LOVE IS IN DISGUISE: Verne Estate Series, Book 3

5. MARK

My heart is beating too fast.

I have thought of this moment dozens of times, hundreds maybe. I had the feeling that it would be something special, out of the ordinary. And yet, I realise that this is just one moment in my life, like any other. At least for now.

In a few years, when I think about it, it will certainly have become more grandiose. Patinated by the years, it will take on a whole new importance. It will certainly be altered by a somewhat failing memory, or even a desire to spruce things up. After all, who doesn’t love pretty stories?

In the one I’ll tell my children, my grandchildren, I’ll be more feverish, more playful, more uncertain.

But today, although I’m sure of myself, sure of the answer Jenny is going to give me, my heart is beating too fast, because I’m going to have to lay bare my feelings, and that’s not something that I do often. But I owe her that, I owe it to us. What would a marriage proposal be without a sincere and eloquent speech? If there ever was a day when I had to deliver everything in my heart to her, it was today.

I light the last candles and turn to contemplate my work. Our apartment has nothing of its usual appearance. The white walls have ocher hues thanks to the glow of dozens of flickering flames. I could have made my request elsewhere, at a restaurant, for example, but since I have one myself, the idea struck me as inappropriate. I thought about another place, but none seemed more obvious to me than this one. This is the place where we meet every day to just be us. It shelters our love, our arguments, our laughter and all our daily life. And then, I remembered this old series that she watches regularly. The one where Chandler kneels among hundreds of candles to ask Monica to marry him. I know she has seen this episode many times, that she sometimes puts it on in the background to clean or cook. But during this scene, she stops all activity and her eyes are riveted on the screen. When it’s finished, they’re still wet. I remember one time I teased her about it. She rebuked me by justifying herself:

“It’s so romantic, don’t you think?”

So here I am in the middle of a forest of candles that would scare a fire prevention manager, ready to kneel to ask the one who has shared my life for six years already to marry me.

I just hear the key turn in the lock. My heart jumps in my chest. My hands are moist, I’m sweating. It must be said that the candles raised the temperature of the apartment by at least ten degrees. The collar of my shirt, especially worn for the occasion, tightens on me. I have difficulty swallowing. Everything looked so easy for good old Chandler. It just goes to show that television is still different from reality.

Jenny’s slender figure appears in the doorway. She hasn’t noticed anything, she takes the time to take off her shoes and hang her coat in the hallway. It’s when she drops her purse on the floor that she looks up and realises something.

Her mouth opens in amazement. This is exactly the reaction I expected. She looks around the room, her mouth still open, before resting her eyes on me. I smile at her.

She questions me with a look, I try to smile more to reassure her. My throat is tied, I find it hard to talk to her. When I finally manage to, I let out in a strangled voice:

“Come here.”

This is it, this is the fateful moment. The next few seconds are what will rock my whole life.

I stare, confused, at the woman I thought I knew better than anyone. She avoids my eyes. I blink, thinking that maybe this is just a bad dream, but no, it looks like I’m wide awake.

“Since when?” I ask in a voice so calm that it surprises me.

Deep inside me, I’m twisting. I both long for the answer to this question, and at the same time, I don’t want it. Who would want to know that? She betrayed me. I had complete confidence in her. Did I need to have all the details? But when it comes to pain, it’s hard to be reasonable.

Jenny has tears in her eyes. This detail irritates me. What right does she have to cry? It is I who am hurt, devastated, not her. She doesn’t speak.

“Since when?” I repeated.

This time around, the anger is palpable in my words. I clench my fists, the urge to hit something itches.

“A few weeks,” she admits in a whisper.

An icy shiver runs through me.

“Do I know him?”

She nods.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and take a deep breath. I need to calm down. But I want to know. Men’s faces march past me, but none make sense. It’s normal, I never doubted her, so why imagine that one of them could betray me?

“Who is it?”

I’m afraid of the answer. Afraid to realise that all of this could have happened right under my nose without me seeing it coming. Yes, I’ve been blind. Only ten minutes ago, I had one knee on the floor and my heart in my mouth. How could things have gone wrong so quickly?

“I’m sorry, Mark.”

I close my eyes. I don’t want excuses, I want answers.

“Who is it?”

She takes a breath.

“Lucas.”

Two syllables which at first don’t mean anything. It takes a few seconds for me to understand.

“Lucas… like the singer of the group that plays at the café on weekends?”

Another nod.

To say that I fell from the clouds is an understatement. Lucas, the f*****g musician who comes to play in my restaurant. Did the guy I pay to perform on Saturday nights come up with nothing better than banging my girlfriend behind my back?

I need to sit down. I stagger to the sofa. I put my elbows on my knees and my palms on my face. I feel the onset of a migraine coming. I massage my temples. I’m suddenly exhausted.

Jenny suddenly seemed seized with the urge to justify herself:

“It wasn’t planned, it just happened. I fell in love.”

She fell in love?

“You’re in love,” I repeated as if to absorb what she just said. “You met this guy three weeks ago, and you’re in love?”

“I told you, it just happened like that,” she sniffs.

“You got to know this f*****g guitarist less than a month ago, and you’re ready to give up everything we’ve built for years for… for him?”

