No Ordinary Love Story: Sequel to The Diary of a Submissive (34 page)

Followed immediately afterwards by:

Although apparently we
weren’t ever actually together.
Stupid me. Fancy a beer?

I passed my phone to Adam and he scanned the messages.

‘That doesn’t sound good. Do you want to ring him?’

I gave him an impulsive hug. Adam’s laid-back nature was one of the things I loved most about him, but never more so than then, when the needs of a friend, one who was effectively an ex, had gate-crashed our evening. Not
only did he not have a problem with it, but he knew that I would want to check on Tom. In spite of the sexual side of our friendship ceasing long ago, Tom remained one of my best friends – and it took a laid-back boyfriend to be fine with that. That Adam felt secure enough in my love for him to be that relaxed was something I was very grateful for.

‘Do you mind?’ I gestured to the wine glasses. ‘Rain check on this?’

He kissed the top of my forehead. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart. I can pick your brain for business ideas whenever. Go ring him.’ He leaned over to get his own phone. ‘I’ll text Charlie and see how she’s doing.’

Which is how our quiet night in ended up with us in two different bars getting drunk with other people.

By the time I arrived at the bar, Thomas had already clearly had a couple. He also looked more miserable than I had ever seen him.

‘Hey you.’

He looked up and waved in half-hearted welcome, before turning his attention back to his drink.

‘I’m going to get a beer. Do you want another?’ I asked, not sure it was a good idea but not wanting to seem rude. He nodded.

When I got back to the table he was fiddling with his phone.

‘I thought I’d text her. But I don’t know what to say.’

He looked a bit broken and, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what to say either. Let’s face it, ‘Are you OK?’ was out, because he clearly wasn’t.

‘Do you think texting will help?’

He shook his head dolefully. ‘To be honest I don’t know there’s anything more I can say to her. I think we’re done.’ His face flashed with grief, as if hearing the words out loud, even from his own mouth, was too much to bear. ‘Fuck, I think we’re done.’

It seemed surreal. Bearing in mind how happy Charlotte had been when we’d gone out, I couldn’t understand what had happened to cause such a change. So I asked.

‘What happened?’

He didn’t speak for a long time. So long that I wondered if he’d actually heard me. Finally, he replied.

‘I told her I loved her. Twice.’ He smile was thin-lipped. ‘I think it’s fair to say she doesn’t feel the same way.’

Shit.

‘She broke things off? Because of that?’

He nodded. ‘The first time I said it, it kind of slipped out. We were lying in bed and she was curled into my arm and I said it.’ Something in my expression must have given me away. ‘No, don’t look like that, it wasn’t a post-sex thing. We were just cuddling. It was really nice. Cosy. When I said it, she stiffened a bit, but I thought I’d better just say it properly – I’d spent ages thinking it and having to be careful that I didn’t blurt it out. So I told her. I told her I loved her, that I wanted us to be in a proper relationship together.’ His voice got quiet. ‘That was when she moved away.

‘She told me that she didn’t want anything serious. She never had. That this was all about having fun sexual experiences with people she liked and trusted. She was quite upset about it, but she also seemed a bit angry at me telling her I had these feelings when we’d always said what we had was casual. I told her that it was fine, we could go
back to being friends with benefits, that would be enough. But she said she now knew it wouldn’t be enough for me, that I deserved better and that we should end things properly. A clean break.’

I honestly didn’t know what to say to make him feel better. In fact, worse than that, I knew there was nothing I could say, no combination of words that could help.

‘I’m so sorry, Tom.’

He smiled wanly. ‘I know. I’m hoping she’ll change her mind, but I’m not optimistic. I’m so stupid for telling her.’

I put my hand across the table to squeeze his. ‘You can’t help how you feel.’

He shook his head. ‘I know, but I’m now going to have to stop feeling it. I just don’t understand. A proper relationship was the next step. We had so much fun, we did so much stuff together – munches, parties, threesomes. The sex was literally the best I’ve ever known.’

I burst out laughing and he looked sheepish.

‘I’m sorry, Soph, I didn’t mean it like that.’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t count really.’

