‘I doubt that,’ I said.
‘I nearly left her once,’ Ant said. ‘I probably should have, really. I’ve regretted it ever since.’
‘God, really?’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘It was right at the beginning. We’d been going out for a few months and I decided to call it a day,’ he explained. ‘But then she told me her mum had cancer. I couldn’t tell her after that, could I? She’d just found out. She was all over the place. And then by the time that was over, she was pregnant . . . It was just one of those things.’
‘God,’ I said. ‘That’s terrible. Does she know? Did you ever tell her?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I’m not a monster.’
‘So you’ve been unhappy from the get-go,’ I said, comparing his story with mine and Joe’s. I’d never been particularly happy either, but I honestly wouldn’t say that was Joe’s fault. But what if it was? Not his fault, so much, but what if I’d just spent all these years with the wrong man?
Ant slid his hand a little deeper. ‘I know I’d be happy with you,’ he said.
‘Happy,’ I said, in a sarcastic tone of voice, even though I wasn’t entirely sure why.
‘Yes, happy,’ Ant said. ‘We get one life, you know, and then it’s gone. And I’m halfway through mine. Don’t you think we deserve to be happy?’
I nodded thoughtfully and sighed, because I did believe that. ‘I have a husband,’ I said, ‘I have a son.’
‘I know,’ Ant said. ‘But I think we need to find out what this thing is. We can try, can’t we?’
‘Try?’ I repeated. ‘Try what?’
‘Try to see if this thing between us is real . . . I mean . . . if I can carry on feeling the way I feel right now, then it’s worth it. If I can carry on feeling like this, then everything else is bullshit.’
I turned from the road and glanced at him. He was always so proud-looking, so upright, where Joe had always been such a sloucher.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said. ‘I just want to spend the rest of my life fucking you.’
Joe had told me that, back in the beginning. How beautiful I was. How much he wanted to make love to me. When had that stopped? I wondered. Five years ago? Ten?
‘We could book a hotel in Malaga,’ Ant said. ‘And then I could fuck you to kingdom come.’
‘I think I prefer to call it “making love”,’ I said, doing my best not to picture the scene, but failing. And was it even true that I preferred ‘making love’? Wasn’t Ant’s touch of rough part of the attraction?
‘Oh, I’ll make love to you as well,’ he said. ‘But first I want to fuck you again. Come on. Spend the night with me in Malaga.’
‘I don’t think that would be reasonable,’ I told him.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Heather will think I’m back home. You can tell Joe you need a bit longer to sort out your thoughts or whatever.’
‘But what then?’ I asked. ‘It’s just putting off the inevitable, isn’t it?’
Ant started rubbing his hand against my inner thigh. ‘If we get sick of each other, then we go back to our boring little lives,’ he said. ‘And no one needs to know.’
‘So there’s no point,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
‘But what if we don’t, Amy? What if this is real?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Ant,’ I said.
‘Then maybe you don’t feel the way I do,’ he said, pulling his hand back.
The absence of his touch felt like grief. I wanted it back. I needed it back there, right now. I needed all of him.
‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but living the rest of my life feeling like this . . . well, that’s not something I can just give up on.’
Until the very last moment, I maintained the fiction that I could resist him, that I’d simply go back to my life. But then, less than a mile from the airport, he pointed at a sign. ‘There’s a hotel there,’ he said. ‘Please, Amy?’
‘What about your flight, though?’ I asked, glancing at him quickly while trying to read all the signs.
‘I don’t give a shit about my flight,’ he said.
I pulled into a bus siding so suddenly that a truck almost rear-ended me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but my heart was racing again, and I’d admitted my hesitation, so in a way the decision had been made. It’s not for no reason that people say he who hesitates is lost.
‘What don’t you know?’ Ant asked. ‘Talk to me.’
‘I have a husband, Ant!’ I said again. ‘I have a son!’
‘And they’ll still exist,’ he said. ‘Neither of them are gonna vanish. But if you’d rather be with me, then what kind of life is that? What if you regret this for ever? That’s no good to anyone, is it? That won’t make anyone happy.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, glancing over my shoulder in case an airport bus should arrive.
‘OK, listen: I’m not getting on that flight,’ Ant said. ‘You can drop me there.’ He pointed at the entrance to the Holiday Inn car park. ‘Then you can come inside, and we can talk this through without getting a Spanish bus up the arse. And if you decide to, you can still drive back tonight.’
‘I told him tomorrow anyway,’ I said. ‘I already told Joe that I’d stay over somewhere to get my head straight.’
‘Well, then!’ Ant said. ‘Come inside and get your head straight.’
We didn’t talk so much, in the end. We drank the contents of the mini-bar and ordered a tapas platter from room service. And then Ant did exactly what he’d promised to do, and this time it was even better because afterwards we really did make love. By the time it was over, I was lost to him.
I woke the next morning to find him sleeping beside me. He had an angelic expression on his face that I’d never seen before, and I realised that it
