While he was gone, I did a quick pre-sex rearrangement. I put my fingers into my knickers to check I was wet enough. Let my hair down. Rearranged myself into a more flattering position, but faux relaxed into it, so it would look like I just naturally and casually displayed myself, like a nude on a chaise longue, with my hair flowing perfectly down one shoulder. I waited.

“Sorry,” Ben called. “I need to get my erection to go down before I can piss.”

“Hurry up,” I called back, smiling. “Or I’ll start touching myself without you.”

“Fern! You’ve just made it come back!”

I laughed and plopped myself down on a cushion again. Tried to keep myself in the sexy zone, despite being able to hear Ben’s random bursts of restrained piss land in our toilet. I reached into my knickers, touching myself to keep the mood going, when his phone buzzed, lighting up on the coffee table. I decided to put it screen down, so it didn’t distract him. I leaned over to turn it around. But, when I saw Jessica’s name on his screen, my eyes went to it like a homing missile.

Jessica.

Then his phone went again. And again. More and more messages flooding in from her. At gone midnight. So many of them his phone’s lock screen wouldn’t let me see any of them, just that she’d messaged him five times in quick succession.

I started shaking, half naked on the sofa. I didn’t even know they’d swapped numbers? I’d never gone through Ben’s phone, no matter how tempting it could occasionally be. I always refrained, but Jessica... I reached out and punched the home button, breaching a cardinal relationship rule. Only the first message would show.

Jessica: Got something to show you xxx

The toilet flushed and I dropped it to the table, my hands still shaking. I tried to replicate my relaxed sexy pose, but my body was riding an adrenaline surge. Every possibility ran through my head as Ben thudded barefoot back to me. Why did he even have her number? What was she showing him? What did the other messages say? Are they meeting up without me? She was around constantly... Oh God, Ben had arrived. That look in his eye. Sex on the cards. I couldn’t be less turned on. I was too busy free-falling.

“Now,” he said in a deliberately cheesy voice, leaning toward me. “Where were we?”

I tried to kiss him back. I tried to trust him. This man, who’d spent the whole night telling me how proud he was. I trusted Ben. Didn’t I? Shouldn’t I?

I broke off for a second, put on a coy grin. “Your phone was going nuts,” I said. “When you were in the loo. Someone might be in trouble or something?”