He’d brazenly lied about all sorts of things back then, without a hint of a tell. Still did when it suited. And most people were none the wiser.

  But my Milo had always told the truth like a five-year-old caught with stolen chocolate around his mouth. And he’d just declared he loved me, wanted me, couldn’t bear seeing me with someone else.

  Christ, I knew how that felt. Did I ever. Bleak. Crushing. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, let alone the most precious boy I’d ever had the privilege of calling my best friend. And neither Milo nor I need ever experience it again.

  For me, it’s always been you.

  “No, Milo. Please no. You can’t do this to me. Please. Not now. Not after all this time.”

  My eyes shuttered closed as I processed his sentences, desperately trying to deny the truth of them. Even as my heart screamed back how much he meant every single word. I love you. I love you so fucking much. He’d said it and meant it and now I…

  “I’m sorry, Mungs.” His whispered sob was so quiet I nearly missed it. “So sorry for messing up everything we could have had together. I’ll see you around, okay?”

  I opened my eyes to his voice, shaky and right near my ear. On his tiptoes, to plant his lips against my cheek. To deliver a goodbye kiss.

  Urgently, I grabbed him, clung on, and lunged at him, desperate to feel those lips again. To crush them against me forever.

  Milo stiffened in my grasp and pushed me away. “No, Mungo. You have to stop. Not that. You’re… no. Stop.” His mouth closed abruptly. As he backed off, he wiped the back of his hand across it, shaking his head.

  I took a pace towards him. “Why? Tell me why?”

  He held an arm out in front of him as a barrier, like he was afraid I’d try again. His other hand furiously brushed away tears; he heaved a couple of breaths.

  “No, Mungo. We can’t. You know that. I’m many things, not all of them good. And a bloody idiot. But I’m not a cheat and nor are you.”

  With one last wipe of his eyes, his mouth stretched into a tight smile: a glimmer of the other Milo, the unbroken one. The one my heart still wanted as much as ever. “At the risk of sounding like a terrible 1990s rock opera, I’ll do anything for you, Mungs. You know I will. Anything at all. But I won’t do that.”

  “Hey. Dude.”

  Soft American tones brought me back to reality. A kindly hand landed on my shoulder. Opening my eyes, the space Milo had occupied was now taken up by Dom. “He’s gone, dude. We need to haul our asses back inside. Cav’s going to be out searching for you if you stay here much longer.”

  “I can’t. I need to go after Milo.”

  “No, you don’t. He’s a proud guy. He won’t want you to see him upset.”

  With a shuddery breath, I clamped my hand over my mouth to stop a sob escaping. “Do you know what he just fucking said to me? Did you hear?”

  Dom shook his head. “No, but Tris has filled me in. So I can guess. He loves you, right?”

  “Yes, but… Christ, Dom. I’ve spent the last five years trying to get over him. And failed miserably. And now he drops this on me? How can I trust him again?”

  He shrugged. “Tris says you can. So I guess if you love him back, then you’ve got to take the leap.”

  “But… but how can I give all this up…?” I waved wildly at the building behind me, and the sob rang out anyhow, a raw and ugly noise, breaking the still of the night. “How can I when I’m still coughing up water from the last time he left me to drown?”

  Dom’s arm slid around my shoulder. “I don’t know, buddy, but it’s time to freaking choose. Twist or stick, I guess.”

  I gestured to the bright lights of the restaurant again. “If I go back in, Cav’s going to ask me to marry him. I know he is. At the end of the evening. I’ve seen the rings.”

  He nodded. “That’s the rumour.”

  “What am I going to do, Dom?” God, the pressure on my chest was killing me. Milo, my fucking crazy, gorgeous, complicated Milo. Why did it always come back to him? “What am I going to do?”

  A noise sounded behind us, and the restaurant door swung open. Cav’s outline filled the doorway. I pushed off from the wall, standing straighter. I sucked in a deep breath and followed it with another. I could get through this.

  “I don’t know, buddy,” he murmured. “But you could always skip dessert.”

