'She's well fit. You'd be well into her,' Caleb says as he unlocks the employee entrance to Spectrum. After Bumble failed to produce a single person he deemed good enough to match with, Caleb started linking me with everyone he's ever met in real life, presently Annalise's replacement.

'Just because I'm pansexual–' I cut myself off when I follow in after him. 'Joe. Hi.'

The greeting leaves my throat in a high-pitched flutter. She's sitting on the barstool left in the corridor because the lever is broken and Sasha hasn't got around to fixing it (it's been two years), with one of Sasha's many binders open in her lap. My face scorches when she looks up.

Are my eyes still red from crying?

Caleb's stare swings from me to her and back. 'You know each other?' The disbelief is unfiltered in his voice.

I would've told him if I met someone so fit, even if we never talked, even if I didn't drive her home. That's frequent in the group chat: "Yous should've seen the worker at Tesco. When I tell you the eyeliner was sym👏🏾met👏🏾ri👏🏾cal!" or "Just fainted over his person on the bus. Imagine Jason Momoa and Dev Patel had a child who got a lot of tattoos". And then Rishi sends vomit emojis over the concept of sexual attraction.

'I recommended her for the job, actually.'

The tooth gems make Joe's smile sparkle. 'Only cause you got me sacked from my original one.'

This irritates Caleb more. 'You got someone sacked? And you didn't tell me? I thought we were best mates.' With a theatrical scoff, he storms off into the dressing room.

I grin at his dramatic retreat until I realise he's left me alone with Joe in an incredibly narrow corridor. She's wearing an Arlo Parks tour t-shirt and cargo shorts that are probably from the men's section, which is mint for me cause if they were any shorter I'd probably have an aneurysm if the way her thighs fill them in is owt to go by.

Definitely a good thing I can't see the dark skin and imagine what my fingers would look like pressed into it, prying her thighs apart–

'Nicolás!'

I snap my attention to Sasha.

Sasha's Russian accent is so strong I'm sure he's putting it on at this point considering he's lived here for forty years. 'What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on holiday till Monday.'

'I've nowt else to do...'

It's pathetic. I stare intently at Sasha to not have to look at Joe. Yeah, I'm a twenty-three-year-old with nowt better to do on a Friday night than cut lemons without even being on shift. I suppose I could go to the gym but I always go with Eilidh now and she'll be here for Caleb's show. Guess I could sit and watch my plants grow, check if any frogs have moved into the pond for the third time today.

Sasha huffs. 'Oh, alright then. But I'm paying you. Don't even try to convince me otherwise.' He jabs a finger at me and I swallow my "but I'm not supposed to be on shift" objection, then gestures at Joe. 'Since you're here, you can train Joe.'

'I were gonna cut some lemons.'

'How many lemons do you need to cut?'

'With Fresher's Week starting Monday, probably a lot–'

Sasha waves a hand to silence. 'Train Joe. Then you can cut lemons together: double speed.'

That is just champion. Thanks Universe!

Sasha recedes into his cupboard of an office and we're alone again. I keep my focus strictly above the neck as I turn to her, tucking my hands into my pockets. Joe's wearing colourful eyeliner again, sunset shades picked from the graphic of her t-shirt. The rest of her skin is bare.

Looking down at the binder on her lap, Joe sighs. 'You've got so many house drinks here. Do people actually order these or is it like sex on the beach and vodka tonics?'

'Nah, it's mostly these,' I say sympathetically and her shoulders slump, carding through the laminated recipes. 'Don't worry. You learn them pretty quick. By the time folk come here, they're drunk enough to have lost eighty per cent of their taste anyway.'

The tower of empty lemon crates by the door collapses and we both flinch. I try to kick them into a pile. Definitely an evacuation risk but I'm not the one who left them there in the first place! It's probably Erica. Ze reckons the cardboard recycling's a game of Jenga.

'Why are you sitting here?' I ask once I've managed to clear just enough floor to walk past. 'You've got a whole club of space.'

'I didn't want to get in anyone's way.'

'There's no one else around.'

Joe goes to argue but I gesture for her to follow. She slides off the broken stool with a clack of its mechanism. We pass the dressing room where Caleb's glue stick dries as he watches the Malta vs England World Cup Qualifier on his phone.

'So... what've ya done so far?'

'Just the trainings. Is it hygienic to serve food that has fallen on the floor? What to do if someone tries to rob the place? Bomb threat stuff. Evacuation plan. Don't sexually harass people. What to do if someone harasses you. And then I've been trying to read these recipes.' She lifts the binder. 'Oh, and Sasha gave me a tour.'

