I finished with my client, let the receptionist take her money and waved her goodbye.
“I see you’ve already booked the weekend of the twenty-first off?” she asks with a smile. I raise my eyebrows in surprise. I hadn’t told Sophie about my plans for a dirty weekend away yet as I hadn’t seen her.
“What d’ya mean? Yeah, I’ve booked it off, I’m going away that weekend. I’ve booked the Friday off too.” Her face falls.
“You’re going away? Shit, where you going?”
“I’ve booked a dirty weekend away in York with Marcus.”
Her face screws up. “Ewww. TMI, Neen, TMI.”
“Well, you asked.”
“Yeah, sadly, I did.”
She looks over my face for a few seconds. “How are things?”
I shrug my shoulders. I have no idea, how things are. Lonely and sexless mainly.
“I want the truth. How are things really, Neen?”
I let out a long sigh. She’s my best friend, if I can’t tell her then I really am alone in this world. I motion with my head, saying, “Office.”
We make our way to our office at the back of the salon, where we have a pair of leather sofas and a large coffee table. We have the usual office furniture too, but we have the sofas so we can escape and relax for five minutes on busy days. The staff have their own break room, but this is somewhere for just Soph and me to retreat to. We have a coffee machine, a microwave and a fridge so we’re pretty much self-contained.
Sophie goes straight to the fridge and pours us both a large glass of wine.
“Come on then Matthews, spill. What’s your prick of a husband done now?”
I roll my eyes as I take a sip of my wine and sit back into the sofa. “He actually hasn’t done anything.”
“So why’d you hesitate when I asked you how things were?”
I let out a long breath and pick at an imaginary piece of fluff on my black trousers. My eyes sting as I fight the tears. Sophie was only away a week and it’s suddenly hitting me how much I missed her.
It’s Thursday. Marcus hasn’t been home until after I’ve gone to bed for over two weeks, and we haven’t had sex for fifty-six days. Apart from my clients and the people that I work with, I’d barely spoken a word to anyone for almost eight days.
“I missed you,” I tell her. Sophie’s face lights up with a real, genuine smile that shines in her eyes.
“I missed you too baby chick. I wish you’d have come with us.”
“How’s Josh?”
“He’s great. Really busy, but great. We clubbed all night and lounged around the pool all day. He asked how you were doing.”
I smiled as I thought of Josh. We used to be really close, but he was too close to Conner and it was just too painful to be around him, so I distanced myself. Then he’d moved to London to work so I didn’t see him about too often. Since he’d set up his own business, I’d hardly seen him at all. He was always travelling around the world, organising functions and events, or just enjoying life.
“Anyway, back to you. What’s going on? You look sad.”
Shit! Tears sting my eyes again. I take a few deep breaths and swallow them down.
“I just feel like I’m the only one in this marriage right now.”
“Pfft. What d’ya mean, right now? From what I’ve seen, it’s been like that from day dot.”
“Don’t Soph, I need your support right now, not your opinion of my husband.”
“Neen, I’ll support you in most things. I’ve always had your back and you know that. But, him… staying married to him? No, I’m sorry, he’s not right for you. You get more miserable every day. I feel like the longer you’re with him, the more of you I lose. You’re fading away in front of me, Neen.”
My bottom lip suddenly has a mind of its own and I lose all ability to stop it trembling.
“I think it’s over. I think, I mean… I don’t know. I just don’t know what I can do anymore, Soph. I can’t make him want me. I can’t force him to fuck me.” I’ve never confessed to Sophie about my lack of sex life, but now I’ve told her the truth about why I married Marcus, she might as well know the whole story. Plus, the glass of wine I’ve just gulped down into my empty stomach has gone straight to my head.
“What? Wait a minute? You’re not having sex? Since when? How long and why do I not know this?”
“No. Since forever. The whole time we’ve been together and you don’t know, because I didn’t want to give you another reason to hate him. I didn’t want to have to come up with another reason to justify staying with him.”
“Fuck Neen… or not, in your case.”
I give her a small smile.
“I’ve told myself that this weekend away is to try and get pregnant.”
Her perfectly shaped eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. “Neen, you’re not still seriously considering…”
I shake my head. “No, let me finish,” I tell her. “I’ve kidded myself that this weekend away is all about making a baby, but I know…” I lose it and start to cry. “I know in my heart, it’s really my last attempt at saving my marriage, Soph.”