  “What are you still doing out here, Mungo?” My boyfriend marched over, jabbing a finger at me and tutting. “I don’t know what the hell is going on with your friends tonight, but none of them seem able to sit at the table for longer than five fucking minutes. You included. Our main courses will be going cold. They’ve just brought them out. You’ve missed the starter.”

  He threw Dom a sharp, proprietary look, and I almost smiled. As if Dom ever had eyes for anyone else. Christ, Cav really didn’t understand the first thing about my friends.

  “Sorry, I was…”

  I was what? Scraping myself up from the pavement? Scared you were about to propose?

  “Sorry, I was just taking a breather. It’s hot in there.” I shook my head, trying to get myself together. Dom quietly made himself scarce. “I felt a bit sick. Just hungry probably.”

  Cav’s face softened, and his arm wrapped around my waist. “That’s okay, hon. I’ll let you off, just this once.” With a chuckle, he nuzzled into my neck. “Actually, it’s worked in my favour. Gave me plenty of time to prepare a little surprise for you.”

  Oh fuck. Dom was right. Sweat prickled under my arms and across my shoulders. “Nothing major, I hope,” I protested weakly. “You know I don’t like surprises.”

  Cav scoffed. “You always say that. You do really.”

  “Really, I don’t,” I said more forcefully.

  “Yes, you do. Don’t be such a grump. Come on, let’s go back inside.”

  When we reappeared, a sea of knowing looks greeted me, plus a couple of cheers from Cav’s mates. Anticipatory smiles were plastered across everyone’s faces, everyone in on a secret about to be unveiled. With the exception of Frankie’s, whose complexion was ashen. And Lysander’s too, his generous mouth set in a thin line. Next to him was an empty spot, where Milo should have been. And beside that sat Tristan, head dipped, hiding his expression under a fall of hair. On his other side, Dom gave a very slight nod. A silver champagne bucket winked at me from the middle of the table, dappled by an overhead light.

  Oh shit, it was happening.

  “Panic over!” Cav announced brightly, earning a few titters. His palm clammy in mine, he tugged me along. “I’ve finally tracked him down! He was outside, being helpful, as usual.”

  Sweat stuck my shirt to my back as I took my seat next to Cav, all eyes on me. No one yet had food in front of them. Even the cooking smells had my belly rebelling. Best weight loss strategy ever. I’d missed the starter and guessed they’d delayed our mains until I’d been located. I snatched up a white napkin and shook it open, intending to mop my face.

  From deep within its soft folds, a neat platinum engagement band clattered onto the table. It circled a few times before coming to rest.

  My sweat dried in an instant. As did my mouth, my throat, and my thoughts. An expectant hush rippled around the table. No, not around the table, around the whole fucking restaurant. Somewhere over my shoulder, cutlery tinged sharply against a plate, then silenced.

  A tight knot of panic clutched at my chest, halfway between fainting or dying, my body unsure which way to jump. In my peripheral vision, Cav pushed his chair back, then dropped athletically to his knee. The ring nestled in the palm of his hand as he offered it up.

  “You’ve made this quite a challenge tonight, Mungo, with your comings and goings! You never make things easy for me, do you?”

  More titters from around the table. My watery stomach churned; I started at a flash from a camera.

  “But we’re here now,” Cav continued, in his clear, confident tones. His other hand sat warm on my thigh. Holding me in place. He cleared his throat. “Mungo Shirley Herbert White, will you do me the very great honour of becoming my husband?”

  Sometimes, time really did stop. People, places, noise, smells, they vanished, until only the horror remained. Of being put on the spot. Of knowing a score of friends and strangers awaited your next utterance. Of getting the next few seconds wrong and altering the course of three lives forever.

  A more immediate horror was of passing out. My pulse stalled, as a trapdoor in my belly fell open. Fear spread like ice through my veins, suffocating me from the inside out.

  For me, it’s always been you.

  Sharply, I pulled in a lungful of air and then another. The inlaid pattern on the white tablecloth came back into crisp relief. The world righted again. Cav’s hand and the elegant ring squatting in his smooth palm narrowed into focus.

  I breathed steadily until the danger had passed.

  “Typical Mungo, he’s making me wait,” I heard Cav joke, even as the brightness in his eyes hardened.

