The Two of Us by Andy Jones Read Free Book Online

sex.’
    My mind rifles through the possibilities: I’m bad in bed, she is married, she has an STD, or . . .
    Sometimes I can be so stupid it’s almost impressive.
    Ivy and I have absolutely not talked about having a baby, but we have not exactly not talked about it, either. The first time we made love I asked Ivy (not, of course, with a full coherent
sentence, but rather a combination of facial gestures, eye movements and ‘do you have any . . .
you know . . .?
’) if it was safe to proceed.
    And Ivy looked at me and said: ‘It’s okay.’
    ‘You’re on the . . .?’
    Ivy shook her head, smiled. ‘It’s okay,’ she repeated.
    It wasn’t a trivial thing. And, naked and enraptured as I was, I was also fully aware of the potential consequences –
    ‘potential’ being a significant qualifier. Maybe Ivy knew she was at a safe point in her cycle, maybe she can’t have kids full stop, or maybe when she said, ‘It’s
okay,’ she meant,
Hey, we love each other, don’t we? I want kids, I love kids, and I think you’d make an amazing father, so let’s allow nature to take its course.
And while this rapid inventory of possibilities was blurring through my brain, we were naked, aroused, Ivy’s hands were clasped at the back of my head, she was kissing my neck, pulling me to
her, raising her hips to meet mine and grinding herself against me – which kind of skews the decision-making process. And, yes, I do love her – not to be confused with the more
frivolous
being in love
; that too, obviously, but something more fundamental than that. My dad, romantic poet that he is, calls it ‘running as fast as you can’ – the
certain knowledge, deep inside yourself, that you are operating at maximum capacity in the love department. I’ve seen Ivy around children, the way she engages, listens and responds to them,
the way she smiles when she’s with them and the way that smile doesn’t fade after they’ve left the room. She adores children; they sense it and then bounce it back. She makes them
feel special, because to her they are. It’s a part of what I love about her. And she is sexy and beautiful and we’re naked and hot and sweaty and . . . well, what the hell. It seemed
like a good idea at the time.
    We made love, twice, and (rather appropriately, it seems) I slept like a baby. It wasn’t until maybe three and a half minutes after I woke the following morning that I experienced, if such
a thing is possible, a minor panic. I’d known this woman, in a professional capacity, for a little over a month. Beyond that, and before our biologically blasé lovemaking, we had
probably spent a total of two hours absolutely alone with each other. So honestly, William Fisher, what the hell were you thinking, having unprotected sex with someone that amounts to little more
than a complete bloody stranger?
    Ivy stirred beside me, rolled over, smiled, stroked my face and we made love again. Our relationship proper was approximately twelve hours old at this point and, cuddling on the crumpled sheets,
it seemed churlish, presumptuous and extremely unromantic to bring up the subject of children.
    I placed the potential consequences into a small box and placed the box, locked now, in a closet in a room in a poorly lit corner of my mind. That was twenty-five days ago, and in the hundreds
of hours I have spent with Ivy since then, not one single thing caused me to doubt the wisdom of my foolishness. Once or twice or maybe a handful of times, I’ve found myself walking towards
the room in the corner of my mind, but I never lingered and I never opened the door. Because what would that achieve? Of course, in the five days since we drove back from Dad’s, it’s
been apparent that something was off, but the worst-case scenario my inner pessimist came up with was not gaining a baby, it was losing an Ivy.
    Sitting outside the artisan coffee house in Wimbledon, Ivy still hasn’t shared her ‘news’. And maybe, after all