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“Nothing. It just sat there while you railed me over the kitchen counter.”
“So the kitchen counter railing is the problem. Damn, you know I felt when I was doing it that I was going too far. That I was getting too out of control,” he said. Then shook his head at himself wearily. Likehewas still the problem.
Even though he wasn’t, he wasn’t at all.
It was just that explaining that was really difficult without the ability to tell the whole truth. It meant she had to keep saying what was wrong without really saying what was wrong, and oh god, it was hard. Like conversational algebra.
“It’s not you who’s getting out of control. It’s me. I don’t like how this is making me feel,” she managed to get out, but then of course there was the question of what exactly it was that she felt, hanging in the air like a big sign that saidI love you I love you I am pathetically and ridiculously in love with you. So she had to try to clarify. “It’s like I’m helpless. Like I can’t stop doing this. Even though doing this is way beyond what I ever imagined. I thought it would just be a couple of fucks and then everything would be the way it was. But instead, it’s like something has taken hold of me, and I just can’t cope with it, Alfie. I think it might be killing me, just a little bit. Which sounds mad, I know, I can see how mad it is, but I—”
He stopped her before she could go any further.
Most likely because she was babbling by that point.
And somewhere in the middle, she’d started flapping her hands.
Quite clearly, because he took hold of them as he cut in. “No, no, it doesn’t sound mad. It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said. Soothingly, too. Though of course nothing could ever be soothing now. For several reasons, starting with this one:
“But it isn’t. This whole thing was my bloody idea.”
He kept trying, however. He squeezed her hands.
And said more things in an attempt to make it all be okay.
“Yeah, and sometimes ideas go places you didn’t imagine. They do stuff you didn’t really want. You think things are gonna be one way and then next thing you know it’s the opposite. I get that, love, you don’t have to explain.”
“I want to, though. I just… I can’t. And I can’t just smile and—”
“You don’t have to. And you don’t have to just smile with me, neither. I don’t mind what you’re like, sad or sunny or panicking or whatever else. It’s all right. You can just be whatever you need to be and only tell me whatever you want to.”
She dared to meet his eyes on the end of that.
But when she did she kind of wished she hadn’t.
Because they were so soft and so kind, and now he was speaking, in that low, grave voice of his. “You go home, and rest easy, and tomorrow we’ll just pretend all this never happened,” he said. And that was good, it was so good of him, he was pure goodness through and through.
There was just one problem with that:
It made her love him even more than she had before.
And in a way she knew she would never now escape from.
Draft Unsent Messages, April 15, 2022
Mabel 6:36 a.m.
Alfie, here’s the thing
Mabel 6:42 a.m.
Alfie, I’m really struggli
Mabel 7:47 a.m.
Okay so I’m just going to say it. I love you, and I know you could never
Mabel 7:53 a.m.
I mean I think that you could never
