Sometimes in  crowded places — like rush-hour trains or the dark, hushed bellies of late-night cinema stalls — you find yourself overcome by an unforeseen desire to reach out and touch someone. As far as you know there is no impetus for this feeling, no warning signs at all; the carriage lights might wink or the screen's contents flicker a little, then all of sudden you'll feel it happening again, the boundaries between neighbouring shoulders and haunches plunging perilously into a state of semi-solubility, walls of thin air turning pervious and sweet as a woman's bare flesh, soft like the optical skin atop a puddle. Quivering things that you long to push into, push through. 

This yearning is what you feel now as you reach for her hand across the table; your grasp is a naked emotion, the unthinking lunge of an animal in heat. There are so many questions you ought to be asking before holding her hand like this, as if nothing has happened in the three months since you walked out on her. Like what's going to happen to her uni degree and is it a boy or a girl; how does she know that it's yours and why this, why her, why you, why now?
 
But for now it's all you can do to just sit there, holding her hand, as your lips wrap their best labio-velar approximate around the bare gutted feeling that's pulsing against your chest. "Wow" they keep going in place of just "ow" — as if your own awe has already melded into the pain of this news, two bodies snarled limb to limb in one long embrace.