How Do You Like Me Now?

by Holly Bourne

  ‘Tor?’ Tom’s voice drifts under the bathroom door. ‘That you?’

  Feeling guilty, I pour out loads of cat food to compensate for yelling at her. The moment it is in the bowl, she stares at it, unimpressed, and pads off.

  ‘No, it’s your other girlfriend!’ I call back. He doesn’t reply or laugh. Maybe he didn’t hear me over the podcast. I stand by the bathroom door for a moment, trying to get myself together before I go in. I do not want Tom to sense my mood, and he’s very adept at sensing my mood.

  Breathe in, breathe out. In and out.

  I push open the door.

  I smile.

  He’s made himself quite the sanctuary in here. He’s lit my candles, and poured in my lotion like I knew he would. He looks so cute I don’t even mind. The water laps at the rim. His dark hair is all matted with soap; a lazy smile plays on his face. He could be five years old. Well, apart from the gut and the bald patch that we’re not ever allowed to bring up, not even as a joke. The love rushes in again. I stand there, arms crossed, grinning at him. He opens his eyes, sensing my presence, or maybe just the draught from the door.

  ‘Hey Tor.’ His voice is throaty and relaxed. ‘Good time with Dee?’

  ‘Yes.’ I want to touch his skin. I want to feel close to him. God I love him, I love him so much sometimes. I point to the bath with a tilt of my head. ‘Room for one more?’

  His eyes squint as he grins. ‘Of course. As long as you take the tap end.’

  ‘I always have to go at the tap end.’

  ‘You snooze you lose, sister.’

  I step out of my clothes, hoping that he is watching and enjoying me doing so. I take care to wriggle out of my dress slinkily, rather than just tugging it over my head. I stand in my underwear for longer than I should, to give him extra time to appreciate my body. My body that only he gets to touch. That he rarely touches, even though I have sacrificed my entitlement to get touched by other people to be with him. But, when I look down, he’s fiddling with his phone to turn off his podcast.

  Some water spills onto the bathmat as I gently lower myself between Tom’s legs, giving each section of my body time to get used to the hot temperature. I tuck myself between the corner of the bath and the tap and smile over at Tom. He smiles back, his eyes almost half-closed again. My newly cut-back-in fringe is already sticking to my forehead with sweat so I slick it back with my wet hands. You see, this is cute. Isn’t this cute? Aren’t we cute? We’re still a cute couple. We have baths together, like couples do. There’s hardly enough room for us though. I have to lean backwards and spread my legs over Tom’s chest to fit under the water. Our genitals brush. We only need to re-angle ourselves, and Tom would need to get an erection, and then we could be one of those couples who have sex in the bath. Who get water everywhere and trash the bathroom and gasp into each other’s wet shoulders. But Tom doesn’t have an erection and now his eyes are completely closed. So I try to relax too, thinking, See! This is intimate. We can still be intimate.

  Tom opens his eyes and grins at me, his gaze falling over my body. He reaches over and pokes one of my soft nipples with his finger. ‘Boobies,’ he says childishly.

  ‘Tom!’ I cross my arms over myself as he giggles like a schoolboy. ‘Seriously Tom, you’re thirty-four years of age.’

  He wrinkles his nose. He stops laughing. ‘For fuck’s sake, Tori! Why do you always have to bring up how old we are? I know how old I am.’

  My mouth falls open and I almost swallow the soapy bath water. ‘Tom, you just poked my breast and yelled “boobies” like an actual child.’

  ‘OK, fair point.’ He splashes me playfully, but his sudden anger has made my skin itch. Sometimes I feel that he hates me. That his hatred bubbles under the surface like a simmering pot of toxic stew. Last week, after we argued in the kitchen about how to wash up properly, I even said, ‘Sometimes I actually think you hate me’. He didn’t even deny it. He just laughed. Laughed. But we’re having a bath, like cute couples do. And, to be honest with you, right now this man is all I have left. Dee is pregnant. Everyone is pregnant or married or married and with children. Tom and I will get there too, I’m sure we will. He won’t be able to hate me if I give him a child, surely?

  It takes me ten minutes to build up the courage to say it. I feel my heart pounding with fear as I open my mouth.

