Page 36 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

‘You can’t wash up for shit,’ she blurts out. ‘Sometimes after you wash up, I wait until you’ve left the room and then I redo all the wine glasses.’ She takes a deep breath like she feels better to have got that one out.

‘Is that really the best you’ve got?’ I smirk.

‘You want more?’

‘I want more.’

‘You complain about going to events that people would kill to attend, you’re ungrateful for all the amazing thingsabout our lifestyle, you refuse to learn which kitchen spray is for what purpose, you’re snooty about my influencer friends, and you’re obsessed with pleasing your parents, which is literally impossible.’ She inhales before launching into her next slew. ‘You snore, you eat like a teenage boy, you forget plans which are in the diary, you don’t hide how much you dislike Clay and you refuse to learn how to make our bed properly.’ She grins. ‘Okay. Your turn.’

Nothing I didn’t know. Maybe we can do this. I squeeze her hands.

‘Everything in our house is organic and natural, you act like I’ve brought a bag of heroin in if I order a Chinese, there are fifteen hundred cushions in our house and you continue to buy more, you complain about all your friends but insist on seeing them anyway, there are a dozen half-empty bottles of beauty products in every room of our house but I’m not allowed to throw them away, you used to eat McDonald’s in bed when you were hungover and now you won’t let me take a packet of biscuits upstairs.’

‘We’re supposed to be fighting,’ she tells me as I push her against the bedroom door.

‘We are fighting,’ I reply.

‘No, we’re not.’

‘Kind of proving my point here.’ I laugh.

I wrap her arms around my neck and then brush her thigh and slide my hand down her jeans. ‘Problem is,’ I tell her, ‘I want you, and I’m getting the sense that you might want me.’ I kiss her neck and she does her familiar purr-shudder. ‘And if we start a fight, we might spoil that.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she responds, pressing her body against mine. ‘Maybe it’ll be a turn-on to get to complain a bit.’

I laugh. ‘Go on, then. Try it.’

She speaks quietly, into my ear, like she used to when she stayed at my place in Oxford and we couldn’t wake my housemates. ‘The way you stack a dishwasher is a war crime, and you wear too much corduroy.’

‘Low blow,’ I say. ‘There’s no such thing as too much corduroy.’

She smirks up at me, her lips full and her cheeks flushed from the teenage snogging. ‘Your turn,’ she says.

‘You insist on taking taxis when it would be quicker to get the Tube or to walk. You ask me what you should wear even though you know I’ve got no taste. You’re on your phone when we’re watching films, even films with bloody subtitles, and you also snore.’

And weirdly – very weirdly – it’s proving to be something of an aphrodisiac. It feels so good not to try to be good all the time, not to obsess over being kind and getting it right. Admittedly these aren’t the big, heavy truths that we should probably have used this time to unpack, but I’m only human and anyone who prioritised doing an assignment over getting into bed with Jessica would have to be absolutely mad.

‘Also, all the kitchen cleaning sprays do fundamentally the same thing,’ I whisper in Jess’s ear.

‘They fucking don’t.’

She’s laughing as I kiss her and lead her into our bedroom.

‘And I do not snore,’ she says breathily, as my hand moves between her legs and I increase the pressure, just the way she likes it.

‘Yes, you do.’

She kisses me urgently, pressing her hand against my crotch, teasing through my jeans, then she pulls away from me just when I don’t want her to stop.

‘Aren’t we supposed to go to sleep? If we’re doing this properly?’ she asks.

I shake my head. ‘You need to reread your own book, darling. It doesn’t say we have to go to sleep. It says we have to go to bed.’ And with that, I pick her up and drop her down on the mattress.

‘Excellent point,’ she says as she rolls over and climbs on top of me.

Jessica

I wake up early on Sunday morning and go for a run, lacing my trainers in the half-dark bedroom, enjoying the silence of the house as I slip down the stairs and revel in the feeling of putting space between me and everyone else. It’s a cold, grey, misty morning, which I think might turn into a bright blue sunny one. I used to think that people who ran for fun were mad. I’d go to the gym if I wanted to look thinner than the other girls on a hen do, or if my jeans felt tight, but that was it. It was only ever about wanting to look thinner (even if I told that lie we all share, that it’s just about ‘feeling fit’ and ‘wanting to be strong’). But then, when the fertility problems started, I needed something to do with myself, and I found that this helped. I liked pounding the pavements, and I liked getting better and better at it. My body was getting it wrong in so many other ways; at least this was something it could do right.

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