Stella #2
‘Okay, well, yes, I have occasionally been told that I’m a talker during TV. So are these the Mormons.’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought they wore long dresses and had plaits?’
I can feel the warmth of his leg radiating out towards mine. Or maybe I’m imagining it. ‘That’s the Amish.’
‘Oh. Right.’
He’s silent until the two women are having coffee, less than a minute later. ‘Are they married to the same guy?’
‘No.’
‘But some of them are?’
‘No, that’s fundamentalist Mormons. These are just normal Mormons.’
‘If they’re not sister wives then why is this fun?’
‘Just wait and see!’ I snap.
‘Sorry.’ He laughs, pretending to pout.
‘Wait!’ he suddenly says a few minutes later. ‘What are they doing? That’s not her husband.’
‘That’s what I’m saying. This show is no Pride and Prejudice, but it comes awfully close sometimes.’
‘The film?’
‘The BBC production,’ I say. I can’t believe he doesn’t already know this.
We watch an entire episode. He talks through the whole thing, I pretend to be annoyed by it, and intermittently I think about how weird this is.
And how nice it is. And then he moves slightly and his skin brushes mine and I wonder if maybe we’re going to attempt to go upstairs again, and then he doesn’t and I feel rejected and ashamed again, and it goes round until the end of the episode.
‘One more?’ he asks.
I have never understood anyone less than I understand this man. But I don’t know how to say no, so I refill his wine glass and let the TV start playing the next episode. ‘I really think she needs to divorce her husband,’ he says sagely.
‘They can’t, it’s fully forbidden, they got sealed in the Temple.’
‘Sure, but he’s using her for money, she can’t stay with him.’
I giggle at his earnestness. I think I lean in to him, maybe?
My head is on his shoulder, anyway. And the room is warm, and the wine is red, and somehow, completely by accident, I can feel my eyelashes falling towards my cheeks and I’m letting myself just take two minutes to rest my eyes before we get up and he leaves.
I have always been an amazing sleeper. As claims to fame go, it’s a pretty mediocre one, but there you have it.
I’ve never once had to think about buying a sleep mask or taking melatonin, or any of the things my fellow neurotics have to do.
I just close my eyes and bam. Sleep. I can do it in the car, on the train, on a plane.
And – apparently – on the sofa of the house I bought with my ex-husband, lying next to a man I’ve only just met from a dating app.
As is traditional when you’ve fallen asleep somewhere you shouldn’t, I take a moment to realise where I am.
Then I unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth and see the wine glass on the floor at my feet, and want to throw up.
There’s a body next to me. I mean, not a body, a person.
An alive person. Dom. Specifically, Dom is next to me, splayed over the other side of the sofa, breathing gently, with a half-smile.
Fucking hell. What time is it? Please, please, please, let it be one of those mornings where it’s weirdly light at 4 a.m. and there are actually hours and hours left for sleep.
I dig in the sofa to find my phone and, yes, it’s 8.30 a.m.
There’s a knocking. It’s the door. I’m pretty sure that’s what woke me up in the first place.
Did I order something? I mean, I’ve always ordered something, that’s like, the definitive thing about having a small child, you’re constantly ordering things from at three in the morning, but obviously that’s not what’s happening here.
Which means that the knocking is Gavin, with Rose.
It means that my baby is sitting outside on the doorstep waiting for me, while I work out how to hide the man in my house who I absolutely did not have sex with but who it’s going to look like I had sex with. Fucking fucking fucking fucking fuck.
I rub under my eyes to get rid of any slept-in mascara and then go to the door, adopting a bright expression and bargaining with the universe to not have Dom wake up.
There’s one very thin wall between the TV room and the front door, and if he so much as stands up from the sofa, Gavin will see him through the front window.
As ever, seeing Rose for the first time in twenty-six hours is heart-bursting.
I drop straight to my knees and unbuckle her from the car seat, noting whether he’s made any mistakes on the straps, which to my combined relief and disappointment, he hasn’t.
I pick her up and she smiles, showing me her little white teeth.
I do a half-laugh, half-sob as I drink her in, unable to believe that she’s finally back, that I can touch her and feel her, and have her be real in front of me instead of the pictures on my phone that I’ve looked at every couple of hours since she left.
I gather her up into my arms and straighten, still standing in the doorway, blocking Gavin from any ideas he might have about coming in.
