I also wondered if Cheryl would dump me if we didn’t now move on to a sexual relationship, and how I’d feel if she did, and if I would ever have another chance to have sex before I died. I even snuggled up to Dawn one night just to check she’d still push me away. She did it tactfully, and with humour, but push me away she did.
Finally, I wondered if I’d look back from the decrepitude of old age and regret that I hadn’t seized the day.
When I finally said yes, I fell in love with Cheryl instantly – fell in love while I still had my dick in her. Maybe that’s why they call it ‘making love’. At least, at the time I thought I loved her, though that probably only goes to show what a stupid word ‘love’ is. It was nothing like the way I’d felt about Dawn, way back when, and with hindsight it didn’t have the depth or heft of how I felt about Dawn even during the lowest ebbs of our relationship.
But Cheryl was pretty and sexy and fun. She gave, it turned out, excellent head, and she gave it with joy. She arched her back and screamed the roof down when she came, too, and these were things that made me feel like a real man – whatever that means. It made my heart race to see her and sometimes it gave me a hard-on just to think about her – she was only the second woman I’d ever slept with, after all.
I’d be sitting, in theory watchingGoggleboxwith Dawn, in reality thinking about sex with Cheryl, and I’d have to position a cushion to hide my erection. That truly was like being seventeen again.
We started to go to her flat. She was single by then and, for shagging, the flat was both more comfortable and more discreet.
Her place was small, new and girly – a sort of opposite of home, where things had morphed into junk-store chic. Many of Cheryl’s things were fake leather, and most of them seemed to be pink.
She had an enormous Samsung TV that was rarely switched off, and, for music, a shitty Bluetooth speaker that was rarely on. She had inspirational art on the lounge wall –Live Well, Laugh Oftenand, in the bathroom,Life Blesses Us Every Day. She had surprisingly expensive tastes in glassware but one hundred per cent plastic pot plants all over the place because she had, she claimed, ‘purple fingers’. I’d questioned that the first time she’d said it and she’d explained, ‘Well purple’s the opposite of green, innit?’
This is going to sound stupid but, in the interests of honesty, I’ll say it anyway: I loved all of it. Even her naff-ness.Especiallyher naff-ness. Being there to witness it felt young and fresh and attractive.
We started going away for weekends – a spa in the Lake District, a hotel in Edinburgh, one-nighters in Scarborough and Devon. As cover, I named business meetings, team-building sessions and conferences, and sometimes these were even real. It was simply that I rarely attended any of the events. I was too busy banging Cheryl in the shower.
For the most part, it wasn’t that complicated to keep it all hidden. Dawn, as far as I could tell, was uninterested to the point that I sometimes wondered if she was conspiring to make it all possible.
Then one day as we were driving home – my knob actually sore from too much sex – Cheryl shifted in her seat and turned off the radio.
‘Can I talk to you about something?’ she asked. She slid one hand down my inner thigh.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Anything.’
‘So, you know how I’m on the pill,’ she said. ‘And you know how I’m nearly forty? Well, I’m thinking that maybe I want a kid.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘OK…’ My breath caught in my throat.Windscreen, air-freshener, Cheryl’s hand.
‘I mean, you like kids, don’t you?’ she asked.
I laughed a bit at that. Lucy’s horror years had flashed through my mind’s eye the instant she’d said the word kid, but I’d countered them with images of her and Lou as cute toddlers on the beach. How could you even begin to sum up how you felt about all of that? Certainly not with a yes or a no.
‘You don’t?’ Cheryl asked, confused by my snigger.
‘It’s just…’ I said, glancing at her and smiling. ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that, isn’t it?’
‘I knowthat,’ she said. ‘I ain’t stupid.’
‘I didn’t think for one minute that you were,’ I said.
‘And I know you’ve got two already, and I know you’re pushing fifty and—’
‘I’m fifty-four,’ I said, interrupting her. I was surprised that she didn’t know that.
‘Oh,’ Cheryl said, looking shocked, then, ‘I thought you were forty-nine but whatever. And I know you’re not gonna leave her…’
I glanced sideways at her and thought – genuinely, for the first time ever –Well, I might. The kids were long gone by then, with Lou working for Activision in London, and Lucy and Alek trying for babies over in Ashford. Dawn and I no longer seemed to share a great deal – though how much of that was my fault, it was hard to tell. But she no longer wanted to do anything much with me. The bike, the car, days out, sex, none of it really interested her. Most of the time she was so wrapped up with her mother or the kids, or Wayne or Shelley, or her latest lost cause asylum seeker, that I suspected she didn’t think about me at all.
‘You wouldn’t leave her, would you,’ Cheryl said – it was more of a statement than a question. All the same, she was daring me to contradict her.
I shrugged and looked back at the road. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
‘I have,’ she said. ‘I think about it all the time.’
‘I didn’t know that. You never said.’
