Mark. Sweet Mark. Lovely Mark. Mark who had never done a thing wrong in his life, except take me to a wedding that Jac was at.
‘Hi Mandie,’ he said, smiling. His eyes creased like Romeo-Dylan’s did in the corners. ‘How are you? It’s nice to see you.’
Romeo-Dylan exhaled in a rush next to me. Relief, I realised, in the one corner of my brain that was still functioning.
‘Mark,’ I managed to croak. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Too long,’ he said. ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you too.’
It was the truth. Being with Mark had been so easy. No challenges, no pressure. No passion, sure, but God, easy could be so nice.
How had Romeo-Dylan said I made him feel? Steady? I’d brushed it off as a backhanded compliment at the time, but I shouldn’t have been so hasty. Steady had some real positive qualities.
‘I can see you’ve found yourself a handsome fellow,’ Mark said. ‘Introduce me to this guy, Mandie.’
‘Oh. Of course. Mark, meet Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor, the Romeo. Dylan, meet Mark, my ex-boyfriend.’
‘Nice to meet you, Dylan,’ Mark said. ‘I hope you’re treating Mandie well. She’s a special one.’
‘She sure is,’ Romeo-Dylan replied, finding his TV smile and his TV voice and slipping back into effortlessly charming mode.
It was easy for them to talk. Mark recognised Romeo-Dylan from the Olympics, and they fell into some conversation about sports to which I only needed to contribute an ‘Oh?’ and a ‘Wow!’ and an ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know that about you!’ every so often. Working for so many years in shops full of men had given me a lot of practice autopiloting through sports talk.
It was a perfectly nice conversation. There were no gaps, no awkward pauses, no silences. We were just three perfectly nice people, engaging in some perfectly nice, perfectly shallow small talk, in which we said nothing at all.
There was movement in my peripheral vision. Murray. He was holding up his phone.ASK HOW THEY BROKE UP.
Romeo-Dylan saw it too, and he squeezed my fingers briefly. ‘So how did you two break up?’
I tensed, but Mark just smiled. ‘It was kind of like sailing, I suppose,’ he said. ‘We were bobbing along together, and then a storm came in and blew her away from me.’
‘Did you –’ Romeo-Dylan paused, swallowed, licked his lips, ‘– did you fight for her? Did you fight for each other?’
‘I could have fought harder,’ Mark said. ‘But if we’d been holding tight to each other, it wouldn’t have been so easy for her to slip out of my grasp.’
I wanted to be angry with Murray. I wanted to be the kind of person that would storm up to him and jab their finger into his chest and demand an explanation.
I wasn’t, of course. I managed to hold it together until after the cameras had stopped rolling and Murray had sent the crew away to prep for the next part of the date shoot, but then I buried my face in my hands, unable to stop the tears coursing down my face. ‘How could you do that to me?’
‘Hey, hey, hey, it’s all right,’ Romeo-Dylan said, drawing me to him. ‘Don’t cry.’
‘I didn’t do anything to you,’ Murray said. ‘I made you a promise, Amanda, and I kept it.’
‘You scared me half to death!’
‘I needed some kind of reaction from you,’ he said. ‘We’re at the pointy end of the season. We need to up the stakes.’
‘You could have at least letmeknow you weren’t going to out her on national television,’ Romeo-Dylan said, arm tight around my shoulders. ‘I could have told her it’d be all right!’
‘Were you listening to anything I just said? Do you think I would have got anything out of her if she’d known that all she’d be faced with was that wet blanket of a man?’
I couldn’t stop seeing it. The Zoom screen flickering to life. Jac sitting there, leaning back in her chair, arms folded.Mandie.
Hi Jac,I would have whispered.
This is a new low,she’d say,even for you.
