Stella
Why the fuck isn’t he leaving?
Look, it’s not that I dislike Dominic being in my house.
It’s just. . . weird. He came over for sex, I decided to cry instead of have sex with him; the obvious thing to do was put his clothes on, suffer through a weird goodbye and then block my number on the walk home.
And yet somehow, he’s still here. Which, in some sense, is nice.
Unless he thinks that I’m going to change my mind and we’re going to have sex?
Which I guess I could. I might. But it feels unlikely.
Very unlikely. Or maybe he’s angry with me for promising sex and backing out, and he’s waiting to have a go at me?
But then he’s dutifully chopping the tomatoes I told him to chop, and humming away to the music, so he really doesn’t seem annoyed. He just seems. . . present.
I find a packet of conchiglie at the back of the cupboard – made by a fancy brand, a relic from the time Gavin and I lived here together.
Rose was five or six weeks old and the house was stacked with boxes, but I was determined to show everyone I was still fun, I was still a great wife, I could still give Gav a decent birthday.
At the end of the night, Rose woke up and I was still getting to grips with breastfeeding, so feeding her involved rolling my tit around for fifteen minutes, so I went upstairs and fed her sitting on our bed, listening to them laughing downstairs and thinking how lucky I was, and how lucky Rose was that she was going to grow up in a house where there were people laughing over pasta and candles and red wine downstairs.
Did Gavin know then that he was getting ready to leave?
Had he started putting essentials into his gym bag and dropping them to his mum’s?
Had he run through how he was going to tell me that he was out?
Or was he still genuinely happy, and if so, isn’t it even more genuinely terrifying that less than a month later, he was gone?
‘What’s your favourite pasta shape?’ Dominic asks, pulling me back to the present.
‘Whoa. Huge question,’ I say, filling a pot with water to boil. ‘Genuinely.’
‘I know,’ he says, entirely seriously. ‘But I am going to need an answer.’
I think about it for a while. ‘Okay, well, you need a spaghetti type of thing, for bolognaise, a standard pomodoro, all those classics. And I’m tempted to go tagliatelle, but I’m going to play it safe and go linguine.’
He mocks shock. ‘Go on.’
‘And then something that does a lot of heavy lifting with sauce, so I’ll say a mafalda, and then you need a short pasta, so I’m going for a calamarata.’
He looks bemused.
‘Calamarata is like a shorter rigatoni,’ I say, by way of explanation.
‘It’s really lucky that you’re not looking for anything serious because, under other circumstances, I think I’d have to marry you for that answer,’ he says.
‘Yeah, well, bad luck, I’m still technically married,’ I say, tipping the pasta into the salted water. ‘Can you lay the table?’
He goes through the drawers to find the cutlery and place mats rather than asking me where they are, which I find surprisingly impressive.
He even scrounges up a box of matches and lights some candles from the book shelves, dusty because I haven’t bothered to do anything so scene-setty for months.
Then he picks up a pile of papers from the end of the kitchen table, various leaflets about things I need to do with Rose or don’t want to do with Rose or have promised myself I will do with Rose.
And then I watch in slow motion as he picks up a piece of paper, turns it over and sees his own name.
‘Just put that over there!’ I say, my voice embarrassingly high pitched.
‘What is it?’ he asks.
I try to pull the paper out of his hands, but he’s taller than me and holds it sufficiently high that I can’t see. ‘The Bad Boy, the Romantic – why is my name on this?’
I go bright red and remember that I can’t throw myself off the roof because the windows are painted shut and I have a child to look after. ‘It’s a list,’ I say.
‘A list of what?’
‘My mantourage,’ I say shamefully, looking down at the floor.
Dom bursts out laughing. ‘What the fuck is a mantourage?
I try to sound dignified. ‘A mantourage, it’s actually based on a book by this very impressive American professor.’ Okay, I don’t think she was a professor, but he might take me more seriously if that’s what I call her.
‘A professor of shagging?’
‘No, professor of. . . I want to say sociology.’
‘That really sounds like a euphemism for shagging.’
‘She’s not about shagging! Okay, well, maybe a bit about shagging, but basically, she has this theory that if you lack experience and you eventually want to settle down again, you have to spend a predefined period dating a number of men who fit different archetypes, and then when you’ve spent time with all of them, you can date to marry.
And you know, I’ve done like no dating, I’m a total idiot when it comes to this stuff, so that’s what I’m doing.
This is like my intensive revision course. ’
He nods and then goes back to the paper. ‘Which archetype am I? A Bad Boy?’
