Page 61 of For Real

And I’m so fucking confused I can’t even. Usually I’ll say, For what? so he has to admit how much he loves everything that I’m not really making him do at all. But this time I just lie there, curled against him, covered in his kisses, and let everything fucking die.

I feel like…

I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be doing now.

From his breathing, Laurie has actually fallen asleep. The bastard. So I’m stuck here, being held and being pissed off, which is a deeply weird feeling.

Then I just get sad. Really, really sad.

And I wonder how he can be so close to me and so far away at the same goddamn fucking time.

And what the fuck I’m supposed to do about it.

7

Laurie

I did not feel guilty.

I absolutely did not feel guilty.

When I woke the next morning, Toby was not beside me. At first I thought he was making breakfast, but as I lay there—not quite dozing, not quite waiting—and time slipped by, I realised he wasn’t coming back to bed. He’d gone. And maybe he wouldn’t come back at all.

It was a painful thought, troublingly so, and I had no right to be either pained or troubled. His absence wasn’t what I wanted, but what I wanted was selfish, and probably very, very wrong. If I had pushed him away, however little I had intended to, it was probably the best thing I could have done for him.

I simply couldn’t give him what he thought he wanted from me. I couldn’t pretend we had any sort of future. He needed someone his own age, or close to it, to share his life as it unfurled before him, as Robert had once shared mine.

I pulled the duvet up, rolled into the empty space Toby had left behind, and then turned onto my back again. But he’d left more than merely absence: aches in my muscles, marks upon my body—my skin was full of the memory of him.

The worst thing about being old enough to know better was the realisation that you weren’t.

My thoughts, cycling interminably through guilt, self-recrimination, frustration, and sentimentality, were beginning to eat each other. But what did I expect? Toby and I were a closed system. I’d lost all perspective. On him, on me, on what was right and wrong. I might have told him his master weapon was complicity, but there was something else. Some way of being, or trick of living, that made me forget everything when I was with him. Everything except for the moments of our being together and some ridiculous, irresistible sense of an us.

Damn that impossible boy.

I couldn’t use him like this. I couldn’t allow myself to become more to him than a temporary…fancy? Aberration? Distraction. A story from his foolish youth he might tell some other lover.

I could have stayed in bed, pickling myself in the sweet, painful ambiguities of wanting and shame, but I knew from long experience that there was really only one response to having lost control of my life, which was to throw myself on the mercy of my friends. I couldn’t imagine they’d be particularly sympathetic, but I didn’t deserve sympathy. I needed common sense and my perspective back.

So I got up, showered, and went to see Grace. She’d started the tradition of Pancake Sundays back at university to prevent emotional complications from whoever she’d pulled the night before. With the added bonus of being able to see her friends and eat pancakes. Sam, for whatever reason—perhaps being Australian—had not fled in awkwardness and terror like nearly all of Grace’s other transitory partners. According to Robert (I’d been in Glasgow at the time), he’d wandered out of the bedroom, wearing only a towel in which he had looked stunningly good, and said, “Oh great, pancakes. And you guys must be Grace’s friends.”1

If only all relationships could be so simple. As simple as not leaving.

After Sam, pancakes had become a kinder ritual. Lovers were invited to stay, not overwhelmed and edged out.

I hadn’t dropped in for a while, for various reasons. The main one, truthfully, being Robert. When we’d broken up, we had decided we weren’t going to be one of those couples who divvy up their friends like the CDs and books. It was a fine principle, but I hadn’t realised how it would actually feel to meet my ex among the people who had once been part of the life we had shared.

It wasn’t a matter of being over him—I was, I was used to being without him—it was simply that moving on was a kind of competition, and I’d lost. I wasn’t unhappy, but he was happier. And the man all of our friends had assured me was nothing more than a fleeting, ill-fated rebound was still with him. I could be indifferently polite to both of them when I met them incidentally, but there’d been a time when Robert and I had gone to Pancake Sundays together, and memory had a way of cutting you open.

Thankfully, he wasn’t there that Sunday. It turned out to be a quiet one: just Grace and Sam; Amy, who was leaving as I arrived; and one of their partners, a softly spoken, dreamy-eyed person called Angel. They were all lounging around in the living room, which meant I’d missed the initial cooking frenzy, but there were still a few lukewarm pancakes left for me to claim and dowse in maple syrup.

Grace was carding her fingers gently through Angel’s hair. “Hey, who’s that guy?”

“No idea.” Sam lay curled up on the floor next to her, resting his head against her leg. “He’s some stranger who wandered in off the street to eat our pancakes.”

“Yes, yes, very funny,” I muttered. “Sorry it’s been a while.”

“Actually, he does seem familiar. We used to know a grumpy bastard, didn’t we, Sam?”

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