Authors: Nicky Wells
‘Me too,’ Casey hooted. Her body brimmed with mirth.
‘We were so close.’ Alex positively howled with laughter.
‘I know!’
‘And still—it didn’t—happen!’
‘Tell me about it!’
Casey sat up too, and she clutched onto Alex for support as they guffawed together.
‘But look, Mr Happy is still very much happy!’
‘I noticed.’ Casey stroked Alex’s arousal playfully. ‘What are we going to do about him?’
‘No idea,’ Alex chortled. ‘Absolutely bloody no idea. But man, look, he’s indestructible.’
‘Want me to—?’ Casey made a suggestive gesture.
‘Nah. Thanks all the same, but no. He’s—he’s—I think he’s overextended himself. He’s so excited, he’s gone beyond the point of action.’
‘He’s catatonic.’
‘Possibly apoplectic.’
‘Totally paralytic.’
Casey drew breath. ‘What a load of big words. We should play scrabble, we’re on fire here.’
‘Great idea,’ Alex enthused. ‘Let’s see who can get the most naughty words in!’
‘Are you serious?
‘Why, yes. I’ve got to do something to—to detumesce.’
‘There’s another potential high score right there,’ Casey sniggered. ‘Go on then, I challenge you. But how’s about we have some breakfast at the same time? I’m starving.’
‘Deal. You put on the bacon, and I’ll set up the board.’
So Casey and Alex ended up playing scrabble over breakfast in their dressing gowns. When they had finished, amid much tittering over the words they put down—some official, and some very highly entertaining but totally unofficial—Alex was still engorged.
They tidied the kitchen and discussed dinner plans. They even braved the social media world to assess the fallout from last night’s debacle. The TV interview was great and portrayed no hint of the embarrassment that had gone before it. The unplanned photo of their tête-à-tête
wasn’t
great, but it was causing a wave of tweets and comments, and, as Emily had said, they would simply have to live with it.And through all this, Alex remained engorged.
‘No improvement at all?’ Casey probed with her voice as she turned off her tablet, not daring to look or touch for fear of making it worse.
‘None at all,’ Alex confirmed. ‘It really is a miracle.’
‘Whatever could we do next to get you un-excited?’ Casey pondered.
‘I know!’ Alex smacked his forehead. ‘We’ve been putting it off and putting it off, but how’s about… tax returns?’
‘What, now?’
‘Why not? What else am I going to do? I can hardly go out like this, can I?’
At this, Casey couldn’t resist a sneaky peek.
‘Probably not,’ she concurred. ‘But tax returns? That’s a bit extreme.’
‘Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures. Just think how smug we’ll feel when they’re done.’
Casey sighed.
How did they get from the promise of hot romance into tax return hell?‘There’s a moral in here somewhere,’ she mumbled, ‘but I’ll be damned if I can see it. Still, you’re right. Needs must. Let’s do it.’
By the end of the day, their tax returns were done, the house was tidy, and Alex was back to normal.
‘There’s a turn up for the books,’ he joked over a glass of wine.
‘Indeed it is,’ Casey agreed. ‘And it’s good to discover that we’ll get a nice little rebate. We should celebrate.’
‘Totally. But what do I do with these?’ Alex waved the pack of pills at her. He had brought it down from the bedroom earlier to read through the instruction leaflet line by line and hadn’t found any answers to their questions—like why one could have heightened performance with totally no desire.
‘Bin them. You don’t need them.’
‘I don’t?’
‘Most definitely not. I think we can safely conclude that the drugs don’t work.’
‘They just made me worse,’ Alex hummed.
Casey hugged him hard. ‘And that’s the bittersweet symphony of life.’
Alex screwed up his face. ‘That’s certainly
our
life at the moment.’‘It’s only a dark cloak,’ Casey reminded him. ‘But with light and calm oceans to come, remember?’
‘Yeah.’ Alex smiled. ‘Hey ho. So long, suckers!’
He opened the bin and disposed of the packet with panache.
‘Way to go,’ Casey cheered. ‘What’s next?’
‘Dinner. Let’s spend that rebate! And screw sex.’
Chapter Nine:
A Beautiful Stranger
~Alex~
Their bravado ran out two weeks later. Alex had noticed that Casey’s optimism seemed to be waning for a few days, but he hadn’t commented. He simply knew better than to provoke an explosion. Besides, he was certain that whatever storm was brewing would eventually hit full force, whether he prompted it or not.
And he was oh-so-right.
‘Alex, what the heck are we going to do? “Displeasure ever after” isn’t part of my life plan.’
Casey hurled this conversational grenade at him over Sunday breakfast without prior warning. The storm had broken.
