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“They always treated me like I w-was. Like I needed to be corrected.” I curled my fingers over Adam’s forearm, hard enough that I felt the skin give beneath my nails. I knew I was hurting him but I had to… Not hurt him exactly. But I had to anchor myself in him. In flesh and bone andnow. He didn’t flinch. “Is it so contemptible to b-be soft?” I asked. Not Adam. But a long-dead woman. And the father I would never speak to again. “To want togivelove?”
There was a long silence. Even the birds were sick of my nonsense. My fears and my foolishness, all the tiny wounds that should have toughened into scar tissue.
Adam still hadn’t pulled away. “Can’t I be answer enough for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“God.” He let out a shaky breath. “Edwin, it half kills me sometimes that you don’t see what you are to me. How much I fucking need you.”
I tried to say something. But all I managed was a noise so humiliatingly garbled that even I couldn’t interpret it.
Adam shrugged. “Just you. Nothing but you. Exactly the way youare. With all your softness and sweetness and wickedness. When you bring me tea in the morning. The way you fall asleep in my arms. How you come greet me in the hall every time I come home. It’s what I dream about, you know. When I’m away. Opening the door and putting my bag down and there’ll you be, waiting for me.”
I bit the inside of my mouth hard enough I tasted blood. But it freed my tongue. “I love waiting for you. I love knowing you’re coming home to me.”
“You gave that to me,” Adam said quietly. “I do what I do because I want to. Because I’m good at it. Because I think it’s right. But I can’t say there haven’t been times when I thought saving other people’s homes was the best I could hope for. Maybe all I deserved. After making such a mess of my own family.”
The tension was fading from my hands. Slowly I relaxed my hold on Adam’s arm. I’d left marks behind, nestled amongst the hair: four floating half-moons, like the grin of Alice’s Cheshire cat. I would kiss them tenderly, sorrowfully, later. “It’s not much. I don’t do much.”
“To me, it’s everything. And so are you.”
“Afternoon.” A burly man in a flap cap, with a spaniel at his side, edged awkwardly around us, his face set firmly forward as if two men hugging each other and weeping was common enough on this part of the towpath.
Adam cleared his throat. “Nice day.”
“That it is,” agreed the man.
He was barely out of sight before I started giggling. Catharsis, from the Latinised Greek.Katharsis. Later extended to encompassemotional release. But originally mostly medical. Bodily. Especially of the bowels.
“Oh no.” I wiped my eyes with my wrist, probably making them red. “Marius is g-going to think we’ve had a fight or something.”
Adam—looking fairly emotionally released himself—passed me a handkerchief. “You’re going to be shocked to hear this, petal, but what Marius thinks about anything is very, very low on my list of concerns.”
We found the right narrowboat round the next bend. It was easy enough to recognise on account of having Marius outside it, perched on top of a ladder, pot of paint and mahlstick in one hand, brush in the other, as he worked on the side of the boat. He was so absorbed that he didn’t even hear us approaching. That was familiar enough—Marius too busy with something to notice me—but he had spent the last six months of our relationship in a listless haze, engaged by nothing, creating nothing, and I hadn’t realised how much I’d needed to see this.
He looked like himself again.
“Hi there,” said Adam, a little more loudly than he had to.
“Yes. Hi.” Marius, unhurried, executed a few deft brushstrokes before finally looking around. “How are you, myszko? Nice of you to tag along, Abel.”
Adam slipped the bag from his shoulder, putting it down on the riverbank. “Thanks. I do like a good tag, me.”
“I’m g-g-good,” I said breathlessly, trying not to resent the wayMarius always turned my words into circus clowns: indulging them, as they fell over each other and capered for his attention. Once-upon-a-time I thought it was because I loved him. “How are you?”
“Oh, you know. Still me.”
“That does seem to be the case,” agreed Adam.
Marius, of course, ignored him. He was too busy setting aside his painting things and climbing down from the ladder. And then—pausing only to pull a pair of unnecessarily large and almost impenetrably black sunglasses over his eyes—he was coming over.
My first thought had been that he had looked like himself.
My second was that he looked different in ways that seemed at once trivial—longer hair, a few days’ worth of stubble, sun-touched skin—and all-encompassing. Maybe it was because he was dressed in a way I could never have imagined him dressing, in ugly sandals, oversize jeans rolled partway up his calves, and a plain T-shirt. Or maybe it was because he’d put on, if not weight, at least a little muscle. Marius, who treated his body like a temple and a sinner at the same time, to be worshipped and punished, and endlessly controlled.
I almost asked him to take off the glasses so I could see his eyes. That it would help me believe it was truly him. But Marius loved his little games—whatever this one was in aid of—and it would have been playing straight into his hands.
In any case, none of it made any difference. He was as swaggeringly, impossibly, painfully beautiful as he had ever been. Except, for once, it did not pain me. It did not feel like something I hadlost or something I could never have. He was just a beautiful man in shabby clothes who smelled of enamel paint.
