Fred was fast to reply to messages, which was one of many things I liked about her. We swapped texts back and forth to arrange for a dinner date – three days on from when Faith first texted her for me – but throughout the days in between we managed to keep up conversation often, too. She would text around her shifts and her modelling, and her ‘other work stuff’, which I strategically side-stepped asking her about. I reasoned that, worst-case scenario, I at least had that in my back pocket for the date. We’d planned for dinner but Fred had said she was waiting to hear back about a modelling gig – Cut-throat industry. Being naked for middle-class artists. Haha. Xx – so we left it until the day before to pin down a time.
The day before happened to be an evening with Rowan, though, and throughout the night – while intermittently grabbing my phone to reply to the woman I hadn’t stopped thinking about for days on end – I felt a new burden brought on by the whole thing. I flitted from Christ, what are we doing … through to Living our best lives, that’s what … in the space of half an hour – before again shifting back and forth between the two. Eventually, though, I changed tune to Is this right … when Rowan excused himself to use the bathroom and my first thought was that it meant I could at least reply to Fred’s message. I hadn’t really been present throughout the film and a half we’d watched. But I wasn’t convinced that Rowan – who’d replied to his share of messages, too – was entirely switched on either.
‘Have you seen Orange is the New Black?’ he asked, when he came back into the room.
I lifted my legs up for him to sit back down on his side of the sofa, then laid them out across his lap. ‘Not that I can think of. Why?’
He shrugged and grabbed the remote. ‘It’s about a load of women in prison. It seems like the sort of thing you and the girls might be into.’ I watched him click around the Netflix screen. ‘I’m not sure I’m bothered about this second film, babe, are you?’
I couldn’t tell him a single thing that had happened in it. ‘Not really.’ My phone buzzed and I snatched it up straight away. ‘Did you want to try a series instead?’
‘That prison thing has quite a few seasons, I think. Maybe five, something like that?’
I whistled. ‘Are you sure we’re ready for that sort of commitment?’ I’d meant it as a joke. But when he didn’t answer, something in me shifted. Then I remembered who it was I was texting … ‘Hey, how’s everything going, Row? Like, with the dating thing?’ I locked my phone, to put a stopper in the text I was midway through typing. Fred had asked how I was spending the evening and, while Rowan knew that I could, potentially, be dating other people right now, I hadn’t yet got to the point of explaining that to the woman I’d be dating.
He looked uncomfortable. ‘Are you asking if I’ve been seeing people?’
‘I guess? I’m more asking whether it works for you.’
He put the remote down and reached over to grab my hand. When he squeezed, I felt my fingers pinch around my engagement ring. ‘I don’t feel like we’re as close, Edi, if I’m honest.’ I opened my mouth to rush in with a reassurance, but he interrupted my words while they were still just breath. ‘But I’m secure enough to know that relationships change and, I don’t know, there are always going to be times where we’re closer, or more distant. Right?’
I stalled. ‘Right.’
‘You don’t seem convinced. But I just mean, we both want this time, and we’re doing our best with it. If either of us felt like it wasn’t working, we’d say.’
He seemed so sure that I found myself nodding along in agreement. But is it working? I was sitting with my feet in my fiancé’s lap while I was texting another woman. Is this what engagement does to people? I wondered. But when Rowan let my hand go and felt around for the remote again, I took it as a sign that our conversation was closed. Still, there was one last thing I needed to push.
‘Have you told me about everyone you’ve dated?’ I asked. He’d only mentioned two girls so far. Betty had seen him out with someone last weekend and in a diplomatic way had told me they looked ‘cosy’. The description she gave, though, of a redhead with a slim build, didn’t match either of the women I knew about. I realised, then, that I wasn’t asking him whether he’d dated anyone else. I was asking him whether he was a liar.
‘Babe.’ He reached over but this time with his other hand, so he could keep the remote ready. ‘Of course I have. I’m not out there playing the field every weekend, Edi, just … I don’t know, seeing what comes up. Like you are.’
And he was a liar.
I flashed a thin smile and reached for my phone.
‘So,’ he started, ‘how are we feeling about a series? Or, if you’re not in the mood for anything new, we can flit back through our watched list and … Is everything okay?’
I looked up. ‘Course, why do you ask?’
‘You’ve been on and off that thing all night. But you look all serious.’ I’m concentrating, I thought, but decided it was something I was best off not admitting to. ‘Are the girls okay?’
I shot him a look. ‘I think so?’
‘I assumed …’ He nodded at the phone. ‘Group chat?’
‘Oh.’ Before they’d left me, days ago, Faith and Lily had asked again whether I’d tell Rowan; I’d asked them in return whether they thought I should. Dating another woman felt a little like colouring outside the lines of our agreement. Even though nothing had been set down in the ground rules – which were by then tacked to my fridge with a photograph magnet of a more monogamous couple than we could claim to be now – to say whether we could or couldn’t date people of the same sex.
‘Do you think he’ll be funny about it?’ I’d asked them both.
Lily’s lips had bunched up to one side as she’d thought it over. ‘He might be into it.’
Faith was less convinced. ‘A bloke like Rowan? Edi, beaut, don’t think me rude, but he probably doesn’t even think you’re dating anyone, never mind dating a woman. Blokes like him—’ she kept phrasing it that way, as though Rowan was of-a-type ‘—they make these suggestions with themselves in mind and I’m telling you now that it won’t cross his mind that you’ll do better at this than him.’
‘It isn’t a competition,’ I’d told her and she laughed, but then Lily had weighed in.
‘When it comes to men and women, babes, it’s always a competition.’
‘It actually isn’t the group chat,’ I answered eventually, even though my internal narrator was screaming protests against the admission. ‘I’m just making some plans for the weekend.’
‘Fair enough.’ He turned back to the television. ‘Hot date?’
If someone asked what was wrong with his question, I couldn’t have explained it in a word. But it was, I thought, fractured with the beginnings of a laugh. He didn’t quite smirk. The question was thrown out there with such disinterest, though, that it occurred to me Rowan – with his perfect looks and his girls lined up around the block – honestly thought he knew what my answer would be. Not for the first time, then, it crossed my mind whether Faith was right – whether he was enjoying this partly, largely even, because he thought I wasn’t doing the same as him. And in the seconds after he’d asked, while something like rage started to simmer in my stomach, I felt spite rise up like a kind of bile.
‘Yep.’ I deliberately waited for his head to snap around, in time to catch my smile, before I went back to typing my message. ‘I don’t really fancy the commitment of a series either,’ I said, staring at my screen. Because unlike Rowan, I wasn’t ready to be a liar.
‘Who?’ he asked, and I thought it might have been the first time all night that I’d had his full attention. ‘Anyone I know?
It seemed a strange question. ‘I mean, I’m not about to date one of your friends or colleagues.’ I tried to sound jovial. The lie by omission was back in the room, though, and I was quickly trying to weigh up the possibilities for how the rest of our talk might play out from here. It’ll be your call, I thought then, it’ll be your call and let the chips fall where they may. ‘Someone I met at a work thing,’ I said, glancing down at another message. ‘Fred.’
‘I see.’ I heard the click of the remote and then the opening hum of the Brooklyn 99 theme tune. ‘This okay?’
And that was the only question he asked for the rest of the night.