  ‘So, Dee’s pregnant.’ I don’t look at him as I tell him. I play with the bubbles, cupping them in my hands. I feel his entire body stiffen in the water.

  ‘Woah.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’m pretty shocked too.’ I pour the foam back onto the surface of the water and look up at him. He’s arranged his face into a careful display of impassive. ‘I mean, she’s only just met Nigel,’ I say. ‘I don’t know how they think this is a good idea. She doesn’t know him at all. I mean, you’re not supposed to make any major life decisions with a partner until you’ve been together at least two years, are you?’

  Tom hardly shakes his head. His eyebrows are furrowed.

  ‘I mean, remember what we were like in the first two years? We were so loved up, but, like, I didn’t know you. You didn’t know me. Not really. I mean, if you and me ever decide to have kids, we’ll really know what we’re letting ourselves in for, won’t we? But Dee has no idea what Nigel’s really like. No idea. None.’ The silence roars loudly between my ears. I plunge my hands back into the water and scoop up the remaining bubbles that have gone flat and scummy. I pour them from palm to palm until they are nothing.

  ‘Are you going to want to have children now?’ Tom finally asks. ‘Just because Dee is?’

  It takes me three whole blinks before I feel capable of replying. Three whole blinks to push down the anger that rises in my body, the anger that makes me want to smash my hands down in the bath and explode water over him like shrapnel. Three blinks to push away the following comebacks, comebacks that arrive with a wise, authoritarian voice that I’m too scared to listen to because I don’t want to upset him: Maybe I want children because that’s a normal thing to want. Maybe I want children because we’ve been together six years and own a flat together and it should be OK to talk about having children without being labelled as some needy freak. Maybe I am capable of feeling sad and jealous and confused about Dee without getting pregnant as some reflex kick-back. What the fucking fuck is wrong with you? I swear something is seriously wrong with you. I swear this isn’t me. It can’t all be me. I swear, I swear.

  ‘Of course not,’ I manage.

  ‘Good,’ Tom replies.

  The air crackles between us, so much so that I’m surprised we don’t get electrocuted in this water. There’s a mewing at the door. Cat has decided she wants to come in. We both watch as she manages to get her paw into a gap and use that to push the door open. She announces her arrival with a loud meow.

  ‘Hello Cat,’ I laugh. Tom’s smile is back and wide and he’s looking at Cat with so much love. She parades up and down the bath mat, purring. Then, with another meow, she leaps up onto the bath rim. She pushes one paw into the water, before leaping into the air and scrambling out of the bathroom. The water swirls as we laugh together at Cat. Cat has, once again, brought us back from the relationship precipice.

  Tom’s head falls back, his smile lazy again. We are silent apart from the sloshing of water. There are so many things I want to say – bang banging at the door to my mouth, demanding to be let through. But I do not have the energy to fight with Tom, not today. Not when we’ve only just made up from the last one.

  The water has cooled down and is now just warm rather than hot – it’s melting away my stress and shock at Dee. I’m beginning to digest this new reality. Breaking it into bite-sized chunks and dissolving it into my future, piece by piece. OK, so she’s going to have a child, but she’s still Dee. She told me she hated it when Nigel put them as ‘in a relationship’ online. She did ask about my day. Her kid will probably be cute and bonkers. And Tom and I will catch up soon enough, and then our children can be
friends and hang out after school.

  I look at Tom’s naked body. How his leg hair expands in the water. At the muscles in his arms; the scar on his thigh from a childhood accident. His penis floats in the water like a lost sea turtle. We’re still essentially touching genital-to-genital. Without really thinking, I reach over and lightly stroke his penis underwater, seeing if it responds.

  It doesn’t. And yet I don’t let go.

  I lightly grip my hand around it and pump it ever so slightly, like I’m doing it absent-mindedly. I reach out with my other hand and gently tickle the wrinkled conkers of his ball sack. But he’s not getting hard and I’m already seeing this failing. His penis floats flaccidly between my loosening fingers. Tom opens his eyes and smiles then firmly pushes my hands off his penis. ‘Mmm, that was nice,’ he murmurs as he rejects my touch.

  The humiliation is instant.

