Celine turned off the bedside lamp. ‘So what’s your limit? In theory.’

‘I mean, it sounds old-fashioned.’ Luke paused, as if waiting for her to pull out the rest of his words from him. ‘But if I thought we’d never get married. Or that level of commitment. If I knew that wasn’t going to happen, then – yeah. In theory.’

‘When you say it won’t happen, who’s decided?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘If you’re a mindreader, you know that’s going to cause way more problems than it solves.’

‘I didn’t say it won’t…’ Luke trailed off. ‘I mean, but it won’t, though. Marriage will never happen between us. And that’s not a problem necessarily. It would be silly to stop when it’s going well. But we’re not going to end up together.’

A pause, for which Celine felt responsible. The cat mewed from the next room.

Celine said at last: ‘If you really think that, we should break up right now.’

No response from Luke.

She added: ‘By your own criteria.’

Silence.

‘But,’ Celine said, ‘sometimes you say things because you want me to contradict you. And it’s fine if you don’t and you want me to agree.’

Still no answer.

‘Tell me what to say,’ she said.

‘Say what you want.’

‘I guess one of us has to. Like – I think back a lot to when you said you didn’t want a relationship. And I said, eventually I want one with someone, but not a guy I’ve just met, so for now we’re good. Then later I said if you still didn’t want anything serious, we should stop. And you said you’d changed your mind. Sometimes I think you’d always wanted to be with me. You just couldn’t acknowledge it until I did.’

Another pause.

‘If I need to say things aloud before you’ll even say them in your head,’ Celine said, ‘then that’s not my favourite quality of yours. It’s not an aspect I’d bring to a desert island if I could only take three. But I’d still have a hard time choosing. Actually, I’d find it impossible, picking only three things. Probably I love all of you. And I think for me that means I want to be with you forever.’

Then Luke asked.

The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan (£16.99, Orion) is out 25 May 2023.

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