Chapter 13 Ex Number Three
Ex Number Three
George
George is the type who loves an outdoor activity: hiking, climbing, skiing, diving. You name it, he’s into it. I like that he’s into wholesome things and is sure of himself. It makes it easier to feel sure of myself, too.
We’re in a cottage by the New Forest on a short holiday, just him and me.
That’s how we tend to like it. The two of us.
My relationship with my mother remains strained, and my sister’s too busy chasing her dreams to see much of me.
He’s not close to his family, either. I don’t love that the trip is over Emily’s birthday weekend, the same Emily whose parents always had a loosely watched liquor cabinet and who would have gone to war with Marc for me had he not died first. Luca, too, even though she hadn’t really known him.
She was that kind of friend. But George had already paid for the holiday before he knew about the birthday.
There wasn’t much we could do about it at that point, and the invite to Emily’s was half-hearted in the first place.
Admittedly, I’ve not seen much of her over the past year or two.
We’re at different ends of the city now, her parents bribing her close to home by buying her a place in South, although the distance began after her visit for my birthday at uni.
I was annoyed that she’d leave town early, on the day itself.
She was annoyed for reasons she did not seem keen to divulge, nor I to press her on.
I had drawn my own conclusions about what had happened to Marc, to Luca, and I wondered if she had drawn them, too.
Either way, I could feel our relationship dying, slowly starved of oxygen.
I didn’t expect it to eventually end so dramatically.
Didn’t expect a catastrophe so big that it would sever my relationships with Claire and my mother, too.
With George, I know I fell into the trap of falling into a relationship and falling out of touch with everyone else.
I’ve tried over the eighteen months or so I’ve been with him to maintain contact, but it’s difficult.
George prefers hanging out with me more than anyone else, which is flattering, and he often makes special plans for the two of us that he’s sensitive about us missing. I’m lucky to have him, really.
A walking holiday? So I guess he picked out the activity again.
My sister’s text this morning. The messages started materializing while I was in the cottage hallway, lacing up the walking shoes George bought me.
Don’t you feel like he decides too much of what you get up to? Even mom’s started side-eyeing him and she has terrible taste in men.
Call me soon. Call mom. It’s been too long.
As soon as I’m done with rehearsals, I’ll come see you.
I wanted to tell her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about; how can she, when she’s so wrapped up in the relentless rehearsals and rapid carousel of romantic relationships that make up her last year of drama school?
Where I get easily attached, she never does, her interest in partners only fleeting.
But if I’m being honest, she’s not entirely wrong about George.
After so much chaos and pain with Marc and Luca, I like having someone with a good head on his shoulders to look after me. And so I left the messages unanswered.
My feet are sore after a long day of walking, boots caked in mud.
George sits beside me in a small nook in this idyllic, cozy pub.
A friendly waitress sets down two steaming plates in front of us—bangers and mash for me, and a juicy steak for him.
We’ve been walking for five hours and I’m ravenous, tearing into the plate.
Halfway through, I catch the corner of something tucked away in George’s eyes.
He sees me catch it and glances at my plate, only fleetingly. I set my cutlery down.
Don’t get me wrong—George has never said anything negative about my appearance.
Ever. But he does like to encourage us both to be healthy, to work out and watch what we eat.
He’s always been clear that our health is important to him, and I know the mountain of food on my plate is fat with butter, grease, and cream.
“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 and most 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 George doesn’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 and kisses 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.