The graze

Fiction, about two adults over 18. The skin went, the evening stopped, and then they spent forty-eight hours protecting each other from something neither of them was actually thinking.

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

A story by the editor.

It was a Thursday, which matters only because it was so completely ordinary. We had done this perhaps forty times. There was a lasagne in the oven on a timer.

I remember the sound of it stopping more than anything else. He was talking, the way he does, low and unhurried and mostly nonsense designed to keep me where I was, and then he was not talking. The sentence did not finish. It went off like a light.

"Right," he said. "We are stopping."

And then his hand was flat on my back, which is the thing he does, and the room had changed temperature.

I want to be accurate about the size of it, because the size of it turned out to be irrelevant to everything that followed.

It was a split about the length of a grain of rice, at the very bottom of the curve on the left side, and it had beaded rather than run. If I had done it on my shin getting out of a car I would have licked my thumb and rubbed it and forgotten by lunchtime.

What it did in that room was end the world.

I was face down on a towel on our own bed and my first coherent thought, which arrived fully formed and took about a second and a half, was: I have ruined this. Not the evening. The whole thing. He will not want to do it again now. He will be careful with me forever, and careful is the opposite of the entire point, and I have done that by having thin skin on a Thursday.

My second thought was that I should apologise, and I did, into the duvet, and he said, "What on earth for," in a voice I could not read at all.

He went quiet then. Properly quiet.

He got up and I heard the bathroom cupboard, the one that sticks, and running water, and him washing his hands for a long time. He came back and did what needed doing without a single word about it, and everything he did was gentle and methodical and absolutely silent.

I lay there reading that silence for four minutes and I read it completely wrong.

I decided he was angry. Not shouting angry. The other kind, the kind that goes tidy and quiet and does the washing up too carefully. I decided he was angry that I had not told him something, or that I had let it get that far, or, and this is the one that stuck, that I had turned out to be somebody breakable and he had not signed up for that.

So I lay very still and said nothing, because I did not want to make him say any of it out loud.

We had tea. He put a jumper round my shoulders and sat behind me with his legs either side and we watched three quarters of something neither of us was following, and at ten I said I was fine about six times without being asked, which is not the behaviour of a woman who is fine.

At one point he asked whether it was stinging and I said no, which was a lie, and I told the lie for a reason I could not have articulated at the time. If it was stinging then something had been done to me, and if something had been done to me then somebody had done it, and I did not want to hand him that sentence while he was already holding whatever he was holding.

So we sat there, me lying about a sting and him not mentioning what he had spent ten minutes washing off his hands, and we called it a quiet evening.

The lasagne was somehow perfect. We ate it at half past ten like people who had been through something.

In the night I woke up and he was awake too, on his back, doing the thing where you breathe carefully so the other person can sleep.

Friday we were kind to each other in a way that was noticeably worse than normal. He asked how it was. I said fine. He said good. That was the entire conversation and it took place twice.

It had already scabbed by Friday evening and it was, I am not exaggerating, nothing. Less than a paper cut. I looked at it in the bathroom mirror with a hand mirror and thought: all this, over that.

Saturday morning he made coffee and sat down opposite me and said, "Can I say a thing."

Here is what he had been carrying since Thursday.

He had not been angry with me at any point. He had been so appalled at himself that he could not speak, because he had been watching me, he thought, closely, and he had not seen it coming, and the fact that he had not seen it coming meant that all the other times he thought he was reading me he might have been flattering himself. That was the sentence he used. Flattering myself.

He said the silence was not him being cold. It was him not trusting himself to say anything that was not either an excuse or a promise he might not keep.

And he said the reason he had been awake on Thursday night was that he had been lying there deciding whether to tell me he would rather stop doing this altogether than get it wrong again, and had concluded that saying that out loud would be a way of making me look after his feelings about my skin.

Which it would.

So I told him mine. That I had spent two days certain he had gone off it, and off me, and that I had been performing being fine so vigorously that I had given myself a headache.

We sat there for a bit with the coffee going cold, two reasonably intelligent adults who had each spent forty-eight hours defending the other from a position the other did not hold.

"It is the size of a grain of rice," I said.

"I know exactly what size it is," he said. "I have thought about very little else."

Then he said the thing that actually mended it, which was not an apology and I am glad it was not. He said, "I would like to keep doing this, and I would like you to tell me if you would rather not, and I would like neither of us to decide that on the other one's behalf."

I said I would rather. He said good. That was the negotiation.

What I would take from it, if I were reading this rather than writing it, is not anything about skin.

It is that the twenty minutes after something goes slightly wrong are more dangerous than the thing that went wrong, because that is when two people who love each other start inventing. He invented a woman who had been hurt and would now be frightened of him. I invented a man who was disappointed in me for being made of paper.

Neither of those people was in the room. We were both in the room, and we could have found that out on Thursday night for the price of one honest sentence.

We have a rule now, and it is not about first aid. It is that if either of us goes quiet after something, the other one is allowed to ask what you are telling yourself right now. It sounds like something off a leaflet. It has saved us about four evenings.

The mark went completely in nine days. I checked, obviously. I checked constantly.