Alex sipped at his tea cautiously, trying to buy himself time.
‘I don’t know, love. I don’t know,’ he offered at length.
‘
Love
. Now there’s a thought. We do still love each other, right?’‘Of course we do. I’m upset you should even ask that.’ Alex tried hard to keep his voice even.
Casey threw her hands in the air, dispersing croissant crumbs all over the kitchen floor. This wasn’t like her. She was seriously unsettled. Alex took note but didn’t know how to respond.
‘If we still love each other, then what’s the fucking problem with us?’
‘No pun intended,’ Alex interjected drily before he could stop himself, then wished he could bite his tongue off. At least he managed to fluster Casey momentarily.
‘What pun?—Oh, I get it. Very good.’
‘You said it.’
‘I know, I know. Call it a Freudian slip.’ Casey sprayed some more croissant crumbs. ‘But joking apart, what are we going to do? I mean—’ her hands went up again, and Alex feared for the integrity of what was left of her breakfast. ‘We’ve tried everything.
Everything
. We’ve been living in denial. And yeah, yeah, I’m holding on to the light and all that but... But what if we don’t make it to the light? What if this all gets too much to bear? I mean—Dammit, I’m bloody frustrated!’Alex knew he was going to be walking a minefield. His next response would be crucial. If only he could hit on the right words, the right thing to say. But what
was
there to say? Casey was right, and he felt the same way. All their assurances of marrying for love and music, that was all very well. But at the end of the day, everybody had
needs,
and theirs were most categorically not being met. He was frustrated too.‘Okay,’ he said in his best soothing voice. ‘Let’s take a moment to think this through.’
Casey opened her mouth as if to protest, but he held up a hand to appease her. ‘I’m not thinking solutions yet. I’m thinking, maybe we’ve gone about this the wrong way. We’ve been trying to fix it, but we haven’t tried to work out what’s at the root cause of it all.’
Casey gulped hard and made a snorting noise. She rubbed her nose wearily. ‘Do we really want to open that particular can of worms?’
‘Maybe we have to. Bear with me.’ Alex scrunched up his forehead dramatically and tried to organise his thoughts.
‘So let’s look at the root causes here. Why can’t we have sex?’
‘Because we’re cursed?’ Casey supplied helpfully.
‘Well, yeah, that could be root case one. But do we really believe that?’
A long silence followed that question. Alex willed Casey to say, ‘no, no, no.’ He was about to despair when she finally replied.
‘I don’t think so, no.’
Alex let out a huge sigh of relief. ‘Thank you. Phew! So, what’s next?’
‘Because we don’t love each other anymore?’
‘Not true,’ Alex immediately countered. ‘Unless there’s something you want to say to me?’
‘No! Of course not. I can’t—I can’t imagine living without you.’
That wasn’t quite the definition of love that Alex had had in mind, but he took the sentiment at face value. He
really
didn’t want to go down that route right now.‘So what then? We don’t turn each other on?’
Casey waggled her head. ‘We do though.’
‘We do. I agree. But somehow…’
‘Yeah. Somehow.’ Casey lapsed into silence. She finished up her croissant, still oblivious to the crumby devastation she was causing. Alex sipped at his tea.
Suddenly, Casey sat up a little straighter. Her bottom lip quivered, and her voice shook while she spoke. ‘Do you think it’s just us?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Do you think—do you think it’s
us
? As in, do you think if we tried having sex with someone else, we’d run into the same problem?’‘I—’ Alex was dumbstruck. He felt like Casey had pulled the rug out from under him.
Where was she going with this?
‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether I’d want to know.’Casey leaned forward eagerly. ‘But don’t you see? There’s an answer in there. Suppose we tried—doing it—with someone else, and it works. Then we’d know it’s
us
.’Alex was vaguely aware that he was opening and closing his mouth like a stranded fish. He couldn’t even begin to figure out how to reply to this statement. Tentatively, he tried.
‘So what? You’re proposing we go and sleep with someone else? And supposing it works, what do we do with that knowledge?’
Casey slumped. ‘It sounds awful when you put it like that. And I’ve no idea what we’d do with the knowledge.’
Silence grabbed hold of them once more while they each followed their own thoughts. Eventually, Casey spoke again.
‘Suppose it
were
a curse. If—if we tried out someone else, we might be able to ascertain whether the curse applies to us as a couple, or to us individually with anybody.’Alex chewed his lower lip. ‘I see what you’re saying, but I don’t understand how that would help us.’
‘It would be an answer. Then we can work out next steps.’
‘And what would they be?’
‘I don’t know!’ Casey wailed. ‘I can’t think that far. I simply—I want to know.’
