The Other Side of the Screen - part 7

The weekend leaves no visible marks, which is almost worse than if it had.

There is nothing to point to. No argument, not even a surgical suggestion delivered across the kitchen table. Don was simply... absent, in the particular way that requires no effort and leaves no evidence.

Saturday he had watched television. Not with any malice. Just the settled, unthinking absorption of a man in his own habitat, the remote control an extension of his hand, the sofa shaped to him. She had sat at the other end of it for a while, then made tea, then tidied things that didn't need tidying, then sat again. He hadn't asked her to leave and hadn't asked her to stay and the not-asking was its own kind of answer to a question she was tired of asking.

Saturday evening they had gone to the pub to meet friends — Jamie and Caro, who Lizzie genuinely liked, who she'd been looking forward to, had done her hair for, had worn the green dress for, the one that made her feel like a person with a life. She'd had two glasses of wine and talked to Caro about Caro's job and laughed at something Jamie said and for perhaps forty minutes had felt almost like herself.

Until Don brought up last week's flower show.

"It was great," he'd said with the enthusiasm of a teenage boy who'd been on a school trip to the Tate Modern, "only Lizzie got us lost on the way over there. She gets so easily confused with maps. Isn't that right, darling?"

The chuckling he'd interspersed it with rounded it off perfectly.

Lizzie had smiled, embarrassed, the performed smile she can produce without effort now, the one that has become its own kind of fluency. The only thing that had got her through the rest of the evening was the feeling that their friends had been just as embarrassed as her.

On Sunday afternoon he had gone out. Betting shop, pub, she didn't know and he didn't say, and she had stood at the window and watched the street below and then had not stood at the window anymore because there was nothing to see and it was making things worse.

She had been alone in the flat for four hours on a Sunday afternoon.

She had not opened Facebook. She had promised herself... not in words, not quite a promise, but something in the region of one... that she would not open Facebook. She had held the line until half three, and then she had simply sat with her hands in her lap and stared at the wall and thought about the cost of things.

Monday morning comes in grey and absolute.

Don leaves at half seven with his going-out face and his jacket and his forward momentum and the door closes and the flat settles and she makes tea and stands at the window and watches the street again.

She thinks about Friday. About the call, the tears glistening in Michael's eyes, the hand pressed to the screen. In another life, I'd have been on that train platform before you could finish the sentence.

She thinks about Saturday's public humiliation.

She thinks about Sunday afternoon. Four hours. The window. The wall.

She opens her laptop.

She opens the spreadsheet, and then she opens Facebook in another tab, and she sits there for a while with both of them open, toggling between them, the product codes and the empty message window, and she thinks about what she is doing and does it anyway because she has run out of reasons not to feel honest.

She types:

Michael. I know I don't have the right to just reappear after Friday. I wouldn't blame you at all if you didn't want to respond. But I needed you to know that I'm still here. And that I'm sorry. And that the weekend was very hard and I don't entirely know what I'm doing. I just know I needed to write to you.

She reads it back. Sends it before she can change it.

She goes back to the spreadsheet.

She has entered four product codes when the notification appears.

He replies.

Lizzie. I'm here. I'm not angry. I could never be angry with you. Are you all right?

She reads this and the relief of it is so immediate and so physical that she has to sit back for a moment and press her hands flat against her thighs and breathe.

Not angry. Of course he isn't. She knew, even through the fear, that he wouldn't be, and yet knowing it and being told it are two entirely different things. And now he's saying in that plain and uncomplicated way: I'm here. I'm not angry. It undoes something that has been wound tight since Friday morning.

She types: I'm not all right, honestly. But I'm better because I'm hearing from you.

Then let's talk properly. If you want to.

Yes, she writes. Please.

His face appears and she feels the thing she always feels, the signal finding its frequency. She also immediately  sees that he has been worried about her. It is there in the first look before he composes himself, the specific relief of someone who wasn't sure what they were going to find.

He raises his hand. She raises hers.

"Hello, you," he says.

"Hello," she says, and her voice comes out smaller than she intends, and she sees him register it.

"How are you, really?"

She looks at the camera and she tries to find the managed version, the version that begins with I'm fine, honestly, it's been a perfectly ordinary weekend, and she cannot locate it. It isn't there. She has used it all up on Don and her friends and the performed smile and the four hours at the window.

"I'm unhappy," she says. "I'm deeply, genuinely unhappy, and I've been trying all weekend to decide whether that's my fault or Don's fault or just the condition of my life at this point, and I keep arriving at the same place."

"What place?"

"That it was there before you. The unhappiness." She looks at her hands for a moment. "We... what we started... we didn't create it. Your presence just... illuminated it. Which is almost harder."

He is quiet, listening, in the way she has come to think of as specifically his, that peculiar attention, the way it makes her feel that whatever she is saying is the most important thing being said anywhere.

"Tell me about the weekend," he says.

So she does.