I laughed again. ‘It’s just as well I know what you mean and have a sense of humour or you’d be in so much trouble.’

He looked discomfited but continued doggedly. ‘I just think that sexual compatibility, that mutual open-mindedness, would be a great basis for a relationship.’

I nodded. ‘Definitely.’

‘But it’s not enough.’

‘No.’

We finished our beers in silence.

Adam got home a little after me – I’d poured Tom into a taxi, while Adam (ever the gentleman) had instead seen Charlotte to her front door. I’d picked up my glass of wine and resumed my place on the sofa as soon as I got home, half watching the news channel as someone reviewed the next day’s front pages and half letting my mind wander, thinking about how rotten Tom felt and how lucky I’d been in meeting Adam. My fury at the cack-handed matchmaking that had got us in the same room was a distant memory.

He sank down on the sofa next to me and leaned in for a kiss.

‘Hey you.’

I smiled and pulled him into a hug. ‘Hey yourself. How’re you doing?’

His smile was wry. ‘Not bad. I’ve had more fun Saturday nights though.’

I nodded gravely. ‘Me too. How’s Charlotte?’

He sighed. ‘Not great, not sure whether she’s done the right thing, questioning the friendship they had, worrying she’d led him on, worrying whether she was stupid to break things off.’

‘It’s so rotten. I honestly thought from seeing them together that they were both pretty smitten with each other.’

Adam nodded. ‘I know. The thing is, I’m not sure Charlie’s ever been that way with anyone. She’s a very independent person. She’s talking about going travelling for a bit to get her head clear.’

Charlotte’s work as a trainer for computer software was on a contract basis and made for a lot of down time,
which made travelling easy. She could easily take some time off for a month or two and pick things up afterwards. I just wasn’t sure if that would make it easier or harder to move on.

Adam smiled. ‘This gallivanting round the world at the end of a relationship might catch on.’ Ah, his ex.

I looked at him closely, trying to figure out if there was any wistfulness there. I couldn’t tell, so I decided the simplest thing to do was to ask.

‘Any pangs on that score?’

He leaned down to kiss my nose and then put his arm round me.

‘Absolutely not, Ms Morgan. In fact, the exact opposite.’

I smiled. ‘Good answer.’

Charlotte didn’t go away in the end. She didn’t see Tom any more either, though. He was bereft at the break-up, and I felt much sympathy for him, not least because there were a lot of parallels with my break-up with James: the sense that it hadn’t been a ‘proper’ relationship, whatever that was, but that it was more than a series of random hook-ups.

Honestly, the whole friends-with-benefits and fuck-buddy culture that seems to have become more
de rigueur
for our generation is a difficult world to navigate. For every relationship like the one I had with Tom (which ended organically, cleanly and with neither one of us feeling upset by the other), there were many others involving hurt feelings, misunderstandings and no bloody sense of where you stand with things. While I’d loved the experiences I’d had along the way and the chance to discover
more about what I was into (and, of course, the inordinate amount of fun I’d had), I was most definitely happy that uncertainty was no longer an issue. I just hoped Tom would be able to move on and find his own happiness.

He was definitely not hanging around waiting to do so, though. After the first few weeks of moping he signed up for an online dating site and for Fetlife, a D/s-focused social network. While he still spoke about Charlotte sometimes, he began talking to women online, although he wasn’t quite ready to take the next step. It sounded like he was having some flirty fun – I just wasn’t sure if this was going to be the start of the kind of relationship he wanted. It can be hard to tell if people are what they seem online.

Adam, on the other hand, remained nothing if not transparent. Sometimes that was accidentally amusing – for example, he had a tendency to become so focused on work that he tuned out everything else and it was a case of waving food in front of him (or stripping naked, that worked too) to get him to break off from what he was doing. It was OK, though, I didn’t take it personally. I felt secure enough in his love for me that the quirks of his personality just amused me.

Sometimes I found him genuinely surprising, though.

We’d gone out to the supermarket on a Saturday morning, at the end of one of those weeks that feels distressingly like it’ll never end. Adam was distracted to the point of hilarity. He forgot his wallet, and we ended up forgetting the milk and having to go back for it. By the time he’d stood in the car park for over a minute, unable to find the
car, I was laughing at him outright. I couldn’t help it. He was smiling, too, so I figured I was safe.

