“I have book club tonight.”
“So talk to me now! Fuck the procurement meeting! We’ll both be late for work. But at least acknowledge that this isn’t goodbye. Unless you’re kicking me out. I know I’m not what you want long term but I…I thought we were…more, you know?”
“Yes. We were.” Each word rips out a piece of my heart. I’m not going to coerce or beg him to stay; nothing but misery lies in that direction. The safest thing is a clean break from him, as soon as possible. “But you won’t trek out here to see me. You hate Sutton Common. You’ve said so yourself, lots of times.”
“Yes… maybe. But that was then, when everyone was coupling up and kicking me out of their cosy nests! I’ve since grown up. Sutton Common’s not so bad, not really. And you’re here! I don’t hate you! I like to think I’ve made that pretty fucking obvious.”
He doesn’t hate me. Is that good enough to cling to in the coming weeks, months, years maybe? Is it enough to counter the knowledge that the man I love is out living his best life not so many miles from here and that, occasionally, when he’s at a total loose end, we might meet up?
“I know you don’t,” I answer. “But I…I don’t know if that’s enough. I…I can’t do that, Alaric. It’s not enough for me.”
“What do you mean, it’s not enough for you?”
“You heard. I’m astonished someone like you can’t work it out.”
And with that, I’m gone.
CHAPTER 32
ALARIC
I don’t hate you.What kind of insane verbal sabotage was that? Three stops away from the hospital, I still have no fucking idea, but it sure doesn’t scream thanks for all the amazing sexing and I consider you one of my closest, most loveliest friends. I might as well have handed Gerald one of his beloved granola bars with a note sayingit’s not poisonin place of a list of nutritious ingredients.
I like him. Massively; this unexpected quarrel is making that crystal clear. The bottom’s dropped out of my stomach, leaving a vacant space where all thingsGeraldyusually nestle, keeping me warm. So what if I’m not his forever man? We have a good thing going. It doesn’t need to end simply because I’m escaping Sutton Common.
Gerald likes me, too. Perhaps more than I realised and I’ve hurt him.I can’t do that, Alaric. It’s not enough for me,were his parting wordsand someone like me is perfectly capable of joining the dots.Fuck.Why didn’t we have this conversation sooner? Instead of this angry, panicked, half-arsed version after Stefan’s posed the question and we’re both rushing out the door?Why didn’t I tell him we needed to discuss it in the shower last night? Did we both think our feelings were so fucking obvious to the other that it wasn’t required?
I kick myself. Not metaphorically, though I do that too, but I actually slam the heel of my shoe into my left shin as I slump down in my seat. It fucking hurts, and deservedly so. My thumbs fly over my phone, I fill the screen with texts begging Gerald to just bloody phone me so we can talk, but I’m wasting my time. He won’t check his messages whilst he’s driving, and he’s too conscientious to arrive late or bunk off his meeting. And with a day in the operating theatre ahead, I might as well hurl the fucking phone out of the window and onto the rail tracks for all the use it is.
I kick myself again, the other shin. Yep, still deserve every sharp slice of pain. If I was waiting for the opportune moment to tell Gerald how much what we have together means to me, that was it, as he walked out the door. I should have sprinted after him down the street, stark bollock naked. To hell with the twitching curtains. Or cracked open the tiny bathroom window and yelled through it as Gerald wrenched open the driver’s door of the Focus, applied his seatbelt, checked his mirrors, and then pulled off and drove away at a careful five miles per hour under the residential area speed limit. And stuck to that speed, even if tears were streaming down his face. Even if he couldn’t see the fucking road through them. Even if he felt like punching his fist through the windscreen.
Because my Gerald, with his gorgeous slugbrows and his obsessive recycling and his row of verdant, well-watered herbs lining the kitchen windowsill, is a good man. The best of men, in fact. Unfailingly, reliably, beautifully, and unapologetically himself. A man who makes me feel like I’ve hit the jackpot, even when I’m jammed on a packed commuter train on a miserable Monday morning.
