Ashley's Deal

Ashley and David were fighting. She was shouting at him, slamming doors, furious. Then she suddenly stopped.

Just stopped, and wondered what she was doing.

“I don’t want us to be like this,” she said.

David looked at her.

“What?” Ashley said. “You’re sick of me? This doesn’t work? This is where we decide it is actually too hard, after all?”

“No,” David said.

Ashley’s mood was brittle, still angry. She wasn’t really listening.

“That’s how it works, isn’t it?” she said. “With difficult relationships. With people like us. At the start we tell each other everything’ll be fine and we’ll make it, but after a while it gets hard so we just give up.”

“Never,” David said.

Ashley stopped. “What?”

“I’d never give on you. On us. You give up if you like, but I’m not going to.”

“Oh,” she said, and stood there for a while. “Really?”

“Not ever.”

She looked at him. He was completely serious, and suddenly she wasn’t angry any more. She couldn’t actually remember what they were fighting about.

“We should stop this then,” she said. “Old man.”

“Tell me how.”

“Fuck me for a start,” she said. “Then we can see.”

He did. There in the kitchen, where they were standing. A year ago he wouldn’t have dreamed of sex anywhere but in the bed, but he was changing. Like she was changing too.

She leaned on the counter, wrapped her arms and legs around him, pressed herself against him as much as she could. She breathed in the smell of him, breathed the air out of his lungs, and held onto him until they were both done.

Then, pulling her clothes back on, she said, “One of these days sex isn’t going to be enough to fix us.”

“Maybe.”

“Should we worry?”

“I don’t know. It’s working for now.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Old man.” She kissed him and went to have a shower.

*

Ashley was twenty-three and David was fifty-one and there were times when that was almost unbearable.

She loved him. She really, really loved him with all that she had, but there were days when she couldn’t see how even that could be enough.

She was too young. In another ten years, the difference in age wouldn’t matter. At twenty-three, it meant everything. She was too young, and not ready to settle down, and she had never been completely sure what she wanted from this. It was also hard because to the rest of the world Ashley was a fling, and no matter what she did, or what David meant to her, people wouldn’t take their relationship seriously. She got sick of people noticing them, always staring, wherever they went. She got sick of the double-take when someone realized she wasn’t having dinner with her father.

She couldn’t even be sure if her job was hers, not something he’d arranged, because he was her boss, and they worked at the same law firm, and even there people whispered about her.