Chapter 15
The next morning, Olivia wakes not to the usual screams of her children, fighting over the toaster or the last keto protein bagel, but to her husband, delivering her a cup of tea.
‘What did I do to deserve this?’ she says, propping herself up against the headboard and sipping from the WORLD’S BEST MUM mug that Saskia and Jack gave her on Mother’s Day three years ago – a mug that had then ended up unused, hidden at the back of the cupboard by other, sturdier mugs, and the plague of plastic water bottles that seemed to amass in various kitchen crevices like locusts.
Olivia looks at it, remembers the mug she and Lily gave their dad, and briefly wonders how Tina managed to stick it out for so long.
‘I don’t want to go into the finer details of what you did to deserve this,’ Nick says, planting a kiss firmly on his wife’s lips, ‘because it might get me excited and we’ll all be late for work.
But let’s just say I very much appreciate this new, vocal version of you that seems to have emerged in the bedroom.
’ He raises his eyebrows, and then trots off to the non-suite where he begins to sing ‘Shape of You’ by Ed Sheeran.
‘That’s really not giving me sex vibes!’ Olivia cries, as she sips her tea.
Downstairs, her father is sitting with the children, buttering toast for Jack. ‘Morning, Mum,’ smiles Saskia, sweetly. ‘Grandad’s just been telling us about the time you and Auntie Lily played a pink and a blue toothbrush in your ballet recital.’
‘Well, he would remember that,’ mutters Olivia under her breath, ‘it being the only performance he ever attended during our childhoods.’
‘Is it OK if I wear my new Primark dress to Auntie Lily’s birthday?’ continues Saskia, oblivious. ‘It says black tie on the invitation so I thought a black dress would cut it.’
‘Does it now?’ Olivia wanders over to the kitchen counter where the invitation sits under one of the discarded pizza boxes, the top left corner now steeped in oil.
She picks it up and reads it. ‘Does Lily know it’s black tie?
The last time I saw her wear a smart dress might well have been the pink one she had to wear in that ballet recital.
Anyway, you can ask her tonight, Sask, it’s her evening again. ’
‘I’m not wearing a tie,’ mopes Jack.
‘I don’t think I even have a tie any more,’ sighs Peter.
‘I’m sure Nick will be able to sort you both out in time.’ Olivia smiles inwardly as she sees Saskia washing up her plate, goes to kiss both her children on the top of their heads. ‘Now, shall we get going so I can get you to school in time to avoid a detention or me missing the train?’
‘Actually, Grandad is going to walk us,’ says Jack.
‘He is?’ Olivia looks at her father in something approaching astonishment.
‘I am! It’s a lovely day for a walk, after all.’
Olivia looks out the window at the grey sky, the low-hanging clouds and the drizzle that has just started to speckle the paving stones in the garden. She shakes her head and expels her disbelief in a big sigh. ‘OK, well if you’re sure.’
‘Never been surer of anything in my life.’ Her father does a little salute, nods his head.
Olivia briefly wonders if they have all gone through a wormhole to another dimension, then says a cheery goodbye.
On the train, Olivia takes her usual place on the luggage rack, where she reasons that she can at least sit alone, without risk of being felt up by any old Tory perverts.
She puts in her AirPods before hitting play on ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
With an uncharacteristic clarity and confidence, she decides that there is nothing she can do for now about the possibility of a criminal conviction, and furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be all that much she can do about finding Rose.
That maybe, given the uptick in everyone’s behaviour at home this morning, she doesn’t want to find Rose.
If Olivia has always been the type of person who worries when she has nothing to worry about, now she has become one of those mystifying humans who genuinely believe that there’s no point obsessing over things you can’t control.
Rose had appeared out of nowhere and told her some hard truths, and maybe that’s exactly what Olivia needed.
Maybe she had to think of it like a one-night stand, except she’d come away from it with some self-enlightenment instead of an STD.
As Celine Dion blares out, full blast, Olivia smiles and allows herself to think about last night. Here she was, forty-four years old and married for almost twenty of them, and for the first time in a good few years, Nick had made her come.
It wasn’t that sex with her husband had previously been unpleasurable.
He had, for a long time, gone out of his way to please her.
But as their relationship wore on and other things took priority, Olivia had never quite felt able to get in the zone.
She was tired, her body had changed to accommodate the two babies it had carried and birthed, she was on her period, or she just wanted to be alone.
So Olivia had begun to fake an orgasm to get it all over and done with.
As a woman who grew up in the eighties and nineties, one who had been weaned on a diet of magazines that promised to provide you with the perfect tricks to please your man, she had learned to derive a lot of her pleasure from the pleasure she could give, from the look on his face as he came, the satisfied grin and the flushed glow.
That was often her reward for sex – not an orgasm, but the validating knowledge that she had been able to deliver someone else one.
Today, in the year 2024, it seemed incredible to her that she had only ever encountered one man other than her husband who had actually made an effort to make her come.
She had met Josh when they were both freshers.
He was squat and solid and attractive in a very plain way that meant he’d had to learn other tricks to snare members of the opposite sex.
But Olivia had come to see his focus on her pleasure as some sort of perversion, a perversion that had in part led to her subtly ghosting him for a while in the hope that he would dump her (she was far too terrified of upsetting people to ever dump anyone herself).
Why would a man actively want to bury his head in her vagina?
(Her vagina that she’s only recently discovered was actually labia, thanks to an interview she had been forced to do with a ‘Sex Positive’ blogger who had started a campaign to educate women on their own bodies.) Vagina, vulva, labia, fruit, mineral, vegetable, the point still stood: she was appalled and embarrassed by everything down there, spent a small fortune each month on keeping it tidy so as not to upset the Gods of Bikini Lines.
But last night … well, last night! Something had come over her, and it wasn’t her husband, or at least not until she’d given him permission to.
She had spent hours ordering him around, expertly directing and instructing him until his tongue brought her to the brink.
She didn’t know what was more enjoyable – the experience of actually allowing Nick to give her an orgasm, or the fevered concentration on his face as he set about delivering it.
‘Fuck, that’s sexy,’ he growled, as she lay there, bucking and whimpering under him.
As the train hurtles towards London, Olivia lets herself acknowledge an astonishing fact: that her husband has always wanted to devour her. He’s always wanted to bury his head between her legs and make her come. The only thing that’s changed is that she’s started wanting him to again.
Olivia Greenwood is beginning to believe that she damn well deserves it.