Outside the cinema, before our first date, I sat in my car waiting for Aarna, with the ignition off and the keys swinging in the steering column.

The cinema, little more than a short walk away, beamed cream panels with movie titles in bold black letters. Naked bulbs flashed in beats. Everything else was quiet, dark. I sighed, put a shoulder to the cold glass, and looked out about the street.

I knew this street. I knew the bus stop in front of the hair salon down from the cinema. The salon was a health food store when I was twelve. From there I caught a bus to my aunt Vera's house so we could go to the football together.

On the fence behind the shelter someone back then had written vertically along a picket: Kylie Compton needs drugs to settle her hard core self down.

The bus shelter was gone now, but it was still a stop. And I couldn't see the pickets because the fence was over grown with long leafy hoops of lantana.

It's an odd game to play when you're near thirty, but I always like thinking what the twelve-year-old me would think if he could see me, like now, sitting in this the old Mercedes across from the bus stop with its big fluffy grey seat covers swallowing my shabby slouch.

I pulled my coat into a tight hug and jammed my hands into the pockets, jiggled a pen and some coins in one, felt a twenty in the other, and put a knee into the dash.

Outside, around the quiet end of this quiet street, a chill air cooled everything and only red and orange neon, warmly curving over the cinema's facade, flared through the dark. Way down the other end of the road, where an occasional car swept by, I saw a couple of hood rats push each other as they crossed and slipped away beyond the corner.

I’d backed my car into a spot between a rusty blue dumpster white lettered with WASTE on the sides where it overflowed with broken plasterboard, and an old dark elm tree, low and leafy.

Maybe ten minutes went by before I saw Aarna stepping confidently into the glow outside the cinema. Lovely Aarna, thrusting wrists from coat sleeves to push against the heavy glass doors, as she leaned in and disappeared inside. I thought about getting out and running to meet her, but I stayed put, puzzling something over.

Abseiling on a long silver thread, a spider its legs bunched and skew-if, dropped in fits and starts from a twig on the elm. And then, sure enough, Aarna came back out into the wintry air, pulling a beret onto long black hair. And I just sat there to watch her standing waiting, just for me.

While she paced, occasionally blowing warm air into her beautiful slender hands, all I could do was watch and slip further down in my seat.

I know it was uncomfortable, for her, in the cold. I wasn’t exactly warm in my car, either. I watched her look at her phone, walk back to the glass doors, and, every now and then, peer inside. Once she made it all the way to a dark empty coffee shop three doors from the cinema past the butcher shop next to the hair salon, where she was very close to the bus stop.

She was so close, in fact, that I had to slide down with both my knees up on the dash, watching her in the sad semi circle between steering wheel and the dash.

This was too much. It had been maybe fifteen minutes or possibly twenty. And I grew disgusted with this game I was playing. When she turned, finally, to go back to the theatre, I pushed open my door and stepped out into the frosty street.

When I got to the bus stop, I stopped, keeping my gaze on Aarna who still had her back to me, walking away. I reached down and pulled the lantana away from the fence, and there, in the half light, I could see 'hard core self', faded and nearly illegible in long ago sharpie scrawled letters. A refrigerator fan from the back of butchers rattled into life and I dropped the lantana and kept walking.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Somewhere a clattering window slammed shut. And, as I got closer, I heard a siren howling streets away, twisting in pained alarm. I was getting nearer now. And the rattle of cans and bottles someone emptied into a bin in a nearby alleu covered my footfalls as I stole closer and into the light. Instantly, I was right behind Aarna in all the detail provided by shinning light so I whispered happily over her shoulder, hello.

Her smile, as she turned, lifting closer with her soft breath warmed a quiver into our embrace. All of it at one remove from the comforting sensation of soft fur against my cold chin and cheek.

Together, we found our seats in the dark, and had what I think was maybe our second kiss. All I know is that the I that is me, which is mostly in the world around me, now felt complimented by an illusion I could call us.

And we sat there holding hands with another illusion on a large screen reflecting in the liquid swell of both our eyes gazing and being, hearts beating in our seats.

We married after three years, almost all of it wonderful with few difficult moments through which we persevered. My coding consultancy was going well, we were saving to buy a house and have children, with Aarna supporting me so wonderfully when my parents died. Though I was home working, most of the time, unless I was on a client's site, I got plenty of exercise, and had been fully sober a year before I met Aarna.

But when I look back into the past, those troubling fifteen minutes where she stood alone in the chill air, enthrals me now as the beginning of a deeper problem. I know now I don’t recall feeling anything at all bad as I sat there looking. Only the feeling of looking. That is the best I can say I know. We rode bicycles together on bike tracks by the Bay and Aarna always stopped to pick up broken glass. Aarna is too honorable – too decent – to bother soiling herself in lies involved with someone else. And I knew that. But it didn’t matter. How it happened that I was secretly watching someone I would see at home all the time astounded me, even as it happened.

And the lumpen truth is that, on the face of it, those fifteen minutes of what I thought of as harmless faltering about in my car watching and waiting on a first date, have blossomed inscrutably into manoeuvres that are much, much worse.

In a year since we married, I talked myself into regularly watching Aarna from a shitty little cafe across from her work. Committing that admission to the permanence of a paragraph is shameful, but I have to do it.

Stupefied in that cafe's dark room bound by distressed brick and hissing steam, I rocked on a wooden stool watching Aarna step through a sweep of revolving glass over the road. I knew, I was divided beyond love for her or myself, each to the other within me.

Weak and worse, less than a month after the café, I moved on, driven negatively forward to newer lows of hiding in doorways – hire cars, even – across from restaurants, or the houses of friends, watching lights go on and off, whenever she went out for dinner. And this went on and on for months more.

When she invited me to come with her, imploring, at times, the monster in my mind declined, preferring, I heard it enchant, the reality of being someone unknown. Falsely powerful before the illusion of the mirror dividing me from myself.

Sure enough, Aarna sensed something. Just before she left for book group at Petra's house, which had a wooded park across the road, and where I had broken the light by the toilet block, she quizzed me.

Are you getting enough exercise? Is everything okay at work?

Yes. Everything's fine.

Okay. The patient tone in her voice told me she'd read the defensive one in mine.

I'm just concerned about you.

Why?

Because I love you, and you don't appear to be enjoying life like you usually do. Do you think perhaps you could see your doctor, get a blood test or something?

No. I'm fine. What would a blood test do?

She held up both palms and backed away. And my heart sank. I knew, now, I was beyond unwell. Addicted to a dependable drug that was eating at the true love that was mine to be part of, but, instead, motivated by doses of hide and seek and peekaboo.

Weeks later, searching up different brands of electronic tracking tags, and wondering whether to attach it to her car or bag, the self disgust was not enough to give me the certainty I could top. I was a prisoner crawling on all fours, looking for a key on a bare stone floor, while the cell door behind me was open wide all the time.

And that was when she caught me.