She banishes Ian to the hard and lumpy couch because she can’t stand the close proximity of his penis, which yearns towards her and stabs her under the sheets. She accuses his cock of communicating in sign language to her clitoris while they sleep. By all telltale signs his pecker is having as much of a problem forgetting its nerve endings as her pussy. His bulging basket knocks against her when they snuggle, like an insistent homing pigeon banging on her closed roost.
Lucy takes an extended absence from her job and rents a stack of subtitled foreign movies in order to dull her lascivious mind, but accidentally brings home a scorching Hispanic film. Raw sex scenes open and close abundant and explicit fucking throughout the story – she can’t turn it off – and blister her thighs from the television screen across the room. Her clitoris doesn’t need to read the captions to get the gist. Lucy sleeps with her hands pinned under her pillow so that they won’t stray. Everything else that she watches or reads is littered with dead babies. Stillborn babies, miscarried babies, aborted babies. Have the sex and dead babies always been there, but she never noticed, just as she ignores billboards on road trips? Or is God testing her with malicious intent, manipulating her arousal and then hurling reminders at her of why she must not cave in to temptation? Lucy should be sainted – these mixed cosmic messages are worse than the arrows flung at Sebastian.
Amidst the rampant abstention and Lucy’s heroic restraint, Lucy’s healthy libido betrays her. A chronic insomniac most of her life, her sleep is deep now, and her dreams vibrant. After several weeks of abstinence, she has a blue dream too explicit even for the X-rated shelf of her mind. She awakens to a powerful orgasm.
The next day, Lucy doesn’t know whether she wants to smash or fondle the calculatingly soothing, smooth, round artwork in Dr Frank’s waiting room, the furniture all feminine curves before the rudeness of the exam room. “Everything’s fine,” Dr Frank reassures her after she haltingly and euphemistically explains her nocturnal explosion. The tiny heartbeat pulses on the ultrasound. “These preventative measures may be entirely unnecessary. Nothing you do will cause a problem unless you’re lifting elephants. We just don’t want you to do anything that will cause you to blame yourself if something happens. Better safe than sorry.”
Lucy notices the doctor says “miscarriage” about as often as he mentions sex.
A week later, Lucy bleeds, a red river of loss.
Lucy will never crave sex again. Despite the doctor’s assurance that nothing Lucy did could have caused the miscarriage, Lucy fears the baby stopped growing out of shock over Mom’s bawdy telepathic signals. Deep down she knows that her turgid urges and sailor’s vocabulary are not just cause for her sterility. Her baser instincts don’t mean she lacks the maternal instinct. Despite her feelings of guilt, she believes she would have been a good mother. And Ian a good father. That they desire each other so profoundly after years together means the promise of a whole, lasting family for their child. A baby girl, Dr Frank tells her. Lucy names her Grace.
Weeks pass. She cannot remember the last time she felt remotely aroused. Sex will only remind her of what their union cannot bring, of what she wants but cannot have, of what she almost had but lost. She is undesirable. Damaged goods. How can Ian ever be aroused again by the crack in her body when he saw what fell out of it? No longer an erogenous zone, but a war zone. She’s gained weight since the miscarriage, her metabolism as slow as a dirge. She feels flabby from her inactivity. Her dull and grey-flecked roots have grown out since her last hair color. Dye isn’t recommended for pregnant women, and she can’t summon the energy to call her stylist for an appointment now that she can douse her head in chemical baths to her heart’s content. Low iron levels exhaust her. Pregnancy hormone mottles her face. Her breasts, back to their normal size, feel tiny and insignificant. When they are touched, she feels irritation, not arousal. If she could only have experienced one orgasm with Ian while they were beckoning, busty, lusty, fully charged creatures with a hotline wired straight to her groin. Her nipples with their own minds had prank-called the clitoris commissioner all those ceaseless weeks, but now the line is dead. The forfeit of that pleasurable experience is one loss amidst so much loss. She could have had a fuck-fest all that time and it wouldn’t have made one fucking bit of difference.
How ironic that desire for sex consumed her during the weeks she could not indulge in pleasures of the flesh, yet eludes her now that she can make love whenever she wants. Now that her womb is open again for business, lust eludes her.
She has no excuse to refuse Ian. The doctor okays baths, swimming, intercourse, tampons, and exercise. (Linguistically true to form, the nurse wedges sex between mundane activities.) Lucy feels the presence of Ian’s cock behind closed doors. He lurks around her with pained desire in his eyes, afraid to pressure her yet needing their union to heal himself – he has lost Grace, too. She misinterprets his respect for her needs as lack of desire for her, confirming her belief that she is no longer appealing – as a fat, ugly, small-breasted woman who apparently will never bear his children. Dr Frank recommends “mechanical birth control” for a few months – but she is mechanical, a robot with no human nerves, and condoms remain a non-issue. Ian remains on the couch. Lucy has no idea how to repair the growing gulf between them.
One night there is a tiny scratching at the bedroom door, with snuffling and high-pitched whining. Startled from the daze she sinks into nightly instead of sleep, she calls out.
“There’s someone here to see you.” The door muffles Ian’s voice.
“I’m not dressed!” Lucy curls up in a corner of the bed, her body shrouded in long flannels.
“He doesn’t care.” Ian cracks open the door. “Arf arf.” Ian is naked. With the hallway light spilling in through the doorway, Lucy makes out his cock – decorated like a Chihuahua. He stands uncertainly, hesitant of Lucy’s reaction. She admires him for exposing himself so fully, wholly vulnerable though chances of rejection are high. She snaps on the bedside lamp. Ian has attached two huge ears tied on a soft cord around the shaft and drawn a happy face on the head with a marsh pen, with a red satin bow at the base for a collar and paws drawn on his balls. “I remembered you wanted a ChiWowWow.”
