Amy
London
“…anyway, by the time of the girls’ night out we’d already crossed the line once, a few weeks before.
” Sarah shook her head at the memory. “That time, Hugo had come home early, much earlier than I expected, and I think if he’d not been juggling two babies he’d have known exactly what he’d walked in on.
” Sarah took a sip of her wine. “So, when it came to the night out we both knew, but we hadn’t really had the chance to do anything about it. We were tiptoeing around it.”
“So the girls’ night out happens. God, did we all need it.
First time any of us had drunk properly for more than a year and you could tell.
Dinner, drinks, dancing even though we didn’t recognise any of the songs.
And Chloe had offered me her spare room, because obviously I couldn’t drive home and something has never felt right about getting into a taxi, drunk, alone with the driver and heading off into the countryside.
She offered casually, on our group chat, just one friend helping another.
” Sarah smiled, a small, wry smile. “She knew what she was offering, and I knew what I was saying yes to.”
“And Hugo?”
“He encouraged me. He thought I needed a night out, said something about how I'd been cooped up for months and it would do me good to let my hair down. So I did my hair, and I put on a dress I hadn't worn since before the twins, and I kissed my husband goodbye, and I went out for the evening with the full intention of going home with someone else. I nearly backed out at the last minute, nearly lost my nerve, but he wouldn’t hear of me staying home.”
She looked into her wine for a moment.
"The dinner was lovely. The bar after was lovely. We ended up in some club that had been the height of glamour in town when I was sixteen and very definitely wasn’t any more.
Chloe and I went out onto a terrace at one point, for some air, and…
that wasn't really for some air. And then later we got a taxi back to hers. And then we were in her kitchen with two cups of tea, neither of us drinking the tea, and…”
Sarah paused, lost in the memory for a moment.
"I won't go into the details of the night.
But I will tell you that I woke up the next morning in her bed, and I lay there listening to the rain on her window, and I felt more like myself than I had in years.
Years. I drove home through the lanes with the windows down singing along to the radio, and I had a text from Hugo saying he hoped I'd had fun and the twins had been angels, and I thought, I am going to leave him.
This is it. Genuinely thought it. For about an hour. And then I got home, and I didn't."
Sarah put her wine down and started to stand. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”
“Of course… end of the hall.”
While Sarah was gone, Amy sat back on the sofa thinking hard.
Her honesty had been almost brutal at times, and Amy was sat there reliving the pain and heartbreak that was so clear.
First Jess, where it was clear that Sarah still wondered to this day, what if?
With Jess there’d been an innocence, clearly, even now, a sense that Sarah was still paying every day for being nineteen and terrified of what people might think.
And then Chloe, which was different, at least on the surface.
With Chloe, Sarah hadn’t been a teenager hiding from herself.
She’d been six months into her maternity leave, married, bored out of her mind in the West Country and had fallen for the only friend who’d made the days bearable.
The way Sarah described their first kiss, then the night they’d spent together, as feeling more like herself than she had in years resonated deeply.
Sarah was opening up to her completely, and it was a revelation. But, Amy knew, there was more to come… they still hadn’t gone on to the mentoring.
Sarah came back into the room and sat down.
Amy looked at her for a few moments, then said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Chloe. Would you have… if she’d wanted to turn it into something real would you have?”
Sarah thought about her answer. “If you’d asked me then, yes.
I left her place that morning convinced that it was the start of something special.
I think she thought that too. But then I think my mistake was to leave it too long, I gave her long enough to get scared.
And once she was scared that was it. If she hadn’t got scared I think we’d have started something.
But now, looking back, I’m not so sure, or at least I’m not so sure it would have lasted.
We’d been good friends for months and whether we could have made the shift to girlfriends, I don’t know.
” She shrugged. “I guess I’ll never know. ”
“But you’d have left Hugo for her?”
“I feel awful saying it, but… yes. I thought about it. And it’s terrible but I think that was a turning point.
