Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
The rest of the day passed peacefully – until it didn’t.
Sam and I went out for brunch, strolling hand in hand out into the sunshine and bypassing the place that specialised in smoothies and the one that did avocado and poached eggs on sourdough toast in favour of the revamped greasy spoon that fried everything in loads of butter and did a killer Bloody Mary.
After that, stuffed and mildly tipsy, we went to the farmers’ market and bought steak to cook for dinner, huge slabs of sour cherry cheesecake for dessert and a bunch of peonies.
As soon as we walked into the flat, Sam started yawning.
‘Sorry, Georgia,’ he said. ‘I’m knackered. Didn’t sleep much last night. Jared’s couch isn’t designed for tall people.’
‘Why don’t you have a nap?’ I suggested. ‘If you don’t mind me hoovering? The place is in desperate need of a clean.’
‘I can’t let you do that on your own,’ he protested.
‘Oh yes you can. Go on – I’ll Mrs Hinch the hell out of everything while you rest, then you can make us a negroni to have before dinner.’
‘Deal.’ He grinned, and we exchanged a fist bump, then he stripped off his clothes, flopped down on the bed and was asleep within seconds.
The truth was, although the flat did need cleaning, my willingness to tackle the task was born more out of self-flagellation than anything else.
In spite of us having made up, I still felt wracked with guilt over how I’d behaved the previous night.
And not just then, although my behaviour had been vicious and shameful.
Before then too. The whole thing with Jamie had been underhand and manipulative and just plain mean.
I wished I could wipe every trace of my behaviour out of our lives as easily as the vacuum cleaner sucked up the drifts of Milton’s fur that had accumulated along the skirting boards, but I knew I couldn’t.
Running a duster over the light fittings and shelves, I found myself cringing as I remembered the things I’d said – and, worse, the tone I’d said them in. I’d been shrill, hectoring, accusatory. No sensible person would have blamed Sam if he had not only walked out as he had but stayed out.
Instead, he’d come back. He’d given me another chance. I didn’t deserve it – the way I’d behaved, I deserved to lose him. If he was at all minded to compare me, his jealous, paranoid girlfriend, with Ava, the one who’d got away, I knew who would come out looking more appealing.
I was going to change, I decided. Not to say I was going to go full tradwife and start ironing Sam’s shirts, providing sex on demand and letting him have full decision-making power over our lives – I wasn’t that far gone.
But I was going to trust him. I was going to believe that what he’d said about Ava was the truth and that whatever his reasons were for seeing her were valid.
I was going to be the partner Sam deserved to have and the person I wanted to be.
Feeling the beginnings of a self-righteous glow, I sprayed the kitchen worktops and wiped them down, gathering all the random bits of clutter – loose change, chargers, Sam’s gym membership card – into a pile. Then I put everything away in its place and moved on to the bathroom.
I spent half an hour in there, scrubbing toothpaste smears off the basin, polishing the taps, squeegeeing the shower screen, bleaching the toilet bowl and mopping the floor.
I was sweating now, my virtuous self-satisfaction beginning to wear off as I remembered just how boring cleaning is once the first flush of enthusiasm fades and you begin to realise you’re only going to have to do it all again in another couple of weeks.
I’d stick a load of washing on, I decided, then if Sam had woken up, I’d give the bedroom a hoover and call it a day. Then I’d have a nice hot bath and do to myself pretty much what I’d just done to the flat.
I eased the bedroom door open. Sam was still flat out on the bed, arms and legs akimbo, his hair fanned out on the pillow, Milton conked out next to him.
Silently, I picked up the washing basket and carried it out to the kitchen so I wouldn’t disturb him when I sorted through it.
The jeans he’d been wearing were on the floor, so I went back for those.
As I checked the pockets, remembering his habit of leaving his AirPods in them to be killed by the washing machine, I looked fondly down at him.
His eyes were closed, the lashes improbably long.
His lips were parted, half-smiling as if he was dreaming about something lovely.
