The Good Part(57)

‘I know. She’s a great mummy.’ He looks up at me, and I sense he wants to tell me he’s not being disloyal either. ‘She does the best birthday parties. Last year she made me this dinosaur cake. All my friends said it was the best cake ever, it had all these teeth made of M&Ms.’

I hum, biting my lip, feeling a sudden swell of emotion behind my eyes.

‘We didn’t cook the broccoli,’ Felix says, pointing to a broccoli head, sitting forgotten on the chopping board.

‘Do you want broccoli for dessert?’

‘I guess,’ he says, shrugging.

I put a pan of water on the stove, and Felix picks up a knife to start chopping.

‘Wait, can you use a knife?’

‘You trust me with a grenade but not with a kitchen knife?’ I laugh out loud, and there’s that smile again, the one he tries to hide, but he can’t disguise his pleasure in making me laugh.

‘Hey?’ comes a voice from the doorway and Felix and I both turn to see Sam looking around at the chaos in bemusement.

‘Hey, Dad,’ Felix says, running over to hug his father. He’s home early? I was going to tidy up before he got back, I was going to do better tomorrow.

Sam looks exhausted, and I have the urge to hug him too, but I’m wary. He’s got that ‘disappointed teacher’ look as he surveys the chaos.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ I tell him. ‘We were playing a game in here. I’ll tidy it all up.’

‘It’s fine,’ Sam says, walking through to the living room, picking up sofa cushions and putting them back where they belong. ‘You should be in bed, buddy,’ he tells Felix. ‘It’s a school day tomorrow. How about you go brush your teeth and I’ll come up and say goodnight.’

Felix gives me a look, conspirator and commiserator, before heading towards the stairs.

‘How come you’re home early?’ I ask.

‘Some of the musicians were ill. We couldn’t record everything we wanted to. I left you a voice memo . . .’

‘Sorry, I’ve hardly looked at my phone. Maria wasn’t well, then Amy was sick. I didn’t make it to London.’

Sam picks up a cuddly shark and collapses in an armchair. ‘I wouldn’t have left if I thought you’d be on your own. You should have called me, Lucy.’

He’s probably right, today has been a complete disaster, just look at this place. But I can’t help feeling disappointed that he sees it that way, because playing with Felix and Amy this evening, I finally got a glimpse of another side to parenting – the fun part, the part I might actually be good at.

‘I’m going to jump in the shower, the train was a sauna,’ Sam says. ‘Then we’ll deal with all this, I guess.’

As he turns to go up the stairs, I realise he hasn’t even kissed me since he came in. How have we gone from our amazing Saturday night to this? Maybe if I make the first move, I can get back to where we were, to the flirting and the teasing and the getting naked. I follow him up the stairs. The shower is already running, so I pull off my clothes in the bedroom. My body aches with tiredness, but as soon as I see Sam’s naked body in the shower, a new energy takes hold.

When I wrap a hand around his chest, he flinches, surprised, but then he holds my hand against his, and turns around to face me. Water streams down over our bodies, my skin bristles with the coldness of the shower and the anticipation of his touch. Those first few days, lusting after Sam felt like lusting after someone else’s husband, but since date night, I’ve made my peace with the moral ambiguity. Future Me would want me to have sex with her husband. I would, if I was her, which I am. Besides, it would be wrong to let this kind of insane chemistry go to waste. Tilting my head up to kiss him, I feel so small. Every man I’ve been with before feels like a fumbling boy compared to Sam. As he kisses me back, I let out a moan, and then his hands push me back against the wall of the shower.

‘You know, I’ve never had sex in a shower before,’ I whisper in his ear. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I feel him freeze, his hands still on my body. I look up at him, eyes wide in surprise, his face full of some undefinable pain. ‘What? What’s wrong?’

He looks down at my left hand, then gets out of the shower and wraps a towel around his waist, ignoring me as he walks back out to the bedroom.

‘What? What did I do?’ I try again, taking a towel from the rack.

‘Why aren’t you wearing your wedding ring?’ he asks.

‘Is that all you’re upset about? I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was such a big deal.’

He turns away from me, and I realise he’s shaking. ‘Who are you? You don’t sound like my wife, you don’t act like her.’ He lets out a groan, sits down on the bed and hangs his head in his hands. He rubs the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and takes a breath. ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s not your fault. It’s not that I don’t want this, or that I didn’t enjoy Saturday. I loved seeing you laugh and let go like you used to. I can’t think when you last fell into bed without taking your make-up off, putting your creams on, when you last kissed me in the street, not caring who saw.’ He looks up at me now, and I see the pain in his eyes. ‘But I feel bad for liking it. It feels weirdly disloyal, and you acting like this is the first time we’ve had sex in the shower has just thrown me, because we’ve had sex in there a hundred times. And you never take off your rings, except to sleep. It makes me feel like I’m with someone else, and if you’re not my wife, I . . . I don’t know where she went.’