She has the laptop open before nine.
She tells herself this is because she has a backlog of product codes to clear, which is true, technically. It's certainly not because she has been awake since six with the particular restlessness of someone waiting for a specific hour to arrive. She makes tea. She drinks it standing at the window, watching the street below do its ordinary morning things: a woman with a buggy, a man with a briefcase, a cat crossing the road with magnificent indifference. The World entirely unaware that she is standing one floor up in her dressing gown, heart already running slightly ahead of schedule.
She opens Facebook at 8:58.
At 9:01, the chat window opens.
Good morning, he writes. Or good evening, depending on your longitude.
Good morning, she types back, and she is already smiling, which is not something she has historically done at nine in the morning. How was your night?
Longer than it needed to be. And it's been a very long day too. I kept thinking about you.
I kept thinking about you too, she writes, and the honesty of it no longer frightens her in the way it did two days ago. Two days. She cannot quite believe it has only been two days.
Are you calling? he writes.
Calling, she confirms, and opens the video.
He appears, and she feels it again... that specific, settling thing, like a signal finding its natural frequency. He is in what she now thinks of as his chair, the warm lamp behind him, Melbourne's late afternoon light in the window beyond. He raises his hand in his characteristic wave and she raises hers back.
"Hello, you," he says.
"Hello!"
They look at each other for a moment, and she notices that the looking has changed since the first time they were both on cam yesterday, a lifetime ago, when she'd been so self-conscious she'd barely been able to hold eye contact. Now it feels natural, this mutual visibility, as though they have arrived at an understanding where looking is simply what they do.
"Can I move to the sofa?" She asks. "It's more comfortable and..." She hesitates.
"More private?" He suggests.
"I'll put the laptop on the coffee table. I can..." She stops. "Yes. More private."
"By all means," he says simply. "I'm here."
She carries the laptop to the sitting room and settles it on the coffee table, and she settles herself on the sofa, and he is still there when she comes back into frame, calm as ever, as though there is no version of this in which he would not have waited.
The conversation begins in the way it always does now, warm and easy, looping from the small to the significant with no particular concern for the boundary between them. Then, gradually, it is growing by the same increments as yesterday. It becomes something else. Something warmer. Something with more importance to it.
"I've been thinking," she says, "about yesterday."
"Have you?" He feigns surprise.
"The way I felt afterwards." She looks at the camera. "I didn't feel ashamed. That was awkward. I expected to feel..."
"Embarrassed?"
"Yes. But I didn't. Not really. I felt..." She searches for it. "Real. I felt very real."
"You are very real," he says. "You're the realest thing I've talked to in years."
She looks at him for a moment. Then: "Michael?"
"Yes?"
"I want to..." She takes a breath. "I want to continue. From yesterday. If that's..."
"Yes," he says quietly. "Yes, Lizzie, also I would like that very much."
She reaches for the hem of her dress. And then stops.
He waits.
"I'm not..." she starts. She looks away from the camera for a moment. Outside the window, the February sky is doing its flat grey thing, impassive, unhelpful.
"I'm not very..." She tries again. "I should probably tell you something first."
"All right," he says, and his voice has shifted to the register she has already learned to recognise as the one that means I am entirely here and nothing you say will make me less so.
"What's wrong, Lizzie?"
"It's stupid," she says.
"I doubt that."
"I don't have a very..." She makes a small, frustrated gesture. "I... my breasts... they're quite small. They always have been. I mean... at school the others were making fun of me, call8ng me a "plank". And I know that's such a... it sounds so... but Don's said things over the years, quite a lot of things actually, and I've got it into my head and I can't get it back out again."
She says it quickly, looking somewhere to the left of the camera, as though speed and misdirection might diminish it.
"What kind of things?" Michael says, with a very particular stillness.
"Oh,..." she attempts lightness, "that I'd be more attractive if I... that I should look into, you know... surgery. A boob job. He said it quite seriously. Said it would make things better between us if I just... sorted it out."
She lets out a small, brittle laugh. As though she could pop down to Boots and pick up a new pair.
Michael says nothing for a moment.
She glances at the camera. His expression is one she hasn't seen on him before, something very controlled, very quiet, the face of someone who has heard something that warrants a great deal more reaction than they are currently permitting themselves.
