She adored everything about him and he seemed (it was a miracle, really!) to adore everything about her.

This was the boyfriend she’d dreamed about when she was fifteen.

This was like, it!

They were going on a picnic. A romantic picnic by the harbor that he had organized and she was wearing a new dress that she was swirling for him and he was laughing at her swirling and then he told her he loved her.

He meant it. She could tell that he hadn’t planned to say it. It had just come out of his mouth. It was an involuntary I love you, which meant it was the genuine article.

“I love you too!” she said and they smiled at each other foolishly and had a lingering, lovely kiss against his kitchen counter.

About twenty minutes later, they were ready to go out when they remembered the bottle opener. Marcus opened the top drawer and made a “tsk” sound. “It’s not here.”

“Oh,” said Gemma, who was still feeling woozy and wonderful. “I put it away last night. Didn’t I put it in that drawer there?”

“Clearly you didn’t.”

“Oh.” She leaned over to look in the drawer and suddenly he slammed it shut, so she had to pull her hand back fast. He yelled so loudly that it was physical, like a blow to her chest, “For f**k’s sake, Gemma, where did you put it? I’ve told you at least five f**king times where it goes!”

It was just so unexpected.

“Why,” she asked, and it was a bit difficult to breathe, “are you yelling?”

The question enraged him. “I’m not,” he yelled, “fucking yelling, you silly bitch!”

He slammed drawers open and shut with such force that she was backing out of the kitchen thinking, My God, he’s gone crazy!

Then, “Why did you put it there?” and he lifted the bottle opener out of the wrong drawer and put it in the picnic basket and said in a perfectly normal voice, “Right, let’s go!”

Her legs were shaking.

“Marcus?”

“Mmmm?” He carried the basket out of the kitchen, collecting his house keys from the table. “Yeah?” He smiled at her.

“You were just yelling at me like a complete maniac.”

“No, I wasn’t. I just got a bit irritated when I couldn’t find the bottle opener. You’ve just got to put it in the right drawer. Now are we going on this picnic or not?”

“You called me a silly bitch.”

“I did not. Come on now. You’re not going to be one of those fragile, sensitive types, are you? I don’t want to have to walk on eggshells. That used to drive me mad with Liz.”

Liz was his ex-girlfriend, and, up until now, she had represented a very pleasing element in their relationship. “Oh, she couldn’t have been that bad,” Gemma would say happily whenever Marcus brought up one of Liz’s faults. Liz had lived with Marcus for two years and was a bit of a loser. Attractive enough, but she didn’t have Gemma’s legs and she was a sulk, a prissy girl, always nagging. Not as smart as Gemma. Gemma didn’t want to lose that enjoyable feeling of gentle superiority whenever Liz’s name came up.

Plus, she knew she did have a tendency to be oversensitive. Her sisters had been telling her about this tendency all her life.

Perhaps she was overreacting. People got angry sometimes.

And so it began.

They went on the picnic and at first she was a little tense but then he made her laugh and she made him laugh and it was another wonderful night, in a string of wonderful nights. The next day when Cat said to her, “So how was your night with the big hunk?” she said, “He told me he loved me! Involuntarily!”

There was no need to ruin the lovely picture she could see reflected in her sisters’ eyes by telling them a silly story about a bottle opener. So she pressed it down, brushed it away, crumpled it up.

And she would have forgotten all about it, if a few weeks later, it hadn’t happened again.

This time there was sand on her feet when she got in his car.

Well.

He loved his car—and he’d been under so much pressure at work and she should really have washed her feet more carefully.

Selfish. Stupid. Lazy. Did she just not care? Did she just not listen? He pushed her out of the car, and it was her own fault for being so clumsy that she dragged her foot along the gravel parking lot, ripping a chunk of skin off her big toe.

There was a family in the parking lot at the beach, two little boys with pink-zinked noses and foam surfboards under their arms and a mum with a flowery straw hat and a dad with a beach umbrella. The little boys stared, and the parents hurried them along, as Marcus roared and swore and thumped his fist against the car.

Afterward, she put her head back against the seat, closed her eyes, and felt grimy with a strangely compelling sort of shame.

Marcus was singing along to a song on the radio, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “Good day, hey?” he said, reaching over to pat her on the leg. “How’s that toe of yours, you poor little thing. We’ll have to get a Band-Aid on it.”

Sometimes it happened every day for a week. Sometimes a whole month would pass without incident. It was never in front of anyone they knew. With their families and friends, he was charming and adoring, holding her hand, laughing affectionately at her jokes. It was a dirty little secret that they shared, like a peverse sexual habit. Imagine if they knew, Gemma would think, imagine if they ever saw, how shocked they would be, when they think we’re normal and nice, just like them.