Madly

by Ruthie Knox

  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.”

  Only a foot separated his chest from hers. Allie held the list balled in her fist. Gravity had drawn her Grecian dress into a puddle on the bed, exposing the tops of her thighs. He studied her bare feet, her legs, the dress that might have struck him as a costume on a different woman. Her chest rose and fell, her breasts half exposed.

  She was the most alive person he’d ever had the pleasure of spending a night with.

  “I’d love to do ‘everything but’ with you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s been a long time, Allie. I very much want to.”

  Her fist rose off the bed. Her arm cocked, and she pitched the list away.

  “We’re not finished with that.”

  “I’m just storing it over there, for now.” She rolled away from him. “Unzip me?”

  The dress parted and fell away, revealing the dip of her spine, freckled skin, gauzy white knickers to match her dress. He pushed the strap he could reach off her shoulder and kissed the mark it left behind.

  He tried to think of how to say what he was thinking in a manner that didn’t seem bald or crass but he couldn’t. So he simply said it. “It’s all sex. The horrid and sad. The new and…adventurous kind. And this. What you want to do.”

  She brushed the rest of her dress off of her shoulders and turned to look at him. “I know.”

  “Do you want to have sex with me?” It wasn’t as hard as he thought, to say it.

  “Yes, I do.” She was topless, a little freckled, slight, and her skin felt almost overly warm and feverish. “I know I only met you yesterday, but I want to. Could you kiss me, while you get the rest of my clothes off? To distract me from that weird first part of being naked.”

  He laughed and kissed her, and even though he didn’t want to, he kept his eyes closed while she shifted and the feel of soft cotton over skin transformed into only the feel of her body, new and strange and alive and so fascinating he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave the bed again. It didn’t feel like he would have to, either. There was no…point to this. It was so terribly, terribly wonderful to have Allie in his bed with no point at all.

  Everything but a point, an end, a conclusion that signals something is over and there’s nothing left to do but fall asleep and try to remember, next time, if there was a reason, a point, to start it all up again.

  This was just Allie, inside Allie. This was just him, inside of himself. Whatever they made between them would be precisely what was intended, an experience that signified nothing but the experience itself.

  Instead of a duty, an act, a task that meant, We’re okay. We can safely sleep. We don’t have to worry. We finished it.

  He started to unbutton his shirt, his tie long gone, hours ago, and he opened his eyes because Allie pulled his hands away and started working her way down the placket. She was on her knees, her thighs spread apart. Her pubic hair directed his attention to exactly how naked she was, how naked her position was, how accessible every part of her body was to him to look at and to touch.

  She had a crescent-shaped appendix scar. He had one, too. She had prominent nipples, and her skin glowed pink and red where her clothes and his hands had touched her. He was hard, felt big and harder than he had, in the shower, trying to fall asleep, for years. He couldn’t bear to let himself imagine what it would be like if she stroked him or…had her mouth on him. He closed his eyes again and took a long, steady breath.

  She slid his shirt off and was kissing him again, this time with her skin against his. It felt wonderful, exciting, even better when she slid her tongue against his and opened his belt, hitched down his pants in degrees between more kisses.

  “Am I too heavy on top like this?” She had a knee on either side of his hips, and her whole front against his, her hair falling around her face and his. He’d restricted his hands to her hips and arse and lower back, smooth expanses to soothe himself with when she pressed against him…there, wet and soft.

  “No.” He pressed her in closer. She braced her hands on his shoulders and pushed back with her hips. They pressed together, both made a noise, it was so very almost.

  She pushed again, more explicitly and with a maddening, slick jerk. They both groaned again, complaining—it felt like if he didn’t just thrust up, sink in, and end the terrible, awful, painful misery, he would die.

  “Winston,” Allie whispered.

  “Don’t move again,” he whispered back.

  The stalemate was delicious, and they held it, panting, until Allie laughed, and he laughed, and then groaned and she slithered down beside him.

  “We should slow it down a little.” She kissed behind his ear.

  “Yes, of course. Excellent plan.”

  She moved her hand over his chest, slow, but then her hand brushed over his belly, slower. He captured it, held it, squeezed it, and then hitched onto his side, on his elbow. He could not let her kill him so early. “This won’t do.”

  She grinned. “No?”

  “I’d like it if my record weren’t five years, nine hours, forty minutes, and fifty-five premature seconds.”

  She nodded briskly like she were taking notes. “What do you propose?”

  “I touch you. This seems the most sensible.”

  “I think so.” She relaxed onto her back and wallowed into the duvet, making a little burrow for herself. “Have at it.”

  She liked it best when he hardly touched her and only skimmed and traced. Her sides were sensitive, her inner thighs, the tender skin just under her nipples. He loved the creases the joints in her arms made and the deep pockets behind her knees.