"He told you to get surgery?" He says, "said it would help? So that he'd find you more attractive?"
"He... yes. I suppose that's what it amounts to."
"Lizzie,..." his voice is measured in the way that wind is measured before it turns into a hurricane, "I want to say something, and I want to say it carefully because I don't want it to sound like flattery. I want you to understand that I mean it as a plain and simple fact."
She waits.
"There is nothing wrong with your body. There is nothing wrong with your breasts. The idea that you should surgically alter yourself because a man has failed to recognise what he has in front of him is..." He stops. "I'm not going to say what it is. But I want you to hear me when I say: you are not the problem. You have never been the problem."
She is pressing her lips together again. She has been doing a great deal of that over the past two days.
"You haven't even seen me... there... yet," she says quietly.
"No. But I've heard you. And I've seen your face. And you've even given me a glimpse of your intimacy. And I know what I'm looking at. I'm looking at the most extraordinary woman I've known in a very... very long time." A pause. "Take your time. You don't have to do anything at all. But if you do... I want you to know that what you're uncovering is something that doesn't need fixing. It is you, and I wouldn't want you to be any other way."
She looks at the camera for a long time.
Then, with the slow, difficult movement of someone dismantling something they have built over years for the purpose of protection, she reaches for the hem of her dress again.
She pulls it over her head.
Her arms come up instinctively. Not fully, not a deliberate covering, just the habitual partial shielding of someone who has been taught to make herself smaller in this particular way. She is looking somewhere below the camera, her jaw set, braced in the manner of someone awaiting a verdict they have been told to expect.
"Lizzie,..." Michael says.
She looks up.
His face. She has not seen this expression before and it is a different one from the controlled stillness of a moment ago. This is open. This is uncalculated. This is the face of someone who has been given something they had not fully anticipated and is taking a moment to understand its immense value.
"You are stunning," he says with the pace of someone stating an undeniable truth. "You are absolutely stunning."
She shakes her head slightly, automatic reflex.
'Stop," he says gently, "receive it. Just this once, receive it."
She is still. She tries. She finds, to her own surprise, that she can almost do it.
"And I'll tell you something else," he says with a smile at the corner of his mouth while looking at her indeed small but deliciously round breasts, "I'll bet they're incredibly sensitive."
She blinks. And then something unexpected happens, which is that she laughs, for real even, warm and genuine, and the laugh breaks something that the words alone couldn't quite reach, some last wire of tension, and she feels her arms lower, naturally, without decision, and she is simply there, simply herself, and the shame has not vanished, perhaps, but stepped back.
"They are, actually," she says, and she cannot quite believe she has said it, and she is still slightly flushed with the laugh.
"I thought as much," he says warmly, "beautiful things usually are. And I so wish I could touch them, very delicately, so you would feel how much I adore them."
She is completely naked now. For a moment, she just sits there on the couch, vulnerable and exposed. But then she straightens her spine, a newfound confidence surging through her. She cups her breasts in her hands, lifting them slightly towards the camera. Her nipples are tight, rosy points in the cool air. She sees Michael’s eyes widen, his lips parting slightly in appreciation. A slow smile spreads across her face. This is her. This is her body, and she is suddenly not ashamed anymore.
She settles back onto the sofa, sinking into the soft cushions, spreading her legs, a deliberate, inviting gesture. The soft, dark hair between her thighs is a wild, untamed forest, and for the first time she feels like a queen. Michael doesn't gape at her. He looks at her like if she were the central masterpiece of the gallery, a Michaelangelo of the smoothest marble shaped to perfection.
On the screen, Michael stands up, his body lean and ready. He walks towards his camera, his image growing larger until all she can see is his torso, his stomach, and the proud, rigid shaft of his cock. He holds it, angling it down so she can see everything... his heavy, full testicles, the thick, dark vein that pulses on the upper side of his penis. It’s an act of pure, unadulterated trust, and it makes her heart ache with a fierce, tender joy.
"Touch yourself for me, Lizzie," he sighs, deep and close, "pretend I'm right there with you."
She doesn’t need to be told twice. Her fingers slide between her legs, finding her small, wet petals and spreading them. She mimics him, her hips lifting off the sofa as she pretends it’s him pushing inside her. Her movements are delicate, a gentle exploration. She watches as his hand mirrors hers, his fist gliding lazily up and down his length, his hips rolling in a slow, sensual dance.
