Making Up for Lost Time Ch. 07

Thank you all for your votes and messages regarding the future of the Making Up for Lost Time series. I found them very clarifying, and here is the result: the first chapter of the continuation of the series. I hope it lives up to the direction you've all given me!

The test had said yes, in the end, the way both of them had known it would, and by the time Jacob came home for Christmas Anna was fourteen weeks gone and just beginning to show.

Simon had spent those fourteen weeks learning the shape of their new life. There relationship was different, of that there could be no doubt. There were no secrets between them, no closed doors in the house any more. He hid nothing from her and she told him things at the breakfast table she'd once have taken to her grave — what the midwife had said, what Jacob had texted, the small daily arithmetic of carrying another man's child under her husband's roof — and Simon took it all with his coffee and found, most mornings, that he was glad things had turned out the way they had.

She was reading different books now, too. He'd noticed that back in the autumn, before the bump, before any of it was certain — the romance novels gone off her bedside table and her kindle there instead, and he'd not needed to pick it up to know what she was reading. Some evenings she read it beside him on the sofa with her hand not quite still under the blanket, and said nothing, and he said nothing, and the television talked to itself. He had, he understood, corrupted his wife into precisely the reader of his own favourite genre, and she had overtaken him in it, and there was no bottom to how that made him feel.

But the reading and the breakfast confessions were old news by now. What was new — what had kept Simon awake for the better part of a fortnight, rehearsing the asking of it the way he'd once rehearsed apologies — was the thing he'd finally worked up the nerve to request, and been granted, for the visit that started today.

He'd asked to be allowed in the room.

He'd asked her first, in bed, in the dark, which was still where the hardest things got said between them even now that the lights were mostly on.

"When he's back," he'd started. "At Christmas. When you two—"

"Mm."

"I wondered if — this time — I could be there. In the room. Not — I don't mean part of it. Just. There." He'd heard how it came out, small and awful, a boy asking for a turn. "I've never once seen it. Twenty years of wanting it and I've never seen it happen. And it's — I'd just like to see. Once. However you want it."

She'd been quiet a long time. He'd thought she was asleep.

"I don't know if I want you watching me," she'd said finally, to the ceiling, and there'd been no cruelty in it, only a genuine turning-over. "It's one thing you knowing. Hearing about it after. That's — I've got used to that, I can do that. But you in the corner with your eyes on me while he — Simon, I'd feel it. Every second. I'd know you were there."

"I know."

"It might spoil it."

"I know. But I wouldn't ask again if it did."

And she'd let it sit, and in the morning she'd said nothing, and he'd assumed that was his answer and grieved it quietly and got on with the day. It was Jacob who'd settled it, in the end — because everything was Jacob's to settle now, that was the arrangement none of them had signed and all of them obeyed. A text, three days later, that Anna read out to him across the kitchen with an expression he couldn't quite name, half apology and half something older and warmer:

"Simon can watch if he wants. Might be good for him. But he does what I say and he cleans up after."

That was the whole of it. He does what I say and he cleans up after. Simon had gone to work with the words going round in him like a hymn, and had achieved nothing at all before lunch, and had understood that he was, at last, going to get the thing he'd wished for in the dark for two decades — and that it was going to be handed to him on precisely the terms the boy chose, the way everything was now, and that the terms were the point.

Jacob was due at four. By two Anna had stopped pretending to do anything else, and by half past she called Simon upstairs in a voice that had gone tight and young, and he understood the readying had begun, and that — God help him — the readying was to be his job.

"He wants me — " She was standing by the bed in her dressing gown, pink at the throat, holding her phone like it had told her to do something she couldn't quite say aloud. "There's a — in the wardrobe. The shoebox at the back. He had it sent."

Simon found it at the back of the wardrobe behind the winter boots, a plain box, and inside it a pair of heels — high, black, ostentatiously expensive looking, nothing like anything his wife owned or would ever have bought. He knew, holding them, that he had not bought them and never could have, that they belonged to another man's idea of her, and that he was being permitted to be the one who put them on her, which was somehow worse and better than not being permitted at all.

"He said I'm only to wear them for him," Anna said, watching him take them out. She said it fast, getting it over with, a woman confessing a rule she'd agreed to. "Not out. Not for you. Just — when it's him."

