One Thing Led to Another

And the hard fact to swallow is, if I hadn’t screwed it up with Laurence, I would probably never have even been in that tent, I would never have made an arse of myself, I would never have carried on having ‘no-strings’ sex with Jim and I certainly wouldn’t be pregnant with his baby!

Under Jim’s tartan duvet, I can feel that he’s had got an erection. A James Ashcroft Morning Glory. Ordinarily, that’s to say pre-baby, this would have meant one thing to me: a quickie, sleepy, hungover shag that would have left me with the smug feeling that I really was a thoroughly modern girl. I occasionally slept with my male best friend and we were cool with it.

Today though, it’s an unwelcome pressure and I feel my body stiffen as he eases closer. He takes a sleepy breath in and as he breathes out, he kneads the inside of my thigh with his knee, trying to gently prize me open. I resist. I can’t do this. My head’s too muddled and weighed down. Where sex before was like an added extra, now it is loaded with meaning. It is as if the lightness had been shot out of it, leaving it withering to the floor like a deflated balloon.

Jim puts his arm around me.

‘Morning,’ he murmurs, then kisses my head, then slips his hand between my legs.

I gently remove it.

‘Jim,’ I say, pushing him gently off me, trying not to sound too annoyed, ‘Jim, look…I can’t, I’m sorry.’

He rolls onto his back and for what seems like for ever, he doesn’t say anything.

When he speaks again, he sounds almost sad.

‘It’s different now, isn’t it?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I guess it is.’

He reaches for my hand, strokes it for a second or two and then turns onto his side. ‘Come on,’ he says, pressing his warm, long body against mine. ‘Let’s just have a cuddle.’

We must have eventually drifted off, because when I wake up again, it’s 7.10 a.m. and Jim isn’t in the bed. I sit up and hear the shower going, so I plump up the pillows and pick up the Bundle of Joy book.

I like waking up in Jim’s flat. Like everything in his life – his car, his beloved books, his friends, he got it a long time ago, nurtured it, tended it lovingly and it’s served him well in return.

Jim has always had to look after things, because he’s never known when anything new or better will come along. He was fifteen when his alky waster of a dad walked out, leaving only his mum’s income from her part-time job as a school nurse to support the family, and so he and his sister Dawn never got much. As a result, the bookshelf in his bedroom, made from red bricks and planks of wood, is full of childhood books that he’s looked after for twenty odd years. There are records that he’s had since the eighties, too, and all manner of retro chic – a leather chair, an orange seventies phone – none of it bought in trendy design bric-a-brac shops, but just things he’s kept all this time.