‘Yes, you do!’ It comes out as an exasperated little yelp. ‘You always know, that’s kind of your thing, the man who knows.’
He sighs as if this is all some massive inconvenience to him, to have to explain the most obvious thing in the world. He looks at me, points at my mouth. ‘You just don’t do the thing you did with Ettie.’ Florian turns back to the café, slips the keys into the lock and goes to open it but I stop him with a firm hand on his arm.
‘The thing?’
‘Yeah, this.’ He smiles, catching his bottom lip a little with his teeth and then with a hard tug the door opens. Florian strolls in, flicking the switches on the wall sending the lights fizzing into existence.
‘I don’t do that!’ I tumble in after him, my finger pointing in his direction.
‘No, you don’t, that’s why I said it. But you did.’ When the final light illuminates the bar he turns to me, arms crossed, that frustratingly knowing grin tugging at his cheeks. ‘With him.’
‘Pfftt, you barely saw us.’
‘I know but I notice things. That very first day I met you, when Etienne brought you to that dinner with Mum, it was plastered all over your face. I mean I know you never made a secret of being completely besotted with him, but your mouth always gave you away.’
I catch myself in the mirrored surround of the bar, my fingers protectively covering my lips. I have no recollection of ever doing that face, it’s not like Ettie ever pointed it out, and I never looked at my own reflection with the same apparent adoration, but Florian’s ability to tell the unflinching truth leads me to believing him. ‘And I don’t do it with Archie?’ I sound disappointed.
‘No.’ Florian shakes his head firmly. ‘You don’t do it with Archie.’
Fuck. I am disappointed.
‘But like I said, it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t know that and I’m sure you’ll be happy and looked after andsafe.’ He starts to revert back to the Florian of minutes ago, the sarcastic one.
‘Why do you make it sound like a bad thing?’ I take a seat on one of the stools in the bar whilst Florian slips behind the Formica counter and reaches up to the shelf directly above us rooting around for the bottle.
‘They’re not bad things…’ he groans, his arm at full stretch. His chest is in front of me, his shirt pulling up and revealing a dark line of hair and his navel. I look and then when I realise I’m looking, I turn my eyes to my wedding band. Something clinks and Florian makes a celebratory sound and places a bottle on the counter. ‘Well, not necessarily.’
‘Is that it?’ I point to the bottle he’s just brought down; it’s half drunk and dusty.
‘No, that bottle’s over there, this is something else.’ On his way back to me he grabs two glasses and puts them in front of us.
‘We don’t have time for this…’
‘Just sit here for five minutes and drink.’ He pours out a large measure and pushes the glass back to me.
I take a sip and then let my eyes wander away from Florian, start to take in where I have found myself. Nothing has changed. Florian’s earlier comments had served as a wonderful distraction allowing me to be here without feeling the weight of the past sitting too heavily on my shoulders. Instead, being back here, bickering with a Grenaud, made it feel almost normal. I look at the door behind the bar, the one that would lead to a narrow wooden staircase and up to Ettie. I try to numb it all out, try to imagine that he is there, but it’s getting harder and harder to do that now because three years is a long time, and I have built the person I am now around losing him, around that catastrophic bit of bad luck. The losing him is as much a part of me as the having him ever was.
I catch him watching me, probably evaluating whether I am about to break in some way shape or form. ‘Is it hard, being here?’
‘No,’ I answer honestly.
‘I put off coming for about two weeks after I arrived. I mean I was staying at my house promising Jules I’d start my shifts, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’
‘What made you?’
‘Money mostly.’ He smirks. ‘I had none and I needed some. I got drunk, like drunk enough so that I could actually get here without bursting into tears.’ At the mention of him crying my hand reaches out and squeezes his; he looks at it for a moment too long, but instead of pulling it away his fingers curl around mine. I don’t hate it.
‘Anyway, when I got here it wasn’t as hard as I imagined. It’s as if I finally knew that he really wasn’t here any more. It was my last bit of hope, that he would come down slightly hungover, tell me off for freeloading and pour me a drink anyway. When I got here and he didn’t materialise, well I knew it was done.’
I marvel at his transparency, how it feels like Florian has been able to see straight through me, gather up all those complicated little feelings and string them together into a sentence that I wanted to say. ‘I think I’ve been imagining the same thing.’
‘It was all a little easier after that.’ He takes his glass and holds it up, inspecting the way the light pours through it. ‘This was Ettie’s bottle,’ he says whimsically. ‘He was given it on his thirtieth birthday. He never opened it, so I did it for him.’
‘Is that allowed?’
‘Well, no one else was going to open it. I save it for special occasions, things that Ettie would have wanted to toast. When France won the World Cup, when I sold my first commission… you.’ He holds the glass closer to me. I hesitate, let the strangeness of it all wash over me. My husband’s bottle of whisky, the one meant for him and his achievements, had now fallen into mine and Florian’s hands. I let myself think about him, of what he would have made of this, the reunification. I’m sure he would have laughed, enjoyed the strangeness of it all, the closeness we had managed to find in each other. But, there’s a discomfort there too that sits so closely to betrayal, an unshakeable feeling that I am doing something wrong just by being here. I used to find it comforting to think of him as some sentient force, finally knowing my innermost thoughts, watching my every move, but since that evening in Florian’s workshop, that belief has become less and less reassuring.
‘Santé,’ I say as the glasses clink together, our eyes locking on to each other as we bring them to our lips to drink. Florian takes a small sip but I choose to swallow down the rest and then when the glass is empty, I slam it down onto the bar and untangle my hand from his. I don’t want alcohol to blur the lines again; it makes me question things, like how dangerously easy it is to fall into an intimacy that actually scares me, or think about how much it had hurt when he hadn’t kissed me back. I can avoid the shame-spiral when there’s other people around, but when it’s just us there’s something else: a fuzziness, a stupid little voice telling me to do things that logical me would never do.
