Silence descended as Marcus took his place behind the baseline, crouching to receive.
The ball slammed over the net. Marcus returned it cross court. Duardin was there, whacking it down the tramline, forcing Marcus on to his backhand. But his backhand was his strength and he returned it easily, knocking it just inside the baseline. Duardin returned it and I assumed we were in for another long rally, the battle of the heavy hitters, until Marcus did something I’d never seen him do before. He sliced the ball, making it look like it was going to go long but morphing it into a perfectly executed drop shot that fell just over Duardin’s side of the net. Duardin hesitated a split second too long before running in, using the full length of his body to reach for the shot. The ball bounced twice before he could get to it. Marcus had won not only the match, but the Queen’s Club Championships. It seemed to take amoment for it to sink in before he put his head in his hands and bent double at the waist as the crowd went wild. I blinked back tears as I stood up and then I didn’t bother to blink them back anymore, I just let them flow, yelling and whooping. Marcus stood up and glanced over at us, smiling like I’d never seen him smile. I raised my hands in the air, clapping above my head as Marcus looked directly at me. For a nanosecond, as we made eye contact, our faces beaming, the warmth we felt for each other shining through, I thought I might never have been as proud of anybody in my entire life.
That night, Dean threw a party for Marcus at a rooftop restaurant in Kensington. He was so busy being congratulated by everyone that I didn’t see him for much of the night and hung out with Dean and Nick instead, and occasionally Patrick when he wasn’t schmoozing with the rest of the tennis crowd. It wasn’t until gone eleven that I finally got to speak to Marcus alone.
‘Want to get some fresh air?’ he asked.
He had beads of sweat on his forehead and he was smiling, excited in a way I’d never seen him.
‘Sure,’ I said.
He took my hand and led me outside on to the terrace, a beautiful tree-lined space with views over rooftops and chimneys, the lit-up London Eye dominating the skyline. We leaned on the railings taking it all in, enjoying the cool breeze on our faces, the thumping music from inside the bar barely audible.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.
He shook his head. ‘I can’t even put it into words. It’s a strange mixture of not believing it’s actually happened and knowing that it’s exactly what was supposed to happen. Does that even make sense?’
‘I think even if you feel like you deserve something, that it’s meant to be, there’s a nagging fear that it was a fluke, or a one-off, or that somebody’s made a mistake and you haven’t won this thing, or got this job, or whatever it is, after all.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, turning to face me. ‘Exactly that.’
I bit my lip, not liking him so close to me and wanting him even closer all at the same time.
‘Did you speak to your mum after the match?’
He nodded. ‘Seeing her threw me off for a second there.’
‘Did you know she was coming?’ I asked, still feeling guilty for the part I must have somehow played in it.
‘Not really. After you showed me that article you’d found, I called her to ask her if it was true. If she’d stopped coming to matches because she knew the story was about to break and didn’t want to embarrass me.’
‘And?’
‘You were right,’ he said softly. ‘She wanted me to be able to focus on my career without worrying about which story about her was going to surface next. I told her I wouldn’t have cared, that she was my mother and that I couldn’t care less what people said about us. That she should have spoken to me about it instead of pretty much disappearing and making me feel like she’d ...’
‘Abandoned you?’
He shrugged.
I touched his arm. ‘So she came to support you today.’ I looked around. ‘Is she here now?’
‘I invited her, but she wanted to take it one step at a time. We’ve still got a lot more talking to do. But it’s a start. And it’s mainly thanks to you. I told her about you, and she said she’d seen pictures of us together and felt like she’d never seen me look so happy.’
I smiled.
‘Ava, do you think we should talk? About what happened at Claridge’s?’
‘Nothing did happen.’
‘But we both wanted it to. Didn’t we?’
I didn’t want to look directly at him, because when I did I couldn’t be rational.
‘It was best that it didn’t.’
‘Was it, though? Because I like you, Ava,’ he said, taking my hands in his and pulling me off balance so that I had no choice but to fall into him.
It was like warm caramel was flooding through my body, sweet and comforting and delicious. I’d dreamed about him having feelings for me in the way I did for him and now here he was, actually telling me he had them.
