CHAPTER TWO
Wednesday. Jude the Obscure with the second years.
Kate stood at the front of the seminar room and talked about Sue Bridehead, about a woman who wanted things she couldn’t let herself have.
“So, what’s Hardy saying about her?” A student in the back row, pen tapping against his notebook.
Kate opened her mouth to give the standard answer. What came out was: “That wanting something and letting yourself want it aren’t the same thing. And the gap between them can ruin you.”
The room was quiet. Kate moved on.
Thursday. Marking in her office. The stack of essays on Middlemarch, the same arguments she’d read a hundred times.
She wrote feedback, sipped cold tea, and the memory arrived without warning.
The wet sound. The girl’s voice. Kate’s pen stopped moving.
She stared at the page until the words came back into focus.
Friday. She used the toilet on the second floor now. The one by the postgraduate offices. She didn’t think about why.
Saturday. The farmers’ market on Green Park Station with Daniel.
Cheese, bread, the good coffee from the stall by the entrance.
Kate held the paper bag of pastries and nodded at something Daniel said about Oliver’s maths tutor.
The morning was bright and ordinary, and she was half a second behind all of it.
“Kate?” Daniel was looking at her.
“Sorry. What?”
“Eggs. Do we need more?”
“Yes. Probably. Yes.”
Sunday roast. The four of them around the table.
Kate carved the roast, passed plates, asked Sophie about her biology coursework.
The answers came when they should. The right expressions at the right moments.
But there was a delay, a tiny gap between stimulus and response, and once or twice she caught Daniel watching her across the table.
She looked away. Refilled the water jug. The evening continued.
After dinner, Sophie vanished to her room. Oliver sprawled on the sofa with his phone. Daniel washed up while Kate dried, the clink of plates and the low murmur of the radio filling the silence between them.
“You all right?” Daniel asked. He didn’t look at her. Just handed her a wet pan.
“Tired.” Kate dried the pan, put it away. “Long week.”
He nodded. Handed her the next dish. Didn’t push.
The kids went to bed. Kate poured herself a second glass of wine and settled into the corner of the sofa. Daniel sat at the other end, his own glass in hand, the Sunday night silence settling around them.
He didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat. Kate could feel him not asking.
“You’ve been somewhere else all week.”
Kate looked at her wine. “Have I?”
“You have.”
She tried for lightness. “Maybe I’m having a torrid affair with the head of department. Gerald’s been giving me looks.”
Daniel didn’t laugh. Gerald was sixty-three and spoke exclusively about funding cuts.
The silence came back. Kate felt the weight of it pressing against her chest.
“Kate.”
She could deflect again. Make another joke. Wait for him to let it go, the way he usually did. He wasn’t a pusher, Daniel. He left doors open and trusted her to walk through them.
The wine was warm in her throat.
“Something happened,” she said. “At work. Tuesday.”
Daniel set his glass down. Waited.
“This is going to sound absurd.”
Daniel didn’t say anything. Just waited.
“I was in the toilet. The staff one, in the humanities building. End stall.” Kate looked at her wine, not at him. “And two students came in. A boy and a girl. They went into the stall next to mine.”
She paused. Let him catch up.
“Right,” Daniel said.
“They didn’t know I was there. And they …” Kate took a breath. “They had sex. In the stall. I was trapped. I couldn’t leave without them knowing someone had heard everything.”
“Christ.” Daniel’s voice was neutral. Processing.
“So, I stayed. And I listened.” The words were coming faster now, tumbling out before she could shape them properly. “I heard everything. The sounds. What he said to her. What she said back.”
She stopped. Her face was hot.
Daniel was quiet for a moment. “That sounds … uncomfortable.”
“It was.”
“Is that what’s been bothering you? That you overheard something awkward?”
Kate shook her head. The inadequacy of his understanding pressed against her chest. She was going to have to say more.
“It wasn’t just awkward. It was …” She reached for a word and couldn’t find one. “What they were saying to each other. What he called her. What she called herself.”
Daniel’s brow furrowed. He set his wine down. “What did she say?”
