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He breathed. Held me closer. We stood there with the world passing us by, just the two of us and the candle on the table flanked by my empty wine glass and his cup of tea.
“We’ve eaten all the olives,” I thought aloud.
“That’s one food we can have at our wedding reception then,” he said.
I laughed. I don’t know what made me happier. The fact that he’d eaten or that he’d been open with me or that he was still making jokes about us getting married.
“Hu?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re ridiculous.”
“Fully agree.” He snorted into my chest. “My name is Hugo, Benjamin. Hu-go.”
“You sure you want to marry me?” I had to. Because it was funny. He was funny.
“Well, I do have standards,” he sassed.
“Such as?”
“Come on, Benjamin. Get a grip. For one thing, you’ll need to propose.Properly.”
“Fuck.” I laughed. “And then what?”
“That baby talk you dodged earlier? That’s next. We need to discuss this, because if you’re going to go off and have pretty French babies with random women—”
“Anna is no random woman,” I huffed in her defence.
“No, she’s apparently my new best friend.” He grinned up at me for a moment, but then we became serious, still holding each other, his gaze firmly on mine.
“We’re going to be okay, Hugo,” I said quietly. “I promise you. We’re going to be okay.”
“I know. Can I ask you something else?”
“Of course.”
He took his time, tasting the words in his mouth.
“When did you know?”
It was an ambiguous question with several possible answers, but I knew what he was asking.
“I could tell something was wrong the first time I saw you. You were too thin, too flighty, all that bravado on the outside while your hands always shook. I could relate to that because I can barely pick up a fork without tipping over my glass. If I get nervous, I might tip the whole table without even trying.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I knew that, but now I’d started, I couldn’t stop because I needed to be honest withhim too.
“Then Mark caught you in the changing rooms. He never called you out on it, but he told me. Said you were covered in bruises, and not the kind you would get from playing rugby…” I paused.
He didn’t say a thing. Just watched me.
“I saw them too,” I admitted. “You had a nasty one on your wrist, and you tried to hide it, but your sleeve kept riding up and you obviously couldn’t move your arm, and it looked really sore. Finn almost called an ambulance.”
“Shit,” he whispered.
“No,” I said sternly. “No shit. You need to know that people were looking out for you, even if it did take me far too long to put all the pieces together and figure you out. Everyone was desperate to help you, but you wouldn’t talk. Joshua and Imran tried to get you to go out for bloody coffee, to the cinema—anything to get to know you because they were bloody terrified on your behalf. You know what it’s like. Mabel was tearing their hair out.”
