he was lovely. God, he was sweet. God. God. God. This had to be the sweetest thing she’d ever felt, nothing had ever been sweeter. It was overwhelming, the feeling that this was pretty much the only thing that mattered, this being with him, this sweetness, this … communing … this … there was no good word for it.
Her fingers encircled the base of his penis and she ran her parted lips up and down him, introducing her tongue like a third lip. Her other hand traveled over his stomach, exploring. It stopped. It moved over his hips. Her palm rested lightly on his skin, as if she were testing the heat over an electric burner. The palm descended, flat. It was a wonderful feeling: skin. Her brushing back and forth was hypnotic and lulled her. With her head bowed she glanced to the side with blurred lazy vision and saw his arm lying there on the sheet. The veins were raised over the back of his hand. She liked seeing his hand there, the manliness of it, and liked the fact that it was his hand and certain, and love for his hand spread through her. It seemed so large for how narrow the forearm was. She closed her eyes and brushed over him, not hurrying. His hand was certain while he had always been uncertain. But this, she thought, this. It … was … really…
BUT HE COULDN’T empty his mind. He hadn’t seen her in so long. He’d finally gotten used to not seeing her. When last had he? Once eight months ago. Probably not two or three times in the six months before that. Her refusal to see him had been part of the continual attempt to enforce something. Not that she wasn’t right to, not that he didn’t deserve to be barred and not that it wasn’t the best thing for her and, truth be told, for him. He had himself told her she was better off without him. He himself had admitted he was a sorry bastard and that she ought to have run away in the opposite direction the moment she saw him. He was the first person to own up to that. Not that he actually thought she’d believe him. It’s easy not to believe the bad things about a person when you first meet, particularly if you’re kissing that person. But he had warned her. He couldn’t be accused of trying to put one over on her, or of pretending to be something he wasn’t. He’d let enough people down recently not to be maintaining certain illusions about himself.
Still, he wasn’t going to take the blame for everything. Not everything was his fault. Some things a person can’t help. Was it a person’s fault if he fell in love with someone else? Could he have stopped that? He couldn’t’ve helped it. How does a person help falling in love?
Or, if you were going to take first things first, how does a person help falling out of love? That was the problem before anything. He’d fallen out of love with Vanessa. He still loved her, he’d always love her, but he wasn’t in love anymore. He’d just lost it. So was it not understandable if a person found it difficult to face the excruciating fact that the person he’d fallen out of love with happened to be his fiancée?
Well, he did face it. He hung in there. And, given his reasoning, he didn’t think it so outlandish to believe that if he just stuck with her anyway she hopefully wouldn’t notice that he, the guy who used to plead with her to marry him, to the point that it became a running joke, no longer felt the same lovestruck urgency. After all, they had been together for eleven years, which made the lack of urgency not surprising, but also in a way kind of worse.
So anyway you do your best. You continue with the plan to get married—fortunately no date has been set—figuring she’ll never notice the difference and will be spared the hurt. And it might haunt you a little, but you figure deep down that this is what was bound to happen over time anyway and that one can’t stay in love like that forever. So you are pretty resolved with the situation when into your preproduction office of the movie you’ve been trying to make for the last eight years, which is finally, actually, coming together, walks a production designer named Kay Bailey who has a way of frowning at you and looking down when you speak as if she’s hearing something extra in your voice. And slowly but surely is revealed to you your miserable situation in all its miserable perspective.
THE BEDSPREAD was sloughing off the end of the bed, the white sheets were flat as paper. This is not what she’d pictured when she asked him over for lunch today. It really wasn’t. She may have changed her shirt a couple of times dressing this morning and put on lipstick, then wiped it off. It was Benjamin, after all. But she was not planning on winding up in bed. She was well aware there’d been other times in the past when she’d met him ostensibly as a friend and it had been known to evolve that some admission like I think about you still or the more direct I still want you would cause a sort of toppling of their reserve and before she knew it she’d find herself blurrily pushing him away at the same time that she was kissing him. When she finally managed to separate she would be half buttoned and unbuckled and the internal army which she’d had at attention to face him seemed to have collapsed into a dreamy, entwined heap. And, she had to admit, there’d been times when things had evolved a little further. She wasn’t perfect. But there definitely were plenty of times when she had remained polite and restrained, when they didn’t talk about matters of the heart or, to be honest, about anything important to either of them. That’s how it’d been recently, for over a year now. Or more, if she thought about it. It always helped to resist him if she were sexually in thrall with someone else. Then the troops would stay at attention, no problem.
But now, at this stage of things, she’d thought as she set out their lunch plates on the Indian bedspread which covered her plywood table, enough time had passed that she could feel safe whether there was another man or not. (At the moment, there was not.) Isn’t that what everyone said? That after enough time had passed you wouldn’t be affected anymore?
What did they know? Look at her now. With him. Time hadn’t protected her at all. Fact is, time had thrown her in the opposite direction. Look where it threw her: back in bed with the guy. And with fewer qualms about being with him than she’d ever had. Apparently time eroded misgivings, too. No one had mentioned that. No one mentioned how time saturated relations between people with more meaning, not less. None of this undressing would have happened without the passage of time.
It wasn’t exactly adding up as she’d figured.
Small tentative blips of danger appeared on her radar screen, but they were easy to ignore. The little alarms of the mind are less likely to be detected when the body is taken over by pleasure.
THE FIRST TIME he met her he was struck by something right away. She was leaning in the doorway of his office, a head with a fur-fronted hat like the Russians wear, talking to his assistant. He hardly saw her, a figure out of the corner of his eye, but that was enough. His chest felt a thump. When she walked in, he looked away. Not that she was so amazing-looking or anything, but there was something promising about her. His body felt it before he even knew what it was. Somehow his body knew she was going to change things.
She was wearing a blue Chinese jacket with all these ties on it, and when she sat down at the table she undid some of them but didn’t take off the coat. She sat and listened to him like a youth recruit listening to her revolutionary assignment. She even knew something about Central American politics. He gave her the usual spiel about the script, which of course she had read or she wouldn’t have been there applying for the job, but he had to rely on automatic because he was feeling strangely backed into himself. He felt as if most of what he
