If You Love Me: True love. True terror. True story.

The next morning, Joe drove me to work, where I spent the rest of the day trying to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing. And when sex was added to the agenda that evening, it was as perfect as every other aspect of our new relationship seemed to be.

For the next two weeks, we spent almost every night together. I was supposed to be flat hunting, which was why I’d been staying in my friend Cara’s flat since the day of the riots, when I first spoke to Joe. So I didn’t have much more than a suitcase full of clothes to transport when I moved in with him a couple of weeks after our first date at the bar. It sounds crazy now, to have taken such a major step after knowing him for such a short period of time. But it just felt right. Whatever we tell ourselves, I think most of us do hope we’ve got a soul mate out there somewhere and that one day we’ll find each other and live happily ever after. So when you think you’ve actually met your soul mate, why would you wait?

Although Jack and I had been together for years and I did love him, at no time during the course of our relationship did I ever feel what I felt with Joe almost from day one. When Jack and I split up, I’d got involved with Anthony almost by accident, because I was hurt and lonely and had begun to wonder if anyone would ever care about me again. For the last couple of years before I met Joe, and particularly after Jack dumped me, I hadn’t wanted to feel anything. Joe and I didn’t tell people at work that we were seeing each other. But that was our choice – at least, I think it was ours, rather than his, although I can’t really remember now. I did tell my friends, though, and was touched by how happy they were for me.

When I met Joe, it felt as though I’d been swept up by a whirlwind and that, suddenly, I had a future again. When we were together in the evenings we talked almost incessantly, and about everything, including when and where we would get married – ‘I know the perfect place for our wedding,’ Joe told me – where we would live, and how many children we would have.

The ‘perfect place for our wedding’ turned out to be a small town in France Joe had visited with his wife a couple of years after they’d got married. He described to me how he had stood on the steps of a church there one day during their holiday, looking out towards the mountains, and felt a sense of peace he’d never experienced before or since. ‘I can’t wait for you to see it,’ he said. And I told him I couldn’t wait either, while silently berating myself for wishing we could get married somewhere he hadn’t already visited with the wife he would first have to divorce.

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