The Night Bus Arrangement

I was thirty-four, and I was proud of my life. I need you to know that up front, because everything that happened on that bus only makes sense if you know where I was starting from.

I had my flat in Birmingham, second floor, decent light. I had my job doing software support, which sounds boring but pays the rent and never follows me home. I had a kettle I loved and a plant that refused to die no matter how I neglected it. What I did not have was a man, and after a few messy years in my late twenties, I had decided that was fine. Better than fine. Quiet was good. Quiet was earned.

So there I was, Friday night, Birmingham coach station, boarding the night bus to London to visit Kari. One bag, one ticket, one plan: sleep most of the way and show up rested.

The bus was half empty. Dim aisle lights, that hum of tires on wet asphalt, the whole thing already smelling faintly of diesel and old upholstery. (That smell gets one mention, I promised myself, and then I stop complaining about it.)

I found my seat by the window, settled in, and then I looked across the aisle.

Oh no, I thought. Oh no, no, no.

Because there he was. Clint. I recognized him instantly, and I need to explain why that felt like a physical event. Clint and I were in the same graphic design certificate program twelve years ago, back when we were both twenty-two and both broke. I had the biggest crush on him for the entire year of that program. He had this way of tilting his head when he was thinking about a layout. He never knew about the crush. I never told him. I graduated, he graduated, life happened, and I filed him away under "nice thing that didn't happen."

And now he was sitting four feet away from me on a night bus, scrolling his phone, wearing a beanie.

My whole plan of a calm, restful trip just evaporated.

"Clint?" I said, before I could stop myself.

He looked up. He blinked. Then he grinned, and I remembered why the crush had lasted a whole year.

"Amanda? No way!" He was already out of his seat, and he leaned over the aisle for a quick hug, which I permitted because my brain was still loading. "How long has it been?"

"Twelve years, give or take." I counted on my fingers like a dork. "Since the certificate program."

"Twelve years." He sat down sideways in his seat, arm over the backrest, clearly not going back to his phone anytime soon. "You look great."

"You look like someone who owns a beanie indoors," I said, which came out meaner than intended, so I added, "in a good way."

"It's cold in here!" He protested, laughing. "Buses are freezing. Why are you on this thing? I thought you hated coaches."

"How do you remember that?"

"Because you complained about it for a whole semester." He shrugged. "Some things stick."

Well. That did something to my calm. Not on the outside, obviously. On the outside I was a composed adult woman with a stable life. On the inside I was twenty-two again and writing his name in the margin of my sketchbook, which I never actually did, but you get me.

"I'm going to London to see a friend," I said. "Kari. She just moved down there. What about you?"

"Convention," he said, and then he grinned again, this weird proud grin. "A wig convention."

"A what?"

"A wig convention. It's real. It's annual. I'm a wig maker now."

I stared at him. "You're joking."

"I am not. Look." He pulled up his phone and scrolled to photos. Lace fronts, ventilated caps, this one gorgeous silver-gray number styled like something out of a period drama. "I make them. Hand-tied. Took me years to learn and now I do it for theater companies and a couple of private clients."

"Clint." I leaned over the aisle to see better, which put me awfully close to him, and I noticed, and I sat back. "That's incredible. How did you even get into that?"

"Long story. Short version: I did stage makeup for a community theater after uni, someone needed a wig repaired, I fixed it, and I fell down a rabbit hole." He typed something and put the phone away. "Best decision I ever made. What about you? Still doing design?"

"Software support. I know, I know, wild pivot."

"It pays better, though, right?"

"God, yes." We both laughed at that, and somewhere around the laugh the last of the awkwardness left, which was dangerous, because what replaced it was easy. Easy was the problem. Easy was how crushes came back.

"So," I said, because I had to know and I hated that I had to know, "is your wife or boyfriend waiting at the convention, or...?"

"Nobody's waiting." He said it lightly, but he watched my face when he said it. "Divorced four years ago. No kids. It's just me and about two hundred wig heads in a workshop in Manchester."

"Two hundred?"

"Two hundred and six, if we're counting."

"Of course we're counting." I was smiling like an idiot. I checked myself. "And you? Are you seeing anyone?"

"Nobody. Not properly, not since the divorce." He paused. "You?"

"Nobody at all, actually. Happily. It's a whole thing I have going." I said it with a little too much pride, the kind you use to wallpaper over a question you didn't expect to be asked. He nodded like he believed me, which somehow made it worse.

The bus pulled out of the station properly then, and the city started sliding past the windows, all sodium lights and wet roads. We talked anyway. We talked through the first hour, easy as anything. His workshop. My plant. The instructor we both hated. The one we both loved.

At some point he said, "You know, I always thought you were interesting. Back then."

"Interesting," I repeated.

"Interesting and way out of my league, and you had a boyfriend, and I had a girlfriend, so." He shrugged. "Timing."

I had a boyfriend back then, yes. That was true. What was also true was that I would have dropped him in a heartbeat if Clint had ever said anything. I did not say that. I said, "Timing," back, and we let it sit there between us like something with a pulse.

