“Are you FUCKING kidding me? That twat doesn’t get to dictate any terms to me. If he doesn’t want to be ‘uncomfortable,’ maybe he should start with taking the 20 foot pike out of his gilded arse. Cunt! Coward!”

My conversation on Friday night with Alex about Julian’s phone call went pretty much as expected. I may have fudged the date of the call a bit, making it last Wednesday instead of the previous Friday. As much as Jenn says I have nothing to fear from telling Alex the truth, I guess it’s so ingrained in me to soften the blow when I’ve messed something up that the white lie was reflexive. (Alex, if you ever read this and now know the truth, I’m sorry.) With Julian, it was almost always better to be creative with the truth when there was a mess up in which I played even a minor role — my flubs were usually met with either loud dressings down or cold dismissals, neither of which were particularly pleasant. So after a while, I learned to keep my own counsel about the very small transgressions of daily life that come with being human, and gloss over as much as possible the larger mistakes. Life was just quieter that way.

On the BART and the bus Friday night, I psyched myself up. I played my “Killer Workout” mix instead of listening to Camera Obscura. (There’s a lot of Queen on my “Killer Workout” mix, which I hadn’t realized until just now.) I reminded myself that any anger Alex would feel would not be directed towards me, but Julian. I repeated the mantra “fuck him, fuck him, fuck him, I owe Julian nothing.” The longer I let the truth stay within me and unaired, the more it would stink when finally exposed. “What’s the point of clean living,” Jenn told me yesterday on the phone, “if you let reality rot within you?” (I’m pretty sure that Jenn only gives lip service to clean living since I could definitely hear her vaping during that conversation, but I got the gist of what she meant.)

By the time I was letting myself into Alex’s building, I was actually relishing the conversation to come. Okay, maybe “relishing” is a strong word; let’s say I was prepared. Alex was still en route when I got there, so I took the time to set the stage a little: I located and lit the Jo Malone candles I’ve bought him (and which he never uses unless I’m there, I’ve noticed from how little has burnt down); arranged in one of Cora’s large, blue hand-thrown bowls the bag of Braeburn apples I’d brought with me; lowered the lights; and set out the nice china he had managed to keep hidden from Minty’s brother during the clear out of the old flat in Cadogan Square. Alex didn’t seem to care that his cutlery was all from Macy’s these days, but I was mindful of how much Alex had lost in the divorce.

It’s not like he lives in a hovel — I don’t mean to give that impression. The building is a little clinical, slightly dingy in the uncompromisingly beige and cheap tweed common areas. The kitchen is clearly direct from Ikea, the bathroom reeks of whatever is being cooked upstairs on any given evening, and the bedroom sports uncomfortably thin walls. (We can regularly hear the woman next door receiving oral sex from a man named Bob, which we know because we can literally hear her yell, “KEEP LICKING IT BOB, I’M ALMOST THERE” through the wall.) It is a step down from his plush 3-bed flat in Knightsbridge, and even he can’t deny it. When we’re finally living together — I mean if, I shouldn’t get ahead of myself — wherever we land, it won’t be here in Cow Hollow.

Alex walked through the door as I was opening a bottle of Decoy. He threw his bag on the couch (so that’s how the accent pillows end up on the floor) and drew me into his arms, resting his chin on my head. “A beautiful woman and a bottle of wine. Hell’s bells, Mel, you’re fucking perfect. A goddess I’m not worthy to even worship.” He tickled my side and I squirmed a little, then broke away.

“Oh stop it,” I said, swatting at him. “I just lit a few candles.” I walked back to the kitchen to finish unpacking the bags of groceries I’d brought and put dinner in the oven.

Alex collapsed on the knockoff Børge Mogensen sofa. (It was sold to us as “probably” genuine, but it was a good enough deal that I don’t mind when Alex gets crackers caught between the cushions.) “Well, it smells fucking gorgeous in here. Now do us a favor and get some of that wine in me as soon as possible. I’ll just open my mouth, you pour it in.”

“We do glasses in this house, thank you,” I said primly, pouring out healthy measures for us both. “Lasagna tonight, I picked one up at Whole Foods.” I handed the glass to him and sat next to him as he half-reclined on the sofa. I pushed a lock of his hair behind his right ear. Still the same tangle of nearly-black waves that I’d spotted at that very first party in Bristol at Charlie and Will’s. He’d been sitting behind a sofa, hiding from Miranda. I was only at this party because Minty had convinced me that an evening out might help with the nascent homesickness that was leading me to do reckless things like sit on the balcony at 3am in light drizzle in my nightgown, while I drank scrumpy out of a teapot and listened to the second Arab Strap album on my iPod.

