It was my turn to snort with amusement.
When we were finished with lunch, we ordered coffees and took them back to our office so we could start making a plan of attack. I swivelled my chair around to face Sadie’s desk-plank so we couldwork side-by-side, me scribing as we both worked off my laptop on a document in the new shared drive we’d just set up, but after the fifth time our chair wheels got tangled, we decided to call it and – like the rest of our colleagues – work from home.
Back in our serviced apartment, we started off sitting at the tiny kitchenette table, tried the uncomfortable armchairs, and eventually ended up spending the afternoon working side by side on the bed. ‘So much for not fighting anymore,’ Sadie said heavily, loose strands of hair sticking to my shirtsleeve as she looked at the plan on my laptop screen. ‘All we’re going to do is fight.’
The only way we knew how to teach together was to performatively disagree. Our planning document was a table of weeks and texts and potential arguments we could have over them – arguments which, over the course of the afternoon, had provoked several more arguments37– trading off lectures the same way we had for the past few years at Bass.
‘Just for work, though,’ the part of me that had got stuck on the phraseJonah, you are by far the best thing that has happened to me this weeksaid. ‘At home, we can be a team.’
‘Thanks, Fisher.’
She glanced at me. I glanced at her. For a moment, I felt exactly like I had at our PhD graduation, when I’d seen that the tassel of her bonnet was tangled in her hair. What would happen if I reached out – gently, gently, ever so gently – and stroked those loose strands behind her ear?
Then her stomach growled, the bubble burst, and we both laughed. ‘Dinner?’ I asked her.
Sadie nodded, reaching for her phone and opening up one of the delivery apps. ‘Let’s see what’s open around here at – shit, seven-thirty. I didn’t realise it was that late.’
‘Two and a half hours overtime and it’s only day one. What an auspicious beginning.’
It happened slowly, her foot slipping on the ladder above her pit of angst, like it was a slo-mo sequence in one of the action movies my Screen Studies ex-girlfriend had forced me to watch.
‘I wish I could talk to Chess about this,’ the greyed-out shadow Sadie whispered. ‘She’d know how to push back.’
I took a risk. ‘Why don’t you call her?’
She looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
‘I’m serious. I know you’re fighting, but one of you is going to have to call the other eventually, right?’
Sadie bit her lip, biting off the last vestiges of her lipstick. ‘Okay.’
She did it.Calling: CHESSIEcame up on her phone screen. Chess didn’t answer.
And Sadie looked completely, utterly crushed.
I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming wave of anger. How dare Chess make Sadie feel like this? Wasn’t her whole deal that she would do anything for her? Wasn’t this the relationship I’d been so jealous of, the one I’d measured mine with Fiona and Elias against?
I’d been so confident last night when I’d told Sadie thatof courseshe could mend things with Chess, no problems. Sure, Chess hadn’t come to our wedding, but she’d turned up at the airport to scream threats at me. You didn’t do that if you didn’t care. She might sulk for a bit, but she’d get over it. She loved Sadie too much not to.
But in reality, I didn’t actually know this woman – and maybe her bond with Sadie wasn’t as strong and as perfect as it had always looked to me, someone who had spent so many years being an objectively bad sibling. And maybe some part of Sadie had already known that, deep down: after all,somethinghad made her so scared to tell Chess we were getting married that she’d waited until we were practically at the altar.
Just how unconditionalisyour love?I should have snarled back in Chess’s face, when she’d had her fingers twisted in my collar at the airport.
Maybe then she would have been the one who stumbled back. Maybe she would have been the one begging Sadie for forgiveness instead of the other way around. Maybe I wouldn’t have to spend all my time picking petty fights just to give Sadie something else to think about, because suddenly I’d become a devout adherent to ahappy wife, happy life-esque philosophy:wife not actively crying, Jonah doesn’t feel like he’s dying.
Maybe then I could reach out and trace the long line of that red hair. And maybe then I could draw Sadie to me, cradle her head in the crook of my neck, and I could say – I could say—
I stopped.
I took out my own phone and opened up a delivery app. ‘What about pasta?’ I said, taking Sadie’s phone out of her nerveless fingers and handing her mine instead.
‘Pasta is the absoluteworstfood to get delivered, Fisher.’ A hint of that familiar acid came back into her voice. ‘You know that.’
I did know that.
And I knew, looking at her as she scrolled (‘If you insist on noodles, Jonah, then let’s get Thai’), that I could no longer relegate the way I felt about her – the way I had felt about her ever since our very first seminar debate, fifteen years ago – to a footnote in my mind, something to be skimmed at best and skipped over most of the time.
No matter how I tried to rationalise it, this wasn’t some teenage crush I’d never managed to entirely shake. It was no mere physical attraction, nothing that could be summed up byit’s your dick, Jonah, don’t romanticise it;no simple intellectual fascination that could be explained away by the fact that Sadie was the best sparringpartner I’d ever had. Now that I was married to her, I couldn’t gloss over it anymore, or argue myself out of what I had always known perfectly well was the truth.
