Alain supposed that the decent thing to do would be to call Mal and apologise for missing the gig. Sending a text message would be easier, less confronting - but it wouldn't explain anything: it'd just seem like it came from the same old him. Well, Alain mused, it did come from the same old him: he wasn't about to disown anything he'd done in the past, he wasn't ashamed of anything he'd done . . . but he felt he'd changed. He wouldn't be able to explain that in a text.

He couldn't say he'd missed the gig, though. Not if he was going to try to explain. He hadn't missed it: that made it sound accidental, like he'd been meaning to come; but he'd never been meaning to. Even when he'd lied and said to Mal that he'd think about it, he hadn't had to think about it at all. He'd known right then that very instant that he wouldn't be going. He felt bad about that, about getting Mal's hopes up; but he just wasn't ready yet to slip back into his old life like that.

Even his housemates had noticed he'd changed, and they were usually too addled or unconscious to notice anything. They'd told him he'd gone weird - "and all 'cause of some girl!" they'd laughed. "Who you didn't even fuck!"

"That's the point, though" Alain tried to explain, "I didn't fuck her. She's got a boyfriend. And I didn't want to do anything about that. You see!" But even he didn't know if that was entirely cause, or effect. And surely it didn't explain everything.

He'd never been expecting this to happen. He'd been perfectly happy in his life. But then he'd happened into the pub one night, and there she was, and he'd fallen hard. Like, he'd never fallen for a girl that hard before. She was perfect, he thought: he remembered thinking at the time: She's a ten, easy. Fuck, she's an eleven! The body, the looks, everything. It hurt him just to look at her. When he realised he'd never see her naked, that hurt even more.

But the weirdest thing had happened. He'd found out she had a boyfriend - that wasn't weird, hell it was practically expected - and he didn't want to do anything about it. Oh sure, he would've died happy if she'd decided to be with him instead - but he realised, almost as if he was realising that somebody else had taken over his body, that he didn't want to do anything to try and break her and her boyfriend up. He just didn't. God knows he'd tried it with other girls before.

It wasn't that her boyfriend was a great guy - though he was pretty cool, and Alain could easily imagine hanging out with him - or that he didn't want to put her through the grief - if the end result was being with her being with him, he supposed she'd get over it - it was just; well, he didn't know what. He just looked at her, and he snuck a peak at her back-side, or down her top when he thought she didn't realise, and he really wished bad that she'd just take it all off, right there, for him - but he knew she never would, and he knew that if he tried to hit on her it'd just end badly, one way or another, and if anything happened her boyfriend would be devastated, and Alain would feel like an arsehole.

He just didn't want to do it.