don’t delete the kisses

It wasn’t the fact that the landlord messaged me, it was the kisses at the end.

Is it weird for your same-sex landlord to send kisses? I’d never received a message with kisses from a landlord before. Letting agents, sure, but not a landlord.

How to reply to such an unexpected thing?

The polite thing was surely to reply in kind. It didn’t have to mean anything.

Or it shouldn’t mean anything. But four kisses?

Ah whatever, I resolved, just send the kisses.

So, I did. At the end of my reply, I added kisses – three, which seemed like a neutral compromise.

At the very same moment I pressed send, another message from my landlord popped up.

Sorry about the kisses. Accidental force of habit!!! 😅😅🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Bloody hell. All I wanted to do was finish navigating my way around South-East Water’s ridiculously circular registration process, to set up the last remaining direct debit for the new place. But now I was caught up in this faux pas, which wasn’t even of my making.

Haha, yes, I’m sorry too.

I hit send, the full stop intended as an end to the weird exchange – and with a lesson learned about kisses.

Just as I was about to head to back to South-East Water, another message from the landlord arrived.

They might not have been entirely accidental xxx

Oh.

Oh, Jesus.

What to do now?

This was now definitely flirting, without margins of misinterpretation.

What’s more, this man knows where I live.

But I couldn’t not reply.

That’s okay x

One kiss felt right. There’s surely nothing weird about one kiss between men, even if they are essentially strangers. The tone remains polite but gives no indication of willing for anything more.

I sat there staring at the screen. Thankfully, no messages from the landlord were forthcoming. Situation: satisfactorily defused.

“Have you sorted the water?” my girlfriend asked, having entered the room without me noticing.

“Ah, uhhh . . .” — I slid my phone down the side of the sofa cushion — “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think so.”

She remained standing there, just inside the door, looking at me.

I could feel my expression. It wasn’t sitting naturally on my face at all. I could almost see it: the look a child gives just before their nappy needs changing.

“Who were you messaging?”

“Oh, just the landlord,” I replied, my hand flopping onto the sofa, not entirely certain why my mouth had gone so dry.

The alien head of the window cleaner’s brush appeared at the window. It made me look, but not her. The head of the brush looked at each of us in turn, squirting water from its mouth before squeaking and scrubbing it back up.

“It’s the window cleaner,” I said, just as the head disappeared.

An Irish goodbye.

vss #63

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