“So tell me about this one.” Winston tapped the list, which he’d laid on the counterpane between them. “This ‘everything but.’?”
The laurel crown had long since fallen from her head, and without it her hair had been getting progressively more expansive, so that now, backlit by the bedside lamp, it formed a dynamic ball around her head, haloed at the edges.
“What do you want to know?”
“Why did you put this down, specifically?”
It had occurred to him today, in one of the idle moments he was meant to have been working, that everything he’d written on the list was there for a reason. Not simple, bucket-list, I’ve-never-done-this-before reasons, but deeper ones that had to do with how he’d been hurt in his marriage, or how he’d hurt his wife.
It seemed to him if they were going to unpack their boxes of hurt together physically, it would be prudent to know what was there psychically first.
Allie traced the stitching of the counterpane with her fingernail. She glanced at him briefly. “You know how you’re with someone for a long time, and you fall into routines. Like, sexual routines.”
“Yes.”
“So you know how to get them off, and they know how to get you off. There’s some simple way to go straight from A to B to C to bam!” She smacked the bed, setting the list askew, and looked right into his eyes. “Matt and I got together in college. I didn’t have a lot of experience with anybody else, and neither did he. We found those routines, and we just stuck there. Like, we stuck there.”
“I could say the same for Rosemary and I.”
“Yeah?”
“Not in the first years, but after Bea came along…after we bought the house.”
She nodded, her eyes back on the stitching. “I think it happens a lot. And it’s not so terrible, you know, to have those routines. You get off, he gets off, afterward you feel like you did something that was about the two of you, to bind you together. Unless you decide, sometime along the way…I don’t know. That the routine is good enough. That you don’t really need to think about doing anything else, because it’s for other people.”
She met his eyes again. “It never stopped bothering me, especially after we got engaged. I kept thinking we were going to do this one kind of sex, forever.”
“Did you ever try to change that?”
Rosemary had. He remembered the anniversary when she’d booked a night in a theme hotel for married couples. Their room had been decorated as a cave, with an enormous bearskin rug by the fire and three bottles of his favorite wine awaiting t
heir arrival. A room for wild, uninhibited sex.
Winston simply hadn’t been able to access, anymore, the version of himself who’d once been wild and uninhibited.
It pained him to remember Rosemary’s disappointment with his response. She’d cried quietly in the toilet, and he pretended not to know.
“A few times,” Allie said. “But it was hard to get the courage up, and he always had so many reasons not to be interested in things. He negged the sex toys I showed him online, or lectured me on how porn is degrading. Like there was something wrong with wanting to try stuff and find out if it felt degrading.”
Head bent, she traced the shape of a flower on the counterpane. Her shoulder strap was a thin strand of glittering ice against her skin, and he reached for it, traced the line from the knob of her shoulder to the point where the two halves of the top came together between her small breasts.
“I started to dread sex. Especially because…the routine didn’t have a lot of foreplay? Just the closet light, and he’d be in bed without any clothes on, so I’d get in bed without my clothes on, in the dark, kind of braced. I’d try not to be so rigid, you know, because it was important that we have this. But it was hard being…He was always on top. Kissing me, and touching me, and I’d try to make myself relax and give into it so I could enjoy it.” Winston hooked his finger inside the fabric and slid it back across the path he’d traveled, glancing over the top of her breast, beside her collarbone. She looked at him, then away. “I like sex. It was always possible, eventually, to make myself be ready for him to be inside me. But that part when I had to talk myself into it inside my head, while it was already happening.”
“It sounds completely horrid in every way.”
“I always felt so much better about things after, though.”
He knew this feeling, too. Thought of Rosemary in the white cotton nightgowns she favored during the hot months. Reading beside each other in bed. The nights he would turn off his lamp early, before she’d fallen asleep with a book on her chest, and roll to his side to look at her face. The acceptance he would see in her eyes, or the pinch to her mouth that forecast the excuse she was about to make.
Completely horrid in every way.
But afterward they would spoon, and he’d feel as though a crack in the wall had been plastered over, made right.
“I don’t ever want to do that again,” Allie said. “Even if I meet someone, even if we fall into our own routine, I don’t want the closet light and the dark, and I don’t want to skip all the parts that used to be exciting when they stop being exciting and tell myself it’s just because those parts are for the new couples, and I don’t need that.” Her eyes had grown fierce. She looked like a dangerous angel, and he wanted to kiss her again. Wanted the exquisite torture of her body heavy on top of his, her slippery tongue in his mouth. “I do need it. Everybody needs it.”
“I think you must be right.” He ran one hand lightly down her side. She moved closer, adjusting her body to welcome his touch.
“I know, and it’s like, I just thought, what if I tried sex without the only part that counted as sex before? I want that. I want to say ‘fuck you’ to the whole idea, too, that getting penetrated is the point of the deal, like it’s not sex if there’s not something inside me. I’m inside me. I am.”