Page 58 of Lovers in Lockdown

I’m not sure it’s as simple as that, but greasy food and shitty TV sounds like just what I need right now. I’ll eat my feelings until there’s so much cholesterol in my heart that it leaves no room for love. Sounds like a fool proof plan to me.

I know that I knew all along that whatever happened between us could only ever be temporary, that we could never have a future, because he has a life in China that doesn’t include me. But I never thought it would end like this. I thought he cared more about me than to leave me without a word, like I never meant a thing to him.

All my life, I’ve lived feeling like I don’t belong anywhere. It’s like wherever I’ve been, my body has been present, but my heart has been looking for somewhere else to settle. Nowhere has ever felt right. All I’ve ever wanted is to feel safe. To feel loved. To feel peace. And I thought I’d found that in Noah.

But I guess he didn’t find that in me.

His home is in China and that’s fine, but if only he’d asked me to go with him, because I would have done so in a heartbeat.

‘Honey,’ Ellie says gently. ‘It’s going to be okay, I promise. You’ll get through this.’

But how can I get through this when I don’t even know how to go back to being the girl I was three months ago. Before lockdown. Before Noah. Because he taught me what it feels like to be home.

I wasn’t looking to fall in love with him. In fact, I tried everything to make sure I didn’t, but I did. Like an idiot, I went and fell completely and irrevocably in love with a man who doesn’t love me back.

‘You want me to order the food now?’ Ellie whispers and I nod, my stomach rumbling loudly making me remember that I haven’t eaten since he left two days ago.

We order something from every takeout menu we find in the apartment. Thai, Indian, burgers, fried chicken, dessert. Everything except Chinese. And for the rest of the night, we follow the rest of Ellie’s plan to get over Noah.

We take the food into the bedroom, where we sit under the bed covers, watching crappy reality television and eating until our stomachs are bursting and we feel like we’re going to hurl. And when we’re done, I fall asleep on Ellie’s chest, tears still leaking from my eyes and dreaming of the green-eyed man who sings seventies pop songs out of tune, cooks food like a Michelin-star chef and makes love like a hero in a romance novel.

The man who has broken my heart into so many pieces, I won’t ever be able to put it back together.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Noah

I’m a coward.

A stupid, shit-brained, pathetic coward. Because for the first time in my life, I’m in love with a woman, and I’ve gone and left her all alone after sneaking out in the middle of the night to move halfway across the world, without even saying goodbye. I thought telling her I love her before I left would make me a selfish fucker, but I’ve never felt like more of a cunt.

I told myself it was because I didn’t want to make things harder, but really, I was just terrified that she might not feel the same way about me. I couldn’t handle the possibility of telling her I love her only for her not to say it back.

Fuck, I’m such an asshole.

I keep trying to tell myself that it’s okay, that it’s for the best. That we knew it had to end eventually and now is as good a time as any, like ripping off a band aid. I can get on with my life now. Go back to work. Focus on my career. Pretend like the last few months never happened and forget all about her.

But I can’t.

I don’twantto.

What I want is to wake up every morning to the woman with honey-blonde hair who diagnoses me with a new disease every other day and burns everything she cooks and fucks me like a teenage fantasy and strokes my hair so tenderly that it sends me to sleep in minutes. The woman with a name as sweet as she is. The woman who feels like home.

What the fuck have I done?

Two weeks have passed since I left. Two weeks of not seeing Honey, not talking to her, not pissing her off so that she scowls in the way that I love so much. I would give anything to just sleep tonight on that dirty, scraggy leather couch, that quite possibly is infected with tetanus, just so long as Honey is within a five-metre radius of me.

The luxuries of my Beijing apartment mean nothing when the girl I love is thousands of miles away, probably throwing darts at a picture of my face as we speak. Not that I can blame her.

Because I’m the asshole who couldn’t swallow my pride for one fucking second in order to tell the only woman I’ve ever loved how I really feel about her.

But how could I even begin to explain what the last few months have meant to me, whatshemeans to me, when I can’t even comprehend it myself? All I know is that it feels like my lungs have collapsed, like my heart doesn’t know how to beat without her around.

God, I just miss her so much.

I miss the fruity smell of her hair as it tickles my face at night, the way her eyes light up when I make her food and the noises she makes as she eats it. I miss her lips and her smile and the dimples in her cheeks when she laughs and how she cries at the news and gets angry at people in the supermarket and keeps her paintbrush behind her ear like a craftsman does with a pencil and forgets it’s there long after she’s packed all of her paints away.

I need to talk to her. Need to make sure she’s okay. Need to tell her that I love her.

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