The Box Under the Bed – Part 1: The Conversation

Rowan was only looking for his other running shoe.

It had gone missing on Monday. By Thursday, he had searched the whole flat, the car, the cupboard under the stairs and, in a moment of desperation, the fridge. The only place left was under the bed.

He lay on his stomach on the bedroom floor with his phone torch and found the shoe, covered in dust, right at the back.

Next to it was a box.

It was a plain black box, about the size of a shoebox, tied with a red ribbon. A card was tucked under the ribbon. On the card, in Tessa’s handwriting, it said:

Ro. Only if you want to. No pressure. Ever. — T.

He stared at it.

Then he did what any sensible man would do. He put it back exactly where it was, slid the shoe out, and spent the next three hours pretending nothing had happened.

---

Tessa came home at six with Thai takeaway and found him sitting on the sofa, very straight, with his hands on his knees.

“Hi,” she said. “Why do you look like you’re at a job interview?”

“I found my shoe,” said Rowan.

“Oh, great! Where was it?”

“Under the bed.”

Tessa stopped halfway out of her coat.

There was a long, terrible silence. Somewhere outside, a tram rattled down the hill. The Thai takeaway sat on the kitchen counter, steaming gently.

“Under the bed,” Tessa repeated.

“Right at the back.”

“Did you,” she stopped. Her face had gone very pink. “Did you see anything else? Under the bed?”

“There might,” said Rowan, carefully, “have been a box.”

Tessa put both hands over her face and made a sound like a kettle.

---

It took them twenty minutes and most of the Thai food to be able to talk about it.

“I was going to give it to you,” Tessa said, curled up at the other end of the sofa, still pink. “I’ve had it for two months. I kept chickening out.”

“Two months?”

“I bought it after that conversation. The one at Christmas. When we’d had too much wine, and you said,” she stopped.

Rowan remembered. Christmas night, on the balcony, the two of them a bit drunk and very honest, talking about fantasies for the first time in five years. He had admitted, laughing, embarrassed, that he’d always been curious about her being in charge. Completely in charge. Including things he’d never said out loud to anyone.

She had gone quiet. He’d thought he’d made a mistake. They had never mentioned it again.

“I thought I’d freaked you out,” he said.

“You didn’t freak me out.” Tessa looked at her knees. “You made me think about it for two months.”

“Think about it how?”

She looked up at him. Her eyes were very bright.

“Ro,” she said. “I really, really liked the idea.”

---

They didn’t open the box that night.

Instead, they talked. Really talked, for the first time in a long time. About what he was curious about and what scared him. About what she wanted and why. About whether it meant anything about who he was, which it didn’t, Tessa said firmly, any more than her liking to be in charge meant anything about who she was, except that she liked it.

“What if I hate it?” Rowan asked.

“Then you say stop, and we stop, and we never do it again, and I still love you exactly the same.”

“What if you hate it?”

“Then I say stop.” She smiled. “And you make me cheese on toast, because that’s what I’ll need.”

He laughed, and some of the tightness in his chest let go.

“We need a word,” Tessa said. “A real one. Not stop, because people say stop in a fun way sometimes. Something we’d never say by accident.”

Rowan thought for a moment.

“Kiwi,” he said.

“We live in New Zealand. People say kiwi forty times a day.”

“Okay. Pavlova.”

Tessa burst out laughing. “Pavlova?”

“Nobody says pavlova by accident.”

“Fine,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Pavlova. If either of us says pavlova, everything stops. No sulking. No questions. Cheese on toast.”

“Deal.”

She held out her hand. He shook it, very formally. Then she didn’t let go.

“Saturday,” Tessa said. “If you still want to by Saturday. And Ro, I mean it. If you change your mind, even at the last second, that’s completely fine.”

He looked at her, his partner of five years, pink-cheeked and nervous and brave, holding his hand on a sofa covered in Thai takeaway containers.

“I won’t change my mind,” he said.

---

Next: Part 2, Pavlova. Saturday night, a lot of nerves, a lot of laughing, and the morning after.