I’m shaking my head. “No.”
“Or someone else who looked exactly like me might have come along. He might have been just as normal as Mark but looked just like me, and you’d have shagged him too but without any intention of ever taking him seriously as a potential partner.”
I don’t know what he’s getting at but I don’t like it. “Stop it, Ruben.”
“You and me… we waited too long.”
“You’re talking rubbish. You’ve got cold feet, that’s all. Tell me you’ve been with other women in the past six months… tell me, because I haven’t. It’s just you. It’s only you. You said to me… you asked me to promise, not to settle for meaningless anymore. Well, I haven’t. If you could just see into my mind, you’d see you’re the only one for me and I don’t want anyone else. I’ll go to Canada if you want, I’ll hide you in my basement if that’s what it takes, I don’t care. Whatever it takes so that we’re together, it doesn’t matter, just so long as we are.”
“It shouldn’t be that way, Freya. It shouldn’t.” He sighs with so much sadness in his eyes and weight on his shoulders, looking down at the ground. He sits on the bed and I follow, sitting beside him with my hand over his. Still looking at the floor, he says, “Yes, it would be you, if I had my way. Yes, my feelings for you are much stronger than those I ever had for Gia. No, I haven’t slept with anyone since you—”
“I knew it!”
“BUT,” he says, turning to me and looking right at me, “if I’m not in your life, then there’s a chance you can have your family back. There’s a chance you can have a family of your own, too and you would never have to think about your safety ever again. There are benefits.”
“Why are you being so pig-headed? My father hurt me, crushed me and made me the way I was so that I ended up a hooker! Why would you even think I’d give you up for a smidgen of love from them, when with you, I can have the world? Why would you think my mother and father will ever change?”
“What about Adam?” he asks.
“What about him? I don’t love him. I don’t even know him. He’s my father’s son.”
“But what if he isn’t? What if he’s just another lad who needs help? What if he’s as crushed as what you were and that’s why he’s never been allowed to show you his true self. What if, you know, you and he got to know one another and then you might have someone else in the world who you can relate to and who can relate to you. What if he became your best friend? How would you feel if you realised that you might have missed out on that because of me?”
I’m beginning to wish I never turned my head and saw him in Caro’s café. I’m thinking I shouldn’t have written the note. Maybe he shouldn’t have turned up last night. Maybe he should’ve remained dead, because he’s talking rubbish.
“You can’t use my situation to put right what went wrong between you and Laurent, which was totally different by the way. You loved each other very much and I know that. I was never as obnoxious as Adam when I was his age and he will never be anything like me. You’re just trying to get out of this and I don’t know why. I don’t even know why you’re doing this when you’re meant to love me, because all you’re doing is making me upset.”
I fly up off the bed with a sheet around me and head to the window, hands over my face, forehead against the glass. It feels like I can’t breathe and that I’d rather be anywhere else right now than here, with him trying to break me down and give in, admit it’s best if he goes and best if I stay and live a life of celibacy for the rest of my life.
“I want you to have a relationship that’s magical, one where you’re not constantly wondering about his feelings. I want you to be with someone who’ll make you never doubt him. You ought to have those early days in a romance where it’s all dinner dates and starry nights and fun, spontaneity and excitement. It shouldn’t be tainted by being thrown out of your parents’ house, then being foisted on dodgy friends and hastily arranged, slapdash engagement dinners and all that fucking tosh. Not to mention having to deal with my fuck of a father. I was rushing you because I was afraid and I was pushing all my worries and fears onto you, forcing everything to happen too fast, and I couldn’t help myself, it wasn’t right of me to do all that and now I’m in the position to let you go, to allow you to be with someone better. All of this brought us right here and we’re now in a position where we can say it had its purpose, but what we had was doomed from the start. I think you will be happier if you find a husband who’ll protect you and not expose you to all I have. You might feel right now that loving someone else will be impossible, but try to imagine being happy and looking back and feeling like you made the right decision because you have someone caring and romantic and who worships the ground you walk on, who will be the father of your children and won’t ever let you down. Because that man isn’t me, Freya and you know it. I will let you down over and over again. I will lie and avoid and run away, because that’s what I’ve always done.
“I’m not strong like you. You went back to Old Windsor and toughed it out when you could’ve reverted back and took the easy route, but no, you faced your shame and your father’s hatred of you and you got on with it and made a difference to people’s lives. All I did was bring heartache and suffering into your life. You as good as lost your job. People started looking at you different because of me.”
“No, Ruben, no!” Tears are sliding down my cheeks, falling onto the floor and onto my bare feet.
“If you want to do something for me, to show me how much you love me, then allow me to let you go. Let me let you go. Let me have this. Let me watch from afar as you build a magical life and become the person you were always meant to be. Let me take pride in knowing I helped in some small way to make you the person you will become. Let me have this, because after all the things I’ve done, I will take all the good deeds I can and hope that one day, they counteract all the other shit on my rap sheet when my time comes.”
