Claudia Carroll - Love Me Or Leave Me

Yet there she was in the photo, in that cheap little maxi dress from Penny’s, long bedraggled hair down to her bum, arms locked tight around Kirk, looking adoringly into his gentle, brown eyes. With their whole lives in front of them, rolling out like a red carpet.

Feck’s sake, sure we’re just a pair of kids in this photo, she thought, sudden anger flooding through her. And the problem now is we’re all grown up, just in two very different directions.

Dawn even looked a bit different these days. While Kirk still looked exactly the same today as he had in the wedding photo, the past few years had changed her dramatically. Well, she’d had to evolve a bit, didn’t she? After all, there was only so much tree hugging and chakra realigning a person could do, without realizing that was hardly going to pay the rent and keep them both in mobile phone subscriptions and Sky Plus.

Besides, Dawn had by now been promoted to manager of Earth’s Garden, the health food store she worked in and was pulling in a not-too-shabby wage these days. So of course, she needed to look the part. Plus she’d recently discovered a tiny niche in the market for spelt muesli, to great encouragement from Kirk, who’d help out with the business whenever he wasn’t teaching his yoga class. And now she was importing it in herself and selling it through the store for a nifty return.

NLE Enterprises, the two of them jokingly called her tiny, fledgling company. Nice Little Earner. Kirk had even talked her into donating a hefty percentage of their profits towards a goat farm outside Nairobi. Mind you, left to Dawn, she’d have been far happier using the cash to move to a better flat, but then Kirk did have a point. After all, one goat farm in Africa could keep a whole village going. And it was the right thing to do, the ethical thing.

Wasn’t it?

Anyway, these days Dawn acted and dressed like what she’d grown into, an up-and-coming owner of a small but steadily growing business. Out with all the hippy-dippy long, flowing clobber he used to love on her and in with neat work trousers and crisp white shirts from Zara.

In the early days, Kirk used to laugh at her and tell her she looked a bit like she was going out to repossess a house, but she’d noticed even that gentle teasing had completely ground to a halt of late. Like he barely even noticed her now. Yet another sign something was up. Just her bad luck, she thought bitterly, that it wasn’t what she’d automatically assumed. The first conclusion any wife in similar circumstances would jump to.

Dawn allowed herself one final glance down at her wedding photo. With almost digital clarity, she could remember how stung she’d been that day at all the nasty, sniping comments streaming incessantly from ‘her side’; her mother and sister Eva, not to mention all her mates from work. The way they kept on griping because nothing about the commitment ceremony had been right for them; all they could do was find fault wherever they looked.

But right at this moment, if she could go back in time, Dawn honestly thought that instead of allowing them all to get to her, instead she’d have berated the lot of them from the bottom of her hot little heart for letting her go through with it in the first place. Jesus, she’d only been twenty-two years of age! She hadn’t the first clue what she was letting herself in for! Instead of moaning about the hemp wine, the lack of a DJ playing Beyoncé and the general crappiness of the sitar music, her mother and sister, not to mention all her pals, should have physically arm-wrestled her to the floor rather than letting her go through with it.

As for her? She must have been out of her mind not to realize this day would eventually dawn. Just not in this way. And not for the love of God, like this.

Peeling herself off the sofa, Dawn began to haul her packed suitcases as far as the door so she’d at least be ready when her taxi arrived. Then a quick, last minute spot check around the place, to make sure she hadn’t left anything important behind. She tried to distract herself with petty, inconsequential stuff, like checking whether she’d remembered to pack shampoo, the charger for her phone and the last of the Hobnobs, just because they were Kirk’s favourites and it would bloody well serve him right.

But whether she liked it or not, shockwaves kept searing through her like some kind of laser. She couldn’t keep it out; it wouldn’t stop intruding.

Of course, she blamed herself for not bloody well copping on sooner. For not guessing the truth, before it had to be spelled out to her. For God’s sake, it had been exactly ten months, three weeks and four days since Kirk had even looked at her as anything other than a flatmate and pal! She could quite literally pin the last time they’d slept together down to a date. Was she really naïve enough to think that the two of them were sailing blissfully towards their silver wedding anniversary?

Even though her brains were like mince right now, that particular date still stuck like a limpet in her addled mind on account of it had been his birthday. Not many people could tell you exactly when they first suspected something was seriously up with their marriage, but she’d been able to sense as far back as then, that something wasn’t right. She could practically smell it.

After all this was Kirk, who’d at one stage been so unbelievably passionate, exulting in her body, barely able to keep his hands off her. He wasn’t even particularly bothered if the two of them happened to be out in public, something he tended to view as little more than a challenge to be overcome and nothing more. (Quite literally. And Dawn just thanked Christ the deer in the Phoenix Park wouldn’t ever talk and left it at that.)

Ten months, three weeks and four days for a man who’d always been so physical and loving and … no other word for it … experimental in bed, she thought sadly. And God knows, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t made an effort. Over her dead body was she just allowing the two of them to slide into this new routine of long bedtime chats, laughs, giggles and then maybe a friendly cuddle before drifting off to sleep. Like some kind of middle-aged ’auld ones who’d slid into not having sex any more and instead just worried about their two point four kids and the variable mortgage.

Not a chance, this gal wasn’t going down without a protracted fight. She’d more than done her bit to try and spice things up between them, hadn’t she? She’d tried her level best to recapture their first heady days and months together, when it was all sex and talking and still more talking and then rolling over for yet another bout of furious, unquenchable lovemaking. Surely no counsellor or therapist could fault her on that score?

Flushing a bit in mortification now, Dawn thought back to what a naïve eejit she must have seemed back then. How she’d forked out on all that highly uncomfortable hooker underwear, then shoehorned herself into it, in the vain hopes that the sight of her kitted out like something from a porno movie might reignite that old spark in Kirk. After all, before they’d ever met, he’d had legions of girlfriends and a tiny part of Dawn always worried that sex-wise, she didn’t quite measure up.

But no, nothing doing. Instead, he’d just look her up and down, smile lazily up at her and ask whether or not those knickers felt like wrapping her nether regions up in dental floss and why wasn’t she howling in agony anyway?

Then of course, Kirk would do what he was starting to excel at lately; turn it all into a joke and pull her in for a cuddle, as the two of them just slid companionably back into their old routine. They’d always been best friends, but whereas back in those incredible early days, they’d been lovers first and best friends second, lately they’d settled into being just each other’s closest pal. And that was where it ended.