After Felix - Lily Morton Page 0,54
that’s when the truth starts to sink in. I sit back. “Shit.”
He nods. “You’re very loyal, Max, and always forward-moving. You’ve had to be to survive in that job all these years. You don’t look back and analyse. You just charge forward like an elephant intent on one goal. You met Ivo when you were both very young, and you threw all your loyalty behind him like a dog with his owner. You misdiagnosed the feeling as love, and it’s become this huge immutable fact in your life. Max loves toast and jam. Max loves rugby. Max loves Ivo. But you don’t really, unless it’s the love you feel for a friend.” He smiles at me. “Or the love for a brother.”
“I hope not,” I say tartly. “Ivo and I have done far too many things together for that image to be at all comfortable.”
He shrugs. “It was just sex, but I think it confused everything. It made you attach the label of love to Ivo when in reality, it was just good sex with a man who wasn’t right for you.”
“And Felix is?”
He looks at me. “If you had the chance to see Felix and say one thing to him, what would it be?”
“I miss you,” I say instantly, the words impassioned and full of so much feeling.
I send mental feelers over my emotions, trying to parse what Zeb said. It’s the truth. I thought love had come to me early in life, slow and gentle like my feelings for Ivo, but in fact, it was just gratitude, loyalty and a friendship that confused me.
In reality, love came to me like a summer storm bursting over my head and leaving me dazed. And now I’m alone without him, and I miss him. That’s what the pain in my chest is, the greyness. It’s because I no longer have Felix here challenging me, making me laugh, and making me feel more alive than I have since the day I handed in my resignation at the paper.
In the month before the wedding, I’d found myself thinking far too much about him, and it had worried me. I thought that I’d exchanged one obsession for another, but the painful truth is that I found pure gold in Felix and threw it away as if it was a chip wrapper because I was obsessed with the one who got away. It never occurred to me that Ivo was meant to get away. That he had his own person who at least had the good sense to hold onto him.
“Oh fuck,” I groan and collapse back on the sofa. “How did I not know? This is so fucked up. I love someone who I made hate me. If this is what love feels like, then it’s bloody awful. Take it away.”
He chuckles. “I can’t do that,” he says. “And you wouldn’t really want me to. Maybe you never realised it before, because you’ve been moving so fast for years. You were like a human hurricane, and the only one in the eye of the storm with you was Ivo, so you never looked elsewhere. And then Felix came along and exploded all your ideas. It probably feels so intense because you’ve come to real love so late in life.”
“I’m not fucking eighty.”
He shrugs. “But you’re too old to adapt well to changing feelings. You never realised in all that time with Felix, but I saw it. I saw how soft you were with him. How fascinated you were by him. He was dancing along and drawing you with him but…” He hesitates.
I make a gesture. “You’ve come this far. Give me the truth.”
“The awful truth is that you fucked it up and you may not get another chance with Felix even if you want one,” he says quietly. He looks at me searchingly. “Do you want one? It might be too late to even try.”
Cold dread steals over me. It’s only now in this moment, after I acknowledged how much I love him, that I realise I might not be able to mend the trouble I caused.
“I do,” I say, and it’s a vow I’ve never made before.
With Ivo, I’d never seen the use of making such a promise, and now I realize it had made things safe for me. I could keep my heart protected, because I believed there was no chance for being happy. The irony is I could have been happy with Felix and the only person who broke that is