She tells him about Saturday and the television and the pub, about Don's tactless and totally absurd comment and her friends' careful non-expression across the table. She tells him about the green dress and the two glasses of wine and what was supposed to be feeling almost like a person with a life. She tells him about Sunday afternoon, the four hours, and as she says it aloud... four hours, Michael, alone in the flat, and he didn't say where he was going or when he'd be back... she hears it properly for the first time, the way you sometimes need to say a thing in front of another person before its full meaning becomes clear to you.

She is crying before she reaches the end of it. Not the performed nor the careful kind. The straightforward kind.

"I try," she says. "I genuinely try to be a good wife... I'm not saying I'm perfect... I'm not saying I don't have... I know I can be difficult, I know I go into my head, I know sometimes I don't..." She stops. Starts again. "But I try. And it's never enough, Michael. It's never quite enough, and I don't know anymore if that's because I'm genuinely not enough or because I'm trying to fill something that can't be filled."

"Oh, Lizzie..."

"And the worst part," she says, and her voice breaks, "the worst part is that I don't know how to leave. Even if I... even if I knew absolutely that I should. I've known him since I was seventeen. Seventeen! He was my first. He's the only... there's no world in my head that doesn't have him in it somewhere, even a bad him, even the him of the phone and the betting shop and the map. I don't know who I am without that world." She wipes her face with the back of her hand. "And then there's you. On the other side of the planet. And I don't know what future we have. I don't know how I get from here to there. I don't know if there even is a there."

Michael is very still.

"Can I say something?" he says.

"Please."

"The version of you that thinks she might not be enough," he says carefully. "The one who has spent years being told, not always in words, sometimes just in being looked through, that she might not quite measure up..." He pauses. "That version is not the version I see. That version is not the version that told me the truth about her life within an hour of meeting me. That version is not the woman in the green dress who probably spent the entire evening making sure everyone around her was comfortable." He leans forward slightly. "You are not the problem in that marriage, Lizzie. I know you know that. I also know that knowing it and feeling it are two entirely different continents."

She is crying properly now, and she doesn't try to stop it.

"You deserve," he says, "to be together with someone who gives you his undivided attention when you walk in. That's not a grand romantic gesture. That's just the basic decency of giving a damn about another person."

"Michael," she says, and the word comes out like something released.

"If you were with me,..." he continues with some difficulty but not with less determination, "you'd always be the centre of my entire universe. And I mean it."

A silence falls between them.

"I know you do." She presses her fingers against her eyes, processing the most beautiful declaration of love she's ever received. She doesn't quite know what to do with it. She feels she doesn't deserve such devotion and yet she needs it more than she needs most things she used to think were essential.

He waits.

"I love you," she says. She had told herself she wasn't going to say it again, that Friday was the end of it, that the sentence belonged in the closed box along with the chat history and the receipt and all the rest of it. But it is true and he is there and she has nothing left to be strategic with. "I love you. I know all the reasons it's impossible. I know the distance and the age and Don and the whole enormous machinery of why not. I know all of it. And I love you anyway and I don't know what to do with that."

His face does the thing it does... the openness, the unguarded respectfulness that she has never seen on another person's face directed at her.

"I love you, Lizzie," he says. "I have loved you, I think, since about forty minutes into the first conversation, which is either the most ridiculous thing I've ever said or the most honest. Possibly both."

"Possibly both," she agrees, and laughs through the tears, and hears him laugh too, and the laugh and the grief share the same breath as they always do with him, as if he is the only person she has ever met in whose presence contradictory things can coexist without cancelling each other out.

They talk for a long time.

The conversation moves the way it always moves, without a map or agenda, from the painful to the ordinary and back again, finding its own level. He tells her about Melbourne, about the summer there — it is summer in Melbourne, she keeps forgetting, it is summer on the other side of the screen — about a walk he took on Saturday along the river, about a book he's reading that he thinks she'd like. She tells him about a plant on the windowsill that she's been trying to keep alive since October, which she suspects is a metaphor she is choosing not to examine too closely.

He makes her laugh three times. She makes him laugh as well. This, she thinks, is also love: the specific love of two people who find the same things funny, who can move from tears to laughter in a single breath, who have made each other laugh despite circumstance and all the reasons not to.

And then, gradually, in the way it always does with them... the temperature shifts with the slow, mutual recognition of two people who have been here before and know the way.

"Lizzie," he says.

"Yes," she says, and she is already reaching for the laptop, already moving to the sofa, already making the small adjustments she has learnt over the past week, and she is not afraid, she has not been afraid since Wednesday, and this... the not-being-afraid, the ease and the freedom of it... is perhaps the thing she will miss most when she tries, as she will keep trying, to talk herself into letting it go.

She gives herself to the afternoon with a completeness she hasn't managed before, even in the previous days. More open than Tuesday, more free than Wednesday, more present than any of it, because she has nothing left to protect and the box is open and everything is already out of it and she is done, for this afternoon at least, with the management of herself.

She is simply there. Simply herself. Simply Lizzie, loved.

And he is there too, fully, wholly, the way he is always wholly there, and the distance is a technicality again, it really is, and what moves between them across the screen and the ocean and the curvature of the Earth is real, she knows it is real, she will not insult either of them by pretending otherwise.

