The email I did not send

Fiction, about two adults over 18. She wrote him an essay because she thought she owed him one. What actually worked was two sentences typed on the 63 with her thumb over the send button.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

The email was nine hundred and four words long. I know that because I checked the word count, in the way you might check a wound.

It had an introduction. I want to be honest about that. It had an introduction, in which I explained that I loved him and that nothing that followed was a criticism of anything, and then it had what I can only describe as a background section, and then it had the actual request, buried at word six hundred and twelve like a coin at the bottom of a swimming pool.

I had also, at one point, included a link.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about wanting something slightly unusual from a man you have lived with for two years. You do not lie awake worrying that he will say no. You lie awake worrying that he will say yes in the wrong voice.

I could handle no. No is a Tuesday. No is a bit of a shame and then you get on with the washing.

What I could not handle was the idea of Danny's face doing a particular thing. Not disgust. Danny does not do disgust, he is a very kind man who once drove forty minutes to collect my sister's cat. What I was frightened of was the small recalculation. The look of a person quietly moving you from one column to another and being lovely about it for the rest of your life.

So the email got longer. Every night that I did not send it, it grew, the way a hedge does.

Some of what I put in that email, and later took out:

A paragraph about being twenty and reading something in a book on a flatmate's shelf and going very still. Out. Too far back, too much like an origin story, and it made the whole thing sound like a court case where I was both the defendant and the expert witness.

A section headed, and I am not proud of this, What this is not. Six bullet points. It began with the words "this does not mean". Out, eventually, though it survived four drafts, because for four drafts I genuinely believed that what I needed to do was pre-empt every wrong conclusion a man might reach in the eleven seconds between reading a sentence and speaking.

A joke. It was not a good joke. It was there to make me feel less naked and it would have made the whole email read like a hostage video. Out.

A frequently asked questions section. I would like it noted that I got as far as writing the words Q: Does this mean something is wrong with us? before I put my laptop on the floor and went to have a bath.

On the Wednesday I nearly did it. I had it open, and my finger was actually on the trackpad, and Danny came in from the garden and said the compost bin had gone over in the wind and did I know where the good gloves were.

And I closed the laptop and said they were in the drawer under the sink.

I sat there afterwards feeling like the biggest coward in the northern hemisphere. But looking back I do not think that is what it was. I think some part of me had noticed that a nine hundred word document is not a request. It is a defence. You do not write nine hundred words to be understood. You write nine hundred words so that nobody can convict you.

The bus was the 63, going up towards Peckham, on a Thursday, in the rain, and I was not thinking about it at all. That is the part that annoys me most. A week of work and it happened while I was looking at a man's shopping bag.

I got my phone out and I typed:

There is something I have wanted for a long time and I do not know how to say it out loud. Can I tell you tonight?

Then I sat with my thumb over the button for two stops.

I want to be accurate about those two stops, because if you have ever done this you will know that they contain roughly a decade.

I thought about deleting the words "for a long time", because they sounded like an accusation, like I had been going without. I thought about adding "it's nothing bad", and did add it, and then took it off again because it is exactly the sort of thing you say when something is bad. I thought about the fact that once it is sent it cannot be unsent and that our whole flat, the good sofa and the bad boiler and the mug he bought me in Whitby, would be a flat where I had said it.

Then a man got on with a wet dog and I pressed send in a sort of panic, the way you jump into cold water.

He read it at 5:41. I know because the little word appeared under it, and then nothing happened for eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes. I went through several complete emotional weather systems on the top deck of a bus. At minute four I decided I would say it had been about wanting a dog. At minute seven I understood that I had wrecked my own life over a fantasy I had never even done anything about. At minute nine I felt weirdly calm and started planning where I would live.

At 5:52 the phone buzzed.

Of course. Do you want to say it here or at home? Either is fine.

That was it. That was the entire response. No exclamation marks. No "what is it??". No reassurance, which I would have found unbearable, because reassurance would have meant he had already decided it was the sort of thing that required reassuring.

A question. He had answered a frightened sentence with a practical question, which is the single kindest thing a person can do, and which had appeared in none of my nine hundred words, because in all my drafting I had somehow never once written down what he might actually be like.

I typed at home and then I put the phone face down on my knee and looked out of the window at the rain going sideways past the chicken shops.

I did not feel triumphant. I felt slightly sick, and very tired, and something else underneath both of those that took me a while to name, and which I think in the end was simply this: it was out of my body and into the world, and the world had not ended, and there were three stops to go.

The email is still in my drafts. I have not deleted it. Every so often I open it and read the introduction and feel enormous fondness for the woman who thought she needed one.