Short story · Couples
Claire and Mark have been married for fifteen years and know each other’s habits by heart. One weekend by a lake, with no children and no schedule, they discover they had forgotten there was more to learn.
The first thing they did when they arrived was stand perfectly still in the yard and listen.
No washing machine beeping. Nobody shouting from upstairs that someone else had taken the charger. No sound at all, really, apart from the wind in the pines and a diver calling somewhere out on the lake, a long, lonely sound that made Claire shiver even though the afternoon was warm.
‘Are we sure we haven’t left a child in the car?’ said Mark.
‘We’ve checked twice.’
‘I’ll check once more.’
He didn’t. He put the bags down on the step and put his arm round her shoulders, and they stood like that for a while looking at the cabin. It was small and painted red, with white corners and a veranda that leaned slightly to the left, and behind it the lake glittered between the trunks. It was the first time in six years they had gone anywhere just the two of them. The children were at Mark’s sister’s until Sunday evening, and his sister had waved them off with a look that said she knew exactly what they needed and had no intention of saying it out loud.
Inside it smelled of resin and old sunshine and a hint of woodsmoke from the stove. Rag rugs on the floor, a bed that creaked if you so much as looked at it, a kitchen with flowery cups that somebody’s grandmother had once picked out with care. Claire went round touching things, the curtains, the windowsill, an old calendar on the wall. Mark opened every cupboard and reported what he found as if he were on an expedition.
‘One corkscrew. Three kinds of coffee filter, none of which fit the machine. An old board game with all the yellow pieces missing.’
‘Someone won so hard they took the pieces home with them,’ said Claire.
They made pasta and ate it on the veranda while the sun went down behind the far shore and the lake turned first gold, then grey, then almost black. They talked about the children for half an hour out of sheer habit, then caught themselves doing it and laughed. Then they sat on the sofa to watch a film on her laptop, his hand on her knee, her feet in his lap.
She woke with a start at around one. The laptop had gone to sleep. Mark was asleep with his head tipped back and his mouth open, and one of her legs had gone so thoroughly dead that she couldn’t feel it.
‘Mark.’
‘Mm.’
‘We fell asleep at half nine.’
He opened one eye. ‘We’re so old.’
‘We’re so tired,’ she corrected him. ‘There’s a difference.’
They went to bed in the creaking bed, and he lay behind her with his arm across her waist, and she felt his breath on the back of her neck and thought that this was a kind of happiness too, even if it wasn’t the one she had packed for.
Because she had packed for something. At the very bottom of her bag, under the wool jumper and the book she would never get round to reading, lay an oblong box she hadn’t yet mentioned.
In the morning they went for a swim. It was Mark’s idea, and he regretted it the instant he jumped off the jetty and surfaced with a noise that sent two ducks flapping up in panic further off in the reeds. Claire went in from the ladder, slowly, with an expression she hoped conveyed dignity, and then she ducked under and the water closed over her, so cold and clear it felt like being born again.
Afterwards they sat on the steps, each wrapped in a blanket, with coffee in the flowery cups. Her hair dripped onto her shoulders. His legs were still red from the cold. The sun had risen above the trees and was warming the boards beneath them.
‘I’ve got something,’ she said.
He waited. It was one of the things she loved about him and sometimes forgot she loved: that he waited.
‘Jo gave me a present when I turned forty-five. You know, at the dinner.’
‘The Jo who gave us a fondue set for a wedding present?’
‘The very same Jo.’
‘We’ve never used it.’
‘No. And I haven’t used this one either.’ She took a sip of coffee. ‘It’s been in the chest of drawers for four months. I brought it with me. I don’t really know why. Well, I do know why. I just don’t know how you say it after fifteen years without it sounding like something’s wrong.’
He looked at her. Then he smiled, that crooked smile she had fallen for once in a queue for a gig when they were both thirty and wearing jackets that were too thin.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said. ‘But now I really want to know what Jo gave you.’