Kate looked at her hands. “He asked her what she was. And she said … she said ‘I’m your slut.’ Like it was a confession.
Like she was giving him something.” She could hear her own voice, too precise, too careful.
“And then she said she needed him to fuck her. And she meant it. You could hear how much she meant it.”
The room was quiet.
“And you listened to all of this?” Daniel asked.
“I couldn’t leave. The embarrassment would have been too much.”
“No, I understand that. But …” He paused. “Kate, why is this still with you? A week later?”
There it was. The question she’d been circling.
Kate took a long drink of wine and made herself look at him.
“Because I didn’t just listen.” Her voice came out smaller than she’d intended.
“I … My hand was between my legs. I don’t remember deciding to put it there.
It just was. And I was … I was soaked, Daniel.
Through my tights. Through everything. Listening to this girl get fucked in a toilet stall, and I was … ”
She stopped. Her throat had closed up.
Daniel didn’t speak. His face was hard to read in the low light. Not disgust, she thought. But not nothing, either.
“I couldn’t stop,” Kate said. “I sat there with my hand pressed between my legs, and I couldn’t move it, and I couldn’t stop listening. And afterward, I went to my office hour and taught, and drove home and set the table, and I was still thinking about it. I’m still thinking about it.”
The silence stretched. Kate could hear the dishwasher humming in the kitchen, the faint creak of the house settling. Normal sounds. The world continuing as if she hadn’t just said any of that.
Daniel leaned back against the sofa. Kate watched him process, watched the information settle.
“Did anyone see you?” he said. “Coming out of the toilet after them?”
Kate blinked. “No. I waited. I waited a long time.”
“Good. That’s good.” He nodded, as if they were discussing a logistical problem. “And the students; do you know who they were? Could it come back to you somehow?”
Kate stared at him. The distance between what she’d said and what he’d heard opened up like a gap in the floor.
“Daniel, that’s not the point.”
He rubbed his face. “Then what is?”
The question hung there. Kate felt the shape of the real answer pressing against her teeth.
“I’m not worried,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
Daniel went still.
Kate pushed on before she could stop herself. “I keep thinking about her voice. The way she said it. Like it was something she’d been waiting to say. And when I think about it, I don’t feel disturbed. I feel …”
She couldn’t finish. Didn’t need to.
“Oh,” Daniel said.
“I wanted to be her.” The words came out flat, matter-of-fact. “On my knees in a toilet stall, saying those things. Meaning them.”
The room shifted. Kate could feel it in her skin.
Daniel’s breathing had changed. He was sitting differently, a tension in his shoulders that hadn’t been there a moment ago. She recognized that tension.
But what he said was, “That must be confusing. For you.”
Confusing. Such a careful word. Such a husband word. Kate watched him reach for the correct response while his body told a different story entirely.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
He nodded. Neither of them moved. The thing was named now, sitting between them on the sofa, and neither of them knew what to do with it.
They went up to bed without deciding to. The conversation simply ran out of words, and then they were turning off lights, checking the front door, climbing the stairs in silence. The ordinary choreography of a Sunday night.
Kate changed in the bathroom. When she came out, Daniel was already under the duvet, lying on his back. She slid in beside him. Not touching, but not distant either. An inch of mattress between them.
The ceiling was the same grey blank it had been every night that week. Kate stared at it. Daniel’s breathing was steady, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. The quality of his stillness was too deliberate.
She had told him. The words were out now, impossible to retrieve. I wanted to be her. It sat in the room with them, taking up space.
What happened now? Kate didn’t know. There was no script for this.
No chapter in any marriage book. She’d confessed to her husband that she’d touched herself while listening to a student get fucked, and that she wanted to be the one on her knees, and he’d said confusing and she’d said yes and now they were lying in the dark and the world hadn’t ended, but it hadn’t stayed the same either.
Daniel shifted beside her. Still awake.
Kate heard herself speak. Half a laugh in it, half something else.
“What would the neighbours think?”
A pause. She could feel him almost smile in the darkness.
“Indeed.”
The word hung there. Kate closed her eyes.