Alicia (IP)

She didn't slam the door open, but it was with considerable authority that Alicia entered the cafe. She compressed her declaration of purposeful striding into the couple of steps required to join Arthur. Folding her slim frame underneath the table, she contorted her arms from the sleeves of her too-large leather jacket and threw it back, trusting the back of the chair to catch it. The sunglasses stayed on.

The conversations continued unabated as everyone else in the cafe was unperturbed by her entrance. Perhaps a paper twitched in the corner, but if she noticed this she did nothing about it. Her elbows connected with the table, echoing plywood and bone.

Arthur didn't look up from his crossword, but offered a distracted 'Hey' across the table as he reached for the last of his tea. His breakfast had been large and he felt quite sleepy in the light of the morning. The door opening had let a brief scent of outside in; it smelt chilled and of traffic, but the moment it had shut he returned to his somnambulant haze.

The cafe had been the scene of many such encounters between the two of them. Despite their closeness at other times and the strange ability they shared to look deep into the other's thoughts and vocalise what had yet to be conceived, they needed a no mans' land in moments of conflict. After a sleepless night and troubling dreams Arthur was in no mood to breach the silence. Fortunately, it appeared that Alicia was to match his resistance with forthright attitude.

Her sunglasses were silver-rimmed, of the round kind favoured by John Lennon all those years ago. The rest of the country had moved on to clumsy plastic frames, worn by brightly coloured matriarchs from the '60s, but she didn't care. She was astute with fashion in every other respect, consciously but not fastidiously moderating her image to remain just ahead of the pack. When challenged she'd shrug and ask if they made her look stupid and peer enigmatically over the top of the lenses, waiting to see how people responded.

Her dyed blonde hair was cropped short and denied any sense of style or order. It was very late at night indeed for her and her hair stood as a cypher for the frenetic excess of the last 12 hours. Arthur knew that underneath the sunglasses were wide pupils, heavy bags and a core of steel.

No makeup remained on her face - 'no doubt sweated into oblivion by midnight', Arthur thought - but this did it no harm at all. She had flecked grey eyes, and high, pointed cheekbones which tapered down to a thin, slightly prominent chin. She only expressed her thoughts intermittently and most of the time she remained composed, her grey eyes studying people whilst her face refused to give anything away.

She was not beautiful, but it usually took less than fifteen minutes of conversation for men to forget this and think of her only as fascinating. By virtue of an introspective adolescence she had discovered that the easiest way to attract men was to step back and let them find her however they wanted her to be. Timely slight smiles, or fractions of suspicious squints gave her admirers ample rope to bind themselves to their self-crafted image of her. She didn't mind, really. Once she had realised how men reacted to her she started studying them and soon after that had identified the tipping point at which her rejection transferred from a disappointment to a trauma.

She leant forward, folding hands around wrists and playing with a weighty silver ring on her right forefinger. A faded red vest-top yielded to gravity and revealed her black bra which proved to be the last intercession between her and indecency. As Arthur looked up slowly he caught sight of this and, despite being entirely familiar with the sight, felt a stirring in his gut. She was cold, or at least her body was, and tiny fair hairs stood out from her skin on top of tiny raised lumps. The white colour of her sharply rang a memory in him of the mornings when they awoke together, his darker, more tanned skin contrasting with her hips.

Alicia stole the thought from him whilst he was embroiled in the memory of sensation and formed a broad smile across her face. Her teeth, some misaligned, one in the bottom row pushed forwards like the runt of the group being volunteered for misery, formed a phalanx around her tongue. The iniquitous smile, meanwhile, drew it's way up he right cheek crookedly. 'Does that mean you forgive me?'

The waitress approached before Arthur could answer. As they were both regulars she simply smiled in greeting and waited with her notepad. Arthur said brightly and clearly, 'More of your insipid and indubitably ominous swill please, Sheila.'

Sheila furrowed only slightly at this as she looked to Alicia with a familiar weariness to check. Alicia obliged her: 'He wants more tea love. Me too please.' Sheila shuffled off back behind her counter at this.