62
‘How?’
Was this where he admitted he was indeed a remorseless womaniser?
‘I think you think I’m this fun party animal, who’s going to whirl you around the dancefloor and get you back on your feet after a decade of Joe Powell.’
He drew breath. ‘Despite what it looks like …’ He nodded back at the teeming bar. ‘I don’t have a lot of people in my life. Ones that matter. I don’t see my family; I won’t be seeing much of the Brian lot from now on. At times, I feel pretty lonely. I don’t know why that feels so hard to admit, but it does. I’m not ashamed, and yet … it seems I am.’
Roisin exactly understood that feeling of being ashamed of something you weren’t ashamed of.
‘You, however, matter. You are one of my oldest friends, and I love you. I’m really flattered you think I’m good for a good time. But I can see us on the other side of that, and I don’t want it. I don’t want to scale down to the awkward WhatsApps every couple of months. Checking in and being forced-casual and cagey with each other about who we’re both seeing. It doesn’t work to stay mates with someone you’ve had those times with.’
Roisin nodded.
‘If you need a self-esteem boost, then I can promise you: you are staggeringly lovely. You won’t struggle to find someone to say yes. But he can’t be me. If it helps, I already hate him.’
‘Thank you,’ Roisin said. ‘For the nicest, You? No, ta, love I will ever get.’ She pulled a comedy face.
Matt smiled, shook his head, and winced. ‘It’s not “no, ta.” It’s, “I like you too much to swap close friends status for being kind-of-exes”. However much fun the brief spell in between is.’
Roisin said, ‘I get it.’ That was that. She decided to claw back some tattered shreds of dignity. ‘But I wasn’t completely off the mark in thinking you might be up for it. You did kiss me? Before I remembered Gina,’ Roisin said.
‘I never said I found saying no to you easy,’ Matt said, with a devastating smile. ‘I’m saying it would be too costly a fling.’
Except … she wasn’t asking him for a fling. Should she say it? Oh, fuck it. She’d come this far.
‘I’m not asking you to have some dalliance with me,’ Roisin said, a last bid she wasn’t at all sure she should make. If not quit while you’re ahead, quit while you’ve not completely humiliated yourself.
‘Then what are you saying?’ Matt said.
‘I’m saying …’ Roisin petered out at the impossibility of looking him in that spectacular face and uttering the actual foolish words.
‘Be extremely blunt and as graphic as you like,’ Matt said. ‘I think we’re beyond nice euphemisms.’ He put his arm up to shield them as a gust of rain somehow managed to pelt sideways, under the awning.
Roisin took a deep breath. ‘I’m saying, Matt, I’m yours, if you want me. I want you to be mine. I’m saying I think I’m in love with you.’
A stunned beat of silence.
‘Since when?’ Matt said quietly.
‘A few days ago. Which sounds flippant, but it’s not. It’s just … suddenly all there. As if it was there all along.’
Matt stared at her, and she stared back. Nearby, a female voice said, ‘Sorry to butt in. Matt, should I get you another drink?’
He looked over. ‘No, ta.’
The person retreated.
Roisin wondered if she should say something else, but before she could, Matt stepped forward, wound his hands in her hair, and kissed her.
She put her arms around his neck, thinking, if this is pure sympathy, I may as well get the most out of it.
‘For clarity, what does that mean?’ she said, when they disentangled.
‘It means, “you could’ve led with that,”’ Matt said, his face suffused with a joy she could honestly say she’d never seen. ‘Then I could’ve said, “Well, that’s a coincidence. I’ve been in love with you the whole time.”’
* --> ‘You know what I’d like to do?’ Matt said, as they lay side by side in bed. Matt picked up her hand and put his palm against it.
‘Horrify me,’ Roisin said, certain she would not be horrified, even if she should be.
Her black dress lay on the floor of his mezzanine bedroom in his frankly daft apartment, and they had embarked on what Roisin hoped was the first of many times they’d fall into this bed. Being naked with someone you’d been friends with for so long could feel strange, and at moments it did, but mainly it just felt very, very good.
‘To go on holiday with you. One of those holidays that exists mainly in the imagination and Instagram brags. Games of UNO on tables with tea lights, tumblers of cheap white wine. Lights in the harbour beyond. That sort of thing. Possibly a lobster with fries.’