On the drive home he took a wrong turn, taking us to a neighbourhood not too far from our flat – but far enough that I was looking quizzically at him as he pulled over.

‘You OK?’ I asked, half expecting his strange behaviour to be a sign that he was ill.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said, getting out of the car. I was confused, but I followed him.

We crossed the road. Adam walked up to the front gate of a small house, and said hello to a man waiting there. Apparently he was waiting for us. I smiled hello, but didn’t really know what to say because I had no clue what was going on. We followed the man inside, while my brain whirred – was this a potential new client of Adam’s? A friend? Why hadn’t he mentioned anything?

When we got inside, everything slotted into place. The house was empty, there was no furniture anywhere, and as we stood in the hallway it became apparent we were here to have a look round.

The estate agent, who’d come to let us in, agreed to leave us to it, seemingly keen to make a phone call from the warmth of his car parked in the drive.

As the front door closed behind him, I turned to look at Adam, my glance questioning. Well, at least this explained why he was distracted.

‘You didn’t mention we were looking at houses today.’

He looked a bit sheepish. ‘We aren’t, not really. It’s just, I saw this advertised in the local paper and looked it up online and it just seemed similar to what we’d been talking about.’

I grinned. We had spent a ridiculous amount of time discussing what our dream house would look like, mostly because it made the endless saving feel more worthwhile. We wanted a little house (well, we’d have been happy with a big house, but we had to be realistic), big windows and a kitchen big enough for a little table (me), room for a home office (both of us), all painted in neutral colours (him) but with lots of opportunities for shelves and bright sofas and the like (me). Preferably a little garden, mostly so that I could have a free-standing hammock (I know it’s a ridiculous thing to fixate on, but honestly, a free-standing hammock to lie on while reading my Kindle is pretty much my summer-day dream) and Adam could have a barbecue.

I had no idea how much this would cost and no sense of whether this would or could become our home. But twenty minutes’ dreaming about it wouldn’t hurt anyone would it? I took his hand. ‘Come on then, show me round.’

We went for a wander. A fairly short wander. Our budget did not stretch to a stately home. But as I walked into the living room and saw the big bay windows and the tiny conservatory out the back I felt a weird moment of recognition. I could imagine us living here. I could imagine Adam’s herb pots on the kitchen window ledge, our DVD shelves in the nook by the living-room door, a little armchair in the conservatory where I could sit with my laptop to write – it’d be a suntrap in the summer and would echo with the sound of rain on the glass roof in winter, a cosy place to sit bundled up out of the poor weather. As we walked through the house I loved it more and more, could hear the voice of my dad – who had given us both lectures
on the dangers of falling for a house and thus not getting the best deal because you were too emotional – warning me to stay calm and be objective.

By the time I saw the deep bath with a power shower over the top of it, I was gone. I snuck a look over at Adam. He seemed distracted still, but even he was impressed – the low pressure of our shower was a constant bugbear of his.

I had no idea what we did now. How this worked. I didn’t even know if we could afford it. This was all grown-up stuff, new things I had no clue about, that we’d talked about but that now – maybe? – might be happening.

I walked over to the window in the master bedroom and looked out onto the garden shed. A shed. I laughed at myself, both for being excited at potentially having a shed and for not knowing what on earth I should put into one. I stood, watching a woman hanging out her washing a few doors down.

‘What do you think?’ Adam asked from across the room. ‘They’ve priced it for a quick sale and they want buyers with no chain. We could put in a speculative offer at least.’

‘I love it,’ I said. ‘I can imagine us living here.’

‘There’s room for us to have kids.’

I laughed. ‘Kids plural? Hold on, I’ve not even set up a home office yet and we’re talking about moving things round?’

He didn’t respond to my mocking, his voice was suddenly serious. ‘It’d be good to get married first, though, wouldn’t it?’

I was still watching the woman. ‘Before we have kids? I
suppose so, although if it happens the other way around that wouldn’t be too much of a problem. We’d get there in the end.’