Around midnight the bus went properly quiet. Most people were asleep or faking it. We were still turned toward each other in our seats, whispering now, which felt conspiratorial in a way I enjoyed maybe too much.

"Where are you staying in London?" he asked.

"Hotel near Kari's. Why?"

"Because I've got a hostel booking and the convention doesn't start until Sunday afternoon, and I'm thinking I should have asked you to dinner instead of telling you about wig heads for two hours."

"You can ask me now," I said. "Retroactively. I'll allow it."

"Dinner tomorrow night, then?"

"Dinner tomorrow night." My heart was not pounding, I told myself. It was just the bus engine. "Fair warning, I have expensive taste and a friend who will interrogate you."

"Looking forward to both."

I should have gone back to my own side of the aisle then. I didn't, not for another hour, and when I finally did sleep, it was with my cheek against the cold window and his voice still going in my head, steady as the tires.

Quiet was good, I reminded myself. Quiet was earned.

Somehow that didn't feel like the whole truth anymore, and the bus just kept rolling toward London.

The stop came around two in the morning, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The driver announced it over the speaker, something about a mechanical check, twenty minutes, everyone off the bus. Everyone groaned at once.

"Come on, then." Clint was already up, pulling his jacket on. "Free coffee if you know where to look."

"There's a machine in there," I said. "That's not coffee, that's punishment."

"You're coming anyway."

I was coming anyway. We stood in the little station shop under fluorescent lights that made us both look like we'd died years ago, and he fed coins into a machine that produced two cups of something brown and steaming.

"To your health." He handed me one.

"To timing," I said, and immediately wanted to bite my own tongue off. He just grinned.

We drank it leaning against the brick wall outside. It was cold and damp and the coffee was genuinely terrible, and I remember thinking, this is the part of the night I'll remember. Not the convention, not dinner. This.

Then he went to sit up on the low wall for a better look at the bus, and his camera, his old film camera hanging off his shoulder, swung forward and cracked against the curb. The sound it made was awful. Glass, metal, something inside rattling.

"No, no, no!" He picked it up. The lens had a starburst crack across it and the whole front assembly sat crooked. He turned it over twice, like that would fix it.

"Oh no. Clint, that looked expensive."

"It was my dad's." He said it quietly, and that was the first time all night he didn't sound light. "It still worked. I keep it loaded."

"Maybe it can be repaired?"

"Maybe." He put it back in the bag carefully, gentler than I'd seen him handle anything, including the wig photos. "Right. Well. Twenty minutes of my life I'll be replaying forever."

I didn't know what to say, so I said, "The coffee really is terrible."

"It really is." And he laughed, a real one, and something unknotted in my chest. We stood there until the driver honked, and he didn't once mention the camera again, and I liked him a whole lot more for that.

* * *

London was gray and drizzly at seven in the morning, which felt correct. We got off at Victoria and stood on the pavement doing the awkward goodbye shuffle.

"So. Dinner tonight," he said.

"Dinner tonight. Text me the place."

"Deal." He paused. "Amanda. It's really good to see you."

"You too. Don't let the wig people eat you alive."

"They're the gentlest people alive. It's a very gentle industry."

I was halfway to the tube when my phone rang. Unknown number. I answered because I was still riding the high of the whole night, which is the only excuse I have for what happened next.

"Amanda Ellis?" A man's voice, brisk. "I'm calling about your storage facility. There's been a leak in the basement, a pipe let go overnight. Storage units are affected. Can you confirm your unit number?"

My storage unit. Where I had, in flat boxes, every single thing I owned from before Birmingham. My portfolios, actual printed work. My grandmother's quilts. Boxes I'd been meaning to sort for six years.

I won't pretend I handled it gracefully. I said some words. The man said the plumber was there, the water was off, but the units had been sitting in standing water for hours and did I want to come assess the damage today. I said I was in London. He said, well, the sooner the better.

I walked back to where Clint was still standing with his bag.

"You look like someone died," he said.

"My basement flooded. My storage basement, back in Birmingham. All my boxes."

"God. What's in them?"

"Everything. Old work. My gran's quilts. Photos." I heard my own voice crack and hated it. "And I have to go back today, apparently, and Kari is going to think I've stood her up, and I've got no idea how bad it is, and I'm standing here being dramatic at you in a bus station."

"You're not being dramatic." He thought about it. "Can I help? I mean it. I can ride back with you, help you carry stuff, whatever sorting looks like. The convention doesn't start till tomorrow afternoon anyway."

"Clint, no. You've got a hostel, plans, a whole weekend."

"Cost me nothing to change a booking. Look, you'd do it for me. You'd complain the entire time, but you'd do it."

That was true, and he knew it was true, and that's how he got me. "Fine. But I'm warning you, wet cardboard weighs about a thousand pounds a box and I will be miserable company."

"Good thing I like misery," he said. "It's basically my brand."

* * *

The flat has never felt smaller than it did with Clint in it. He's not a big man, but the second floor of a Birmingham terrace doesn't have room for two adults, one dying plant, and a decade of unsorted grief in cardboard form.

We got back around noon. The basement was exactly as bad as I'd feared. Three inches of standing