An Unexpected Entry

If I was brutally, explicitly, excruciatingly honest with myself... all those years ago, had I not found myself getting... tired? Yeah, okay, let's say it: bored? Of Katie's lithe, light, perpetually-slim body; of those neat, flat breasts with their delicate little nipples; of her desire for gentle, slow tenderness as we made love? Had I not, in those dark moments lying awake in the small hours, guiltily yearned for a change? A buxom, bouncy, feisty sort of change? A change who might, had she existed in such a form back then, have been called Jadie?

Once it had started, that infernal little voice in my head seemed reluctant to shut up. Now it moved on, into even more uncomfortable territory. Were the signs not there also, that Katie had been... tiring of me? I had a brief, disturbingly vivid memory of the way I'd once caught her looking at David; her soon-to-be publishing agent. Wiry, geeky, bespectacled, effeminate David whom I'd immediately written off as any sort of masculine threat... and yet, the voice now suggested, might David perhaps have offered, in Katie's mind, certain charms that had lain beyond my own gift to give? Had it been his face who'd come to her in those small hours as she'd lain awake beside me?

And what about John, my junior sales manager back then; even younger, leaner, fitter than me; joining us for dinner all those years ago with his coiffured hair and his oh-so-confident flirting with his boss's wife? My wife. Yeah, the voice in my head said; sure, we'd laughed about him together afterwards; shared jokes about his smarmy charm... but might it have been illicit thoughts of his hard, taut body which had been behind Katie's extra little gasps; her more violent shudders which had accompanied our lovemaking later that night?

The voice kept talking in my head; moving now from past to present. Was that what had happened earlier, it challenged, when my mind had fantasised about Emily and Bethan even as Jadie and I thrust against each other? Was that hedonic adaption; the brain's endless quest for novelty; driving me to imagine doing things with inferior girls, just because they were... something different? The voice took on a victorious sneer. It was, wasn't it? It happened to everyone, in the end. It was all around us; just like those countless times when I'd laughed with Kiera, watching something on the telly about some celebrity break-up and saying really? He's just thrown it all away with her for that?

I wished the voice would shut the fuck up. Because I knew, then, that it was speaking the truth. Which would mean... Jadie was right, too. And whilst I might, in all honesty, be genuinely convinced that I would never tire of her; I was of course a whole lot less certain of the reverse. I realised with a jolt that this wasn't just about me; about the archetypal male with the wandering eye. It was just as much about her. The difference being, of course, that she had the honesty, the guts and the intelligence to realise that and confront it before it even properly happened, instead of... refusing to believe it and hoping it would go away, like I realised I'd been doing.

Jadie's voice shook me from the unwelcome diversion my brain had been taking me on.

"Actually, there's not," she said. She was still talking about the exceptions I'd mentioned. "Not for every rule. And yeah, there are outliers... but believing you're going to be the outlier? That's just..." I could tell she was going to say stupid, but held back, "...that doesn't make sense."

She was so logical. I loved her for it. I was still struggling to accept such cold rationality, but something inside me could already see she was right.

"It does if you're married to the most awesomely awesome girl in the known universe. You're so much of an outlier, you're off the scale..."

She smiled, but I wasn't convincing her. I wasn't convincing myself, any more.

"Awesomely awesome, I may be," she accepted. "You're amazingly amazing, too, don't forget. But it won't matter. Your brain – and mine – they're just going to kind of suck away at that awesomeness... eat away at the amazingness... until in two years it's going to feel like the same thing as average. Unless..."

"Unless what?"

But I knew the answer, already. I'd made the connection between what she was saying and why she'd asked the girls to watch us today. Unless we keep changing things up. Trying new things. And, just as I had back in the summer when I'd pondered even then how rapidly our sex had seemed to have graduated prematurely onto traditionally taboo activities, I feared slightly for where such experimentation might ultimately lead.

I shook my head, laughing quietly; the same image popping into my head as it had back then in July. "Right. I get it. This is where the whips and chains and you doing me up the arse with Mr Purple comes in, isn't it?"

She laughed properly at that. "No... it doesn't have to be like that. Well, not yet, anyway."

She looked at me playfully, putting her head on one side. "Unless... you want to?"

"Trust me, I don't..." I assured her. That was true enough.

"Okay, but... we are going to have to, you know, fool that biological programming. Confuse it. Turn it upside-down so we keep it guessing; keep surprising it."

"You make it sound like it's got a mind of its own."

