Exposure by Talitha Stevenson Page A

use of was the row of work shirts neatly ironed by his cleaning lady. And yet he regularly ordered sweatshirts and chunky sweaters online—like posthumously acquired souvenirs of his leisurely early twenties. Just three years before he had not needed to plan a four-day skitrip six months in advance. He would have crammed those chunky sweaters into an overnight bag, chucked in some Rizla, a bottle of vodka—and then off.
    Now the days passed quickly between lifting off the duvet and folding the duvet over himself again. He was beginning to see why people wanted a family. You could want a family solely because it was something that wouldn't go off or go out of fashion before you had time to notice it.
    He ran his hands over the shelf of T-shirts and pulled out one that he had worn during his gap-year. It had a picture of a spliff on the front. He remembered standing under the clock at Waterloo, while he waited for his father to collect him, holding his surfboard, vowing never to shave off his beard, never to get stuck in a normal job. Ludo laughed about this lost idealism, but he, like most of his friends, was still embarrassed to have proved so ordinary, and quickly changed the subject if ever it came up.
    But he did not really think for a moment that he could have acted differently. How else could you afford to live in London, be a member of a good gym, have a decent car? He wondered why his sister, Sophie, still dreamt of going back to India, to the places she had visited at eighteen. Surely they would not be the same now. Backpacking was dirty, European hotels were nice; these were axioms of adult reasoning.
    But he had still not shaken off the belief that Sophie's excellent grades, her grade-eight violin and piano, meant she had a firmer grip on reality than he did. Where he suspected her of sentimentality or nostalgia, he found his judgement encroached on by a sense that he might simply have missed the point. She was always saying that to him, after all: 'You're missing the point, Lulu. You're not hearing what I'm telling you. You hear cliches.'
    Normally, having remembered this crushing observation, he would have been tempted to brood, but just then his mind could not stay still: it felt pursued and aggravated. He slapped his hand against his forehead and wondered if he had ever actually felt physical desire before, because this, what he felt now, was close to humiliating. Again and again he thought of going into the sitting room, waking Arianne and offering her his car, his salary,
anything,
if she would let him take off her clothes—just her
jeans,
even — and run his mouth up between her legs. It didn't matter if she did anything to him really—not right away. First he just wanted to kneel down in front of the sofa with the weight of those beautiful legs over his shoulders, those thighs cushioning his cheeks, his lips and tongue lost to her taste and smell—and to watch her face, to watch what
he
could do to her face.
    But why on earth would she let him? And why had he never wanted to do this to Lucy?
    He looked at the T-shirt in his hands, unsure how long it had been since he had touched it.
Two years? We
don't have time to touch the things we own, he thought. And then he felt close to tears.
    'Hey? Is it making you feel funny, too?' Arianne said. She was leaning on the wall by the doorway. 'The painkillers are making me feel funny. Maybe it's because of the champagne. She said not to drink, didn't she—the doctor?'
    He imagined she had caught him looking through her clothes, rather than his own, and hurriedly put back the incriminating T-shirt. 'What is it? Do you feel sick?' he said.
    'Sick? No—no. Not that kind of funny...' It was never 'that kind of funny' with her. She could profoundly understate herself at the least expected moment. She used words associated with mild physical sensation to describe deep emotional change.
    'Does your head hurt?'
    'No ... not that kind of funny at