That last picture has a comment: Looking forward to our little astronaut moving in for good.

86

   MADDIE

   I’M SO ANGRY, I think I’m going to punch something. And there’s nothing I can do to take the edge off my fury. Making love is out of the question now, of course. And so, it seems, is sleep. In desperation, at around three in the morning I get up and go in search of something, anything, that might relax me a bit. At the back of a cupboard I find an ancient bottle of some weird elderflower liqueur. Experimentally, I try some. It tastes vile—sugary and slightly musty. But it’s alcohol, so I take a longer pull. Within moments I feel my stomach heave, as bad as the time I ate smelly scallops on a beach in Morocco. Something wrings my insides, tighter and tighter. Christ, it’s like that scene in Alien—it feels as if my colon’s going to explode through my cesarean scar. I only just make it to the sink in time, then spend the next hour in the bathroom, throwing up.

Okay, maybe alcohol really isn’t an option.

In the morning, after a queasy dawn, I reach for my iPad again. Pete and I have investigated Miles, Bronagh, and Paula, but the other person on my list is still an enigma.

   She’s strange with him, actually. Like she’s a little bit scared but she also depends on him for everything, Michaela had said.

I need someone who can explain to me why a woman like Lucy would stay married to a man like Miles. Going into my messages, I search for a name I haven’t contacted for over a year.

* * *

—

IT WAS MY CBT therapist who originally suggested Pete and I could benefit from some couples counseling. I can’t remember now how I found Annette. On the internet, probably. A fiery South African with a huge mane of curly auburn hair, she wasn’t anyone’s typical idea of a relationship counselor. For one thing, there was nothing gentle or soft about her. Her website said she specialized in PTSD and domestic abuse as well as sex and relationships, using a combination of psychodynamic therapy, energy psychotherapy, and transpersonal techniques. I had no idea what any of that meant, but it sounded as far removed from my CBT sessions as it was possible to get, so I booked an introductory session.

Initially, Pete quite liked the idea of therapy. It fit with his whole outlook on life—that talking and communication were the answer to most problems. And he was quietly desperate for us to start having sex again. What he hadn’t anticipated was having to describe in excruciating detail to Annette just what he did, or didn’t do, to satisfy me in bed. Annette listened, nodding with what appeared to be an expression of sympathy on her face.

“So what you’re basically saying is, you believe it’s your duty as a modern man to go down on your partner and give her oral sex until she climaxes,” she said when he’d stuttered to a halt. She turned to me. “Maddie, does that sound like a turn-on to you?”

“Not really,” I admitted.

“You’d like him to do it because he loves the taste of you and he’s caught up in the moment, right?”

   “Um,” I said. “I guess.”

Annette turned back to Pete. “How do you seduce her?” she demanded.

“Seduce her?” Pete echoed blankly.

“When was the last time,” Annette said sternly, “that you buried your face in Maddie’s hair and inhaled the scent of her?”

“Well…” Pete made an attempt to look as if he was counting back the days.

“Tell me how you flirt with her,” Annette said. “Show me how you sizzle.”

Pete blinked.

“The reason women don’t have sex with men is because men aren’t prepared to put the effort into making women want to have sex with them,” Annette announced firmly. “I want you to woo Maddie, Pete. Excite her. Make her fall in lust with you all over again. When you say goodbye to her, don’t peck her cheek. Wrap your arms around her and press your body against hers. When you’re away from her, send her sexy texts. Make her feel desired.”

“We do have date nights,” Pete said hopefully. “And we cuddle.”

“Cuddling,” Annette said witheringly, “is the enemy of arousal. When you cuddle, you’re leaching all the passion out of your partner’s touch.”

“Oh,” Pete said.

“Which is why I’m going to put the two of you on a sex ban,” she added.

Pete looked slightly shocked. After all, ending the sex drought was the main reason he was there in the first place.

“You are going to start touching each other,” Annette continued. “Preferably naked. Preferably by candlelight. Massage each other. Arouse each other, if you feel like it. But you are not, repeat not, to have intercourse. Or, God help us, any other kind of sex. I want you to rediscover the pleasure of anticipation.” She consulted her pad. “And I’ll see you again in three weeks.”

   To be fair, Pete went along with Annette’s instructions. And gradually, I discovered that the combination of relaxing massage and intimate touching without any pressure to have sex was arousing, to an extent. Unlike Pete’s attempts to woo me with flirtatious texts. It was bad enough to be interrupted in a fraught meeting by a text saying Can you pick up supper?, but when it was followed by What are you wearing, sexy? it was downright irritating.

You know what I’m wearing. You watched me fish my dirty knickers out of the laundry basket at 7 this morning.

 And very erotic it was too, you dirty slut.

Ugh. Pete, not sexy. Takeaway or ready meal?

And when a session of touching finally became too much and I pulled Pete inside me with a moan of pleasure, there was the illicit thrill of knowing we were defying Annette’s sex ban. At the next session we sat in front of her like two naughty teenagers and confessed what we’d done.

“Well, of course,” Annette said, nodding. “You’ve learned to excite each other.”

She sent us away with more “homework,” as she called it—Pete was to surprise me every week with a romantic gift; I was to surprise him with some sexy underwear—and an instruction to come back if things tailed off again. Which they did, but somehow we didn’t return. It was just too much of an effort when Theo and work were taking up so much of our time and energy.

The therapy did have one lasting benefit, though. Learning to articulate our problems in front of a stranger had, perversely, made us better at articulating how we felt to each other in private. The problems hadn’t gone away, but they felt more like shared problems.

   At least, they did back then. But I know it’s all too easy to confuse the frankness with which we talked about our sex life with genuine openness. After all, it’s not as if I’d shared the not-so-little matter of my own slipups. But on the plus side, neither had I slipped up again. When, on a shoot in Prague, the good-looking director dropped a large hint in my direction—“What happens on location stays on location, right?”—I’d replied firmly that nothing did happen on location. And it didn’t.