Rosie moves forward to help and they’re both soon shaking with laughter as Anna puts her head through the wrong hole so when she pulls the costume up, her enormous breasts are forced out either side of the fabric. They’re hanging like water balloons, almost under her armpits, and Anna slides her goggles on and while Rosie doubles over, stamping her foot and shaking with laughter, Anna says, ‘Perfect! Let’s swim!’
And Anna starts to walk, duck-like, tits swinging free, towards the pool.
‘God, I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed like that,’ Rosie says after their swim as she lies back on the bottom shelf of the wood-panelled sauna while Anna, breasts now safely contained, lies on the top. Anna doesn’t say anything, but Rosie knows she’s smiling, glad. She loves to make people laugh. Rosie bubbles up with giggles again before they both settle into a delicious, endorphin-charged quiet.
After a couple of minutes, her face just a few inches from the ceiling, Anna says, ‘You said you had something you wanted to talk about?’
For a moment, Rosie can’t remember what it was she’d wanted to discuss with Anna, but then the weird disquieted feeling blooms up in her again. ‘How often do you and Eddy have sex, Anna?’
Above her, Anna laughs.
‘Quite an opener,’ she says, but Anna doesn’t squirm like Rosie when sex is mentioned. ‘Umm. Once a week, every Sunday. He reads the papers, I read the supplements and then we have sex.’
‘How about you guys?’ Anna asks back.
‘We’re going through a bit of a dry spell, actually. I’m just kind of trying to get back into it, I guess.’
‘Oh, babe.’ Anna twists around, peering down at Rosie between the slats. ‘That’s so normal, especially with young kids. I wouldn’t worry about that. How often do you have sex?’
Rosie feels her veins leap before rushing with shame. She’s never talked with anyone about the drought, only argued with Seb about it. She can’t go straight in with the truth. She needs to ease in gently. ‘Umm, maybe it’s been three months?’
Anna’s eyes widen. ‘I prescribe a maintenance shag. It’s worked for us before. Even if you don’t feel like it, gets you back on the horse as it were,’ she says with a snort of laughter.
‘Yeah,’ Rosie says, irritation nibbling at her now because all the sex she’s ever had has felt like a maintenance shag. She’d been trying to uphold and maintain some false version of herself – Rosie the sexual, generous, intimate lover – when really she had no idea who she was sexually. No idea what turned her on or even how she liked to be touched any more.
Above her Anna is quiet, so she adds, ‘Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Thanks, Anna.’
Rosie wants to ask, but could never without confessing how long it has been: is a year really
Seb acts like sex is as urgent and necessary as breathing, something that keeps him alive. Rosie is sure she used to like sex, but she’s never felt like that about it. Never felt like she’d fade away without it.
‘I remember you saying that as soon as you saw Eddy after Singapore you knew something had happened.’
Anna peers down at Rosie again, wondering why Rosie’s asking this now. This time, Rosie avoids her eye completely.
‘Yeah. I did. He stepped through the front door and I knew something had happened before he even took his coat off. He had nervous energy; he’d spent the whole flight home trying to figure out what to say, eaten up with guilt.’
‘As he should!’ Rosie adds.
‘Yeah,’ Anna agrees, wiping sweat from her brow. ‘Women’s intuition, I guess. I knew something had changed.’
‘He told you right away?’
‘Yes, right there in the kitchen, and then I threw a plate at him.’
A drop of sweat falls off Anna’s chin as she shakes her head and half smiles at the memory.
It had been on one of Eddy’s flashy business trips two years ago.
Eddy runs a company specializing in car tech design and is frequently put up in five-star hotels, encouraged to order whatever he likes at the bar. This trip had been to Singapore and the woman perched on the hotel bar stool next to Eddy laughed at everything he said. Eddy told Seb that the woman was the opposite of Anna – dark, thin, spiky. He knew she was bad for him in the way he knew smoking or having another whisky would make him feel awful the next day. But Eddy was a glutton. He couldn’t – and he didn’t – resist. The flight home was the worst day of Eddy’s life. It never crossed his mind to lie. Eddy was many things – selfish, an impossible flirt, arrogant – but he was not a liar. He could never lie to someone he loved.