"Okay," said Simon, and knelt, because what else was there to do but kneel, and lifted his pregnant wife's foot and fed it into a shoe bought by the boy who'd put the child in her. His hands weren't quite steady. Hers came to rest on his shoulder for balance, warm through his shirt, and neither of them said anything while he did up the little buckle at her ankle, and then the other, and sat back on his heels to look at what he'd made — his soft, familiar, expecting wife, the mum from three doors down, standing in her own bedroom in her dressing gown and a pair of fuck-me heels that weren't for him — and had to put his hands flat on his own thighs to stop them shaking.

"There's the other thing," she said, quieter still.

He knew what the other thing was. It lived in a different box, in the drawer, and it had been part of the ritual since October, since the first weekend Jacob had come back for a night and Simon had learned the newest and lowest of his offices. He got the little bottle and the tapered plug that was the boy's and not his — a door that had been Jacob's alone since the late summer, that Simon was permitted to prepare and forbidden ever to use — and Anna leaned herself over the end of the bed with the weary practised grace of a woman who'd stopped being embarrassed about this particular thing weeks ago, her dressing gown falling open, the heels planting her at an angle she'd never have found on her own.

He readied her the way he'd been shown, back in October, on the first of these afternoons, when the doing of it had made his hands shake and now barely did. Slow, careful, plenty of the oil warmed first between his fingers because she'd asked once that it not be cold; a thumb to start, working her open by patient degrees, the tapered thing after it, easing in to the widest part and past; his own breath loud in the quiet room and his own body clenched and ignored. The maintenance-work of a man keeping his wife prepared for someone else. His to open but not his to enter.

Anna, for her part, breathed slowly into the duvet and let her husband do it, and tried, as she always tried at this exact moment, to locate the version of herself who would have been appalled — the woman from the spring, the parish-newsletter wife, bent over her own bed in fuck-me heels while her husband oiled her open for a teenager — and, as always now, couldn't quite reach her. That woman was somewhere back down the road, waving, getting smaller. She thought instead, helplessly, about four o'clock, and the doorbell, and the weight of another man, and felt her own body soften and open around her husband's careful hand as though it too had stopped listening to anyone but Jacob. She hated, distantly, that Simon would see all of it later; she'd told him the truth in the dark, that she wasn't sure she wanted him watching.

When the plug was seated she made a small sound into the duvet and then straightened up, flushed, resettling the gown, testing her balance on the unfamiliar heels, and looked at him.

"You're sure about this," she said. "Being here. Watching. Because once he's here I can't — Simon, once we start I won't be able to think about how you're feeling. I won't have room."

"I don't want you to have room," he said. "That's — Anna, that's the whole of it. I want to watch you not have room for me."

And underneath the hating ran the other thing, the newer thing, that had heard him say I want to watch you not have room for me and thrilled to it against every instinct she'd been raised with.

She looked at him for a moment longer, this man she'd married at twenty and remade the meaning of at thirty-eight, and something moved in her face that had pity in it and appetite in it and was, underneath both, unmistakably love, and then the doorbell went, and it was four o'clock, and Jacob was home.

He'd changed, in a term. Not much — you'd not have seen it across a shop — but Simon saw it, because Simon had made a study of him. He stood a little easier in himself. He'd filled out through the shoulders, a term of the climbing wall or the rowing club or just the ordinary broadening of a boy who'd left home a boy. He shook Simon's hand in the hall and said "good to see you, Simon" and meant it, and that was the thing Simon could never get past, the sincerity, the total absence of gloat — Jacob had won so completely that winning had stopped being visible to him, the way fish don't see water.

"Leo says hi, by the way," he added, shrugging off his coat, entirely easy. "Well — he doesn't know I'm here, obviously. But we had a couple of pints Wednesday. He's doing all right, you'd be proud. Joined the boxing lot, if you can believe it."

"Leo's boxing," said Simon.

"Getting battered, mostly. But yeah." Jacob grinned. "I keep half an eye on him. Make sure the second-years don't take the mick."

And there it was, the particular vertigo of the whole arrangement in a single sentence — the boy who was going to breed Simon's wife again was, in the meantime, looking out for Simon's son at university, a good mate, a steady lad, the sort of friend every parent hopes their child falls in with. Simon thanked him. He actually thanked him, and meant that too. His son had no idea. His son would go to his grave with no idea, if the three adults in this hallway did their jobs, and the keeping of that from Leo was the one wall in the whole structure that Simon would have died before letting fall.

