Somehow, just like that, as though time squeezes itself down into the space of a second and slips through the eye of a needle, a week passes. Sunny doesn't notice the hours building into days as she goes to work and serves hundreds of customers and drags her tired body home at one in the morning. Except it's not home, not yet. It's Viv's flat she is drawn to each night. She gets in at quarter past one and sometimes finds Viv sleeping. On those nights, she sheds her uniform and slips into bed next to her. Sometimes Viv is still awake, so lost in a book that she's shocked to hear Sunny come through the door, shocked to realise it's one o'clock already. On those nights, they stay up and talk. They share music and their day and they slip under the covers together – to sleep. Only ever to sleep.

In the day, Sunny puts on any one of the CDs she forgot and she wastes hours playing with Britney. Cats are the ultimate time wasters, she thinks – it's far too easy to while away the day with a laser or a feather on a stick. She devours book after book, her mind at last settled enough to enjoy reading again – she realised on Thursday that in the weeks since she woke up in this life, she has read only one book, her brain to full of everything else to slip into someone else's reality. But now she is reading again, working her way through the shelf where Viv keeps all of her favourites; she writes notes on sticky tabs and slips them between the pages, marking the passages she loves, the characters she adores and abhors.

It's been more than a week since she last saw Fenfen. She hasn't spent the night at home since before getting Britney; she hasn't seen Fenfen since before that. They were already ships in the night but now that Viv's flat has started to feel like home to Sunny, she's had so little reason to go back to the flat she pays to live in. As much as she loves Fenfen, she has got too comfortable here; the thought of having to go back to her dark, cramped little flat makes her sad, and the last thing she needs at the moment is any reason to feel sad. This is the natural progression of things, she thinks. It's not like she and Fenfen were going to live together forever. She just never thought too hard about moving out, but now she has Viv. Viv, who she wants to spend her time with, her life with.

"What's on your mind?" Viv asks as she clasps a necklace around her neck without looking, without having to pull the fastener round to the front to see what she's doing. "You look very deep in thought."

Sunny pulls on a pair of dark jeans, about as smart as she gets, and says, "I was just thinking about how long it's been since I spent the night in my flat. I haven't seen Fenfen in a while."

"You know you can go back, right?" Viv brushes a few stray lilac hairs off her chest. Sunny quite likes that her hair is on her girlfriend's clothes, proof of their proximity. "I love having you here but you can stay at yours whenever you want."

"No, that's the thing." Sunny purses her lips and pulls on one of Viv's floppy shirts over her tank top, the blue linen a perfect complement to her hair. "I don't want to go back to mine. It's just weird, not seeing Fen."

She makes a mental note to invest in a few more grown-up pieces for her wardrobe, most of which looks like it could belong to a ten-year-old – she and Viv are having supper with Astrid and Celeste tonight, and only an hour ago did Sunny realise she had nothing appropriate to wear except the black of the shirts and trousers she wears for work. She's trying to figure out which buttons to do up and which to leave open when she catches a glimpse of Viv in the mirror. Viv's paused in the middle of clasping a second necklace, one with a pendant that sits between her breasts, and she's staring at Sunny with a look on her face that Sunny can only describe as daylight.

"You mean that?"

"Mean what?" She has forgotten already; her mind has moved onto other things by now.

"You don't want to go back to yours?"

"Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do. Mean that, I mean." She pulls on a pair of socks and hopes her plain white pumps are the right footwear. She is not the best socialised of people, no idea how she should dress for supper with a pair of octogenarians. Her day to day style is so different to Astrid's or Celeste's, who always look ready for a dinner party at a moment's notice. "Maybe we can talk more seriously about, you know, living together?" She looks up at Viv through her eyelashes. Not because she's trying to be alluring, but because she's got her finger wedged in the back of her shoe.

"You know I'd love that. But I don't want you to say that just because you know it's what I want."

"Don't worry, I'm far too selfish for that," Sunny says with a laugh. "I need to talk to Fen, obviously, and fuck knows when my lease is up—"

"End of June," Viv supplies.

"Okay, that's one question answered." She wedges her foot into her shoe without undoing the laces and stands, slightly out of breath from the effort. "So, uh, we should talk more about this when we're not at risk of running late for supper, but I guess ... I won't renew it this time? And we can split the rent here?"

Viv looks so fucking happy and it makes Sunny pretty fucking happy to see. She drinks in the sight: Viv is rosy-cheeked and bright eyed, her curls painstakingly washed and dried and teased into perfection, and she's wearing make-up for the first time since Sunny's known her. Just a little lipstick and a brush of powder on her cheeks, a dash of mascara and a careful swipe of eyeshadow in the same shade of pearlescent pink as her shirt.

