said Alice, as though asking for reassurance.
‘You asked him to—’
‘To what?’
I looked away. ‘You know what you asked him to do.’
‘How do I know if you won’t say?’
‘Fine. You asked him to stick a finger up your arse.’
‘Julia!’
‘You’re the one that said it!’
‘That’s private!’
‘So keep your voices down!’
Alice’s cheeks were pink.
There was an unpleasant silence.
‘Did you really hear us?’
‘Yes! I always hear you!’
‘You can’t always hear us. We don’t even have sex that often any more—’
‘Three times a week isn’t often?’
‘Not for us.’
‘Well. I’m very happy for you.’
Another silence.
‘You wouldn’t care so much if you had a boyfriend too.’
‘I don’t want a boyfriend, thank you.’
‘Sex, then.’
‘I have sex.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she said. And that’s when she pointed it out, about the three years.
I went back to bed after that, and stayed there for most of the day, eating cheese and trying to remember what sex was like. I’d never had really, really good sex, the kind that resulted in the sort of noises I heard Alice and Dave making. Oral always felt a bit like someone was wiping a wet flannel over my nether regions, and having a man on top of me made me feel quite claustrophobic.
The thing is, sex had never been particularly high on my list of priorities. In my teens, I was too obsessed with becoming a dancer to worry about having a relationship. I did manage to lose my virginity after my first year at ballet school, though; my friend Cat took me to Jamaica to stay with her grandparents, and I did it on the beach with a boy named Derrick, who had terrible acne and a bottle of cheap rum, which is what led to the sex. We didn’t use a condom; the sheer terror I’d felt afterwards at the prospect of being pregnant and the mechanics of trying to procure a morning after pill without Cat’s grandparents finding out had put me off sex for years after that. I still can’t drink daiquiris. But I was pleased to have got it over with – I felt more sophisticated than the other girls in my year, enjoyed muttering wisely, ‘Don’t do what I did. Wait until you’re ready,’ whenever we talked about sex at sleepovers.
Then there was Leon. I met him during a Freshers’ Week toga party at Warwick. He’d looked very fetching in his white sheet, and it was only later that I realized he wore corduroy trousers every day. Nevertheless, we stayed together, right up until he dumped me just after graduation because he wanted to ‘travel the world’ and be ‘free of ties’. He moved to Peckham three months later and started a graduate training scheme in management consultancy.
Leon and I had quite fun sex in the early days – we tried out the reverse cowgirl, did it standing up in the shower, things like that – but by the end of the relationship he could only get in the mood by listening to the ‘Late Night Love’ playlist on Spotify, and I knew exactly where his hands would be at which point in each track, so it was a bit like an obscene, horizontal line dance. The boring sex was bad for both of us, self-esteem-wise, I think. After we broke up I decided to have a bit of a sex break, and the longer I left it, the scarier sex seemed, like crossing a big, naked Rubicon. I had a couple of drunken one-night stands – including the sofa sex – but most of the time going home alone seemed like a much more sensible, less humiliating option, and far less likely to lead to stubble rash.
I masturbated, though – I had a couple of reliable vibrators, a Rampant Rabbit and a small bullet-shaped one that I took on holiday with me. The only thing I didn’t have was someone to grab my breasts. I tried to do it to myself sometimes, but it wasn’t the same.
Dave made us roast beef that Wednesday night. As he was cooking, I sat on the sofa imagining myself fucking him – something I swear I’d never done before – and I found my heart speeding up a bit. Dave is objectively a very good-looking man, despite his massive beard. I found myself staring at the beard, wondering whether it got in the way during oral sex, and looking at his knuckles, imagining what they’d feel like inside me. I couldn’t look him in the eye for a little while after that. I didn’t really want Dave’s fingers inside me, honestly. But I did want something inside me. Something live and warm and moving and not made of pink latex.
I was more awkward than usual during dinner that night, which isn’t that surprising, really. Dave did most of the heavy lifting, conversation-wise, asking me lots of questions about work in his lovely northern accent and pretending to be interested in my answers, even though I was a civil servant at the Department of Health and Social Care, answering letters from members of the public about foster care and NHS waiting times and other things I’d rather not think about, and he was a graphic designer, which is both cooler and less depressing.
He passed me the horseradish and asked, ‘Get any good letters this week?’
People don’t usually send letters to the government unless they are very angry and very old. But there are exceptions.
‘Got another one from Eric,’ I said.
‘The Bomber Command vet?’
I nodded. ‘He’s upset about the cuts to social care.’
‘Didn’t he write to you about that last month?’ Alice asked, through a mouthful of beef.
‘Last month it was the standard of hospital meals.’
‘Getting old’s a bastard, isn’t it?’ Dave said, but his eyes were fixed on Alice, and I could tell he was playing footsie with her under the table. I stared down and concentrated on the steam curling up from my potatoes, but the footsie continued.
There was a pause in the foot fondling while Alice cleared the table and served our dessert (Ben & Jerry’s), but then it started up again, and it put me off my ice cream – no easy feat. So I ate it as quickly as I could, then pushed my chair back.
‘Thanks for cooking, Dave,’ I said.
‘No worries,’ he said, smiling at Alice.
Alice looked up at me. ‘Stay and hang out with us,’ she said. ‘There’s that Benedict Cumberbatch thing on tonight.’
‘I’m not really into Cumberbatch,’ I said. ‘And I’ve got a bit of a headache.’
I went to my room and switched on my TV. I tried to watch a cooking show, but Alice and Dave were soon snogging so loudly that I could hear them above the shouty presenter. So I opened my laptop and put my headphones on, and then I switched on private browsing and searched for real couples