There was a girl, too. Simon knew because Anna had told him at breakfast, the way she told him everything now: a girl at the uni, Sophie, a fresher like Leo, nothing serious, he's being a normal boy, which is what I told him to be. Anna had reported it with her chin up, a woman insisting on the terms of her own arrangement, and only Simon, who had spent a summer learning her face, had seen the half-second of something underneath before she buried it. That was the pact, the one she'd made in the hotel by the station: Jacob got his life, the girls his own age, the whole ordinary future — and in return this, whenever he was home, for the rest of theirs. Simon suspected the girl called Sophie cost Anna more than she'd ever say. He suspected Jacob knew it. He suspected that was partly why the girl got mentioned at all.

Jacob went to Anna and put his hand on the bump without asking — the first thing he did, before he'd even taken his coat off, his palm spread wide and proprietary over the small firm swell of her, the proof of himself he'd left inside her in a station hotel — and Anna's breath went out of her, and Simon stood in his own hallway and watched another man lay his hand on the child in his wife and felt the floor of himself drop away into the warm and bottomless place it dropped away into now.

"Look at you," Jacob said, low, to her, to it. "Look what we did."

"Jacob—"

"Is he watching?" Not turning round. Meaning Simon.

"He's watching," said Simon.

"Good," said Jacob. "Upstairs, then. Simon — you know where you're sitting."

He did know. There was a chair in the corner of the bedroom, a little upholstered thing Anna used for putting her tights on, and it had been carried to the foot of the bed and angled, and that was his, that was the whole of his territory, and he took it and sat in it with his hands on his knees like a man in a waiting room while his wife and her lover undressed each other three feet away.

He had imagined this, in the dark, for twenty years, and not one of the ten thousand imaginings had got it right, because in all of them he'd been the camera, weightless, everywhere, and in none of them had he been a specific soft-bellied man of thirty-nine sitting in a tights-chair with his heart coming apart, close enough to smell it, forbidden to move.

The imaginings had all been silent, too, like a porn video watched on mute. He saw that now. In the stories on his laptop the cuckold watched from a tasteful distance and thought his tasteful thoughts. He had not known — how could he have known — that the real thing would be so full of the ordinary sounds of it: the specific creak of his own bed under a weight that wasn't his; the wet plainness of the sex, which the stories always tidied away; Anna's breathing changing gear in a way he knew from the inside and was now on the outside of; and, under all of it, the small mortifying music of his own arousal, which he could not switch off and had not been given leave to relieve. He sat very still, as instructed, and took it in through every pore, and thought: I asked for this. I asked and I was granted. Remember that you asked.

Jacob undressed her slowly, and left the heels on. Of course he left the heels on. He laid Simon's wife back across the bed with her feet still in the shoes that were his and knelt between her thighs and looked up the length of her — the heels, the soft thighs, the bump, the face — and then he looked past all of it, at the corner, at Simon.

"Tell me what you see," Jacob said.

And there it was, the term Simon hadn't known was coming and understood at once was the price of the ticket. He was not to be a silent watcher. He was to narrate. His own voice was to be part of it, the running commentary of his own dispossession, spoken aloud into the room for their use — and Simon opened his mouth, and his voice came out cracked, and he described his wife to the boy who was about to fuck her.

"I see—" He swallowed. "I see you between her legs. She's — she's already wet, I can see it on her, she's—"

"Louder. Whose is she?"

"She's yours." It came out of him in a rush, the truest and most ruinous two-word sentence of his life, and Anna made a sound at it, at hearing him say it, that Simon felt in his teeth. "She's yours. She's wet for you. She's wearing your shoes."

"Good," said Jacob, mild as milk. He didn't hurry. He kissed the inside of one soft thigh, and the other, watching Anna's face watch Simon's while he did it, running the whole room off one unhurried current. "Keep going. What am I doing now?"

"You're — kissing her. Her thighs. She's — she can't keep still, she's lifting up towards you, she wants—"

"She wants what?"

"Your mouth. She wants your mouth on her."

"Ask me nicely, then," Jacob said to Anna. "Since he's asking so well on your behalf."

