Page 159 of What's The Catch?

He nods, halting the car as we hit the end of a queue again.

‘I think I fell a tiny bit in love with you, even then,’ he admits, a little sheepish. ‘Is that weird to say?’

The words never fail to immerse me in a comforting glow, shrouding me in inescapable warmth, and the memory of Elliot saying ‘I love you’ for the first time sweeps through me.

I was sitting with my laptop on his sofa early on a Friday morning when he rushed over to me in his suit to say goodbye for the day. We exchanged kisses and blurred ‘see you laters’only for it to be followed by a rushed ‘I love you’ under his breath as he made to leave, immediately freezing in place, slowly turning back to me to see if I’d noticed.

I had. My jaw fell ever-so-slightly open.

‘That wasn’t really how I’d been planning to say that,’ he said with wide eyes. I attacked his mouth and cheeks with kisses, leaping on him without restraint, whispering ‘I love you’ into his mouth. He groaned as he undressed me with impatient hands and pushed me back on to the sofa. He ended up being late for work.

It was bizarre and unplanned but it was also undeniablyus.

In the last year we’ve gotten into the habit of spending our weekends at each other’s places. Elliot comes to Brighton more often, claiming to love the city as much as he loves London, while I crave the privacy and serenity of his own flat. There have been countless walks on Brighton beach, visits to London pub gardens and heavenly weekends where we stayed resolutely in Elliot’s bed and had food delivered to satiate our hunger between embraces. Hennie joins us in Brighton for movie nights and the boys come to Elliot’s on Saturdays for hungover breakfasts. Every single second of it has been bliss.

‘Maybe weird for some,’ I reply with a chuckle. ‘But I love you enough for it to be fine with me.’

He kisses my knuckles again. ‘Good.’

Out of nowhere, the rain starts to pound against the windscreen so heavily it completely obscures the view of the road and I gasp at the volume of it against the roof.

‘Still think it’s not going to rain this weekend?’ Elliot asks with a knowing look.

‘Yeah, this is great,’ I reply with confidence. ‘It’s just getting the rain out of its system.’

He stares at the sky with skepticism.

‘We’re going to be drenched,’ he mutters under his breath.

He’s absolutely right.

It does, in fact, rain heavily for the entirety of the festival. We spend every minute of it soaked with rain and, eventually, covered in mud.

It’s the greatest weekend of my life anyway.