It feels like he’s trying to rip out my gizzard and burn my entrails right in front of my eyes. How could he do this to me? Give me hope, only to rip the rug out from underneath me? I can’t even speak, my heart hurts that much.
“You will find someone who won’t ever cause you pain. You’ll find someone infinitely better than me and that’s what I want for you. I don’t want you to live with lies and betrayal and the threat of our pasts coming back to haunt us. I hate myself for what I’ve done to you.”
My mind races and images of the things we did that meant a lot to me flood my mind’s eye—the carriage ride in Florence, the hotel in Paris where we ate burgers in bed and watched TV in a vegetative state. All the Friday nights we met at the pub and talked shit over wine and whisky… the first night we fell into bed. The night I tried to abscond at Heathrow and then we came back and he whipped me, then made love to me in a way nobody ever had before or ever will again. None of any of it would seem so romantic, even the grotesque parts, if it wasn’t Ruben that I’d done it all with.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I whisper. “We do this once a year and the morning after, you can go back to skulking in the shadows or whatever it is you do when you’re not with me—”
“Freya, no!”
“Um, I’m not finished.” I turn and look at him, still sat there on the end of the bed with blazing eyes. “While you’re skulking, I’ll do as you said and date other men. If I like them, maybe I’ll fuck them. If I fuck them, you have permission never to return to me, but if I don’t meet anyone I really like within twelve months, then you come back to me exactly a year today and we do it again—we have our night, the same day, every year, for five years. I’ll spend twelve months trying to find a replacement, and then you come back to me for one night. I’ll even visit Adam and try to convince him not to be like Dad. I’ll start a charity for addicts and actually make it work, if that’s what it takes. And then if five years have passed and I still haven’t deemed anyone else worthy enough to fuck, then you come back to me and we get on with th
e business of living. We get married and buy a dilapidated chateau and change our names and live off the land, I do not give a shit for toys or money or any of that. You know that. Or you could just admit right now that you’re trying to get rid of me because you’re struggling and you don’t want to be a burden to me. You think you’re doing right by me but you’re not.”
He puts his head in his hands and appears to have given up on his line of argument.
“I’ve had six months where I thought you were gone. During this time, I’ve been tormented by thoughts of you. Missing you. I once or twice contemplated suicide because I thought it would bring us back together. But do you know what stopped me? What saved me?”
“Freya, please stop,” he begs, sounding disconsolate and wretched, tears pouring down his face.
“I knew you wouldn’t want me to do that. I knew you’d want me to live. And I have, I’ve tried to live, doesn’t that seem evident?” I gesture at the house I’m living in, at the life I’ve created and established here. “At any point during those six months, if someone had come along and told me I could have five more minutes with you in exchange for handing over my soul, I would’ve done that gladly, a thousand times over, just to feel your hand close around mine or your arms wrap around me, or your fingers brush against my cheek. You insult me when you say all these things. If you don’t think I have the intelligence to have known all along that you were troubled and in pain and felt somehow trapped, then you don’t know me at all. I rode that rollercoaster with you because I was in love with you. I’m still in love with you. It doesn’t matter what it takes, surely that I’m still here after everything tells you that I won’t be budged. My love for you cannot be broken. You tried that already by faking your death and it didn’t work. So just admit you’re weak and need me as much as I need you. Admit you’re weak and vulnerable and in pain and need help. Please, because I want you to allow yourself to be honest and open with me. This fantasy man you speak of, this perfect guy you want for me, he doesn’t exist. I was out there living even before I met you. I didn’t decide to love you because I thought you were perfect, I loved you in spite of my fears, my doubts, my pain, my past… and I loved you especially because we’re the same, and before I met you, I couldn’t see myself, didn’t know myself. I saw what I could become because I saw myself through your eyes—and now you want to take away all those special gifts you gave me by turning your back on me now, after everything, and you don’t get why I’m apoplectic! Screw your inability to be straight with me! Just admit that you’re not the man you used to be, but that you still love me, want me and hope I’ll carry your babies one day. Those are the few things I want and I don’t want anything else. I don’t need you to prop me up. I can be strong enough for the both of us if you want, just please don’t leave me, not now, not after everything. If you love me then you’ll trust me when I say that you are the most special and precious thing to me in the whole world and I love you and I won’t stop. I won’t ever stop. Even if you still insist on this ridiculous theory of yours.”
I allow myself to catch a breath, my chest heaving up and down, my desperation overwhelming. If he walks out of the door after the speech I just gave, then I don’t know what I will do—and maybe he doesn’t deserve me after all, but even so, I can’t let go of him. Call this insanity or barbarity or whatever, but there’s something inside of me that’s tethered to him and I can’t let go.
“See me as the soil to sow your broken pieces into, let me nurture them and nourish them, grow them into one whole tree, many shoots twining into one, sturdy, steadfast specimen of life and triumph. If you go, you’re turning your back on everything we ever had and that erases everything for me. It means none of it meant anything and I was under an illusion. It means fuck all if you give up now, and it means all the ways in which you made me feel special were a lie.”