The boys’ flat was jammed with the detritus of just-past-teenaged male life: pyramids of Fosters cans, socks draped over the radiator, copies of FHM, overflowing ashtrays and what appeared to be a shrine to Kelly Brook, complete with incense. It was full to bursting with the 20 or so of us in there. Nobody could hear the Kaiser Chiefs on the stereo over the steady flow of conversation. I felt crowded and yet totally alone, even though Minty checked on me repeatedly. My fellow partygoers were fascinating creatures to me — I had been in Bristol long enough now to know they were all posh — sorry, “smart” — and even if some of them were technically not well-off any longer, they at least passed themselves off as wealthy with the trappings of the upper and upper-middle classes. There was a certain carelessness for how they dressed (slightly careworn but expensive classics only), how biting their passive-aggressive backhanded conversation flowed, how easily the champagne poured out of bottle after bottle. I absentmindedly picked up and turned over a candy dish that I’d eaten the last almond out of only to discover it was antique Sèvres porcelain, like it was no big deal that it was just hanging out on a 20-year-old boy-man’s coffee table. I was out of my element.

I discovered Alex quite by accident when the sofa I was sitting on seemed to shift a little forward, bringing me out of my reverie about 18th century French porcelain in a shitty student flat. I thought maybe someone had bumped into it but when I turned around I couldn’t see anyone standing there, though the sofa had been pushed out a few feet from the wall. I peered over the back to find a boy of about my age, sitting on the floor with his legs bent before him, squinting down at what looked like a copy of last week’s Sunday Times Magazine. All I could make out of his appearance was a mess of dark hair and his pale fingers gripping the supplement.

“Do you usually read behind couches at parties?” I asked him. He lifted his head slowly to the side and froze, as if caught in the act of something truly terrible. In profile, he had a long nose (Julian later called it “patrician, though there’s nothing else patrician left about Alex”), and the dark hair was longer than that of his fellow male partygoers. He looked up at me and smiled, a look of relief passing over his face, all rosy cheeks and dark brown eyes.

“Not really. I’m hiding and I got bored. I saw this stuffed under the sofa and fished it out to pass the time. I’m Alex. But I’m not here and you didn’t see me.” He ducked his head again when a couple of Minty’s friends walked by.

I slipped behind the sofa and sat down next to him, our backs to the sofa and sneakers resting side by side on the wall. (I used to be so brave before I met Julian, heedless of how any action might look.) “Melissa de Mornay. I’m Minty’s roommate. I mean flatmate. I’m bored too.”

“Aha! The American! We’ve all been so curious to meet you.” Alex rubbed his palms together, then self-consciously pulled his hands into the arms of his rather moth-eaten forest green sweater. He was long-limbed and was fairly jammed in the space he’d opened for himself between the sofa and the tobacco-stained wall. His cheekbones were a little high, his lips a little chapped, and he smelled faintly of cigarettes. He stole a look at me, then started rolling up the magazine into a tube. I could feel a nervous energy pulsing from him.

“Really? Curious? Because everyone’s avoided me tonight except Minty and some guy named Julian.” I wrinkled my nose a little. Julian had indeed been the very first person who had made an effort with me, but truth be told, I found him kind of dull. He had visited California and New York the year before with his father, and thought his comments on everything wrong with America and Americans would find a receptive audience in me. (They didn’t.)

Alex laughed, a low chuckle. “Julian can be an acquired taste. We’ve been friends since school. He’s always been a bit of a knob with girls. Especially pretty ones.”

I wasn’t sure what to say — to thank him would be to acknowledge I was attractive, which I had learned was Not A Done Thing out here, and to deny it would be, well, a little disingenuous. So I let it slide and asked a question to turn the conversation back to my new companion. “So, who are you hiding from and why?”

“Have you met Miranda yet?” Alex whispered, and peeked over the back of the sofa, scanning the room, quickly dropping back to the floor.

“Yes, just recently,” I replied. I had in fact spent a fairly amusing evening with Miranda and Minty only a few days before, getting completely hammered on vodka tonics as we watched Mastermind and Little Britain. Miranda was not conventionally pretty, but rather striking — long brown hair, an olive complexion (“my Spanish mum,” she explained), and plush lips she kept glossed light pink at all times. She had a dirty sense of humor and a potty mouth, and I had developed a mild girl-crush on her, I admit. I didn’t want to kiss her on those beautiful lips, so much as I wanted to be her, droll, a little cynical, vivid in her passions and dislikes. Why this boy would want to avoid her seemed unbelievable.

