All Chapters of I Shouldn’t Have Craved My Father’s Best Friend: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

Aria | Age Eighteen I have practiced this moment my whole life, so I hold his gaze.“I’ve been in love with you—”The words catch.For one awful second I think they are going to die there and I will have ruined myself for nothing.I force them through.“I have. For years.” My throat tightens. “Since I was old enough to understand what that meant.”The party is still going on in the next room. My mother’s laugh. Glasses touching. Someone crossing the hall outside the study without knowing the air in here has changed shape completely.He goes still.Not blank. Not empty.Completely rigid, as if something has hit him somewhere he cannot afford to show.Heat floods my face.“I know what it sounds like,” I say, quieter now, because there is no point pretending my voice is steadier than the rest of me. “I know who you are to my father. I know what this is supposed to be. I just—”My breath turns on me. He still is not saying anything. Oh God.“I needed you to know it wasn’t childish. It wa

Adrian | Three Weeks LaterMarcus is telling the Rotterdam story.I know this because I can hear the specific cadence of it from the kitchen doorway — the way his voice rises on “I told them—, and drops on “—and they didn’t listen.” And the way the whole table responds to the pause before the punchline the way an audience responds to a comedian they have seen many times and still love. I have heard this story approximately eighty-five times across fifteen years of Sunday lunches. I could deliver it myself, including the gestures.I pour myself a drink instead.The kitchen is warm. Diane is at the oven, which is making a sound she does not approve of, and she is speaking to it in the specific low tone she uses for things that are failing to cooperate.“I need another twenty minutes,” she says. To me or to the oven. Unclear.“Marcus said fifteen.” I say.“Marcus,” she says, with the precise, practiced weight of a woman who has been translating her husband’s optimism into reality for t

Adrian | Monday MorningMarcus is in my car.This was not my idea.He was standing at the bottom of my building at six-fifty-two in the morning with a coffee in each hand and the specific expression of a man who has decided something and is not going to discuss whether he has the right to decide it. I had looked at him through the windscreen for approximately three seconds. Then I had unlocked the door.He got in. He handed me one of the coffees. He did not explain himself.We drove in silence for four minutes.“You think I need babysitting,” I said.“I think nothing of the sort,” Marcus said, looking out the window.“You’re standing outside my building at six-fifty-two on a Monday morning with two coffees.”“I was in the area.”“You live twenty minutes in the other direction.”“I was in the area,” he said again, with enormous composure.I looked at the road.“You’re three years older than me,” I said.“I’m aware.”“Not twenty years. Three.”“Yes.”“Then I don’t require—”“The paparaz