The third of us

Fiction, about three adults over 18. She was fine about all the parts she had expected to mind, and then found herself furious about a coat on a chair, which turned out to be about something else entirely.

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

A story by the editor.

Frances and I have been together six years. She is the one who does it and I am the one it is done to, and that has been settled between us since about our fourth month, when I said something into a pillow that I had not planned to say and she took about a day and a half to come back with a considered yes.

Eighteen months ago she asked whether she could play with somebody else. A woman called Jo, from the group we both go to, who bottoms and who had asked her.

I said yes, and I meant it, and I was proud of myself for meaning it. That pride should have been the warning.

We did it properly. We sat at the kitchen table with a pot of tea and worked out what counted as play, what stayed ours, what I wanted to be told and when. I said I did not want a report and I did want to know it had happened. Frances said she would never make me ask, which is the kind of sentence she is good at.

The first Saturday she went, I had a plan for myself. A film, a bath, a friend on the phone if it got bad.

It did not get bad. That is the honest and slightly disappointing truth of it. I watched most of a film, I ate an entire packet of the good biscuits, and when she came in at half past eleven and put her head round the door and said all right, I said all right, and it was.

I want to be clear, because I spent a long time waiting to be ambushed. The thing itself does not trouble me. Frances raising her hand to another adult who has asked her to does not go anywhere near the part of me that hurts. I could watch it. I would probably find it interesting, which is its own conversation.

The Tuesdays took about six weeks to register.

Tuesday evening is when they talk. Not a quick message. An hour on the phone, sometimes longer, in the back bedroom with the door not quite shut, planning. That is what it is: two people planning. What they are going to do, what happened last time, what Jo found difficult, what Frances is thinking of trying.

And Frances comes off that call lit up. Not aroused. Lit up. The way she is when she has been given a problem she likes.

I noticed I had started finding things to do at the other end of the house on Tuesdays. Then I noticed I had started being slightly unpleasant on Wednesdays, in small deniable ways. Then, on a Wednesday in November, I went off about a coat left on the back of a chair, and heard my own voice doing it, and had to go and stand in the kitchen for a bit.

The specific Tuesday I could point to, if pushed, is one in October when I went past the door to get a jumper and heard Frances say, "No, hang on, let me think about that properly."

That is all. Nine words about nothing, to somebody who was not me. I stood on the landing holding a jumper and felt something go through me that I would have described, if I had been honest at that moment, as bereavement.

Here is what I worked out over the following fortnight, mostly while driving.

Frances used to plan for me. In the early years there was a version of her that thought about me during the week, worked things out, arrived on a Friday with an idea she had been turning over. I did not know at the time that this was happening. I only know now because it stopped, and because I can hear it happening through a door on Tuesdays with somebody else.

We had got comfortable. What we do now is good and it is largely improvised, the way you cook for somebody you have lived with for years. Nothing wrong with it. But the planning had gone, and I had not noticed it going, and then I heard it in another room and recognised it like a smell from a house I used to live in.

So it was never the spanking. It was the attention. Specifically it was being thought about when I was not there, which it turns out is the thing I actually want out of all of this, and which I had never once said to anybody, including myself.

Saying it was horrible. I had rehearsed a reasonable version and what came out was: I do not mind you hitting her. I mind that you think about her on Tuesdays.

Which sounds insane, said out loud, in a kitchen, to a woman holding a tea towel.

Frances did not laugh and did not get defensive, and I know how much of that was deliberate. She sat down. She thought about it for long enough that I began to fill the silence, which she stopped by putting her hand flat on the table.

Then she said, "So the problem is not Jo. The problem is that I stopped doing my research on you."

The fix was absurdly small.

Thursday evenings, Frances plans out loud. That is it. She sits at the other end of the sofa with a notebook and says what she has been thinking about, and asks me things, and writes some of it down, and half of it never happens. It takes twenty minutes. It costs nothing.

It has been fourteen months and I have not been unpleasant about a coat once.

Jo still exists. They still talk on Tuesdays. I still do not want a report, though these days I sometimes ask.

I met her properly last spring, which Frances suggested and I agreed to about four days later, having said yes immediately and then privately panicked. It was a pub in Chorlton and it was aggressively normal.

She is a foot shorter than me and works in insurance and talked for a long time about a boat her brother is restoring. At no point did anybody mention anything, and I came home slightly deflated, the way you are when a thing you have been frightened of for a year turns out to have a lanyard and a Vauxhall.

We get on. That surprises people who assume an arrangement like this must be seething away underneath, and I have stopped trying to explain it at parties.

What I would tell anybody standing where I was standing is that jealousy is not one thing and it is not a character defect, whatever people who are calm about everything tell you.

It is a pointer. It is pointing at something, and if you can find out what, you have converted an emotion into a logistics problem. Emotions are unbearable and logistics problems are Thursday evenings with a notebook.

I spent six weeks feeling like a small and unattractive person for minding. I was not minding about what I thought I was minding about, and nobody could have told me that, because you have to go and find the actual thing yourself, and it is never where you left it.