‘Sounds like Greece or Italy. We could do that. Holidays in half terms are punitive though. Drawback of my job. Dev Doshi money. Oh God.’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘Not looking forward to going back to work. I had a panic attack in front of a class playing a clip from Hunter. Urgh.’
Matt rearranged himself on the pillows to pull her into the crook of his arm, kissing the top of her head. ‘You are an absolutely ace teacher, and you will be fine. I have every faith. Stroll back in there with your head held high.’
‘Thank you,’ Roisin said. She gazed at their opulent surroundings, and she didn’t just mean Matt McKenzie. ‘How much of this is you? I don’t mean what’s yours, as in own …’
‘Aye aye. Assessing if I have enough family silver left?’
‘Pffft. I mean. If you say the flash and glamour and man about town stuff was a … front.’ She didn’t want to repeat the word ‘lonely’, though she still felt it in her gut.
‘That’s a good question. One I asked myself a lot after I got the sack. It’s only half serious, in a weird way. Like I played a role on purpose that people found amusing.’
Concocted Casanova persona. So, Joe’s assessment hadn’t been entirely off.
‘The mask eats the face though, and all that. I can’t tell you how idiotic I feel admitting to you, and myself, that my lifestyle was some sort of performance-art joke to get people to like me.’
Roisin thought of Matt uncomplainingly mopping up napalmed spaghetti hoops that Terence had detonated in the microwave at The Mallory, and realised why she’d caught feelings for him when she had.
‘I don’t think you need to hide behind anything to be liked,’ Roisin said, warmly.
Matt squeezed her shoulder. ‘Having never been a couple, I want to be so very coupley. Would you feel vomitous if I did things like wrote you cards with inspirational messages about my love and put them in your work bag to find?’
Roisin hooted with laughter. ‘Saying what? Live, laugh, love?’
‘Saying … I don’t know, you’d have to open it to find out. Declarations that would leave you unable to concentrate for the rest of the day. Or maybe I’d go with a joke.’
‘Oh God, nothing blue, please. Knowing my luck, I’d drop it and someone from 10E would open it.’
‘I promise. Nothing like, “found the keys to your dildo cabinet.”’
Roisin shrieked. ‘Have you really been in love with me all along?’ she said.
‘Yeah. I told you I had been. The woman I was in love with, back in the day? Who I told a friend about and he steamed in ahead of me? That was you. And Joe, of course.’
Roisin sat up slightly. ‘What? Really? “She emigrated to the other side of the world”?’
‘That was an exaggerated depiction of West Didsbury. I needed a red herring. I feared while speaking that you’d seen right through me, with those old soul brown eyes of yours.’
Roisin had to take a few seconds to absorb this. ‘Wait. That was me? You hid me on social media?’
‘Haha! I love that you think that’s the most shocking thing, not the secret ten-year obsession. Yeah, sorry. I checked in every so often so you couldn’t tell, though, right?’
‘In case of a baby announcement?!’
‘Yeah. I recently downgraded the threat level of your posting an ultrasound from substantial to moderate, obviously. The chances were low, but never zero.’
‘This is amazing. Why didn’t you ask me out in the first place?’
Roisin cast her mind back to the Deansgate shop floor years. She remembered an absurdly handsome, personable young lad from a monied background, whom she was surprised wanted the grunt work of retail. She remembered suspecting he’d be a brat, and instead Matthew McKenzie being one of sweetest-natured people she’d ever met. And he looked like he’d been carved from marble. Roisin had assumed he had a vast hinterland of attention from women, the sort who didn’t dip twiglets in hummus while reading Hello! in the staff room.
‘I was going to. I kept trying to finagle the seating plans when we went out after work, so I could talk to you. You may recall, a lot of people wanted to be next to Roisin on those nights. Then, as I said, I lost the moment. You were seeing him.’
She’d never seen Matt look shy before. (God, Gina, you were right.)
‘Joe asked me out because you’d told him you were going to?’
‘Yup. He told me you’d forced the timing, not him. Took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realise that was bullshit.’ Matt paused. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned this, should I? He’s come between us, again.’
Roisin pushed her hand across his chest, under the sheets. She’d told him she’d been trying to acclimatise to someone having this many muscles, more muscles than she actually knew anyone had.
‘I promise you. I’m not thinking about Joe.’