"Oh fuck... Lizzie..."
"Fuck me," she gasps, "fuck me with that incredible cock of yours!"
The pace is a shared rhythm, a silent conversation conducted through the language of touch. It’s a tender, beautiful pretense, a slow act of making love through a screen. But the gentle tempo can’t last. A primal need begins to stir, a deep, demanding ache that wants more, wants faster, wants everything.
"Harder..." she exclaims, shedding all of the shame and the many years of conditioning, "I want you to fuck me... hard! Make my pussy scream!"
Her fingers move faster, plunging in and out of her wet cunt, her palm grinding against her clit. She watches Michael’s hand moving with more pupose, his strokes becoming longer, harder, faster.
"God, Lizzie... I want to fuck you... fuck you so hard! Fuck that beautiful cunt of yours!"
The pretense of slowness shatters, replaced by a frantic, desperate need for release. All reins are loose. This is no longer a delicate dance; it is a raw, hungry fuck.
Her head thrown back, her mouth open in a silent scream, Lizzie rides her own hand. Her fingers are a blur, her hips bucking wildly. The sounds coming from her speakers are Michael’s now... harsh, ragged breaths, low guttural groans, the slick, rhythmic slap of his fist against his skin. The room, the house, the entire world shrinks to this single, frantic point of connection.
She sees him tense, his body going rigid.
"Lizzie! Aaaahhh!" He chokes out, her name a primal prayer. She watches, transfixed, as his climax hits and thick, powerful jets of cum pulse from his cock, shooting onto the floor.
That’s all it takes. Her own orgasm tears through her, a violent, explosive release that doesn't seem to stop. Jolt after jolt is shooting through her entire body until she cannot take it any longer and closes her legs, pressing them together in despair. The spasms consume her entirely, leaving her shaking and breathless.
They collapse back into their respective seats, their bodies limp and spent. The only sound is the irregukar panting of their breaths, slowly, slowly returning to normal. Lizzie looks at the screen, at the man who has just shown her a universe of pleasure she never even knew existed. She is no longer just Lizzie, the timid wife from Brighton. She is Lizzie, the woman who comes undone on a sofa in Melbourne, thousands of miles away. And she has never felt more herself. Finally... she's getting herself back.
Not all of herself, though. Not the parts that have been quietly packed away over years, the ambitions and the confidence and the easy laughter that used to come without effort. Those will take longer, if they come back at all. But some essential register of herself, some precious instrument that had been silenced, sounds again, clean and true, and she is not afraid of the camera anymore and she is not afraid of being seen and she gives herself to this day with an openness that she had genuinely believed was no longer available to her.
And Michael... Michael meets her there with everything he has, with the same unhurried generosity, the same quality of attention that makes her feel like the only thing in any room he has ever been in, and the distance is a technicality, it really is, she can almost feel the warmth of him, and what they have together is more present and more real than anything that has happened in this flat in years.
Afterwards, they are both quiet. They just sit there in the awe of people who have arrived somewhere significant and are taking a moment to understand the new landscape stretching out in front of them.
"Well,..." she says eventually.
"Yes," he agrees, "that was..."
She is lying along the sofa, the laptop on the coffee table, and she's making herself comfortable, the breasts she'd always been embarrassed about fully exposed and she feels... surprisingly loose, and light, and very close to happy, which is a sensation so unfamiliar at this point that she keeps examining it to make sure it is what she thinks it is.
"I wish,..." she starts.
"I know," he says.
"No, let me say it." She looks at the camera. "I wish you were here. Not for... not only for..." She gestures at her hairy bush. "Just to be here. In this room. I'd like to make you tea and sit next to you on this sofa, naked, and feel your arm around me. She pauses. I'd like to feel what real feels like. Just once."
"Even if just once," he echoes softly. "Come here, my love..."
She looks at the screen.
He opens his arms towards the camera, a gesture of absolute silliness and absolute sincerity, and she loves him for it, she realises, she loves him for the fact that he can do something absurd and true simultaneously. She leans towards the laptop screen and wraps her arms around herself and closes her eyes and she can feel it, she actually can. It is not imagination exactly but some form of knowledge her body has assembled from the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes and two days of the most honest conversation she has had in years.
