Friend Request(91)
I would agree with him no matter what he said, but this one is easy. Yes, we were happy. For the first time in my life, I was with someone who knew what I had done and still loved me. It lessened the burden of guilt somehow. When he kissed me outside that pub in Clapham, I felt lighter than I had done in years.
‘It was such a relief to be with you. You loved me so completely, so… innocently.’ It seems a strange choice of word considering the things we had done together. He must have seen something of this on my face, because he insists, ‘It was innocent, Louise. Or maybe pure is a better word. The things we did together, we did out of love. You wanted it as much as I did, didn’t you? I never forced you, did I?’
He is almost pleading. I shake my head. No, he never forced me. Or perhaps more accurately, I never said no. A shiver runs through me, revulsion laced queasily with the remnants of desire. At first it had been liberating to be released from the confines of the vanilla sex I’d had with previous boyfriends. There was something about the letting go, the relinquishing of control, that excited me, freed me. But there were times, especially after Henry was born, where things went further than I was comfortable with. I thought it was because I’d become a mother, that I’d changed. But I didn’t say. I never said because I could feel him slipping away from me by then and I didn’t want to give him a reason to leave.
‘I didn’t want to hurt Sophie, I swear.’ Sam turns the wine glass around and around in his hand, the liquid slopping about dangerously.
‘No, of course not,’ I say, tasting bile. Oh God, what did he do?
‘I just wanted her to be quiet, to stop saying those things, things that someone else might have overheard. But she wouldn’t shut up, she just kept on saying it, saying she’d seen me with Maria at the leavers’ party, asking me what happened, if Maria had said anything, if I said anything to her. I kept telling Sophie it was nothing, nothing happened, that I left Maria in the woods, that she was fine the last time I saw her.’
‘What are you talking about? What do you mean you left Maria in the woods? When?’
He doesn’t answer, just twists the wine glass even more furiously.
‘Sam?’ My need to know is overriding the fear I feel. Am I on the brink of finding out the answer to the question that has been clawing at me since I was sixteen years old? ‘Is this something to do with Matt?’ I think of Matt’s eyes boring into mine at the reunion, his insistence that we should all keep quiet. A wild hope surges in me that what Sam is about to tell me is that he has been covering up for Matt all these years.
‘Matt? No, it’s nothing to do with him. He’s just worried that it’ll come out that he supplied the E.’ My heart sinks. ‘It was hard,’ he goes on, placing his glass carefully on the table. ‘Seeing you still so torn up about it, all those years later. Knowing that with just a few words I could put an end to your guilt, your shame. But also knowing that it would mean the end of you and me. The end of us.’
I stare at him, wanting yet not wanting him to continue. He takes my hands in his, enfolding them, his thumbs circling my palms over and over. He puts his face in my hands, so that I can’t see his eyes as he speaks, the words rushing out, unstoppable, his hot breath on my hands.
‘You didn’t kill Maria, Louise. I did.’
Chapter 38
Louise doesn’t talk to anyone about the details of her and Sam’s sex life. She is too ashamed of her response to being dominated, pinned down, helpless. She did tell Polly a bit when things got bad after Henry was born, but even she doesn’t know the full story.
When Louise was a teenager, and into her early twenties too, it was all the rage to talk to your girlfriends about the intimate details of your sex life – the mechanics, the quirks, the sounds, the things that went wrong. Nothing was off limits. But then something happened. Around the time she and Sam got together, her friends started to think about getting married, and actually to do so, and she found that those conversations tailed off. Was it because they had made their choice, and couldn’t admit to anything that was less than perfect? Not so easy to laugh at the sexual foibles of someone you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life with. Not so funny any more.
The conversations where she might have been able to bring up her own sex life dwindled away, and she didn’t want to be the one to introduce the topic. She would have liked to have had someone to confide in, to check how far from the norm their sex life was, especially in the last couple of years when things got really out of hand. She reads obsessively on the subject, googling BDSM and rape fantasies, reassured when she sees studies that say this falls within the ‘normal range’ of fantasies, horrified when she reads articles linking it to real sexual violence.
Things got worse the second time Sam was passed over for promotion, and then again after Henry was born. He thought that motherhood would level things out, that he would become the important one. But Louise’s business went from strength to strength and he was left behind. But of course she could never leave him behind. Not him, the only one who knew her. If only Louise had known what he had done, how very different things might have been. Who might she have become without a lifetime spent building a wall around her to make sure no one could get in? Of standing on cliffs or bridges wondering what it would be like to just give in, to step forward and not have to be any more?