The rain drummed on my skull and soaked through my hair, down my collar, along my spine in icy trails. It had been dry when I left the house. I hadn’t anywhere to go, only time to kill. A walk to put off the next job applications and cold beans for dinner, a walk just to get out of the house for the first time in days.
The street swirled, shivered and dissolved around me.

Then I woke up. I lurched upright, tangled in clean and plump blankets. My room was bright and broad, one wall a bank of windows overlooking a city park and another wall obscured by more books than I’d ever dared buy. The clothes cast across the floor were fantasies escaped from my sketchbook, not the scrapings of secondhand shops. Suddenly, the bed shuddered as somebody turned over next to me. He was handsome and, as the sleep-fog cleared, very familiar.
This was my life. There was an hour before I needed to get up, long enough to doze and dream again.
I decided against it. There was sunshine through the windows and pizza in the fridge.