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“I mean,” I said. “Sure?”
“Then why are you reacting to the reminder that I care about you like I just told you to b-beware the ides of March?”
I was exhausted. Had been spun in an emotional centrifuge. Multiple times. So my tongue spoke what my brain thought. “I suppose I just don’t feel like I’m worthy of it.”
There was a long silence.
And then Edwin exploded. “Are you s-serious? That is the s-silliest thing I everf-fuckingheard.” And he really must have been feeling some kind of way to take on twos’s and anfin close proximity. Then he caught my face between his hands and yanked me around, surprising an undignified squawk out of me. “Love has nothing to do with worth,” he declared. “But you are worth loving. And you have to b-believe me.”
Had he always been this bold? Probably he had, now I thought about it. I had always painted him boldly—full of unabashed sensuality—and he had never demurred. “Why do Ihaveto believe you?” I asked, curious in spite of myself.
Assuming it had mostly been well-meaning rhetoric, I wasn’t actually expecting an answer. But Edwin, being Edwin, had one for me anyway. “Because I spent ten years with you. And nobody gets to take that away from me. Not even you.”
“Edwin, I—”
“No.” He covered my mouth with his hand, and not gently either. “If you will not think well of you, think w-well of me. D-do you think I give my love lightly? Mistakenly? Because I am foolish or I cannot see who you are?”
I made a muffled noise, protests rising and falling away against Edwin’s palm. And then, when he finally let me speak, the only word left on my lips was the meekestnoI’d ever uttered.63
“Good.” Edwin sat back, looking far too smug. “And don’t you ever forget it again.”
Silence fell between us once more. But it fell gently, like snowflakes upon the river. Edwin was drooping slightly, having reached the particular point of tiredness that rendered climbing the stairs to bed an impossible obstacle. I hoped he was right about Adam because—selfish to the last—I wasn’t ready to break this peace. While I didn’t think it was fragile, I wasn’t sure if it would ever feel quite like this again: a soft expanse of forever that lay past words, beyond hurt, on the other side of love.
It was also the first thing I’d created, or helped to create, since Edwin and I had broken up. Was it art? No. But it was beautiful and it was true and it was mine. More than that, it was…liberating. Plucking at the knots inside me that I had thought were holding me together when instead they had been holding me back. I could already tell it would take a long time to undo them. Perhaps the rest of my life.
Still, I had time and people who loved me. This could be enough for now. This small sense of possibility. Light glimpsed through cracks. My mind untrammelled by doubt and free from fear, recklessly dreaming of all the other acts of creation that could be mine. Ripples left upon smooth water. Pleasure inscribed upon a man I desired. Pierogi. I could learn to make my parents’ fucking pierogi.
“Edwin?” I said, breathless upon my own daring, hardly able to hear myself above the swirl of my thoughts and theputt-putt-puttof my pulse. “I think I might be in the wrong place.”
15
Edwin and Adam dropped me off at Folly Bridge with a bag full of freshly washed towels belonging to a drug dealer, the clothes my mother had packed for me, and Mr. F riding proudly atop them. Most of the ice had melted, but the towpath was still little more than a line of shadow to me. The river, too, was mostly shadow, distinguishable only by the silver flutters of the moonlight across the water. Still, for the first time in years, I knew where I was going, and I walked as quickly as my boot allowed. Over the footbridge. Past the hunched shapes of the holiday boats. The occasional glow from another liveaboard. Back to the only place I could, for the moment, imagine being. And the only person I could imagine being with.
The Demoiselle was dark and silent as I approached, something I had somehow neither considered nor prepared for, even going so far as to dismiss Edwin’s concerns about the late hour as soon as he’d raised them. At least the plume of smoke rising from the chimney suggested Leo was home. Not…elsewhere. Nevertheless, a sense of my own foolishness was steadily sinkinginto me as I stood there on the towpath, staring at a closed-up narrowboat. All I had to do—probably—was step into the stern and knock on the door. But it felt unbearably presumptuous. What was I going tosay?
Minutes passed while I was frozen with indecision.
I’d seen rom-coms, albeit reluctantly. This was supposed to be the easy bit. You rushed into your lover’s arms. Credits rolled.
Why, then, was I finding it so impossible? It wasn’t even as though we had some terrible betrayal to resolve. His last words to me, as we’d parted only that afternoon, had been an assurance that I was welcome back at any time. He probably hadn’t imagined I would interpret “any time” as less than twelve hours later. But that wasdetails. The worst he would do was laugh at me a little. Yet still I lingered, unable to decide if this was cowardice or contrariness or some unique cocktail of both. Perhaps, after Edwin, I had so grown used to walking away that I had lost the capacity to walk back. Or to stay.
Closing my eyes, I tried to believe what Edwin had told me earlier—that I was understood, forgiven, loved, worthy. That just because I had already lived, ruined, and rejected one happy ever after didn’t mean I could never have another. Besides, that wasn’t what Leo had offered me. All he had promised was freedom. And a future I could fashion for myself. How could I turn away from that?
In any case, if I didn’t do something soon, Leo would find me come daybreak, abandoned like a puppy outside his boat. And somehow that was even worse than having to get his attention, wake him up, and tell him I’d made a decision I didn’t even wantto make because I was too stupid and stubborn and vain to admit when I needed something.
Resolved then, I put my trust in the single quality I knew I possessed that was unerring and eternal: my sense of pointless drama.
Having made sure my bag was out of harm’s way, I threw myself to the ground, making as much noise as I could without causing a second injury.
“Fuck,” I shouted at the air. “Fuck.”
A light came on. Followed by another. A trail of them leading from bow to stern. Then the hatch opened, dazzling me so severely that I had to put a hand up to shade my eyes. And Leo was still mostly a blur of gold as he stepped down onto the bank.
“My foot,” I said, “is actually fine.”
Leo’s face resolved into discrete features as he leaned towards me: cheekbones jutting above his beard, winter eyes with a summer’s warmth, a wide, generous mouth that looked oh so good around my cock. He seemed—not unreasonably given the circumstances—confused. “Marius? Why are you—”
“My foot,” I repeated, “is fine.”
