At least, I think, it will probably go viral for her. That should ease her grief.
With one last, loud cough, which comes from the very pit of my pelvic floor, making me exceptionally grateful for my Tena lights, the offending crumb shifts and shoots across the table and I gasp, sucking air into my lungs.
‘Sorry,’ I say as soon as I’m able.
‘No need to apologise,’ Conal says. ‘Are you okay? Did I just leave you breathless again?’ The amusement, now that he knows I am not expired, is there in his voice. The gentle, cheesy way he has of teasing me, while reminding me that he can, and does, quite often leave me breathless.
‘Not this time, big man,’ I say with a smile. ‘This time I was bested by a caramel square.’ I proceed to tell him where I am, and what I’m doing. And, of course, what my mother and Mrs Bishop are up to.
I’m rewarded with a hearty laugh. ‘I love your mum,’ he says. ‘She does right. Embracing all the craic she can.’ He’s right, of course. While never boring, or overly prudish, my mother has always erred on the side of seriousness. That is until losing the love of her life – my beloved daddy – taught her that life is too short and once it’s done, it’s never coming back.
‘You say that now, Conal. But when she becomes a full-on influencer, gets invited to doStrictly, and breaks a hip, you might not think so.’
‘I love how your brain has the full scenario already worked out,’ he says, and the thing is, with Conal, I can hear the undertones in his words. I know when he says that, he is saying ‘I love you, Becks’, and I feel warm and fuzzy inside.
‘It’s just one of my many talents,’ I reply.
‘Indeed.’ I just know he is smiling. We smile a lot. We are in that totally sickening stage of relatively new relationship where we are just happy almost all of the time. ‘And speaking of your many talents, that’s why I was calling. I know we haven’t seen much of each other this week, what with Clara staying with you, and your club meeting, so I just wondered if I could secure a slot in your diary for this weekend? Tonight even?’
I love that he misses me, and of course I miss him too. But I think of the haggard and tired version of me that currently exists and how I just desperately want a long shower and a good night’s sleep tonight and I know I can’t do it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Honestly. But little Miss Clara had me up most of the night and you do not need to spend time with this version of me. I want to be well rested when I see you again.’
‘Okay. Well, tomorrow night?’ He sounds a little disappointed. I’m just about to tell him that’s absolutely fine when he drops the four-word bomb that every woman dreads. ‘We need to talk.’
5
FML
Becca
Nothing – nothing at all in this world, living or dead – strikes fear into my heart quite the same as ‘we need to talk’ does. In my lived experience, ‘we need to talk’ is never good. Ever. Even if everything seems to be okay – as it does with Conal – those four words carry the weight of an atomic bomb ready to detonate.
It was how my now ex-husband Simon broached the whole ‘It’s not you, it’s me. I love you, but I’m not in love with you. I just need to find myself etc, etc’ monologue of bullshit before he walked out on me, and our two children, leaving devastation in his wake.
I still carry the emotional scars from that experience even though I have long since moved on and Simon Cooke no longer has any effect on my nervous system other than to give me the unholy ick. Once my rose-coloured glasses fell from my eyes and I was able to see him for what he was – and more importantly began to see what he very much wasn’t – my healing truly began. But it never quite finished. Several years of counselling have notbeen enough to stop the fear settling deep into my bones at the notion someone ‘needs to talk’.
I am aware that Conal is still talking – I can hear the tone and depth of his voice coming down the line, but I have no idea what he is saying. The special talent he alluded to before – where I can create entire stories from one line of information – is in full swing. He’s talking while I’m sitting in Asda wondering if this break-up is going to destroy my friendship with his sister, Laura.
There would some sort of irony in that – given that it was my split from Simon more than a decade ago that led to a horrible big freeze between Laura and me that we have not long thawed out from.
And now, I could lose her again. I could lose it all. I could be back on the single shelf – a shelf I had been relatively happy to reside on for the last decade until Conal O’Hagan came back into my life. Something tells me that after the joy and love, and yes, the sex, he has brought into my life over the last ten months, I will not find that shelf all that comfortable any more.
Was it something I did? Something I said? Am I awful in bed? I mean, I’m not a prude by any means but could I be more adventurous? Try a bit of light BDSM, or role-play? My face, which is already pretty scarlet thanks to the choking fit, is now roaring red at the very thought. There’s no way I’d be able to take any of that carry-on seriously. I couldn’t be calling him ‘Sir’ or, even worse, ‘Daddy’. The very thought of it is enough to make my vaginawantto atrophy. And as for role-play? This peri-menopausal body was not made for a French maid’s costume.
Shit. I’m really going to get dumped, aren’t I? Again. In fairness I’ve only been dumped once before, but it was by my husband so the battle scars still sting a bit and I don’t think it would take too much to reopen them.
‘Becks?’ Conal’s voice cuts through my internal meltdown. ‘Would that be okay, then? We can take the dogs for a walk around the park.’
I nod, momentarily forgetting that he cannot see me, before I mutter a fairly unenthusiastic ‘Yes, okay.’
‘Great,’ he replies with the very opposite tone in his voice. ‘I’ll text you when we’re good to go. Lazlo will love seeing Daniel again.’
‘He will,’ I say as my brain runs through a hundred different shitty scenarios, all of them ending in me residing in Dumpsville. I wonder what Lazlo and Daniel will think if their little furry family becomes a broken home?
A peel of laughter distracts me, and I turn to see my mother and Mrs Bishop seemingly being manhandled by a burly security guard while they giggle like naughty schoolgirls. I swear to God if I find out my mother has been shoplifting it might just be the end of me.
‘Conal, I have to go,’ I say, not waiting for a response before I end the call and rush over to the scene of the commotion.
