Mr. Park Lane (The Mister)

“I don’t do relationships,” I said as if I were placing the first piece of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle down in the middle of the table.

“Right,” said Dexter. “After being kicked in the bollocks like you were, it’s normal not to want to commit again . . . right away.”

The second piece of the puzzle had been put down. I could follow Dexter’s logic—I’d not had another serious relationship since Diana. Part of that had been because all my focus was on my job, which, come to think of it, made Hartford’s commitment to medicine after her accident all the more understandable. It struck me like a brick to the head, how we’d both reacted to our separate heartache by wholly throwing ourselves into work. What did it say about Hartford that after over a decade, she was still doing it?

“But not forever,” Gabriel said. “At some point you have to let that pain go and move forward.”

“I don’t feel like I’ve been holding onto what happened,” I said. That’s what had brought me here tonight. I liked Hartford. A lot. I liked her complete lack of self-consciousness around me. I liked her smile and her freckles and the way she was so bloody kind. I liked her silence as much as her conversation. But there was something stopping me moving things forward with her. I just wasn’t sure what.

Was it possible I had been holding onto what Diana had done for so long that the pain had become like white noise? I didn’t often think about Diana or what she’d done—or hadn’t done. I had a full and fulfilling life. It wasn’t like I was still heartbroken.

More like I still bore a faded scar.

“I’m not sure I know what my life looks like with a woman,” I said, laying down another piece of the jigsaw. If I was going to be honest anywhere, it was with the men who’d seen me through thick and thin.

“Maybe you haven’t tried very hard to picture it,” Gabriel said. “The arrangements you have at the moment don’t involve the women you’re sleeping with being in your life outside the bedroom. It’s like you will only entertain the opposite of marriage. And maybe it helps, but each arrangement seems like a reaction to being hurt.”

I didn’t feel hurt.

“Bethany’s the same way—for ages she wouldn’t sleep in her big bed because she fell out of it the first night she spent in there. In the end, she didn’t even remember falling. She just knew she didn’t like the bed.”

I took a deep breath, trying to let his words settle. “You being celibate for a thousand years was you not wanting to sleep in the big bed?” I asked.

He nodded. “I didn’t want to care for someone and have my heart ripped out again. A bit like you, I suppose. When Autumn came along, I knew I had to make a choice between opening myself up and losing her. Opening myself up was the lesser of the two evils.”

My invisible, internal scar burned red at his words. My wedding day had been the worst of my life. People talk about their worlds being shattered and most of the time they were exaggerating, but that day? That day, everything I thought I knew about the world went up in flames.

I’d woken up with a sense of certainty of how the day would go—who I was and who I was going to marry. Within hours, it had all gone up in smoke.

I’d replayed all our conversations in my head, searching for clues that she wasn’t happy or that she didn’t want to marry me, but I’d found nothing. And I still didn’t know why she’d left. I’d never had any kind of explanation. I had to start again from the foundations and build myself back up—my confidence, my self-belief, my trust in people around me.

Gabriel continued. “You have a lifetime of experience behind you in a way you didn’t last time you fell in love.”

In love? It was like Gabriel had just dumped a hundred puzzle pieces on a carefully emerging picture and obscured everything that had been coming into focus.

“I’m not in love. And I’m over Diana. It’s hardly like I’ve been celibate all these years.” I laughed, but Gabriel’s face was stony still.

“There’s nothing wrong with casual sex after a breakup,” Dexter said. “We’ve all been there. But unless the shagging turns into more, it’s going to start to feel empty. Surely you must get that.”

I considered how I’d been avoiding Kelly. Sex with her was never bad, but it had become . . . a little less than it had been at the start. Our routine was always the same:

A couple of sentences about work or the weather.

Kiss.

Undress.

Blowjob.

Sex.

Orgasm.

A couple more sentences about work or the weather while pulling on our clothes, followed by a goodbye.