Free This is Not a Love Story by Suki Fleet Page A

and feet are now completely numb, and Phillippe is shaking uncontrollably beside me, all I feel is emptiness.
    Eventually we come to Joe Brown’s cafe. Everything is dark and shut up, and we curl up together and sleep around the back of the building our feet in the glass Julian broke.
    “Romeo?”
    I wake with a start to find Cassey peering over me a deeply concerned look on her face.
    “Oh my God, Romeo, I thought you were dead!” she cries, holding her hands over her heart.
    It’s still dark, and I’ve no idea of the time as she takes us inside to the dimly lit back room where she used to give me toast to share with Julian. She tells us to sit down in the tatty armchairs and get comfortable, while she grabs every blanket and towel she can find to cover us and make us slowly warm. We don’t move but to breathe.
    Leaving us briefly to open up the cafe, she returns with hot sweet tea and chocolate biscuits. She doesn’t ask about Julian, but she watches Phillippe and me closely, as though she’s working something out.
    It’s so painful warming up after such a long time being cold. So painful I sob as the feeling comes back into my fingertips. I can’t walk at first, and the two of us just sit like statues, hoping we’ll never have to leave.
    Around midday, Cassey gets Phillippe to help clean the tables out front, and when Jodie, the only other member of staff, comes in to start her shift, Cassey closes the door and sits down in the back room with me.
    “What’s happened, Romeo?” she asks softly. For a moment the light catches in the wispy hair that frames her face before she absently tucks it back in her loose bun.
    I wonder if she has children of her own to look after. I wonder why she runs this cafe—it can’t make any money. It’s perhaps one step up from a soup kitchen.
    It must be some sort of self-preservation that kicks in when you dip below the point of survival, when you’re on the very brink, but I ask her something I’ve never asked anyone before—Julian and I were too proud, or too stupid—and I write, Can we stay here tonight? Please?
    She nods. And for an instant, I can see she’s scared for me.
     
     
    T HE NEXT two days are the coldest of the season so far. Frost spreads like fractured glass across the pavements, even though the sun glares down like an icy fire. The nights are full of stars. I don’t move from that room except to use the bathroom, and I don’t get up except to occasionally stare out the window. Phillippe no longer talks to me, but he continues to stay. I doubt it’s for me.
    Cassey even sends Cricket and Roxy through to see me when Phillippe is helping with the tables, but I just stare into space and won’t talk to them. My mind is paused, stuck in that moment I realized Julian was no longer with me. I want to search the whole of London, but I can’t move.
    After three days I stop eating the food she brings us, and I start to draw. Obsessively, I search my mind for details.
    There’s one thing, one thought that’s been forming in the cold of my mind, growing like frost across a windowpane. One thing I have become convinced I have to do, even if it’s too late, even if I never manage to do anything else.
    It started with what Joel said as he cried in my arms, what Joel said about the police….
     
     
    I T ’ S MY mother’s distrust of authority that I feel as I stand in front of the ugly square building. My mother’s distrust of the police. But the thing about not eating for a few days and then not sleeping all night and then getting up at dawn and walking miles and miles is, it makes everything disconnected, and I am dislocated from reality. If I don’t really feel like I’m doing this, it makes it so much easier.
    At 7:30 a.m. the police station is still pretty quiet.
    “Can I help you?” a deep male voice sternly asks before I can even work out where I’m headed to in the reception. I look at him blankly. I fantasize that he’s one of the officers