Everyone knows — Everyone knows — Everyone knows. The rhythmic whine of the windscreen wipers hummed that night. The night you sat outside, your moral compass tending south, the rain slashing horizontal swaths through the darkened sky. It was all there in front of you, a sign, everything going the wrong way. If only you'd listened. You want to tell her about that night. About what the wipers said. About what you almost did. But it doesn't matter now. It's too late.

"Someone wants to see you," they said. "About a loan." You looked beyond the laminate signs where the woman stood. You studied her, the cut of her jaw, her features, thin and territorial. You thought it could be her. But in your mind every woman was her. So you pushed it aside, motioning her to your desk.

"You're here about a loan?" you asked with a genial smile.

"Yes," she said. "Something of mine that's been on loan."

It was then that you knew.

"Hear me out," she now says, raising her hand in a calming way. "There are some things I need to say." You study her, the curve of her throat as she forms the words, the easy way she holds her head. Humility stills your tongue. You brace yourself against the coming storm. You've rehearsed the scene a thousand times, the fiery stand-off, possessives hissed through tightened jaws. But it isn't that way at all. She faces you squarely, her tone even, her face a windless bay. His warnings reel through your mind. Maybe he lied — Maybe he lied — Maybe he lied.

In that moment something breaks free inside you. Something dense and impenetrable thins to tissue and falls away. You long to take it all back, perform some evolutionary slight of hand. If only you could scoop the last six months into your palms and replace them untouched. But only memory can be rewound. Let's follow this thing, he said to you, see where it takes us. As if it was a garden path. No one will know, he assured. No one will get hurt. Those words, the magnetic pull of them, had set your needle spinning until all sense of direction was lost. He explained it all. So effortlessly. So tidily. A mistake, he said. A lapse in judgement. He'd been too young, so it didn't count. As if he'd been married with his fingers crossed.

"I know how it is," she says. "I was the borrower once." She crosses her legs, focusing on something in the distance, something unseen, something lost. "But it seems that I'm the lender now."

You think of how it started. So innocently. He was a customer. Like all the others. You knew his preferences. Fifties instead of twenties, please. Always the silver pen in his left shirt pocket. No envelope, thanks. You're a doll. Somewhere — you can't say exactly when or how — it changed. The preferences became personal, ones you had no right to know. Ones which belonged to someone else. He fed them to you one by one, delicate and sweet. And you held them like stolen candies from the corner shop. Clenched each melting morsel, thrust them deeply into your pockets.

"We're the same, you and me," she says. "We're intelligent women. But its' not about intelligence at all, is it? It's more primitive. No matter how wrong you know it is, you just can't stop yourself. You get so caught up. You want so badly to be the one. You don't think about the consequences."

You prided yourself on your orderly existence. Life by mathematical equation, you'd say. Intellect over emotion. I over E. But he'd flipped the script, awakened a need, deep and umbilical. Turned it on its head and placed the E in the driver's seat. You craved him. His smouldering coldness. His rugged lustre. The thick and muddy sweetness of his skin. So the day it happened, you felt it. You felt yourself slipping, your footing loose and dangerous. Felt that at last, after so long with your hand in the air, you'd finally been picked.

But it didn't happen in haste. You want to tell her about that night. The night you went to his house. Sat outside in the rain. Watching. If only you'd seen something. A blurring of forms. A merging of shadows. If you'd seen anything you'd have stopped right there. But there was nothing. The house sat in the darkness. Stubbornly. Like a child holding its breath. Nothing to lose — Nothing to lose — Nothing to lose.

"So you make a choice," she says, "to leap anyway. To leap and to hope."

You remember how he snared you, snagged your sleeve in the door of his world and dragged you in. You remember the colours. They were so beautiful then. You had never really seen them before. Lush crimsons, verdant greens, azure blues. Their depth. Their richness. Their texture. The colours of promise. But the colours soon blurred, fading in the dim light of that world. Monochromatic sludge. A world without substance or illumination. Where you became a scavenger. Feeding on the scraps of someone else's kill. Never enough — Never enough — Never enough.

"Let me tell you a story," the woman says, leaning gently in. Her words become heavy, rising from her throat. "When I was a girl the milkman would leave our bottles on the steps. When they were empty," she says, "we'd put them back on the steps. Where they would sit, empty, waiting to be filled and emptied and filled again." She pauses. You want to say something, but there is not a single word. "That's us, you know," she says. "You and me. We're those bottles."

You search the silence for a way to disagree, some way to make her wrong. You rewind back to that night. You are in the car. It is raining. The wipers drone. But this time you listen. You pay attention to the signs.

Sally Houtman is an American-born writer living in New Zealand. She is the author of the non-fiction book, To Grandma's House, We...Stay currently in its third publication. She has recently had poetry published in Rustblind and fiction in Midnight Screaming.