I don’t know if I’m talking to her or myself right now. She doesn’t answer. A few seconds of heavy silence stretch between us, then quietly, she declares:

“There has been nothing between us for a while now.”

This remark brings me out of my daze, it hits me like an arrow in the heart. I lift my head and stare at Jenny. Her small and familiar figure that I have so often taken in the crook of my arms. Her brown hair, which she wore long when I met her, and which has now been cut to the shoulders for a few years. Her green eyes in which I thought I saw my future. This person I thought I knew by heart.

“I don’t agree. I love you.”

I run a hand over my face.

“I was… I was going to ask you to marry me, I…”

“I know. That’s why I had to tell you the whole truth.”

This is where reality grabs me. A flood of anger pours in again, I jump up from the couch and take a step forward in her direction. She recoils. She saw that a change had taken place in me, she understood that the shock had passed, the moment is now on the attack.

“Tell me, Jenny: if I hadn’t been like an i***t a few minutes ago with one knee on the floor, how long would this masquerade have lasted?”

Her mouth forms an O. She’s speechless.

“Go ahead, explain it to me. Would you have stayed here and made me believe everything was fine? Would you have gone to bed every night by my side, would you have kissed me? How many times would we have made love when you had someone else in mind? Tell me, Jenny, how much longer?”

“I… I thought I would talk to you.”

I chuckle.

“You thought! But that’s too kind of you! How would you have done it anyway? One evening in front of the TV? Or maybe at breakfast? Why not during a family meal with my parents? You would have told me: Can you pass me the salt? By the way, I’ve been cheating on you for weeks with the loser who sings in your restaurant!”

“He’s not a loser! He’s talented”

“Sure, crawling around in the shadows like a roach takes courage. That’ll take him to the top!” I shout sarcastically.

“He’s not a roach! He has ambition!”

I feel like she just dealt me ​​a fatal blow. My pride takes it and falls to the floor; she blames me for a lack of ambition...

“Sorry?”

She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, then begins:

“He wants to succeed. He has dreams, and he does everything to make them come true. You, you want to stay until the end of your days in Locron where you grew up, with your parents and your perfect sister right next door.”

The fact that she talks about Cora bothers me. I glare at her, there’s no way she’ll say anything bad about my twin.

“You’re content with your little cafe, with the same routine every day without wondering what you could do better.”

Something is breaking inside me. She knows how important the Café de la Place is to me. Of course, it was my parents who managed it for years. But the place doesn’t look anything like what it was then. I completely transformed it. I fought for change when everyone except Cora didn’t believe me capable. Against the bankers, the suppliers, who didn’t trust a guy in his twenties with a dubious past. That’s the problem with small towns, nobody forgets the bullshit you did when you weren’t even of voting age. I could have gone elsewhere, started all over again, it would have been easier. But this is where I wanted to develop my restaurant project. Here, because I’m attached to the region, the food that I wanted to do. Not to mention all the people who never believed in me. I wanted to prove to them that the Tuffin twin who was taken for a failure was capable of more than they expected. And I realized at that moment that I was convinced that Jenny, even if she didn’t say it, was proud of me. Now, she tells me just the opposite.

I’m choking, I need air. I run my hand through my hair and step back. That’s it, I have to get out of here. I walk towards the entrance of the apartment, I vaguely hear Jenny ask:

“Where are you going?”

I’m on autopilot, but I still have the instinct to pick up my keys from the hallway, before putting them in my pocket. I open the door.

“Mark! Hold on!”

I don’t look back. I tumble down the stairs, I have to get out of this building as quickly as possible. When I finally find myself on the sidewalk, I inhale a gulp of air that stings my lungs and skin. I’m out here with no jacket on and I’m only wearing this stupid shirt she gave me for Christmas because she thought I would like it. But the bite of the cold is welcome, rather than the dripping atmosphere of pseudo-romanticism that I had wanted to create in the apartment.

I start to walk. I vaguely hear the door of the building slam behind me. Jenny is on my heels. I accelerate, I don’t want to see her anymore. I need to think, alone. I don’t know where I’m going, but the streets of the village all seem to lead to the same point. Place De Gaulle, the largest in Locron, its heart and the place where my restaurant is located.

The Café de la Place will certainly be my refuge and my only love after this evening. But for now, I’ll avoid it. But as I pass nearby, musical notes ring out, and that asshole Lucas’s bleating reaches my ears. It’s like a discharge that freezes me. This asshole has already taken the one I thought was the woman of my life, to think that he’s right now in my restaurant seems unbearable to me.

I fork and accelerate. Jenny is still behind me it looks like since I hear her screaming at me:

“Mark! No!”

My ears are ringing, my blood is pulsing at full speed. I push the door which closes the terrace in this season. I half hustle people who are coming out, I don’t apologise. Someone is trying to talk to me. It’s like that every night, there are always familiar faces. But I don’t stop, I suddenly feel invested with a mission, driven by a rage that doesn’t seem improper to me. My fists tighten, I take a determined step forward. In the space at the back which serves as a stage, Lucas’s eyes meet mine, and a flash of panic distorts his features. He understood that I wasn’t here to work, he knows that I know. The notes of a Beatles song die in his throat in a gurgling of terror. My arm goes up, his eyes widen and the next second I break his nose.