Page 26 of Someone Like You

He wanted to laugh at himself: a grown man basking in another man’s embrace like a starving beggar hanging on to a scrap of food. Phil was no beggar. He had more than most human beings could dream of. He shouldn’t feel so starved. He shouldn’t feel so nourished by Ian’s closeness.

They stayed like that for a long while, not a movement, not a sound uttered, both aware that they would never get anything more than this. Something stolen. Something they could never talk about.

But for those few minutes, it was good.

Then Ian’s hot breath skimmed Phil’s ear and his beard scratched his cheek, and Phil didn’t need him to mutter ‘You should go’ to know it was over.

“Yeah.” He wiped his wet cheek into Ian’s hoodie before letting go. It was torture, but Phil made himself do it, dusting the melancholy off by doing his best to pretend the loss of Ian’s arms around himself wasn’t killing him a little. “See you at the fountain at 6?”

“Aye.”

That was it. Case closed, back to normalcy. No questions. The stolen moment they’d shared would be a page ripped out of a journal, a piece no one would ever know was missing .

While Phil collected his stuff in the entryway, Kibble appeared out of nowhere and demanded goodnight pets, which Phil happily provided. He had the impression this cat understood more about him than most of his acquaintances ever had.

He took the bike down the short flight of stairs, then slipped the helmet off the handlebar.

The scratches on the side were nasty. Without it, the fall would’ve scraped Phil’s scalp down to the bone, maybe worse.

In that moment, when his head had hit the ground, his first thought had been that Ian was still taking care of him, even from afar, and that realisation had brought a smile to his lips.

He gazed back to the door: Ian was standing there with Kibble in his arms, her kneading paws partially hiding the dark stains Phil had left in the hoodie.

It was right there, the thing he was missing, the remedy to the void that was consuming him from the inside.

But Phil couldn’t say what he wanted to say, so he shoved it back as a gust of cold wind spread goosebumps all over his skin.

“In another life—” he began, but Ian knowingly caught his eye.

“We don’t have another life, Phil.”

They didn’t.

But dreaming cost nothing.

“In another life,” Phil stated more firmly, despite the searing pain in his heart, “maybe I’d meet you first.”

Walking away felt like fighting gravity, but then he heard Ian’s door close, locking away the temptation luring him back, and Phil was finally able to mount on his bike and put some distance between himself and the cause of his inner torment.

Maybe I’d meet you first.

It rang in his ears all the way home, as he pedalled through the city and its lights, the cool wind blowing in his face, all sounds and noises around him cancelled by the loudness of the echo of that one thought.

Maybe I’d meet you first.

Maybe I’d meet you first.

Maybe I’d meet you first .

But he couldn’t come up with a single scenario where he and Ian could’ve realistically met without a link to bridge the abyss between their separate existences.

Phil would’ve never left Chicago on his own volition, let alone the US.

Abby had crossed the pond to find him. He couldn’t imagine anything bringing him to Scotland without her.

He wasn’t big in Europe, not enough for his publisher to invest in flying him here for a promotional tour.

He never would’ve met Ian without Abby.

* * *

One of his favourite aspects of the UK was that everything was smaller and less garish here: even one of the biggest malls in Glasgow seemed modest compared to the ones he was used to.

It would’ve bothered many Americans, but Phil was very much okay with the downsizing, especially when he and Abby went out for one of their massive grocery hauls.

To Abby, grocery shopping was as fun as shopping for clothes, but she didn’t have much time for it and Phil wasn’t overly fond on going on his own, so once a month they took the car and drove to Silverburn to stock up as much food and household necessities as they could, which unfortunately took hours.

The one good thing was that Abby always made sure to pencil it in on early Saturday mornings, meaning no crowds and no chaos.

They currently had two fully loaded carts and the list Phil had on his phone was entirely checked off, but, for a financial consultant, Abby had zero spending awareness.

She was every marketer’s dream customer: an impulse buyer attracted to flashy, colourful things, quirky flavours, and any novelty in sight.

The exact opposite of Phil, who could’ve happily lived on the same five foods for the rest of his life.

