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“I don’t know, to be honest. I never had any big crisis when I was younger. Never even thought about it. I liked my friends, but I wasn’t into all the partying and flirting and that. I just wanted to play rugby and go to school and come home and hang out with Mum. My life was pretty straightforward back then.”
“Mine too,” he said, then chewed his lip like he was carefully contemplating his words. “I liked school, had friends, and my parents were always great. My sister and I kind of tolerated each other like siblings do. She was always there for me. Well…until I met Lewis.”
“Do you want to talk about him?”
“Isn’t that the worst thing you can do? Talk about your ex?”
“I talk about Mark, all the time. And now you’ve met Anna, I’ll keep talking about her too.”
“But Mark is not your ex.”
“No, I don’t know how to describe that. I asked him the other day, and he said that we’ve been in a dysfunctional, half-platonic, open relationship for the past ten years, yet he’s never even got a blow job off me.”
Hugo snorted and rolled his eyes.
“Oh, Mark,” he sighed.
“It’s a good description,” I said. “I met him and we fell into what we became, whatever that is. And you’ll have to somehow live with the fact that Mark will always be a little too much in your life.”
“Of course he will. He’s very important to you, and I’d never…well, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t know Mark that well, but I like him, and I do know Finn. I’m not sure how that happened. He’s nosy and asks too many questions, but he’s there for me. He’s pretty cool.”
I got that. “He sees people,” I said. “Got this tough exterior and you think he’s all hard and cold, but he’s watching all the time. When Mark and I took over at work, Finn hated us both. It was really unpleasant for a while, and I didn’t quite understand it. Mabel was all twitchy, and this whole fabulous venture where we were to run this amazing, top location place—” Hugo cut me off by feeding me an olive, so I did what he did. Grabbed his hand and licked his finger clean.
“Dirty,” he muttered gruffly.
“No, it’s a Manzanilla. The brine gives it that smoky flavour. They’re gorgeous.”
“Manzanilla.” He laughed. “But that must’ve been hard for you. All that tension. I remember all the rumours when I first started at The Clouds. Oliver told me to watch my back because Mark shagged everything that moved, and Finn was working on having him sacked.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Mark was half ashamed and half flaunting it, but he’d been secretly shagging Finn for weeks. We had a massive argument about it, and at one point, I was going to just chuck the job in and resign because I couldn’t take it anymore. And then…” I had to laugh because it had been truly bonkers. “There was this woman called Liz, head of our temp agency, and she had a thing for me and kept following me around and turning up on nights out. She was always a little too drunk and very,veryhandsy.”
“Handsy?” I loved that he questioned me. That he didn’t find me ridiculous, even though I was.
“Yeah. Kept trying to make out with me and putting her hands down my pants. And I kind of let it go on far too long because I was pissed off with Mark and his antics, and then she was telling people that she was going to shag me for Christmas, wrap me up in a big bow and lick me from head to toe…or something.”
He almost choked on his cup of tea, brown liquid running down his chin. I reached out and dabbed it with the tea towel. He wiped his hands on the dressing gown.
“Bad Liz,” he said.
“Yeah. And me being me, I didn’t know how to handle it. You know when you get embarrassed and try to play it cool when all you want to do is to hold your hands up and shout BACK THE HELL OFF?”
“Yeah.” He had such a pretty smile. It made me smile as well. “I never know if people are flirting with me or taking the piss. It makes me really uneasy, so I always turn it into a joke, pretend I’ve misunderstood.”
“I never get it either,” I admitted. “Unless they’re blunt like Liz, who I told to leave me alone and never contact me again. She lost the temp contract after that. My doing, and I’m not proud of it. It wasn’t very professional,but in my defence, I was kind of freaked out. So yeah. I’m rubbish with things like that. The only successful relationship I’ve had is with Mark, and he’s the kind of guy who cuddles up in your bed after knowing you for less than a week and tells you he’ll love you forever.”
“You’re a bit like that too.” He grinned. “Forcing me to have cheesecake for dinner with you. I didn’t even know your name.”
Yeah. I laughed, embarrassed but not. “I was kind of…desperate. And intrigued. I wanted to be able to talk to you instead of just staring at you. Not that it stopped me staring at you—that’s the highlight of my day. If you’re working, I just kind of float around, taking far too many smoke breaks so I can see you. Well, I did. Guess I need a new excuse now. Sometimes you smiled at me. God. You’re just so beautiful and…yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“My crush on you got out of hand. Quite a bit out of hand. Mark was threatening to kidnap you and dump you on my doorstep, so I would actually talk to you.”
“That would have…well…that would have freaked me out no end.”
“And been slightly illegal.AndI would have died of shame.”
“Promise me you won’t let Mark arrange our wedding.” He picked up another olive, and even though I knew he was joking—too soon to talk about whether getting married was a thing we wanted—I still cheered on the inside.
