The Mating Season

Amanda said something on Sunday evening that I've thought about since.

We were in the kitchen, the television on in the other room, the ordinary Sunday sound of it. She was making tea and I was at the table with a book I hadn't been reading, and she said, without looking round, "You seem far away lately."

I looked up.

"Do I?"

"Mm." She poured the water. "Not badly. Just." She considered it. "Somewhere else."

"Work," I said. "The Harwich tender. It's taking up more than it should."

She brought the mugs over and sat across from me and put her hand over mine briefly, the easy gesture of twenty-three years, and said "don't let them do that to you," meaning the company, meaning the hours, meaning the way work had of filling the available space if you let it.

"I won't," I said.

She went back to the television. I sat with my book and my tea and looked at her through the doorway, at the back of her head, at the easy familiar shape of her on the sofa in the lamplight, and I thought about Beth in her new build four minutes away with Josh asleep beside her, and I thought about what I'd said to Amanda just now, and the word for it sat in the kitchen with me and I didn't look at it directly.

---

The text came Monday at eight forty-seven.

*He's gone. Come for lunch.*

Three words and a full stop. I looked at it sitting in my chair at my desk in the science park and felt something shift under me, the same thing that had shifted in February on a frozen path when she'd put her earbud back in on the same side.

*Twelve*, I sent back.

*Eleven*, she sent.

I was there at ten past.

---

She opened the door before I knocked and she looked different, something in her face I hadn't seen before, something that had been close to the surface for four days and hadn't had anywhere to go.

She stepped back and let me in and I followed her into the kitchen and she put the kettle on and we stood in the way we sometimes stood, close together, not touching yet, the small distance between us that was its own kind of contact.

"All right?" I said.

"Yes." She looked at the kettle. "Four days is." She stopped. "It's fine. It's nothing. Don't listen to me."

"Beth."

"I mean it." She turned and looked at me directly, the way she always did when she meant something. "It's fine. I'm fine."

I didn't say anything.

"He's very happy," she said. "That's the thing. He came back Friday full of the week, the firm, some case he's working on, all of it. Talked for an hour over dinner." She paused. "I don't think he noticed I was quiet."

She said it without bitterness. That was what made it land.

I crossed the kitchen and put my hands on her face and kissed her, and she kissed back and then pulled away and there was something bright standing in her eyes that she hadn't planned and that surprised her.

"Don't," she said. "Don't be kind about it."

"I'm not," I said.

"You are."

"I'm really not."

She made a sound that was almost a laugh and turned and put both hands on the counter and looked at the window. The patio beyond it, the small pots, the thing she'd been growing was flowering now, something yellow, the garden doing what she'd asked it to.

"I cried on Saturday," she said. "In the bath. I don't know why. Nothing happened. He was perfectly nice." She shook her head. "I hate that."

"That you cried?"

"That I don't know why." She looked at the garden. "I'm not that kind of person."

"What kind of person?"

"The kind that cries in the bath without knowing why."

She turned and looked at me and the brightness was still there, steadier now, and she looked at me the way she looked at problems she was working out, that particular attention, and then she moved forward and kissed me again and I held her and felt the small careful strength of her and the four days of it in how she stood.

After a while she pulled back and wiped her face with the back of her hand, matter of fact, and said "right."

"Right," I said.

"Come upstairs," she said. Not the way she'd said it before. Just asking.

---

The bedroom was the same careful room it always was, the striped duvet, the curtains half open on the May sky. She'd left the window ajar and there was a breeze moving through it, barely there, the sound of the estate going about its business somewhere below.

She stood at the foot of the bed and reached back and unzipped her dress, the practical movement of someone undressing, no ceremony around it, and let it fall and stood looking at me with the usual directness.

No uniform. No plan. Just her.

I crossed to her and we kissed and I moved her back toward the bed slowly and she went, lying back against the pillow, her dark hair loose, and I lay beside her and we stayed like that for a moment, looking at each other in the May light.

"Okay?" I said.

"Yes." She looked at me steadily. "Don't stop looking at me."

"I'm not."

"I mean it," she said. "The whole time."

I understood what she was asking. Not a position, not a thing she'd had since she was nineteen and never told anyone. Something harder than that.

I moved over her and she held my eyes and when we came together she drew a slow breath and kept looking. Not away from the feeling, not to the ceiling or the middle distance. Straight at me.

I kept looking back.

We moved slowly. Outside the building works carried on their low percussion and somewhere on the path a dog was barking, briefly, and then wasn't, and none of it reached us. She had her hands against my back, not gripping, just there, feeling me move. She said my name once, quietly, not as a sound the feeling pulled out of her but deliberately, as if she wanted to say it, as if saying it meant something specific.

I held her face and kept moving and she watched me with those brown eyes and the composed surface of her was nowhere, the actual thing entirely showing, and I understood that this was the most exposed I'd ever seen her and that she knew it too and had decided on it.

She came quietly, her eyes staying on mine throughout, her whole body gathering and then going loose, a long slow exhale, and she kept her hands on my back until I followed her.

We lay there afterward. The breeze moved through the open window. Neither of us spoke for a while.

"That was different," she said eventually.

"Yes."

She was quiet a moment. Then she turned and looked at me.

"Andrew."

"Yes."

She opened her mouth. Stopped. Tried again and didn't manage it, and not the stutter this time.

"I know," I said.

She looked at me.

"I know," I said again. "Me too."

She held it for a moment. Then she put her head against my shoulder and I felt her exhale, the full weight of the four days going out of her, and we lay in the May light with the window open and said nothing, which was finally and completely enough.

---

I left at two.

She walked me to the door and kissed me once, brief and specific, and said "tomorrow morning" and I said yes and crossed the road back to the science park and sat at my desk.

I had three emails. A call at three. The Harwich tender sitting in a folder, wanting attention.

I looked at my screen for a long time before I did anything else.

Then I got up and walked to the window that looked out toward the estate. You couldn't see the lake from here. Too many buildings in the way, too much of the ordinary world between us. But I knew it was there, four minutes away, and I knew she was there, four minutes away, in her careful house with her prints on the walls and her yellow flowers on the patio.

I thought about the swans. What this time of year meant for them. I'd looked it up in March, in a moment of weakness or honesty, I still wasn't sure which. Forty-two days from laying to hatching. The cygnets would be on the water by now, or close to it. Small and improbable, the two of them shepherding something new out across the lake, that same slow orbit now with a different purpose.

I thought about Amanda's hand over mine on Sunday. The back of her head in the lamplight.

I thought about Beth's eyes not leaving mine.

Fifty-two years old. Married twenty-three years. A good man, I'd always assumed.

I stood at the window and looked at the place where the lake was, behind everything, and I thought about what she hadn't been able to say and what I'd said instead, and I knew, standing there in the ordinary afternoon of my ordinary life, that the word for it had been sitting with me since February on a frozen path at half past six in the morning.

I hadn't looked at it directly then.

I looked at it now.

---

Thanks for reading this one. It started with two swans on a February morning and I followed it until it knew where it was going.

The things that mattered most to me were the things left unsaid. I hope you felt them.

The swans are still out there. I checked this morning.

Innocent302