“I think about it all the time. I would have been absolutely devastated, obviously.”
“You made me beg for you to speak to me, to even acknowledge I existed. You made me feel desperate and deluded. You made me feel like you didn’t exist, like I’d made it all up.” He held his head in his hands. “And I couldn’t say anything because whenever I questioned your coldness, you made me feel like I was crazy. You tried to convince me that it was abnormal that I wanted to speak to a man who’d just told me he was in love with me. I can’t believe you made me think I was crazy, what the fuck was the matter with me.”
“It moved so quickly and it felt so intense so fast,” he said. “When in reality we didn’t really know each other that well. It derailed me, just for a bit.”
“You were the one who made it intense. You were the one telling me you wanted to marry me. Or that you couldn’t stop thinking about me. You rang me twice a day. You insisted we spent every other night together. I just wanted to hang out and get to know each other. You decided the entire pace of this relationship then you slammed on the brakes when it suited you. It was like I was just a lucky passenger along for the ride.”
“I fell in love with you very quickly, I couldn’t help it. I wanted to spend all my time with you, so I did. I should have taken it slower.”
“You weren’t in love with me.”
“I was completely in love with you.”
“Being in love isn’t a notion. It’s not a theory. It’s a connection you have to someone. If you were in love with me, you wouldn’t have been able to be apart from me. Fucking hell, didn’t you miss me? What’s wrong with you, Max? We saw each other so much, we spoke every day and then there was nothing. Why didn’t you miss me?” I was aware how hysterical I sounded now, but I didn’t care.
“It was too painful to miss you, I found a way to distract myself.”
“With what? Other women?”
His gaze broke away from my mine. “You know what I’m like, I’m scarily good at compartmentalizing things. I can put the blinkers on and hide from all the really difficult things I need to address.”
“By which you mean: I can think only about myself. That comes very easily to me.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s why I’ve always been in a career I hate, it’s why I never talk about my family. I can live in denial very comfortably.”
I wasn’t going to let this become a sympathetic psychoanalytical study of who he was. “What do you want?”
“I love you and I’m unhappy without you. I’ve been doing everything I can for months to avoid the fact that I know we’re meant to be together.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, sitting down on the chair. “At all. I don’t think you actually care about me. I think you care that an experience that might be good for you has ended.”
“I know it would take a lot for you to trust me again, but I really, really would do anything for you to consider it. I don’t mind how slowly we go, or how long it takes.” I stared at the table. “Have you been happy without me?”
“Of course I haven’t. It’s been terrible.”
He tensed his features in pain. “I hate that.”
“I’ve known I’ll be fine. It’s easier, being heartbroken in your thirties, because no matter how painful it is, you know it will pass. I don’t believe one other human has the power to ruin my life any more.”
He came over and sat on the seat next to mine. “How unromantic,” he said.
“It was so needlessly dramatic, Max. I don’t understand why you had to end it in such an extreme way. You could have just told me you were having doubts, or even just broken up with me.”
“I couldn’t face it. I was too cowardly to look at what was really going on, so I just deleted you.”
The brutality of this admission shocked me, despite having known for some time this was the reason for his disappearance. “You can’t ‘delete’ a human you love. I’m not a picture on your phone,” I said, sitting back in my chair and rubbing my eyes with the heels of my palms. I was so tired. “Or maybe that’s exactly what I am to you, maybe that’s what happens when you meet someone on a dating app.”
“It was nothing to do with you. I know you’re smart enough to not need me to tell you that.”
I hated how my body reacted to these glowing paternalistic assessments of my intellect that Max occasionally dispensed. “What was it to do with then? I really need to understand.”
He leant on the table and rested his head on his hand. “I was so unhappy when I met you, I realize now. I was a mess. I absolutely hate my job, but I don’t know what else I want to do. I hate living in London, but I don’t know where I want to go. I have next to no relationship with my family. All my friends have their own proper adult lives that keep them occupied. I don’t have any sort of settled life. Then I fell in love with this woman who was so together and focused. Who is successful, who’s happy, who has all these meaningful relationships. Even with her ex-boyfriend. And I knew that if I was going to properly commit to you, I’d have to become the man I’ve been putting off becoming. And I wasn’t ready to. I wasn’t ready to grow up.”
“I didn’t ask you to change.”
“I know.”
“And I am not ‘so together.’ Everything’s coming apart. My dad has got really bad—he keeps having accidents and forgetting who I am. Mum and I argue all the time. We’ve had to get a nurse to help us. I don’t know when or how we need to get more help. I can’t seem to write about anything other than about him. Katherine and I had an enormous row. I’m scared of being in my own home because I’m pretty certain my neighbour is really dangerous. And I’m alone.” My voice wavered. Max reached his hand out towards mine on the table and held it. “I am really fucking alone.”