“Well, she seems to think I owe her a better explanation as to why I no longer wish to, um, engage in carnal embrace with her. I don’t think I do.” Alex pulled a silver hip flask out of his back pocket and unscrewed the top carefully. “Care for a sip?”

I took the flask from him gladly — I’d left my half-drunk glass of champagne on the coffee table — and tossed a fair amount of the contents back without even thinking to ask first what I should expect. I choked — I was not expecting whisky, and I was definitely not expecting single malt — and then exploded with coughing. I wheezed and thought my body would seize with the heat coursing down my throat into my gut.

“Shit shit shit! You’re going to attract attention!” Alex banged my back and I was able to control myself fairly shortly, though I gasped for air. If anyone heard, no one came to investigate.

“What is that stuff? You should have warned me,” I gritted out at last. Tears poured down my cheeks and Alex passed me a grimy handkerchief, which I accepted with only a little dubiousness.

“10 year old Edradour. From Pitlochry, near where my family has a house. It’s fantastic stuff, but not meant to be chugged like one of your American lagers.” He was smiling now, his hand still on my back where he’d been thwacking it moments before. I didn’t ask him to move it.

“Jesus. Can I have a real taste now? I promise I’ll just sip.” I wanted to know more about this Edradour, and Pitlochry, and Alex and carnal embrace, which may have been the Edradour and champagne talking in concert.

Alex laughed quietly and passed the flask back. “Steady, just a wee nip this time.” He watched me very carefully as I took one small swig. It truly was lovely, honeyed but powerful, and tasted of coziness and autumn. “What do you think now?”

“Delicious, thank you. Can I ask you though — why are you here if you’re avoiding Miranda?” Alex had taken the flask back by now and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans after slugging back a sip of his own.

“Why am I usually at these things? Free booze and Julian. Usually more the former than the latter. Julian drags me along because he thinks I should ‘lighten up’ a little more.” (Alex made little air quotes and screwed up his face while doing what I came to know as his “Julian voice.”) “I suppose I come out of loyalty to him.”

“And why does he come to these things?” I could tell Alex had had enough alcohol this evening to pitch him at the sweet spot of tipsy, where he was completely lucid but a little loose. I intended to pry as much information out of him in this unguarded state about what I was fast understanding would be my cast of friends for the next nine or ten months.

“Jules? Right now? He actually likes going to parties, god knows why. Used to be for Amanda, too, they used to go out but that –” Alex made a fizzing noise, fffffffzzzzzzzzzzz, accompanied by a hand gesture much like a plane falling from the sky — “has been over since the end of last term. Amanda’s the ginger in the navy blue dress, nickers like a pony when she laughs and apparently terrible in bed, even bad at faking an orgasm. I wouldn’t know, not my type.”

I stifled a laugh in my fist. “What about Charlie and Will? What should I know about them?”

“Rugby types, both of them. Charlie’s fairly serious about his course — he’s going to be a doctor, you see — so he’s the sensible one, whatever that means. Will fancies himself a bit of a player, so I’d watch out for him, he can get a bit handsy at times.” Alex put both his hands out in front of him and squeezed an imaginary pair of breasts, then quickly crossed his arms as if it had belatedly dawned on him that perhaps the gesture was impolite.

“Good to know, noted for the future,” I said solemnly, and gave him a smile.

Alex turned towards me slightly, and started peering at me closely, sniffing the air. I panicked — Minty had said my DKNY Be Delicious perfume smelled “aggressively American” to her, which may or may not have been a compliment. “You smell lovely, Melissa. You are lovely, Melissa.” He offered the flask to me again, and I took a small slug before passing it back to him, keeping my eyes locked on his.

I was feeling bold from the whisky and leaned over to whisper in his ear, “Are you still bored, Alex?”

Something passed between us at that moment, a flash of electricity that started in my stomach and passed up through my shoulders, my neck, my mouth and into his ear. He shuddered a little and took my wrist between his hands to draw it to his mouth. I felt even more on fire, illuminated, than when the whisky had coursed its way through my throat.

“Ahem.” From above us, we both heard a throat being cleared quite ostentatiously.

Now it was the turn of both Alex and I to freeze as if caught in the act of doing something tremendously naughty. I looked up to see Julian scrutinizing our little intimate scene, his head cocked to one side, a sly smile slowly blossoming. “Al, Miranda’s looking for you.”

My wrist dropped from Alex’s grasp into my lap as he twisted around to look at Julian. “Thanks, Jules. I know.” Alex sighed deeply, his shoulders sagging.

