Aftermath

Linda lies perfectly still, afraid that even the smallest movement will wake him. The man beside her... God, what was his name? Mark? Michael?... snores softly, his breath carrying the sour tang of whisky and sleep. His arm is draped across her waist with the casual ownership of someone who's done this before. Many times before.

She stares at the ceiling. The room is unfamiliar, all sharp angles and shadows in the darkness. A wardrobe looms against one wall. Curtains, heavy, expensive-looking, block out the streetlights though a thin seam of orange glow edges their border. She can make out a chair in the corner, her dress draped across it like a discarded skin.

Her dress. Black. The one she'd bought three months ago and never worn because it felt too revealing, too obvious, too much like she was trying. But tonight... last night... she'd pulled it from the back of her wardrobe and put it on. She'd stood in front of her bathroom mirror, turning this way and that, telling herself she looked good. Telling herself she deserved to feel good. Telling herself that at thirty-four, it wasn't pathetic to want to feel desired.

The memory makes her stomach turn.

She remembers the bar. The noise, the crush of bodies, the way the music thudded through her ribcage. She'd gone alone, which felt brave at the time and foolish now. Her friends had all cancelled. Sarah with her children, Emma with her migraines, Claire with her perfectly valid excuse that Linda can't even remember. So she'd gone anyway, because staying home felt worse. Staying home meant another Friday night on the sofa, another bottle of wine consumed alone, another evening scrolling through other people's lives and wondering where hers had gone wrong.

He'd approached her at the bar. Confident. Good-looking in that polished way that should have been a warning. Too much product in his hair, too white teeth, cologne applied with too generous a hand. But he'd smiled at her, really smiled, and said something clever about the bartender's pretentious cocktail names. She'd laughed. God help her, she'd laughed, and felt something unfurl in her chest that had been closed tight for so long.

"I'm buying you a drink," he'd said, not asked, and she should have said no. Should have made some excuse and moved away. But his attention felt like sunlight after months of winter, and she'd heard herself say yes.

They'd talked. Or rather, he'd talked and she'd listened, grateful to have somewhere to direct her gaze, someone to make her feel less alone in the crowd. He was funny, she remembers that. Quick with words, self-deprecating in a way that seemed genuine but probably wasn't. He'd asked about her work. She's a librarian, which usually makes people's eyes glaze over, but he'd seemed interested. He'd leaned in close to hear her over the music, his hand occasionally touching her arm, her shoulder, the small of her back.

The drinks kept coming. She remembers that too. Whenever her glass got low, there was another appearing.

"One more," he'd say. "Come on, we're having fun, aren't we?"

And they were, sort of. She was, sort of. The alcohol made everything softer, easier. Made her feel witty when she responded to his jokes. Made her feel attractive when his eyes moved over her. Made her forget, for a little while, the crushing weight of her loneliness.

"Let's continue this conversation somewhere quieter," he'd said eventually, his mouth close to her ear. Not a question. A statement. An assumption that she'd say yes.

And she had.

Linda closes her eyes now, lying in his bed, and tries to remember the moment of decision. Had there been one? Or had she simply drifted from the bar to the taxi to his flat, carried along by momentum and alcohol and the terrible, desperate need not to go home alone?

She remembers the taxi ride. His hand on her thigh. Her hand on top of his, though she can't remember if she'd been encouraging him or trying to slow him down. The city lights blurring past. The driver's eyes in the rear-view mirror, knowing, and the shame she'd felt but pushed down, down, down because turning back seemed harder than going forward.

His flat. Modern. Minimalist. The kind of place that looks like it belongs in a magazine and feels like nobody actually lives here. He'd poured more drinks, wine this time, expensive, from a bottle that hissed when he opened it. She'd accepted the glass because refusing felt awkward, confrontational, like admitting she'd made a mistake in coming here.

"To new friends," he'd said, and clinked his glass against hers.

Friends. As though that's what they were becoming.

She'd drunk it anyway.

The rest is fragments. His mouth on hers, tasting of wine and wanting. His hands, practised and efficient, finding their way to her zip, her bra clasp, the places that should have been discoveries but felt more like procedures. Her own responses, sluggish and uncertain. She remembers saying "maybe we should..." but not finishing the sentence. Remembers him saying "it's okay, you're beautiful" as though that was an answer to an unasked question.