He knelt on the floor in front of me, held my chin in his hands and tentatively kissed me. He smelt of tobacco—like wood and raisins. He stroked my cheek with his thumb and clutched the back of my head with his palm. I slid off my chair and sank to the floor, so we were both on our knees. We undressed each other and he lay on top of me, pressing his heavy warmth against my body and opening me up, firmly and slowly. And then it was urgent—as if we were now both worried the other would disappear. Only one part of me remained in my skin while other Ninas detached and circulated the room. There was one who was a spectator of the clawing and clinging; who couldn’t believe Max was inside my home and inside me—that I could not only look up to see his face but feel his body temperature permeate mine. One Nina rejoiced, another one was scared. Another Nina examined him—every move and every sound—to find evidence of where he’d been since I’d last seen him. I’ve missed you, he said to me as we fought for breath. I’ve missed you so fucking much.
We lay naked on our backs, side by side on the living-room rug with only our fingertips touching. I stared at the long thin line that stretched across the plaster of my ceiling like a crack in dry soil.
“I want tea,” I said. I went to stand up, but he tugged my hand.
“Stay here with me a bit longer.” He turned me on my side and wrapped his arms around my body. I felt the sweat on his skin against my back. “I’ll make us one in a minute.”
“How many women have you been with since me?”
He buried his face in my hair and breathed deeply. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if we are going to be together again, I need to know the whole truth of when we were apart.”
“And you’re not going to torture yourself with it?”
“No, of course not, this isn’t a jealousy issue. I’ve assumed you’ve been with other women.”
“Okay,” he said. “One.”
“One? I don’t believe you.”
“Just one.”
“You’ve had one night
with another woman since me?”
“Not one night.”
“How many nights?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t count.”
I turned to face him. “Were you in a relationship with her?”
“No—I mean”—he looked to the ceiling to avoid my eyes—“we were seeing each other, but we weren’t together.”
“When did you start seeing each other?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Max.”
“Maybe a month after we finished?”
We finished was such a dishonest retelling of how we’d ended, implying consent and communication, but now was not the time to debate wording.
“How did you meet her?”
“Linx.”
“Did you delete me as a match? Because when I redownloaded it, you weren’t there.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think I probably didn’t want to see when you’d last been online because I didn’t want to think of you dating again.”
“Who was this woman?”
“Her name was Amy.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s temping at the moment.”
“How old is she?”
He paused.
“Twenty-three.”
I did a silent calculation in my head, ready to weaponize against him when the time called for it. Fourteen years.
“And she finished with you, so you decided to come back to trusty old me? The service station you can pull into for a break.”
“Nina,” he said, kissing my forehead. “No. You couldn’t be more wrong.”
“I don’t understand why you started seeing someone immediately after me if what you were scared of was commitment. Your reason for vanishing would make sense if you then went on some sex spree.”
“I just needed to distract myself so I didn’t think about you. And I can’t do sex sprees, so I accidentally fell into something regular with someone.”
“How did it end?”
“I finished with her.”
“By which you mean you ‘deleted’ her?”
“No,” he said, somewhat irritably. “We ended amicably. I told her I was in a very confused place and she understood.”
“All these women who end up as the collateral damage of your confusion, Max. What are you so confused about?”
“I’m not confused any more,” he said, gripping me tighter.
* * *
—
We got into bed just as the sky was turning the lilac-blue of predawn.
“Tell me again why you stopped talking to me,” I said as we faced each other, our heads on the pillows. We spoke softly, as if trying not to wake anyone else up. “And don’t speak abstractly or philosophically. Tell me, clearly, why.”
“I knew that I wanted to commit to you, but I was scared to. Committing to you meant looking at the kind of life I really want. And I wasn’t ready to. I was a coward.”
“And how do I know the same thing won’t happen again?”
“Because I know I don’t want to be without you now.”
“You have to promise me you’ll never, ever disappear again.”
“I promise,” he said, using his knuckles to gently stroke my cheek. “I fucked up once and I’ve learnt my lesson. I don’t care how long it takes to re-earn your trust.”
I closed my eyes, failing to will myself to sleep. “I tried to speak to you, sometimes. At night, when I got into bed. That’s really properly desperate behaviour. That’s someone who’s lost it. I’d concentrate really hard and try to send you messages. But I don’t suppose you ever heard from me.”
“I’m here now,” he said. “Nina, I’m here now.”
Our breathing slowed in tandem. I heard the tinkling morning call of the blackbirds outside my window.
“Have you really missed me? Or have you missed how I made you feel?” My body felt cold and my head felt light, the prelude to unconsciousness. I heard the lethargic murmur of his voice.
“They’re the same things.”