  There’s the noise of thousands of water droplets rushing towards gravity as Tom stands up and gets out of the bath. He takes half the bathwater with him so it hardly even covers my ‘boobies’. ‘I’ll let you enjoy the bath to yourself a bit,’ he says. Like he is kind. Like he didn’t just push my hands off his body. Like he wasn’t lying just a second ago when he said ‘that was nice’ – because if it was nice he wouldn’t have pushed me off him. I cannot cry until he has left the room. And, even then, I cannot cry in a way that it shows. Crying is even unsexier than whatever it is that I just did wrong. You can’t fancy a woman who is crying. I tip my head back so the tears fall around innocent, hideable, parts of my face.

  And I get the feeling that Tom isn’t even thinking about what just happened.

  Month Five

  Excerpt from Who The F*ck Am I?

  What nobody tells you about your twenties is that you lose the methods with which to measure who you are, and how well you’re doing. That’s what causes so many of the problems. Think about it. From when you’re born until you’re twenty-one, you’ve always been doing pretty much the very same thing as everyone around you. The measurements of success are pretty straightforward. What grades did you get in your exams? A or B or C or D? Have you been fingered yet? Have you started your period? Have you got a boyfriend yet? Or even a best friend? And, yeah, you may’ve whinged about ‘peer pressure’ at the time, but at least you knew what the fuck you were supposed to be doing!

  But your early twenties come and then you’re all set free on your own gusts of wind. What is success? How do you know if you’re doing well? Yes, you may have a job and it pays really well and you’re earning more than your friends, but you hate it and cry in the loo. Or you love your job and you know it’s leading somewhere, but you’re so broke you’re stealing bog paper from the office toilets. Or you’re in a relationship and trying to play house but looking at all your single friends screwing their brains out thinking I should be doing that. Whereas your single friends spend Sundays alone and hung-over and wish – just wish – they had someone to binge-watch something with. Not enough credit is given to what a mindfuck your twenties are. I just want to be in my thirties! I want to have all that self-belief I’ve heard is coming my way. I want to know what happens! At least in your thirties you know what happens. That’s got to be better than this, right?

  *

  Extract from Tori’s first draft of What The F*ck Now?

  Hi, my name is Tori and I’m a fucking moron.

  I hate the Tori who wrote about her twenties. I hate the Tori who thought her thirties would be brilliant. I WANT MY TWENTIES BACK, OK? Why the fuck did I ever whinge about them?

  Oh, yes, of course it’s confusing and scary and your flat is shit and everyone seems to be having a better time than you. But you are free. You are so free. And every decision doesn’t have massive life-changing consequences. Your boyfriend is a little bit crap? Doesn’t matter! You’re not going to marry him, are you? Job not great? That’s all right! You can still shake the etch-a-sketch and start all over again. Everyone’s sporadically honest about how sad they are. You all get pissed together and take turns to cry in the gutter about how lost you feel. Yeah you lose a few cool points for admitting you’ve messed things up, but you all mess up. It’s just a case of whose turn it is.

  But in your thirties it’s all game face.

  ‘Yes, I’m so happy! Look how happy I am! Look at this huge milestone I’ve achieved! I’m not going to admit to you how terrified and trapped I feel!’

  Because, in your thirties, the stakes suddenly get so high. You make decisions that are hard to get out of. So you pretend they’re the right ones. Your friends suddenly marry people they’ve only known a year and buy houses in areas that they always swore they wouldn’t and start spouting off shit about school catchment areas. And your eyebrows are raised and you’re thinking ‘Are you happy? Really? Really?’ But they won’t break. They can’t. They’ve paid estate agents’ fees and do you have any idea how much estate agents’ fees cost? Nobody will back down. Somehow the gusts of wind we rode on in our twenties have landed us somewhere and we have to make this somewhere work. Because you can’t turn back the clock. It’s too late now to figure out whether you’re on the right gust or not. And you don’t want people to know you’re so stuck, and so scared and think it’s too late to get yourself out of this situation. You don’t want to fail when everyone else is supposedly thriving. And, you are happy, right? Sometimes you’re happy, anyway. And isn’t that what happiness is? Fleeting moments, rather than a permanent state of euphoria. And as long as it looks OK on the outside who cares, right? And, you’re confident in who you are now. That is right. That is the one pay-off you don’t want to exchange for your twenties. But that sometimes makes it worse because you know who you are and you know this is wrong and yet you’re doing it anyway and fucking hell Tor, what the fuck are you writing? You’re so unhappy Tor. You are so fucking shitting unhappy. WHY AREN’T YOU DOING ANYTHING ABOUT THIS TOR? WHY WON’T YOU LEAVE TOM? YOU NEED TO LEAVE TOM. YOU KNOW YOU DO, SO WHY THE FUCK AREN’T YOU LEAVING? WHERE THE FUCKING FUCK IS YOUR FUCKING AGENCY YOU FUCKING SCARED MESS? HTleah;eshlsruhgshg;osnjkrsbgjkbg;ogn;o