"I'll be right back," she says and her voice carries a promise. To herself, perhaps, the self that has been waiting, quietly and without much hope, for someone to make the waiting worthwhile. But also a promise to that same someone who's really proved himself worthy of all of her. For once, she will not make herself smaller anymore.

Not a minute later she returns from her bedroom, holding a realistic dildo in her fist and Michael's gaze freezes on the object that's just appeared on his screen.

"This is my only faithful friend," Lizzie confides, "and this time I want to feel the reality of you filling me up inside."

Her desire for Michael is a hurricane, crashing over and obliterating the flimsy wall of her guilt. She stands, her movements stiff at first, then purposeful. She doesn't just undress; she sheds her skin, her shame, her marriage. When she is naked, she spreads her knees wide and teases Michael by sliding the silicone cock up and down her deliciously wet slit in the way she wished he was doing for real.

Michael’s eyes darken. "Oh beautiful girl,..." he sighs, his voice a low hum that vibrates through her. "Yes, I want you to use that. I want you to pretend it's me. I want you to fuck yourself with my cock."

She leans back on the sofa, pressing the tip against her clit, her hips jerking at the sudden, intense pleasure.

"Oh God," he whispers while staring at her, transfixed, his fist clenching his cock and so desperate to fuck her.

"Michael," she breathes, the word a vow for eternity. She slowly slides the dildo down, parting her hairy folds and pushing the head inside. Her back arches off the sofa. It’s not as warm or as alive as the real thing, but the fantasy is so potent it almost doesn't matter. She begins to move it, her strokes mimicking his rhythm.

"God yes,..." he groans. "Take it. Take all of me. Can you see how hard you're making me? Oh how I wish I were buried deep inside that tight, wet pussy!"

His words are gasoline on a fire. She fucks herself harder, the toy plunging in and out of her, her other hand frantically rubbing her clit. Their respective rooms are filled with the wet, sopping sounds of her fucking herself with the dildo and the filthy words they are saying to each other across continents.

"I wish I could feel your nails digging into my ass," he pants. "I wish I could suck those incredible tits of yours!"

"Oh my love," she cries out, her body writhing, delirious because, for the first time, someone's called her small breasts incredible tits. "I want to be yours! Ah!... Oh Michael! Fuck me! Harder!"

The pleasure is building to an impossible peak, a frantic, dizzying spiral. She is no longer in that ghastly flat in southeast England; she is in a moonlit kitchen in Melbourne, impaled on a beautiful, kind man who sees her.

"I'm going to come, Lizzie," he gasps, his restraint flailing quickly by the sight of the dildo pumping in and out of her dripping cunt. "I'm going to come all over you. Come with me. Now."

The command shatters her. Her orgasm is a violent, explosive thing, a scream that tears from her lungs as her body convulses, her inner muscles clamping down hard on the pulsing toy. The pleasure is so intense it almost borders on pain, a blinding, all-consuming release that cuts through her. She raises herself off the sofa once, twice, every time a new jolt shoots through her body until she's left limp and sobbing.

Through the haze, she hears Michael’s own unrestrained moans of completion and she notices something about that must be cum on his thigh and in his thick pubic hair. It's all a blur.

They lie there, two spent bodies in separate rooms, the wild sounds of their shared ecstasy slowly fading into the quiet hum of the laptop. The guilt is still there, a faint shadow in the back of her mind. But for now, it is drowned out by the overwhelming, undeniable truth of her own desire. This is the wildest sex she has ever had, and it is happening entirely in her head. And it is more real than anything she has ever touched.

They are quiet for a while. Neither of them speaks and it is the best kind of silence, the kind that is full rather than empty.

"I don't want to say goodbye," she says eventually.

"Neither do I"

"Even 'see you tomorrow' feels... " She stops.

"Too much time," he says.

"Yes."

He looks at the camera for a long moment. 

"Send me something to keep. So I have something of you until tomorrow."

She understands what he means. She feels the fear of it arrive and then, with some surprise, feels it leave again, because there is no version of herself left to protect here, no last door she hasn't opened, and he has given her every part of himself without reservation and asked nothing in return, and this is the least and most she can do.

They close the video and continue via chat.

For you, my love... 

She takes the photo. She looks at it for one moment, naked, her legs wide open, unashamed, unedited and her red swollen pussy, which she imagines Michael's just fucked into oblivion, on full display.

Then she sends it.

You are... incredible! He immediately replies, drowning it in emoticons that completely fail to adequately describe his emotional state.

He sends her a picture of himself, blowing her a kiss with his cock still half-hard.

She looks at it on her screen and she feels the familiar complicated alchemy of it: the wanting and the grief and the gratitude, all of it at once.

You are so handsome, she writes, and means it in every sense of the word.

You are divine, he replies with a heart.

They are both still tearful, in the way they have been all afternoon, swept away by the emotional weather of two people who feel things and have stopped pretending otherwise.

Tomorrow, she writes.

Tomorrow, he replies.

I love you, more than anything.