This document is a short story told in 5 pages. It describes a woman, Grace, spending the night with her ex-husband after reconnecting as friends. They have an intimate encounter, but he abruptly leaves her during their act. She hears him talking to another woman and realizes he has a partner. His partner then enters the bedroom and sees Grace in bed. Grace flees the apartment in shock and confusion, realizing she made a mistake in trusting her ex-husband again.

1. 3 am
by
Monica Clarke
Caillou de Cogulot
24500 Eymet
France
Tel: +33 9 54 32 55 31
Email: monicaclarke@edev.org.uk
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2. 3 am
He was still the only man who knew how to find her deepest liquid self. She
trembled, trying to push herself up to him deep inside her. Her eyes level with his hairy
chest, she wondered, fleetingly, where his firm stomach muscles had gone. Might they still be
there somewhere, hidden under the fat which shuddered under her arms as he came down
into her?
Suddenly he rolled over, out of her, just as a wave of completion rose up, stopping it.
Before she knew what had happened, he was up, out of bed, reaching for his dressing gown,
rushing through the door.
Her anger was instant, all-consuming. It boiled over her throbbing insides, flushing
hot blood over her cheeks. Tears welled up, forcing her to close her eyes. Her rebuffed body
went rigid as two hot tears cursed down the sides of her upturned face into her ears.
Through her distress and anger she heard voices, his voice and another’s, on the other side
of the now closed bedroom door.
Grace lay suspended in a pool of rejection. Slowly the fear, which she had been
suppressing all evening, clawed its darkness back into her mind, shadowing even her anger.
He was, after all, her ex-husband, she had told herself all evening, when she had
known that they’d end up in bed together after all those years of fighting and hatred. They
had talked about their old irritations which, after seven years, had lost their intensity in some
parts, as old curtains lose their colour in places exposed to the sun of experience and
hardship. They had laughed about the insipidness of their silly jealousies and they had
become friends again. Or so she’d thought.
Between kisses and foreplay the second half of the bottle of Chardonnay had
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3. disappeared into both of them unnoticed, and suddenly the bottle had been empty. This she
remembered. She also remembered running eagerly past her clothes and shoes, leaving them
in a pile on the floor in the sitting room. Naked evidence still lying there.
But that did not matter. What did matter was that she had just given herself to a man
whom she had vowed never to allow into her inner emotions, or self, ever again. She had
failed herself. She had allowed him to reach her.
Without a condom.
‘We’ve known each other a long time,’ she remembered him whispering in her ear,
‘we go back a long way, Grace,’ he’d side-stepped her request that they use a condom, and
she nodded agreement as she sipped the wine.
And after all that, he’d just jumped up, out of her, his body still glistening with –
what she had been sure of, was still sure of – his need of her. He had rejected her.
A wave of hatred swept away the fear.
Suddenly the bedroom door flew open. Grace lay rigid. A woman’s voice came in
ahead of a big body, which Grace could see in the full-length mirror on the other side of the
bed. Then the woman came around the wardrobe and saw Grace.
Grace was shocked. She did not try to sit up in bed, just pulled the covers closer
around her naked body.
The woman stared into Grace’s face, but did not seem to notice her. Grace realised
with amazement that the woman was so comfortable with her surroundings and confident
within herself, that another woman, naked in bed in front of her was just a small matter. An
irrelevance, which could be sorted out later, not important right then.
The woman put an overnight bag on the chest of drawers facing the bed, and for an
instant turned her well-corseted fourteen stone buttocks to Grace inside a tailored burgundy
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4. suit. Then she turned back to face Grace, white teeth showing between perfect lips, painted
a very dark colour, a shade darker than her almost navy velvet skin. Her recently permed hair
flamed out in an attractive black cloud above smooth skin stretched tightly over high
cheekbones.
‘You can take the spare room,’ she said to Grace with a slight smile, not the least bit
perturbed, not curious.
Grace jumped up, folding the bedcovers around her small forsaken frame, and fled
from the bedroom. She came level with the women’s close-set sparkling black eyes as she
pushed herself past the other’s bulk through the door. The woman’s naturally smiling lips
curled up into a full-blown smile as she stared past Grace at the figure of their mutual man,
now standing facing the bedroom in knee-length shorts twisted in a hurried angle of panic
around a bulky middle.
It was three in the morning.
Grace’s purse was still lying on the couch where she had dropped it an hour earlier,
before her short-lived surrender into evasive ecstasy. The alcohol, typical coward that it was,
had fled, taking its pleasant fuzziness with it, leaving her head throbbing, her mouth dry. She
felt cold, her body having left its heat behind in the bedroom, to warm up the intimate
murmur behind the once again closed door.
Her rejection was complete. She sat down on the couch, inside the big duvet, pulled
her feet up under her, too tired and confused to know what to do.
After a few minutes he appeared. Bile rushed into her throat and her head screamed
at her. She swallowed hard.
‘Sorry,’ be began, throwing out his arms, and the sight of the pathetic, trembling flab
of the middle-aged failure of her one-time man swept like a panacea over her nausea.
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5. She felt sorry for him, sorry for herself, for her foolishness. In fact, more fed-up with
her stupidity than with his carelessness.
Wearily Grace threw on her dress, stuffing her knickers and bra into her bag.
‘I did not expect her,’ she heard him mumble from under an overgrown moustache
as the front door slammed behind her tired back.
She stopped to put on her shoes only when she had turned the corner into the high
street to hail a taxi.
As she got into the cab, she realised that she’d left her purse behind.
end
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