  *

  Jessica Thornton has posted a picture

  DATE NIGHT for me and The Hubby. My man’s taking me out for dinner #MarriedLife #Blessed #HubbyDiaries

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  Couples selfie alert! I call this one #DeathByTableFavours

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  Comments:

  Amy Price: OMG – I cannot WAIT for your wedding guys! You two are soooooo cute #goals

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  Saturday night in with the fam #Blessed #Takeaway #FamilyLife #MarriedLife #ILoveMyFamily #SaturdayNightIn #FeelingGood #Breastfeeding #DogsOfInstagram #Weekend #GymTomorrow #LuckiestGirlAlive #BeStrong #Mother #Wife #Peace #Love

  *

  ‘Will you take my picture?’ I hold out my phone to Tom and try not to notice the flicker of judgement on his face. I walk away from him, to ensure there’s enough space between us for a good full-length shot. I have not done all these squats and sit-ups for nothing you know. Herman has left the building. I stand sideways in the mirror each morning and feel good at how flat my stomach is.

  ‘Make sure you get St Paul’s in the background,’ I instruct. There’s another flicker there. He doesn’t even try to hide it. I smile and turn my good side towards the phone and bend one leg to make myself look even skinnier.

  ‘Smile then.’ Tom presses his thumb to the screen then hands the phone back. I grab at it to inspect his efforts. He’s not framed it properly, cutting off my legs, which pisses me off because I want people to think I have good legs in this dress.

  ‘All right?’ he asks. ‘Come on, there’s a queue.’

  South Bank heaves with tourists and more tourists enjoying the sunshine. It’s one of those days where London has never been so beautiful and yet it’s ruined by how many people are cram
med into it. A line of people wait patiently for Tom and me to move along so they can have their photo taken here. It’s the best spot on this part of the Thames. You can get both St Paul’s and the Walkie-Talkie in the background.

  ‘Let’s get a photo of us,’ I suggest. We’ve not had a photo taken together in so long.

  ‘Nah, come on. People are waiting.’

  ‘Just one!’ I’m already lifting up my arm and swapping sides with Tom so my good side is showing. I aim the camera down at us so it’s more flattering and I smile and look proud to have this man on my arm. ‘See, that wasn’t so painful.’

  Tom’s already leading me away by the arm as I check how the photo came out. I judder to a halt. This angle has made my forehead look huge, even with my new fringe. And I swear my nose isn’t normally that nostrilly. On top of that, Tom isn’t smiling. Tom’s face isn’t doing anything. He’s just staring into the camera lens like he’s dead inside.

  ‘Tom! You’re not smiling,’ I complain, feeling rejected and stung. Tom is hardly listening because he’s checking his phone.

  ‘Come on,’ he pulls my arm again to the point it almost hurts and slips his phone back into his pocket. ‘We’re going to be late.’

  We dodge through the throngs of people who aren’t in as much hurry as we are. They swarm in clusters of carefree happiness. There’s a pop-up gin bar with giant novelty chairs made out of shrubbery – because this is London so why not? There’s a queue of people waiting to get a photo taken on them, cradling their gin in their hands, trying not to drink it before they get their turn. I wonder when liking gin became a personality trait. And how that paved the way for liking Prosecco to become a personality trait. I want to loiter at the second-hand bookstore under the bridge but Tom pulls me along and I pretend this is funny, even though it feels like he’s pulling my shoulder out of its socket. ‘What’s the rush?’ I giggle.

  ‘I don’t want us to lose our fucking table,’ Tom snaps back.