And men like that don’t come along very often, if at all. Already his outburst is totally forgiven, because even excellent men like Gerald can behave like a tit occasionally, just as feckless, jittery idiots like me can occasionally step up to being the sensible, mature one.
Predictably, nothing goes right at work. The hospital computers are glitching, although, to be fair that happens almost every morning. Unable to access and review the up-to-date scans of the patient scheduled first on the operating list, we can’t safely start. When the nerdy bods in IT finally fix it, the boss throws a hissy fit because there’s a small hole in the sterile packaging protecting the surgical instrument set. Seeing as the NHS is skint, we don’t have another set lying around, so we have to kick our heels for an hour whilst these ones are resterilised. The second patient, when we finally get around to him, is scheduled for a bladder transurethral resection that should take forty minutes but turns into a two-hour haemorrhagic tumour extravaganza. Hospital transport doesn’t turn up to bring the last patient in; just as well, seeing as we ran out of time to operate on her.
And so it goes on. Distracted by worrying about Gerald, I stumble into my own exclusion zones, and my clandestine vaping sets off the fire alarms in the coffee room. Now I have earache to contend with too. My messages to Gerald remain on unread. My calls go straight to voicemail. He’s angry and worried and upset and hurt and everything he shouldn’t be. And it’s all my fault. I growl at a scrub nurse and am sullen with the boss. If one more person asks me who pinched the jam out of my sandwich (or a variation on that theme) they’ll find themselves on the wrong end of a sizzling hot resectoscope.
When my pained day draws to a close, I don’t need to take the Tube to reach Stefan’s place. His flat is brilliantly, wondrously, idyllically situated only a fifteen-minute stroll from the hospital.The warm, just-baked-bread scent emanating from an artisan delicatessen seduces me into buying a bumper-sized cheese-and-ham pasty, hoping it will cheer me and Stefan up. The closest thing Sutton Common has to an artisan deli is fucking Gregg’s.
Music’s coming from somewhere. On the corner a guy with a voice like Ezra’s strums his guitar, smooth enough to suck you in but scratchy enough to sound perennially cool despite singing a cheesy nineties love song. This part of London is sensory overload; in every direction, shop windows vie for my attention—vintage jackets, neon signs, a poster for an edgy-looking band I’ve never heard of. Fresh graffiti lines a newly painted wall as I turn into Stefan’s road, not the messy scribbly kind, but a bold explosion of colourful street art, insightful political commentary given life. A different tantalising smell hangs in the air now, Korean food mixed with the hoppy smell of a pub with its doors flung wide. Everywhere I look, London’s loud and crowded, sucking me in like a siren, singing straight to my soul: this is where I belong.
After stopping to say hi to Stefan’s neighbour, chilling on his small balcony with a pungent evening spliff, I punch in the code to the flat. At the click of the door, Stefan bounds into the hallway, throwing his arms around me as if I’ve staggered back from a war zone. To be fair, after some days at the hospital, I feel as if I have.
Like London, Stefan smells great, too, of beer, crisps, and aftershave, of my happy twenties and my even happier childhood.
“PlayStation’s missed you, bud,” he says, “You can have the best controller.”
For a moment, I’m fourteen again, hanging around the chip shop on the corner of our cul-de-sac back in Dagenham, or laughing at something stupid Stefan’s whispered in the back ofclass. I’m still laughing as I disentangle myself from his golden retriever hug and take a long, careful look at him.
His eyes are wet and swollen. His face is puffy. He looks like shit. “That bad, huh?”
Stefan nods, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
“Worse.”
“Oh, Stef.” I search for a tissue. “Don’t waste any more tears on Marcus. He was a thoughtless, manipulative, emotionally unavailable and arrogant cunt, devoted to nothing but his own fucking self-importance and his reflection. Like hugging a hologram.”