She remembers giving in. Not wanting to exactly, but not knowing how to stop. Not wanting to make a scene. Not wanting to seem like she'd led him on. Not wanting to be rude, for God's sake, as though rudeness was the worst thing that could happen.

And underneath all of it, that terrible hunger to be wanted. To be touched. To feel, even for a moment, like she mattered to someone.

The sex itself is barely a memory. Mechanical. Quick. Him on top of her, moving with the rhythm of someone completing a familiar task. She'd made sounds that she thought she was supposed to make. She'd touched his back, his shoulders. She'd tried to be present, to enjoy it, to make it mean something. But mostly she'd stared over his shoulder at the ceiling, this same ceiling she's staring at now, and waited for it to be over.

When he'd finished, mercifully soon, he'd rolled off her, breathed heavily for a moment, then said "that was great" before getting up to use the bathroom. She'd lain there, naked and exposed, listening to him discarding his condom and piss without closing the door, and felt something inside her contract into a hard, cold stone.

He'd come back, climbed into bed, kissed her shoulder once, a gesture that might have seemed tender if it hadn't felt so perfunctory, and fallen asleep within minutes.

And Linda had lain here ever since. Awake. Thinking.

She wonders what time it is. Late enough that the bar closed hours ago. Early enough that dawn is still a promise rather than a reality. The dead hours. The hours when everything feels worse, when every mistake is magnified, when the voice in her head speaks loudest.

What have you done?

But she knows what she's done. The same thing she's done before, though never quite this badly. Given herself away too easily. Mistaken attention for affection. Confused being wanted with being valued. Let loneliness make her decisions.

She's done it with boyfriends who stayed just long enough to become familiar before disappearing. With colleagues who flirted at office parties then acted like nothing had happened on Monday morning. With a married man once... fuck, that married man... who'd made her feel special right up until the moment his wife called.

Each time she'd told herself: never again. Each time she'd meant it. And each time, eventually, the loneliness would build and build until it felt like suffocation, and she'd find herself making the same mistakes in different configurations.

The man beside her snorts, shifts, his arm tightening around her waist before relaxing again. She holds her breath until his breathing evens out.

What must she look like to him? Another easy conquest? Another woman who said yes? He probably won't even remember her name in a week. Might not remember it now. She'll become a story, maybe. Something to tell his mates. "Met this bird in a bar, absolute sure thing..."

The thought makes her want to cry, but she won't. Not here. Not where he might wake and see, might ask what's wrong in that patronising way men do when women's emotions inconvenience them.

She tries to trace back the chain of decisions that led here. The decision to go out. The decision to wear this dress. The decision to stay at the bar when her instincts told her to leave. The decision to accept the first drink. The second. The third. The decision to get in the taxi. The decision not to say no when she still could have.

But when could she have said no? That's what she can't work out. At what point did the evening cross from possibility into inevitability?

Maybe when she'd put on the dress. Maybe that was the real decision, the original sin from which everything else followed. Because she'd known, hadn't she? Some part of her had known exactly what she was hoping for. Not this, not this hollow aftermath. But attention. Desire. The temporary relief of feeling wanted. All true. All completely fucking useless when you're thirty-four and alone and terrified that this is all there is. That you'll wake up at fifty, sixty, seventy, and realise you spent your entire life waiting for someone to make you feel whole.

She'd tried, after the married man. Really tried. She'd gone six months without dating, without seeking male attention, without any of it. She'd focused on herself. Joined a gym. Started painting classes. Read self-help books with titles like You Are Enough and Love Yourself First.

And she'd been fine. Sort of. The loneliness had been there, constant and heavy, but manageable. She'd told herself she was growing, healing, becoming the person she needed to be before she could be with someone else.

But six months had turned into nine, and nine into twelve, and one day she'd realised she'd spent a year being "enough" and she still felt empty. The gym made her fit but not fulfilled. The painting classes produced mediocre art and no meaningful connections. The books told her she was complete on her own, but they couldn't hold her at night. They couldn't make her feel desired. They couldn't silence the voice that whispered, at three in the morning, that maybe the problem wasn't her standards or her choices or her self-worth. Maybe the problem was simply her.

So she'd given up trying to be enough. Or given in. She's not sure which.