Lucy laughs, as much at Ian’s inability to pronounce foreign words as at his humor. His mispronunciation was the only thing that ended their argument when they last fought over Lucy’s desire for the rat-sized dog, because neither of them could keep a straight face over his ridiculous slaughter of the dog’s breed. The murmuring, surprised bubble of her laughter grows inside her until she cackles breathlessly, doubled up on the bed. She laughed like that the night they met, and her unrestrained glee sealed them for life more than the sex that swiftly followed. They could foresee a day far in the future when they would be too old to screw, but never too old to laugh.
Lucy catches her breath. “Man, I needed that. That was better than an orgasm.” She hasn’t so much as smiled in weeks. Though Ian had tried to make jokes about horny monks and nuns, she hadn’t appreciated the humor.
As Ian’s cock grows under the glow of Lucy’s pleasure, the puppy’s face distorts. Ian looks down. “Uh oh. He’s drooling.”
“Better than piddling. Does he know any commands?”
“Come.”
Lucy makes kissy noises and pats the bed. “Come, Loco!”
Ian snuggles next to her on the bed, though her thick nightgown and the blankets separate them. “He likes to be petted.”
“I wouldn’t want to spoil him.”
“There’s no such thing as too much love for a puppy.”
“His fur is so soft! Oh, dear. He’s outgrowing his collar.”
“I know a way to fix that.” Ian’s hand creeps under the blanket, up her gown, and down her panties. He rests the heel of his palm against her mons, his fingers cupped over her mound. At first Lucy winces. Her gash is now a raw wound, not a path to pleasure, but Ian does not nudge her open with his fingers. His hand simply rests low on her belly with
only the pressure of its weight. She feels the cold arc of his wedding ring as his palm presses down against her, pushing her own small mound of flesh against her clitoris.
Lucy doesn’t know where the orgasm comes from. It mounts inside her and explodes without warning, like a team of Clydes- dales tearing around a bend in the road to knock her over. Their thundering, unforeseen passage leaves her sprawled and sloppy on the wayside of unleashed repression, her dress to her face and her hair in damp tangles. The breeze of their stampede dies down, and it is just Lucy and Ian together in the quiet bed.
Lucy blinks at him. “Okay, so maybe laughing isn’t better than coming.”
Ian smiles. “You can have both. Doctor’s orders.”
She catches her breath. “I think I needed that.”
She cries when Ian crackles the condom packet, symbolizing the prevention of a pregnancy that she so badly wants but that can’t be. “You’ll suffocate Loco.”
“He’s a special mutant super-ninja ChiWowWow. He doesn’t need air.” They kick aside covers and clothing and Ian climbs on top of her. Ian has a hard time gaining entry, partly because he is being so careful, and partly because Lucy is closed like a fist. The condom chafes. “It won’t work,” Lucy weeps.
“Hold on.” Ian squirts half a tube of K-Y between her legs. Her story starts and begins with lubricant. She should purchase stock in the goopy stuff. Lucy laughs.
Ian brushes her cheek. “I love your laugh. I’ve missed it.”
Smeared with jelly, they slide in a slick puddle on the sheets. Ian is cautious and tender. His hesitant entrance hurts at first. “I thought he was a Chihuahua, not a St Bernard,” Lucy gasps. Her vagina creaks, like a swollen door pushed open from its tight frame.
“You okay?” Ian asks. Lucy has forgotten how big and powerful he looks from this perspective, his protective body fully covering hers, when in daily life he is a small man.
“I’m like a virgin.” Ian gets his tight fit, after all.
“Remember Sister Cyndy?”
Sister Cyndy, the self-proclaimed Born-Again Virgin who used to preach on the campus lawn where she and Ian first met during his ROTC days. Everything seemed possible, then, except Born-Again Virginity. But it turns out that Sister Cyndy was right. The return of the virginal state is possible, yet so much else that seemed possible is not. Lucy remembers the innocence of those days, sitting in the hot sun on the green lawn eating gloppy cafeteria food, when they hadn’t yet thought about starting a family, when sex was simple, nothing but the joining of their two young, healthy, and perfect bodies. Sex is loaded now, fraught with repercussions and reminders.
Lucy welcomes the familiar fullness of Ian’s body inside hers. There can be nothing sinful about her love of this act. She believes she is a decent person, despite indecent thoughts. She believes in her own goodness despite the lewd locomotive of her mind that pushed her into erotic torment for weeks on end, that broke up the smooth passage of their relationship like train cars derailing, that twisted her like the resulting wreckage into a ball-busting bitch. She believes in her marriage, in the man who won’t let her go despite the baby that leaked away.
Another rolling thunderclap unleashes inside her. Her pelvic bone tilted up to Ian’s belly as he barely moves, like slow dancing, the orgasm sneaks up on her and bursts.
“Making up for lost time?” Ian brushes the hair from her forehead.
“Shit, that is a Wow Wow,” Lucy arches and sighs.
“Performs just for you.” Sorrow hovers behind their smiles, but they let the hurt pass without sobering the light mood. Ian seems in no hurry for his own pleasure. His cock fills her but doesn’t move inside her other than the pulse of his blood. “I love your hair like this. Don’t dye it any more, okay?”
“But all the grey! I’m getting old.”
“No, we’re getting old. Together.”
She had lost the baby, orgasms, laughter, and her own personality, but what she missed most was intimacy with Ian. They had always connected and healed through sex. Tonight won’t make up for the loss of Grace, she knows, but in this at least she is blessed.
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