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If there was one thing Helena could be sure of, it was that the man who called himself her husband excelled at disappointing her.
Even before they’d stood at the altar and were proclaimed married in front of friends and family, the list of things that irked Helena—things that annoyed her and made her wonder what on earth she was doing—was longer than it should have been going by her usual standards in men, but Mark was devilishly charming enough to make her forget that he’d once again come back from the shops with the wrong milk or hadn’t put the washing in the tumble dryer.
At the start of it all, oh how docile he’d been.
They’d met purely by chance, a collision in Helena’s favourite bookshop, where she’d disappear between all those long study sessions for her degree and the dragging, yet fascinating courses for Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure, and wander for hours amongst the shelves. Admittedly, he’d preferred reading ‘Moby Dick’ and would never have touched her ‘Anna Karenina’ or ‘The Stranger’, and would rather have trailed after her than look for new books himself, but that was fine; it wasn’t particularly bothersome because, at the end of the day, he’d carry Helena’s stack of books all the way to her little flat, and they’d make love until the neighbours complained.
Mark was good at supporting Helena with her degree, and yet she still found time and again that she’d go over cases until she was blue in the face, memorising them, only to be asked by him the simplest of questions, for which she wouldn’t have had to spend the whole day with her nose in her notes.
He would forget about events she had written into their shared calendar, and then apologise with bouquets of roses sent to the office she worked at after graduating.
Helena found it annoying that Mark had the habit of always just showing up just on time, that he would leave cupboards open. Drawers half shut. His shoes in the middle of the hallway despite the shoe rack being less than three feet away. He had once put the empty cereal box back into the cupboard, which Helena had considered such a profound act of uselessness that she had stared at it for several seconds before deciding she loved him too much to kill him.
He could remember that her old school teacher had a dog called Bertie that Helena walked to build up her savings, but not that Helena had specifically asked him to buy butter.
He could spend an entire afternoon researching the perfect restaurant for her birthday, then forget to make the reservation.
He could remember the exact wine she had liked on their honeymoon but somehow forget that she hated coriander.
He would promise, solemnly, to fix the dripping tap, and three weeks later Helena would find him standing beneath it with a screwdriver, having apparently only just remembered that he’d promised.
And then there were the grander disappointments. The anniversary he nearly forgot. The dinner he’d agreed to cook and then discovered, at six in the evening, that he was needed back in the office. The Christmas present he’d hidden so well that neither of them found it until March, which made for a horrible last-minute trip to Hamleys in the afternoon and oh, Helena will never forget the sound of her Hattie bawling her eyes out because the yearly Holiday Barbie had been sold out.
It didn’t hurt, however, that he was one of the few men she had dated who actually liked going down on her. A disastrously low bar, but if Helena was to spend at least some years of her life with someone, they better not mind eating her out
But no matter how good he was with his tongue, it didn’t do him any good when Helena walked into their house and found Mark between his therapist’s thighs, shagging the exactically screaming brunette into next Friday and Helena’s favourite throw-pillow.
As she said: an expert at disappointing.