Aspen looked up at him through her eyelashes. “Do you like the idea of me sleeping with other guys?”
“No,” he said, quite honestly.
“Do you want to sleep with other women?”
“Where would I get the energy from?”
She grinned. “Then it looks like you’re in a relationship with me, yes.” She twisted her noodles around her fork. “How does that make you feel?”
There was a slight tension to the question. She knew, of course, about his ex-wife, and though he had shared hardly any details, he suspected Aspen was also aware of how quite utterly the breakup had overturned his life. It was hard to spend any time with Jones andnotnotice this. He hadformerly marriedwritten all over him, from the clothes he wore to the tragically small collection of plates in his bachelor pad’s cupboards.
“Good,” he said, after some thought.
She laughed. “Your straightforwardness is extremely sexy, do you know that?”
“I’ve definitely not been told that before,” he said, and then winced at himself—it was a thoughtless reference to his ex. Whydid hedothat? He knew Aspen didn’t like it, and he wouldn’t, either, in her shoes.
Her smile did drop a little. “I really appreciate it,” she said, after a moment. “The straightforwardness.” She glanced at her phone, which had flashed up with a new message. Not work, though, not someone going into labor—she put it back down again, but her expression remained distracted.
“All OK?” Jones asked.
“Yes! Yes, sorry—you have my undivided attention,” she said, refocusing on him.
He felt it, too—Aspen could really bathe you in her spotlight when she wanted to, one of those people who made you feel like youmattered. But the beam faltered, and her eyes weren’t quite as warm as usual.
“Sorry,” she said, picking the phone up again. “It’s my sister. The baby’s still so little, and she’s having a bit of a hard time, do you mind if I…”
“Of course,” he said.
She squeezed his shoulder and let her hand linger there as she moved away from the table. The contact made his skin tingle. He’d gotten so lucky with her—she was caring and thoughtful as well as fun and sexy. “What genie lamp did you rub to land that one?” his mate from the bar had asked the week before, and he’d laughed, but shedidseem almost too good to be true.
—
A month or so later, Jones noticed to his surprise that life with Aspen was still rolling along very smoothly. In fact, he was feeling quite—dare he say it—happy.
He was meeting Aspen at an auction event for a perinatal mental health charity she was involved with, hosted at a communityspace down the road from the hospital. He was late—held up at the bar, some drunk arsehole had smashed up a toilet tank—and walked into the event expecting to find it packed with minglers. But it was sparse, and too bright; lots of polished pine on show and zero ambience. His eyes found Aspen within seconds in the thin crowd, her red hair glowing, her elegant neck holding a rather stubbornly raised chin.
He headed to the bar for a beer before going over to her—she was talking to someone gray haired and important-looking anyway. As he waited for his drink, there it was: a quiet bumblebee hum of contentment in his belly. Strange. It hadn’t even been a particularly good day. Why was he feeling so cheerful?
“Hey,” he said to Aspen, when she’d made her polite excuses and he could steal her away for a kiss. “This is great.”
“Don’t lie,” she said, with spirit. “It’s shit.”
He barked a laugh. “It’s not shit. It’s just too big a space and the lighting’s not right.”
“No amount of ambient lighting is going to make anyone give a crap about women’s healthcare,” Aspen said, knocking back her drink and stalking toward the bar. “Nobodycares. Women are half of people! More than half! I was just chatting to someone whose research is on endometriosis and it was so depressing—she’s going to have to change tack because she just can’t get funding.”
Jones gestured to the bartender to get Aspen another drink, wondering whether he should confess that he didn’t know what endometriosis was. He rarely engaged with this sort of charitable thing, not because he didn’t care, but because he found it near-excruciating to expose himself to the raw inadequacy of humanity when he could do so little about it. He’d flail, make huge donations he couldn’t afford, feel uselessly miserable. As it was, he was already planningto bid much more than he should on a cruise holiday this evening, having read a traumatic birth story pinned up by the bar. Why was the world so bitterly cruel?
“I’m sorry,” he said instead. “I’d be furious all the time if I was a woman.”
Aspen looked at him in surprise, and then laughed.
“I kind of am, actually,” she said, looping her arm through his.
“Are you?” he said, grabbing their drinks with a thank-you to the bartender. “You’re always so positive.”
“I suppose I just repress it. Don’t worry, society taught me how from a very young age.”
