Love Always

understand . . .’

He makes a clicking sound with his tongue, and puts his hand on mine. ‘Oh, God.’

I wipe the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand, but they keep fal ing, fal ing onto the pile of brown napkins, into my coffee. ‘I just – I mean, how long’s it been going on?’ I look at him, and see his eyes are ful of tears too.

‘I don’t know. Not long. Since that night we had together.’

‘And you real y – wow.’ I shake my head. ‘You’re leaving me for her. For Chloe.’ I exaggerate her name.

‘Natasha, babe – it’s not like that.’

‘What’s it like, then?’ I say. It’s so depressing, the cliches, the questions you’ve heard asked on TV shows and films a mil ion times before. In a minute, he’s going to say, I love you, but I’m not in love with you, and then I real y wil lose it.

At this exact moment Arthur puts the coffee and toast down in front of us with a smile. ‘Here you go, guys!’ he says.

I turn my head away til he’s gone, waiting for Oli to speak. He runs his tongue nervously, quickly, over his cracked lips, and he says, ‘What’s it like? It’s like, I think our marriage was over a while ago. And we didn’t see it.’ I open my mouth, but he shifts his stool closer to mine and says, ‘I’m gonna say al this now, while I’ve got the chance, before you kick me out again. You’re a hard woman, Natasha. You’re a hard woman to live with. I don’t think you love me, and you don’t respect me. I don’t know if you ever did.’ He has his hand on his heart and his face is only a couple of inches away.

‘You think I’m hard?’ I say in a whisper. ‘Yes – no.’ Oli’s expression is agonised. ‘Maybe it’s because of your mum. Your family.’

‘They’ve got nothing to do with it!’

‘Real y?’ Oli says. ‘Honestly? You’ve got this obsession with Cornwal , with the house and al of them, with your grandmother and al your family living this wonderful life that you can’t replicate.’

I tear the napkin in half. ‘That’s crap.’

He sighs. ‘Maybe it’s your mum. Or because you don’t know who your dad is. Maybe you need to find out. I just feel like you’ve grown this shel around you, and I can’t get through to you any more.’

‘You think this is about me?’ I can’t believe it.

Oli’s voice is hoarse. ‘I know what I did was wrong. I slept with someone. I lied to you about it, I carried on seeing her. Me and Chloe – it’s different. It’s new, it’s clean, we don’t have al this baggage that we bring to it—’ He mimes a circle around the two of us.

Someone brushes past us, at our cramped window counter, cal ing out a farewel to Arthur. I lean in towards Oli. ‘Do you love her?’ I can’t believe we’re sitting here, and I’m asking this question. Again, it’s such a cliche. I hate it.

He nods, and says simply, ‘I think so, yeah.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Right then.’

‘But it’s different . . .’ He shakes his head. His big blue eyes are ful of tears again. ‘We can talk about work, we’ve got loads in common . . . but she’s not you, Natasha. She’s fun and sweet and she can drink me under the table, and she’s lovely. And she thinks I’m great, and it’s great.’ He says this without irony, and I feel a flush of shame at this. ‘But – I don’t know – she’s not you.’

‘No, she sounds much better than me,’ I say. ‘I’m amazed you’re stil here, to be honest.’

He ignores this, and frowns. ‘That’s the thing.’ He swal ows. ‘You know something? I never even tried that hard to keep it a secret. I wanted . . .’

He stops. ‘No.’

‘What?’

‘No, I’m not going to say it.’

‘Go on,’ I say. I nudge him. ‘Be honest.’

Oli looks at me. ‘I almost wanted you to find out. So you’d show some emotion. I wanted to hurt you. I wanted you to be hurt.’

He looks at me with a kind of expectation, like, That’s it. I get up, a tear running down my cheek. ‘I’m not listening to this.’

He pul s me against him. ‘You’re not leaving now. Dammit, Natasha!’ Arthur looks over at us, blank surprise on his face. ‘You’re so fucking afraid of anything dark or depressing or real, you can’t admit it into your life at al . You can’t even talk about it.’

‘I cried, night after night for you,’ I hiss at him, wrenching out of his grasp. ‘I bloody fainted at my grandmother’s funeral. I don’t sleep, I haven’t done for weeks. Al I can do is think about you, about us, about where we’ve gone wrong. Everything is dark and depressing and real, that’s why I’m crying about it! That’s why I don’t sleep! Ben asked me if I was OK the other day, how things were.’ My voice cracks. ‘He did just now! When do you ever ever say, What are you thinking, how are you?’

‘Al the time,’ Oli says. ‘You just don’t want to tel me.’

‘Who are you?’ I say. I push his hands away and stand there, looking at him. ‘I don’t know you any more.’

‘I don’t think you do.’ Oli looks up at me, and his smile is ugly, his teeth gritted. ‘Because you saw what you wanted to in me, and you took it,’ he hisses. ‘You never saw the real me. You were looking for someone, I don’t know, a daddy replacement? Someone your mum could fancy too?