Page 91 of Book People

I’ve never had a relationship before, not one, and that’s because I’ve never wanted one. Caring is hard work and complicated, and after Mum died and Dad left, I’ve been happy with easy and simple, yet . . .

I want to know what it’s like to have her make-up in my bathroom, her clothes in my wardrobe. I want to know what it’s like to share a living space with her. To cook dinner with her. To come home after work with her and have a glass of wine as we talk about our day. To argue over how to stack the dishwasher or whose turn it is to clean the loo. To laugh over a private joke that only she and I understand.

I don’t have that, yet suddenly I want it. I want it badly.

Except . . . I can’t. Not if I want her to be happy too.

‘I don’t think it’s just the sex, Bas,’ Dan says. ‘You’re always talking about her. In fact, you never bloody shut up about her.’

‘It’s casual,’ I repeat, and I know I’ve said the word too many times, because now it sounds meaningless. Hollow. ‘You know I don’t do relationships.’

‘Right,’ says Dan. ‘But you’re lying to yourself, mate.’

I turn sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

He gives me a long-suffering look. ‘Bas, you’re in love with her. You’ve been in love with her for at least the last month.’

Utter horror goes through me.

Love. I’mnotin love. Why would I be? When love is the very last thing in the world I want? Love is hard. Love is difficult. Love has destroyed the men in my family and I want no part of it. I never have.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I say, with as much emphasis as I can. ‘I’mnotin fucking love, Daniel.’

‘Sure. Just like you don’t care at all if Kate’s horrible ex-boyfriend is here, possibly wanting to get back with her.’

He’s being a prick and I shouldn’t rise to the bait, because I’ll only reveal myself. I have never been one to protest too much. Yet now all I can think about is Fuckface and how he hurt her, and how he wants her back, and no matter how much I believe a leopard can’t change his spots, maybe he has.

Maybe he really is a better man, maybe he’s changed, and maybe he’ll convince her to go back to him. He might. And she might, too, mightn’t she? I don’t know what she wants and I don’t know how she feels, because we haven’t talked about it.

Something inside me plummets, but I ignore it. Hard.

‘Even if he has changed, she won’t want to go back to him,’ I say, mostly for my own benefit, even as my brain is going flat-out on a mouse wheel, around and around, jealous and angry and desperate all at the same time. ‘She’s too intelligent for that. But it’s her decision, so if she does, I won’t stop her.’

‘Of course you won’t.’

‘Have you ever been in love, Daniel?’ I growl.

He screws his face up, thinking. ‘Once. With Carole.’

‘The school secretary? When you were six?’

He shrugs. ‘She was kind to me.’

‘My point being that you’re talking through a hole in your head.’

‘Fair. But I know you, Bas. You’ve never been like this with another woman in your entire life.’

‘I’m not listening.’

‘What would be so wrong with admitting it?’ he asks, persistent as a fucking mosquito. ‘She feels pretty strongly for you.’

Does she? Does she really? She wants casual too, that’s what she said.

‘If I felt it,’ I say, ‘I’d admit it.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ he scoffs. ‘You’re about as emotionally open as a potato.’

I stay silent a moment, resenting like hell being compared to a potato, all the while struggling with the cascade of feelings inside me. We don’t admit what we feel, the Blackwood men. We keep it properly repressed.

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