The next day went by in a blur of front rooms.
We had stayed in a hotel in town the night before, the pair of us, because you do not put a fiancée in your mum's home in Moss Side and you do not put your mum out either, and because there are some mornings a man wants to wake up next to the woman he is marrying without a thin wall between him and the kettle.
I woke before her with the city grey-gold in the gap in the curtains and Emma half on top of me, the sheet down off her back, the ring hand flat on my chest where it lives now. No bra, no phone, no three jobs yet, just the warm weight of her breathing slow and the heavy red of her hair across me.
I had one hand resting on the bare dip of her waist, but I moved the other up, dragging slow over the warm, sleep-flushed skin of her ribs until I found the heavy, bare weight of her breast.