When I went back to work on the surface we were this amazing couple, me a high flyer in the city, we bought our house near the school, much bigger, character in spades, we bought my apartment…
the one you know. We could have it all. Beneath it though it’s not like we were struggling, but we became more like friends who lived together and coparented rather than lovers.
Kids can do that to you though, I know that.
I think that’s what he tells himself. I know there’s more and… he doesn’t know about any of it.”
“Were you tempted to tell him?”
“Yes… once or twice, but what would I tell him?”
“The truth? Doesn't he deserve to know?”
“If it was just him… maybe. But it’s the kids too. They’re so important to me, I… what if I lost them? Or saw them less?”
Amy watched Sarah as she talked and could see the emotion… this wasn’t a new topic for her, obviously, and it was clear that she’d given a lot of thought to it.
“Tell me about after maternity leave.”
“About a year after coming back, I signed up to the firm’s mentoring scheme.
Completely from the perspective of giving back, no ulterior motive whatsoever.
I got paired with two mentees, one man, one woman, both recently qualified.
” She looked at Amy. “I didn’t count on falling for the woman.
Hard. And her for me. I won’t name her because while she left the firm you’ll have come across her professionally, but we had what I can only call a torrid affair.
Me in my thirties with a husband and kids at home, her in her mid-twenties, beautiful, confident, we worked well together. ”
“What happened?”
“She wanted us to move in together, and… I liked her a lot. Really a lot. We had a lot of fun together… and no, I don’t mean just like that.
But was she Jess? Or Chloe? No. It got messy, like her threatening to tell Hugo messy.
Like her threatening to tell the partners messy.
There was a moment when I nearly said yes, but it wasn’t right.
She deserved more than I could give her. ”
“What’s she doing now?”
“She moved firm so that we didn’t have to see each other every day. The last time I saw her, a couple of months ago, I bumped into her at an industry event. She’s living with someone, she seemed happy.”
Amy watched Sarah for a long moment. “Do you wish it had ended differently?”
“No… no, I don’t. It was this passionate affair we had, it was crazy. I learned things. She liked to be more submissive in the bedroom and that’s where I discovered that I tended towards the more dominant side.” She hesitated and smiled, her cheeks reddening. “Well, until you came along anyway…”
Amy smiled back, her head tilted. “Happy to be of service.”
There was a few moments of silence while they each drank their wine.
“And after her is, I think, where it all started going wrong. I think, looking back on it, that I panicked. I realised… I guess I realised that I’d screwed Jess up and I’d screwed Chloe up, and I’d kind of screwed it up with my mentee too.
I was a lesbian playing at being straight, I was living pretty much the exact opposite life to what I wanted, and I was already the wrong side of thirty five and not getting any younger. ”
“That shouldn’t matter…” Amy started to say, but Sarah interrupted her.
“It does. Trust me, it does. You’ll understand more when you’re my age.
You start… you realise that what you’ve taken for granted won’t last forever.
And I know I’ve got a look that suits me at my age, I know I’m still only in my thirties, but I’m terrified of when I become invisible to women who would’ve been interested before. ”
“So you built your mentoring program?”
“Exactly. Not right away though. After that I told myself never again. Too messy, too dangerous, and I meant it. For all of six months…”
Sarah looked a little sheepish. “There was another woman approached me to help with something. She actually came on to me, out for a drink one evening, and I went with it. And then I thought what if I do this differently? What if I’m upfront at the outset?
No ambiguity, no catching feelings, no one getting hurt.
Adults, clear terms, everyone knows where they stand.
The power imbalance… it didn’t even occur to me, I’m embarrassed to admit now.
I think I underestimated what that dynamic meant.
“And it worked, or I told myself it worked. That woman was grateful for the help and she seemed happy. I got to feel… wanted. Like I still existed as a woman that beautiful women desired, rather than invisible as another working mum back at work. It built from there, usually three or four mentees at any one time. And there were some, of course, who didn’t want to take those terms and that was fine, we’d been clear that there was no come back and it’s always been true… I’ve been scrupulous in ensuring that.