Prologue
I come home from work on 8th November to find Ava crying inconsolably on our bed, a little piece of white plastic clutched in her fist.
"How long have you been here?" I ask gently, taking her in my arms and kissing her loose chestnut curls.
She doesn't answer so I ask again, "What time did you take the test?"
"At five," Ava hiccups indistinctly. "I wanted to be able to give you the good news when you got home."
It's now a quarter past seven.
We have been trying to get pregnant for two years. I long to have a baby with her too, but she says - when it doesn't happen - that it's easier for me; and she's probably right. I have two boisterous little boys of six and eight from my first marriage, for one thing. Certainly, I've never lain on our bed for more than two hours, my body racked with sobs over a blue horizontal line on white plastic.
I think the need to conceive has become an obsession for her. I feel rotten saying it, but it's sapping from her everything I fell in love with in the first place. I was still married to my ex when we met, although all Serena and I ever did was row, and Ava, apart from her beauty, sex appeal and sass, had this incredible joie de vivre. We worked together and I couldn't wait to get into the office every day to see her. She was an outrageous flirt, adventurous and willing to try whatever I asked. We would play truth or dare over lunch in the canteen and I swear she would do
anything
if it were prefaced with the phrase "I dare you to..." We would roar with laughter after she had stroked a non-executive board member forty years her senior to hardness under the conference table, or flashed a work experience student when he came to fix her PC. She loved those games.
And we would have amazing spontaneous sex, with each other and with others. Ava dislikes condoms and, for this reason, since she stopped taking the pill we have been entirely monogamous - but it wasn't always that way. Ava had been more than eager to participate in numerous threesomes, both mmf (and one amazing mmmf with two guys I knew from the pub, when my gorgeous Ava was made quite airtight) and ffm with several of her girlfriends.
I loved going out with - and later being married to - a hot slut like Ava.
Sex is never spontaneous now. For most of each month I'm not allowed to touch her at all (I'm not supposed to wank either, but I'm only human, and what she doesn't know won't hurt her) and then on her most fertile days I am supposed to be able to achieve instantaneous erections and fuck her five times in quick succession.
The more we try, and the more we fail, the more tense we both become. And if I've learnt anything from the stream of embarrassing appointments with GPs, fertility nurses and gynaecologists, it's that the more strung up you are, the less likely you are to conceive.
"Come down and have some dinner," I say, uselessly, at last.
. . .
After this latest disappointment, Ava loses interest in sex altogether. I try everything I can think of to seduce her: romantic, candlelit dinners; doing a striptease to reveal a posing pouch shaped like an elephant; watching "Bridget Jones' sodding Diary" with my arm round her on the sofa; bringing home little gifts of Turkish Delight, earrings, poetry books; writing notes telling her how much I love her and leaving them in her jewellery box, purse and make up bag for her to find throughout the day; ordering saucy lingerie, porn and sex toys. But while I might coax a smile from her, she turns her face away when I try to kiss her for longer than a couple of seconds.
"What's the point?" she says, listlessly. "Why bother if my body doesn't work?"
This can't go on. She's miserable; I'm miserable. I need to find a way to recapture the devil-may-care Ava of old; put the mischievous sparkle back into her beautiful hazel eyes; get her hot and hungry again. I rack my brains and finally it comes to me. It requires all my creativity, but by 30th November, by which time I haven't fucked my lovely wife for more than three weeks, it's all ready to go.
We have been to see a late-ish showing of the new Bond movie and then popped to a bar for a couple of glasses of wine. Ava is more relaxed and mellow than I have seen her in months, snuggling into me in the cinema and then letting me hold her hand as we walk back to the car. She doesn't turn her face away when I kiss her and even slips her tongue briefly into my mouth and her hand into my back pocket. Something about tonight - the 'date night' ambience? the alcohol (Ava never drinks these days: it's bad for the hypothetical baby)? hell, maybe even Daniel Craig whom she's always had the hots for - has re-awakened the ghost of the old Ava.
It's late when we reach home but Ava, as always, checks her email on the PC before bed. I use my phone to send the message with the link and go out to the kitchen to pour her a cold glass of water.
"I've got an email from you!" she calls, and I come through to the lounge and stand behind her, leaning over her and kissing her ear.
"Click on the link," I tell her.
She frowns at the webpage, a brightly-coloured picture of a Christmas scene with twenty-four boxes with red numbers in, each underlined to show that it's a link.
"Advent Calendare?" she scoffs. "Honestly, Dale, your spelling!"
"Nuh-uh," I say, shaking my head. "It's not a mistake. Each window contains a dare for you."
She turns her head, her interest piqued, and stares at me.
"A dare?"
"That's right," I say. "Just like the dares I used to give you at lunchtime back at Mayfield's."
A smile spreads slowly across her pale face and her eyes glow.