The deep sleep I’d fallen into had lured my body and mind into believing that I was exactly where I needed to be. My cheek rested comfortably on his warm chest, my hand on his abs, our naked bodies together, silent apart from the soft, peaceful breaths falling from both our mouths. It took a while for my eyes to flutter open, but when they did and the dim light of the room reminded me exactly where I was, the panic set in. It was slow at first, a sense of dread turning my toes cold until it crawled up the back of my legs and thighs, curled around into the pit of my stomach and shot an arrow through my heart. I gasped for air as goosebumps taunted my flesh, but I was too afraid to move.

Eventually lifting my head to look up at him, I watched Alex sleeping peacefully with me in his arms, his face serene, his body strong as it cradled me like he was made specifically to hold me this way for the rest of our lives.

There wasn’t any way to describe the pain and the confusion I felt as I stared up at him while he slept. No matter what we do in life, we cannot control who we love. We can’t control who walks into our world and turns it upside down. We can’t pretend that we hate someone in the hope that everything we feel will go away. Feelings – the feelings I was having for him – weren’t something I could brush under the carpet or close the door on. They were real. They were raw. They twisted my gut up until all I could think about doing was loving him to the best of my loving abilities.

The only question remaining was how the hell was I going to move forward with my life?

Moving at all would be a good start.

Closing my eyes and pulling in a sharp breath, I began to peel myself away from Alex’s body. My skin cried in desperation to return to where it had just been, and so did my heart, but my mind… my mind was trying to put things in order. It was trying to solve this Rubik’s cube of a love puzzle I’d got myself mixed up in and I knew, as Marcus waited in another room for me, I had to let my mind take over.

My heart was too love-struck to lead the way.

Swallowing down all my fear, I moved around the room as quietly as I could and slipped back into my dress. It was still dark outside. I could tell through the crack of the curtains, and I only hoped that meant that Marcus was still sleeping soundly, unaware of my betrayal, unaffected by my absence. The balls of my feet padded against the carpet as softly as they could before I picked up my shoes and made my way to the door. The farther I got away from Alex, the colder I became. Each footstep that increased the gap was a struggle, but I had to keep moving. As I reached for the handle, my fingers shaking as they curled around the cool metal, I heard his long, heavy exhale.

But still, I didn’t look back.

When the door clicked on its opening, I tried to move a little quicker. I tried to escape and slide out through the small gap I’d created.

“Natalie,” he breathed out, his voice pained and tight as he spoke like a man on his deathbed. My face creased up as the tears threatened to fall again, my hand resting on the door, my body half in and half out of the room.

“I’ll always be waiting for you. That’s a promise. Whether it’s tomorrow, ten years, fifty years. There’s no one else for me now. There never will be. You’re all I will ever need.”

My shoulders shook but all I could do was nod and swallow down everything I wanted to say back to him.

“Thank you for tonight,” he whispered.

And just like that, I closed the door on Alex again. I took the steps I needed to take, letting my mind beat my heart down with a rock once more as I stepped out into the hotel corridor and began to walk back to my room with Marcus. I had no idea how I must have looked. I had no idea of much at all, except that my heart was breaking like never before, and the words of my father rang loud in my ears.

I’ve already lost one daughter to a broken heart. I won’t lose another.

The morning after the wedding, Marcus, the gang and I were all standing in the hotel foyer with our bags ready to check out of our rooms. After waking up that morning with Marcus curled around me while I lay there frozen, I’d been unable to shake that feeling of dread. The same dread I’d had a few times in my life that had always resulted in some big changes happening. It was a before and after thing again. The decisions I’d yet to make taunted me like bullies, poking me while I showered, hackling while I brushed my teeth, trying to trip me up as I dressed.

I needed to get out of the hotel, and I needed to get out fast. The threat of seeing Alex again before I’d had a chance to talk to Marcus was making me nervous, causing me to fidget and bounce lightly on the balls of my feet while looking over my shoulder every few seconds. If Alex was to show up in the foyer, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be able to stop myself from going to him.

“You okay?” he asked, leaning in to whisper to me as Sammy, Suzie and Paul joked around in front of us.

“Uh huh.” I smiled, nodding as I looked up at him. “Just tired. How about you? You still look green.”

“I feel…” His forehead had a sheen across it, and his skin was pale. “… Fucking horrific.”

I smiled softly, rubbing his back as I blew out a breath. “What made you drink so much? That wasn’t like you.”