His neck and arms were darker than the rest of his torso thanks to the hot summer.
A kite shape of softly curling hair stretched from the hollow of his throat down beneath the waistband of his boxer shorts.
Remembering the pleasure our bodies had given each other just hours before, I felt an involuntary shiver. He was mine. He was wonderful and precious and I’d be mad to ever let him go.
In the pocket of his jeans, my fingers encountered a piece of paper.
Shaking my head with smiling annoyance, I pulled it out.
This wasn’t my first rodeo – I’d had to rewash clothes more than once when they came out covered in lint from some paper napkin or scrawled shopping list Sam had pocketed and forgotten about.
But I could tell straight away that this wasn’t either of those things.
It was a letter. A letter written on heavy, cream paper that looked as if it had been cut out of a fancy notebook.
There was gold ink on the edges of the pages, which were unlined but printed with a ghostly pattern of scroll-like ferns.
The text, in violet ink, looked like it had been written not with a fountain pen, but not with a regular ballpoint either – perhaps with one of those fancy rollerball pens. The letters were neat and rounded like a child’s.
It was a letter from Ava. It was private. I knew I shouldn’t read it – but I knew I was going to anyway.
I kicked Sam’s jeans under the bed, walked through to the living room and sat on the sofa. To my surprise, my hands were quite steady as I unfolded the pages and began to read.
Sam,
I’m lying next to you, watching you sleep.
You look so peaceful – like a child. I suppose that’s true of most people when they’re asleep, but it seems especially true of you right now.
I’m close enough to you that I can smell your body – a bit of that leathery cologne you use, a bit of shampoo and a bit of me because we just had sex.
I wonder how you’re feeling about that. I can’t know for sure, but I’m pretty certain it’s different from the way I feel about it because it’s different for me from all the times before.
How many of them? Hundreds, definitely. Maybe a thousand or even more.
There’s no way I can remember each individual time.
I wish now that I could because then I’d be able to hold in my heart how special each one was.
I wonder how many times we’ve told each other we love each other. That must be even more times than we’ve slept together, because of all the times we’d go, I love you. I love you more. No, I love you more – carrying on for ages until we started laughing and gave up.
I wonder whether we’ll ever have sex again, and whether we’ll ever say we love each other again. I think we probably will, but I know it won’t be the same as it used to be. Everything is different now.
I’m different. It’s like the Ava you first met and loved doesn’t really exist any more. It’s someone else you love now and not me.
I wish we could find a way to go back to how things were before. Erase everything that’s happened, like wiping one of those old video tapes to record new stuff over. But we can’t because no matter what we decide to do now, what’s happened will always have happened, and I can’t change that.
You look so innocent, sleeping there – like you haven’t got a care in the world. I wish you could stay that way forever, but I know you can’t – same as I can’t fall asleep and realise when I wake up that it’s all been a dream and we can just carry on like before.
Sam, I love you. I wish I could have always been
Your
Ava
My hands had been steady when I picked up the letter, but they weren’t now.
The paper was fluttering even though the air in the room was still. I felt sick. I read the note again, right the way through. I thought about taking a photo of it with my phone, but my phone was in the bedroom, and there was only one more thing I was going to do when I went back in there.
I didn’t need a photo anyway. I knew what Ava had written and what it meant.
My palms were slippery with sweat, so much that I worried if my fingers touched the writing on the page, they’d smudge the purple ink.
Maybe if I wiped my palms all over it, I could erase it all, but I knew I would never be able to wipe it from my mind.
Feeling like the muscles in my legs had been replaced with wet spaghetti, I walked back into our bedroom. Silently, I retrieved Sam’s jeans from beneath the bed, replaced the letter in the pocket and slid the jeans back again.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had absolutely no idea. I found myself longing to talk to Jamie, to turn to him for comfort and advice, even though I knew it was Sam I needed to talk to.
But I also knew that I couldn’t let him know what I’d found.
Not yet.