The Playhouse

They did a lot of smoking in the bath, it seemed counter-intuitive to do something involving burning things and water, but they did it in more than one hotel around the country. She cringes slightly when she thinks about the number they must have ruined with cigarette burns. She can see quite clearly the odd brown slug-shaped marks that their bath and fag sessions left.

He has drunk his champagne and she sees something nearly approaching a smile.

‘It wasn’t all bad was it, we did have some fun, especially in the bath.’

They did. The bath was a play space. It was also completely free of all the speculation about what they were up to, a secret space even more hidden than the hotel room. Everyone knew of course, or had guessed. The air between them warped with the heat of their attraction to each other and anyone standing too close to them was discomfited by their hyper-awareness of each other. Though didn’t necessarily understand what it was, they knew what it meant.

They talked about somethings and nothings. The conversations were rarely serious and very often about sex, because at that point the sex between them was at the urgent, obsessive, fierce, exquisite, lost-in-the-sensations, overruling everything, including, common sense stage. They took ridiculous risks in the office and pubs, and the hotel toilets.

‘Did you know seventy percent of women need clitoral stimulation to have orgasms and only fifteen percent orgasm through vaginal intercourse?’

‘What about the other fifteen percent?’

‘What?’

‘The other fifteen percent, what about them? Where did you get this from?’

‘A Cosmopolitan survey’

‘Cosmo! What were you doing reading that?’

‘There was one lying around in the office.’ She suspects he had probably been looking at the photos of scantily clad celebrities and models masquerading under the ‘empowering women’ banner. She had her doubts about its agenda, but it had been a handy manual for her for finding helpful hints and sex tips which she’d had no clue about before him.

‘I don’t think Cosmopolitan can be seen as a reliable data source.’

‘Lizzie, don’t go all ‘let’s analyse this’ about it. We could do our own survey’

‘Not sure a survey of one is really going to give an accurate result.’

‘Maybe not, but we could have fun doing the research.’

He moves down the bath, displacing a wave of water.

‘We could start now.’

Mostly, they played, had competitions about whose farts could create the most bubbles, he always won. They squirted each with the empty bubble bath and shampoo bottles while water sloshed over the side of the bath soaking the floor and mingling with dropped fag ends and empty wine bottles. At some point, they invented a game where he became Captain of the good ship Lizzie and there was a lot of punning around lowering mainstays and who could shiver whose timbers the most. The Captain title stuck and they wrote little notes which they passed to each other during the day and under the doors of their rooms while they still pretended to have separate ones. An analogue texting system before mobile phones existed.

It was fun, but like all games, there were a lot of opportunities for cheating, bending the rules, not playing off a straight bat and while she was a novice in the games they were playing, he was not . Once that disparity started to reveal itself, the games became something quite different. The Good Ship Lizzie was holed beneath the waterline by the collision of the truth and the reality. At first she just listed slightly, tried to stay upright, but as each new truth revealed itself, she slowly capsized and sunk.