"It's not a mind. It's just chemicals in our brains. But if we can do the right things... keep that chemistry moving so it never stands still... moving in the way it does right now every time I see you... then maybe we can put off that day when you wake up next to me and think, meh."

Or, I thought, vice versa. I laughed at how utterly impossible the idea sounded of me ever associating this gorgeous little creature with the word meh – yeah, another one of those internet words – which expressed such stark indifference. But still. I knew where she was going with all this, now.

"Okay, okay. I get it," I said. "And that's what you thought earlier, when they came in? That it was a good opportunity to... keep things moving? It wasn't just you being super-horny."

She smiled. "I love you so much. You do just get it. Every time."

I laughed, shaking my head again. "If we've got two years, though... do you not think that, like, trying to keep things moving after, what, eight months is a bit... premature?"

She didn't respond straight away and I caught another guilty look flashing over her face, then. I was momentarily unsure as to what that meant. Until, of course, the realisation hit me in the face.

"How long have you known about this... hedonic adaption thing?" I asked. I already knew the answer, though.

"I followed a link in something Mrs Coppin gave me to read, ages ago."

Mrs Coppin had been one of her science teachers at school. She used to feed Jadie's rapacious intellect with all sorts of extra reading around the subject.

So, my realisation was correct. It wasn't just eight months. She'd been doing this from the day we'd first got together.

It had all been there for me to see; I'd just chosen not to. Her constantly-changing hairstyles; both on her head and between her legs. The continual switching between different styles of glamorous make-up, interspersed with not wearing any at all. Dressing like a grunger girl one minute and a classy office worker the next. Even the multiple-personality acts during sex; good-girl, dirty-girl; porno-queen – perhaps, even her new little noise today; had that been calculated? And, I thought, back in the summer; her taking advantage of another accidental situation; engineering it so that Becky and Jess had got naked – unwittingly and unknowingly – in front of me.

I realised the truth then about those occasions when she caught me looking at her like I'd never seen her before; why that genuinely seemed to give her such satisfaction. That was more than just girlish pride, I realised now; that was joy at seeing the countdown-to-boredom timer reset once again.

Part of me – a tiny part – felt almost scared that she had been so... calculating. But that little piece of me was overwhelmed by the crushing sense of pride that, once again, this fabulous little creature had been doing all that... for me.

And, I thought to myself, maybe all that effort and thought and awareness was already working. After all it really did feel, to me, after eight months, as if we'd been together for mere days; I was still just as utterly consumed with desire for this girl as I had been on our first rainy afternoon together.

"Oh," I said.

She knew I'd got it. She said nothing, smiling at my realisation.

"You've... been doing it right from the start, haven't you?" I confirmed.

She nodded.

I sighed, as I took her in my arms again and kissed her forehead. She was so awesome. "If that's what you really believe... that it's basically impossible for two people to stay together for longer than a couple of years without getting bored... that this natural cut-off exists... why did you say yes to getting married?" I knew she didn't want me for my money; it had been hard enough getting her to accept the few gifts I'd bought her already.

She pushed back, looked up and took my face in her hands. She fixed me with her gaze, again; those endlessly-expressive, ferociously-intelligent eyes looking right at me with such... passion, that I nearly took a step back.

She took a deep breath and then, looking at me with an intensity that almost hurt, her reasons came tumbling out.

"Because I don't believe that it's impossible. Because, whatever the research and the psychoanalysing and the biology and all that other stuff might say, the fact is that I love you so much right now, I can't imagine ever being without you. Because, however stupid it might be, I do want to be that exception. Because the human brain is such a ridiculous, unknown, complex thing that you're right that science doesn't have all the answers."

"Because... it's like, why did I take History at A-Level when I didn't even enjoy it? Why am I going five thousand miles away to university instead of fifty? Why did I let myself fall in love with a man who I never, ever thought in a million years I'd actually get to be with? You know, maybe because I don't always want to take the easy route. Maybe because... yeah, it's a cliché, but you've just got to, you know, follow your heart sometimes instead of your brain and deal with the consequences. Maybe because, well, if you can't, like, challenge yourself to fight for the impossible when you want it so badly, instead of just turning away defeated at the start, then you might as well just... I don't know; give up, go crawl under a rock... whatever..."

