On the way home from central London with my 14-year-old son Hector, we passed the lingerie store La Perla. I stopped and looked out the window.
‘What’s the point of you getting that?’ he said. ‘Who’s going to see you in your underwear?’
‘Nobody!’ I said, moving forward. “It’s pretty, that’s all.”
He looked at me suspiciously. Although our three children knew that his father and I were separated, the fact that he had moved out again to claim the family home had muddied the waters.
Now that we were living together again, the kids thought we were a family unit once again, albeit a dysfunctional one: Nick and I had separate schedules and bedrooms.
Annabel Bond says she was obsessed with Eliot, 27, whose body she describes as “elegant, powerful and perfectly proportioned.”
Nick definitely wouldn’t have liked the fact that I’d spent last Thursday kissing 27-year-old Eliot. Nor that I’d been texting him every hour of every day since. I felt guilty, too.
In truth, I was obsessed with Eliot. He was a monster that couldn’t be controlled even by the scrutiny of my naked body in the full-length mirror in my bedroom, surrounded by old dog beds, Legos, and Barbies.
Barbie made a comparison to me that I didn’t like: unlike her, I had a chubby belly and dimpled thighs with cellulite. I hadn’t been naked with anyone since my marriage ended (except for a terrible one-night stand after a friend’s party).
It seemed impossible to show my naked body to someone much younger and fitter. But also impossible not to. I thought of Eliot every minute.
My breasts were still fine, my cheekbones too. Eliot knew I had three children; he was (hopefully) less judgmental of my physical imperfections than I was. Men tend to be.
So I started looking at hotels, deciding which one Eliot and I were going to have our first date at.
I had bought new lingerie (in the end not at La Perla, but at M&S): a black silk balconette bra and some French panties. They were the symbol of a bold new version of myself, or so I hoped.
Other arduous preparations had to be completed. I shaved, waxed and trimmed. I still couldn’t face a Brazilian wax, although I worried that Eliot had never seen pubic hair on a woman. But still the feeling of unreality persisted.
Annabel didn’t end up buying new lingerie from La Perla (pictured) but instead bought it from M&S – a black silk balconette bra and a pair of French panties.
Was I really leaving my feuding sons to spend a sexy night in west London with someone I’d met in a bar?
When we met a week later, I was again struck by the freshness of Eliot’s face, the radiance of his beauty. His thighs, clad in light jeans, spread out on the bar stool, radiated heat.
He was a different person in real life than in the text; she left longer pauses between questions and answers, she was more unknowable.
As we walked to the hotel, I was so nervous that I couldn’t speak. I was surprised that he could chat so easily. Did he do this often or was he better at hiding his feelings?
The hotel was full of hen parties. When we got to the room, there was no air conditioning, it was too close to reception and the window looked out onto an inner courtyard. Unfazed, Eliot took off his shirt and then tried to take mine off.
“We don’t have to do this now!” I said, suddenly desperate to put off the moment. “We can wait until after dinner!”
“Or we can do it now and after dinner,” Eliot said. He looked at me worriedly. ‘Does that sound good?’ Unlike (some of) the men of my generation, he wanted to make sure he had my consent. I nodded and touched his bicep.
I’d never been with anyone so fit. But it was hard to have amazing sex when I was thinking so much about trying to be sexy, sucking my stomach in, trying to show him my best angles.
I resolutely stayed on my back, not wanting my body parts to hang over him.
Eliot had no such problems: his body was elegant, powerful and perfectly proportioned.
Even if we didn’t yet know what each other liked (how different this was from the well-oiled sexual rhythm of my marriage), I was turned on by just being with him. He could have done the chicken dance and I would have had an orgasm.
Afterwards we went to Nando’s. It was the only place open. I didn’t mind, I was feeling cheerful, full of nervous energy.
I talked too much to hide the fact that we would spend the night together. Then we went back to the hotel and had sex again, twice. It was amazing, but I was still in performance mode. I made a lot of noise, maybe too much, considering our proximity to the reception.
The next morning we were uncomfortable with each other. He was asking me how Eliot saw me now. At least he had told me the night before, upon seeing that my stomach was free of stretch marks: ‘I can’t believe you have three children!’ But he was clearly very aware of our age difference.
Neither of us had ever been in a relationship like this. It wouldn’t last, it couldn’t last. It would be a passionate encounter and then we would move on.
■ Annabel Bond is a pseudonym. All names must be changed.
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