the Black Sands Bugle is ready for that kind of post. Those ads are for straight people."

As comfortable as Sunny is in her identity, she knows that she lives in a bubble with her queer parents and her queer friends. The rest of the world isn't so open. It can't even bring itself to tolerate her, let alone celebrate and love her, lesbianism and all, and the thought of finding love when threat lies around every corner terrifies her. How is she supposed to find a queer girl when the world is so damn straight? If she ever finds a woman she wants to marry, the law says she can't, and Sunny is a romantic. She wants to get married. She wants a wife.

"Do you want to date?" Ravi asks.

She looks at him. Really looks at him as she considers her answer. Her shoulders sink when she says, "No."

"Oh. Problem solved, then."

"No, I don't mean it like that." She looks around and once she's ascertained that there's literally nothing to do, no recently vacated tables to clean or new customers to serve, she slips around the counter and pulls up a seat next to Ravi. The screech of wooden legs on the floor rouses one of the tired drunks, who lifts his head to grunt before letting his forehead drop back onto his arms. As the café's policy goes, if you're not causing a problem, we don't have a problem.

"What d'you mean?" Ravi sips his coffee and snacks his lips, one of Sunny's least favourite sounds.

"I want a girlfriend," she says, picking at the skin around her short nails, "but I don't want to date. It's such a hassle and it's awkward and embarrassing and I'd rather fast-forward to when I'm in a relationship with someone who loves me and already knows everything about me, and there's none of that painful getting-to-know-each-other small talk."

She looks down at the table, thinking of that day last year when she was looking through her parents' extensive collection of queer literature and she came across a slim purple book with a title that she's sure stopped her heart for a moment. Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians. The book was old, published some time in the seventies, but it had made her feel seen in a way she had never known to look at herself before, introducing her to a whole new spectrum of her identity.

Never before had she come across the idea of asexuality despite Sylvia's deep dives into every corner of queerness – she isn't the best listener, her brain wandering off without permission; she learns best when she finds things out for herself – and while she isn't sure how perfectly it fits, because for Sunny, the concepts of gender and sexuality are like things that go bang in the night, vague and mysterious and unseen, it has opened her eyes. When she curls up on her sofa to tune into the latest episode of Friends or Sex and the City – can they bring out season two already? – she knows now that she isn't a freak for lacking the single-minded sex-obsession given to every portrayal of people her age.

It used to leave her feeling unmoored and othered, when she couldn't relate to her friends' desperation to lose their virginity, and their talk of the sex acts they got up to disgusted her, yet she so achingly envied their relationships, their companionship, their soft little romances.

Ravi clucks his tongue. "That's quite a lot of stuff you want to skip," he says. Sunny hasn't told him about her revelation because she's still unsure, still searching for the right labels. Like a hermit crab seeking a shell, she latches onto the closest approximation the moment it arises and she hopes that sooner or later, she finds a better fit.

"All I want is to be happy," she says. "I want someone to be romantic with. Someone to snuggle with and go out with and just be with. Someone who wants me and loves me as I am, without the months of figuring it all out and worrying that some weird little habit is going to ruin everything."

She doesn't say the most obvious part out loud. That it is so fucking exhausting trying to date as a lesbian in a straight man's world. She doesn't say that she's scared to accidentally flirt with a straight girl who takes it badly. She doesn't tell Ravi that, despite the hardships he and Fraser have faced, she is jealous of them, because they got together long before Fraser transitioned. They got those early, awkward, public dates out of the way back when they looked to the world like a straight couple, back when Ravi thought he was straight, back when Fraser was trying so hard to force himself to be who he knew he wasn't.

She doesn't tell her parents that she's jealous of them too, because it was only once they were married with a six-month-old that Sylvia voiced her lifelong feelings out loud: that she was not the man the world perceived her to be; that she was quietly delighted when, with her hair grown out and her androgynous style, people called her ma'am and she didn't correct them.

"I don't know, Sunny, I don't think you can have one without the other," Ravi says, chewing on the pencil eraser and grimacing when the rubber breaks off in his mouth. "The early stuff is exciting. Getting to know someone and figuring them out, putting them together like a puzzle so you can see if you like the whole picture."

Sunny pouts. "I want the finished puzzle."

"Tough luck, Tennyson. You've gotta do it the hard way. But wanna know a secret?"

"Mmhmm?" She leans forward. Ravi does too. She can smell him, that pencilly smell mixed with the light musk of his aftershave. He cracks a grin and she can count the creases around his eyes, their faces mere inches apart.

"It's so fucking worth it," he whispers.

*

Welcome to Sunny's story! This book is my pride and joy, one that has been years in the making. If you've read any of my previous books, this is pretty different - it's third person, it's hella English, it's historical (1999 & 2000) and although it's contemporary, it has a lowkey sci-fi twist. I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I can't wait to share more.