Alex rolled his shoulders. ‘If it worked, at least it would be a release of sorts.’
‘Yeah! See? So that wouldn’t be a bad thing.’
‘On the other hand…’
‘On the other hand what?’ Casey nudged Alex impatiently. ‘What?’
‘You remember “Indecent Proposal”, right?’
‘The movie?’ Casey acknowledged. ‘Yeah, and?’
‘“Yeah, and”?’ Alex echoed her. ‘Do you recall what happened to the couple?’
‘That’s different. They were doing it for money. We’d be doing it for…’ Casey petered out.
‘For what?’
‘I was going to say, “for love”, but that sounds wrong. I’m sorry. Stupid idea. Forget I ever said it.’
Alex poured himself another cup of tea. ‘I don’t know. There might something in it, as crazy as it sounds.’
Casey shot him a suspicious look. ‘Don’t play devil’s advocate to humour me.’
‘I’m not. But while it’s an extreme measure, you might be on to something.’ Alex placed his hands on the table and spread his fingers wide. ‘Look, we’re at a complete stalemate. We’ve no idea where to go from here. Maybe—maybe a radical course of action will be a catalyst for something else.’
‘Maybe. But you’re right too, you know. What if we don’t like the outcome?’
‘We’ll have to deal with it.’
Casey sighed heavily. ‘Agreed. See, we’re totally made for each other. Nobody else would consent to my crackpot proposal. Nobody else would come even close to understanding it, but you do.’
Alex summoned a shaky smile. ‘If we’re made for each other, we’ll deal with the fallout from your plan. We simply have to believe in each other.’
‘So you want to do it?’
‘Let’s do it,’ Alex pronounced. ‘Let’s see what happens.’
~Casey~
The train pulled out of Victoria station, and Casey had butterflies in her stomach. Even though it had been her suggestion originally, she couldn’t quite believe that she and Alex were headed for a dirty weekend in Brighton with separate, as-yet-unknown partners.
I’m going to have sex with a stranger to save my marriage
, she pondered.
Really, life doesn’t get any ‘stranger’ than that
.She rummaged in her handbag for a chewing gum. If she didn’t get to chew on something, she would suffer verbal diarrhoea; all her doubts would come pouring out, she would drive Alex mad, and they would either argue or go home, or both.
Alex was sitting opposite her, facing backwards to the direction of travel, and he was staring out the window. He had been uncharacteristically silent all morning, and that wasn’t like him. He wasn’t the broody type. Evidently, he also wasn’t the philandering type, and Casey felt oddly cheered by that. She had always known that, of course, but here there was real living proof right in front of her.
‘It’s not too late to back out,’ she offered softly.
Alex turned his head and fixed her with an intent look. ‘I know,’ he replied, equally softly. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. But I think we ought to go through with it.’
‘Just to see what happens,’ Casey finished his thought for him.
‘Exactly.’ Alex shrugged almost imperceptibly.
‘Do we—do we really have to go all the way?’
More shrugging on Alex’s part. ‘I suppose that’s rather the point, isn’t it? We’ve gone nearly all the way with each other plenty of times. The proof is in the pudding, as it were.’
‘Yikes.’
‘Yeah.’
‘If we… as we haven’t actually, technically, really got over the finish line since we got married, will this… Would this actually qualify as cheating?’ Casey pondered. ‘I mean, obviously it’s cheating because we’ll have different partners.’ She paused and felt her cheeks burn. No doubt she was an attractive shade of puce. ‘But will it be extra-marital? What I’m trying to say is, are we marriage breakers if we’re not fully married yet?’
Alex sighed. ‘No idea. I’m all muddled. I’m not really sure that it matters either way. I hate the thought of going behind your back.’
‘Hardly behind my back. We’ve agreed to do this.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Hey,’ Casey tried to lighten the mood. ‘We could just put it down as a swinging weekend. People used to do that all the time without marriages breaking up, didn’t they? You know the whole car-keys–in–potpourri–bowl thing?’
‘Err, yes.’ Alex shot her an amused glance. ‘Your mind truly works in mysterious ways.’
Casey laughed quietly and felt some of the tension ease out of her. ‘We’re consenting adults after all. Who knows? Maybe this’ll be fun.’
‘But remember: I love you,’ Alex said earnestly. ‘Whatever happens. I love you. And it’s breaking my heart that we’re so unhappy.’
‘I love you too.’
‘But please be careful. There are some really creepy people out there, and I don’t want you to—to get hurt.’
Casey was overcome by emotion. It was all too easy to forget how much her man cared for her. She swallowed and smiled brightly. ‘Aw, of course I’ll be careful. And you too!’