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This was ridiculous. I let my hand fall to the sink, still holding the face cloth. I shouldn’t have to put on performance mode for my own wife. The backbone of any relationship was honesty and communication, surely? I needed to be honest with her. Tell the truth about how I was feeling, sexy lingerie be damned. I realised I was still wearing it, and grabbed one of the straps in frustration. I was just about to tear it off when-
“Jean?”
“Petra,” I said automatically, dropping my hands to my sides as I turned to face her. In that instant, spotting the haunted greyness of her pallor, I knew I couldn’t tell her. Not when she was so overwhelmed.
“Wow,” she said after a brief pause. “This is… different.”
“Surprise?” I said weakly.
“Yeah, a surprise,” she nodded, swallowing hard. “A pleasant one, of course. A different one.”
“This wasn’t quite how I planned it,” I said. “I was going to surprise you at the door with it. In the hope that you’d be too stunned to speak and instead would just whisk me upstairs to the bedroom. But… you’re just stunned. Full stop.” I chuckled nervously.
“Is that what you really wanted?”
“Only if you wanted it too, of course.”
“What if I… didn’t?”
She looked nervous now, and I rushed to reassure her.
“Then that’s not a problem either! I can take this off, and we can have a good old laugh about it while we eat dinner. How does that sound?”
“No, no,” she took a step back, looking flustered. “The last thing I want to do is laugh at you.”
“Don’t you mean the second to last thing? After… making love with me?” I tried to laugh, but I couldn’t stop the bitterness in my voice.
“Oh Jesus, Jean.” She took another couple of steps back and sat on the bed with a plop. “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just… I think it’s the stress. It’s like the route between my brain and my lady parts has just… been blocked. That channel where my libido used to flow is obstructed. By all the shit that’s been happening. I’d like nothing more than to… do it like we used to, but there’s just something stopping that message from reaching my… lady parts.”
“So this doesn’t do anything for you? The lingerie?” I stepped into the bedroom and gave her my best proud, upright, goddess-like stance. Like the models on the lingerie website. Like Petra, once upon a time. However, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror, and looked quickly away.
“No,” she almost whispered without even looking at me. “Not physically. As a person, yes, you do it for me… but if you’re talking about sexually, then no. But again, it’s nothing personal. It’s just me being… faulty.”
I moved to stand right in front of her.
“Not even if I were to kiss you? Or to…” I ran my finger down her jaw, down her neck and across the exposed collarbone shown by her scoop-neck T-shirt with the lightest of touches. “How about that?”
She gulped, then put her hand around my wrist to stop its trek downwards. I snatched it away immediately.
“No. Okay. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed,” I said, heading back to the bathroom. “Give me five minutes and I’ll get some clothes on and we can start dinner.”
“It’s not you, it’s me,” she reminded me mournfully as I shut the door behind me.
I nearly growled. Of all the lines.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Saturday off didn’t happen in the event – something came up. Petra did try to explain it to me, but I waved her explanation away and reassured her that it was fine. I knew that it was all potentially a lie, and she may just be sneaking off to see Stella. In her defence, she did look crestfallen when I waved her away, but I didn’t have the energy to probe. The light had somehow gone out of our relationship, for me. And I wasn’t sure how to ignite it again.
Gemma comforted me. I hadn’t told her my suspicions, but she seemed to sense that something was wrong that Saturday morning, because she sent me one simple message: Any more collywobbles on the horizon? How have you been doing?
Her intuition should have freaked me out, but it made such a change to have someone explicitly caring that it just made me smile. Not in the least because the old-fashioned word reminded me of the paragraph she’d sent me.
Maybe a little, collywobbles-wise, I replied coyly.
Uh oh. Do I need to belabour you with my vomit-inducing cheesy words of affirmation again??
Maybe a little, I said again.
