Maybe I’ll find a wonderful new man too.
My mind quickly drifts back to where it’s been going all afternoon: Jude.
Maybe we’ll meet again at the reunion. It’ll be too soon then, of course, too fresh and raw, but we’ll chat. We’ll keep in touch. He’ll text me now and again, just when I’m feeling most down. And then one day I’ll find him on my doorstep with a big bunch of flowers and I’ll just know I’m finally ready to have my own ‘glow’. Dan will be nothing but a distant memory.
I sigh, wishing it could be true, that I could jump forward to that moment in reality, not just in my mind, and that I wouldn’t have to experience all the in-between bits.
Don’t be silly, I tell myself. Things don’t happen just because you wish them, and I put my phone to sleep and walk back inside the house to cook Dan’s tea.
We sit eating our pasta. Neither of us has much to say. Dan keeps his focus on his plate most of the time, hoovering up the large portion I gave him – extra cheese on top – and while he eats, I look at him. I wonder who this is, who my husband has become.
You never really knew how to reach me, I tell him in my head. I always thought you’d figure it out some day, but now you’re not even trying. You’re probably too busy trying to ‘reach’ into some other woman’s knickers.
I chew my pasta and wish I’d cooked something that makes more of a crunch. Another thought creeps up on me, and then another and another.
What if it’s not just sex?
What if he’s falling in love with someone else?
What if he knows how to reach her, this mystery woman he must talk to on the computer?
Then I’ll rip his chest open with my bare hands and kill him.
The force of my rage stops me cold. I put down my fork.
I’m shocked. I thought my love for Dan was comfortable, like a bath you’re not quite ready to get out of, even though it’s well on its way to lukewarm. I didn’t know there was enough left to prompt such fury.
I get up and scrape my food into the composting bin, then dump my plate in the dishwasher.
‘Are you OK?’ Dan asks, pausing from his pasta-shovelling marathon.
My face feels so stiff I’m surprised I can answer. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘You didn’t finish your pasta,’ he says, his mouth still half full. I want to reach over and slap it closed. ‘It’s your favourite.’
No! I scream silently inside my head. It’s your favourite. Why can’t you ever remember that?
‘Wasn’t hungry,’ I say, then I leave the room. I want to slam the door but I don’t. I might as well have done, I suppose, because, a second later, Dan yells after me, ‘What the bloody hell have I done now?’
What if …? becomes an itch I can’t stop scratching. As the days roll by, I find myself thinking about Jude all the time. In my mind he has mellowed with age, lost some of that youthful arrogance but is still ruggedly good-looking. He wears cashmere coats and Italian shoes, I imagine, as I kick Dan’s muddy trainers towards the shoe tidy and hang his windbreaker on a hook.
Safe bet? Hah! I put all my chips on Dan and yet he’s wasted almost a quarter of a century of my life. I think I hate him for it.
I haven’t done any more digging into his secrets, although I know I should. I won’t ask him if he’s banging one of the perky PE teachers at school and he’s not asking me if anything is wrong, even though we’ve hardly said more than a handful of words to each other in the last few days. I feel like I’m in a fog; everything is fuzzy and boring and grey. The only sharp thoughts in my mind are the ones I conjure up about Jude. Those are colourful and sweet and juicy. I want to live in that place, not even thinking about Dan. I am an ostrich and my head is firmly down the hole of my fantasies.
Becca comes into town on Dan’s ‘Thursday night with Sam Macmillan’ and we go for drinks. ‘Come on …’ she says, as we install ourselves at a table in the Three Compasses. ‘We’ve talked about it, now I think we just ought to do it!’
‘I told you,’ I say wearily. ‘I’m not following Dan. It would just be too … sad.’
I don’t want to be that desperate woman. I want to be her even less than I want to be a slowing fading, middle-aged empty nester, and that’s saying something.
‘Not Dan!’ she says, although she looks ready to be persuaded if I changed my mind. ‘I was talking about the reunion – it’s next week. Next Friday. Let’s go.’
‘On our own? What about Dan?’
Becca shrugs. ‘Someone mentioned in the Facebook group that they’d invited Jude.’
I study my large glass of Pinot Grigio. ‘Really?’ I haven’t told Becca about how he’s hijacked my every waking thought since we last talked of the reunion. It’s strange, I think. Becca tells me everything – Sophie calls her ‘the Queen of TMI’ – but there’s a lot I don’t tell Becca. I didn’t tell her about Jude asking me to run away with him, not back at the time and not even now. I also didn’t tell her I almost packed a bag and tried to track him down three days before my wedding.
‘You never liked Jude.’
She gives me a little one-sided shrug. ‘Maybe I was wrong about him. I was wrong about Grant, and we both might be wrong about Dan.’ I see her eyes glaze over and her jaw harden. She’s deep in thought. ‘Bastard …’ she mutters, shaking her head. ‘Just when I was starting to think not all men were cheating lizards, as well.’
I reach over and lay my hand on hers to comfort her, which seems topsy turvy but I get it. I haven’t been properly happy with Dan for five years. Maybe ten. But while Becca was stuck in her lousy marriage, she always held Dan up as the pinnacle of everything a good husband should be. She’s acting as if he’s let her down too. I don’t know if she’s ever going to forgive him for it.
‘Anyway, I think we ought to go.’
I take a long sip of wine to give myself time to think. ‘I really don’t know … Even if he’s there, he might just swan past me with his fabulous, ex-model wife. Or worse, he might not even remember me!’
‘You don’t know he has an ex-model for a wife,’ Becca says dryly, then her eyes twinkle with mischief. ‘You don’t even know he has a wife!’
‘You’ve lost your mind,’ I tell her. Not because she’s suggesting a bit of payback with my first love. Because she seriously thinks ‘done well for himself’ Jude would be even remotely interested in me these days.
‘Come on, Mags. This is you we’re talking about. You won’t be doing anything wrong. It’s not like you’re going to drag him out of there, get a room and have your wicked way with him, is it?’
While, technically, I know it will all be tame and above board if I bump into Jude at the reunion, I’m also aware how out of control my fantasy life has become in recent days. In my head I’ve done just what Becca said. Every time I think of it, my heart starts to race and I catch my breath. I feel like a teenager in the grip of her first boy-band crush. It doesn’t feel like ‘not doing anything wrong’. It feels as if I’ve already crossed a line I shouldn’t have done. I start to wonder if people who say that fantasises are harmless really know what they’re talking