"I guess you could say you've grown on me, Miss Galanis," Sunny says. Her hand finds Viv's waist; her lips find the strong line of Viv's jaw, somewhere she can kiss without ruining her make-up. Viv is less concerned about smudging her lipstick: she holds Sunny's chin in a gentle hand and kisses her square on the lips and for a moment, Sunny is tempted to call Celeste and cancel because all she wants to do is wrap her arms around her girlfriend and drink in this moment. She wants to take off these jeans (good god, why are jeans so stiff?) and get into bed and cuddle Viv; she wants to put You've Got Mail on in the background because she loves Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, even if she hates the message of the film.

But she doesn't do any of that, because yes, she does also actually quite want to see Astrid and Celeste. They are her honorary grandmothers, after all.

*

There are so many candles. Sunny has never seen so many candles in one place, all alight at the same time – there are several in the middle of the table, various heights and sizes and stages of melting; several more are dotted on the dressers and shelves in the warm, vanilla-scented dining room. It really does look like it could be a witches' lair. Sunny wonders if Astrid and Celeste realise that, if they lean into the stereotype on purpose. She can't fully shake the thought that it could all be true. Stranger things have happened than it turning out that these friendly eighty-something lesbians are a pair of actual witches. That'd be pretty fucking cool, actually.

"Your place is amazing," Viv says, her eyes drawn to the art on the walls and the plants that fill every surface not already taken up by candles. She marvels at an intricate miniature in bronze, a naked woman reclining with a book in her hands. Marvel turns to delight when she realises the statue is a bookend; the curve of the woman's shoulder is propping up a handful of yellow-paged, well worn paperbacks.

"Thank you, dear," Celeste says. "Dinner will be ready in about half an hour. I was thinking we could have a drink in the sunroom first? Though the moonroom might be a more apt name at this time."

It's only seven thirty, not that late. The sun won't set for another hour. They walk through and it is bathed in glorious light, those warm colours that come out at the end of the day when the hour heads towards twilight and everything seems a little more magical.

"Actually, before we sit, could I use your loo?" Viv asks. Sunny wonders if she actually needs the loo or if it is a guise under which to covertly explore the house alone.

"Of course! It's just upstairs, first door on the right. There is one under the stairs but it's not the most reliable at the moment."

Viv ducks out of the sunroom and Astrid comes in, and Sunny grabs her chance to lay down the rules for tonight.

"Hey, um, so," she starts, perching on the very edge of a chair, "obviously Viv knows what happened and everything but I'd rather tonight wasn't all about that. We're in a good place and I don't want to shake things up by talking about, you know, Isabel and Margaret and all that. Dead people and tragedy and the general shit that seems to come with my predicament. I know it's how all this started but I just, I don't want to talk about the well tonight."

Astrid clasps Sunny's hands in hers. "Understood," she says with a sincere nod. "This is nothing but an evening to have a good time and good food with new friends."

Warmth floods Celeste's face when she says, "I'm so glad to hear that you're in a good place, Sunny. That"—she trails off, a flicker of emotion crossing her face—"that means a lot. I couldn't bear to lose you too."

"I don't plan on going anywhere," Sunny says. "Although I am planning to move in with Viv, so I guess everything's working out just fine."

"Sunny!" Astrid cries. "That's absolutely wonderful!"

"All or nothing, right?" She grins, like this has been her plan all along. Like it hasn't taken her all this time to come to terms with what's happened. "I found this diary I supposedly started a few months ago where I wrote that I'm gonna marry her someday, so it's only natural to move in together. Plus," she adds when a sleek black cat winds itself around her legs, "we have a cat now. I don't have a choice."

*

"Oh, gosh, it was so long ago now." Celeste takes a sip of chardonnay and rolls her eyes in reminiscence. "What was it, nineteen forty?"

"Nineteen forty," Astrid agrees with a sage nod. Sunny and Viv have already shared the story of how they met while the four of them ate Celeste's impeccable fish pie; now it is the turn of their hosts to share their tale as they digest. "We were both fannies in the war."

Sunny coughs on her water (she isn't much of a fan of wine; it feels too sophisticated, too grown up) and says, "Fannies?"

A wry smile teases at the corner of Celeste's lips. "The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. We drove ambulances for the ATS. Astrid and I were assigned to the same one. I don't recall how long we worked together before we fell in love, but I can't forget the years of trying to hide our relationship."

"I thought we were so sneaky," Astrid says with a laugh, "but, remember, we told Doris some twenty years later when we had that reunion in the sixties and it turned out she'd known all along."

"Well, she was working for the special operations executive. She probably wouldn't have been recruited to work in secret intelligence if she couldn't tell that her closest friends were lovers."

Astrid sighs and says, "I was so miffed when I learnt about the girls who got to be spies for the SOE. I would've loved that. You know, they got taught how to handle a weapon? They were trained in morse code and silent killing! Isn't that exciting?"

