So we worked hard through the week and played hard through the weekend. When Liam had a boyfriend we went to the Village, but the women he dated thought gay bars passé, and with them we went to the trendy hotspots at Deansgate Locks instead. I’m not sure if he ever told them about himself, or if they thought he just humoured his gay best friend. It turned my stomach to think he was earning brownie points for being okay about me when he was screwing me behind their snotty, stuck-up backs.
I wasn’t single through all that time, of course. I got a boyfriend of my own after college, a couple through uni and one or two afterwards, but they never lasted long. Just until they worked out that they’d never replace my best friend in my heart, and as Liam never seemed to get along with them anyway, it was for the best. The simmering hostility gave me a headache, and it was easier to break up and remove the complications they brought into my life.
Which is how I ended up here: lying naked on my sweaty sheets, listening to Liam let himself out of my house. It must have been four or five in the morning—we hadn’t left the club until two—but he’d refused my offer to sleep over as he always did, and was probably right now getting into the taxi he’d called while I was still wiping the evidence of our tryst off my chest.
I’m not upset, I told myself, curling around a pillow which smelled faintly of him, of his cologne and sweat and musk. I’d done this a hundred thousand times over the years we’d been fooling around, and I could handle it. I just had to remind myself that I could handle it.
If I didn’t get to sleep until the sun was up and the birds outside were singing, well, that was just my own stupidity, wasn’t it?
*
“I can’t do this anymore.”
I froze with my pint half-raised to my lips. “What?”
“This. Whatever it is we’re doing. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I lifted the pint the last couple of inches and sipped, willing my hand not to shake. If either of us was to call time on our little arrangement, I’d always imagined it would be me; I’d be the one to break. What had Liam got to lose?
“Viv suspects something, I’m almost sure of it.”
“So?” I returned the pint carefully to the raised table against which we were leaning.
“So I care about her, Toby. I want this one to work.”
My guts twisted. “When did you decide this?” I asked, trying to keep the bitter edge out of my tone.
“You know I like her,” he protested, not really answering my question.
“You like them all, Liam. That hasn’t stopped you before.” I was hissing the words, the venomous, sibilant accusation slicing through the thumping bass of the Village bar.
“Well maybe Viv’s different,” he snapped, blue eyes flashing with angry light. “We can’t keep doing this, Toby. We’re too old.”
Screw him, ‘too old’. We were twenty-bloody-eight. We’d been doing whatever it was we did for almost half our lives. We couldn’t just…stop.
“We should be…friends. Real friends.”
“We are friends,” I snapped. “Friends with benefits.”
His laugh was utterly humourless. “Is it a benefit, though? Or was it all a big mistake?”
I recoiled like he’d slapped me. If he’d slapped me, it would have been easier to deal with.
“Do you regret it?” I asked, unable to bite my tongue and make myself stop.
“No… I don’t think so.” His smooth brow furrowed in a frown and suddenly it seemed he found the scratched tabletop the most interesting thing in the world.
“Then why?” I asked, plaintive and a little whiny.
“When did you last date someone?” he asked instead.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. A year ago, maybe.”
“Exactly. Don’t you think that’s a problem?”
“It’s not my fault every guy I meet is a prick.”
Liam sighed, long and loud. “What if they’re not, Toby? What if they were just nice guys who really liked you but couldn’t get close because we’ve got this crazy co-dependent thing going on and we wouldn’t let them?”
We?
I stammered half a response.
“I’m as much to blame,” Liam admitted. “Probably more. I started this whole thing, after all. That’s why I think it’s got to be me who stops it.”
“What if I don’t want to stop?” I whispered the words, my eyes wide and beseeching.
“Oh, Toby.” He cupped my cheek and I butted my head into his hand like a cat seeking comfort. “That’s why we’ve got to, don’t you see? Before one of us gets hurt.”
Before?
Something in my irritated snort and eyeroll must have given me away, because I can’t say I’d ever seen Liam contrite before, but that’s exactly how he looked. Instead of speaking, however, he rose from the high stool on which he was half-sitting, took my hand and led me onto the small, crowded dance floor. With the bass thumpa-thumping in our ears and the heat of a hundred closely-packed bodies surrounding us, he kissed me, in public, for the very first time.
It felt like goodbye.
*
We didn’t see each other for two whole months after that night. We kept in touch via occasional text messages and one strained phone call early on, but it was too painful, too raw for me to engage. Liam had his life and I had to let him lead it. I also needed to find a life of my own.
I went out with other friends, acquaintances, even escorted a receptionist from work who wanted a guided tour of the Village with some of her loud, obnoxious girlfriends. It was the longest separation from him I’d ever know and I missed him like a limb, like I’d lost one of my senses, given it up after he took me home and left me standing in the doorway, the ghost of an impression of his lips against mine the last thing I had to hold onto.
I vacillated between extremes for a while, yo-yoed from going out every night desperately seeking a man to help me forget, to staying in, closing the door and locking myself away from the rest of the world. My friends thought it a good thing Liam had called time on the physical side of our friendship, convinced he had been poisoning my other relationships. They took me to the cinema and for meals at ethnic restaurants, even bowling. Anything to provide an alcohol-free distraction.