Chapter One
Ashley and David were fighting. She was shouting at him, slamming doors, furious. Then she suddenly stopped.
Just stopped, and wondered what she was doing.
"I don't want us to be like this," she said.
David looked at her.
"What?" Ashley said. "You're sick of me? This doesn't work? This is where we decide it is actually too hard, after all?"
"No," David said.
Ashley's mood was brittle, still angry. She wasn't really listening.
"That's how it works, isn't it?" she said. "With difficult relationships. With people like us. At the start we tell each other everything'll be fine and we'll make it, but after a while it gets hard so we just give up."
"Never," David said.
Ashley stopped. "What?"
"I'd never give on you. On us. You give up if you like, but I'm not going to."
"Oh," she said, and stood there for a while. "Really?"
"Not ever."
She looked at him. He was completely serious, and suddenly she wasn't angry any more. She couldn't actually remember what they were fighting about.
"We should stop this then," she said. "Old man."
"Tell me how."
"Fuck me for a start," she said. "Then we can see."
He did. There in the kitchen, where they were standing. A year ago he wouldn't have dreamed of sex anywhere but in the bed, but he was changing. Like she was changing too.
She leaned on the counter, wrapped her arms and legs around him, pressed herself against him as much as she could. She breathed in the smell of him, breathed the air out of his lungs, and held onto him until they were both done.
Then, pulling her clothes back on, she said, "One of these days sex isn't going to be enough to fix us."
"Maybe."
"Should we worry?"
"I don't know. It's working for now."
"Yeah," she said. "Old man." She kissed him and went to have a shower.
*
Ashley was twenty-three and David was fifty-one and there were times when that was almost unbearable.
She loved him. She really, really loved him with all that she had, but there were days when she couldn't see how even that could be enough.
She was too young. In another ten years, the difference in age wouldn't matter. At twenty-three, it meant everything. She was too young, and not ready to settle down, and she had never been completely sure what she wanted from this. It was also hard because to the rest of the world Ashley was a fling, and no matter what she did, or what David meant to her, people wouldn't take their relationship seriously. She got sick of people noticing them, always staring, wherever they went. She got sick of the double-take when someone realized she wasn't having dinner with her father.
She couldn't even be sure if her job was hers, not something he'd arranged, because he was her boss, and they worked at the same law firm, and even there people whispered about her.
Sometimes Ashley felt herself not taking it seriously either, like she was being let astray by the opinions of strangers.
They managed, though. They both worked a lot, and had that in common. More than anything else, what each needed was a partner who didn't mind the other working fourteen-hour days, and Ashley was glad she'd found that so easily. She went with David to his golf and wine tours, and he took her to concerts and wore ear-plugs and thought she hadn't noticed. She was a first-year associate and she knew judges and barristers and partners at major firms. She was twenty-three, and lived in an unaffordable apartment and drove an unaffordable car and her life was good.
And she loved David. More than she'd ever loved anyone else.
Sometimes it was all too much.
*
Ashley cheated on David. She couldn't help herself. She was bored, and feeling trapped by the seriousness of her life. She was twenty-three and was barely ready to sleep with the same person for a month, let alone settle down for the rest of her life.
She was making excuses.
She did a terrible to David. She did it because she was selfish. She knowing it would hurt him, and that it was completely unforgiveable. She did it anyway, and she didn't really know why.
She went to an old boyfriend's house, someone she'd once thought she loved. She stood at Kyle's door and said, "I want you to fuck me."
"I haven't seen you in months," he said.
"So?"
"Yeah," he said. "Come in."
It had been a bad breakup. Kyle had sobbed and threatened and tried to blackmail her. She shouldn't be here, not with Kyle, but part of her wanted his desperation. A dark little part of herself liked how much Kyle had needed her. David didn't need her, not obsessively, not like Kyle had. David didn't need anyone like that.
She was a monster. She did horrible things to people. She'd warned David at the start, and he hadn't believed her.
She lay on Kyle's bed and he fucked her. She didn't move, put her hand over his mouth and pushed him away when he tried to kiss her, just lay there and watched him grunt and moan and got fucked.
She wanted to be there, but she didn't really enjoy it.
Kyle phoned her a week later, and she went back, and let him do it again. Then went home to David and hated herself.
She didn't understand what was wrong with her.
When Kyle phoned a third time, Ashley said no, never again, and don't try and contact her. He cried again, and begged again, and she told him to stay of her life.
*
The problem with keeping secrets around good trial lawyers was that good trial lawyers knew when you were lying.
Ashley was often a second chair for Mary, who was tough and cold and ruthless, and in a complicated way a friend. Mary knew Ashley, and knew David, and was one of the few female partners who didn't look down on Ashley for sleeping where she did.
Mary walked into Ashley's office one afternoon, and closed the door, and said, "Who is he?"
Ashley looked up. "Who's what?"
Mary didn't answer. Suddenly Ashley understood. This wasn't about work.
Ashley knew her face was calm. She spent as much time as anyone else at the firm staying expressionless in the middle of a crisis.
"David thinks you're sleeping with someone else," Mary said.
"I'm not," Ashley said.
"You've got a game face on," Mary said. "You're lying."
Mary spent her life waiting for CEOs to blink and confess their secrets. She was hard to lie to, but Ashley had to try, anyway.
"I'm not," Ashley said. "I don't know what you're taking about."
"You do."
"I don't."
Mary shrugged. "Fine," she said. "If you want to talk, you let me know, okay?"
"I don't know what you mean," Ashley said, and sat there without moving until Mary left.
*
Ashley worried all night, waiting for David to say something. She didn't sleep, and was irritable the next day, and couldn't work out what mistake she'd made. David seemed normal, as if nothing had changed. Except he was sending Mary to question Ashley.
Two days later, in Mary's office, Ashley said suddenly, "You were right, the other day."
"I know."
"I was sleeping with someone else."
"Of course you were."
"Does David know?"
"He wondered. He asked me if I'd noticed anything. I said I thought you'd changed. That you seemed happier."
"Happier?" Ashley said.
"Relieved." Mary said. "As if you'd made a decision. He thought so too."
Ashley nodded.
Mary was Ashley's boss, but the whole situation at work was odd. Talking about an affair with her supervising partner wasn't the strangest thing Ashley had ever done. The firm's partners came to her house, and she saw them drunk, and she knew their spouses. She'd given a judge chewing gum after she vomited in their toilet once, and had a drunk barrister with marriage problems cry on her shoulder. Mary was Ashley's boss, but a friend in a way too, and dealing with complications like this was the smallest of the problems she had being with David.
Ashley wasn't even certain that Mary would tell David. Mary played hard. She'd had to, to get where she was. The profession was rough, especially at a firm like this. Ashley had seen far too much of the nasty side of firm politics since she'd been with David. She avoided it, but knew how it worked. She knew Mary was as likely to keep this quiet, and hold it over Ashley, as she was to tell David. It wasn't dishonest, not really, and Ashley didn't resent it. It was just how everyone was.
"It's over?" Mary said. "Completely over?"
Ashley nodded.