I nod, tryna play through my routine from the perspective of someone who's never done it before. 'If you're on opening shift, you have to do prep work and the cleaning routine which is mostly: disinfect everything. I prefer to do cleaning first and then the prep so let's do that today but when you're alone you can do whatever you like.'

I show her where to find Sasha's colour-coded binders for all the instructions of everything you could ever possibly need. He even has laminated instructions for washing your hands. Before we start cleaning, I connect my phone to the speakers. 'What music do you like?'

'Anything is fine by me.'

I play "Awaken, My Love", the volume low enough that we can easily talk, and tie my locs back. We start taking stools off the tables to Gambino's psychedelic synth.

'So, um, have you worked here long?'

'I've been hanging out here pretty much every weekend since I turned eighteen—it is a twenty-plus club most nights but Sasha let Caleb start performing at eighteen and I go where he goes. I started helping out to pass the time so it made sense to be paid for it. But I'm an IT technician for my actual job.'

'Oh, is it like The IT Crowd?' Joe asks, revealing her teeth gems again. I only register that she's waiting for my answer when her grin starts to fade.

'No,' I say, way too loud and snap my focus on scrubbing a table like there's three-day-old toffee melted on it. 'Turning things on and off again does solve ninety per cent of problems but nah, I've never set owt on fire or found the vampirical figure of Noel Fielding in the cellar. Just boring stuff: changing people's forgotten passwords, maintaining the website, mucking about with Caleb. He works part-time as a data analyst for the same place.'

'You two have been friends for long then?'

'Since we were four.'

'Was she always performing?'

'Caleb goes by he/him pronouns in drag,' I say. 'There's Caleb and there's Caleb In Drag but he's always Caleb. But no, he were a football kid through and through. He found drag after his accident.'

Joe's eyes glide over me. 'Do you do drag?'

'My stage career is limited to "naked boy toy prop".'

Laughter bubbles from her only to abruptly cut off. She sprays disinfectant on the horseshoe seat of a booth to wipe it down with a bit more focus than necessary. Don't: Look. Do not look at her bending over.

Is she imagining me naked? I kinda want her too.

As the conversation flows, my mind finally stops acting like I've abruptly aged down to fifteen. We wipe down all the tables and chairs, empty the dish trolley, make sure all the equipment is in the right place, and stock the bars in each room. Then we get to the kitchen to prep. Slicing lemons! And oranges and limes, preparing olive skewers, splitting branches of mint.

"Awaken, My Love" has ended and Joe picked a Roberta Flack album that weaves between us. As we work side by side with only the sink between us, I notice that she has slightly pointed ears. Combined with the cleft lip and round cheeks, I wouldn't be surprised if she turned into a fairy like we're in some Barbie movie.

"Did everything turn out okay with your brother? You do use "brother", right?'

'Yeah.' I glance at her, swiping the lemon ends over the side of the cutting board into the colander waiting in the sink. I cut off the ends of the next lemon before halving it, and talk as I slice. 'I asked about that and they said to use brother "in the way Robin Hood and the Merry Men were a brotherhood, not brother as in I'm a man" so... whatever that means. Brother. "Our kid" always works.'

Joe makes a sound of distaste. 'I know it's normal for you northerners but it's weird—that's not my child! "Our kid"... doesn't roll off the tongue.'

I stop slicing to look at her and she meets me with an expectant grin. 'That's cause you pronounce "our" wrong—it's not "hour kid" it's "are kid".'

'The Oxford Dictionary would disagree with you on that.'

'Sure. Let me consult my handy Oxford Dictionary that I carry around to make sure I pronounce shit right.'

'Maybe you should.' Joe shrugs and continues to cut slivers into strawberries so that they can easily be stuck onto the rim of a glass. She freezes so abruptly that the knife slides dangerously close to her thumb. 'That's a joke.'

'No, I– I mean, I assumed that.'

'Okay.' She exhales. 'Just had to make sure cause we don't know each other very well so I don't know what kind of humour you have, if that makes sense.'

I offer her a smile before I return to my lemons. 'Anyway, yeah, everything's alright with my brother. Thanks for asking. They've gone back to West Country now so...'

The sentence tapers off. How exactly were I planning to end it, so now I'm miserable and lonely but a little relieved and maybe a horrible person also?

Notes

Freshers' Week: The first week of university where societies and the student union will have planned different kinds of activities for the new students.