“You’re amazing,” he says, and I laugh, and kiss him back.
“This isn’t love,” he adds.
It isn’t?
“What is it, then?” I ask.
He shrugs.
So I reach out for the dictionary, but drop it – and all the words spill out, scattering like soundless marbles. I pluck one spinning by: naive. It blinks at me. I snatch another: foolish. He unfurls a sleek deceitful, and grabs another: lying. And another, wildly: cheat.
“It isn’t true!” he says, wide-eyed, and then one floats between us like a feather.
“Eybdoog is not a word,” he says.
“Goodbye,” I say.
© Joanna Rubery 2017