When Robert’s twenty he spends Christmas with a girl called Erica and her family. They’ve been seeing each other for a couple months at this point, which mostly means shagging at house parties and falling asleep on the sofa watching old episodes of MAS*H, but he likes her well enough. She wears cheap vanilla body spray and tastes like fake strawberry lip balm and spearmint gum, and when she finds out he isn’t going back to Yorkshire she invites him over, says it isn’t anything fancy but her cousins bring their boyfriends so no one will mind.
(It’s the first time she’s called him her boyfriend.
Robert spent the Christmas before curled up on his shitty kitchen floor, drinking the bottle of wine he’d won in a pub raffle and staring at the landline on the wall, wishing and hoping and dread…
When Robert’s twenty he spends Christmas with a girl called Erica and her family. They’ve been seeing each other for a couple months at this point, which mostly means shagging at house parties and falling asleep on the sofa watching old episodes of MAS*H, but he likes her well enough. She wears cheap vanilla body spray and tastes like fake strawberry lip balm and spearmint gum, and when she finds out he isn’t going back to Yorkshire she invites him over, says it isn’t anything fancy but her cousins bring their boyfriends so no one will mind.
(It’s the first time she’s called him her boyfriend.
Robert spent the Christmas before curled up on his shitty kitchen floor, drinking the bottle of wine he’d won in a pub raffle and staring at the landline on the wall, wishing and hoping and dreading for it to ring. It hadn’t, and he’d fallen asleep with the taste of salt and Burgundy on his tongue.
He says yes immediately.)
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