‘He seems to think he’s made some sort of mistake. I’ve a horrible feeling he wants to get back together with me.’
‘What about Ben?’
‘Does everyone in this damn town know my business?’
Abi looks at me for a moment and then turns her attention back towards Marcus.
‘He’s very handsome,’ she says. Marcus is staring at his phone. He hasn’t changed so much on his travels if he still stares at his phone all the time.
‘You can have him,’ I reply. ‘But first can you look after things for me for half an hour?’
‘Sure,’ she says and I signal Marcus to follow me back up to the flat. Disappearing upstairs with him will no doubt give everyone even more to speculate on but right now I don’t care. I need to know why he’s here.
*
‘Look, Marcus,’ I say as we sit down in the living room. It’s surprisingly tidy in here considering Marcus usually manages to spread his belongings far and wide. ‘You left last year without talking to me about it first, telling me you needed to “find yourself”,’ I make air quotes with my fingers. ‘You can’t just walk back in and tell me how good we were together and expect me to just drop everything to be with you again.’
‘That’s not what I expect,’ he says. ‘It might have been what I hoped when I was driving here last night but now I’ve seen you here, seen the café, seen the community you’ve created around yourself I don’t necessarily expect you to leave it.’ He takes my hand and I don’t pull away this time. ‘I can see that you’re happy here in a way you never were in York.’
‘I wasn’t unhappy because of you,’ I say, remembering the days when Marcus was the only reason I got up in the mornings. ‘You were—’
‘You were unhappy because of me in a way,’ he interrupts. ‘Without me you’d have realised much sooner that academia wasn’t where your heart lay; you’d have realised you were just doing it for other people and not yourself. Trying to keep your dad happy wasn’t a reason to make yourself miserable.’
‘I wasn’t miserable exactly…’ I begin.
‘But you wouldn’t go back to it now would you?’ he asks.
I shake my head. ‘But that’s why I was so surprised when you were the one who left first. You loved your job so much and it was your love for the work and for the department in general that kept me going for so long. What happened?’ I ask. ‘Why did you leave so suddenly?’
‘It wasn’t really so sudden,’ he says. ‘I’d been thinking about it for a while, months really – maybe even longer. I’d been looking to change something for years. That’s the reason I came to England in the first place. I only meant to stay for an academic year; I didn’t expect to fall in love.’
I don’t say anything at first, instead looking down at where our hands are entwined. There are too many questions I want to ask all at once – like why did he leave if he was in love with me and why did he never tell me that he wanted a change, that he only meant to come to England for a year?
‘Why did we never talk to me about all this before?’ I ask. ‘Why didn’t you try to work through this with me? Why did you just announce you were leaving that night? I thought—’
‘I know,’ he interrupts again softly. ‘You thought I was going to propose that night didn’t you?’
I look away from him and I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks and my heart breaking all over again. What an idiot I was.
‘Believe me I thought about it,’ Marcus goes on. ‘I thought about asking you to marry me. I even thought about asking you to come to Thailand with me but I knew it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. I knew I was holding you back, stopping you from working out what you really wanted to do.’
‘None of that explains why you didn’t talk to me about this.’ My voice sounds sharp now and I can’t work out if I’m angry or upset or both. ‘Why did you just leave, making me feel as though it was my fault?’
‘None of it was your fault,’ he says stroking the knuckles of my hand. I look down to where our hands are joined again. It feels so familiar, as though our hands are meant to fit together.
‘I handled the whole situation badly,’ Marcus goes on. ‘I never meant to hurt you. We were so good together.’
‘We were good together for a while,’ I say.
‘And that’s why I’m here,’ he says quietly. ‘To show you that we could still be good together.’
I pull my hand away. ‘No, Marcus,’ I say. ‘That’s not how things work.’
‘What do you mean?’
I lean back on the sofa and rake my fingers through my hair. I don’t know what I mean. Even a month ago I’d been dreaming of this moment – of Marcus coming back to England and telling me that he’d made a mistake, that he missed me and wanted to try again. But today all I can think of is Ben and the way he tucked my hair behind my ear just before he almost kissed me. As I think of that, I realise that at some point I’ve moved on and I’ve stopped being the person who was waiting for Marcus to come back. It crept up on me so quietly that I didn’t even realise it had happened.
‘I’m guessing you didn’t find what you were looking for in Thailand?’ I say, not answering his question.
‘It’s hard to find what you’re looking for when you don’t know what it is,’ he replies cryptically. ‘The first six months were fantastic – I travelled all over Thailand and across south east Asia – Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia. It was so eye-opening, El, there was so much I didn’t know.’ His eyes light up as he speaks. ‘But then afterwards I went to live with this community of travellers in Koh Samui and… I don’t know… everything just seemed wrong and all I could think of was you and everything I’d left behind.’
‘And that’s why you came back?’ I ask.
‘I wanted to retrace my steps to find out where I’d gone wrong – not just with my career but with you. I might not have found the answers I was looking for but I have changed and I want to prove that to you, Ellie.’
I stand up and walk to the other side of the room to put some distance between us.
‘What’s the point, Marcus?’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore.’
‘I wondered if it was my job I missed at first,’ he goes on, ignoring me. ‘So I spoke to Professor Doyle to see if there were any positions.’ Doyle had been our supervisor at York. ‘That’s how I found out you’d left, that you’d come back here.’
‘Were there any positions?’ I asked.
‘Why? Do you want one?’
‘God no!’ The words are out of my mouth before I even know what I’m saying and Marcus smiles.
‘You really don’t want to go back do you?’ he says.
‘I guess not.’
‘No there’s nothing suitable,’ he goes on. ‘But like you, once I knew there were no vacancies I realised that wasn’t what I wanted anyway. What I wanted was you.’