What he could not say

Fiction, about two adults over 18, told by the man on the receiving end. He has never managed to say any of this out loud, including to her.

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

A story by the editor.

I am forty-four. I employ nine people. Every other Wednesday, at about half past nine in the evening, my wife tells me to go upstairs, and I go.

I have never said any of what follows out loud. Not to her, not to anybody. I have said the operational parts to her, obviously, because you have to. What I have never managed is the rest of it, and I have had years.

The first thing is that it is her.

People who know a bit about this assume the hard part is the wanting it. It is not. I made my peace with the wanting it somewhere around twenty-six, alone, in a flat in Leeds, in the manner of most men my age, which is to say by deciding it was a fact about me rather than a fault in me and then not examining it again for a decade.

The hard part is that the person doing it is Claire. Claire, who I met at a friend's wedding. Claire, who has sat with me in A&E at three in the morning and who has seen me be pathetic about a broken toe.

There is a version of this that would be far easier, which is the one where you pay a stranger in a flat in a town you do not live in and drive home and have a Twix. I know men who have chosen that version and I understand exactly why.

What I wanted was harder than that and I did not have a word for it for years. I wanted it to be somebody who knows what I am like when I have flu.

The second thing is the fear of looking ridiculous, and I want to be accurate about this, because it is not shame exactly.

A man of my age and build bending over the end of a bed is not a dignified sight and I have no illusions about it. For the first two years I was permanently half braced for her to laugh. Not cruelly. Just the ordinary laugh of a woman who has suddenly seen the whole thing from the outside, which would have finished it for good, and which I would not even have blamed her for.

She never has. Not once, not even in the early days when we were both bad at it. I asked her about it a few years ago, in the dark, which is where I ask things. She said, "Why would I laugh? You are the only person who has ever asked me for something and meant it."

I thought about that for about a week.

The third thing is what I actually get, and this is the part I genuinely cannot say to her face, because every time I try it comes out sounding like a complaint about my life, which it is not. I have a good life. That is almost the point.

Everything is mine to decide. That is what the last twenty years have been. The business is mine to decide, and the payroll going out on the twenty-eighth is mine to decide, and whether we can afford the roof, and whether my mother goes into the home, and which of the nine people I have to let go if the Bristol contract does not come through.

Nobody senior to me exists. There has been nobody senior to me since I was thirty-one and it turns out that is a strange way for a person to live.

For about forty minutes, once a fortnight, none of it is mine to decide. I do not choose the number. I do not choose when it stops. I could stop it, and she has made very sure I know that, and the fact that I could and do not is somehow the whole engine of the thing.

What I get is not pain. The pain is the toll on the road. What I get is forty minutes of not being the one who has to work out what happens next, and there is no other place in my life where I can buy that. Not a holiday. Not drink. Not the golf that I do not play. I have looked.

She sends me up first, which was my idea, though I did not tell her why.

The stairs are the worst and best eleven seconds of the fortnight. There is a point on the landing, by the airing cupboard, where every single time some part of my brain says: you are a grown man, go back down, make a cup of tea, be normal. And every single time I keep going, and the going is the thing I am actually doing, more than anything that happens in the bedroom afterwards.

Then she comes up. She takes her time about it, and I know she does it deliberately, and knowing does not reduce the effect by one per cent.

I will not go through it in detail. Partly because the detail is not interesting, and partly because I have read men writing this sort of thing down at length and they always sound like they are showing you a wound and hoping you will admire it.

What I will say is that she is steady. That is the entire quality that matters and it took her about a year to find it and I do not think she knows how rare it is. She does not rush. She does not get carried away. She does not go soft at the point where I sound like I want her to, which is the point where I most need her not to, and she worked that out on her own.

There is a moment, usually about two thirds of the way, where something in my back gives up. I have never told her about that either, though I am fairly sure she can see it, because whatever she does afterwards is always slower.

After that I am not really thinking. It is the only time I am not thinking. I have had approximately eight thousand hours of therapy suggested to me by various people over the years and I have no doubt some of it would help, and also, on a Wednesday at half past nine, this is what works.

Afterwards she sits with me and does not talk much, which is correct, and at some point she says, "All right?" and I say, "Yes," and that is the whole debrief.

I cry sometimes. Not every time. Maybe one in five, and never at the point anybody would expect, and she has learned to carry on doing whatever she is doing and let it happen without making it into an event. The first time it happened I apologised for about ten minutes. She said, "Stop it," and put a blanket over me, and that was the end of the conversation.

I am aware of how this reads. A man in his forties, a business, a mortgage, waiting upstairs for his wife and a wooden hairbrush. I have imagined my brother finding out. I have imagined the lads I play five-a-side with finding out. There is a version of me that finds all of this humiliating in a way that would take a year to recover from.

And then there is the version of me who comes down the stairs afterwards at half past ten, and puts the kettle on, and feels about four stone lighter than he did at nine, and sleeps like a stone, and is a considerably better man to everyone around him for about ten days afterwards.

I know which one of those two is the real one. It took me until about forty to stop arguing about it.

One last thing, and it is the only thing here I would want another man to read.

I did not ask her for eleven years. Eleven. From the wedding to the night I finally said it, badly, in a Travelodge in Warrington, of all the places on earth. Eleven years of assuming she would look at me differently afterwards, and of being certain enough about that to simply not have the life I wanted.

She looked at me exactly the same. She had questions, and some of them were hard, and she took about three weeks to decide, and one of the things she said at the end of it was, "Why did you wait so long? What did you think I was?"

I did not have an answer then and I do not have one now. Only the arithmetic, which I do sometimes, late, when the house is quiet. Eleven years. Two hundred and eighty-odd Wednesdays I did not have.