He nodded. Listening. Leaning forward. “But where are you in all this?”
“I don’t think about that.” My voice sounded faint to my own ears.
“What happened to your marriage?”
“I was happy in my marriage. It was Mitch who said it wasn’t fair to either of us to live the way we were living anymore. Sex is great…but animals have sex. Animals don’t talk. They don’t share each other’s pain the way humans can. There is nothing so sacred about sex that you have to break up a family over it.” The words were spilling out like the stupid tears that were coursing down my cheeks. I was embarrassed, but too upset to do anything about it. “The ways that people turn their lives inside out for sex can be dangerous. They forget it’s not just the act, not just the release that matters. It’s the needing and the being needed, too.”
“Do you ever think about someone touching you again?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“But?”
“But what?”
“But why did you freeze the minute you knew I was going to touch you?”
“Every single sex act already belongs to someone else. The women and men who talk to me, they do all those things to each other. And I listen. Nod, take it in. I wade through their bedrooms, invisible and silent, taking notes, filming them and snapping their photographs. And then I go home. Dulcie and I eat dinner, I help her with her homework. We watch a movie, she goes to sleep. I go to my study. And I chip away at a stone.”
“What are you looking for in the stone?”
“An untouched place.”
He put his hand on my arm. It was not a sexual gesture this time. Just a connection. He was making contact.
“When you carve stone, there’s this sound the chisel makes on the marble. It’s loud. Have you ever heard it?” I asked.
“No. How loud is it?”
I could feel his fingers on my hand. The heat came off him in waves.
“It sounds like a jackhammer.”
His hand moved up past my wrist, up my arm, and then with his other hand he pushed the hair off my face. He leaned in. When he spoke now he was almost whispering.
“Does the sound drown out the patients’ voices?”
“Yes.”
He was not kissing me, but I could feel his lips near my ear as he spoke to me. Soft pressure, light rain. His right hand was unbuttoning the cuff of my shirt while his left hand stroked the space behind my ear. Not an erogenous zone. But bare skin. And it was sending an alarm, a shocking thrill, to the center of my body.
“But the voices come back, don’t they, Morgan? The images start to flood your brain and you hear the patients’ voices in your head again? Touching and kissing and fucking become all words again, all pictures that have other people in them but not you?” His fingers were still on that patch of skin, and they felt more like the wind than someone’s touch. I lost the words he was saying for a moment because for the first time in a long time, sensation was overpowering thought.
“How does all that make you feel?”
I should have laughed at how he was turning the tables on me and asking all the questions. “I get angry. I want to help my patients find their center, be able to make love, to enjoy their bodies, their partners, except I want the same thing for me, too.”
He leaned over and kissed me, but before I could respond his mouth moved down my neck, down farther. He kissed the skin above my bra, moved his mouth back up my neck, trailing kisses, pressing his lips against my collarbone, using his teeth. Shivering, I moved closer to him. He was reaching me somehow, miraculously, after all this time.
“What do you do when you get angry?” He began to work the rest of the buttons on my blouse. And then slipped it down my shoulders and pulled it off my arms. The fabric sliding over my skin was yet another embrace, as if he had imbued the shirt with erotic powers so that the very movement of the silk was some sort of lovemaking.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“You can tell me about it, Morgan.”
“I just want to find my own images again.” I wasn’t thinking about my words but about how this man’s hair was soft against my chest. How his breath was hot on my stomach and how his hands were kneading the knots out of my shoulders.
What were we doing with this odd combination of bloodletting, massage and seduction? I didn’t want to stop to figure it out. My body was quivering. I couldn’t get close enough to him. My hands finally, after all this time of him touching me, moved up to his arms, and I gripped his muscles.
“Tell me all about the things that have gone wrong in your life, about the things that you’ve rationalized because you’re too smart to get mad, Morgan.”
“I don’t rationalize.”
“Bullshit.”
Almost immediately, my fists came up, curled tight, and attacked him. It was easier than I could have imagined to rain punches on him while he kissed me.
As hard as I was hitting him, his kisses were gentle. His tongue barely grazing mine, playing a hide-and-seek game, holding back as much as he was giving.
His hands were on my back, holding me tight against him. I didn’t want that; I wanted to push at him and knock him down, and I wanted to hurt him, to crash against him.
I stopped long enough to unbutton and unzip my pants, pull them off, then go to work on his, struggling with the buttons and his fly. He did not help. He made me work at it on my own. I moved with the angry energy that had been building up for so long. The passion that I had not found any outlet for exploded. Feelings I had been so sure didn’t exist in me anymore erupted.
As soon as we were both naked and lying on the floor, the whole length of our bodies was in contact, and his hands moved like butterflies alighting on my skin. Hundreds of electric shocks shot through me, and he made me give him more of what was buried inside me.
“This is something. It’s real now,” he whispered.
“Isn’t it?” The anger was moving out of me, replaced by something hot and thick and sweet that pulsed through my body.
This was just want. Not love or even something as sane as lust. This was just want. Everything was gone now. There were not even memories of this in me from some long-ago college night or early courtship. My mind was not running in a logical path. I pulled back to look at him, to take it in with my eyes this object that was under me. This thing that I wanted so badly.
I slid down his body. With both hands I held his foot, then I bent down and used my teeth and lips and tongue to work my way up, tasting his skin, smelling his body, stopping to touch myself between my legs, then moving my wet fingers up his leg. I was marking him in some primitive ceremony, and when he saw me do it once, he took my hand and made me do it again. Touching myself, taking my own slickness, I finger-painted him. His thighs. His stomach. His chest. His nipples. His erection. The scent was around me, a smell that I had never immersed myself in before. My own smell. On a man. All over a man.
He picked me up, saw my startled face and laughed.
“I’m not used to this,” I said.
“Good.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Too bad.”
“You have all the control,” I complained as he carried me into his bedroom.
“Yes.” He laughed again. Deeper in his throat. The kind of intimate laugh that I have heard other couples share at a dinner party when they think no one else is listening. “It’s such torture. Poor Dr. Morgan Snow is not in control. That’s what it will be like with me. You’ll have it. Then I’ll take it back. We will be intimate. And that is the worst thing you can think of, isn’t it? You won’t like it, will you?”
“No, I won’t like it.”
“Shh.” He kissed me quiet and lay me down on his unmade bed, which was redolent with his scent. I rolled over on the cool cotton sheets and buried my head in his pillow, feeling the cold air from an air conditioner bathe my back. Luxuriating in the bouquet of smells in the pillow, I lost him for a minute. Forgot about everything, breathing in a whole other world.