Page 54 of We All Live Here
Eleanor cackles. “Well, that’s you told.”
“AndthenBill said it was perhaps not the best example to set the girls.”
Lila had stared at him, her cheeks flaming. “I’m forty-two years old,” she had said, standing a little more upright. “I haven’t even been on a date in twenty years. I’ve been too busy picking up the pieces while the girls’ father was busy impregnating a much younger woman. I spend most of my waking hours trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their mouths. And yours too, for that matter. So back off with your judgments—both of you.”
Or, at least, that was what she would have liked to say. What actually happened was that she had apparently reverted to being sixteen, found herself mute, then muttered, “Well, thanks for your opinion,” and, face glowing, had stalked past the two old men and up the stairs to take a shower.
“So—the important question. How was it?” Eleanor peels off her gym clothes with the casual insouciance of someone who is now apparently used to being naked in front of strangers. She actually sashays toward the lockers, like someone on a catwalk.
Lila stares at her towel. “It was…fun. I mean, it wasn’t like steamyFifty Shadesshenanigans, not like you get up to. But we laughed a lot. And the sex was kind of…a sidebar?”
She couldn’t quite articulate to Eleanor what had happened. How Jensen, in the end, had declined to have sex, but had instead done that thing to her that Dan hadn’t done in fifteen years (he once told her he didn’t really like it, that it made him feel claustrophobic). And she had felt at first deeply awkward and exposed, and then a little panicky, and then he had been so good at it that she had stopped feeling awkward, at least for the time it took her to come, noisily. Embarrassingly noisily, although she couldn’t seem to do anything about that at the time. And afterward she had been braced to feel awkward again but he had made her laugh and seemed so comfortable with bodies, and her sounds, and stray hairs, and told her he couldn’t go “all the way” on the first night as (a) neither of them had condoms, and (b) he needed to keep something back in case she thought he was easy, which had made her laugh again.
It had been almost three by the time they’d stopped talking, too late for Lila to go back without waking everyone. They had slept on a couple of garden cushions, and he had covered her with his jacket. He had fallen asleep almost immediately, his arm heavy across her waist, only the odd muffled snore coming from his side. She had barely slept, her whole body humming with the unfamiliarity of having a near-naked man beside her. For the entire day after it happened, she kept seeing his sandy-colored head between her legs and getting a shivery little charge from it.
Eleanor pokes her head over the shower cubicle.
“And you felt okay about it? After all this time with Dan?”
That was the thing. She really did. It was weird to feel this okay about having sex with someone you weren’t in love with. It had occurred to her afterward that in the last few years of their relationship, Dan had approached sex like he approached his carbon-framed bicycle. Once the preliminaries were out of the way, his head would drop into his shoulders, his whole body a knot of concentration, and it was basically a matter of pumping his way to the finish. “It was actually really…nice.”
“ ‘Nice’?”
“Happy. Happy sex. I can’t really describe it. I mean, he’s not my type physically, and he’s not interested in a relationship, and he’s a slightly annoying broke gardener. But in terms of me getting back on the bike, it was pretty much perfect.”
As he had dropped her off, he’d told her he had to go and see his parents in Yorkshire for a bit. “Convenient,” she had scoffed, and he had rolled his eyes and said he genuinely had to—she should ask Bill if she didn’t believe him because he had already talked to him about it. He was sorry to leave her with all the mess in the garden but, you know, parents. She did know. He had texted her the following day, telling her he had had a great night and would love to see her again “or at least when I’m not in a trench in your garden,” but she was mindful of what Bill had said about mixing business and pleasure and hadn’t been sure how to reply. And now it had been three days, which had turned her not answering immediately because she didn’t know what to say into something more weighty and awkward.
“Well.” Eleanor’s grin has spread halfway across her face. “I’d say that was a pretty good first attempt.”
“Does that mean I can use your thinly disguised sexual escapades in my book?”
Eleanor is washing her hair, her fingers knuckle-deep in the foam on her head. She stops for a minute and pulls a face. “Actually, Lils, would you mind not? I was thinking about it and it just seems a bit weird. Even if you’re pretending it’s you, I think people I’ve been having fun with might recognize things, or be weird around me, and then I won’t be able to go out with them anymore. It just feels a bit…off?”
Lila looks at her with the kind of disappointment that happens when you’ve just been blocked from doing something for entirely understandable and sensible reasons.
“Okay,” she says, after a minute, trying not to sound resentful.
“Sorry,” says Eleanor.
“It’s fine. I’ll work something out.”
“I mean you’ve got your own stuff to write about now, right?”
“I guess.”
Lila reaches into her locker for her bag, then looks at her phone, checking that there’s nothing from the girls, and suddenly stares at the little screen.
Hey, so let me know when you fancy that drink. I’m sorry it took so long to reply—stuff just mounts up, you know? You looked raggiante at the school gates yesterday btw x.
•••
Something strange hashappened since the night of the non-date with Jensen. It is not anentente cordiale, exactly, but Lila’s two fathers are definitely not actively fighting. When she arrives home from the afternoon school run, Bill is at pains to be cheerful and pleasant, asking after Lila’s and Violet’s day, occasionally cooking less challenging meals, and showing Lila small changes he has made around the house—the pinning up of a notice board, so that the girls know what to take to school each day, or the purchase of a new lock for the first-floor bathroom so that nobody was likely to walk in on her anymore (for “her” read Bill, and for “nobody” read Gene). There is notably less peevish closing of doors and passive-aggressive piano playing.
Gene, meanwhile, rises at an almost normal hour (nine thirty), folds the sofa-bed neatly, is out for much of the day, then makes a point of performatively greeting Bill first when he returns.Hey, Bill! How’s your day been?
Perfectly pleasant, thank you, Gene. Yours?Bill responds.
Lila is not entirely sure whether this exchange takes place on theoccasions she is not within earshot. But one evening the two men washed the dishes together after supper, Bill not even commenting when Gene put the plates back in the wrong cupboard, and over dinner the following evening they had a short conversation about a leak in one of the bathrooms, which involved nobody else at the table. If there is a slight gritted-teeth element to their small-talk, it means at least that Lila does not go about her day feeling like a bomb-disposal expert waiting for the next explosion.
