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AMBER: He’s your soulmate, I’m telling you.
ME: You need to get out more. He’s not my soulmate.
AMBER: You’re half in love with him.
ME: Stop putting words in my mouth. I feel a connection to him, yes, but I also feel a connection to pizza and pink gin. And cats.
AMBER: Pizza and pink gin. Now there’s a soulmate I can get behind. I’m off to Tesco to get some. BRB.
ME: Please don’t bring a cat home.
AMBER: No promises.
I shook my head and put my phone down. I should have known better than to get sympathy from her. She was chaos in a bottle, a bit like Granny. Neither one of them would sympathise where snark would do.
“You look distressed,” William said, rubbing a towel over his hair.
“Do you believe in soulmates?” I asked, leaning over the back of the sofa and looking at him. He was wearing nothing but a pair of jeans, and an errant droplet of water escaped from his dark hair onto his shoulder where it trickled down his chest.
“Stop staring, you’ll make me blush,” he replied, wiping the droplet away before it could complete its journey.
That was rude.
“Why do you ask?” he said a moment later.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was just thinking. Do you believe in them? Romantically or platonically?”
“Wow. I kiss you twice, and this interrogation is what I’m subjected to.”
“I’m only asking.” I half-heartedly tossed a pillow his way. “Because I don’t.”
“You don’t?” He raised his eyebrows, grabbing a t-shirt from the bed before walking through the double doors into the living room with me. “Platonic or romantic?”
“I believe in platonic more, I guess,” I answered. “Like… Amber is my platonic soulmate. We’ve been best friends as long as I can remember, and I can’t imagine my life without her in it. But romantically? I don’t know.”
“I think both can exist,” he replied, pulling his t-shirt on and dropping onto the sofa with me. “Whether or not you meet that person is another matter entirely, but I think we have someone—more than one someone, maybe—that we’d do anything for.”
I wrinkled my nose up.
“But we have different views on love that possibly shape our feelings on this,” he pointed out, looking at me intently. “I grew up in a family where my father risked everything for the woman he loved, even potentially losing his birth rite just to be with her.”
I flattened my lips. “And I grew up in one where he threw her away because she wasn’t enough.”
William winced. “Ouch. That seems a harsh way of putting it.”
“It’s how it’s always seemed to me. I’m not a son. I can’t inherit. He found someone who could give him what my mother couldn’t.” I shrugged, hugging my knee to my chest. “It’s just a fact of life.”
“Have you ever… I don’t know, spoken to him about it?”
“We did therapy, believe it or not.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Your therapist sucked. No offence.”
I mock-gasped. “Are you bringing up my daddy issues?”
“It’s kind of hard not to when we’re talking about him Grace.”
I opened to mouth to argue with him, then stopped, pressing my lips together instead.
