Make Me Sweat by Madderson Sara

Author:Madderson, Sara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

22

CLARA - 2019

The conference today was a blur of exhaustion and love-drunkenness. I swear I saw a difference in Alex up there on stage, too. He was more at peace than he’d been yesterday—possibly because our sensual pre-conference bath morphed into energetic, uninhibited love-making, our wet bodies sliding slickly against each other as bathwater sloshed over the sides of the roll-top tub.

I’m both horrified and fascinated by how easy it is to assimilate back into my normal life. It’s like I screwed off the top half of my skull when I came through my front door, plopped it on the hall table and screwed my ‘wife and mum’ skull cap back on. I get home before Jeremy, Violet and Charlie, who are having a slow journey back from Dorset, and have the benefit of time to shower, throw on some leggings and a jumper, and defrost some chilli before tuning out from my own problems with my millionth re-read of my all-time favourite, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

While the twins chatter on about their adventures with Granny and Grandpa, I watch Jeremy with an absent-minded curiosity, as if he’s a dissected frog under my microscope. He corrects the twins’ grammar, he corrects their table manners, he comments that the chilli could have done with more cumin, and I count the number of questions he asks me about the conference.

Answer: two.

Both closed-ended.

Did it go well, darling?

And Are you tired?

At least there’s no chance of him ever noticing anything is up with me. A pie-chart of Jeremy’s brain function would show his capacity as being divvied up between work, our personal investment portfolio, the upcoming tournament at the golf club next weekend, his client lunch at Simpsons tomorrow, and possibly a slice of self-congratulation that he has (very loosely) looked after the kids all weekend. Not the smallest sliver of pie would be devoted to pondering whether his wife ever regretted her life choices.

No, it’s much easier to deflect. I ask him how his parents are, whether they’ve decided to go to France or Italy this summer, how the M3 was, and whether Violet and Charlie have finished their homework. If a wife is cheating on her husband, and said husband’s impression of their marriage is not in the tiniest, remotest way changed, does that really constitute cheating? Philosophers can go ponder that one.

As Jeremy fields a one-man debate about whether his parents should consider down-sizing before they get too frail, I stare at him dispassionately. He’s very attractive, there’s no doubt about that. Laughably different from Alex, with his fair hair (about which he is ridiculously vain) swept back off his face in a style that hasn’t changed since I’ve known him, and a full, sulky mouth. That he and Alex exist in the same world—in my orbit—is actually so bizarre it makes my head spin. Jeremy is flippantly saying his parents would be fools not to take advantage of the current property boom. He is flippant about everything. It

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