Page 66 of For Real

She pulled back so she could look at me, her expression uncharacteristically solemn. “Because we let you get so lost.”

* * *

I pondered the conversation on my way home. It was a pleasant day, bright and on the cusp of spring, and I suddenly realised I’d seen Toby naked in every way, but I’d never seen him in daylight. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be with him now, walking together, hand in hand, coming back from my friends, or going somewhere together. A couple.

It was an idea at once compelling and absurd. How could I be his boyfriend? Presumably I had been Robert’s boyfriend once, but it felt like a word—and a concept—I had left behind long ago. Surely it was better to admit that Toby and I were simply having a fling. One that, sooner or later, would seem ill-advised to both of us and come to a swift, inevitable end.

The problem was, I didn’t want it to end. I wanted Toby and the way he made me feel. I even wanted the breathless declarations he surely couldn’t mean and I surely didn’t deserve.

But wasn’t it my responsibility to be clear-eyed? To do the right thing?

Whatever it was.

A busy week at the hospital—as if there were any others—meant I didn’t have time to dwell on the problem. Though sometimes, in stolen moments as I drank my coffee, walked home, showered, woke in the morning, went to sleep at night, I did. Instead of the faces and bodies and wounds of the day, I thought of Toby. His too-big, dark-rimmed eyes, his sharp face. The way he kissed, holding nothing back.

The times he had blurted out “I love you” in a babble of passion. And that final time, the time I’d stopped him, when he’d sounded so dangerously certain. He had chained me open, made me vulnerable, made me beg, then weep for him, and the shame had burned itself to nothing until there was only freedom, pleasure, joy. It had been terrible and perfect, and still he’d found a way to strip me deeper with only some words I hadn’t let him say.

I missed him.

And as I waited for him that Friday, I wondered—for the first time since we’d established our weekly ritual—if he would show up. Perhaps I’d been soul-searching for nothing, and he had already moved on. I couldn’t have made any clearer the limitations of what was possible between us.

Even if some terrible part of me had liked hearing the words.

Just words. An indiscretion of the moment. He couldn’t have meant them. Not really. How could they have such power over me? How could he?

I was so full of good intentions—resolved, if he did come, to talk to him. Possibly to bring this impossible situation to a neat and mature ending.

But then the doorbell rang and there was Toby on the doorstep and, suddenly, everything I had thought about and worried about seemed flimsy or irrelevant. And all that was left was a vague intention of maybe talking about it next week and the purest, giddiest happiness.

Sam had been right.

I’d been living my life as if nothing had changed. But the promise of Toby had illuminated all my days, edging them with gold like the calligraphy of medieval monks.

With an ugly, frantic moan, I pulled him inside and bent my head to kiss him.

For a second or two his face was turned up to mine, as if this moment had become as instinctive and as necessary for him as it was for me, but then he wriggled away, ducking under my arm so my lips grazed clumsily over his cheek instead.

His eyes sought mine. “We have to talk.”

Ah.

It should have been a relief, in a way, that he had reached the very conclusion I kept postponing, but all I felt was dread. I nodded and led him into the living room.

I suddenly realised how little time we’d spent here. I’d been on my knees for most of it, and the rest had been sex, or a prelude to sex, and now it was awkward, as though we were strangers.

Toby was standing uncertainly in the middle of the room, his hands hanging at his sides as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them. He looked…young, and I wanted to hold him until his shoulders relaxed their tension and all his tight, anxious muscles unlocked.

“Do you want to sit—” I began, at the exact moment he said, “We can’t go on like this.”

I took a sharp breath. The fact I’d expected this didn’t make it any easier to hear. And there was a part of me—the part that was neither clear-eyed nor responsible and merely ached and craved like some lonely beast—that wanted to beg. Not now. A little longer. Please don’t leave me yet. “I know.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “Okay. Right. Good.”

But he sounded miserable. As miserable as I was. The least I owed him was making this easy.

“We don’t have to have this conversation,” I told him gently. “I always thought you’d just stop coming when you were ready. You don’t owe me anything.”

His head came up, and his eyes were so very blue it hurt. “Why the fuck don’t I owe you anything?”

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