“You might want to take care of it sooner rather than later. Wouldn’t want her to, uh, misinterpret what you and your new friend are up to should she happen to see you. Melissa, right?” Julian held out a hand and pulled me up. “Let’s get you another glass of champagne to tide you over until Alex has cleaned up his little mess. Right, Al?”

I climbed out from behind the sofa and let Julian lead me away from Alex, not for the last time. As I walked towards the makeshift bar (right next to the Kelly Brook shrine), I could hear Alex’s shout of frustration rise above the din. “FINE! MIRANDA!” Alex stalked out from his hiding place, the rolled up magazine back in his hand. Standing up, he was even taller than I’d thought, about 6’2″, with a stride that ate up the entire length of the sitting room in a few paces.

Minty sidled up to Julian and me, grabbing my shoulder with something a little like glee upon her face. “This is going to be fun, watch.” The entire room paused to take in the show that their friends were about to put on. “Alex and Miranda can’t figure out if they are madly in love with each other or want to engage in mutually assured destruction. Or both. It’s too funny.”

It didn’t seem to be funny at all to me. Admittedly, I had relatively little experience in affairs of the heart, having only one serious (and truly awful) boyfriend in high school, and nothing at all in college to that point beyond a couple of one-week flings in my sophomore year. I did, however, know how someone could be madly in love with another and want to destroy them — it had nearly happened to me. What I could not fathom was how Alex could be madly in love with Miranda and yet want to kiss me. I was so innocent then, before I trapped myself like a fly in Julian’s amber and Alex’s sap.

Miranda had been standing in the far corner of the room, chatting with Amanda about Glyndebourne (it had been “Julio Cesare” that summer, an opera which I’d never even heard of, though granted I knew little about opera and at that point zero about Glyndebourne). As Alex closed the distance between them, she swivelled to face Julian and placed one slim hand on her chest, mouthing, “Who, me?” with a broad grin. She wanted her showdown with Alex, and she was going to get it.

Alex stomped up to her, thwacking the magazine in his hand. He towered over her, and if I’d been her, I might have turned tail and run. It wasn’t that I felt he really would strike her with the magazine, it was the raw power and frustration that he was clearly controlling through that soft thwap thwap that was terrifying. What if it were unleashed?

“Oh Alex,” she purred, “I’m so glad you’re here at last. Champagne?” She waggled an open bottle of Billecart-Salmon in front of him. Alex grabbed it out of her hand and swallowed three large glugs (at least his Adam’s apple bobbed that many times — I counted).

“You always want a show, don’t you, Miranda?” Alex spread out his arms above his head, still holding the bottle and magazine. “Well, here’s your show, everyone! Miranda, we are over. OVER. I don’t owe you any explanation and I certainly don’t have to take you back because you’re bored now with whatever fresher you lured into your bed last week. You’re jaded and tired and you’re not even 21. Maybe I’m bored with you, had that ever occurred to you? Maybe I want some change, something less likely to cause me flesh wounds.”

And in that moment, Alex began the sealing of my fate, quite by accident, by looking at me momentarily as he finished speaking his mind. The glance did not go unnoticed by Miranda, who glared at me as though I were already her usurper, nor Julian, who could not bear to have his best friend succeed where he had failed, in any endeavor. That look reverberates to this day in the very circumstances we — Alex, Julian and I — still inhabit, the tensions that still expand and contract our connections.

Miranda grabbed the bottle out of Alex’s hand and smacked his face. Alex barely flinched. “Go ahead, Al, go take your fresh new thing” — the girl I wished so badly to be instead of my awkward and foolish self scoffed at me with a toss of her head, and I wilted — “whoever she is, and suck the life out of her until you’re bored with her, too. All you do is take and take, with so little in return. You’ll be lucky if she doesn’t get bored with you first. After all, it’s not like there’s much for you to give these days.”

Alex gripped the magazine tighter. I wanted to reach for him, to try to stop this embarrassment, but I understood I’d only be adding kindling to this conflagration. Julian seemed to sense my agitation and patted my arm lightly. “Don’t worry,” he said in a low tone. “This isn’t about you.” Minty looked warily between Miranda and me, not sure where her loyalty found a home.

“Are you done? Because I’m done.” Alex turned his back on the room and stomped out of the flat, yelling over his shoulder, “Show’s over!” before slamming the door behind him. Miranda shot me a dark glance and walked into the kitchen, followed by Amanda and Charlie.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d seen. The only fights I’d ever been in were with Rachel, of course, and Jenn, back in high school over some ridiculous business about a drama club performance when I’d been cast in a play and she hadn’t. I didn’t have any familiarity with the sort of Grand Guignol drama I’d just witnessed. It was strangely sexy in a way that left me confused — I wanted to run after Alex and throw him to the ground in carnal embrace, even if he ended up bleeding me dry as Miranda claimed he’d done to her.

