The cold bites at my face despite the tartan scarf that comes up to my button nose and full lips. It's so cold that I even worry about Dale as he runs across the playground towards his friends, stopping once to wave at me with mittened hands, before rushing off around the corner of the school building.
This wasn't the life I'd imagined for myself back when I met my husband Joel in a swanky nightclub in London nineteen years prior. He was in finance and wealthy beyond comprehension for a young, naive girl from a quiet town. But I knew how to dress and I knew that I looked good, and that's what caught his eye. A drunken romp in his hotel room had led to a proper date, and that had led to sharing a flat and then to the wedding day from my dreams. Joel wasn't shy of telling me he like blondes with big tits and long legs, and I certainly covered all those check boxes for him.
It was a trade of sorts. He gave me security and an easy life where I didn't have to work, and in return I gave him something to put on his arm at fancy dinners, someone for his friends and colleagues to admire as I flashed a smile and perhaps a little too much cleavage. Not that Joel had ever complained - he wanted them looking at me, lusting after me. And as long as it stayed that way, at lustful looks and dangerous thoughts, he didn't care.
That was all well and good until I reached my thirties and he started worrying about his legacy. Joel was getting on at this point, seeing as he was ten years my senior, and it took two years of trying and a lot of expensive treatment until I became pregnant. He was delighted when Dale was born, and I genuinely felt the fact that we would be a family would change things for the better between us.
I was to be proved very wrong.
It was like he felt he had done his part in impregnating me, and now it was my job to raise our son until he was ready for private school - his job and the prestige it brought was the most important thing to him. His interest in me waned too, certainly now my body became a little softer and my large breasts a little droopier. Occasionally he would ask for a blowjob, and sometimes we'd even fuck - but he'd usually be drunk, and it would always leave me cold.
This is what I got, I was told gleefully by my sister, when I married for money and not love.
"Frozen, isn't it?"
My head turns and I see Chris beside me, another parent at the school that I'd become friendly with. He was a single parent to a little girl in the same class as Dale, and I'd gotten to know him after our children were put together for the end of year play last school year. Each evening they'd come back to ours to rehearse, and each night I'd gotten to know him a little better.
It was those meetings in balmy, summer nights that had made us close. He was lighthearted and sweet with none of the self-conscious attitudes I had grown used to in the circle of Joel's friends. He could make me laugh, and I realised I was crushing on him just a little bit. It might have even been reciprocated - there had certainly been lingering touches and looks, but never more than that.
It wasn't too much of a surprise that I had taken a liking to him. He was younger than me by five years, but he didn't look it. His jet black hair was greying on the sides and his thick beard had the same streaks of white in it. He looked manly though - today he was wearing a thick coat displaying the top of his green flannel shirt, and his face was weathered and cracked from his job as a tree surgeon. Essentially the opposite of Joel, who had almost as many face products as I did - I wasn't even sure whether Chris knew what moisturiser was.
"Just a little," I respond, tucking myself deeper into my wool coat and eyeing him with blue eyes. "Not working today?"
Chris shakes his head at me, but his concentration is on Ellie as she waves happily at him and he waves back just as enthusiastically. "No, not today. I've got a job in place to manage the conifer for one of your neighbours in the next few days though."
I pause and try to think of who that might be. "Carol?" I ponder aloud, and he turns his kind eyes to me with a nod.
"Aye, Ms. Bruce."
"It needs doing."
He smirks from the corner of his mouth. "Not a fan?"
I give a shrug that is barely noticeable under my many layers. "Joel isn't."
Chris barks a laugh and turns back to the playground. "No, I don't suppose he would be."
The two of them didn't get along. It wasn't an outright dislike; it wasn't like they would ever come to blows. They were just two very different people, with very different life experiences and expectations. That, and Joel hadn't been especially fond of how close we'd gotten earlier in the year, so for the most part they avoided one another, and that suited both just fine. Not that Joel worried about Chris as a threat - his thoughts would be what did a tree surgeon have that could possibly entice me.
"Fancy a brew?" he suggests. "Coffee shop around the corner. Looks like you need it too, if I'm brave enough to be honest."
I glare at him then, ready to tell him where to stick his honesty, but there's only kindness in his eyes. Only ever kindness. With a dejected sigh I nod.
"Not the coffee shop though. I don't like their coffee. I have some nice stuff at home if you fancy that? " I suggest, the expensive tastes I'd gotten used to after nearly two decades clear.
"Joel not home?"
I roll my eyes at him. "No, he's working. He's always working."
We leave the school premises and form a small convoy for the five minutes to my large home. It's this stretch of the day that I hate the most, between Dale going to school and him returning home. The loneliness of a housewife with few friends and little to do around the house because of the collection of cleaners Joel hires.
