Page 37 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

When I come back to the room, my face flushed and my T-shirt soaked with sweat, Jack is sat up in bed reading on his phone.

‘Tell me you haven’t been for a run.’

‘Lie to you? My lawfully wedded husband?’

‘After all that wine last night. And those fucking rafts.’ Jack groans and rolls over and pulls a pillow over his head. ‘Everything hurts. All of my limbs are going to fall off.’

‘It’s the best thing for a hangover,’ I say smugly. Then I peel off my leggings and top and I realise I’m standing in my underwear in front of Jack, and I feel very, very naked. I don’t know why this feels so weird. We had sex not ten hours ago. And I used to do this all the time, wandering around our flat in my underwear, fake-tanning in my knickers in the living room, sleeping naked when it was hot. But, like so many things, it changed since we’ve been trying to get pregnant. I feel more protective of my body. Guilty, I suppose, that it’s failing us. And even when I’ve got clothes on, I still find myself trying to hide from him, from everyone. Increasingly I’m drawn towards oversized cashmere jumpers and massive linen shirts, tentlike dresses, anything which puts up a barrier between my empty body and the rest of the world.

I notice that Jack is staring at me. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But you’re staring at me?’

‘I just can’t remember the last time I saw your belly button.’

I half laugh. ‘Is that a thing for you? Belly buttons?’

‘Yes. I’ve been harbouring a secret belly button fetish for years now. I thought this was the time to tell you.’

I take my sports bra off, and I stand there in front of him for a moment so he can see me. Jack sits up with a big grin on his face.

‘Honestly,’ I say, taking my knickers off. ‘You’d think you’d never seen a naked woman before.’

‘It’s not my fault I’ve fancied you for the better part of twenty years!’

I’m standing under the water, my wet hair pushed back from my face, when Jack walks in. He stands for a moment, watching me shower.

‘Do you really still fancy me?’ I ask him, meeting his eye in the mirror.

‘Have you seen you? How could I not?’ Jack joins me under the water, kissing me, and I’m enjoying the sensation of our wet bodies against each other. ‘You’ve got sexier every year I’ve known you, and you were already stunning.’

He slides his hand down my body, between my legs. We’ve been doing this for a lot of years. We know every trick, every motion, every movement. Friends of mine have lamented the predictability of having sex with the same person over and over again, the lack of variety, but I love that Jack knows how to make me come. I lean against the shower tiles, my arms braced, eyes tightly shut. I wonder for a moment what he’s thinking about, whether he’s managed to divorce this from the kind of mechanical conception sex we’ve fallen into, but dismiss the thought. One hand is on my hips and he’s moving against me, grinding the palm of his other hand against me in the way I taught him when we first started sleeping together, just enough contact but not too intense. As we have so many times before, I come slightly before he does, my orgasm thetrigger for his. We stay in position for a moment, both slightly shaking, both – I think – slightly surprised.

It’s probably not quite the impression we wanted to send, arriving to breakfast late, both of us still pink in the face from the exertion and the shower.

‘Good morning?’ I overhear Ben ask Jack in front of me at the breakfast buffet. ‘I’m not exactly a reader,’ he tells him, loading his plate. ‘But if your book gets my wife looking like that,’ he points back at me, flushed and happy, ‘I might give it a go.’

Jack certainly isn’t the only person around the table with a hangover – in fact, everyone seems a bit worse for wear. Plus, we did ask them to deliberately start fights with each other last night. In short, it’s no surprise that the atmosphere in here is absolutely dreadful. There’s no conversation, which means that the sound of people chewing is unbearably loud. Eventually Suze shows that whatever she’s being paid isn’t enough, and puts the radio on. But it’s the show Jack used to work on, doing a very depressing report about a drought related to climate change. It’s the kind of topic that he used to spend days grappling with, trying to distil down into a report that anyone could understand. I used to worry, occasionally, that it must be a bit bad for a person to constantly be immersed in terrible news, all day and all night. I get up and switch it to Radio One, and the music hums a much less depressing soundtrack to breakfast.

‘Shall we?’ I turn to ask Jack, when everyone seems finished.

‘Okay.’ Jack gets up. ‘I know no one wants this, but let’s go to the snug, where the chairs are really comfortable, andif everyone makes it there without crying, I’ll make sure someone hands out a round of very cold Diet Cokes.’

Everyone sort of laughs and murmurs their approval, and people start making their way to the snug. Suze looks pained as she stage-whispers to us, ‘The official beverage partner for this weekend is Rafe’s Alkalised Water. We really shouldn’t be providing any other soft drink, in case they mention it in their end-of-weekend interviews.’

‘Suze,’ Jack says beseechingly. ‘Have you ever had a hangover?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I have.’

‘Did you want a Rafe’s Alkalised Water, when you had that hangover?’

She smiles. ‘No, Jack, I did not.’

‘So do you think maybe just this once we could sack off Rafe and give the people what they want? Maybe talk really nicely to the chef about doing some bacon rolls for lunch later?’

Suze rolls her eyes. ‘I’ll tell Cait and Will to sort something out.’

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