Julian snapped me out of my haze by handing me a glass of champagne. “Here, have this. Don’t make too much of all that. They’re both prone to amateur dramatics. Miranda’s got hot Spanish blood, and Alex can’t help it, his whole family’s a little…” He made the universal hand signal for “nuts” by his ear. “He’s the sanest by half, which should tell you something. I think we got off to a poor start, by the way. I’m Julian. That was Alex, my best mate, flatmate and… inmate?” He smiled gently. I was struck by how similar our eye colors were — it was like staring into my own. I saw my gaze return upon myself through someone else, distanced but familiar, like regarding yourself in your bedroom mirror through a piece of sea glass.

I smiled back. “Nice to meet you, Julian. I’m Melissa. But you know that.”

“I do. Now, tell me some things I don’t know about California, since I clearly don’t know them all.”

By the end of the evening, I had changed my thoughts about Julian. As Alex had mentioned, people were curious about me, how I ended up in Bristol, what my life was like back in SoCal. And by people, I mean Julian. He had me drawing light character sketches of my parents and the Jen(n)s, my best friend Sean, and of course, Rachel. (Men always want to know more about Rachel, I’ve found.) Julian wanted to learn my thoughts about Britain and the British, and whether I’d ever consider living here in the long term. I laughed at the last of these — though I was enjoying my year abroad so far (and I was only a few weeks in at that point), I was already missing the sun and my family and my car and knowing how everything worked all the time and what the words were for things and how to dress and my friends and how to hold my fork and knife properly without anyone making fun of me. Instead of being offended by this, Julian promised me that “we’re not all bad, the British, we just take some getting used to by Americans.”

And even though I didn’t feel anything talking to Julian that was quite so delicious or forbidden as I’d felt in that moment behind the sofa with Alex, I felt… safe. Relaxed. Comfortable. (Although that might have been the champagne he kept pouring for me.) But it all seemed… too safe after what I’d witnessed with Alex, what I’d felt with Alex. I had expected a kiss from Julian at the end of the night, and even when I only got one on each cheek, I wasn’t completely disappointed, though he left me wanting more. A proper date. I’d given Julian my number and asked him to call me if he wanted to have dinner some time, which felt like quite a grown up thing to say, somehow. What I’d later learn is that Julian brought that scrap of paper home to the flat he shared with Alex and crowed about how he’d won round one that night, and would win every round to follow if Alex wanted to fight.

Alex certainly wants to fight now, having watched his sometime-best friend break my spirit, disorient me, steal the power I had in me to make Alex see brightness and newness and hope in the world. I’m still learning not to flinch, not to second-guess myself, to trust my instincts, to put myself first once in a while. And part of putting myself first was getting what I wanted — Alex at the wedding, stunts or no.

So I took a deep breath, held my beloved’s hand, and told him everything. (Well, not everything, because I was creative with the truth about the date of the call, and I didn’t dare even breathe about Fenn.) I told him about how Julian thought Alex should just send a gift, about how disrespected Julian believed he would be if Alex even showed up, let alone be in the wedding party. I told him that Julian thought everyone would be too uncomfortable to enjoy themselves, and that Alex would be better off going to Scotland early. Alex said nothing, but was getting progressively pinker and pinker in his cheeks. When I got to the part about how Julian was adamant that I be there without Alex, he lost it.

“That fucking coward, who the fuck does that bastard think he is? We’re not chess pieces to be moved about on a bloody board. He can’t bear to see you happy, see me happy, Mel. Can’t stand that he cocked it all up when all he had to be was a fucking human being and love you as you deserved. And now he wants me to not be there for Jamie — Jamie! Someone who stood by me when Minty stole my daughter. And where was Julian back then? Too busy ‘making enough money to be comfortable, old man'” — the Julian voice again — “to listen to my life fall apart. And now he wants to cut me off from my friends, and corner my girlfriend to, what, convince her to leave me? He wanted to fight me all those years ago, and I never put up much of a struggle out of some asinine, misguided sense of loyalty. Some good that loyalty did me over the years. But I’m ready now for that soft little bastard. FUCKER!”

To his credit, Alex only used the word “cunt” one more time in the next 15 minutes of ranting. I guess my influence is starting to rub off on him.