Page 103 of The Moon & His Tides

“Today, I’m saying I love you.” God, but the words felt carved from my very soul with a jagged knife. I winced as they came out, cut up and still bleeding. “It’s not much because we’ll only have…thisfor so long. But one day, I want exactly what you want.”

“Which is?” he whispered as the crowd got to their feet around us, cheering for the goal King’s Cross United had just scored to tie the game.

I took the risk of taking the watch back to put it on his wrist myself. My hands lingered over his, and I tapped the face with my nail as I looked into his eyes and said, “One day, I want your impossible universe to be our universe. I want to hold your hand and Savvy’s on a beach walk. I want to kiss you when we go to the supermarket. I want to love you in all the quiet and mundane ways of daily life that we can’t have right now. That… that we can’t have for a while.”

“How long is a while?” he asked, and he waseager, not judgemental, not scornful like I’d secretly feared.

“Until we retire?” I said like it was a joke, but of course, it was the truth, and it fell flat and broken between us.

“But you love me,” he reiterated, eyes so bright I had to blink away the sunspots. “Youloveme today and tomorrow and until then.”

“Until the end of time,” I admitted.

“ThenMadonna santa, Adam,” he said empathetically, grabbing both my hands in his. “Of course, that’s enough. That’s fucking everything.”

“Not exactly a love to move the sun and the stars,” I admitted, feeling so fucking small that I hated it and had to fight the urge to remain open with him.

“Let me be the judge of that,” he argued with that movie star grin that made breath arrest in my chest. “Because from where I’m sitting, only a love like that could survive the wait.”

Fear pierced me sharp and narrow like a needle through the bullseye of my heart, right at the centre of my insecurities.

Because it wasn’t only Sebastian whom I doubted. That he would stay after a year or two years or five, satisfied with a secret relationship when he was such an open, honest man.

It was alsome.

Even now, there was this risk of discovery that made my hair stand on end and my heart drum too hard and too fast.

I’d witnessed secrets just like mine bubble to the surface and ruin lives.

Even end them.

Could I live with the fear I’d been living with every day until I was old and grey that someone would discover us, and everything would disintegrate like castles in the sand?

I hoped so.

Sebastian was teaching me to be brave and bold for myself and not just my characters, so maybe, if I worked tirelessly and was very, very careful, we could have this.

This dream that seemed like such a far-flung reality.

“Let’s just love each other,” Sebastian suggested, sensing my disquiet as he always did. “Let’s just let that be enough for now.”

“I do, you know,” I said, a little urgently, too forceful. “Very much.”

“I knew before you ever told me,” he said with a wink. “You aren’t the kind of man to faff about with something you’re not completely obsessed with.”

I laughed, startled and relieved enough to laugh a little too hard and too long. When Savvy came back, she merely raised an eyebrow and told Sebastian to get up and switch seats so she could sit neatly between us.

She didn’t know in so many words that I loved him, but she was clever, my wife.

She knew.

And though she didn’t say it again after their confession in the car that night after the BAFTAs, I knew she loved him too.

We’d be okay.

Hours later, I was proven very wrong.

Before that day,there were three “worst moments of my life” that defined me more than I would’ve liked them to.