Kaisha's letter ...

Not long after she came into our lives, E read to me a letter which Kaisha had left her one morning. She gave it to me while I drank my coffee. Taking the letter from her hand as I drank, I scanned it quickly – it was typed, full of spelling errors – and handed it back before I’d finished even one mouthful of perfectly hot filter coffee. "I really haven’t the energy, read it out to me."

She smiled in an embarrassed fashion, a touch of smugness only I would notice, and began to read aloud. How did it make me feel? Useless. Behind the spelling errors and the grammatical mistakes lay words and phrases, suggestions and quite direct statements which not only described E in the most perfectly-worded way imaginable, but laid bare exactly what was so wonderful and perfect about being with her, and all of it written in words I could never have dreamt of. She had touched on a part of E that I thought, strangely, only I could see. In the space of five minutes reading, it became clear that someone had come into her life and appreciated her more than I had the ability to. I felt sad, sickened, increasingly curious and surprisingly aroused.

She smiled at me and asked what I thought. I replied with a huge lie. There was nothing in that letter that I hadn’t seen in their eyes the first time I saw them together.

"But how does it make you feel, to hear all that?"

"Eff, aye, enn, ee. Fine. Really. It's kind of hot." More coffee, bigger mouthful this time.

She came over and sat sideways on my lap, an arm around my neck, the other on my chest, a passionate kiss broken off with the words, "Eurg, coffee breath." I raised my mug.

"Will she be here tonight?" I asked.

"You want her to be?"

"Yes."

"You confuse us both."

"You have discussed it?"

"We’re not complaining, we all seem to be keeping each other satisfied."

That was pretty much the end of that conversation.