016. Loose lips

Once, a make-up artist had told Lilly her lips were perfectly proportioned. Most people have one lip bigger, the top or the bottom, but Lilly’s were equally plump and equally fine.

If she’d had thin lips like her mother, she would have spent her life pursing them together in resentment of the people she loved. If they’d been rounder – like her sister’s – she’d have used them to avoid conflict. She never knew if she’d inherited her father’s full-open pout. He wasn’t around to show her.

Sometimes, when it was quiet in the café, Lilly’s lips tingled. She worked hard, but it was her lips that were tired. They wanted to be admired, and caressed, and kissed. They wanted to taste salt on the ocean air. They longed to hurl curses and mouth dark secrets. And then, they wanted to curl up around a cigarette, to be bitten, shyly, for strangers and to stay up all night, talking and not talking.

The rest of Lilly made coffee and took orders and wiped benches and fiddled with the pocket of her apron and answered the telephone and gazed aimlessly out the window. But her lips yearned for the lips of another. It was almost as if those perfectly proportioned lips knew it would be easy to convince another pair to join them.

Those lips – they were her escape, and her undoing.