"Please," said Anna, who did not say please for things like this, who had run a household and a school run and twenty years of quiet respectability and did not beg for things — and Simon heard his prim wife beg another man for his tongue and described that too, because the look flicked his way and the look was law, his voice going to pieces on the words while the boy lowered his head at last and gave her what the two of them had asked for between them. She came apart on another man's mouth with her husband narrating the fall, and it was the most terrible and the most complete thing Simon had ever been permitted to be part of, and he would have signed away years of his life before he'd have given it back.

It went on for a long time, and somewhere in it the last wall in him came down.

She came on the boy's mouth twice before he'd so much as taken his own clothes off, and Simon was made to describe both, in a voice that steadied by degrees as the shame in it curdled over into something worse and more honest — the way her thighs came up to grip the boy's head, the way one heel kept slipping on the duvet and finding purchase again, the sounds she made that Simon had spent twenty years unable to draw out of her with any tool he owned. When Jacob finally knelt up and stripped off his shirt Anna reached for him without being told, both hands, the way you reach for something you've been thinking about since the last time you had it.

"Tell him what you've got hold of," said Jacob, switching his attention to Anna.

"I'm—" Anna's mouth was barely under her control. "I'm holding your cock. It's — I can't fit my hand round it. I never could round his — I mean yours, his, it's—" She was babbling; Jacob let her babble, mild, waiting as she breathed deep. "It's so much bigger than his. It's twice — it isn't even the same. Looking at the two of you, you wouldn't think you were the same animal."

"No," Jacob agreed pleasantly, "you wouldn't," and had her guide it to herself, and pushed in.

Simon described the first push. He had no choice — the boy glanced at him and the glance was an instruction and the instruction was law now, absolutely, in this room — so he watched the bare fat length of another man sink into his pregnant wife with nothing at all between them, no rubber, no reason for one, the load long landed and the child already made. Nothing between them. Every ridge of the boy going into her bare. The little catch of her breath as she took the width. His own cock strained useless and unattended behind his flies, because the rule was hands to himself unless told and he had not been told.

"How's she taking it?" said Jacob.

"All of it," Simon said, wretched, precise. "She's taking all of it. Right to — there's none of it left, it's all inside her."

The boy fucked her slow and deep and unhurried, one hand splayed the whole time over the bump, over his own handiwork, as though he could feel the child through the wall of her while he moved in the mother — and Anna came again, on the cock this time, the deep rolling kind she had never once had from Simon in twenty years and had learned from this boy like learning to breathe, loud and helpless and unhidden three feet from where her husband sat and said so.

Then Jacob drew out of her, and turned her over, and Simon understood with a lurch what came next, because he had prepared it himself not an hour before.

"Plug," said Jacob.

Anna reached back — she was past shame by now, past everything, gone somewhere the words couldn't reach — and drew it out herself and set it aside, the thing Simon had seated in her with his own careful hands, and lifted her hips in the heels, and offered the boy the one door in her that would always be his alone. The door Simon had spent an hour that afternoon oiling open and would never once be let through. He watched the boy line up against the hole he'd prepared. He watched, because a look told him to, and he described it — the slow give of her, the way she pushed back onto it, the way she wanted it, this thing she had refused her own husband across two decades and handed to Jacob like a set of keys — and his voice broke apart halfway through and he kept going anyway, narrating his own exclusion in real time while it happened in front of him, which was, he understood dimly, the most complete thing that had ever been done to him.

"Whose is this?" said Jacob, seated deep in her, still, letting her feel it. "This one especially. Whose?"

"Yours," said Simon. "That one's only ever been yours."

"And whose'll it always be?"

"Yours."

"Good boy," said Jacob — to Simon, not to her — and it went through Simon like a current, the good boy, the two small words settling him fully at last into the place he'd been travelling towards since a boy asked him a question in his study back in the summer, and he sat in his tights-chair with his heart in his mouth and was, God forgive him, happy.

Jacob took his time. He had her up on top of him for a while, riding, her hands braced on his chest and the bump swaying and the heels planted either side of his hips, and made Simon narrate that too — his wife working herself on another man's cock, unhurried, greedy, magnificent, a woman who'd found out at thirty-eight what her body was for.

"Tell her what she looks like," Jacob said, near the end, laying her back down, coming over her, the hand returning to the bump. "Go on. Tell your wife."

"You look—" Simon's face was wet; he'd not noticed starting. "You look happy. You look beautiful, you look like — Anna, you look like you're exactly where you're meant to be."

"She is," said Jacob, not unkindly. "She's exactly where she's meant to be. Aren't you?"

