Page 69 of The Notecard
‘Which is?’
‘That my sperm are essentially pissed up students watching repeats of Cash in the Attic and Fee’s womb is so inhospitable that even her own womb wants nothing to do with it.’
‘Just give it time,’ I say, and then I hear Meg’s door across the hall. ‘She’s coming back. I have to go.’
‘Limbo!’ says Rob, and then he’s gone.
I take a second to compose myself. I can do this. Now isn’t the time to be contemplating our future. I can’t think about Meg in the future tense. I can’t think about us getting married, having children, buying a house in Hertfordshire, and going shopping for furniture together. Weekends spent looking at paint colours and then painting those little squares on the wall. Going online and asking the people of Instagram which one they prefer. Giving strangers a say in our life as if we can’t do it alone. It’s group therapy for the socially needy. Talking about having children one day. Will we be one of those annoying new parents who say things like, ‘Barney will just have to fit into our life and not the other way around?’ And Barney will only eat organic, gluten-free food, and Meg will breastfeed in public because why not, it’s natural and her body, and she will start juicing because that’s what good parents do, and we’ll eat pine nuts on fucking everything and only homemade sourdough bread, and my god, we’ll love it. Holidays abroad, maybe to Michael’s house in Ibiza. Lying on the beach and getting a tan, drinking cocktails, and loving life. Then it’s back to our house in Hertfordshire. Back to the small squares of paint on the wall, and decisions to make on the garden, on the second and third bedrooms. The future. I can’t worry about the awkwardness of tomorrow, of waking up together for the first and the last time. Rob’s right. I can’t predict the future. I don’t know the ending, and it’s ludicrous to not enjoy the present because of what might happen next. It’s self-defeating. I need to embrace the moment.
The door to my flat opens and Meg walks back in.
‘Sorry, she was melting down. Her fiancée Simon called her a drama queen, which she is, but apparently that made her angry and surprisingly dramatic, so…’ says Meg.
I’m standing in the middle of the living room. Our table of food is sitting there, unfinished, and I look at Meg. She is so beautiful. Her face. God, her face and her skin. I love her skin.
‘What?’ says Meg.
There’s a pause. A moment. Embrace the moment, Nick.
‘You just look so beautiful. I was just thinking that you look beautiful, that’s all.’
Meg looks at me and I look at her. There’s a moment. Sexual tension. She walks towards me. I stand, waiting. She gets to me, looks into my eyes for a moment, and then she leans in and we kiss, and I’m not thinking about tomorrow, or some point in the future where we’re painting little squares of paint on the walls of our house in Hertfordshire and about Barney. I’m just thinking about this kiss. This moment. One night.
Meg
Inever imagined I’d be the sort of person who would say something like, ‘let’s move this to the sofa’. That’s the sort of thing people say on television. Actors. Cool people. ‘Let’s move this to the sofa’. As if that’s a thing. Perhaps it’s a gateway phrase and before you know it, I’ll be saying things like, ‘fuck me again, Nick, and this time with feeling’.
‘Let’s move this to the sofa,’ I say to Nick with a smile.
‘Okay,’ says Nick, and we walk across and fall onto the sofa together.
We look into each other’s eyes through the soft candlelight of the flat and then we kiss again. It’s happening. It’s going to happen. We didn’t even get through dinner. I still have half of my pizza left. I didn’t even touch the salad. We kiss on the sofa, our hands for the first time wandering around each other’s bodies. I slept with Harry from work, but I don’t think that really counts as proper sex because I was drunk and there wasn't any feeling in it. This is the first time I’ve been with someone properly since James. A chill of nervousness and passion shakes my body.
The first time I had sex with James it was monumental. It was spectacular. That doesn’t happen often in life. I think it’s one of the biggest lies we’re served up by television and film. That sex is always mind-blowing. The truth is that sex is often not mind blowing. It’s often clunky and awkward. It’s not all intense orgasms, screaming, hair pulling, nails on the back, different positions, slow, sensual, romantic, fucking sex. Sometimes it’s weird and difficult and just not very good. The noises can be strange and don’t get me started on orgasm faces. Then there’s the time when you’re a woman and you don’t orgasm during sex. It happens frequently. The man is lying there post- coital, like a dying seal, and you have to point out that actually he isn’t done yet. His work needs to carry on until you’re both done. There’s that chestnut, and it’s not very romantic. It’s usually him lazily fingering you, and you’re desperately trying to imagine something sexy to make it happen faster. A short aside. One of the worst experiences of my life was being in that position with my first boyfriend at sixth form. We’d only just started having sex. He was lazily fingering me, it was taking a while, and eventually he stopped, looked at me and said, ‘I can’t go on, Meg, my fingers are too tired’. We laid there in silence afterwards, him with his tired fingers and me sexually frustrated and embarrassed. I’ve never forgotten that feeling.
There’s a scene in the film About Time. The main character and girl are having sex for the first time, and it isn’t very good. He can, of course, travel in time so he just goes back and does it better the second time around, and then a third. Imagine that superpower? With James though, the sex was just really good the first time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough to stop him having sex with someone else. I don’t know why I’m thinking about sex with James while I’m on the sofa with Nick. Ironically, well maybe not ironically, but weirdly, the last time James and I had sex I was dressed up as a policewoman. We’d been talking about role play for ages, and I took the initiative. I got a costume online. PC Perky Tits. A foul-mouthed, no-nonsense, maverick cop who got the job done while wearing the world’s shortest skirt. You have to admire that sort of feminism. Our last time together after seven years and I’m telling him what a naughty boy he’s been and that I’m going to need to see his concealed weapon. It still haunts me.
We’re kissing. Nick’s hands are suddenly on my breasts. They’re on top of my dress, but still on my breasts. I always feel slightly tentative about this. Self-conscious. You’d think that by now I’d be over it, but I’m not. I have small breasts. I’m flat chested. And I don’t just mean, they’re a bit small, I mean I literally hardly have any tits. When men touch them for the first time, I can’t help but think that they’re probably disappointed. This is all I get? I want my money back. I have no idea if this is what Nick’s thinking, but it crosses my mind in a flash. Boy tits. Hurtful nicknames like that don’t just go away.
‘We should, umm, probably, you know, move into the bedroom,’ says Nick, who suddenly sounds unsure of himself.
I get up and take him by the hand. I lead him into his bedroom.
‘Light on or off?’ says Nick.
‘Off.’
We fall down on the bed. We’re side by side. Still kissing. Nick reaches around my back, unzips my dress, and then tries to undo my bra. We’re still kissing and he’s fiddling around back there, but he isn’t getting anywhere fast. He might be a doctor, able to perform surgeries and save lives, but he can’t undo my bra.
‘Sorry,’ says Nick. ‘I can’t…’
‘No worries. It’s fine.’
Clunky.
I sit up and take off my dress and then my bra. I’m in just my new white knickers. This is why the light is off. I couldn’t do this in the full glare of bright light. As it is, there’s enough light coming through the curtains so we can see each other. Nick decides this is the time to take off his jeans. His skinny jeans. He tries to take them off standing up, which doesn’t go well, and he’s soon hopping around the bedroom pulling at his jeans like a child doing an impression of a bunny.
‘Stupid. Fucking. Skinny jeans,’ says Nick.
