Page 10 of One Day at a Time

‘In your defence, the timing hasn’t been great,’ Chanel pointed out, and Sheena appreciated the support.

Only a couple of weeks ago, she’d been ready to have the ‘I want a different life’ discussion with Gregor, but then, of course, he’d ambushed her with the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party and she’d completely back-pedalled on the decision. Actually, not so much a back-pedal, but more of a raincheck. She’dstuck a pin in the idea and she just hadn’t been courageous enough to take the pin back out yet. Meanwhile, Gregor was completely oblivious because he was the kind of man who thought that making one grand gesture of romance in twenty-five years had bought him another two and a half decades of wedded bliss.

‘I mean,’ Martha piped in, ‘you should really have a relationship therapist to help you figure out how you went from planning to leave him to having the first sex of the year in the space of just a few hours.’

Sheena’s face burned at the thought of that encounter. The night of the party was the first time they’d had sex since a Hogmanay quickie a few months before. It had only happened on both occasions because Gregor had broken his vow of alcohol moderation and got sufficiently wellied to be frisky, but not too wellied to perform, and Sheena had been in the right place at the right time.

‘I know, I panicked. And I thought the party was such a sweet gesture. But the next day he got up and went off to play golf and he’s just gone straight back to… well, to being Gregor. You know, part of the agreement we had last year when I first raised our issues with him was that I’d like a minimum of five minutes a day of physical affection. Just five minutes. A wee slow dance in the kitchen. Or a hug in bed at night. Or, God forbid, another night of bendy sex. Has it happened? Nope. I’m not even worth five minutes out of his day. And I tried, I really did.’

She was trying to make it sound light-hearted, but the truth was that one stung, because she’d tried everything in the marriage-saving guidebook to get things back on track. Over the years, she’d gone with the sexy underwear, the role playing – he’d played the part of the bored vicar perfectly – and attempts at spontaneity, which were mostly rejected. It wasn’t even the lackof sex that bothered her most, though. It was the complete void of romance, of touch, of dreams and excitement. They’d been together since they were both fourteen years old, they were each other’s only partners so far in life, and they’d simply outgrown each other. They’d settled into parallel lives where they loved and respected each other, but the passion had long gone. He had his golf holidays; she had weekends away with the girls. He did fifty-mile cycle rides on the weekends and she hung out with Martha and Chanel. He trained every night in the gym, while she read books, watched her favourite shows, or chatted to Forty-Two Long. Because the reality was…

‘We are just two best friends that live together. I don’t understand why he is perfectly content with that, and I truly believe him when he says that he loves our lives, but the problem is that I don’t. It’s not enough for me. I want more. Before I die, I want to know what it feels like to be adored and desired and to have fun again with a man. I don’t just want to be a comfortable habit. I want to dance. To feel sexy. To have a partner who makes me laugh and wants to explore life with me. Is that too much to ask?’

Neither of them answered, because they both knew that it was a rhetorical question. She’d said all of this countless times before, but they were the kind of best friends that would allow her to rant about it on a repetitive loop.

‘I think I need to speak to him tonight. I really do. Otherwise, I’m going to be hanging out with my Zimmer frame in my nineties, just desperately hoping he’ll cop a feel of my buttocks on the way past.’

If either of them fully expected her to back out again, they were too kind to say. In fact, Chanel went one step further.

‘Well, you know my spare room is yours if it gets tense tonight, doll.’

‘And so is mine,’ Martha agreed. ‘But you’d need to share itwith a clotheshorse of damp sports kits, an ironing board, and my husband if he’s in the bad books, so I’d definitely go to Chanel’s if I were you.’

‘Thank you, lovelies. I’ll keep you posted. I need to go and rehearse what I’m about to say in my head. It’s so much easier when I’m just telling other people what to do with their lives.’

She wasn’t actually kidding about that. The rest of the way home, she ran through a dozen different conversation openers.

‘Gregor, we need to talk…’ Too clichéd?

‘Gregor, I’ve been thinking about the next chapter of our lives together. Well, not actually together.’Too blunt. Gave the game away too soon.

‘Gregor, do you feel fulfilled in life?’Yes, maybe that. Bring his needs into it too.

Or perhaps not, because the problem, as far as she saw it was that he was perfectly content. He seemed to think this amiable, emotionally flat-lined existence was both normal and perfectly adequate. And maybe it was for some people. Maybe this restlessness and irritation she was feeling all the time were just perimenopausal side effects and if she blew up her marriage, she’d get through to the other side of her midlife crisis and desperately regret it.

He wasn’t a bad guy. He was actually a really good man and he would be a great catch for someone. She couldn’t explain why she’d fallen out of love with him, but it had been years now and she was absolutely certain that those feelings weren’t coming back. The truth was, they’d gone through things early in their relationship that had bonded them, things she chose not to think about right now, that had made them stick together, out of some kind of misplaced loyalty. She often wondered if they’d have stayed together if those mistakes hadn’t happened, or if they’d just have been a fondly remembered teenage, first love romancethat ran its course. She didn’t have the answers, but she did know that almost thirty years later, she had to believe that she’d paid the price for the awful decisions of their youth. It was time to let it all go and that clean slate left her with two choices. Stay with a man she had already spent her entire adult life with, because it was easy. Or leave and search for a life that fulfilled her, one that still held excitement and joy and the prospect of a new and thrilling chapter.

She rolled down the window, hoping the breeze would cool the furnace that had suddenly switched on inside her, but it was too warm and balmy outside, so she closed the window again and switched on the aircon.

By the time she reached home, a gorgeous two-storey duplex in an old mansion conversion just off Hyndland Road, she was ready. She could do this.

As she walked up the hundred-year-old stone stairs to her front door, she decided to stick with the unimaginative cliché that had pre-empted break-ups since prehistoric women sat their cavemen down for a chat.

‘Darling, we need to talk…’

5

MADDIE

‘Is that the last of the boxes, Maddie?’ Alyssa’s grandad, Hugo, shouted to her over the noise of the community centre minibus, the café’s delivery van, Val’s bright yellow Jeep and the frog-green Skoda Maddie had inherited from her mother, all of which had engines running, ready to go.

‘It is, Hugo, thank you. I’ll see you at the other end.’

‘Wagons roll,’ he shouted, invoking a deafening but weirdly jubilant cacophony of horns, as the convoy bearing all her worldly goods took off in the direction of her next home.

Maddie closed the door for the last time, jumped into the Skoda, then quickly fired off a text to Dylan, trying to ignore the wave of nausea that was churning her stomach. She’d thought she was over that damn bug, but in the last week there had been occasional bouts of queasiness again. Thankfully, it subsided as she typed.

Morning cowboy. Just letting you know, that’s me leaving the flat. It’s spotless, so don’t let the dodgy landlord dock any of your deposit. Have a nice day, y’all. Xx