"One of those is not like the other, darling." Celeste gives her partner a fond but slightly disparaging look. "I don't think the life of espionage would have become you. And if it had, we never would have met."

"No. No, you're quite right. I can't imagine how my life would have gone without you," she muses. "You know, I felt so grown up at the time, back when we were saving the lives of the people saving the country, but when I look back on it now, I was virtually a child."

"You were twenty-one, Astrid."

"I'm nearly twenty-five," Sunny says, "and I still feel like a child." Under the table, Viv squeezes her hand. "Though if I had to drive an ambulance in the middle of a world war, I'd probably grow up pretty fast."

That, or she would curl up into a ball of terror and disassociation. She can't even drive, for one, and while she isn't fazed by the sight of blood, she cannot bear to see beneath the skin. The stuff inside a body is supposed to stay on the inside and she feels queasy at the mere thought of the muscle and fat and bone that lie beneath the surface.

Astrid launches into her memories of the war, the terror and the thrill of it all, and Sunny is rapt. She cannot tear her attention from these stories; she cannot believe the atrocities these women lived through on a daily basis when they were several years younger than she is now. A couple of queer fannies working on the home front, fighting for love and life.

She weaves a wonderful tale. Both she and Celeste certainly have the gift of the gab, taking it in turns to add to a tale as though they are playing ping pong and each memory is the ball. It's such a relief, Sunny thinks, to spend time with people who didn't know her before. There is no expectation here. When they ask after her, she does not have to worry that she has forgotten something and there is no pressure to pretend.

"You've had such an exciting life," Viv says. "You've done so much. You'd already done so much by the time you were our age, god. It's crazy."

"We've lived a lot more than you, my dear," Celeste says. "By the time you reach my age, I'm sure you'll have a world of stories. Look at the pair of you, building a life together. One day you will have so much to reminisce on."

They are skirting dangerously close to the topic of the well and the catalyst for this entire situation, but they don't quite get there. Sunny's about to interject and nudge the conversation in a new direction, but Astrid jumps in.

"You'd be amazed how the memories build up over the years. I felt I'd lived forever by the time I was forty, and then it felt like starting a whole new life when we had children. Just ask your mother, I'm sure she'll say the same," Astrid says, chuckling to herself.

"My mother died when I was a baby," Viv says. "She really had lived her whole life by the time she was forty."

Silence falls. Sunny reaches for Viv's hand this time. It feels like forever that no-one knows what to say, though in reality it's only a few seconds before Celeste says, "Darling, I am so sorry to hear that."

"It's okay. I never knew her."

"What was her name?"

"Molly. Molly Galanis," Viv says. Celeste smiles.

"Such a pretty name."

Astrid glances at Sunny, a look on her face that says you asked us not to mention death and tragedy but your girlfriend has just brought up her dead mother, what would you like me to say?

To be fair, Sunny doesn't know what to say either. So she picks up on what Astrid says before and she replays it and says, "I didn't know you have children."

She doesn't ask how that works – she is too used to people's confusion over the circumstance of her birth to quiz others on theirs – but Astrid, it seems, is happy to share.

"Cassie and Apollo. I'm sure I've mentioned them before," she says, twisting in her chair to take a photo off the chest behind her. Apollo is the spitting image of Celeste: tall and slim, with cool eyes and a sharp face. Cassie, however is a carbon copy of Astrid, the only difference being a few decades and a little pigment in her hair. "Quite an unusual arrangement, we've been told many a time, but we had a dear, darling friend, Richard, back in the – what was it, the fifties? The sixties? Gosh, all the years blur together now." She purses her lips and frowns.

"Fifty-nine," Celeste supplies. "Cassie and Apollo were born in nineteen sixty."

"Yes, that's it. Anyway, he didn't want children of his own but he was happy to help us become parents." She titters and says, "We wanted to double our chances of success so we both tried to get pregnant. We didn't expect it'd work so well."

Celeste takes the photo. Her features have softened throughout the evening, no longer that imposing presence Sunny first met a couple of weeks ago. "They were born two weeks apart. In hindsight, we should have spaced them out a little more."

"Oh, but it was ever so fun, confusing everyone who ever enquired as to their ages." She places the photo back on the dresser and sips her wine. Viv reaches for her glass, only to find that it's empty.

"We seem to have polished off the wine," Celeste says, holding up an empty bottle and failing to find another, "but we do have plenty of homebrew, if you'd like to try that?" She fishes out a suspiciously dark bottle with a handmade label that says homebrew batch 5, bottled 12/10/99.

"What exactly is it?" Sunny asks, her eyebrows raised.

"Like cider, but slightly more potent. And a lot tastier," Astrid says. She tips the bottle at Sunny and Viv. "Want a taste?"

