‘Was it your mum who got you into tennis?’ I asked him, keeping my voice soft and gentle, so he didn’t feel as though he was being interrogated.
He rubbed at his jaw.
‘It was. She worked behind the bar at a tennis club near Manchester.’
I literally hadn’t read this anywhere. ‘Okay.’
‘I hung out there while she did her shifts because she couldn’t afford to pay for childcare. It was a way for her to keep an eye on me without having to fork out for after-school clubs or a childminder. Luckily, the owner of the club had a soft spot for her, because obviously employees weren’t supposed to have their kids there.’
I rested my chin in my hand, watching him. He rubbed his mouth with his fingers, perhaps wondering if he’d said too much.
‘Is this the kind of thing you want?’ he asked. ‘The sort of stuff you’ll use?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Try not to think of it like that.’
I wondered whether to push it further. I had so many questions about his past, about young Marcus and how he’d discovered he was a tennis prodigy. What he was like at school. What the other kids at the club thought of him – I could imagine, of course, that they were probably annoyingly entitled and then in breezed Marcus, the barmaid’s son, blowing them all out of the water.
My phone buzzed again and Marcus looked at me expectantly.
‘Need to get that?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry, I should have turned it off.’
‘Any more photos shown up online?’ he asked.
‘Not that I know of.’
I’d barely thought about all of that since I’d seen the pictures of Charlie and the woman I was becoming increasingly convinced he’d left me for. I should probably ask him – it was a fair enough question when he’d posted it all over Instagram, wasn’t it? – but part of me didn’t really want to know the answer. When he’d called me yesterday morning, maybe he’d been planning to tell me he was already shagging somebody else but had bottled it at the last minute, banging on about knitwear instead.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, gauging Marcus’s reaction as I went.
‘Don’t wear yourself out,’ he said.
‘I’m up for it, if you are.’
There, I’d said it. I wasn’t sure anyone was going to believe we were actually together, anyway – I mean look at us, we were like chalk and cheese in almost every way – but if it put the tiniest, most miniscule amount of doubt in Charlie’s mind, if it made him realise that just because he didn’t want me, it didn’t mean nobody else would, I’d come to the conclusion that it would categorically be worth it.
‘Up for . . . ?’ he enquired.
Taking a deep breath, I said the words out loud – quickly, before I started to overthink it.
‘I’ll go along with the fake dating thing.’
Marcus cocked his head, looking utterly confused. ‘Really?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Really.’ He still looked dubious, so I said it with more conviction. ‘Definitely.’
If I said it enough times, maybe I’d even start to believe it.
‘Why the sudden change of heart?’ he asked, shifting in his seat and crossing his arms, as though he suddenly didn’t trust that I was of sound mind.
‘Some ... new information has come to light,’ I said, being deliberately vague and hoping he wouldn’t be interested enough to push for more detail.
‘Information about what?’
Damn.
‘My relationship,’ I replied.