She fetched the box. Inside lay a We-Vibe Wand 2, purple, long and soft, all silicone with a rounded head and a neck that gave when you bent it. Mark held it up to the light and turned it over the way he turned a plank before deciding whether it was worth using.
‘It’s almost as long as my forearm.’
‘Twenty-seven centimetres. I looked it up.’
‘Course you did.’ He pressed the button. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. ‘Is it charged?’
‘I charged it at home. With a magnetic cable I hid in the bag with my wash bag so you wouldn’t ask why I had another one.’
He pressed it a third time and looked offended. Mark was a joiner and in fifteen years had never met a machine he couldn’t get going. He took the quick-start guide out of the box, read it, and started laughing so hard the blanket slid off him.
‘It’s got a travel lock.’
‘What?’
‘A travel lock. So it doesn’t start up in your bag. You hold plus and minus down for two seconds.’ He did. The wand woke in his hand with a soft, deep hum. ‘It’s more responsible than we are. It knew it was going on a trip.’
Claire laughed so much she got coffee up her nose, and he laughed at her getting coffee up her nose, and it was a long time since they had laughed like that together, without either of them thinking about something else at the same time.
Then, mostly as a joke, he put the head against his own shoulder. His face changed.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘OK. That is not a joke.’
He held it against the back of her neck, right where she always carried her stress. She closed her eyes. The vibration went deep into the muscle and on, out into her shoulder blades, down along her spine, and she heard herself sigh in a way she hadn’t said she was going to sigh.
When she opened her eyes again he was looking at her with an expression she hadn’t seen for a while. Not tired. Not kind. Something much more awake.
‘Later?’ he said.
‘Later,’ she said, and they both knew later wouldn’t be very late at all.
Afternoon came. The sky clouded over and a chill drifted in off the lake, and Mark lit the stove with a seriousness that suggested their lives depended on it. Claire half-drew the curtains, so the light turned green and dim as if underwater, and lay face down on the bed in just her knickers.
‘You can start with my back,’ she said into the pillow. ‘I’ve got fifteen years of backs to catch up on.’
He straddled her thighs, warm and heavy, and started at the small of her back. He had big hands, rough from work, and she had forgotten how they felt when they weren’t on their way somewhere else. The wand hummed low over her spine, and the neck bent when he pressed it against her shoulder blades, so the head followed the shape of her body instead of digging in. He moved slowly up towards her neck, then out along her arms, then down again.
‘Tell me if it gets too much,’ he said.
‘It’s not too much. It’s a little bit too little.’
He pressed plus. She moaned into the pillow.
After a while she turned over. He stayed where he was, above her, looking down at her, her breasts, her stomach with the silvery lines from two pregnancies, her face that had gained more lines since they met, and he looked at all of it as if it were something he had just discovered.
‘May I?’ he said, and let the head of the wand rest against the inside of her thigh.
She nodded. Then she regretted the nod – not the answer itself but that she had only nodded, the way she usually did, as if it were something you dealt with quietly. ‘Yes,’ she said out loud. ‘I want you to.’
He moved it slowly upwards, over the fabric of her knickers. She felt the vibration spread through the cotton and into her, and her hips rose off the mattress. He held it there, lightly, barely touching, and she reached for his wrist.
‘A bit higher. There. No, not harder, just keep it still.’
It was so easy to say. Fifteen years, and she had never really said it, not like this, not in detail. She had let him guess, and he had guessed well, mostly, and neither of them had asked what lay beyond what was good enough.
She pulled off her knickers herself. He laid it against her again, straight against her skin now, against the swollen, wet warmth, and she closed her eyes and breathed and let him hold it while she moved her hips against it at her own pace. The stove crackled. The rain had started, softly, on the tin roof. He kissed the inside of her knee, her hip, her stomach, in no hurry at all.
She came with his hand in hers, their fingers tightly laced, and it was like falling backwards into the lake again, that cold, clear shock that turned into warmth.
When she opened her eyes he was lying beside her propped on one elbow, looking embarrassed.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I’ve got something too.’