  When he palmed her lightly, barely, she bucked and drew him down with a hand on his face to kiss her.

  “May I touch you?”

  She nodded into his neck, and his pulse picked up, making him harder, yearning, urgent.

  She was very wet. He deepened his kiss. Stroked gently, then more firmly when her hand came down and showed him how. Then she grabbed him, her grip loose until he nodded and she explored every inch of him and he every bit of her until their bodies were so tight against each other’s that there wasn’t any room left to touch the way they wanted, needed.

  “I want to use my mouth,” he heard himself say.

  She let go of him to cover her eyes with the back of her hand. “Really?”

  Now that he’d said it, he could think of nothing but the hot mess of how she would taste, how vulgar and perfect. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t want to.”

  “You can.”

  He moved her hand, peering at her face. “But do you want me to?”

  “Yes.” Her color was high, her mouth soft, relaxed. “Yes, please. Preferably right now, rather than, you know, next week.”

  He kissed her deep with a sweep of his tongue. She clutched at his head, kissing him back, then pushing him down, panting,
laughing.

  Winston followed his hand down the plane of her stomach with his mouth, kissing beneath her navel as he parted her thighs and stroked through her slickness. She was already familiar to the touch, but he hadn’t looked, hadn’t watched his hand moving through her, and he played with her for long minutes, fingers slipping inside and out, pressing where she wanted pressure, watching her hips rise to meet his touch. Then he slid down the bed, rearranging himself between her thighs, taking a moment to find the right position.

  “You need a pillow or anything?” she asked.

  “I think this will do.”

  He licked the slickness off her inner thighs, then worked inward bit by bit, savoring her strange and peppery flavor and how soft, how incredibly and unforgivably soft, she felt against his tongue. And then a rougher texture near her clit that he rubbed his tongue over, slow drag after slow drag with two fingers inside her that made her fling her arms wide and clutch at handfuls of sheets and finally turn her face into the pillow and shove it up over her head, her eyes covered, her breath coming fast as she said, “I don’t think I can.”

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  “No!” The word came out like a sob, urgent and full of feeling.

  “Okay. But I’m going to need more direction.”

  “You’re doing perfect. You feel…there aren’t words, but it’s so good. I just don’t know how to make myself come like this. There’s nothing to focus on, or push against, and I’m on my back like a stupid turtle—”

  He kissed her hip bone. Her stomach. Worked his way up to her neck, behind her ear, her cheek, which was when he noticed her eyes were full of unshed tears.

  She was trembling.

  “I can stop,” he said. “There’s nothing we need to get to. We could put on clothes and watch a film.”

  This made her eyes overflow, and she swiped at them with the back of her hand. “I don’t want to watch a film, not right now, I just—I don’t know what I want. I want to know how to come.” She turned onto her side, facing him. He rested his hand at the dip of her waist.

  “I suspect you do know how.”

  She hid her face in the bed. “I don’t want to have to figure it out, I want to have been doing this for years already, and I’m angry that I wasn’t.” She lifted her face to him. “I’m so mad, Winston.”

  “That seems reasonable. Would you like a cuddle?”

  “No. A cuddle is the last thing on earth I want.”

  But she didn’t look as angry as she wanted to sound. She looked terribly sad. So he put his arm out, and she tucked herself against his side, her face in his neck.

  She bit him lightly. Then hard enough that he hissed. “Your teeth are sharp.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  Allie kissed his arm, then turned onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. “I hate feelings.”

  “Sure.”

  “I hate failure.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even orgasm failure.”

  “I’m not sure one can actually fail at orgasm.”

  “One can fail to orgasm.”

  “Yes, but that’s in the spirit of the idea that orgasm is the only reason to have sex at all, which I feel we’ve just resoundingly disproven.”

  “I’m not sure ‘disproven’ is a real word.”

  He settled more comfortably into the bed. “I’m not sure I mind whether it is or isn’t.”

  They were quiet for a minute. His skin cooled, his erection softened. His bollocks ached. None of it unpleasant.

  “I followed my mom to New York because I thought I could stop her,” Allie said. “But I can’t stop her. I never could.”

  He waited. She needed him to be the mailman again, and he liked the role. Though he felt less all the time like Allie’s mailman, as he became her friend. Her lover.

  He didn’t have a name for what their relationship was, just at this moment, and he didn’t want to put an endpoint on it that might spoil everything that came before, distorting it by forcing it into a direction. But he cared for her, and he wanted most of all to have an opportunity to keep doing that.

  “I just couldn’t stand even one more time to wait at home while she went somewhere else and made her decision to come back or not. We aren’t supposed to talk about it, we aren’t allowed to know why she leaves or what we did that made her decide to stay with us, nothing to tell us when it’s going to happen again. I can’t do it anymore. It’s too horrible.”

