A Relationship (in 1000 words)

It’s 6am and sunlight is streaming in through the window that will soon be covered by curtains I’ll help to hang. My mouth is dry, my skull feels like it’s being prised open from the inside, and looking down at me with her fingers curled around my hard cock is the woman who’s spent the last three months finding creative ways to turn every working day into a living hell. The woman who holds not just my dick, but my future at this small management consultancy in her pale, freckled hands.

What do I do? What do you think I do? I pull her up till she’s straddling my face, and I start to lick…

—

Three hours later, I slink into the office in yesterday’s clothes and make a beeline for the kettle. In my head I’m already composing the email I’ll send Emma once my hangover has worn off and I’m capable of staring at the screen for long enough to type it.

“I’m sorry,” I’ll say. “That was a mistake. I’m so embarrassed. We should probably forget the whole thing.”

Because it was, and I am, and we should. Never mind the fact that we’ve been flirting ever since I joined the firm. Forget the way we waited till everyone else had left the bar last night before falling on each other, desperate and greedy, our mouths mushed together as she slipped her hand down my trousers. No, she’s my boss – and besides, I have a girlfriend. She’s 3000 miles away and things have been shit for a long time, but this is the wrong way to do this. We both know that.

So I send the email.

And then I do it anyway.

—

It’s three months before our colleagues find out. Three glorious months of filthy emails, separate taxis, emergency shopping trips – one can only turn up at work wearing the previous day’s shirt for so long – and quick, sweaty, mid-afternoon fucks in the company toilets. Even filthier late-night fucks on the MD’s desk. The more elaborate and dangerous the rendezvous, the more it turns us on; after a while she only has to glance in my direction to elevate a boring project meeting into exquisitely extended foreplay.

Emma is ambitious and driven – qualities I haven’t yet discovered in myself, and therefore find incredibly attractive in others. Smart. Sarcastic. Mad about football. And she gives as good as she gets, which is really how this whole thing starts; when I take the piss, she’s having none of it and fires right back, till all I can think about doing is bending her over and…

It’s playground flirting, in other words – but for grown-ups.

She’s tall and curvy, with long cyclist’s legs and what can only be described as magnificent tits. I try not to be shallow about these things, but her tits alone are enough to get me hard whenever she struts through the office in heels and a low-cut dress. She’s 10 months out of an eight-year relationship that went stale after five, and drinks up the attention like it’s ice-cold water on a hot day.

We see each other all the time, and for someone who’s only really known long-distance relationships that brings its own thrill. Lazy weekend brunches, with no thought given to upcoming flights and ticking clocks. Shared reference points – cultural and geographical – which we get to explore together as sticky summer gives way to the deep, rich colours of a British autumn.

—

When we’re finally rumbled, something changes. Normalization always ushers in conformity – a regression to the mean – and we’re no different. We lose that tinderbox edge. It’s replaced by a professional veneer that feels threadbare and false, but becomes self-fulfilling in its sober caution.

And I’m a cunt to her, of course. I might be 26, but in many ways this is my dry run at adulthood…and I fuck it up in spectacular fashion. I’m the bull that lays waste to her china shop, smashing everything in sight as I bounce around on clumsy, selfish feet. The arguments are harder to hide than the sex; they’re angry and tearful outside the office, hissed and bitter whenever we’re at work, but the net result is the same. Raised shoulders. Thin, unsmiling lips. Pointed silence as we pass each other in the corridor.

Leaving the company doesn’t help – when something is already strained, any fundamental change in rhythm tends to make it worse rather than better. The sex is still fantastic, but before long it’s the only thing holding us together. We fuck, and when we’re not fucking we wade deeper and deeper into grass so long that in the end it blocks out the light. It grows over our heads and we suffocate. Instead of a relationship, we have a conversation about a relationship – one that plays out in front of our friends, in pubs across the city, and on the therapist’s couch.

—

Things end badly. Too much pain, too much crossover between our lives. She cries her way through my sister’s wedding. I stay away from a mutual friend’s engagement party. Slowly, we start to move on.

Years later she shows up at a work reunion that I organise. Six of us sit in a Central London pub and gossip about all the people who aren’t there. She lives with her boyfriend in Oxford, in the house with the curtains that I helped to hang, and she’s happy. Much happier than she ever was with me. I’m happy too – when we leave at the end of the evening it’s like going back to that field full of tall grass to find it freshly ploughed and full of warm, damp earth.

—

A relationship isn’t defined solely by its ultimate failure; by the acid that breaks it down. If that’s all we take forward with us, it will break down our future relationships too. It’ll hollow us out from the inside.

We have to see the whole picture.