She stays there for a long moment.
"There," he says quietly. "I've got you."
"You have," she says, eyes still closed. "It's almost as if I can feel you for real."
When she opens them he is looking at her with an expression that makes her have to look away briefly, not because it is too much but because she is not yet used to receiving it without flinching.
"You know," he says, "I simply cannot understand... and I mean this honestly, I'm not performing outrage, I genuinely cannot understand how no-one's ever told you. How you've gone..." He pauses. "How long? Without being told that you are beautiful?"
"Oh, years," she replies.
He shakes his head slowly.
"I'm going to ask you something and I want you to be honest with me."
"When am I not?" She chuckles.
"Fair point." A small smile. "Are you happy, Lizzie? Setting everything else aside. Setting me aside... and I know that's hard to do right now, believe me, it's hard from this side too. But strip it all away. Are you truly, genuinely happy?"
She looks at the camera for a long time.
"No," she says. "No, I'm really not."
He nods. Just nods.
"I keep trying to manage it," she says. "I keep trying to find the angle at which it becomes manageable. And sometimes I think I've found it and then something small happens and I understand that I haven't at all."
She shifts slightly.
"Last weekend we went to a flower show."
"Tell me."
"I love flowers. That was actually my idea, the trip... it was in the countryside, about an hour away, really lovely. And we got lost, which,... well... Don refuses to use the navigation until it's already a crisis, which it became, and I knew... I was certain... that at a particular crossroads we needed to turn left. I said so. He said right. We went right..."
Michael can see where this is going from the expression already beginning to form on her face.
"We ended up in a field, essentially. And I got the app out and I showed him... the map was clear as anything, you could see exactly which crossroads it was and which way we should have gone. And he looked at the map and he said it was a different crossroads. That he'd been right and I'd confused them. That I don't understand maps!"
Michael is staring at her.
"You showed him the map," he says.
"I showed him the map."
"With the crossroads on it."
"With the crossroads, yes. And the correct direction clearly indicated."
"And he told you that you don't understand maps?"
"Yes, in those exact words."
He exhales slowly, the breath of someone exercising considerable restraint.
"Oh Lizzie, that is..." He hesitates. "I have no words for it actually. Why wouldn't he just admit he was wrong? I mean, what's the point?"
"That's just how he is." She sighs.
"Lizzie... That is not a small thing!" Michael immediately replies. "I know you're going to tell me it is, but it's not. If that is his general attitude, then he has a problem."
She opens her mouth.
"Don't," he interrupts her, not unkindly. "I can see you assembling the argument. I know you're going to say that it was just a drive and you shouldn't have undermined his confidence by pushing it and maybe you should have let it go..."
"Well," she says, "I do wonder sometimes if I make things worse. He doesn't like being contradicted and I could have just..."
"Lizzie..." His voice is very gentle and very firm. "You showed him the evidence. A literal map. And he told you that you couldn't read it. That is not a matter of tactfulness or you making things worse. That is someone looking at you with proof in your hand and deciding that their pride matters more than your reality!"
He pauses.
"And you came away from that wondering if you'd been at fault. Don't you see what that means? Not about the map. About what years of this have done to your ability to trust your own perception."
She is quiet.
"You knew which way to turn," he emphasises. "You were right. You are allowed to have been right."
She looks at the camera and she thinks about the crossroads, the particular turning with the oak tree on the corner that she can still picture clearly, and she thinks: I knew. I knew, and I knew that I knew, and I talked myself out of my own knowledge because it was less trouble. And she thinks about how many other crossroads there have been, how many small certainties she has relinquished at the same junction, handing them over so quietly that she'd stopped noticing she was doing it.
"Thank you," she says softly.
"Don't thank me. Just... the next time someone tells you that you can't read a map that says otherwise... I understand that there have been many similar arguments in your relationship and that you've come to the point that you're exhausted. Telling him he's right may be the easy way out. But never... never believe that he was right. Do not let him undermine your self worth like this."
"I won't," she says, meaning it but already knowing she's going to fail the next hurdle."
"Baby steps," he smiles at her.
"Baby steps."
They stay like that for a long while.
