“I’ve had enough,” I say.
“Are you sure?” he replies.
I nod. “Yeah, I can feel my arteries clogging.”
He smiles, and whatever it was in his expression fades. “God, I love how disciplined you are. It’s so sexy.” He reaches over and skewers a plump sausage from my plate, dropping it onto his own.
I spend the rest of the meal watching George finish his food andmost of mine, allowing myself another slimline gin and tonic while I wait. The second drink has me eyeing the dessert menu, but George’s praise about my discipline is ringing in my ears. I push the menu aside, wanting to keep making him happy.
By the time we return to our cottage Airbnb, I’m light-headed and bone-tired. It’s been a long, active day, and I probably shouldn’t have tried to show off by declining to eat half of my meal. We discard our mud-clad shoes and shrug off our waterproof coats. The sofa beckons and we collapse onto it, laughing as our simultaneous bounce on the material threatens to throw us both off.
“What a perfect day,” George says.
“It was, wasn’t it?”
He snakes an arm around my waist, kisses my shoulder. “I can think of one way to make it even more perfect.”
It feels uncharitable to deny him sex—I rarely do—but my head is spinning. What I need is to fall asleep watching a cheesy film and to wake up refreshed. I tell him as much.
“Baby,” he says, climbing on top of me, pushing my legs apart. “Please.”
I whack him lightly on the arm and laugh. “I’m not your fuck doll. Off.”
He climbs off but looks visibly chastened.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What for?” he asks, tight smile. He gets to his feet and claps his big hands together. “Right, a bottle of wine and that film you were talking about?”
“Sounds perfect.”
We make our way through a bottle of red surprisingly swiftly, George joining in as I take swipes at the bad acting and clichés on the small screen. We’re good at snarky telly watching, although Georgedoesn’t like it when I take swipes at the more boneheaded comments on the men’s podcasts he listens to. I protest when he uncorks the second bottle—my empty belly has sent the booze rushing to my head—but we’re having fun, which was the whole point of this holiday, and so the second quickly disappears as we roll about laughing on the sofa. Unsurprisingly, I don’t make it to the end of the third, my eyelids growing heavy as we approach the film’s ending. It’s everything I wanted.
It would be difficult to pinpoint exactly when it is that I fall asleep, but the moment I wake up will be forever seared into my memory. The first thing that’s immediately clear is that George is inside me, panting in my ear. My head is filled with painful static and it takes me a little while to figure out everything else: where I am, what’s happening. Slowly, my vision comes into focus, the vague shape of the bedroom nightstand solidifying before me. I remember that we’re in the Airbnb. We were watching the film. I fell asleep, and at some point, George must have carried me upstairs.
There’s a clock on the nightstand, red numbering blaring out “1:09.” The side of my face is pressed firmly into the hotel-soft pillow and it’s all I can really see. It’s not immediately clear to me whether George intends for me to have woken up or not, and that not knowing shocks me into silence. Distress begins to build and dislodges my stuck voice. At 1:10 I say,
“George?”
It’s more of a question than anything else. I feel him falter, then push on.
“Oh, baby,” he says. “You feel amazing.”
I’m still incredibly drunk—that’s obvious. It occurs to me that we might have started this together, when I was awake, so I don’t say anything else, just lie there until he finishes with a big grunt at 1:14. It’s only five minutes in total, and when it’s over, he holds me to him andkisses the canvas of my back. In this specific moment, it feels normal, like normal couple sex. I just happened to fall asleep in the middle of it. I wouldn’t be the first, nor the last.
It’s only in the morning, when I ask him gentle probing questions about the night before, really looking at him this time, that I realize he knew I didn’t want to have sex with him, knew that I was sleeping, knew that I’d wake up and know he knew I didn’t want it. There’s an ugly word that I’m scared to ascribe to it. But when I look it up hunched over my phone with a hollow feeling consuming all other emotion—the definition, the law—it fits perfectly. And when I turn my eyes back to the night before, to the past year or two, I understand how much I’ve missed. I understand that last night was a punishment, a reminder to know my place in the shape of us. I can almost hear the brainless bark of one of his podcasters reminding him,Sometimes you’ve just got to show your girlfriend who’s boss. I feel a fool for not having seen it sooner, that hardness at his center, that need to dominate masked as willingness to support.
But I don’t let him see any of this, don’t say any of this to him. Because I’ve realized that I’m not the only monster in my relationship.
14
Now
Thoughts are clanging together in my head, loud chaos. I’ve always prided myself on being able to keep my emotions in check, but suddenly, there are too many for me to keep hold of, each one slipping through my fingers. James must see the maelstrom of feelings on my face because he squeezes my hand, still tucked in his, and places a reassuring palm on my thigh.
“Please say something,” he says.
“W-what do you mean? When you say letters…”