I really don’t know yet. I’ve barely got to know Dom, and I haven’t actually got past the third chapter of Lexie Leung’s book because Rose is having a sleep regression and my brain has been melted by mum Instagram and breastfeeding TikTok.
‘That would be telling,’ I respond, looking up at him and trying to sound coy.
‘I put you down as Bad Boy provisionally, okay?’
Dom is elated. ‘What makes me a Bad Boy?’
‘I don’t know!’ I retort. ‘You were wearing a leather jacket in one of the pictures on your profile.’
‘I was dressed up as Danny Zuko for a Grease theme night!’
‘Well, I didn’t know that! You’re not even in the mantourage yet; I’m just working it out.’
‘Wait, I’m auditioning?’
I sigh, exasperated. ‘Yes!
He laughs again. ‘This is genuinely amazing. I am going to need you to update me at absolutely every step of this insane plan. I’m going to get into the mantourage purely so I can have a front row seat to what’s happening around me.’
I shake my head and drain the pasta, then combine it with the sauce, snow a generous amount of Parmesan over it and put both plates on the table.
As the plates touch the tablecloth I realise that I haven’t cooked dinner like this, low key, things from the fridge, for one other person since Gav left, and I want to cry all over again but then he probably will leave and it’ll be a waste of pasta.
‘Where did you grow up?’ I ask in a slightly strangled voice.
‘Are you okay?’ he asks, not ignoring the oddness in my voice like I’d hoped he would.
I nod. He seems to understand that I need to not talk right now. ‘Ruislip.’
‘Nice,’ I say, blowing on a forkful of pasta that I’m suddenly not hungry to eat. ‘This might need salt.’
He takes an enormous mouthful. ‘It doesn’t. And I’m taking it you’ve never been to Ruislip.’
‘I’ve never even heard of Ruislip.’
‘It’s the arse end of the Metropolitan line. Lots of pampas grass outside semi-detached “villas”. Swinging central in the eighties, apparently. And the high street has three different bed showrooms.’
‘Sexy.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And your parents have always lived there?’
He shakes his head. ‘I lived with my grandparents.’
‘Why?’
I probably wasn’t being invited to ask why, but I’ve done it now. He looks down at his food, rather than at me. ‘My parents split up when I was a kid; they had me super young, so me and my mum lived with them and my dad just sort of fucked off.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘That’s shit.’
‘I mean, it was and it wasn’t. My grandparents were pretty great. Apart from watching The Good Life when everyone else was watching Robot Wars, it was a pretty sweet deal.’
‘I fucking love The Good Life,’ I say, responding to totally the wrong part of this story. ‘I wanted to name Rose after Barbara, and he wouldn’t let me.’
‘What a twat.’ He smiles. ‘As if I needed to be convinced that he had bad judgement.’
There’s a moment. A static moment, with a sort of crackle between us.
I could kiss him. I could lean forward and kiss him.
We’ve kissed before, he was into kissing before, it wouldn’t be bad or weird or presumptuous.
And maybe I won’t start crying again this time, maybe we’ll go upstairs and I’ll get to feel another person’s body against mine for the first time in months and months.
He looks at me, searchingly. ‘Shall we go and watch the housewives?’
I blush bright red and thank the god I’ve really gone off believing in that I didn’t try to snog him a minute and a half ago. ‘Yes!’ I say, way too enthusiastically.
We go through into the TV room, which is my favourite room of the house.
It’s a small one, off the kitchen, made smaller by my insisting on lining it with bookshelves.
There’s a TV on the wall but other than that, all books.
And a squashy sofa I bought from a hotel that was going bust. I wrestled it into a hastily hired minivan by myself just before I found out I was pregnant with Rose and then worried the whole first trimester that I’d somehow broken her by doing it.
The walls are a dark red colour in here, so it has a sort of cloistered, comforting warmth.
Dom sits down on the sofa heavily, like he’s lived here his entire life, then looks at me guiltily. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I keep forgetting I’m a guest.’
‘Fine by me,’ I say, sitting down as far from him as I reasonably can, because I’m never getting over the humiliation of nearly kissing him when he just wanted to watch TV. ‘If you’re not a guest then I can make you wash up.’
I click on the programme, which is about a group of women who are ostensibly friends and ostensibly deeply pious but spend most of their time shagging other people.
‘Are those the Mormons?’ Dom asks.
‘Are you the kind of person who talks over the TV?’
‘It’s the title sequence,’ he says defensively.
‘I’m just checking. I need to know what I’m in for.’