‘How are you?’ I ask him, more by force of habit than anything else. Why have I asked? I need him to leave as quickly as humanly possible so he doesn’t see Dom, or, more importantly, so Dom doesn’t see him and think he’s ended up in some weird suburban divorce swinging situation.
Gavin looks surprised at the question, which is understandable because I very deeply don’t care how he is. ‘Fine.’
‘How did things go?’
‘Pretty good. She woke up a couple of times for a feed—’
‘That’s normal though, around midnight and 5 a.m.?’
Gavin nods. ‘Yeah. I did midnight and Mum did 5 a.m.’
‘That’s good,’ I say, possibly snider than intended because the idea that he’s taking our daughter away so that he can do fifty per cent of the childcare and have his mum do the rest makes me want to kick a hole in the wall. ‘It’d be a lot to do both feeds on your own,’ I say sarcastically.
Either he ignores my sarcasm or he doesn’t register it. ‘Exactly,’ he agrees. ‘Okay, well, I should shoot.’
‘Busy day?’
‘Just got to catch up on a bit of sleep.’ From the one wake-up he did overnight.
I’m tempted to ask how he ever thought he was going to handle the horrors of having a job and a baby at the same time, but then he bailed before there was any chance of having to find out so it would be a pointless question.
Right. I resolve not to say anything bitchy because Rose is going to understand what we’re saying to each other one day and it’ll be easier if I don’t have to suddenly stop being a massive cow overnight.
I’m just about to force a placatory goodbye when a shadow falls across Gavin’s face. I can feel someone behind me. Fuck.
I turn slightly, still holding Rose on my hip. Obviously Dominic has woken up, and looks like he slept in his clothes because he has absolutely slept in his clothes. Gavin stares. Dominic freezes. Time seems to entirely stop moving.
‘All right, mate?’ Dom says, after what feels like an hour of them staring at each other.
‘This is Dom,’ I say slowly. ‘Dom, this is Gavin.’
They eyeball each other. Then Gavin turns on his heel and without saying anything walks away. I look at Dom. I look at Rose. I look at the bags and bags of things Gavin brought home with him, things that I’m going to have to launder and put away before doing the whole thing again next week.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Dom says after a moment. ‘I thought it was a delivery.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say, going inside. ‘But I’d really appreciate it if you could leave.’
‘Sure. Yeah. No, I’ll go now, I just wanted to make sure that we were okay – obviously that must have been pretty fucking awkward for you. And this is your kid? She’s really cute—’
He reaches out to give her one of his fingers to grab on to and I physically wince.
‘Don’t!’ I yelp.
Dom freezes and pulls his hand back. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s not you. I just. . . I really need you to leave.’
This is so deeply, painfully wrong. On my list of things I was going to do to make sure that this whole dating experiment was okay, no man meeting Rose until we’ve been together for at least one year was top of the fucking list. It was the number one promise that I made to myself and I’ve literally already broken it.
My inability to get anything right is staggering. It should be studied.
‘Okay,’ Dom says. ‘Sure. Course.’
He shoves his feet into his shoes without undoing the laces and pulls his coat off the coat rack, accidentally taking several others with it.
He looks at the coats, the floor, at me, at Rose, and correctly summarises that there’s no advantage to hanging them back up properly, and just shoves them back up so they don’t fall.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, not meeting his eye. ‘Really.’
‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘Really.’
There’s a long silence. ‘Maybe we could be friends?’ I ask, like a small child asking if Father Christmas is real.
He smiles. ‘We’re already friends,’ he says. ‘You can’t watch that much Mormon telly with someone unless you’re friends. And I’m serious about helping you with the heavy lifting on the house. I’m bring a drill next time and sort out all those shelves that need to go up.’
I blink back some very embarrassing tears. ‘Cool,’ I say. ‘Always nice to have a new friend.’
‘Bye,’ he says, as he closes the door gently behind him.
What the fuck was I thinking? In what world was I going to be able to make this work? I had one night to have nice, no-strings-attached sex and instead I had a platonic sleepover with a guy I then introduced to my daughter and ex-husband. What the fuck is wrong with me?
I go to the toy box, unroll the beautiful, expensive playmat that Gavin’s sister bought us, and then put out a variety of toys and books. I place Rose comfortably in front of it. Then I go and sit on the sofa, out of her eye line, and I sob.