For Better for Worse

‘Good. If you’d just like to undress, I’ll come back in a few minutes to give you your pre-med.’

Slowly, Zoe took off her clothes, her movements automatic, her eyes and mind deliberately blank.

The paper gown she had been left flapped loosely round her as she pulled it on, her skin icy cold to the touch. A welcome numbness seemed to have engulfed her, even the tormenting little voice which had haunted her so much silenced now, as though it knew that the battle was finally over.

The nurse came back. ‘All right?’ she asked her, as she took hold of Zoe’s arm and dabbed her inner elbow with a piece of antiseptic wet cotton wool.

The light from the window flashed momentarily on the needle.

Zoe stared at it as the nurse lifted her hand, focusing on it…

* * *

The flat smelled hot and stuffy… airless and alien somehow.

It was probably just the contrast between its shuttered, sunstroked windows and the clinical coldness of the air-conditioned clinic, Zoe told herself emptily, as she sat down.

The doctor had been reluctant to let her come home alone, but she had insisted, and eventually they had given way, although they had insisted on a nurse seeing her into her taxi.

Her legs still felt oddly weak and shaky, her body lethargic, heavy and tired. All she wanted to do was to crawl into bed and sleep forever. It was as though all the emotional turmoil and misery of the last few weeks had finally caught up with her, her mind and body too exhausted and drained now to go on fighting against them, craving only sleep and escape.

She was too exhausted even to bother undressing, never mind wipe away the tears which coursed silently down her face.

She had started crying in the taxi, a silent slow flow of tears that ran as ceaselessly and steadily as blood, and which were just as impossible to stem.

* * *

Ben unlocked the door and walked into the flat, checking as he saw Zoe’s bag on the table.

A sharp, cold thrill of fear pulled his body as taut as a bow. He stood silently tense, his senses alert, like an animal checking for danger.

He had known that Zoe was lying to him about staying over with her mother. Deceit wasn’t something that came easily to her, and he had been sorely tempted to end the misery for both of them by telling her that he knew the truth.

Lying awake at night, wondering who he was, this other man who had taken her from him, he had asked himself bitterly whether it was because he loved her too much that he couldn’t bring himself to do so, or whether it was because he didn’t love her enough.

Loving someone, really loving them and not merely being in love with them, surely meant putting them first, before and beyond one’s own needs and desires, and yet he wasn’t doing that… wasn’t perhaps even capable of doing it. Because, if he was, surely he would have put an end to what was happening between them.

He told himself that with all that he knew of life and people he shouldn’t have been so shocked at how quickly the corrosive acid of mistrust on his side and the death of love on Zoe’s was destroying a relationship he would once have sworn was as secure as any human relationship ever could be.

It had taken him a long time to acknowledge his love for Zoe, and even longer to accept hers for him, but, once he had done so, his commitment to her and his belief in her commitment to him had been total.

One day when the time was right, when Zoe was ready, they would marry, he had hoped. He recognised rather ruefully that there was that need within him for a legalised commitment that Zoe’s stronger sense of security and self-worth did not as yet share.

Zoe was the whole focus of his life, although he had striven not to overburden her with the intensity of his feelings, careful not to suffocate her with his love. Naïvely, perhaps, he had feared losing her through his own intensity rather than to another man.

As he focused on her handbag, he frowned, wondering what it was that had brought her home when she had so obviously planned to be with her lover.

He heard a sound from the bedroom and froze, nausea a burning acid bile inside him as he thought the unthinkable. She couldn’t surely have brought him back here, to their home… their bed…

He stared at the half-closed bedroom door, torn by two equally powerful conflicting male emotions: the first to go in there and take hold of his rival with his bare hands; the second to protect Zoe from the unexpectedness of his return, from the embarrassment and shock she would suffer and even from his disruption of her privacy with her lover; but in the end the deeper, more atavistic feeling won and he strode towards the door, thrusting it open.

Zoe was lying fully dressed on the bed, and she was alone… alone but not happy, Ben recognised, as he saw the tear-tracks on her face and the bleakness in her eyes. She looked, he thought, caught up in a wave of mingled resentment and tenderness, like a bereft, unhappy child.

What had happened? Had the man, whoever he was, let her down? Was that why she had come back here to cry all alone in their bed?

‘Zoe…’

He saw the shocked darkening, the blackness in her eyes as she turned and stared at him, struggling to sit up, one hand resting against her stomach in t