* * *
—
Max stayed every night for a week. We talked—about what we had been together and what we had been apart. The talking was not charged with emotion but logic—the conversations felt like a safety measure. Two dignitaries meeting after global disaster, analysing the chaos and its after-effects, discussing preventative measures. Our conversations were tinged with a new-found sincerity, which I found exhausting but essential if I were to ever trust him again. We made a promise to be as honest with each other as possible—no matter how uncomfortable it might feel. I warned him that his actions had left me uncharacteristically anxious—that I associated him with pain and precariousness, that it would take time for me to relax back into our relationship. I told him I wanted reassurance without asking for it, as much time as was necessary and allowance for anger and interrogation when I needed it. He said he understood, that he would feel the same and that I was entitled to whatever I wanted. As long as I’d try to trust him again.
He told me more about Amy. He told me how surface-level and tenuous their connection had been and I hated myself for how comforting I found the comparison between us, like we were contestants on a dating show of women competing to win one worthy bachelor. I hated myself even more when we laughed about the grimy graduate house-share she lived in and her love of bottomless Buck’s Fizz brunches and the fact she had never heard of John Major. I informed him that the embarrassment was not that she hadn’t heard of a man who became a member of parliament in the late seventies, but the fact he was romantically involved with a girl who was born the same year as the Spice Girls’ first number one.
I told him about Angelo’s knife collection, Joe’s wedding, Lola’s first love, my and Katherine’s fall-out. He read the new chapters of my book. I updated him on Dad’s waning health, but briefly and sparing any detail but the necessities. I still couldn’t talk about Dad in any real depth, or in the context of emotion rather than practicality, to anyone. Gwen was the closest thing to a confidante, and even then, when she asked in our many phone conversations how I was, all I could manage was: “a bit sad.” I wanted to open up to Max about it—I craved his comfort and advice—but I found the visits home to be increasingly distressing and I wanted to keep them separate to the rest of my life. The only way I had managed to not think all day every day about my dad and his brain—his beautiful, big brain being unassembled and laid in front of him like flat-pack furniture—was the fact that no one knew the details of it. So, no one thought to ask me about it.
In the weeks that followed the night I’d found Max on my doorstep, we talked about things we’d never spoken of before. There was a gentle attentiveness to us—we were less eager to make each other laugh, his bravado quietened, his swagger softened. I was more myself than I ever had been—uninterested in the pursuit of retaining his attention. He told me he loved me, prudently and sporadically, keen to prove he was being thoughtful; that he wouldn’t frighten himself with his own extremity again. I kept a running tally of when he said it. Once, whispered in my ear on the tube during morning rush hour as we were surrounded by crotches and armpits and drowned in garish light. Another time during a particularly bad hangover when we were eating chicken nuggets in bed. Another time as we queued for drinks in the pub, when I asked him if he wanted pork scratchings. I often said it back, but never said it first. I pressed the home button on his phone when he was out of the room to see Linx notifications or messages from girls—signs of a secret life that I still suspected he harboured. There was never anything there but the background photo of his car.
I was unused to his presence, which continued to feel like intrusion as well as security. I woke up every morning and checked my phone hoping for a message from him, as I had done for months, and in a half-asleep state would feel disappointme
nt. Then I’d turn to see him lying asleep next to me—a pile of sinewy limbs and golden curly hair. I had the flesh and blood version of Max, but I still felt like I was being haunted by the virtual one.
Lola, who I barely saw since she had emigrated to the land of love and secured a permanent visa, was happy for me. She was monogamy’s greatest advocate now, an ambassador for relationships. If she could have done, she would have quit her job and become a missionary for it, knocking door-to-door and handing out literature on how you too can be saved with the right romantic partner. She persistently asked when we could all do a double date, and every time I managed to put her off with a vague excuse. What Max and I had rekindled felt fragile and I wanted to momentarily protect it from outsiders. I could tell Joe thought getting back together with him was a terrible idea, but diplomatically said I should trust my instincts while remaining cautious. Mum was delighted and desperate to meet him—she had a new recipe for carrot spaghetti that she wanted to try out on the both of us. I couldn’t tell Katherine, because Katherine and I still weren’t speaking.
Eventually, the darkness that preceded our reunion began to disappear and what remained was what I had loved about him, about us, before. We talked—openly and intensely—we laughed, we listened, we got drunk, we were spontaneous and filthy and domestic and peaceful. I remembered the surplus focus and energy that being with Max gave me—I lived every day wanting to do things, see things, learn things and achieve things that I could go back and share with him. And I did, most nights. At his flat or at mine—I gave him a key.
* * *
—
A month after we started seeing each other again, we went away together for the first time. It was set to be a hot June weekend so we hired an almost sickeningly chocolate-box cottage that had ponies roaming around it and a stream running through the back of its garden for three nights. And seeing each other outside our city felt like it would confirm us as a couple, taking us out of the interim state of “seeing each other” again.
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