"Yes," said Anna, wrecked, one heel dug into the small of the boy's back, and did not look at her husband when she said it, and Simon understood that her not looking was the last mercy she had left to give him, and that it was worth more than being looked at.

When Jacob finished he did it deep and held there, buried, a hand on the bump and a hand fisted in the sheets, and told the room what he was doing while he did it — taking it, giving it to her, right up against where it's already — and Anna cried out under him and clenched around it and took every last pulse, and Simon watched another man empty himself into his pregnant wife and made, involuntarily, a sound of his own, a small broken noise from the tights-chair that he'd be ashamed of for a week.

For a moment nobody moved. The boy softened and slipped from her, and there it was — the thing Simon now got to witness in full, in the light: the slow spill of it, another man's spend leaking from his wife, tracking down over the curve of her.

He was out of the chair before he knew he'd stood. On his knees at the side of the bed before he'd been told — half a beat before Jacob's lazy "go on, then" — his hand going to her, his fingers to the wet warmth of it, needing to touch it, to confirm with his skin the thing his eyes couldn't wholly credit even now, even after everything: that it was real, that it was there, that it had happened and went on happening and was the ground he lived on now. He traced it, dazed, the way you touch a thing to know you're awake.

"Clean her up," said Jacob, gently, from up among the pillows, already half gone into the boneless doze of the young and thoroughly spent. "That's your bit."

And Simon cleaned his wife. That was the whole of his office and he performed it on his knees at the side of the bed — the cloth he'd been told to have ready, warm from the tap, and his own careful hands, tending to her, to the mess another man had made in her, the most intimate and most menial and most strangely peaceful work of his life. She let him. She lay back in the heels with one arm over her eyes and let her husband clean her, her breathing slowing, the flush fading from her chest, and somewhere in the quiet performance of it — the wiping, the tenderness, the sheer domestic ordinariness of a man cleaning up — Simon felt the grief and the arousal and the twenty years of wanting all fold down together into something he had no name for that was very close to peace.

"Thank you," Anna murmured, from under her arm. Not to Jacob. To him.

"S'alright," said Simon, and meant it more than he'd meant anything.

Jacob couldn't stay. He never could; that was how it worked now, the thing that made it bearable and the thing that made it ache. There were people expecting him — his own family, his own Christmas, the girl called Sophie somewhere in his phone — and he dressed in the lamplight with the unhurried ease of a man who'd got exactly what he came for and would get it again whenever he liked, and kissed Anna at the door of the bedroom in a way that was not a goodbye because none of their goodbyes were goodbyes any more.

"January," he said to her. "Reading week. I'll let you know."

"Okay."

"Look after them both." He put his hand on the bump one last time, and then, extraordinarily, he put his other hand for a second on Simon's shoulder, on his way past, a squeeze, the gesture a captain gives a good man — well done, thanks, as you were — and was gone down the stairs and out into the dark, and the front door closed, and the car started, and the house was quiet, and it held, again, the way it always held now, changed and intact and holding.

They lay together after, husband and wife, Anna still in the heels because she was too comfortable to care and he was too undone to ask, his hand resting where the boy's had rested, on the small firm swell of the child that would arrive in the spring with another man's face and Simon's name on the certificate and a father in every practical, daily, three-in-the-morning sense.

"You all right?" she said. "That wasn't — it wasn't too much?"

He thought about it. He thought about the chair, and the shoes, and the narration, and the cloth, and the hand on his shoulder, and the whole descending stair of the last two years that had carried him from a man with a secret to a man on his knees cleaning up after the boy who'd bred his wife, grateful, grateful, past all sense grateful.

"No," he said. "It wasn't too much."

He'd wanted, once, only to know. Then only to be told. Then, on the worst night of his life, in a car park by a station, only not to be shut out. And now here he was on the far side of all of it, let in at last, all the way in — not up, never up, the power a whole postcode away in a boy's easy hands — and he lay in the dark with his hand on the bump and understood that this was the rest of his life, the room and the chair and the cloth and the terms, and that he would sit in that chair every time it was offered him until he died, and be thankful, and clean up after.

Downstairs, much later, when she was asleep, he took the heels off her, and set them in the box, and put the box at the back of the wardrobe where it lived. Then he stood a while in the dark bedroom listening to his wife breathe, and found he was, of all the impossible things, content.

Jacob would have the room again in January. The boy had said so.