The afternoon does its slow work around them, and the light in his window shifts as Melbourne's evening comes in from the east, that rich deep blue of dusk, and she watches it change over his shoulder and feels, with a sorrow that is also a kind of sweetness, the particular tenderness of two people who are running out of time for today.
They talk about nothing consequential and everything important. They pretend to make love again, to touch each other through the screen, the absurd and earnest ritual of it, and she pretends to welcome his cock inside and he pretends to push it deep until he's completely buried inside of her. Neither of them is thinking about it, because it has become simply the condition of this particular afternoon, as natural as the lamp behind him or the grey light at her window. And distance disappears and for the first time Lizzie understands that she's never really known what love is.
"I don't want to go," she says eventually.
"I know." He looks at her. "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," she says.
They say goodbye the way they always do now... the blown kiss, the wave, the held eye contact for one moment longer than is strictly necessary, as though a little extra looking might carry them through to the night.
The screen goes dark.
She sits for a moment.
Then she dresses, methodically: underwear, then the dress retrieved from where she'd set it aside, then the smoothing-down of fabric, the ordinary reassembly of herself. She tidies the throw back over the sofa. She moves the laptop back to the desk. She wipes down the coffee table, a burying the evidence act she is becoming efficient at, and tries not to think too hard about what that efficiency means about the direction in which this is going.
Yesterday she had felt fear. Real, cold, scrambling fear... deleting the chat, clearing the history, the hammering heart as Don's key turned in the lock.
Today she notices, with something between relief and unease, that the fear is quieter.
She's not sure if this is because she's made peace with what she's doing, or because she's simply getting used to it. She suspects it is the second. She suspects she should probably be more concerned about that than she is.
She goes to the kitchen. She opens the fridge.
What she feels, underneath the logistics and the low hum of guilt, is something she hasn't felt in so long that it has taken her three days to correctly identify it: she feels like herself. Not a diminished, managed, carefully edited self. Not the Lizzie who nods at the stove argument and rewashes the mug and talks herself out of maps she knows how to read. Something older than that. Something she'd packed away so long ago she'd assumed it was gone.
She thinks: I can't be without this. I can't go back to before this existed.
The thought should frighten her more than it does.
She is still thinking it when she hears the outer door.
Don comes in trailing the atmosphere of a day that has been, in his estimation, heroic. He sets his bag down with a particular thump that indicates grievance. He loosens his tie in the hallway with the movements of a man removing armour.
"What's for dinner?"
"Stew," she says. "Twenty minutes."
He makes a sound that is not quite gratitude and not quite complaint and settles into the sofa. The television comes on. The news presents its catalogue of disasters with the familiar rhythmic urgency, and Don watches it with the focused attention he reserves for things that are not her.
She stands at the cooker and stirs and watches the stew and thinks of Melbourne.
She thinks of him saying: you are absolutely stunning.
She thinks of him saying: you were right. You are allowed to have been right.
She thinks of his arms opening towards the camera and the feeling of being held by someone who held her like she mattered, like the holding was the point and not a transaction.
"The Tube was a nightmare," Don says, from the sofa.
"Mm," she says.
"Signal failure at London Bridge. Stood there for twenty minutes. Twenty bloody minutes, just standing."
"That's awful," she says.
He says something else. She catches the shape of it... something about the government, something about incompetence... and she nods at the appropriate interval and stirs the stew and she is twelve thousand miles away in a warm lamp-lit room with a man who thinks she is stunning, who thinks she deserves to be worshipped, who listened to the story of a map with his whole face and said: you were right.
"... Lizzie, are you listening?"
"Sorry," she says. "Yes. Signal failure. Awful."
He turns back to the television, apparently satisfied.
She dishes up dinner and sets his plate on the coffee table without comment and takes her own to the kitchen table, which is where she eats when he's watching something, which is most evenings, which is most of her life.
She sits. She looks at the wall.
Somewhere in Melbourne it is the middle of the night, and Michael is sleeping, and in the morning it will be tomorrow, and tomorrow they will open the video again, and for now that is the thing she holds onto, the small warm fact of it, the thing that makes the kitchen and the stew and the noise of the television and the shape of this life feel, if not bearable exactly, then at least finite.
She picks up her fork.
She eats her dinner.
She dreams, with her eyes open, of being held.
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