I met Ryan on Tinder. He only had one photograph of himself on his profile, edited with a grainy filter. I thought he looked alright. I didn’t have much in the way of standards. My own picture wasn’t even really me; it was another lanky brunette that I’d found online, her face turned away from the camera. My bio was Tinderloin, after my favourite cut.
I’d started babysitting more regularly since moving in with Ivan. It wasn’t about the money. The rent at his flat was no higher than my last place. I did it because I liked the feeling of, having left, coming back. Surfacing on the tube to a text, Grab us some eggs? Striding through the wet streets, my cheap headphones scratching at my ears. The light going. Pit stopping in Sainsbury’s. Taking the stairs up to the flat, the soles of my trainers sticking to the lino, a Bag for Life slung over my shoulder. Letting myself in to find Ivan in the kitchen, a room that always looked too small for him, hunched over garlic cloves, tiny red chillies he’d grown in a pot on the windowsill. Remembering, in that moment, the first time I realised I was in love with him: the day he climbed over a garden fence to steal some pears from a stranger’s tree, and sat down next to me on the curb, eating them bottom to top, cores and all. I’d feel like a grown up, returning from work to this scene of domesticity, remembering the misadventures of youth.
