Page 136 of For Real

“Please.” Laurie’s voice is this distant swirl of panic and fear, cracking a bit. “Please don’t leave.”

I shove through the door and into the night, and I don’t look back.

11

Laurie & Toby1

Toby was gone. He’d run.

My first instinct was to go after him, but he’d…told me to get away from him. That he was done with me. And I wasn’t sure I could bear to see him flinch from me again, his eyes full of something far too much like fear, far too much like hatred.

I’d argued with Robert. All couples argue. It was something you learned over time how to do without destroying everything. How to navigate each other’s anger and pain. But I’d somehow forgotten how…how searing it could be, and how easily vulnerability to love became vulnerability to hurt. Toby had lashed out at me like some wounded creature, not just careless of my feelings, but deliberately striking where he knew he’d do the most damage, and it had come out of nowhere when I had only wanted to help him. I tried to muster self-righteousness and resentment, but I was too worried for him, and too afraid for myself.

What had I done? Had I lost him?

I tried to detach myself from panic and pain but—for once—it didn’t come naturally.

Stay calm. Assess the situation.

If the patterns of his previous behaviour were anything to go by, Toby would come back to me. Even that very first night when I’d made him leave and he’d been unable to get home. That should have been reassuring. It meant I could reasonably rely on his common sense. He wouldn’t do anything stupid. All I had to do was wait.

But I feared for him anyway and for myself.

What if it was different this time? What if he truly was sick of waiting for me?

And, oh God, why had I never told him I loved him? I’d thought it to myself often enough. Even noted the absurdity of it. Of being so helplessly, irresistibly, and undeniably in love with a nineteen-year-old boy. But giving Toby the words had seemed at once too much and too little, too easy at his feet and too difficult in the quiet, and so I’d kept my peace. And so he’d fled from me.

In case he came to his senses sooner rather than later, I decided to stay a little while in that shining, unfamiliar kitchen. When it became clear he wasn’t coming back, I rang him. Went straight to his voicemail: “This isn’t Toby. I’m too fucking busy or vice versa.”2

I didn’t know how to say what I needed to say, so I hung up.

And then rang again, a few seconds later, in the hope he would pick up. When he didn’t, I blurted out something tangled about needing to talk to him, amid apologies and pleas. It wasn’t dignified—it probably wasn’t coherent—but I didn’t care. I just wanted him to answer his phone.

So much for detachment. So much for calm.

Not wanting to get him into trouble, I checked the café was properly locked up, turned off the lights, picked up my door key from the floor, and let myself out of the fire door, making sure it closed behind me.

Maybe if I went home, Toby would already be there. Sitting on the front step just like always. He could have been on the Tube now, for all I knew, which was why I kept going straight to voicemail.

As I walked briskly towards Bethnal Green, I struggled with various burgeoning annoyances. I was annoyed at Toby for running away from me, and I was annoyed at myself for being so upset by it. But my mind kept throwing up images of loss and destruction—of Toby alone or frightened or hurt in the dark—and, much as I tried to rationalise them away, my heart had become a shrieking hysteric that wouldn’t listen to reason.

It was an awful journey. I tried phoning a few more times, and still there was no answer. On the Tube I fretted constantly he was trying to phone me, but when I emerged there were no messages, no missed calls. And I still went straight through to his voicemail.

I texted him. All I wrote was, Toby, please.

I practically ran down Addison Avenue, not really expecting anything, but hoping.

The house was dark, and there was no Toby.

Inside, I phoned him again. Silence.

What was the point of giving people keys and phone numbers and all these promises if they were going to mean nothing?

And what if something had happened to him? A moment of distraction was all most accidents came down to. And would anybody know to tell me?

God. God.

I tried to remember if it had been like this with Robert and me, back at the beginning, before we had settled into the patterns of love. We’d surely had our own dramatic moments? Heart-crushing uncertainties?

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