The man shifts again, and this time his arm slides off her waist. The sudden freedom feels like both a relief and a loss. She could get up now. Could gather her clothes, dress quietly, slip out before he wakes. She's done it before. The walk of shame, though it only feels like shame because she lets it.

But something keeps her still. Maybe it's the cold outside. Maybe it's the difficulty of finding a taxi at this hour. Maybe it's the sheer exhaustion of pretending, even to herself, that leaving would change anything.

Because she'll do this again. She knows she will. Not tomorrow, maybe not next week. But eventually. When the loneliness gets bad enough. When she's convinced herself that this time will be different, that the next man will see her value, that she's learned her lesson and won't make the same mistakes.

Except they're not really mistakes, are they? They're choices. Conscious choices, even if she makes them through the fog of alcohol and need. 

And underneath the regret, underneath the shame, underneath the voice in her head cataloguing all the ways she's failed herself... there's a small, terrible truth she doesn't want to acknowledge.

Part of her doesn't regret it. Part of her needed exactly this. The attention. The desire, however fleeting and false. The temporary escape from being alone with herself. Even this... lying awake in a stranger's bed, feeling terrible... is better than another night on her sofa, pretending she's chosen solitude when really solitude has chosen her.

That's the thought she can't bear. Not that she made a mistake, but that this might have been exactly what she wanted. That her self-destruction is also her self-medication. That she keeps putting herself in these situations because, for a few hours at least, they make her feel less alone.

Linda watches the thin line of light at the edge of the curtains. It's growing brighter. Dawn is coming, whether she's ready or not. Soon he'll wake. He'll be charming, probably. Offer her coffee. Maybe ask for her number, though they both know he won't call. She'll gather her things, put on yesterday's dress, and take a taxi home.

And then what?

She'll shower for a long time, trying to wash away the feeling of his hands on her skin. She'll make tea and sit at her kitchen table and promise herself, again, that this was the last time. She'll avoid her reflection in mirrors for a day or two. She'll throw herself into work, into routines, into the comfortable numbness of daily life.

Until the next Friday night. The next moment of weakness. The next man with white teeth and easy charm and the ability to make her forget, temporarily, how much she dislikes herself.

The light is definitely brighter now. She can make out more details of the room. His clothes from last night are scattered across the floor... jeans, a shirt, boxer shorts. There's a photograph on the bedside table that she didn't notice before. Him with a group of men, all grinning at the camera, all looking like the kind of people who've never questioned their right to take up space in the world.

She wonders if any of them have lain awake like this. Probably not. They're the ones who sleep soundly, secure in their choices, unburdened by shame.

The man beside her stirs, makes a sound between a grunt and a sigh. His eyes flutter but don't open. Linda holds perfectly still, hoping he'll sink back into sleep. She's not ready yet. Not ready to put on the performance of morning-after pleasantries. Not ready to pretend this was something other than what it was.

Just those few hours in the bar. The laughter. The attention. The temporary reprieve from being alone.

It'll have to be enough. It'll have to sustain her until the next time loneliness becomes unbearable and she finds herself, once again, making the same choices and calling them mistakes.

The curtains are definitely glowing now. Dawn is breaking. A new day is beginning, ready or not.

Linda closes her eyes and tries to sleep, but sleep won't come. So she lies there, watching the light grow stronger, feeling the weight of everything she knows about herself and can't quite bring herself to change.

Outside, the city is waking up. People are starting their days, making coffee, planning their weekends. Normal people. People who make better choices. People who like themselves enough not to need validation from strangers in bars.

Or maybe not. Maybe everyone is struggling in their own way. Maybe everyone makes choices they regret. Maybe everyone lies awake sometimes, wondering how they got here and whether they'll ever learn.

The thought should be comforting. It isn't.

The man beside her snorts, coughs, shifts onto his back. His eyes open briefly, unfocused, then close again. Any moment now, he'll wake properly. The night will officially be over, and the morning will begin.

Linda takes a deep breath, preparing herself. For the performance. For the gracious exit. For the walk of shame that she'll pretend isn't one. For whatever comes next in this cycle she can't seem to break.

The light fills the room slowly, transforming shadows into solid objects, making everything clear and unavoidable.

Dawn has arrived.

Linda lies still, and waits.