  For me, it’s always been you.

  Of their own volition, my arms came up and looped around my kneeling lover. Being a fat fucker had its uses; he couldn't escape my tight hold, not without an undignified struggle. Automatically, his arms wrapped around me too. To accompanying cheers, my mouth found his ear. “Thank you,” I managed to whisper, my eyes squeezed shut against gathering wetness. “Thank you so much for asking me. For sharing your life with me. For loving me. I’m honoured.”

  Onlookers whooped as we embraced in a tight hug. Cav stiffened, and I squeezed him even tighter against my sweat sodden shirt, his head pushed into my shoulder. Someone ‘aahed,’ and my eyelids flared red as another camera flashed. My belly churned.

  For me, it’s always been you.

  “You’re supposed to say yes, hon.”

  “I know. And I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.”

  As I rocked Cav harder, a hot tear rolled down my cheek. Another followed. Cav’s own tears seeped through my shirt as around us a champagne cork popped, and glasses clinked. Soon, when he’d composed himself, we’d break apart. We’d get through the rest of the evening smiling and waving. Cav would pull himself together and put on a show.

  He excelled at that.

  CHAPTER 13

  MILO

  I lurched through my front door at twat o’clock, having detoured via a place I knew damned well still clung onto its gay credentials. I’d picked Danny up there only a few weeks earlier. I headed straight for the bar, whereupon I had way too many mixed drinks about feelings until my favourite leather daddy bouncer poured me into an Uber and sent me on my way, before I did something really stupid, like get railed by a virginal seventeen-year-old. Again.

  On reaching home, I powered down my phone, drew the bedroom curtains, and took to my bed. Like a decrepit Dickensian crone, I made the excellent commitment to stay there. Forever.

  Call it grief, call it depression, call it pathetic, egocentric self-indulgent wallowing if you fucking needed to give it a label. I didn’t care a jot. Stop all the clocks, cut off the phone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone—you got the picture. Retreating under the duvet to lick my wounds was how I rolled. The alternative, dressing up as smart sassy Milo and facing people, even my good friends, was too… painful.

  Several days blurred into one another as I lay in the dark, listening to cars trundling up and down my narrow street, to doors slamming, to the boiler chugging on and off, to Danny thumping up and down the stairs. To my breath cycling in and out. To my heart, each beat a fresh tear. I’d reached the end; I’d laid it on the line for him. I had nothing left to give.

  One week in, however, I started to pong. Even my favourite black misery kimono was beginning to seem weary. Nonetheless, I’d determined to make mourning Mungo’s impending nuptials the chief concern of my existence. Therefore, I planned on sticking it out much longer before I declared it time for him to leave my head, for me to let go, pick myself up, hold my chin high, smile, and start again.

  “Haven’t you got an important job to go to? Court battles to fight? Justice to serve? Won’t the whole fabric of society crumble without you?”

  Danny slouched in the doorway. Wide-eyed, Reuben peered over his shoulder. In my absence, the two of them had set up home together downstairs, making a much better fist of it than me, if my nightly tiptoeing raids of the fridge for choc chip and mint ice cream were anything to go by.

  “No. I’m taking some holiday.”

  “Not much of a holiday,” he observed, unimpressed. “Spending the days sulking in bed. Sulking solves nothing, you know. And you’re way too old to carry off the cool, tortured look.”

  “I’m not sulking, Danny. I’m grieving. This is how I do it.”

  Maybe it was prideful, or just plain weird, but I had no other outlet for expressing it. I hadn’t ever experienced a home where comfort was the norm, where a burden shared was a burden halved. Where I sat on the sofa while Mum or Dad squeezed an arm around my shoulders and passed me the box of tissues. I just had me; taking to my bed, hiding under the covers had always been my haven. Alcohol was a viable alternative, but we all knew where that led.

  “Looks like sulking to me,” Reuben agreed, with his arm around Danny, the smug fucker.

  “Trust me, flower, it’s a broken heart. May it never happen to either of you.”

