Page 137 of For Real

But it was so long ago, submerged into my past like Robert was now, that even if I could scrape up incidents, they felt too distant to be real, the emotion that had led to them or underpinned them entirely lost to me.

There was only Toby and this hurt and this fear, this loss and helplessness.

As the empty hours dragged by, I dug up further frustrations to comfort me. What had I done or said that had been so terrible? He should have been thanking me, not running away from me. The problem here wasn’t me. It was him, and his immaturity.

What was I thinking? It wasn’t that he was immature—simply that he was young. His experiences and expectations of life were shaped differently to mine, but that didn’t mean they were inferior or misguided. Had I ever recognised that before? Had I told him? Or had I just questioned, lectured?

Had I failed to get him, just as he’d claimed?

If I’d said the words—if I hadn’t taken it for granted that he must have known I loved him—would he be with me now? Safe in my arms and I safe in his? If he had truly understood how I felt about him, if he had known he had dominion over my heart as well as body, he could never have feared I would think less of him for…anything. But I had never given him reason to trust me. And everything I had given had been too little, offered too late, at a time when the world had already stripped him of too much.

I deserved this pain. I deserved his anger and his mistrust.

I’d just…thought I’d have more time to prove myself to him. To show he was loved and treasured and valued. But then I’d thought that with Robert too. Waiting to heal, to change, to move on, to find ourselves again, and he’d already left me.

I found myself—of all places—in the kitchen, where the warmth from the AGA Toby loved so much wrapped around me like a hug. Still clutching my phone, just in case, I sat on the table and waited. This room was full of Toby. To say nothing of the depraved and imaginative things he had done to me in it. I’d cleaned the table afterwards, blushing and aroused, but the memory was whorled in the wood now, as it was in my skin.

There were other memories too. Everyday ones. Toby telling me some slightly incoherent story, gesticulating wildly with one hand, as he put on the kettle for tea. Coming down with him at midnight for toast. Watching him lick shiny, melted butter from between his fingers. Carrying him back to bed again after.

And this was where he’d told me about his D.

Something else I’d handled badly, assuming it wasn’t important. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk to me about any of this. You’re supposed to be on my side, he’d said then. And I hadn’t been. I hadn’t really listened or tried hard enough to understand. Which meant I’d treated his choices as if they were mistakes, and his fears as if they were nothing.

And now…I didn’t even know where he was.

I tried phoning him yet again, mortified to think my name was probably in double figures on his missed-call list. But I didn’t know what else to do. What if he didn’t come home tonight? What if he didn’t come tomorrow? What if he never answered his phone to me again?

All because of one conversation?

Or did it go deeper than that?

The truth was, the years between us mattered. Not—as I had thought—because of how other people would judge, but because while some of the bridges between us were instinctive and effortless, love and sex and faith, others had to be carefully built. And I’d failed not just to build them, but to notice they were needed.

I put my head in my hands, hating myself, terrified that it was too late. It was true he’d always come to me before, but maybe this time he wouldn’t. And I didn’t know how to go to him. It might almost have made me laugh, remembering how enormous asking for his phone number had seemed. But it was nothing, a string of numbers that no more connected me to Toby than a flare shot into the sky.

* * *

I run for the Tube in case Laurie follows me.

He doesn’t.

Of course he doesn’t.

Why would he? After everything?

And I’m such a fucking mess because all I want is for him to hold me. Which he was doing until I shouted and cried and threw things at him like the insane freak I am. But I want him to fight for it too, even if that means fighting me. I’m just so…tired of everything being so careful. Uncertain. Fragile. A compromise. Everything that isn’t sex, anyway. It’s not so much the kink I want, but the way it feels. Like we fit and I’m his and this is right and I can do anything.

But right now I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing, and nothing’s right, so I go home.

Mum’s there and so’s Marius. When we’d moved in, we couldn’t figure out how to get a sofa up to the loft so we have these silk scatter cushions that drive me mad, and he’s sprawled over them, looking gorgeous and fantastical, like something from the Arabian Nights. And Mum is, well, Mum.

I must look completely wrecked because the first thing she says is, “What happened to you?” in this slightly bewildered tone.

I tell her because…why not? I’m too miserable to pretend anymore. “Broke up with my boyfriend.”

“Probably for the best, love. You know relationships are ultimately an ideological construct designed to limit our freedom.”

This is so not what I need to hear right now. “I know.”

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