I lay in his bed high from the edible and was delighted to realize I had the ability to whip myself into a sexual tizzy while we texted. I hadn’t really been horny all day even though he had dropped many unsubtle hints at his intentions for that night. He was grabbing tacos on the way back to his house where I had been all day, working mostly. I had stayed there the last few days – which was usually a reprieve from the reality of my life. Usually, it felt so nice to stretch out in that house and feel as if I were an adult – with a place of my own to traipse around in naked if I felt like it. But over the last few months, I’d begun to feel repelled by that space. The house that was kind of ours for a little while.
After we broke up and began fucking again, I would stay there and feel inspired by his dirty laundry and messy kitchen. I would fall easily into the fantasy of being his wife, how lovely it would be for that place to be ours. Really ours this time, now that I was better behaved, now that I appreciated what had been given to me, now that I understood my place on the team. I would clean and fold and pretend I still lived there, I considered it an act of faith. I was digging my ditches. Surely God would smile down upon me, he would see that I couldn’t bear to live without this; he would bless me with a miracle.
The fantasy floated me until it was time to leave, time for his daughters to return. Time for me to disappear again, into the background of his life. Into the reality that I had nowhere to call my own.
I was sexually aggressive in my texts. I knew we had to do it right when he got back – before we ate the tacos – before the mood escaped me. The unspoken agreement between us was that we were having sex that night and I didn’t want to feel guilty if I ended up turning him down. I had to capitalize on this feeling.
I came hard, hard enough to be quite loud, actually. He came a few seconds later, spurred by the slow contractions still happening inside of me. I kept him inside me and collapsed lazily onto his chest, feeling nothing.
This moment was supposed to be tender, moments like these were supposed to be tender. And what struck me was that I would normally want to lay my head on his shoulder and to breathe him in, but I didn’t want to. Or at least I had become numb to it. Conditioned.
In that dreamy, yearning state I was usually in after climaxing, I would have stayed on the fence, too afraid to fully commit to the gesture of affection. I would wait in vain for him to give me a sign that it would be well received. My whole body would ache for his love, for him to embrace me in a way I could actually feel. To let me know what we had just done had brought us closer instead of just being what any two people can do. Previous attempts had been met with rote reciprocations or nothing at all.
And I have long been hypervigilant of my effect on others. To feel as if my fervor is too much cracks a whip inside my chest that returns me to a safe distance. I need only the faintest hints of unrequited energy to back away and I pride myself on my ability to save face. I had felt for some time that turning towards him in these moments, to nuzzle, to connect, would almost be rude, an invasion of his post-coital space. I was a burdensome woman, no different from any other.
All of this was our new normal; swallowing my pain and refusing the thoughts I couldn’t handle was my new normal. But on this night, those cravings had left me. Needing them answered by him, at least. I felt the lameness of it all. I appreciated the orgasm but I felt numb in this barren space. My heart’s keeper lay elsewhere.
Chasing the Fox 