Page 38 of Only Ever You

She rested forwards on her elbows and tucked her chin on her linked hands. All shyness gone. “How old was he? When he ran naked?”

Both of Bash’s parents turned their eyes to him expectantly.

Okay. They were really doing this.

His shoulders slumped in resigned defeat.

“Nine,” he murmured.

And the embarrassment continued for a further hour.

* The croissants are warm

* Perfect

* My dear

12

FAYE

After devouringthe buffet Michèle graciously served for a second lunch, Faye received a tour of the house; its spacious kitchen, living room plus the smaller sitting room, a passing glance at the office with dual oak desks, the patio (though it was too cold to stay out there for long), and lastly the beautifully designed annexe where Bash would sleep, before returning to the main sitting room.

The whole house had been decorated in the Christmas spirit to a rough sort of perfection, elevating the cosy cottage feel within a property that was anything but. To Faye, this home was a mansion. She loved the living room’s exposed beams in particular, dotted overhead with a line of Christmas cards tacked into the wood.

Stealing glances out of the windows facing the neatly kept front lawn and driveway, she edged along a trio of sage-green rustic sideboards. Too many photographs sat on their tops in mismatched frames to count, but Faye was determined to look at them all. Most were more recent photos so far, which made identifying Bash easy, until she reached a cluster of grainy prints in older looking frames.

Careful to not knock any others, she picked up one in particular; a print of a young boy in tennis whites and sports socks pulledhalfway up to his knees, smiling as he held up a trophy. In her heart, Faye knew it was Bash, but she wanted to be sure.

“Is this you?”

Bash had hovered beside her as she moved along the display, sipping on a mug of tea, but his face washed over with greyness as soon as his eyes snagged on the picture. He stilled for half a second longer than Faye would’ve expected, as if he hadn’t recognised himself at first.

“Yeah,” he mumbled and turned himself away, picking at the back of a mustard wingback seat that looked rather a lot like some of the ones fromBaked.

That response told Faye more than he knew. Namely that he still saw himself as the smiling boy in the photo, even just a little bit … and he didn’t like what he saw.

“You look so young.”

“I look terrible.” Bash tried to gently take the frame from her hands without spilling his tea.

“What? Why? I think you look great.”Happywith the ginormous, gleaming trophy in his hands.

He put the frame back further to the rear of the cluster and moved another larger image in its way, muttering, “Shame none of the other teenagers did.”

Faye’s softening gaze didn’t leave his profile. Every crinkle that flattened and ounce of loathing that hardened Bash’s expression as he shoved his younger self to the back of the queue made her long to jump back in time and find that boy to tell him how amazing he was.

He didn’t have to say out loud the reasons why he thought those things. Bash’s childhood was a sensitive topic for him just like her parents’ divorce was for her, because they were the loneliest years of his life. He spent his school break times hiding from his unnecessarily cruel classmates outside of classroom doors, or in the toilet blocks where he could be by himselfawayfrom those who shamed him for his larger body back then.

He’d joked a few times that from the age of eight, he’s stayed the same weight but just grown taller, and it sank Faye’s heart every time she heard him say such deprecating things, even now, though it was rare.

He was such a beautiful person inside and out and he couldn’t seem, to her eyes anyway, to get past the thought that he wasn’t.

When they’d met, he’d been the leanest Faye had ever seen him. She’d noticed soon after they’d begun spending more time together how he tightly controlled what he ate, though she’d never seen him restrict himself. Still, she knew that hadn’t always been the case.

Now, Bash ate what he wanted when he wanted it and rarely skipped out on dessert. Hell, he loved sweet things more than she did and still somehow kept his Adonis-like shape. But it had always been there in the back of Faye’s mind that something was wrong. And she’d been right.

When she’d eventually found the right time to ask him about it, Bash trusted her enough to tell her about his up and down bingeing cycles when he was a teenager. And then he’d told her about the monthly therapy sessions she hadn’t known about before then and still attended to this day.

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