Marcus cleared his throat and shrugged, effectively knocking my touch away from him, leaving me a little surprised as he rolled his shoulders and looked at all the others in front of us. “I guess I’ve always been more scared of ghosts than I realised.”

“Ghosts?” I frowned.

His eyes locked on mine, and his face was more serious than suited his soft features. “Not here. Not now.”

I was certain the colour drained from my own face as I stared up at him, but I reluctantly nodded anyway and pushed my bag farther on my shoulder, just for something to do. The panic hit me. Did he know who I’d cuddled up with last night? Could he see through all my smiles as I tried to hide what I was feeling from the rest of the world?

You’ve always been a terrible liar, Nat.

After several goodbyes to the others, and what felt like a hundred promises to Sammy that the two of us would go out for drinks during the week, Marcus and I drove home in silence, and that godawful nausea never left me once.

I knew there was another goodbye on the horizon, only I wasn’t sure who I would be waving off this time. Marcus, Alex, or the girl I had yet to truly discover: myself.

“Are you coming in?” he asked me as we parked up outside his apartment.

“If you want me to?” I answered, making it sound like a question.

“I think it would be a good idea. We could do with talking.”

“You’re worrying me.”

“Let's just go inside.”

“Okay,” I gulped, unclipping my seatbelt and climbing my way out of the car. Marcus grabbed his bags, slinging them over his shoulder before he walked in front of me and led the way. Marcus rarely walked in front of me. He was always by my side or letting me pull him along, but there was something robotic about him that morning. He was there, but he wasn’t, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that was just the effects of the alcohol.

Once inside his apartment, I found myself standing with my hands clasped in front of me like I was an errant school child about to be scolded by her parents. My guilt and shame had taken over. Everything else was out of my control.

Marcus took his time dumping his bags in his bedroom before he eventually came back out to see me. His eyes remained down on the floor as he ran both hands through his thick, curly hair and began to pace in front of me.

“Do you want a drink or anything?”

“No, thank you,” I answered politely, like we were strangers.

“A water? A…” He sighed, stopping himself from carrying on with the small talk before he spoke quietly again. “I don't know how to start this conversation.”

“Just tell me whatever it is you want to say, Marcus.”

His head snapped up and our eyes locked for the first time since we’d left the hotel. “I know what happened last night,” he finally mumbled.

Everything inside of me came to life like a live circus. There was banging and crashing, a commotion rolling through my blood while my eyes remained open and my mouth stayed shut. I was certain he could hear the hammering of my heart beating in my chest, or that he could see the shallow breaths of mine that I was struggling to ingest as I kept quiet, unsure what to do or say.

“Were you going to mention it?” he asked, taking a step closer.

“Marcus, I…”

“Don’t even go there,” he snapped, and I flinched, my shoulders bouncing as I blinked and waited. “Don’t you turn this around to be all about you.”

“I would never do that. I know it was my fault.”

He frowned. “No, Natalie, for once this isn’t even close to being related to you. This is all me. I fucked up. I messed everything up.”

“What do you mean?” I breathed out.

“Fuck!” he cried, kicking his foot out to skim across the carpet as his frustration poured out of him. He began to pace again, and my eyes followed him in every direction he went. “Last night I was a mess.”

“The drink? You were just having a good time.”

“Nat, please. Let me get this out because if I don’t, it’s going to burn me alive. I need to say it. Please don’t try to make me feel better. Just listen to me, okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered.

Marcus blew all the air out of his cheeks before he began. “You looked incredible last night. I mean… out of this world. As soon as I saw you in our room before we went down to the party, I knew I had to try and keep it together for you. I knew I had to put on a show and, I don’t know, pretend like weddings were my thing. So I strapped on this huge smile and got all bouncy, and it was good. I was doing good until the third or fourth drink, but as soon as that alcohol hit my system, I couldn’t seem to get enough of the stuff in me. The thoughts opened up and all the pain came flooding back.”

“Pain?” The word fell out of my mouth without permission, but it didn’t break his train of thought.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of pain?”

“The memories of a broken-hearted kid kind.”

“Your ex?” I said in quiet disbelief.

“Yep. The infamous Alice Harper. We met in my first year of uni and she was, well, she was the first girl to ever worm her way into my heart.” He sighed again, his head tilting to one side as both brows rose on his forehead. “Of course you know. Alex is to you what Alice was… is… to me.”

My lips parted as I listened, the shock of hearing him acknowledge what Alex was to me making me falter.