He reached for his wash bag on the floor and took out something small and blue in silicone. It looked like a ring with two bendy prongs and a ridged pad on top.
‘It’s a cock ring,’ he said, unnecessarily. ‘It vibrates. I read about it one night when I couldn’t sleep and thought that if Jo was allowed to buy you a present, then surely I could buy one for us.’
Claire sat up. ‘You’ve had a secret in your bag as well?’
‘In my wash bag. Right next to your cable, as it turns out.’
They looked at each other and burst out laughing again, the kind of laughter that makes your stomach ache, and she kissed him in the middle of it, and the laughter turned into something else.
The ring had a slider for adjusting the size. Mark adjusted it with the same concentration he gave to fitting a door frame, and she lay watching him and thought she had never loved him more than right now, naked and hard and frowning over a slider.
‘It’s got twelve programmes,’ he said. ‘And one button.’
‘One button for twelve programmes?’
‘You have to click all the way round.’
He pressed. And pressed. She lay back and laughed while the ring rumbled, pulsed, went quiet, pulsed again in a new pattern.
‘You just clicked past a good one.’
‘Which one?’
‘The last one. No. The one before that.’
He had to click all the way round again before he found it, and by then they were both laughing so much she had to hold on to him. Then they stopped laughing.
She pulled him down on top of her. ‘Yes,’ she said, before he had a chance to ask. ‘Come here.’
He slid into her slowly, and she felt the ring’s humming pad meet her exactly where she was still sensitive from before. She gasped. He stopped at once.
‘Good or too much?’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very good. Don’t move yet.’
He didn’t move. They lay still and felt it, she beneath him, he inside her, and the vibration ran through them both as if they shared one pulse. Then he began to move, unhurriedly, and she met him, and it was familiar and completely new at the same time, like walking into your own house and finding a room you had never opened.
The wand was still lying beside them on the sheet. She picked it up, switched it on at the lowest setting and laid it against the small of his back, against the backs of his thighs, and felt the whole of him tense and tremble against her.
‘Claire,’ he said, just her name, in a voice she hadn’t heard for years.
‘Wait,’ she said, and he stopped mid-movement, instantly, without a question. She smiled up at him. ‘I just want to be on top.’
They rolled over, and she sat astride him with her hands on his chest and the light from the stove flickering over them both, and she moved the way she wanted, slowly and then faster, and he held her hips and watched her as if he didn’t want to miss a thing. She came once more, trembling, head thrown back and his name in her mouth. He followed her soon after, with a sound that was half groan and half laugh, and pulled her down against his chest and held her so tight she could hear his heart.
They lay like that for a long time. The ring had gone quiet. The wand had gone quiet. The rain on the tin roof had not.
‘Fifteen years,’ he said at last, into her hair.
‘Mm.’
‘Why did we wait so long?’
She thought about it. ‘I don’t think we waited. I think we forgot to ask.’
Late in the evening, when the rain had passed and the sky had cleared again, they went down to the jetty with the duvet wrapped round them both. The lake was perfectly still and black, and the stars lay in it as if someone had scattered them across a table. The air was cold and it was warm under the duvet, and her feet were icy against his calves, and he didn’t complain.
The toys lay on the draining board inside the cabin, clean and dry, next to the flowery cups. Mark had washed them under the tap as carefully as he cleaned his tools, and Claire had stood in the doorway watching him and thought that some things about him would never change, and that she didn’t want them to.
‘Do you know what I was thinking about?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The app. It’s got twelve patterns. We’ve tried none.’
She leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘Then we’ve got twelve weekends to go.’
‘The kids will wonder where we keep disappearing to.’
‘The kids will be glad to see the back of us.’
Out on the lake the diver called again, the same long, lonely note as when they had arrived. But it didn’t sound lonely any more, Claire thought. It sounded like someone calling to someone else and waiting for an answer.
She took his hand under the duvet. It was warm and rough and familiar, and she had held it for fifteen years, and tonight it felt as though she were holding it for the first time.
‘Same cabin next year?’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘Next month.’
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