They were in the juices aisle and Abby had stacked three bottles of dragon fruit juice into her cart before inspecting the shelves for inspiration.

Phil loved watching her: her face was always scrunched up in concentration, eyes sparkling with excitement, like a little girl in a candy store.

When the items were too high for her to reach, she tried jumping for them first, and then turned to Phil for assistance.

He was glad he could make good use of his height, especially because since meeting Ian he’d sort of become the short one.

While picking up a bottle from the top shelf for Abby, Phil caught a familiar picture a couple of shelves below and stopped for a second to stare at it longingly.

“God, I miss my grapefruit juice.”

He hadn’t touched grapefruit or anything with grapefruit in it in years because some chemicals in it interfered with his medication.

As a former pink grapefruit juice addict, going cold turkey on it hadn’t been easy: since college, most of his hydration and vitamins had come from it and sweeter alternatives like orange weren’t as satisfying to drink.

Abby checked the carton in front of Phil, her pretty nose scrunching up at the ‘100% organic grapefruit’ banner on the label. “What about this one?” She picked a different item on the left. “Grapefruit flavour . It’s safe. This so-called juice has never seen a grapefruit in its sorry life.”

Phil took it from her, turned it around to take a better look at it, then his nose scrunched, too. “Can’t believe you’re encouraging me to drink a cocktail of chemicals and colourants.”

Abby sympathetically curled two fingers under his chin. “If you can’t have the real deal, you might as well try the next best thing.”

Phil didn’t want the next best thing . Didn’t want an artificial concoction fabricated to trick his taste buds to believe it was what he wanted. Perhaps it’d have worked if he hadn’t had the real deal first, but if he couldn’t have grapefruit, he’d rather have nothing at all.

“I’m not drinking this junk.” He set the carton back on the shelf. “Are we done here?”

Harsh. Very unnecessarily so. It was the thing he hated most about his mood swings: he could tell he was overreacting and treating people unfairly, but he couldn’t stop himself.

There was a selfish little voice in the back of his head constantly whispering to him: ‘You’re suffering. Let them suffer, too.’

That wasn’t him. He’d never wanted anyone to suffer because of him — anyone being Abby, because she was the only one who had stuck around when even Phil had given up on himself, the one who never took his fits of rage personally and gave him space without demanding answers or apologies, even when many were due.

And Phil still had the nerve to sleep with her every night, and kiss her good morning, and sit by her as she drove them home from the mall, brimming with feelings for somebody else, and say nothing.

Because he was a coward.

Because being honest with Abby about what he felt for Ian would mean losing her, and he couldn’t imagine living without her. Abby was his heart, his emotional compass, the one whose mere proximity helped him keep his functional adult disguise on and bear the weight of it.

He couldn’t lose Abby.

But he couldn’t keep such a cumbersome secret from her either.

They were unusually quiet while putting the groceries away. Phil was being extra meticulous, angling every item to face forward, evenly distanced from one another. He hadn’t paid any attention to that kind of thing in a long while and Abby, of course, didn’t miss it.

“Everything alright?”

“Sure.”

He went on lining up the tomato sauce cans, then started with the beans and the chickpeas.

Abby put a hand on his arm. “Phil.”

“ What? ” he snapped. Abby’s eyes narrowed at him in reproach. As tiny as she was, she had a natural talent for looking imposing.

“You’ve been weird lately. You were doing so well, and now it’s like you’re regressing to—”

“I’m fine,” Phil cut short. “Just… coping.”

“With what?”

“Scotland.”

Abby blinked. “Scotland. ”

“Yeah.”

It didn’t explain anything, but Abby understood he wasn’t in the mood for talking.

“Okay.” She kissed him on the cheek and left him alone in the pantry, just him and his demons and twenty-four cans of Pepsi to arrange.

He had an appointment with Ian in the afternoon to make up with the run they’d skipped in the morning.

In many ways, Ian was just like Abby: intuitive and responsive to the abrupt shifts in Phil’s mood, always willing to roll with whatever Phil brought to the table on any given day.

If Phil was chatty, they chatted; if Phil was cranky, Ian would attempt a joke or two and then establish whether it was the right tactic or not according to Phil’s reaction.