“What?” he said quietly. “You don’t think I know you still love him? Come on, Nat.”

I stared at him for some time, unsure what to say, what to do, or how to respond. “How long have you known?” I finally whispered. “Why haven’t you ever said anything?”

“Because it’s easy to pretend, right? I love you. You love me. What did it matter to me if some part of you still loved him? He wasn’t around anymore. He couldn’t get to you. Not physically. Pretending the obstacles didn’t exist made us happy.”

“And Alice is an obstacle, too?”

“Aren’t all our demons?”

“I guess so.”

“Especially when the fuckers refuse to stay buried away.”

I took a small step closer. “What happened?” I found myself asking. “What went so wrong for you and Alice?”

“I don’t know. We were young and I was in love with the idea of loving her for the rest of my life. Things moved so quickly, so fucking quickly it felt like my head was spinning most of the time and I always felt sick. Always. Morning, noon and night. Like she was some kind of drug where if I didn’t get another hit, I knew I was going to go mad. The beauty of it was, she loved me back just the same. My whole damn life became about her. I stopped calling home, I forgot to message Sammy and check in with her to see how she was getting on. I lost friends. I dropped out of football teams and quit going out with my mates just so I could stay in bed and fuck her all day and all night long.”

I felt sick. Hearing him speaking about someone else that way was never going to be easy, but I understood it. Of course I did. I was living and breathing it, too. I understood his obsession, his love, his first time at handing himself over to someone else. That didn’t stop my hands from flying to my stomach to suppress the nausea, though, nor did it calm the panic in my breaths as I tried to figure out where all this was going.

“I asked her to marry me one night. Just out of nowhere. I was looking at her as she sat on the edge of my bed in my dorm. Her feet were tucked under her bum and all she had on was one of my t-shirts and some knee high, thick grey socks, and I just thought ‘Fuck me. Now, do it now. Make her yours forever.’ It wasn’t preplanned. I never meant to do it. Even as the words came out, I knew I was making a mistake. She wasn’t ready.”

“She said no,” I guessed.

Marcus swallowed, the weight of telling me the story showing in the rise and fall of his shoulders. “She said yes. Her eyes lit up and she smiled that coy smile of hers, and her brown hair fell all around her shoulders as she looked down into her lap as though she was embarrassed. I was the happiest son of a bitch alive. The next day I went out and bought her a ring and we spent three weeks in bed, promising to love each other for the rest of our lives.”

“What happened?”

Looking up at me slowly, his eyes glazed with water as his heart pinned itself to his sleeve without his permission.

“Reality happened. We stepped out of our comfort zone and we told other people. Friends began to take the piss, making her doubt everything I’d made her believe. They said we were too young, that it would never last. Alice was from a broken home. Her parents had split up when she was five and things had gotten nasty. Other people influenced her, told her we’d never make it. Then her mum found out, and once she knew, that was that. Alice left me. She left university and she walked away from us like we hadn’t got an entire trip to Thailand planned or a whole life time of being together mapped out.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whimpered. And I was so fucking sorry for him. If ever there was a man who was capable of loving someone selflessly, it was Marcus Anderson. He was made to be that guy – the one of who put everyone else before him. He was born to make people safe, make them feel cherished, make them feel wanted. He deserved the very same in return. Taking a step closer to him, I brought my hands up to his cheeks and searched his eyes. A tear fell from the corner of his eye, and a moment later, a tear fell from mine, too. Who were we anymore? What were we when we were together?

“I’m so sorry that she left you that way. Nobody deserves to feel that kind of pain, especially not you. Does anyone know? Sammy or your parents?”

Marcus shook his head in my hands. “No,” he croaked. “No one knows. I’ve kept everything to myself for years. I thought I could do the man thing – just shove it all in a cave in my head and roll a giant boulder over the doorway or something. I thought I had my shit together. That’s why I’m so fucked off with myself over last night. The whole wedding thing, seeing Suzie and Paul so certain of their shit, it messed with my head, Nat. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t see anything but her and then there was you, looking the way you looked, every single pair of eyes in that room on you rather than the bride. The guilt tore me up. You deserved more. You deserve someone that sees only you, not some other girl when he’s drunk. You deserve all of me, at all times, and I’ve not been giving it to you.”

