Free How I Lost You by Jenny Blackhurst

tonight you won’t,’ Nick tells me, taking me by the elbow and leading me out to the car park. ‘I’ve already booked us in at a hotel down the road.’ He opens the passenger door of his car and practically places me inside. ‘We’ll be in bed before you know it.’ He cringes at the look that clouds my face. ‘Not together,’ he hastens to add. ‘I mean separate beds, in separate rooms. I don’t want to . . . well, not that I don’t want to . . .’ He sighs in defeat. ‘Look, it’s late and I’ve lost the ability to speak properly, so how about we head to the Travelodge and get some sleep.’
    The Travelodge is closed but Nick has had the good sense to arrange for the night porter to let us in and book us into our rooms. It’s with a huge sense of relief that I thank him again for his help, and after I manage to convince him that I’m not on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I settle into the comfortable bed and pull the covers up round my face, just like I used to do when I was a little girl. With the last couple of days’ events running through my head, I don’t expect to be able to sleep at all, but as I lay my head against the pillow my eyes close automatically and I drift away in an instant.

13
    The room is cold.
    Which room? Where am I? Is the room cold or am I cold? I don’t open my eyes, I can’t open them. For now my world is confined to my other four senses.
    Smell. I can smell the fresh, citrusy scent of the shake and vac I regularly use on the carpet to cover the cloying smell of baby sick. There’s something else: a male scent, a man that isn’t my husband. An expensive scent that smells cheap, something one of my ex-boyfriends used to steal from his dad when I was a lot younger than I am now.
    Touch. My body seems to melt into the carpet – my carpet judging by the smell – but when I try to spread my hands beneath me they won’t work; almost like I’ve forgotten how to make them perform the simple function of opening and closing. What has this man done to me? Who is he and why is he in my home?
    Focus, Susan, what else is there? Taste. Something acidic stings the back of my throat, almost a burning sensation but without the pain. My mouth is dry, like I’ve been asleep a while. I try to swallow to move some saliva around, but none comes, just that feeling I get when I’ve drunk too much the night before, like I’ve swallowed a mouldy sock.
    Was I drinking last night? I can’t grasp at the last thing I can remember, how I have come to be sleeping on my sitting room floor rather than in my bed with a funny taste in my mouth and another man’s scent in my nostrils. I try to focus on sound but the room is silent, another sense that has betrayed me. Have I gone blind and deaf? No, it isn’t an absolute silence – there’s just nothing to hear – and my eyes are definitely closed, I’m not blind.
    ‘She’s dead. Shit, she’s really dead.’ It might have been a minute or an hour. I feel as though I’m drifting in and out of sleep, the way I do on a long car journey, never realising how we’ve got from A to B so quickly when I’ve been awake the whole time, honest. Just resting my eyes.
    When I wake at the Travelodge the next morning, my head feels like I’ve gone ten rounds with Amir Khan and nearly every inch of me aches. I should be used to lack of sleep by now. My time with Dylan was punctuated with trips around the house in my pyjamas, rocking and shushing, praying to the gods of sleep for just one peaceful night. Afterwards, in hospital and Oakdale, my sleep was deep and dreamless – I took so many pills I hardly knew when night finished and day began – but I never woke up feeling rested. I don’t remember the last time I felt rested.
    I roll over in the luxurious king-sized bed and check the time on my phone: 9.20. I have three messages and four missed calls, which I ignore, deciding to tackle them later. I step into the spacious shower and my aching