Viv shrugs and holds out her empty glass after draining the last drops of white wine. "What harm can it do?"

*

The homebrew, it turns out, is pretty fucking potent. But it goes down easy. Sunny, who has never been a fan of cider, or of anything much that doesn't taste like fruit syrup, polishes off three glasses of the stuff before it kicks in, and it kicks hard. It's almost eleven o'clock by the time she and Viv say goodbye to Astrid and Celeste with hugs and kisses and promises to do this again, and Sunny's balance is suffering. So is her ability to keep a straight face: everything is amusing, her reactions tripled by the alcohol, and Viv has not escaped unscathed either.

Sunny loops her arm through Viv's and latches on tight as they try to navigate the steps down to the pavement. It's a lot harder than it sounds. Sunny feels all loose, like her limbs have been disconnected from her body, and using Viv for balance is like holding onto a kite in the storm. She is wavering too, cursing and giggling when she bumps into the well.

"Oh my god, we're never going to make it home," Sunny groans. "Shall we just sleep here?"

"On the pavement?" Viv finds this hilarious. She creases up at the thought and starts to sit down until Sunny tugs her up.

"No, in their house! So many sofas. So many places for two little bodies to snooze," Sunny says. "I can't walk all the way back to yours. My legs will fall off. I can't even feel my legs. Oh my god, Viv, I can't feel my legs!"

"You're walking on them. I think you're okay."

"Do you think they poisoned us? What if there were, like, sleeping pills in the homebrew?"

"Then they're out cold too, 'cause Astrid had more than me."

The bus stop is so close. The bus is due in three minutes. But Sunny can't fathom actually reaching it because her feet don't belong to her and why does everything seem so funny? The night breeze is cool on her face and the seagulls sound like they're laughing, and that makes her want to laugh too because she wants to be in on the joke, whatever it is. It'd be nice to be a seagull, she reckons. You have wings and everything's free and you're just expected to steal chips and ice cream. She throws out her arms, pretending to soar.

"I'd like to fly," she says. Viv grabs her hand.

"Let's fly to the bus."

So they do. They run and stumble and float to the bus stop and they're just in time for the 19, and Viv has exactly the right money already prepared in her pocket, because that's just the kind of person she is. She probably always has 70p in each pocket just in case she needs to catch a ride.

It's a miracle they make it home in one piece. Sunny does have an aching graze on her knee from where she miscalculated the step off the bus, and she's dreading taking off her jeans because she just knows the fabric will be sticking to the wound, but she's also too tipsy to care that much. After well over a minute of intense effort, Viv gets her key to work in the lock and they both stumble into the flat and Britney greets them with a little chirrup of a sound.

Viv, who still has her head screwed on, puts food down for the cat before she starts pulling her clothes off in the bedroom. Sunny's stuck in her jeans. They were a bit tight when she put them on because it must be years since she bought them – six or maybe seven, even – and now she's full of fish pie and Astrid's homebrew and her knee is all bloody and her fucking jeans won't come off. It doesn't help that when she drinks, she loses all coordination, her hands blindly fumbling at the button and the zip until she gives up with a groan.

"I'm going to die in these jeans," she says, flinging an arm over her eyes as she throws herself onto Viv's bed. Her bed, too. Their bed.

Viv kneels on the floor by the bed, her elbows resting on Sunny's knees as she gets face to face with the problem. Her face is literally inches from Sunny's crotch as she works the button out of the buttonhole and pulls down the fly, and slips her thumbs through the belt loops to tug the jeans off Sunny's hips.

"Ta da. You're free to choose whatever you want to wear before you die."

Sunny sits up. She gazes at Viv, who has stripped down to nothing but a pair of snug boxer briefs that hug her hips and the curve of her perfect arse, and she does the same, getting rid of everything but her threadbare pants. Why are my pants always threadbare, she wonders as she picks at the limp elastic and fails to recall the last time she actually bought new underwear, and then the thought falls away when she looks up at Viv again

A moment of clarity strikes and she sits up too fast, blood rushing to her head as her hands rush out to catch Viv's wrists.

"I love you, Viv," Sunny says, pulling her down onto the bed so Viv ends up straddling her lap, her breasts a few inches from Sunny's face. But Sunny isn't looking at them because her gaze is fixed on the women she adores. "We've already lost so much fucking time. I don't want to waste any more time. I know I'm a shitty girlfriend and my memory sucks but I love you and I just want to be with you, all the time." Her hands wrap around the back of Viv's neck and pull her down for a kiss.

Viv stops a second before their lips meet. Her arms are draped over Sunny's shoulders. She sighs and pouts a fraction, the movement enough to make her lips touch Sunny's in the most tender of kisses. "I never want to live a day without you by my side. Life can't get crazier than it already is, huh?"

*

i hope you liked this!