She paused, momentarily, to take a breath, and looked away. The emotion was thick in her voice, as she carried on, quieter now but still intense; "Mr Baines, I want to do this with you. I want us to do it together. I want to defy the odds; I want to be with you forever; I want to take... hedonic adaption and beat it and batter it and hammer it into submission so we can dig it a grave and bury it and then just dance on top of it forever so it can never crawl back out and hurt us... I want that challenge. I will do whatever it takes to stay with you. Anything. By any means necessary..."

She looked up and met my eyes again; hers now glistening with tears. Where that had all come from, I had no idea, but her words had punched the emotion so hard into my chest that it threatened to stop me breathing right then.

"Will you... will you do the same for me?" she asked. It was so heartfelt; so naked and vulnerable and honest.

I looked down. There were a million different things I could have said right then; a million different ways I could have said yes; telling her how much I loved her and always would no matter what; that I really would do anything with anyone if that was what was needed to keep her love; that hell, yes, I'd walk to the ends of the earth with Mr Purple sticking out of my arse if that really was what it took.

But, when all was said and done, there really was only one possible response to her question. I knew she'd understand the words. I knew she'd understand my little attempt to make her smile, even now, amidst such emotion; making her smile was, after all, what I wanted to do – to keep doing – more than anything else in the world.

I took her hands in mine, gently and looked down at her, blinking the wetness out of my own eyes.

"Challenge accepted," I whispered.

Epilogue

It was ten o'clock, later that evening. I was sitting in my living room, still mulling over everything that had happened that day. I knew I was going to have to up my game when it came to 'keeping things moving' but, well, I had a few ideas on that already.

I smiled to myself. I was going to be making an unexpected entry in my journal later that night, for sure. All about Bethan and Emily's unexpected entry into the kitchen earlier on. The whole afternoon had already taken on a dreamlike surreal – unreal – tinge in my mind and I needed to write something just so that I'd be sure, when I awoke in the morning, that it had, you know, actually happened.

Back in November, I'd stopped what had become my habit of writing up the events of the day, thinking that I no longer needed to. That hadn't lasted long, though, and I was now back to making little notes before bed each night. Some nights I wrote more than others. Tonight, I suspected, was going to be a long one.

I'd left Jadie an hour or so earlier. After our little emotional moment, we'd held each other for a long, long time and then just sat, as we so often did, in comfortable companionship; chatting about random shit for a while until we'd both got hungry and I'd fixed us something to eat.

After we'd eaten, we'd relocated upstairs to lie on her bed. The conversation had turned to the future, as it often did. The move to California. Josh's plans to train as a barrister. What, exactly, the hell Keith and Sarah were going to say when Jadie told them about us. And, as we'd talked, I'd looked around her room just as I had with the kitchen, feeling the same pang of sadness that this snug single bed; that large mirror which had reflected so much and, of course, that much-historied closet where Jadie's voyeuristic tastes had been first formed; all would, very soon, no longer be a part of that future for either of us.

At some point, I'd sensed a change in her once more; the return of that fire in her eyes. I'd undressed her again; wordlessly, lovingly and slowly. It had all been for her, then; fingers, tongue, the buzzing end of Mr Purple; both holes explored, delicately and gently at first then moving gradually faster and harder; those pressure-points located and teased inside her until she gave it all up for me – all over me – in a special occasion that, I knew, should keep her sated for at least, well, another day or so...

We'd showered together and I'd returned home. Of course, I'd wanted to stay the night and wake up with her. I'd only done that with her once before and it had been the most magical awakening of my entire life, opening my eyes to her that morning. But we'd already agreed to save that specialness for some unspecified time in the future; perhaps after we were officially man and wife. Even when she moved in with me in a couple of weeks, she'd be taking the spare room. Just another trick we were keeping in our little bag of... novelties, I realised.

Back in my living room, I heard Kiera return from work, just as the theme for News at Ten began. She'd phoned me earlier to say that she'd sorted things out with Sam – the family emergency had turned out to be a minor incident involving Sam's father cutting his hand on a broken Christmas decoration and having to go to the local A&E department. No serious harm had been done, and Kiera had gone straight to her shift at work afterwards.

I looked up from the news as she popped her head round the living room door to say hi, before she went straight through into the kitchen. On seeing her face, my brain finally caught up with something which had long been forgotten in the afternoon's excitement. Oh shit, I thought. Here we go.

Her voice, which I heard yelling from the kitchen a few moments later, did not sound amused; in fact she came as close to swearing as she ever allowed herself to in my presence.

"Dad... The milk! For God's sake! Where's the frickin' milk?!"