He stands up from the bed, walks to me and takes my hand. He’s calm and cool, not even a sweaty palm giving him away. “With or without me, you’re the most special girl in the world. That’s why I have to go.”
My face contorts into an ugly, gurning, twitching, trembling mess. “No. Ruben. I’m not on the pill anymore… you could have put a baby in me last night… no, Ruben, NO! DON’T GO!”
He grabs his shirt and jacket off the floor. “Goodbye, Freya.”
He turns and walks away, severing all those bonds we made, instantaneously.
I cry after him, on my knees, but he doesn’t look back… doesn’t sweep me up into his arms.
He leaves… taking with him more than he will ever understand.
Chapter Forty
Basically, That Fucking Random Cinema Dude
(RUBEN)
When I set off from my house that day, did I think I was going to fuck Freya into oblivion later that night? Did I think I was going to plough her so deep, I was going to be able to feel her clench uncontrollably around me as she grunted in my ear? Did I think it was possible to fall even more deeply in love with her? Could I even have imagined just how beautiful she’d look naked and how much I’d end up regretting having wasted so much time? No, is the answer, to all the above. I’d contained myself for so long, but…
Now, she was upset, and I fucking hated myself. She’d been telling me about the guy in the cinema and I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or making it up, but either way I couldn’t stand that she was talking about some other bloke, fictitious or not.
“It’s the same as you meeting a woman in a bar and then fucking her in the toilets. It’s actually probably not as bad as that because I didn’t fuck him. I just wanked him off, then I rested my coat over my lap and let him finger me until I came… twice.”
The thing I hated even more was that she seemed to have got off on this cinema fantasy of hers… and I would have loved to have gone down on her in the cinema, even fucked her on the floor between the seats… but I couldn’t do any of this and it enraged me. That’s right, enraged, because I was so deeply into her, I was starting to wonder if I should jack in everything… take the risk… and just nail her, once and for all. Really fuck her hard and come inside her, fill her womb… her mouth… anywhere else she wanted it. I ached to hold her in my arms and feel every inch of her body shake against mine.
I felt villainous and couldn’t hear any more about this fucking random cinema dude.
“Well, at least you got some, I suppose,” I stropped.
She threw back her drink and looked at me like I was her worst enemy.
Standing up to leave, she snarled, “Is it because his girlfriend was there that you sound… annoyed?”
“No,” I said, fearing she’d go and never come back this time, “no. I’ve done riskier stuff, you know that. I couldn’t care less about that. But at least when I do stuff, we chat first, have a drink, converse, you know? I make them human. The past few times you’ve done stuff with people, it’s like you’d rather they weren’t real, you know?”
She despised me, I could tell. She was shaking her head and pointing and angry and I didn’t like the look in her eyes. I wanted to pin her down and fucking quell everything, soothe her with my body and kiss her into silence.
“Fuck you, Ruben. I hope whichever woman you have bouncing on your cock later tonight enjoys the frigidity. See ya.”
I’d always known there was a fiery bitch in there, but that was the first night she’d really unleashed it—leaving me crazy with desire.
I sat dumbfounded for a while and didn’t know what the fuck to do. We were in a mess. Whatever friendship we’d been clinging to was completely fractured because feelings were very much in the way and desire was making me crazy, I didn’t know about her, but not being able to show her how I felt was making me moody and unable to think straight.
To think we only met up once a week and yet, I thought about her for nearly all of the rest of the time we weren’t together. I’d think about her smile and the way she laughed and how she held her drink, how she sashayed a little when
she walked and how beautiful she looked when she stared out of the window with her thoughts, not imagining I’d be watching and examining, soaking up the sight of her and committing it all to memory.
I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t.
I raced from the pub and sprinted to the tube station, going the back away so I could head her off maybe or at least avoid all the foot traffic.
I got to the tube entrance and looked around, desperate to find her. She couldn’t have made it before me? Unless she’d gone to a bar and was intending to get an actual date tonight? I waited for a couple of minutes before a mass of people crossed the road, and it was then I spotted her, head down, trying not to draw attention to herself.
She was crying.
It dug into me, seeing her like that. Not just crying, but weeping. Ugly crying. Snotty, red-eyed, nasty, sad and ugly crying. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach.
She didn’t see me as the throng carried her into the tube and I stood there, stuck, motionless, my heart in my throat and my stomach aching.
I should’ve fished her out of the crowds and saved her, pulled her close and kissed her as deeply and as passionately as I’d always wanted to.
Instead, I stayed there. Silent. Useless.
Impotent.
I walked around for a bit before I came to a bench on Soho Square, where I sat and slumped, feeling dead.
An hour or more passed and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling inside of me. Failure or whatever it was, the feeling wouldn’t go away. I picked up my phone and dialled her. If anything, I just needed to hear her voice.
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