  “No child, no husband, should have to wonder if it’s safe to grieve, or if they should be…hoping.”

  “Worse, be asked to wonder silently. Without fucking talking about it. Once she left when I was around sixteen. Early in my junior year of high school. It had been a long time since she had gone the last time. I thought, ‘We’re all old enough, now, to discuss this like adults.’ I kept waiting for my dad to sit us down and tell us what the deal was. But nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then I came down for breakfast one morning and she was there, making scrambled eggs, her suitcase in the mudroom. I ran out the door, slammed it so hard that the storm window came out of it and smashed on the walk, which I didn’t even notice, my dad told me later. I got in my car and drove and drove and drove. I didn’t stop until I was somewhere in Iowa. Some nowhere town in Iowa. I thought, ‘Here. I’ll just live in this nowhere place, because who fucking cares? Who do I even belong to?’ All those times—”

  She had been talking over her voice cracking, her chest hitching without allowing herself tears, and it was awful every time her throat caught. He tucked his leg between hers, held her tighter.

  “Like, it’s supposed to be baby makes three, right? Did they not notice something was fucking missing? Their little fucking trysts…they were all about them, the two of them. I was by myself, in all that silence, and I never had even one moment where I was…anyone’s. It was them. I could never decide if it would be worse to find out they talked about me all the time, or if they never mentioned me at all. Pretended I didn’t exist, just like my dad pretended I was his.”

  It was awful, this. He thought of Bea and had a sharp, keen desire to hug her and tell her how much he loved her. He thought of impossible things, like bottling Allie’s anger and grief in this moment and smashing the bottle at her mother’s feet, and Justice’s, watching it release pain they were forced to take in, right in their faces.

  After they had been quiet together, after her breathing slowed a little, he said, “I think that my brother, Nev, Neville, has felt a bit of what you felt. We all knew, from when he was very young, that he was different. Not in this way, this big way that has happened in your family, just in that ordinary way. But my dad’s approach was to simply jovially, and in a very English way, ignore all the difference and keep telling Nev that he ‘guessed he was all right, then.’ My mother tried to raise him like she raised me. None of it worked, none of it made him feel loved, or safe. I was the one who thrived under the kind of love my parents were prepared to give. Nev didn’t need all that much more, I realized later. Just his parents to let him know that they saw him, and loved him. That it was all the things that made him different that made him most worthy of love.”

  “Yes. That…helps.” She was quiet for a long time, while he swept his hand over her hair, over and over. “It would be so good, I think, if my dad said, my dad that raised me, my dad, said, ‘Just so you know, Allie, you’re mine. You’re mine.’ And if my mom said, ‘I’m not sorry I had you. I never, ever was.’ And if my sister said—”

  And then she started crying, this woman he had met yesterday, tenderized. Dear, already. It scared him, but all of this, he had something in him that made it easy, maybe fatherhood, maybe everything he’d been through with Rosemary, to just…hold this woman and be glad he was here with her and that she felt the way she did.

  Rosemary had said once, in the blurred days or weeks after she’d told him she wanted the divorce, that she wasn’t hurting him. That all the pain he felt, the pain of their d
ivorce, was the same pain that had been in their marriage.

  It stuck with him, because it was absolutely true.

  All the pain Allie felt, crying in his arms, was the pain that had always been there. The pain that caught in their throats as they tried to talk with each other about what they wanted.

  The pain between him and his daughter over brunch at an expensive restaurant. The pain that kept Bea from picking up the phone to call Rosemary, and the pain that had kept Allie from ever saying a word against the closet light left on, that had made her brace herself to be kissed and tell herself to relax.

  If he’d learned one thing from losing his life in England, and losing his way in New York, it was that it didn’t hurt more to admit how much it hurt in the first place.

  It didn’t hurt more to unravel.

  And once you’d unraveled, you could look around and think, a bit. Discover Netflix. Discover someone like Allie.

  He smoothed his hand over her hair. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “Can we…do number five?”

  He squeezed her and then, with a show of reluctance, got out of bed to retrieve the list.

  “It says, ‘Explain, in detail, exactly what you want done, out loud.’ I wrote this because this was something I could never do, and the times my ex would, I don’t think I attended to what she said in a way that was respectful.”

  It didn’t hurt more to simply admit the hurt, than the real hurt did.

  Allie nodded, running her finger over number five.

  “I want you to get back between my legs. I want you to hold my thighs down, firmly. Don’t let me, like, hump too much. I mean, really, really hold me down. I want you to lick harder when I’m trying to get you to back off. I want you to…uh. I want you to make a lot of noise. Like…you know. Like you like it. Really like it. I want you to come if you feel like coming, and, um. If you want to come I want you to stop licking me and jerk yourself right in front of me, then finish me off.”

  Then she squealed and pushed the pillow into her face, laughing.

  He didn’t laugh.