The night I put it down

Fiction, about two adults over 18. He had told himself for months that he was the useful one, the thing in her week that worked. The signs were all there in the calendar, and he was the person least able to read it.

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

A story by the editor.

We had been seeing each other a year, near enough. It began as the second Thursday of the month, which was her idea and which suited me, because a date in a diary is easier to be sensible about than an impulse. By March it was not the second Thursday of anything. She would text at about four in the afternoon, I would move whatever needed moving, and she would be at the door by eight.

I enjoyed that. A woman I liked enormously wanted to come to my flat at short notice and be put over the arm of a chair, and I was flattered to the back teeth about it.

Here is a year of it, from where I was standing at the time.

She always drove. She never stayed longer than twenty minutes afterwards and she always had a reason, and the reasons were good ones. I made her tea twice and both times it went cold on the side while she looked for her keys. I decided she was self-contained, which is a generous word and one I picked on purpose.

She asked me twice how long marks last. I took that as interest. People do ask.

In a year she never used the safe word once. Not an amber, not a slow down. This from a woman who is in no way shy, and who has told me to my face that my sofa is an eyesore.

We tried to have dinner in April. She cancelled on the day. She cancelled again in May and after that neither of us suggested it, and I let that go, because I did not want to be the man who made a small thing awkward.

In February she was signed off work for a month and told me there was nothing to say about it. From February the texts came weekly, then twice in some weeks. I read that as her wanting comfort. I was pleased to be comfort.

That is five things. Set down in a list, in daylight, they take about eleven seconds to read. They took me a year.

The evening in question was a Thursday, and not the second Thursday, and she had texted at ten past four.

She was fine at the door. She got her coat off and said something rude about the state of my hallway, and I laughed, and if you had stopped me on the stairs at that moment I would have said she was in a good mood.

She asked for the strap. She had always preferred the strap and I had always heard that as a preference about weight and noise. That evening she said, and I can hear the exact flatness of it now, that the strap was better because it leaves something.

I said, "Leaves something."

She said, "Lasts. You know what I mean."

I did know what she meant, and I filed it under vanity about marks, which is a real thing that plenty of people have, and I got on with it.

We were fifteen or so in when it arrived.

She made no sound at all. There is a silence in the middle of one of these with a whole person inside it, hands tight on the chair, gone somewhere, and I have heard that silence a great many times. This was an empty room with two people in it.

I stopped and put my hand flat between her shoulder blades, which is what I do, and asked how we were doing.

"Keep going," she said. Ordinary voice. The voice she orders coffee in.

I asked for a colour and she said green, and there was an impatience in it, and the impatience is the thing that finally got through. She was entirely lucid and entirely somewhere else, and she was waiting for me to do enough of it. There was a number in her head. I had no part in the number.

So I asked her the other question, the one I had quietly dropped somewhere around Easter because it had started to feel like paperwork between people who knew each other well. I asked what it was for.

She said, "Does it matter?"

I put the strap on the arm of the chair.

There was no speech. I said I was going to stop, and I got her up, and I put the blanket from the back of the sofa round her, and then I sat down on the floor with my back against the radiator because I could not think what else to do with myself.

"Pick it up," she said.

I said no.

She said it again, differently. Then she said, "You do not get to do that," which is the sentence I have thought about most in the fortnight since.

She was right in one direction and I was right in the other, and there is no arrangement anywhere in which both of those sit comfortably in the same room.

She stood up with the blanket round her and told me I had decided something enormous about her in roughly four seconds, in my own front room, with no qualification of any kind and no real idea what her February had been. She said I sounded like her GP. She said, worse than that, that I sounded pleased with myself. Then she said the thing that landed.

"A year. You have been perfectly happy about this for a year."

"I know," I said.

"Do not do the calm voice."

"All right."

"Do you know what you have actually done? You have made it into a thing. It was fine. It was the one fine part of the week and you have gone and put a name on it."

Then it went quiet, and the quiet was far worse than the anger had been.

She sat on the end of the sofa with her coat across her knees and did not put it on for a good ten minutes. At some point, in a completely different register, she said, "How long have you thought this?"

"About eleven minutes."

She almost laughed. Then she said, "You are not wrong about the dates."

That was the whole of it. She did not agree with me and she did not tell me I had lost my mind. She handed me the dates and left them lying on the table between us, and I have not gone back at her about what she meant by it, because going back at her is the same instinct that got us here.

Here is the part I would rather not write down.

I did not miss those five things. I saw every one of them at the time and found a reasonable explanation for each, and the explanations were genuinely reasonable, which is exactly why they worked so well on me.

What was going on underneath is this. I am forty-six and I am good at one specific thing, and for a year a clever woman who needed me for nothing else at all arranged her week around coming here for it. I was the bit that worked. Not many people get to be that. Every time the gap between texts shortened I took it as a report on my own competence.

A top who wants to be useful will always find you a reason. I have read all the sensible material about watching the timing rather than the intensity, and I could have written most of it myself, and none of it was the slightest use, because the observations were all present and correct. What I had no appetite for was the sum of them.

I might be wrong about her. I have run at that hope from several angles this fortnight and it will not hold, mostly because when I put it in front of her she did not take it.

She left at about half eleven. I walked her down to the car, which she did not want, and at the car I managed the only sensible sentence of the entire evening, which was that I would like to buy her a coffee in a fortnight and talk about nothing.

"Coffee," she said.

"Coffee. No arrangement and nothing to negotiate. The two of us and a bad flat white."

She looked at the roof of the car for a while, and then she said all right, Tuesday, and named a place near the station, and got in and drove off.

She did not say she would come. I have been over the exact words perhaps thirty times. She said all right. She said Tuesday and she named the place, and not one of those is the same as saying she will be there.

The fortnight is up on Tuesday. The strap is in the cupboard where it lives and I have not opened the cupboard. I will be sat in that coffee place at eleven whether or not she comes, and I am aware that turning up somewhere and being reliable is the cheapest available version of what I should have been doing since February.

I do not know what I want her to say when she gets there, if she gets there. I know what I am hoping for. I am not at all confident the hope is about her.