His Baby

I giggle again because the stuff on Lifetime is so saccharine that sometimes you can feel the sugar dripping through your veins. But no, I haven’t started on those movies.

“It’s not that,” I said with a smile. “It’s just that … well, what do you call it if you’re acting out the scenes from a romance novel? Like I’m reading along … but also doing it, do you get what I mean?”

This time, the muffin falls from Leonie’s fingers altogether as her eyes grow wide.

“You’re what?” she sputters. “What do you mean?”

I nod, helping myself to some more butter.

“That’s right,” I say smugly. “Mace and I do that sometimes. We pick a passage that we want to re-enact, and then go through it detail by detail. One step at a time, hot and dirty, or slow and sinful, if you get what a mean. It’s am-a-zing.”

Leonie’s jaw is practically on the ground now and her eyes bug out.

“You must be kidding,” she breathes. “You guys do that? But it’s so dirty. And trust me, I’ve read Fifty Shades of Grey. Are you even doing that? You know, with the paddling and bondage and stuff?”

I giggle a little.

“Maybe,” is my mysterious answer.

Leonie’s eyes practically bug out now.

“You’re shitting me,” she whispers. “You, Little Miss Straight A Student, are getting it down with whips and chains and floggers? Just like in the movies? Do you let him tie you up?”

Now I have to stop her.

“Okay, not really,” I say with a laugh. “We’re not some crazy BDSM people, but yeah, we experiment. What’s wrong with having a little fun? Besides, with the right man, anything’s possible. Here, let me get you our latest book,” I say, standing up to make my way to the bookshelf. There are at least fifty dog-eared copies of various romance novels lined up in no particular order, and I seize one that has a picture of Fabio (who else?) on the cover. On this cover, he’s a cowboy with a sweet girl clutching one of his muscled thighs while looking up at him adoringly.

“Here you go,” I say, sliding the book over to her on the table. “Check out scene number two in Chapter Seven. The one where they use the lasso. We did that one last night.”

But Leonie’s staring at the cover. She doesn’t pick it up.

“Mel,” she says in a scandalized whisper. “I know you read your books over and over again which is why they’re pretty beat up. But is that a semen stain on the cover?”

I look down immediately and to my embarrassment, oh god, there’s a white splotch at the bottom left corner, right where the cover joins the spine. The paper’s buckled and wrinkly, and if I had to bet, the pages are stuck together just a teeny-weeny bit. Come to think of it, they’re probably glued solid seeing how Mace blasted last night, his roar deafening in my ears.

Because that’s how my man and I do it. We live out our fantasies with one another, always finishing with an ecstatic climax. So he’ll be my cowboy, my swashbuckling buccaneer, my gorgeous Highlander, so long as he gets to finish in one of my holes. And I’ll be his slutty princess, his doll, his plastic sex toy, so long as he fills me up until I’m moaning and creaming. You can see how most of our interactions end.

But there’s a deeper side to all of this. Because one, we want to get pregnant, and so it’s great that our sex life is off to the races. The more we do it, the better, and my man has gallons of virility to spare. Second, Mace knows he’s dying. Not dying, dying, per se, but he’s not doing serious treatment for his cancer. Instead, he’s spurned Western medicine and takes some homeopathic shit that probably does nothing. I couldn’t believe he was going down this route at first, and it was a tough talk to have.

“I can’t let you do this,” is my firm voice as I survey the box he’s brought home. My eyes squint while reading the fine print. “There’s nothing in these but some echinacea and orange blossom. That stuff’s for treating colds, not prostate problems.”

Mace takes the box from me wordlessly before opening it and popping a tan-colored pill.

“So?” he asks. “It’s been working,” he says, voice steely and determined. “Do I look like a man who’s sick?”

And I have to admit that he looks healthy as a horse. In fact, my lover’s practically bursting with vitality, his muscles rock hard and firm, standing tall and proud. And for sure, he’s virile. Mace gets it up two or three times a night, if not four or five.

But that’s the thing. There’s an element of the needy to our loving. It’s like he knows he has limited time on the Earth, and thus craves my body again and again until the grey light of morning.