London, Eleven Months Earlier
Jones was uncomfortable, which meant he was at the bar.
Stuart had gone home, despite it being his birthday party—work emergency—but had urged Jones to stay and “mingle,” and, with no excuse to leave, he felt obliged to do as he was told.
Without a glass in his hand, he kept finding himself running his thumb across the bare skin at the base of his ring finger.
Each time he felt the absence of his wedding band, something seemed to trip in his chest.
“Oh my God, am I invisible?” said the woman beside him.
He looked at her. Her hair was an extraordinary shade of luminous ginger; she was wearing the scrubs the characters on actual Scrubs wore, pale blue and ill fitting.
She looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t quite place her—perhaps he’d met her at one of Stuart’s things before.
Either way, she definitely was not invisible.
“I’ve been here for twenty minutes. Five eighteen-year-olds in crop tops have come and gone with their drinks. Is this the universe giving official notice that I’m past it?” she asked.
She wasn’t actually looking at Jones, and he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to respond. Surely the answer was obvious, anyway—she didn’t look much older than thirty.
“Hey, what can I get you?” one of the bartenders asked Jones.
“Please don’t do this to me,” the woman said to the bartender, who looked understandably confused.
“I think she was first,” Jones said, tilting his head her way.
For the first time, she turned her gaze on him. His stomach bottomed out. She was the classy, grown-up sort of beautiful that belonged in teacher-student fantasies. Arched brows, quick eyes, a long, elegant neck.
It was the strangest feeling to look at her and notice.
He had been a married man for so long. It was just habit now to not notice a beautiful woman, or rather to notice in the way one might notice an interestingly shaped cloud or a trailer for a new program on one of the few remaining streaming services you’d not caved and signed up for.
Huh, that’s nice, was his default reaction to a woman like this.
But he was single now. Wasn’t that why he was at this party? Single, alone, and—according to his friends—far too mopey about it. He was supposed to put himself out there. That was the idea.
“Or I could buy your drink,” Jones said, inadvertently cutting across whatever she was beginning to say. “Sorry. Go on.”
She tilted her head to the side, smiling slowly. “He’s a gentleman and he apologizes.” She turned to the bartender. “Please can I have a large glass of house white and whatever this polite, observant man would like?”
“Oh, no,” Jones said, slightly horrified. He was pretty hazy on how dating went these days, but he was definitely meant to buy her a drink. “I should pay.”
“Don’t disappoint me now,” the woman said. “Chivalry’s dead, didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t,” Jones said. “Do I still pull back your chair when we head over to a table?”
She looked surprised, and then faintly delighted. He was quite surprised himself. Who knew he still had a bit of flirtation left in him?
“You do not,” the woman said. “Nor do you walk on the road side, open my car door or carry my bag up the stairs to your flat. You do, however, make the first move once we’re inside.”
She flashed him a grin that made him hot all over.
“I’m Aspen,” she said. “And I don’t like wasting my time. Do you want to take me home?”
—
She was the perfect rebound. Sexy, bold, hilarious—every day he spent with her left him faintly breathless.
She was a midwife, working with the community team, so was called out to home births at all hours of the day and night.
This only added to the whirlwind of life with her—if she was on call, she might spend twenty-four hours stretched across his bed like a lazy ginger cat, or she might answer her phone while he was still inside her, and hop off with a quick Sorry!
, already reaching for her car keys. It was completely discombobulating. Jones loved it.
The relationship crept up on him, though.
He felt instinctively that it was just a casual thing—he never took her out on dates or introduced her to his parents or close friends.
They just spent their days and nights together sometimes, doing whatever they did, and having sex in between.
It was only when he received a text from Aspen saying Don’t forget toilet roll!
that he wondered if this easy, companionable way of life was actually a committed relationship.
When he thought about it, he did spend at least four or five nights a week with Aspen.
They ran errands together, had toothbrushes at each other’s flats, ate together often—he was pretty much a vegetarian now, thanks to her influence.
He knew a lot about her job; she knew all the various dramas at the bar where he worked, too.
He brought it up one night over takeaway ramen, once he’d had enough beer to make himself brave.
They were chatting about Aspen’s friend having a baby at her birthing center—she showed him a picture of the happy couple with their daughter, recounting the numerous inconvenient places the father had fainted during the labor.
“I can’t imagine being a dad right now,” Jones said. “I’d probably faint, too. Listen, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” She put down her phone.
“Am I your boyfriend?” he said, a little more abruptly than he’d intended.
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 and not notice this.
He had formerly married written 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. Why did he do that? 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 you mattered. 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 she did seem 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 community space 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.
“Nobody cares. 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. ”