Not tonight

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Six years in, she said no for the first time, and spent two days beforehand working out how.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

Six years, and I had never once said no.

I want to be clear that this was not because he had made it difficult. He had not. It was because it had genuinely never come up: he asked, I wanted it, that was the whole system, and a system that has worked two hundred times does not invite you to test it.

Then a Tuesday in February when he said, in the ordinary voice, "Thursday?" and something in me said no before I had any idea why.

I said, "Sure."

I had two days to fix that, and I spent both of them on it.

The first thing I did was look for a reason, because I could not go to him without one. That is not something anybody had told me. I had simply absorbed it from somewhere: that no on its own is not a complete object, that it comes with documentation.

I could not find a reason. I was not ill. Nothing had happened. Work was ordinary. He had done nothing wrong, not a single thing, and I checked several times in case I was quietly cross about something and had not noticed. I was not. I simply did not want it on Thursday, in the way that some evenings you do not want a curry.

So then I built the excuses, and I want to list them, because I think the list is the most humiliating part of this and also the most recognisable.

One: my back had been bad, which was true in June. Two: an early start on Friday, which was a lie but a defensible one. Three: something vague about my cycle, chosen specifically because I knew he would not ask a follow-up question, which in retrospect is a fairly ugly thing to do to somebody. Four, held in reserve for if all else failed: crying, which I was fairly confident I could manage by Thursday afternoon.

Four excuses. Two days. A grown woman with a mortgage.

I also, and this is the bit I would leave out if I were telling it in a pub, considered simply going through with it. Not in a resigned way. I had a whole argument prepared for myself about how I would probably want it once it started, which is true and has happened, and about how the wanting is not always there at the beginning.

What stopped me was working out that if I did that, I would never afterwards be able to tell the difference between the evenings I wanted and the evenings I had talked myself into. Six years of clean data, and I was about to put a smudge in it to avoid one awkward sentence at a sink.

Underneath all of it was one belief, and I did not examine it until much later because it did not feel like a belief, it felt like a fact about the world.

The belief was that if I said no once, that would be the end of the whole thing. Not that he would be angry. Worse. That he would be understanding, and gracious, and would then quietly stop asking, forever, because he would have filed the information as she has gone off it.

And I would spend the next four years waiting for him to ask and being unable to raise it myself, because raising it myself after refusing would mean admitting the refusal had been about nothing.

That is a lot of load for a Thursday. I had built the whole architecture of it by Wednesday lunchtime.

He was at the sink. I had decided to use excuse two and hold three in reserve. I had actually rehearsed the tone.

What came out was, "I do not want to tomorrow. I have not got a reason."

I have thought a great deal about why the rehearsed version did not survive contact. I think it is because the moment I looked at the back of his head I understood that lying to him about this would be a far bigger thing than refusing him.

He turned round, dried his hands, and said, "Fine. Thanks for telling me."

That is one word and then four more. He did not ask why. He did not say are you sure. He did not do the face. He put the tea towel over the rail and asked whether I wanted the last of the wine.

I found out later what that had cost, and only because he told me months afterwards when I asked directly.

He said his first thought, in the two seconds between me speaking and him turning round, was that something was wrong, and that it was probably him, and that he was about to find out which thing.

He said the effort was not in accepting it. The effort was in not asking, because asking would have made me produce a reason, and once I had produced a reason it would have become a thing to negotiate about, and it was not a thing to negotiate about. It was a no.

He said, "You did not owe me a reason and if I had asked for one I would have been charging you for the privilege of saying no."

Then he said he had gone and sat in the car for ten minutes later that evening, which he had not mentioned at the time, and which I had not noticed.

Thursday was completely uneventful. We watched a documentary about volcanoes.

I kept checking him all evening, which he did not deserve. Reading his face during the adverts. Deciding at one point that he had said good night in a slightly different way, and lying there examining the evidence for it. There was no evidence. He had said good night in the way he says good night, and I had spent a fortnight of emotional energy on a man who was asleep in four minutes.

Nothing changed. That is the whole point and it is somehow the hardest part to convey. He asked again eleven days later exactly as he always had, in exactly the same voice, and I said yes, and it was as it always is.

Three weeks after that, I asked.

I had never done that either. Six years of being asked and never once initiating, and I would have told you that this was simply the shape of us, that being asked was part of what I wanted, that initiating would spoil the thing.

It turns out I had not been able to ask because I had not been able to refuse. You cannot say yes properly to somebody if no is not in the building. All those years of enthusiastic agreement had a small hollow place in the middle of them that I had never inspected, and one Wednesday at a sink took it out.

So now I ask, sometimes, badly, and I say no, occasionally, without any reason at all, and both of those are the same discovery wearing different clothes.

If you have been doing this for years and have never once said no, I am not going to tell you there is something wrong. But I would be interested to know what you think would happen if you did.