‘I liked it there. I used to go as a kid, and I wanted to share that with Tom. I remember we had grilled fish for lunch, and a beer. In the time I’d known him Tom never drank, said he didn’t like the taste of alcohol. But he didn’t mind if I did, and I was feeling great; here I was on a sunny day, out by my favourite beach with the man I was starting to think I loved. So I had a beer with lunch, and he joined me. I didn’t think much of it, but then he ordered another one, and another. I was a bit surprised, but he seemed happy and we were talking about the future and … Well, you can probably guess what happened. We were heading back. I was a little tipsy but it had hardly seemed to touch Tom. At the station we bumped into an old colleague of mine, a guy I’d worked with a few years before and we’d chatted for a few minutes whilst we waited for our train, just the usual kind of thing. Tom changed during the ride back; he got quiet, sullen almost, and I wondered if he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe the fish, or just the fact he’d had a few beers and wasn’t really used to it. So anyway, later that evening, I was getting a glass of wine from the fridge, and I closed the door and got a real shock: he was standing in the kitchen doorway and there was something different about him, about his face. I asked if he was all right, and he just lost it. I mean full-on-crazy lost it. He started ranting and raving, accusing me of fucking the old work colleague. That’s not normal, right? You might say “seeing” or “sleeping with”, but he was insistent that I was “fucking” the guy behind his back. So we argued. I told him he was just being paranoid, that he needed to calm down, but of course that just made him madder. But he didn’t hit me that night. The next morning he was so sorry, apologized over and over, begged me to forgive him. He blamed the alcohol, said that he couldn’t handle it, which is why he didn’t drink, and that I wasn’t to let him drink again.