  I may have had a flair for the dramatic, but I was pretty sure the low ache, caged inside my chest, escaping into liquid form and leaking from my eyes in the dead of night, didn’t accompany a fit of the sulks. Pain touched every part of me. Over the years, various members of my family had broken my spirit, my windows, plant pots, my bank account, and on one memorable occasion, my blooming jawbone. But those hurts were nothing in comparison to this damned broken heart.

  Danny gave me an exaggerated teenage eye roll. “Whatever. We’ll leave you to it. I’ve got better things to do. And Reuben’s got flute practice.”

  “So that’s what the youth are calling it these days.” Despite being half dressed and smelling like a sewer, I managed a warning look. Danny and Reuben’s innocent relationship was currently the only high point of my existence. I had a duty to keep it that way. “Do we need a little chat about precautions, consent, and taking it in turns?”

  “Not unless Vivaldi is a new Italian brand of dildos, no. Seriously, Danny’s got his grade six flute exam coming up next Tuesday. Relax, Milo, some of us are choosing not to get laid.”

  Amusing little shit. “I’m letting that go, flower, but only because I’m in such a weakened state.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Some of us are choosing not to wash too.”

  On day nine of my lying-in state, a pitiful woman also occasionally referred to as my mother popped by. Although struggling to summon the energy to go downstairs and offer my usual effusive greeting, I almost welcomed the distraction. The four walls of my room had become a tad samey. Danny trudged up the stairs with the thrilling news.

  “If it’s food she’s after, and she’s alone, then there’s a tenner under the bread bin. And one of those helpline cards too. Make sure you hold onto the tenner until she takes the card. But if you see a shifty-looking bloke hanging around the Erdogan’s, then give her both tenners. Otherwise, they’ll come back again later. And if my dad turns up here, tell me, and I’ll do an online transfer. I tend to go straight to fifty.”

  “She’s alone. I already checked. I could just tell her to fuck off. Or threaten to phone the fuzz.”

  “No.”

  “Why the fuck not? They treat you like shit.”

  I’d lost count of the number of times Mungo had tried to persuade me to report my family to the police. Or seek legal advice from someone within the firm. There were established channels for managing minor inconveniences such as harassment, extortion, and intimidation. He was all for a restraining order.

  But stupidly, as much as these people hurt me, I couldn’t help hanging onto them. They needed me. Warped and crazy logic, maybe. But no one else did.

  “Because if I didn’t have them, then I’d have nobody, Danny.”

  “And wouldn’t that be a better state of affairs? You’d be able to spend the money you hand out to them on soap and deodorant, for starters.”

  He carried on, ignoring me. “Simon said you should consider seeking legal redress, like your friend Mungo suggested. He said you have a problem with boundaries. That you need to establish some. Seeing as you have no intention of breaking the toxic cycle of abuse any time soon.”

  “I swear when I was your age, Simon said, ‘walk three paces forward, or touch your nose.’ He’s put childish games aside and become a life coach now, has he?”

  Danny huffed with annoyance. “I’m trying to help you, Milo. And the boundaries are for you, not them. You should be deciding how you spend your hard-earned cash and when people can come to visit. Not your mum. Simon said you should stop asking why they do it and start questioning why you allow it. And you do have plenty of people, by the way.”

  But not the one I wanted.

  “It’s like bloody Piccadilly Circus around here,” Danny grumbled on day fourteen. “There’s a disabled bloke been knocking on the door for the last five minutes. Says he knows you. Shall I give him a twenty and tell him to fuck off? Or is his rate higher? You need to make a list, mate. It’s confusing.”

  I’d like to see him try. “No, flower. He can come up. Just make sure you’re shadowing him on the stairs. We don’t want him to take a tumble, even if he is only visiting to nag.”

  The rhythmic drag and thud of Tristan making his way upstairs ended with him eyeing me dubiously from the landing, out of breath.

  “Hello, Milo. Frankie mentioned you were running a creche.” He watched Danny disappear back down. “He seems a nice lad. Made me a cup of tea and everything.”

  With a sniff of disdain, Tristan advanced into the room, leaning his weight heavily on his sticks. “Five thousand miles, five yards, and fifteen stairs,” he commented. “You’re testing the limits of our friendship. This room stinks by the way.”