“Are you kidding me? All you’ve ever done is give and give and give,” I told him quietly. “You and I, we’re not too dissimilar. We have these feelings, this passion for other people, and we love hard. Too hard sometimes. We pretend too much. What we didn’t know, or what we refused to acknowledge, is that there’s this blind side to love that we don’t even think about. We’re aware of who we want, who we love, who we want to protect. We’re aware of the plan in our minds to live a certain way, yes. But what we aren’t aware of are other people’s thoughts or intentions – who might come back into our lives, who others love, what they will do to get their happy ending. We look outwards, forward, always trying to find a solution and see what’s coming because we don’t ever want to be hurt again like we were hurt all those years ago. We try to tackle it like it's some kind of maths problem. The rest isn’t there in our eyes. If we can’t see it, feel it or touch that love, it can’t exist and it can’t hurt us. And that’s where we’ve been going wrong. Both of us.”

Marcus’ nostrils flared as he looked down on me, his eyes searching mine wildly as my bravery and courage built up in my chest like a lion about to roar for the first time.

“Both of us,” he whispered back to me.

“I’ve never once pretended to love you. Everything I’ve ever felt for you has been real. But, by the sound of it, I think maybe we’ve repressed too many things for far too long.”

We both smiled flatly, our sadness taking over.

“I didn’t mean to act like I acted last night, Nat. Kicking off with Alex, the proposal, all the alcohol…”

“I was no better than you. I focused on the ghosts last night, too.”

“Alex…”

I nodded slowly, closing my eyes for just a second to find some composure before I looked back up into his eyes. “If I could turn off my feelings for him, I would. But the more I lie to myself, the stronger those feelings get.”

“Fuck,” he croaked.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Tell me you love me, Natalie.”

“I love you, Marcus.”

“Now tell me you’re in love with me.”

My stomach rolled and my chin trembled, betraying me and all my thoughts as my eyes frantically searched his to buy myself some time to think.

His hands rose quickly to cup my face as he leaned closer, his nose skimming the edge of mine. “See,” he mumbled softly. “You can’t say it without me seeing the fear in your eyes. I saw that too much in Alice when she was about to leave. There should be no fear in love, baby. There should be no what ifs in love. I can’t live through that again. Look at our friends last night. Look at the certainty they had for each other while we stand here, each of us fucked up from our first loves, each of us scared of hurting the other. If what we have isn’t as strong as it was with someone else, then maybe it’s not ever going to be enough… for you or for me. If the thought of losing me doesn’t scare you, then it isn’t enough. I don’t want to spend my life wondering if you know that I’m thinking of her whenever I see a girl in a white dress. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if you’re thinking of him when your eyes have glazed over. I want someone to feel drunk off me, so drunk that no one else exists.”

The tears of love I had for him poured freely down my face. “And I want you to be able to drink for pleasure at a wedding, not to numb the pain. You deserve to feel special. I want you to be happy.”

“I guess I want that, too.”

“So what now?”

“What now?” he sighed.

“I'm scared.”

“Don't be. Don't be scared. I love you, little Nat,” he breathed out, his hands pushing my hair behind both my ears before he cupped my cheeks the same way I was holding his.

“I love you, too. I need you to know that.”

“I do,” he said through a weak smile. “But sometimes it just isn’t enough.”

I began to shake my head in protest, the reality of what was happening choking me and making me doubt everything that I was about to throw away. “I don’t want a life without you in it,” I admitted to him, my throat aching and tight.

“You won’t have to have a life without me in it. Maybe we were just always meant to be the best of friends.”

“Will you go and find Alice?” I dared myself to ask, my brows rising as I exhaled painfully.

“No. Some pasts shouldn’t be revisited. You’re going to take a little time to get over, too. I need to figure out who I am and what I want for a while.”

My eyes fell to his mouth, like I was looking to see whether I could reread the words he’d just spoken out loud, just to let them sink in a little bit more. I need to figure out who I am and what I want for a while.

So did I.

So… did… I.

I’d lived for so long doing what I felt others wanted me to do. Lizzy had always been my anchor, then Alex, and when he walked away, it was Marcus that I clung on to, to feel safe.

Who was I? Who was Natalie Vincent and what did she want from life besides her first love? I had no idea, but as my eyes flickered back up to Marcus’, and I felt the end of one thing all over again, I allowed myself to believe that a brand new beginning was exactly what I needed, no matter how painful the transition.

“Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

“Kiss me goodbye.”

And he did. He kissed me like we’d never kissed before, like two lost souls that had once found a path to travel down together for a while, but now there was a fork in the road, and it was time for our hands to break apart and for us to each take different routes. No matter how much that scared us both.